Re: (TFT) Man To Man & GURPS

[Jeffrey Vandine <jlv61560@yahoo.com>]

You could read the designer's notes for The Fantasy Trip (published in The 
Space Gamer, number 29, July 1980).  And I quote:

"It started in 
early 1977. I had just found out, much to my surprise, that I cou
ld design games . . . people were buying Ogre.  But the game that
 I was playing a lot myself was Dungeons & Dragons.  And lik
e everyone else who tried an early version of D&D, I wanted
to make 
some changes.  The polyhedra dice were irritating — but t
he biggest problem was combat.  The D&D combat rules were co
nfusing and unsatisfying.  No tactics, no real movement —
 you just rolled dice and died.  T&T was the same way. ��Monsters! Monsters! was more detailed in some ways, but still allow
ed no tactics.

So I did something about it.  My origina
l idea was to design a game that would accurately simulate medieval��sword-and-shield combat.  It would have to be simple and fast,
 and FEEL accurate.  So Melee was born.  It was very simple,��as fantasy games go. Instead of six attributes, it used only two: s
trength and dexterity.  Movement was very simple, and combat was 
handled by "options" which allowed a variety of different actions. ��When I designed Melee, I wasn't going for anything but a quick, som
ewhat realistic
game that could be played by itself or used to fight
 battles in a role-playing adventure." -- Steve Jackson

I'd say t
hat pretty definitively answers both that and the question as to whether or
 not TFT followed the same design paradigm as D&D, wouldn't you?


__
______________________________
 From: "raito@raito.com" <raito@raito.com>

To: tft@brainiac.com 
Sent: Sunday, August 3, 2014 11:37 AM
Subject:
 Re: (TFT) Man To Man & GURPS
 

> Gents,
> I think we agree on the
 points that SJ wrote Melee / Wizard as a
> "reaction"
> to things he d
idn't like in D&D.  As my patent lawyer pointed out, all

I don't 
really agree with that at all. One thing you're not taking into
account i
s Steve's experiences in the SCA (though how both TFT and the
original Ru
nequest could both evolve from that continues to evade me).

I may have
 only met him a time or two, but a bunch of my Austin friends
from when I
 lived there worked for him at one time or another, and that
wasn't their
 opinion, either. Nor do I recall seeing anything that would
indicate tha
t those rules were a reaction to anything. Well, OK, GURPS was
a reaction
 to not being able to buy TFT.

Neil Gilmore
raito@raito.com




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