I'm interested to know if other people use them in the same way, and what "house rules" or tweaks have you come up with? What are the biggest issues that have come up that you feel a house rule could resolve?
I have. Also, when I GM, I tend to use more of a simulation approach than a PC-centric storytelling approach. And, there tend to be many tactical situations. I've done some TFT and GURPS combats in my campaigns that had hundreds of fighters in them.
However, after playing TFT for maybe five years back in the 80's, my friends and I became dissatisfied and started making lots of new rules to address what we felt were weaknesses, because we had more or less mastered TFT combat and wanted more detail and realism. When GURPS appeared, we found it to include more playable versions of the changes we wanted, and we were pretty happy with GURPS for maybe another 10 years. I'm now at the point that I like both TFT and GURPS, but I'd rather be playing my own rules that are more complex than GURPS on the tactical details I am interested in.
For tactical-detail-fascinated players, I would recommend looking at GURPS advanced combat as an alternative, especially for small numbers of fighters on each side.
For large-scale battles, I have also devised some systems that use GURPS to determine odds of results, but are faster and less complex than TFT, by determining the probabilities of various results between different known types of fighters doing typical things, and then rolling a single die for each pair of fighters, with only a few small DRMs. This could be done for TFT too. By using the same time/hex scale and having full details for the fighter types, one can even have fully-detailed combat for important characters amidst a sea of fighting minions whose combat is being resolved very quickly and not really less realistically (just more abstractly).
For TFT weak points, that might want house rules (depending on player tastes), what immediately come to mind are:
Polearm rules HTH rules Talent capacity Defending Engagement Point of death Mounted combat Climbing rules (18 should not be automatic fall) Damage with weapons and high ST PvK ===== Post to the entire list by writing to tft@brainiac.com. Unsubscribe by mailing to majordomo@brainiac.com with the message body "unsubscribe tft"