(TFT) Man To Man & GURPS - was Re: (TFT) The return of Ogre - Rick did something silly.

[Peter von Kleinsmid <pvk@oz.net>]

Gamers all have different tastes, and those of us who subscribe to 
this email list all like and are still interested in TFT. I'm one of 
the few who also really likes GURPS and actually prefers it in many 
ways, so I'll chime in on the question of whether Man To Man is an improvement.

When Man To Man first came out, my friends and I who had played TFT 
for several years were getting dissatisfied with it because we knew 
it so well that it seemed too familiar and gamey and predictable for 
our personal tastes. And the characters we had who'd survived years 
of play were breaking some of the system - one guy had enough armor, 
DX and damage than many people had little chance of hurting him, and 
another would drill people in the head with a crossbow almost always, 
etc. So we were making some heavy house rules, really designing a new 
game, to provide what we thought we wanted at that point, and that 
stalled our games and was taking a lot of time and making something 
very unplayable.

Man To Man was almost perfect for us. It provided almost everything 
we wanted, and felt close to TFT, though it was just melee and no 
mental abilities or anything. It was the first draft of GURPS combat, 
and isn't all that far off from later editions of GURPS combat, but 
it did put all the combat rules in one place. It had active defenses, 
a good variety of different equipment effects and tactics, and had 
much more chaotic and unpredictable combats. It was quite a few more 
years before I started feeling the desire to add house rules to 
GURPS. And, the latest version of GURPS actually included a number of 
my house rules, without making it more complex in those ways (though 
they did make the books very long and complex by adding almost every 
possible thing from every worldbook, more or less).

So for players who are into the detail of combat, it's great, but few 
besides me who have those tastes are still hanging out on the TFT 
email list. ;-)

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