The Fantasy Trip

Last year, I found my curiosity piqued by The Fantasy Trip and looked into a couple of the retroclones. I resolved to get hold of it when it was republished - in part, because I couldn't remember if I'd ever played the minigames on which it's based: Melee and Wizards. Steven Jackson Games were popular as lunchtime diversions when I was at primary school; we played Car Wars and OGRE quite a bit, but I'm not sure about Melee.

Having bought the Legacy Edition of The Fantasy Trip, I'm still not sure. The rules seem familiar, as do some of the counters. But it was a long time ago - and if we did play it back then, we played Car Wars and OGRE much more. I never owned any of them, and I do remember designing some grid-based combat games shortly after I moved schools - possibly to recapture the counter-and-grid thrills of those lunchtime sessions.

Anyway, the kids and I played four games of Melee over the weekend. It's terrific. I'm planning to use it for most RPG sessions with the kids and their friends from now on, simply because it'll make combat encounters so much more compelling than the various D&D clones we've tried. Whitehack will doubtless remain a go-to for small, focused groups, and I'm playing Tunnels & Trolls with some old friends next weekend, but for dungeon-crawling with the kids, The Fantasy Trip/Melee appears perfect.

So why is that? Well, the sheer amount of decisions to be made - formalised in the game as options - gives a tremendous range of outcomes. I can't think of any one-figure-per-player skirmish game that offers quite so many options in combat situations.

And yet the game is very simple. For Melee (the TFT combat system as a freestanding game), characters have three stats: strength (ST), dexterity (DX) and movement allowance (MA). You design your character(s) by deciding the balance of their ST and DX and then choose whatever weapons and armour you like.

And that's where the real genius of the game comes in. It combines a reasonable amount of realism with a tremendous amount of game balance. Strong characters can take and hand out more punishment: ST acts as your hit points, and allows you to use nastier weapons) But DX decides who attacks first - and the higher your DX, the higher your chance of landing a roll. Armour absorbs damage - but also reduces DX and MA.

So sufficient ST to wield a grisly weapon like a two-handed axe will impair your DX when you initially assign points between them - and heavy armour will impair it still further. But you will be appropriately tank-like and able to deal terrible damage on those rare occasions when you hit.

Alternatively, you could choose high DX to allow you to hit quickly and often. But against heavily armoured foes, you'll be relying on lucky shots to get through the armour.

You can see how this is perfect for gladiatorial combat: secutor v retiarius, or whatever.

And then you've got the hand-to-hand option - grappling, essentially, in which no weapon larger than a dagger is useful, but a dagger is very useful indeed. That creates a whole extra dimension. If you're determined to grapple with a foe, you'll probably want to drop your main weapons and draw a dagger - but there's a chance that they'll be able to do the same when you close, or even just clobber you with their main weapon and step back.

It's a fantastically elegant combat system. There are certainly lapses in realism; I suspect armour wasn't quite so constricting/slowing, at least initially, and of course many strong people are very dextrous too. YOu don't need to be terribly strong to use a two-handed sword or battleaxe; a two-handed sword isn't usually twice the weight of a regular sword. And the weapons list has some oddities (a pike axe?). But for a balanced game, it's just right.

Incidentally, while the RPG rules (In the Labyrinth) give a whole list of real-world weapons that might fit into the various categories, these make very little sense. The glaive and the naginata - essentially the same thing - are in different slots, for example. None of this matters, though - it's very easy to look at a miniature and decide that its big fantasy polearm is the very quintessence of pike axe.

After an initial one-on-one run through the rules, we played three lizardmen against three orcs, then a couple of games with two burly, armoured hobgoblins and a smallish giant against five orcs: two heavily armoured types and three skirmishers (two with javelins and one with a light crossbow). Both times, the orcs won, because they were able to surround the unsupported giant and pierce it with many weapons. There was something of the mammoth hunt about it, which seemed quite appropriate.

We're eager to play more, and to try the wizard rules. There are printable hex papers of appropriate size available online, so drawing out some floorplans on those will be no more onerous than drawing them out on traditional grid paper.

The labyrinth beckons ...

Another thought on character generation in Tunnels and Trolls

After going through T&T's character-generation procedure with the kids, I was struck by how artful the game is in making its characters distinctive - through something as simple as its famously recherché  list of arms and amour.

The best weapons are expensive. But beside the strain they put on the budding adventurer's budget, they also require exorbitant levels of strength and dexterity to use properly. As I noted before, this is hardly rooted in realism. It does mean, though, that characters are forced into peculiar niches. You have to balance the need for armament with the need for armour and other equipment, and reference that against your ST and DEX levels and the amount of weight you can carry (not forgetting to leave room for loot).

So a strong but clumsy warrior with ST 14 and DEX 6, and100 gp to spend, might blow most of his budget on an oxtongue spear (about the most damaging weapon that he can wield to full effect), an open-face helmet, a set of clothes and a pack.

