Re: (TFT) Is it an RPG or really a Tactical RPG? - Rick Weighs in.

[ErolB1@aol.com]

In a message dated 4/26/2008 12:57:28 PM Central Daylight Time, 
rsmith@lightspeed.ca writes:


>   The main thing I noticed is that combat in TFT is
> fast and deadly.  (Far faster than D&D and GURPS any
> way.)  This worked well for us because the deadliness 
> encourages diplomacy and non-combat solutions & when
> combat does start it's over quick.  I always found 
> that TFT had more Role Playing per hour for those 
> reasons.


This is a pet peeve of mine: I keep hearing over and over about how "deadly 
combat encourages non-combat solutions and more & better roleplaying" And that 
has not been my experience at all. 

Mileage obviously varies, but my experience is that making combat deadly 
encourages players to become *obsessed* with combat, and to scant roleplaying as 
not being worth doing. When combat isn't deadly, OTOH, I find that players can 
relax and role-play. In fact, they can even roleplay in combat, given a 
non-quick&non-deadly system, as well as out of it. 

To take an extreme example, consider a Champions 4-color superhero game. Here 
the combat is extremely non-lethal by both game design and genre. There's 
lots of combat, but the game doesn't have to be all combat - in a superior game 
that emulates a superior comicbook, there will be lots of characterization and 
lots of non-combat activity. Some sessions will be all combat, but other 
sessions will hae no combat and most sessions will lots of both combat and 
non-combat activity. 

Or consider Lord of the Rings, where the Fellowship had something like 14 
combat encounters, producing a total of eight injuries, one death, and one 
died-but-got-better. How many games out there are that non-lethal? How many rpg 
combats come out with none of the PCs being injured at all, never mind killed, or 
with at most one or two out of a half-dozen being injured? 

Obviously there has to be *something* to the idea of "lethal combat 
discourages combat and encourages roleplaying" or else it wouldn't have become the 
ubiquious mantra that it has. But it has NOT NOT NOT been my experience at all. 
(And in fact most of my house rules are aimed at hammering the lethality out of 
TFT, that lethality being - IMO - the one great flaw in a system that is 
otherwise full of virtues.) 


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