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(TFT) Re: TFT Digest V4 #4



At 21:29 -0500 1/18/10, Jay wrote:

Bill-Guisarme / 8'+ - SR 2' - SF 10
includes Scorpion

...
Halberd / 5'+ - SR 5' - SF 9

...
Lance (heavy horse) / c.14' - SR 1' - SF 8

Lance (light horse) / 10' - SR 1' - SF 7

Lance (medium horse) / 12' - SR 1' - SF 6

...
Spear / 5'-13'+ - SR 1' - SF 6-8

Trying to figure out what SF (speed factor) means. It would make sense if interpreted as "which goes first in a charge attack" but not if interpreted as "which can move around fastest in a brawl". If the former, the above ratings don't make sense. The longer polearms all go after the shorter polearms.

Also not confident the room-required makes all that much sense, but have not thought about that much.

At 21:29 -0500 1/18/10, Jay wrote:
Traveller

...is a *whole* *different* system for representing combat. I'm not sure there's much value in trying to map Traveller into TFT for combat systems. Traveller has a lot of good stuff in it, particularly the Trillion Credit Squadron starship design system and the Vehicle design system add-on (forgot the name). Given the "magic technology" assumptions they make, those are pretty impressive. But snap-shots, directed energy weapons, and balancing your technology against my technology are really out of family with TFT's balancing missile weapons, pole weapons, DX, ST, IQ, etc.

I think the only real way to compare the two systems is to compare each to "real life" (modulo the missing magic for TFT and technology for Traveller) to see what aspects of real life are streamlined/simplified/oversimplified by each, and how much fun the resulting game is to play.

TFT does a better job of that, imho. I note that "Melee" was a fun game on its own, while "Snapshot" wasn't much.

Have not played AD&D enough to comment.

I'm not much hung up about different weights. What Traveller calls a "Battle Axe" may be the exact same thing TFT calls a "Small Ax".

At 21:29 -0500 1/18/10, TFT Digest wrote:
Any thoughts?

"Air War" broke down 1960-80 jet fighter combat into 0.5 second (?) turns, and tried to very accurately model physics. It did a pretty good job, but the result was > 100 pages of rules, tables, charts, etc.

Playing out a combat which took 30 seconds of game time took all day on the clock. Worse, the players had plenty of time to think out their next move, count hexes, and basically turn it into a "chess game" rather than anything remotely real-time. TFT can be played on a pretty close to real-time time scale, for small engagements, and it takes a lot of the chess-playing out of it and puts a whole lot of excitement back into it.

For computer games, arbitrarily deep levels of detail are OK, as long as they are used to present a "realistic" interface to the player, in close to real-time.

For board games, the appropriate arena for the deep level of detail is only to help the referee add realism into his scenario. TFT pretty much nails the level of detail the players need to know, in my opinion. More is overwhelming (D&D, Traveller) and should be carried by a computer (World of Warcraft) if it's going to be present. Less is too simple, and no longer corresponds closely enough to realism to interest the players or to allow enough flexibility in character design.
--
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