Meanwhile, the reverse (ST 6 and DEX 14) with 150 gp could tool up with a terbutje (a shark-tooth-studded 'sword), a staff sling, leather armour and a buckler. That's about the best she can do in the circumstances.

Immediately, the two warriors are utterly distinctive - and begging for backstories. The exotic equipment list and the entirely arbitrary ST and DEX requirements very quickly create the sword-and-sorcery equivalent of this:

Tunnels and Trolls

Trolls in search of tunnels

The Easter holidays loom. And that entails portable family gaming in case of rainy days or evenings in. We usually take a board game or two with us when we go away, but it's good to have some theatre-of-the-mind RPG stuff on hand as well.

'Theatre of the mind' is how I played most RPGs in my youth; I can recall only one or two scenarios for which we used miniatures consistently. For most of the games I've run since returning to gaming, though, miniatures have been the default. We have lots of them, and they do help with large parties and younger players.

But most of the best games I've run in the past few years have been the miniatures-free sessions: an excursion to Hell in Heroquest Glorantha; a delve inside the slowly reanimating skeleton of a kaiju-like behemoth using Dungeon World; and a Whitehack scenario involving an insectoid scientist and his time-bending, terraforming experiments.

The advantages of miniature-based gaming are obvious: visual scene-setting and tactical possibilities. The disadvantages are fairly clear too: every encounter looks like a wargame; the imagination is constrained by the limits of terrain and tabletop; and a huge amount of time and effort is needed to keep things fresh. That's especially true of games with kids: "We killed that orc last time!".

There's one hoary RPG that was clearly designed without regard to miniatures: Tunnels and Trolls. I don't think I ever actually played this as a kid, but I often borrowed the rulebook from a friend or from the library. I recall being slightly baffled by it. The combat system seemed to be arbitrary to an undesirable extreme, despite the huge list of exotic weapons. And then there were those silly spell names. So it remained an unplayed oddity.

I decided to give it another look and bought the PDF of the fifth-edition rules. And, with adult eyes, I like what I see. It's amazing how advanced the game appears now. In many ways, it's similar to Dungeon World. Its 'saving throws' provide a universal, 2d6-based mechanic - or near-universal, as it's not the default for combat or spell-casting. But it is applicable to combat, as it covers any special ploy you attempt.

A great thing about the saving rolls is that they're heavily based on the character's core attributes. So DEX 11 is better than DEX 10, and so on. That's a huge advance on just having bands of modifiers.

Also, the combat system looks much more interesting than it did to my youthful and Runequest-jaded eyes. The default is that each side rolls damage (based on weapons and 'adds' derived from character attributes), and then the losing side takes the difference in actual damage, split equally between the parties.

That sounds simplistic. But there are plenty of hidden subtleties. For instance, while damage is shared out, not all characters will be equally able to absorb it. A plate-armoured dwarf with a CON (hit points) of 32 will laugh at all but the highest doses of damage. But an unarmoured wizard or lightly armoured rogue will often have to back out of the fight to stay alive - which means that any future damage will be focused on those still left in the fight. So that near-invulnerable dwarf could soon be in a lot more trouble.

And it's clear that those sudden switches in situation will lead to the attempting of death-defying feats, which is where the saving rolls come into combat.

There's also a simple mechanic that makes wounded monsters weaker, which in turn encourages the DM to do something unexpected on their part - or simply let them flee the field. That 'death spiral' adds a nice touch of realism and mirrors the 'don't stay in the kitchen' aspect of PC combat.

Rolling up a few characters with the kids has illustrated some other nice aspects of the game's design. Arms and armour are pricey, and characters will typically be much worse equipped than their counterparts in many other RPGs. That provides ample motivation for dungeon-crawling. My son rolled up a dwarf of formidable physique (ST 22 and CON 32), but could only equip him with a short sword, a face-mask and gauntlets.

I like the open nature of the attributes, too. While dwarves will start off strong (2 x rolled ST and CON), all characters can increase their stats as they gain levels. And higher ST and DEX will allow them access to more powerful weapons. That's hardly realistic, but it makes for a great game incentive; if you want to wield a greatsword effectively, you need to get your ST up to 21 and your DEX up to 18. That's more easily done than in many other games that incorporate training (e.g. RuneQuest), but it will still probably take a bit of work. And if you're happy to throw realism out of the window (two-handed swords aren't that heavy, and wielding a weapon with two hands is probably easier and more natural than with one), then it all works fine.

As for magic, the silly names don't bother me in the slightest now - Take that, you fiend! is probably a better name than D&D's Magic missile or RuneQuest's Disruption. All three games require a bit of thought about how these spells are actually described 'in universe', so T&T's light-hearted approach is neither here nor there. If you want a dark sword-and-sorcery flavour, just have the wizard describe the effects of their spell.

And actually, in the holidays, we might just go with the T&T silliness in all its Pratchety charm.