There’s currently a Kickstarter to republish the long out-of-print ancestor of GURPS: The Fantasy Trip.
I was really into GURPS for quite a while, ever since I got the Man to Man book (a sort of “preview” of GURPS published as a stand-alone arena game). I lost a lot of enthusiasm for GURPS when the complexity grew to the point that their were separate books for players and GMs. I saw the ads for Melee and Wizard in Dragon magazines back in the day but never saw them is stores or had any idea what they were about. When the first edition of GURPS was published (as a boxed set with two stapled booklets that did not even have covers!) there was something about The Fantasy Trip (TFT) in the introduction but I didn’t pay any heed. I finally learned about the game in the late 1990s or early 2000s when some fan sites started posting scans of the rules. Intriguing, but GURPS was already filling that niche and why go backward, right?
When I heard Steve Jackson reacquired the rights to TFT, I was a little excited and convinced my gaming group to test out Advanced Melee — the combat system from TFT with no frills. We liked it quite a bit.
So I’m pretty excited about the Kickstarter, because there is the option to subscribe for a seriously packed “Legacy Edition” boxed set that includes the minigames Melee and Wizard, the full RPG In the Labyrinth with three modules, and a lot of extras like play mats drawn by Dyson, a GM screen, and dice (“I want it all” level) plus possibly more stretch goal add-ons.
I really like TFT‘s simplicity.
- The basic mechanics are rolling under a stat or score on 3d6, with possibly more or fewer dice depending on the difficulty of the task.
- Weapons all do fixed ranges of damage, with strength just counting for hit points and allowing use of bigger weapons. This seemed like a terrible idea to me at first, but it has grown on me.
- Characters advance more like GURPS than D&D: XP are used to buy new talents/skills/spells or increase attributes.
- Characters can do fairly superhuman things eventually, but they can also always get killed by lesser foes who are lucky or clever.
The reports on longer campaigns seem to emphasize that the mechanics, being simple, tend to take a back seat to story, but being so tactical they also allow dramatic action for combat. Sounds like a winner. My only concern is how much ‘planning’ is necessary in character generation. I never liked 3e D&D for that reason — your choices early on tend to drive what your options are later. But TFT does have some “unlearning” rules, at least for spells IIRC, so it may bem ore flexible than it looks.
Now, if I can figure out a way to tack on some version of the miracle-based clerical magic in my own book…
