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[REVIEW] The Fantasy Trip
Mar. 28th, 2010 02:24 pm
Title: The Fantasy Trip
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Description: The Fantasy Trip is composed of three separate products released at the same time: In The Labyrith, Advanced Melee, and Advanced Wizard. As the "Advanced" part of the title indicates, they were expansions on the systems originally presented in the Metagaming microgames Melee (1977) and Wizard (1978), also by Steve Jackson.
Melee was a simple man-to-man combat system played on a hexgrid. Wizard added wizards and rules for magic to the game system. Both have been through a number of editions, both before and after the publication of The Fantasy Trip, with slight revisions to the rules in each edition. The Fantasy Trip was supposed to expand the boardgames into a full-fledged role-playing game, which is why the first book in the series was In The Labyrinth. Advanced Melee and Advanced Wizard expanded the combat and magic rules presented in Melee and Wizard respectively, and thus all the games should probably be considered as a single system.
However creative differences between Steve Jackson and Howard Thompson (the owner of Metagaming) over the project led to Steve Jackson leaving the company, and the eventual publication of a simplified version of the game (as The Dragons of Underearth). Metagaming collapsed, and whilst Steve Jackson offered to buy his game system back, the asking price was impossible. Steve went on to found Steve Jackson Games and produce GURPS as a substitute system (which is why the early GURPS rules had a great focus on the tactical battle aspects of role-playing than is apparent in later editions).
Setting: The Fantasy Trip is set on a generic sword-and-sorcery fantasy world called Cedri. The diversity of life-forms were explained by postulating an elder race, the Mnoren, who had constructed gates between worlds, and then subsequently mysteriously disappeared. Very little official support was given to this setting however. Metagaming continued to publish microquests for Melee and Wizard however, and a couple of these (Treasure of the Silver Dragon and Treasure of the Gold Unicorn) were set in a rather interesting world that, amongst other things, mixed dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals with Native American cultures (such as the Toltecs), and which had intriguing possibilities and potential. There is a very rich, and very underdeveloped, world setting here.
Character Generation: As befits something that was originally a microgame, character generation is extremely simple. There are three stats: Strength [ST] (which determines the size of weapons you can wield and thus the damage you do in combat, as well as being the amount of damage or fatigue from spell-casting you can take), Dexterity [DX] (which determines your ability to hit with both weapons and magic), and Intelligence [IQ] (which determines both the number and power of the spells and talents you can know). A human has a base score of 8 in each, and gets to add 8 points to the abilities of their choice. So a typical fighter would be ST 12, DX 12, IQ 8, equipped with a broadsword doing 2d6 damage, and possibly in leather armour, reducing his effective DX to 10. Most players didn't even bother with visiting the shopping lists to purchase equipment and simply equipped characters with the attribute-appropriate equipment.
Mechanics: The basic resolution system was simple. Roll a number of dice and attempt to get equal to or less than the appropriate attribute. For average tests this was 3D6. For increasingly difficult situations the number of dice went up. For example, an opponent could decide to "defend," in which case the difficulty to hit them went up to 4d6 (the opponent's actual skills being irrelevant in this situation).
That being said, it was very much a tactical combat system played on a hex map, and tactical manoeuvres often trumped the simplicity of the resolution system. For example, actions were resolved in descending DX order, so a high DX character could always strike first or even withdraw from combat, before the lower DX character gets to strike. Getting hit by that wizards spell was difficult if the wizard couldn't see you. And firing arrows past your friends was a quick way to get them annoyed at you (and having to explain why their only injuries are on their back...).
Thoughts: This was one of the most popular role-playing games* amongst my peer circle at the time (exceeded only by the various forms of D&D that were in play at the time, and possibly by my regular Runequest games). The reason was the utter simplicity of the game mechanics, combined with the tactical and strategic complexity of the actual play. For the first time you had a role-playing game where tactical decisions were the core of the game, rather than something added to the original game. The difference is something subtle and yet highly significant. No subsequent game has managed to capture the feel of this game, because either the tactical elements of combat are an add-on, or the actual system became overcomplicated with special rules and exceptions, and thus lost a vital immediacy of play.
Character creation was also so easy that it was trivial to create both player-characters (and opponents), leading to lots of dungeon crawl style play. After all, it didn't really matter if you lost your newbie character as it was easy to make a new one. [Although that definitely didn't stop people from trying to survive to become an experienced veteran, and a few heroes being carried back in pomp on their shields.]
The only real problem with the game was it's reliance on the hex map, which didn't necessarily mesh well with standard orthogonal architecture. Still, that was easy enough to compensate for.
And interestingly enough, the lessons learned in playing The Fantasy Trip often made combat in other role-playing games more enjoyable and much more realistic.
Rating: Excellent (as a tactical boardgame); Good (as a role-playing game).
Addenda: Whilst legal copies of this game are difficult to find nowadays, Dark City Games are publishing a simple pseudo-clone of the Melee/Wizard games called Legends of the Ancient World [pdf], as well as a number of microquests and adaptations of the basic system to other genres.
* Although it could equally be reasoned that it was a boardgame (albeit with intense identification with your game piece on the part of the player). As one who has leaned right in an effort to get his Warbird to make that turn in SFB just a bit faster, I feel the difference is really moot. <grin> |