Why you Should be Playing: The Fantasy Trip

[Edgar Ironpelt]

As someone who has been a TFT GM for a looooong time, I'll practice thread necromancy and throw in my two cents.

TFT at heart is a grim and gritty, anyone can die, low fantasy sort of system. In some ways it's more like RuneQuest than D&D, and it appeals to the sort of player (and particularly the sort of GM) who thinks of D&D levels 1-3 as the Core Fun Levels with 4th level and higher being "overpowered high level play."

Now I'm not that sort of GM or player, and what attracted TFT to me is that it's a simple system that can serve as a good base for a swashbucking style of play and with a magic system that's closer to what Champions/Hero System would call "martial arts, usable at range" than to "Artillery pieces disguised as wizards." And so I've been engaged in a long project to house-rule away the grim and gritty high lethality aspects. Currently it's at a point where I don't consider my game to be house-ruled TFT but rather a TFT-based homebrew.

Since I'm not bothered by a lack of powerful, active gods in my games, I'm not much bothered by the cynical treatment of religion in the base TFT rules. I did consider grafting a RuneQuest inspired religious system onto my house rules, and decided against it, although I do give priests in my game some minor arcane abilities for being priests.

 

[Thomas Shey]

As an aside, I was rereading it the other day, and was reminded how much swish-and-miss you're liable to see unless you really invest in Dexterity. And at the other end how hard it is to improve your defense.

 

[ichabod]

The thing I always liked about it was the flexibility of the characters. There are no absolute limits on having any talents or spells, although cost limits that make it impractical in most cases. But it was the first roleplaying game I ever bought, and my older brother would play melee with me when I was in grade school, so there's a lot of nostalgia there.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Of course that's true of most build point systems, though some have secondary caps (usually because their purchase costs are linear rather than progressive, which means its often overly attractive to hammer one or two important abilities over spreading out. This is even worse in the case of games that are linear initially and progressive in advancement).