Re: (TFT) TFT-style rules

[Christopher Fuhrman <fuhrman8or@yahoo.com>]

Hi Kirk and welcome to the list,

First, as someone who's (too) nostalgic, it's great to have you contribute the history of TFT and SJG. I enjoyed the "gang up on Steve" story.

TFT II is a great idea. As I wrote before, it would be excellent if the justification for any design decisions were documented explicitly, and "traceable" to the objectives of the rules (e.g., simplicity, realism, playability, etc.). This is useful so that when modifications are proposed, one can see the impact they might have on the global vision for the game. It's quite like the design of software, which has been sometimes compared to document maintenance, because software is basically a set of rules to support requirements. I can't help it if I see things that way - it's what I do for a living :-(

Even if 100% of the people agree to support a TFT II, I'm 100% sure you will NOT find a consensus among players here about what is the true "spirit of TFT" you'll be trying to capture in TFT II. It's hard to agree on the requirements of anything complex. This is probably the reason why there needs to be a single leader in any game design.

Here are a couple of replies to your comments:

> I spent two hours recently looking for a link to the TFT rules and *COULD NOT FIND AN ACTIVE LINK" anywhere, meaning that TFT is fundamentally unavailable to anyone even if they know what to look for.

Not entirely. I found these sites:

http://bluwiki.com/go/Tft-wizard
http://bluwiki.com/go/Tft-melee

Granted, it's only basic TFT. However, neither of these is password protected, nor have they been plagued by spammers, defacers, or other things (so far). Both allow anyone to modify them, in principle, according to Wiki philosophy.

> Would the brainiac site, for instance, host a link to this rewrite of TFT if it were available and if DCG would not?

No offense to brainiac or the folks that do a great job to run the server and the mailing list + archives, but Wiki pages, mailing lists, forums, etc. exist today and, as shown above with the bluwiki sites, you could host the entire rule-set without even needing to get permission from anyone. Google groups, Blogger, bluwiki, etc. are all sites that are likely to not disappear any time soon, and cost $0 / month, and come with "free" administrators who take care of the service. The acronym for this is SaaS (Software as a Service) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_Service

No need to apologize for diatribes on this list! At least, I never do :-)



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