Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Sell me on The Fantasy Trip

So SJG launched the Kickstarter for The Fantasy Trip:




I'm at least a little interested. But I know me - if it's a PDF only, I'll never actually run it or play it. But if it's print, we're looking at $60 plus approximately $80 for the complete edition in print + PDF. That seems like a lot of $ and a lot of shelf space. I've never played TFT - I jumped on board Steve Jackson's stuff with Car Wars and then Ogre, and then Man-to-Man on my way to GURPS.

I'm not sure what the $80 really gets me. I have DFRPG and I love it. I have Ogre: Deluxe Edition and I don't ever get to play it (and it's too big to keep handy, just in case.) Why should I go for TFT?

If you know TFT, explain what I'm really getting here that's worth getting in to. I'd appreciate any comments and pitches.

13 comments:

  1. From what I recall... it's like an ultra-ultra-light version of GURPS.

    Also, if you do go all in for the books, it'll be a lot easier to get a bunch of people who are willing to play creaky old games like AD&D to play a (hopefully not as) creaky old game like TFT, whereas I understand people's unwillingness to to give OGRE a go.

    I mean, I love OGRE, but even I have to reread the rules when it gets dusted off for that once every decade game I managed to trick someone into playing of it... and then recheck the rules during play. It's daunting to a newb.

    But I'm pretty sure I could play TFT without even really going back to the book more than once, and that's just to whip up fighters... It's basically pure arena combat, 2 stats (ST and DX), no defenses, just two brutal warriors AOAing each other till one is dead (which is really quick). At least that's what a quick reskim of Melee looks like (I admit, I hadn't cracked it open in over twenty years).

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    1. The problem with Ogre is that it's huge, and it's two player at heart. Tough when a "small" session these days is 6-7 people.

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  2. Not here to sell it, but to share the slight confusion. I'm an enthusiastic backer of SJGames stuff, and so I keep looking at TFT and thinking "I should want this, shouldn't I?" - but in the end I just can't work out what I'd want it for. I understand that to some of the really old guard it might have nostalgia value, but to me (and I'm not young!) it's hard to see the appeal. I feel almost guilty saying it, since I support SJGames enthusiastically at every opportunity, but part of me keeps thinking "Why bring back TFT when you have two brilliant RPGs, GURPS and DFRPG, just sitting there crying out for more enthusiasm from the top end?"

    Now, I could be entirely misguided, and am very happy to be shown to be wrong about this - maybe it's a very sound commercial decision, and money spent on GURPS and/or DFRPG would be wasted by comparison. But as a lover both of GURPS and of DFRPG, I can't help but wish that they would get a bit more love at the top.

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    1. It just feels like nostalgia + Steve putting out his old stuff because he finally can. I'm not sure that's worth much to me, if anything. I never even heard of TFT until after GURPS, from old vets who assured me GURPS was just TFT re-skinned.

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    2. That's *exactly* how it feels to me. And now Pyramid! Nooo!

      On the plus side, the TFT Kickstarter has just cracked $110,000, which means that maybe Steve knows more about these things than I do... Who'd a thunk it?

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    3. Nostalgia has value. People would pay anything for things missed out on, or things passed by, that come around again.

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  3. Ditto. I originally backed it but after thinking about it, when will I ever use it? I’ve got too many KS cool things that I don’t use...DFRPG doesn’t need a “lite version” for me. For others, perhaps. I’m in for $1 to get the updates, and I like the idea, but I can’t justify $80 to be a simpler version of what I already enjoy.

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    1. And even that $1 gets, what, like two packages of those cookies andi brings?

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  4. I asked the question and SJ gave his answer in the video

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  5. My currently situation has me only being able to play RPGs using VTTs since my gaming group is geographically dispersed. Which means that dice rolling (and everything else) is just slower. Given that, TFT:ITL is simply speeds play.

