(TFT) Word Value

[David Michael Grouchy II <david_michael_grouchy_ii@hotmail.com>]

Word Value


   So I've been talking for over two months now about the same thing in every
post.  Word Value.  Yet what I read here makes me feel some are further from
implementation that when I started.  I'm pretty sure my story telling is more
effective than my direct discourse.  But I have to ask, does anyone care which
formula is used on an active defense DX ability.  Or if it is used at all.
What's important is that the Monsters, NPCs, and Players all use the same
Rules.  That's all.  AD&D didn't do this, MMO's dont, TFT does.

   I mean obviously I have grossly underestimated the cosmic urgency that the
proper level of math detail has to our ability to participate in gripping
story making.  It has to be the case that everyone here has a really great
tale of a campaign and a play.  One that hinges on that active DX defense.
The reason not a single one has been posted here yet is obviously because no
one wants to embarrass me with their evidence.

   Well let me be really angry at the universe during my conclusion.  Word
value.  You know what I'm really sick and tired of.  Not word value.  People
coming to me years later and saying ``You know what.  you were right.``  Word
value.  If I can see just a single active personality who starts thinking
about how to implement word value, then maybe the migration of definitions
will become interesting to more than just my group of players.  Word value.
And not in ten years from now.  Word value.  But maybe someday within this
very decade someone will actually start to see what I've been seeing all
along.  Word Value.

   So, I'm done expressing my opinion.  I'm going to submerge myself back into
testimonials of what I have seen players & GMs do.  And if no one else has a
single story to share and everyone wants to chase math theory in circles for
another 12 years, against it I wont say a word.  One day, when it's too late
we may find that the feeling of isolation I keep reading about in the gaming
world is directly related to the number of variants we add in.  But about that
I wont say another word.

   Before I do return to stories though.  I want to state for the record what
staggering arrogance I think an active DX rule is.  Given a sword, and a
target the size of one pip on the face of a dice and five seconds I can score
a hit a hundred percent of trys.  In TFT, the fact that one can miss at all
presupposes that there is some form of resistance from the target and
environment.  someone turning their back on you gives you +4 to hit them, but
even that is not a guarantee.  Further, by deduction, we can see that an
active defense of -4 is already built into the game.  This would be a -7 in
the case of a small cat (specifically mentioned as a further DX-3) and -13 in
the case of a small invisible cat.  Again, already built into the game.
Giving players lots of fiddly bits to work so they can really feel their
active defense in the face of the GM's unawareness and failure to communicate
its existence themselves is fine.  Go ahead and let them crank that DX -13 up
to even higher numbers.  Then fold in UNARMED COMBAT on top of that.  See if I
care.  What I find intolerably outrageous, and what I do care inestimably
about, is the irreparable damage to TFT definitions done by blindly trampling
over them with Gurpsian understandings and how that toxicaly obliterates the
ecology of our existing TFT word values.  I am an irritant precisely because I
am an antigen.  But I'm done.  We have all had our shot of medicine.  If we
get well or not depends entirely on if in the first place we were or were not
healthy.

David Michael Grouchy II




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