Re: (TFT) Football Field for Jay

[Jay Carlisle <maou.tsaou@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 3:31 PM,  <dwtulloh61> wrote:
> Looks like a huge version of the game map from Scrimmage (by SPI). B  Which I
> think serves as a great starting point for TFT Football.

I forgot about that one.
I've been stuck in rules hell here lately.
I got a stack of old stuff including several Metagaming products as a
gift over x-mas and then found a cache of GURPS WWII stuff amongst
some history books at the local thrift store a couple of weeks ago.
It's the Metagaming stuff that's slaying me these days.

Metagaming was MUCH more than Steve Jackson it seems.
I suppose I could claim my "youth" at the time for such a grievous
oversight but for whatever reason I had looked at Metagaming as
Jackson doing the bulk of the "design" and Thompson as the producer
with other material coming in from occasional submissions and etc.

Keith Gross, Robert Taylor, Guy McLimore and a host of others would
probably have a bit to say about THAT and I'm still not mentioning the
artists like Jaquays, Hallowell, Hidy, or Danforth that came up with
some pretty iconic stuff (IMO at least).
It turns out that Keith Gross is one of my favorite designers and I
never knew it until now.
And it turns out that the first synthesis of Microgames was done by
Mike Crane in Space Gamer in '78 with Rivets and Ogre.

But I've got to eat the most crow over Howard Thompson Himself.
>From Chitin: I through Starleader Assault it turns out Thompson did
MUCH more "design" work than I formally knew.
Memory lane gets a tad spooky when it doesn't look like you remember it.

SPI always struck me as a halfway point twixt Metagaming and Avalon
Hill type stuff.
Metagaming had Invasion of the Aireaters, SPI had The Creature That
Ate Sheboygan, and Avalon Hill had Starship Troopers out at around the
same time as I recall.

Thanks for the reminder about Scrimmage, I'd forgotten about that one.


>
> ---- Gavin wrote:
>> Hey Jay -
>>
>> Somebody up there likes you, and wants to make all of your dreams come true!
>>
>> Check out this Football Field game map:

Hi Gavin.

While I'm thinking of it I'll at least make Game Storm at the end of March.
<knocks on wood>
I was thinking of running a couple of not my things for a little
variety (for me at least).
How about a TFQ run maybe using a DCG adventure?
Just a thought.

I also came up with a large number of Pages for a full layout of a
sports pitch at scale.
Mine is actually a bit bigger than this one (about three and a half
feet by six and a half feet) as 1.3m is about 4.3 feet instead of the
5 feet per unit for this map.
As I have a design rule that the map component has to fit 40 inches by
40 inches at maximum I had to come up with a workaround for that 6
foot plus length.
Instead of laying the Pages out in a grid I stagger the columns lining
the tops of Pages in one column with the middle of the pages in the
next column.
This gives each Page six surrounding Pages in a mega-Page arrangement
analogous to mega-Hexes.
Even a plodding MA 10 covers a Page a turn.
So I don't lay out the whole field at once but only the Pages for the
specific action as needed from the player POV.
I use a larger scaled Page to keep track of other movement with each
hex representing 1 Page on the field scale.
It lets me keep Melee's scale while still fitting it on a kitchen table.
Of course if you have access to a 7 foot long table then why not lat
out all the Pages?
=====
Post to the entire list by writing to tft@brainiac.com.
Unsubscribe by mailing to majordomo@brainiac.com with the message body
"unsubscribe tft"