    A standard combat round in DFRPG/GURPS (i.e. no Close Combat, Grappling, etc.) with one guy swinging at another can take 4 or more dice rolls and may apply 9 or more rule references until the actual damage is calculated and the target's final state is determined. TFT:ITL, on the other hand, takes 2 rolls and references 4 rules.

    This alone, at least in my opinion, makes TFT:ITL a much more story driven system. Fewer dice rolls means faster situational resolution which means more stuff explored, etc., in the same amount of time. I have not seen anything that DFRPG/GURPS can do that TFT:ITL cannot (I'm old enough that I have the original Metagaming versions).

    Another, truly personal, opinion is that the TFT:ITL magic system is the most elegant I have ever seen, bar none. No character levels, no prerequisites, just a very straight forward mechanic. You can come close to it using Thaumatology's "Spell Slots" and "Sorcery" approaches but only with a lot of effort and rule searching.

    Is TFT:ITL perfect? Of course not. There is DFRPG/GURPS functionality that I will house rule in. And there are valid arguments to be made about TFT:ITL's character progression logic. But it has all the functionality I need without having to search through 800+ pages of rules (DFRPG/Basic GURPS/Thaumatology/etc.) to find what I want or need in case a decision needs to be "defended".

    I guess that's why they make chocolate and vanilla.

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    1. The magic system has me interested, but not even close to $30 interested at this point. It's a big high of a price point for curiosity.

      I have to ask this, though - why does "less potential rule references" mean "more story driven system"? I've seen this assertion made many times. Less rules = "more story driven." Okay, but how? I'm not attacking this position, not really, but I am challenging it. I've heard it asserted many times, but I'm not sure I buy the idea that less potential rules impinging on a situation necessarily means more story. Or does more story driven mean something other than more story?

      You probably have to understand that I played Man-to-Man and fell in love with the combat resolution system, and that GURPS does the same thing better in my opinion. And that I'm a big proponent of not looking things up most of the time. That's where my biases come from.

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    2. My "less potential rules references" leading to a more "story driven system" is based simply on limited playing time. Since I have been dusting it off for going on 40+ years, I know TFT:ITL better than DFRPG/GURPS. I am much better at remembering those 40 pages of rules (and have the spell descriptions in one place organized by IQ) than knowing where to look in roughly 6 books and over 600 pages.

      I have been gaming with two of my players for almost 40 years and we only get about 3 hours a week to play. I can't force them to buy the rules (they both have Basic GURPS and Magic but not DFRPG) and no one has the time to memorize them anyway. So, when something out of the ordinary comes up it g needs to be "discussed". I try to have all the rules for any "new" actions documented ahead of time but am not always successful. And I am not one to "GM fiat" rulings that could be very wrong because I don't have the rules (and, as someone once stated, "the exceptions to the rules, and those exception's footnotes") memorized. While I don't mind killing off their paper men, I don't want to do it because a rule was misused or misunderstood. Hence game time is lost verifying things that may or may not be verified in other groups that could have been spent driving the story. So 40 pages of having 98% of everything that I want in TFT:ITL fits my needs better than the DFRPG/GURPS toolkit.

      And, as stated earlier, DFRPG/GURPS combats require more than twice as many dice rolls and involve about 3 times as many conditional rules than a TFT:ITL combat. Dice rolling using VTTs is _SLOW_. Anything that reduces them increases "story" time.

      Hopefully this helps explain why I, at least, think that some "crunch lessening" increases a system's ability to tell a story.

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    3. Put a long version out the other day, but I think it must have gotten lost in the big bit bucket.

      But, long story short, I think "less rules = more story" because there is only some much time available to play. If the rule set is not memorized, then time that could be spent on "story" is instead spent on "rules".

      That's not to say that rules are bad. It's just that given a rules toolset like GURPS, I personally try to minimize what is needed, i.e. try to make it look like TFT:ITL. So, now that the real deal is back, I'm going to dive right back into it.

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