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Author Topic: Q&A with Settembrini over FtA!  (Read 841 times)

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Q&A with Settembrini over FtA!
« on: March 29, 2007, 10:54:12 PM »
Settembrini writes:
"I just finished reading FtA! So far I´m thrilled. There are several things that I don´t really dig/get though. Don´t be disappointed, I really like it and don´t want to disrespect your labor of love, but still I have some objections."

Ok, shoot.

"Dislike:
- advancement per # of adventures
reasoning: Unsatisfying for the players; Doesn´t differentiate between challenges. How about an EXP System?
I think it really belongs into there, XPs are so cool to get as a player. And it gives the DM a means to punish or motivate actions
."


Well, that's simple enough. I chose the "you go up in level when you complete a number of adventures equal to your current level" method because its simple and easy to keep track of. If you want to use an XP system instead, that's simple enough too. Multiply the number of adventures needed to level x 1000, and that's how many "experience points" you have to gain to level up. Then as GM suppose that an average adventure will give a player 1000xp.

"Questionable:
- Just from reading, I don´t know how melee combat is supposed to work if there is no "battle line". If people each have their own enemy in different parts of the battlefield, how can I explain the interconnectivity of the melee actions? I understand it´s supposed to be abstract, maybe my spoiled D&D3.5 brain is too damaged to "get it".
-Would you discourage me from using a Battlemat? Would it be exactly what you don´t want?
"

The melee combat thing is probably the hardest thing to get your head around if you're coming from D&D, because its the most unlike D&D. The combat system in FtA is most like Tunnels & Trolls, where each player rolls for combat and all the players who are fighting add their rolls together, comparing it to the enemy's total to determine who "wins" the melee round. There are two ways you can go with this: simple or complex. Neither are worse than the other, its just a question of what you wanna do.

Simple would be: everyone who says they're doing melee, assume they get in position to fight some enemy (assuming its at all reasonable that they could); roll and add up everyone's combat value, and compare.

Complex would be to keep track of where everyone is; and yes a battlemat would probably be the easiest way to do that for most combats. There's no problem with using one; since in this game movement and whether or not you're in an enemy's "melee space" is so important, its pretty useful to apply the battlemat.

Now, if your issue is just with the fact that you could have hero A and goblin A fighting at one end of the room, and hero b and goblin B fighting at the other, so why would it all be the same combat? Well, it just is. Or it doesn't have to be; if the combats are totally separated by distance, and not part of one larger battle, then you could choose to separate one fight into two or three different "combats" too. But in general its easier to keep all the melee combat "together" and play out the same battle  (the melee combat being "collective" is meant to represent the overall ebb and flow of battle), as it forces the player characters to use a lot of tactics and teamwork (figuring out how to get as many players as possible fighting to do as much damage as possible, when to do stunts, when to fire missile instead of fight melee, etc etc). Collective melee combat means that your party has to be co-ordinated, you can't just do the standard D&D 3.0 "lets all just pile on the head orc even though there are 8 other guys attacking us too" tactic that I so despise.

"- Human barbarians vs. orcs Human barbarians get +1 STR and +1 CON and two mali of one each to other Stats. The orc race gets +1 STR and two mali of one each to other Stats. So basically orcs are inferior to human barbarians? Let´s give the orcs a rocking +2 STR!"

Yup, Orcs are inferior. Humans, even barbarian humans, are superior to orcs. I basically just included orcs as an option if someone REALLY wanted to play one, and didn't care that theres nothing about them that makes them a better choice than barbarian humans. Still, that's just me. If your game works better with "stronger" orcs, then go ahead and make it +2, that won't really fuck anything up.

"- I would suggest using metric measurements for the international version, but you may have thought of it for the Spanish version already"

Yup, when I do the Spanish version, it will definitely be in metric. Until then, assume that 30ft equals 10m for convenience's sake.


"- Alignment:
I think your numerical alignment system rocks. But as feverishly as I would support your reasoning about good and evil in real life, I think it can hav it´s place in a game. Just to seperate two celestial factions and to add more permutations. Think green and red, don´t explain too much about good and bad, but they are handy to have around as antagonists to each other. Would you be angry, if I introduced good and bad as descriptors of two camps of gods? As they could hand out Championhood, they would be simulated by your numerical system of Alignment too. Thanks again for letting me playtest it
"

The answer is no, I wouldn't be angry. If you want to add "good and evil" to the alignments, or whichever other alignment, feel free.

The thing is, I made FtA a tribute to various things I really liked: Rules-Cyclopedia OD&D, Roguelike computer games, Tunnels & Trolls style combat, and in the case of alignments, the Michael Moorcock style Elric fantasies. To me, its cooler having a world where you might have total bastards and really nice kind people working together because they're both Lawful, against the nature-loving Balanced dudes in the forest. That and the idea that all priests are basically either charlatans and swindlers or wizards in drag, and that all the gods, in their ultimate form, are pretty toxic to man (gods of Law that want to stagnate all existence, gods of chaos that are horrible lovecraftian tentacle-things, cthonic nature gods of balance that see man as just another animal of no significance, etc etc), but that in certain forms each of them can be "bargained with" in exchange for benefits.

Now, that's just the shit I like. One other thing I tried to do with this system was make it very easy to change these kind of little details. And to put the system, in terms of complexity, right in the middle, but with easy mods to "shift up" the system into more tactical play (battlemats, more sophisticated and rigorous stunt rules, lots of condition modifiers); or just as easily to "shift down" to more abstract play (one big roll for all melee combat, few mods, stunts limited only by the imagination and the DM's limits of sanity, etc), depending on what the more experienced gamer might enjoy.

So yea, all the stuff you've talked about, feel free to "shift up" or "shift down" as much as you like. You want to make a double axis of alignment instead of just one? Go for it. Want to use a battle mat? Do that too! Want to add wacky amounts of experience points? No problem!

The only thing you are forbidden to change, basically, is the "Adventure!"

RPGPundit
(originally posted March 6, 2006)
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