As I say, and have said in the past, one of the great features of TFT is
that it is, in great part, rules about making rules.
And yes, I've experimented greatly with all those sorts of things over the
years (most of them are probably in the archives of this list).
And mostly, I've abandoned all of them as being costly in terms of either
time or record-keeping in detriment to the game. About the easiest was
allowing a character to, when defending or dodging, to use their DX to
adjust their opponent's roll upward. But on their next attack, they'd
adjust their own roll by the same amount. And if they dodged/defended for
multiple turns, the highest DX they used would be their adjustment. It
works OK, but you then tend to get characters going defensive for the
entire combat. And only having it be a viable option if you have a weapon
skill keeps the peasantry from avoiding damage by trained fighters. And
like most things TFT, it doesn't scale too well. One tweak might be to
make the adjustment 2 for 1. 2 DX to adjust the opponent's roll 1, but you
take an adjustment 2 on your attack.
I find the relative lack of healing magic to be a feature, not a bug. Some
disagree.
I also find that while one attack per 5 seconds works very well for the
game, it's not a good depiction of real-life combat. And yes, I have
fenced (and a bunch of other things, too).
As for religion, I do handle that in a rather idiosyncratic way. If you
want to have a religious character where the religion has real-world
effects, then consider being a wizard and take spells that fit that. If
you want to go a bit further, work up Priest or Theologian.
For the characters with Priest or Theologian, you'll have to have faith,
because you will never be able to command your god(s) to do anything. That
doesn't make the Talents useless, though. It's just that any affect they
have is unseen by the player. My implementation is that, per day,
characters with those Talents will have rolls that they cannot see
adjusted in their favor. One for a Priest, two for a Theologian. And if
you are in a situation where there aren't any such rolls for a day, too
bad. You're not doing anything that needs intervention.
Mass combat is pretty easy to fake up on a large scale. It's really just
using the entire bell curve at once, shifted higher or lower for numbers,
skills, and command Talents. It gets a bit rougher at medium scale, where
the particular units and movements are more visible.
Neil Gilmore
raito@raito.com> I'd say that's still a pretty easy fix though -- just fix the "Dodge" and
> "defend" options to make them a bit more active and flexible.
>
> For example, one could change the rule to read that a figure is allowed
> one "defending option" (either DODGE or DEFEND) and one "attacking option"
> per five-second turn -- which is not an unreasonable thing if you've ever
> taken fencing in real life. Then just tweak the DODGE and DEFEND options
> to allow the player a little bit of influence in how they work, and you're
> there.
>
> Add in the healing magic, some decent rules on religion (you can look at
> Advanced Fighting Fantasy for one example on how to make that work from a
> contemporary (with TFT) game), and steal DCG's evolution of Skills (which
> is a lot simpler to keep track of IMHO), and you'd have TFT Second Edition
> pretty much in the bag. You could add in mass combat on land and sea for
> bonus points for your second edition, but that's still a fairly trivial
> exercise if you think about it.
>
> In short, TFT is an easy fix to get it where you want it. Heck, I'm
> betting that most of us have already experimented with most of these
> things -- I know that I added in healing magic back within a few months of
> launching my first TFT campaign (had to cut down on those character deaths
> somehow!), and have since experimented with almost all of these other
> issues. I'm betting the rest of you have too, to a greater or lesser
> extent.
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