(TFT) TFT II

["Kirk Woller" <kwoller@satx.rr.com>]

What a great bunch of players!  Some very informative and helpful comments.
And I am still hoping there are some TFT players here in San Antonio that
will contact me.  Does anyone have an idea on how to ferret out these
players? Am I the only one left? :-(  Let me quickly divide up items I want
to narrow our discussion along to perhaps decide on a course of action:

1)  Making the original system easily available and current state of game
posted
My preference would be to make hard copies available of the original game
system available for sale, which requires dealing with the copyright issue
and we all know that is currently as mysterious as the lost continent of
Atlantis and so not doable, I guess, by anyone without deep pockets to make
this a pet project.  Next preferred state would be making the original game
(and I mean at least all of Advanced Melee, Advanced Wizard, and In The
Labyrinth, and possibly all of the support material and modules that go with
these) available for download, with or without a fee involved.  Although I
have two degrees majoring in physics, mathematics, and computer science I
don't keep up with the "hardware" side of things and sometimes aren't sure I
understand them and don't develop professionally much anymore.  So what do
people in the know here think about just making sure that the aforementioned
rules are always available and easily found or even stumbled on by old and
new players alike?  I refer to the excellent references to wiki, etc. and/or
posting on this brainiac site or equivalent.  Is there anything that keeps
us from doing this, sort of a "keepers of the book" priesthood?  My
discussions with George from Dark City Games has him seemingly adamant
against being able to trace from DGC sites to the copyrighted rules,
unfortunately, for fear of contaminating the operation with possible legal
issues, understandably.  He did mention a Dave Jackson (relation to
Steve???) who he has some knowledge of being an instigator in shutting down
sites that permit downloading of TFT.  Does anyone know anything about this
or him?

2)  Writing TFT II to avoid copyright infringement with and/or without small
"improvements"
I see that some good work has already been done on a rewrite.  And you are
right about a cat fight when it comes to "improvements'.  I had these with
George over Legends during development and playtest.  I think the best thing
to do barring implementation of 1) above is to just rewrite the three
advanced modules in the same friendly and understandable style that Steve
had a knack for in all of his games, present day SJG development when he has
a hand in it always seems to be easy and fun to read and efficiently
informative and WELL-playtested (a major thing with me, I hate poorly tested
anything).  The proper use of examples and pics throughout the text and an
index and table of contents would help people quickly find relevant rules.  

As far as I am concerned, though this is probably another thread, there are
really only three or four areas that I think could be improved, and truly
these are after three decades of playing and designing to this game.
Briefly, these are changing charge attacks slightly to avoid everyone
preferring a pole weapon to a sword.  Even though the sword talent includes
dagger whereas the pole weapon user has to spend another IQ point to get
knife ability almost makes up for it, we generally play that to obtain
double damage in a charge attack a character must charge at least 3 hexes in
the straightest possible line (bearing in mind the uniqueness of hexagons).
My memory has me believing that this was a rule sanctioned by SJ himself,
who in an attempt to mitigate the pole weapon damage problem from Melee
originally changed the damage for a spear, for example, from 1+2 to 1+1/1
(one handed) as well as the others, if memory serves, from between Melee and
Advanced Melee.

Allow a 4d/IQ saving roll against the Sleep spell, as it is a standard
tactic to put mighty characters to sleep, then slit their throats.  This is
hard to bear when you have worked your character up from scratch to a 40
pointer!  Most other "control" type spells allow a saving roll and this
should be no different.

Make the Staff to Snake spell a bit more powerful, somehow, since I have
NEVER seen anyone take it.

And there are a few others but really no big deal and no changes to make
anything more "realistic" etc. that turns it into GURPS.  And the most
powerful part of TFT, IMO, is the move/move/go according to DX system PLUS
the use of Front hex engagements.  These are the two biggest things missing
in Legends that I made a case for but was outvoted on that keep it from
being the rewritten substitute it could have been to support new module
development (IMO).  My playtesting has found that a good player (GM) can
wipe out a group of players in one encounter (or sometimes two) almost every
time.  The tactical nature of Legends just isn't the same as TFT.

3)  Legends vs. TFT in adventure game development 
Someone had mentioned they didn't see how Legends versus TFT could stall a
microquest adventure.  Primarily, play balance is supremely affected in a
well designed module depending on which system is used (reference above
statement).  Being able to run around people without being engaged and not
forcing characters to act on their DX creates very definite problems in the
tactical play as I documented and confirmed in several playtest groups.  I
won't use the term broken, but I think it applies.  Also, the differences in
nomenclature for weaponry and other differences created to differentiate
Legends or to keep it basic, and the use of stacking talents to add DX to
skills (like GURPS a bit) again creates textual and balance problems when
making these references in an adventure module.  There are a few others as
well but believe me, many dozens of hours would be consumed matching Legends
to TFT and trying to rebalance against those rules because of the mentioned
differences.  These difference, IMO, make it very difficult to design a
finely tuned adventure that works well using either TFT or Legends rules;
clever players will either be able to destroy most anyone they meet, or
consequently BE destroyed by a clever GM.  I have gamed this enough times to
shut down playtest sessions in disgust because of it.  There seems to be no
solution forthcoming, unfortunately, as no changes to these "differences" is
in the works according to anything George has made me aware of.

Your comments on each of these areas would be greatly appreciated.  Maybe we
can make some headway on this somehow.

TFT Trivia:  Did you ever notice that the original first edition Melee
boards had very small stars only on the eight entry hexes and dots in the
rest, and that subsequent boards seem to have stars in the center of every
hex (fellow player's dog ate my original edition board and advanced modules,
unfortunately)?

Did you know that SJG was housed (maybe still is?) in an old converted
kennel in South Austin?  The two story shipping and warehouse were where the
cages were kept, and the attached two story house was where production was
housed.  Steve's haunts were upstairs and he handled business in the morning
and design in the afternoon and was NOT to be disturbed after lunch while he
was thinking.  The country style mailbox avoided the use of the words games
or the name of the company because people would come by and disturb the
employees or think it was a game store or video game arcade.  If you didn't
know the address, you wouldn't be able to find it.

-Kirk
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