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The Historical Importance of Ron Edwards' Sorcerer [+]
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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8949373" data-attributes="member: 82106"><p>Yeah, I know the Melee/Wizard/Fantasy Trip system. I was living in Central Texas and our gaming club there was HUGE back in the late '70s. I mean, like, there were 200 active members, a very large space that contained at least 10 4'x8' plywood tables, tons and tons of terrain (large boxes of lichen, hexagonal hills and rivers and whatnot) and sported a very active RPG side. Metagaming was an hour or so away in Austin IIRC, and Steve or some of the people he worked with would come up with their new micro-games and various ideas which we would playtest, or just buy if they were already done. So we basically got copies of O.G.R.E. Car Wars, Melee, Wizard, G.E.V., etc. etc. etc. 'hot off the press', and often with designers playing with us. We also had Forrest Brown, the guy who ran Martial Metals. He'd come up and basically trade us old 'lead' figures almost pound for pound for his 15mm fantasy armies and 25mm figure lines. I still have a bunch of his stuff from those days.</p><p></p><p>So we were REALLY well equipped! We played quite a lot of Melee/Wizard and this thing they called 'T.H.E.' which was some sort of proto-GURPS I guess. Anyway, GURPS didn't come out till a few years later after Steve left Metagaming, but the DNA of GURPS is basically Melee and Wizard, which were later combined into TFT, The Fantasy Trip, which fleshed out a sort of generic fantasy world and added rules beyond the "fight to the death in any arena" setting which was all Melee and Wizard did by default. They are all very trad c1980 d6 based RPGs. TFT's rules are quite simple, you have 3 stats, etc. I don't even remember a lot of the details. My Father loved TFT and used to run it now and then up into the early '90s. </p><p></p><p>Honestly, I don't recall their being any 'innovative' mechanics in the sense of stuff that would have contributed to games like OtE, PV, and Sorcerer ultimately. However, I can certainly see why the very spartan mini-game of Wizard would leave you wanting something more. You could play D&D of course, but Wizard was probably intriguing BECAUSE of its very incompleteness. All sorts of design possibilities were latent there and unrealized, and the sheer simplicity of it all (the rules are a few pages long) means hacking it together with something like OtE probably wasn't that MECHANICALLY hard.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 8949373, member: 82106"] Yeah, I know the Melee/Wizard/Fantasy Trip system. I was living in Central Texas and our gaming club there was HUGE back in the late '70s. I mean, like, there were 200 active members, a very large space that contained at least 10 4'x8' plywood tables, tons and tons of terrain (large boxes of lichen, hexagonal hills and rivers and whatnot) and sported a very active RPG side. Metagaming was an hour or so away in Austin IIRC, and Steve or some of the people he worked with would come up with their new micro-games and various ideas which we would playtest, or just buy if they were already done. So we basically got copies of O.G.R.E. Car Wars, Melee, Wizard, G.E.V., etc. etc. etc. 'hot off the press', and often with designers playing with us. We also had Forrest Brown, the guy who ran Martial Metals. He'd come up and basically trade us old 'lead' figures almost pound for pound for his 15mm fantasy armies and 25mm figure lines. I still have a bunch of his stuff from those days. So we were REALLY well equipped! We played quite a lot of Melee/Wizard and this thing they called 'T.H.E.' which was some sort of proto-GURPS I guess. Anyway, GURPS didn't come out till a few years later after Steve left Metagaming, but the DNA of GURPS is basically Melee and Wizard, which were later combined into TFT, The Fantasy Trip, which fleshed out a sort of generic fantasy world and added rules beyond the "fight to the death in any arena" setting which was all Melee and Wizard did by default. They are all very trad c1980 d6 based RPGs. TFT's rules are quite simple, you have 3 stats, etc. I don't even remember a lot of the details. My Father loved TFT and used to run it now and then up into the early '90s. Honestly, I don't recall their being any 'innovative' mechanics in the sense of stuff that would have contributed to games like OtE, PV, and Sorcerer ultimately. However, I can certainly see why the very spartan mini-game of Wizard would leave you wanting something more. You could play D&D of course, but Wizard was probably intriguing BECAUSE of its very incompleteness. All sorts of design possibilities were latent there and unrealized, and the sheer simplicity of it all (the rules are a few pages long) means hacking it together with something like OtE probably wasn't that MECHANICALLY hard. [/QUOTE]
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