Re: (TFT) Heretical notion --> DoU

["Charles Gadda" <cgadda@earthlink.net>]

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: tft-owner@brainiac.com [mailto:tft-owner@brainiac.com] On Behalf
Of
> > Charles Gadda
> >
> > Might not be fair, but after reading the stupid little jabs they did at
SJ
> > in Interplay, I have to conclude HT was not exactly working on all
> > thrusters...
> >
> > Too bad, since TFT had (and, in my mind, still has) a lot of promise.
They
> > could have done a lot more with this system, or at the least provided
more
> > Microquests, modules, etc. Underearth just screamed for more material,
and
> > not merely a bunch of small unit combat encounters. What a waste.
>
> I agree on all counts. The jabs to SJ are all over the place in Interplay,
> Metagaming ads, games they produced, etc.

Strange coincidence!

Last Friday, I chanced across this website:
http://micro.brainiac.com/archives.html

It has a number of scanned documents, including a letters, meeting minutes,
etc. much of which come from Metagaming. While the meeting minutes are of
keen interest, as they discuss several "upcoming" projects that were in the
pipe just before the company imploded (which I will summarize in my next
thread), there is also a letter from HT himself that has a couple of
paragraphs that are quite apropos to this thread:

                           ***
"TFT is too complicated as completed by Steve Jackson. He completed the
project as he wished, not as I'd hoped or even laid down constraints." ....
"I think the system is better than D&D, but not by a huge margin. All the
material in Advanced Melee and Advanced Wizard didn't need to be added at
all. More spells and weapons fine, more detail of combat, no."

"My feeling is that in the extra two years of work TFT got longer instead of
better. I'm having work started [on] a new FRP system that can be introduced
in 3-4 years and is closer to what I think the market wants and what I'll
feel comfortable in publishing."
                          ***

Very illuminating statements on HT's part. For starters, it does paint a
slightly different picture of the HT vs. SJ spat. While I still think HT
reacted quite poorly, it is clear that he had some legitimate gripes with SJ
's work, and that SJ insisted on marching to the beat of his own drummer,
and flaunted HT's instructions. I guess that would qualify as "creative
differences"

All that said, I am rather glad that SJ went ahead as he did! While HT did
have a point (which I will discuss below) in looking at DoU I find HT's
vision to be so narrow and simplistic as to be only barely worth playing.
Don't get me wrong - the ultimate, ideal goal of any game designer is to
model the "reality" of whatever it is he is trying to model with the
cleanest, simplest, and most elegant rules possible. And DoU did have some
very good ideas, such as how the "rolling to miss" rules were heavily
streamlined. But there is a line that, if crossed, renders the game not so
much unplayable as simply uninteresting - the ultimate example would be
distilling all of the rules to a "heads-tails coin toss" - and that is
precisely the line that DoU had at least partially crossed.

However, HT was on to something in his criticism of SJ's work. I suspect
that a lot of it was probably due to the very sloppy organization inherent
to AM, AW, and ITL (especially AM). There is no question that the lack of an
index, meaningful TOC, and in general incoherent organization (AM in
particular has various rules scattered to the four winds). But with AM and
AW one does find a bit of excessiveness - some examples:

- The HTH rules are overly verbose and clumsy, not to mention have different
mechanics
- The "Aimed Shots", "Dagger Marksmanship" and "Crippling Hits" rules have
too much overlap and really should be combined and condensed.
- The stats for armor MA and DX penalties, encumbrance rules, and rules for
exceptional strength vis a vis armor penalties are a needless multiplication
of mechanics. One could eliminate the latter rule altogether by assigning
minimum penalties for armor wear that would apply to everyone regardless of
ST, and then "amp up" the penalties of the normal encumbrance rules, to
approximate the original penalties for figures with less heroic ST's. I'll
post some ideas on this later.

And so on. I do not feel that TFT was "too complicated" (I would consider it
almost too simplistic); rather, it just wanted for better organization and
streamlining.

Actually, TFT has a good enough basic concept that one can rather easily
portray a fair amount of semi-realistic detail without bogging down with a
lot of die rolling or excessive rules. Indeed, it is much better than any
other game system around (except possibly "Pocket Universe" but I have no
experience with that - what I have seen struck me as overly simplistic, but
that may be an unfair opinion), which is why I continue to tinker with TFT
rather than some other system. Basically, TFT offers a good set of basic
underlying mechanics that can support enough detail to be interesting yet
still be fast paced and easy to play with - unlike even 3rd Edition D&D
(which isn't that bad - I have to admit the current writers did a pretty
outstanding job cleaning up the system. But it is still bloated, and there
are too many rules. Our group is constantly having to spend a lot of time
consulting rules and so forth, slowing up play). Further, TFT can easily be
made to accommodate modern technology and so forth, in a manner similar to
GURPS but much more streamlined. One could say that TFT, in its idealized
form, could become what GURPS should have been.

That's why I like TFT - it may not be perfect but they had all the right
ideas.
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