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Re: (TFT) Simplified experience.



I always looked at Melee (and later Wizard) as the "Tactical" game system where as Gurps and D&D were "Strategic" game systems.

By this I mean, that when me and a few friends wanted to do some quick gaming over a few beers we would pull out Melee/Wizard and do a quick Hack-n-Slash session with toons rolled up/drawn up on a whim. These toons were seldom used again. Infrequently, we would carry a single survivor over in a Kind-of-the-Hill, longest surviving toon champ slap on the back for a few weeks before he would finally have the dice roll against him and he fell to be replaced by a new wonder-kid. The whole purpose was to bloody each others toons up and kill before being killed.

When we wanted to have a marathon weekend session, or looking for more in depth creativity, that is when we would pull out our carefully crafted characters that we "religiously" obsessed over every little detail. Planning where and when we would spend XP points to best develop the character for long-term goals. These characters were carried over from scenario to scenario and lived in vast game worlds. These were traditionally D&D and later GURPS.

The Fantasy Trip: In The Lybraith series was going to be Metagamings answer to D&D by providing the DM materials to move Melee/Wizard toons from one-use to multi-use characters. I believed that Howard Thompson, Metagaming's owner was unhappy with the work Steve Jackson had done on TFT:ITL which result in Steve leaving Metagaming. TFT:ITL was as "not fully fleshed out" as Steve wanted but was more than Thompson wanted. Thus Steve finished his fleshing and thus GURPS was born. I would say that basically Steve's expanded vision of TFT:ITL's grand design was GURPS.

Anyway, just my two-cents on why Melee/Wizard is where they are and not really meant for extended game play.

Kevin "Slyvnr" Perryman



On 8/15/2013 10:34 AM, PvK wrote:
The main difference I think needs consideration, apart from your goal of less record-keeping, is that the GURPSy system is based on play sessions, which don't necessarily map to what happened in those sessions, unlike TFT where it's mainly based on actual game events. Character skill development can become much more based on the GM and how the RP sessions went. For example, one GM would hardly give out any points at all, while another GM was giving out maximum points per play session for great role-playing, even though what the characters were doing was mostly just socializing mainly with each other, which WAS very good roleplaying, but was resulting in those characters becoming stronger, more agile, smarter, better in their skills, because their players had plaid them in-character in amusing and/or interesting ways, which fits incentive-to-roleplay thinking, but is totally illogical for in-world cause-and-effect making sense, and led to quick character ability inflation in !
  terms of game-time.

--- rsmith@lightspeed.ca wrote:

Hi David,
   I've been tempted to do a Gurps style experience
system.  You get 1 point per session or a couple if
you did well.  Then...

Attribute	Points needed
Total		To advance:

30 to 34	3
35 to 39	6
40 to 44	12
45 to 49	24, etc.

   The reason I go with 3 (rather than 2 or 4) is that
the superscripts in my campaign cost 1/3 of an
attribute which works well.

   This system would eliminate the whole, constant exp
paperwork in TFT.
Warm regards, Rick.

On Wed, 2013-14-08 at 16:01 -0400, David O. Miller wrote:
Hmm I sometimes wonder if all of us play the same game. TFT combat is extremely deadly and most the time I ran it a players character was very lucky to survive to the end of a multi session scenario. It did happen though, which gave the scenario consistency. And those characters became very memorable characters in all players eyes. But most characters were fodder. Because of that I rarely saw anyone gain enough experience to really advance.

In fact (as shocking as this is to the purist amongst us) we stopped bothering with experience after a while. It was too too much like bookkeeping and really not very much fun.

So in a sense all of our games were like the "start of TFT campaigns". And it was great fun to watch characters succeed against seemingly insurmountable odds. Sort of like "most" fantasy books I've read.

If I wanted characters with tons of experience and almost impossible to kill I would have played D&D.

Of course I was also know by some of my players as the "Deatharee" instead of the "Referee".

David
__________________________________________
David O. Miller
Miller Design/Illustration
www.davidomiller.com



On Aug 14, 2013, at 2:32 PM, Joey Beutel <mejobo@comcast.net> wrote:

Thats part of why I've always liked the "start" of TFT campaigns, or campaigns where gaining XP is relatively slow...
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