Fighting Fantasy

I’ve neglected this blog too much recently – alas, work and (shock horror!) a social life got in the way. As some may have noticed, it’s been relabelled, to greater encompass my geekery and not be merely limited to Warhammer. And the first extension of this geekery is to Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.

Having attending a seminar held by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson at the Birmingham Games Expo (it was on their favourite games and was, to be clear, very interesting and informative. And also made me realise how cool Livingstone is. Seriously cool is the answer) Mal decided to buy Warlock of Firetop Mountain as he’d never played it. This resurrected my interest in the genre and I recovered my old books from my parents' house and picked up a handful more from some secondhand bookshops. To be honest, as a kid I never really played them. I always wanted to play them, but the actual act of sitting there, rolling dice and reading the various paragraphs, never seemed to really take place. I remember trying Citadel of Chaos multiple times and getting nowhere. And playing the first Sorcery! book one weekend (I had a pack of rolos and whenever my character – I named him, RPG style, as Salohcin Maghniffe for obvious reasons – ate a provision I ate one too; this particular prop rule lasted ten minutes before I devoured the entire pack.) I never completed them. (I did play Tunnels and Trolls gamebooks, although I only ever completed the Gamesman of Kazar book – they’re pretty naff in many ways, such as being grossly unbalanced in places if you’ve just generated a character as they seem to have trials that only higher level characters could compete. I also played Arena of Khazan many times over in the hope of spawning it and getting a Bronze Bodkin.) So, in many ways, playing them as an adult is a whole new experience.

So, how does it hold up years later? So-so.

The first gamebook I tried was Trial of Champions. I gave up after 26 attempts. That’s right, TWENTY SIX. Most of those took place in the start of the book. This sounds kinda frustrating, but in many ways was a blessing. One of the problems with F&F is how nuts the game system is. Rather than starting with a set character, and the book being aimed in difficulty at that level of difficulty, you randomly roll your characteristics. Trust me, if you have a SKILL of 7 it’s a whole different game  from when you have a SKILL of 12. On those occasions that I went through with SKILL 12, it was a lot easier. Hell, sometimes I didn’t even pick up the dice for a battle (for  I could immediately defeat a SKILL 7 opponent.) Now that means that you might get a fair way through the book, and then kark it because of your low stats. That’s gotta suck (although House of Hell (q.v.) claims this isn’t an issue if you play it right.) Trial makes your first 30 or so paragraphs a big set of challenges that are fairly difficult for any low SKILL character to survive. So, by the time you get to the dungeon, you’re pretty much assured of having a decent SKILL because of natural selection.

I still think just having a better game system would’ve been a better idea.

Anyhow, whilst many of the remaining attempts were fun, I eventually gave up when it became clear that you had to follow a very, very specific path in order to win the book. So I’d get a little bit further through the book each time, before realising that I didn’t have a purple cloak, gold coin, magic sword etc. that was somewhere in the previous locations, and promptly died because of it. This eventually sucked the enjoyment out of the game for me, especially as I didn’t really feel like there was much more to figuring out how to win than playing through the various arbitrary decisions – it’s not as if I felt that the decisions were particularly guided by clues, or demanded intellectual engagement etc. (I've been informed that sometimes clues are in the pictures, but I never spotted any.) So I felt I was randomly picking options out of the bag and seeing where they took me. A little element of that ain’t so bad, but if it continually results in your death (the vast majority of in dungeon deaths were just the result of such choices, with me getting to an instant death paragraph) it’s less fun. When I realised I might be sitting through another bunch of such random choices, I called it a day. Lesson: Trial gave me lots of choices that, at first, gave me the illusion of free will. But if only one set of those arbitrary choices is the required set, you have no free will. 

I then tried House of Hell. There was a similar affair in this one, although I only played it four times (I intend to try again.) Certainly it was more fun, and I died once or twice via slow attrition of stats like STAMINA and FEAR (House of Hell has a special FEAR stat to cover your being afraid and scared to death) which somehow seemed a more justified demise than those I suffered in Trial. I’ve also picked up and played through, just the once, Appointment with F.E.A.R. which was a far superior book  given that I seemed to stay alive a lot longer. Even if I have to do a few play throughs in order to get all of the clues (etc.) that I need to win, it’s somehow more appealing to do those play throughs if, unlike Trial, I’m not just retreading the same steps each time and then maybe getting one extra paragraph or two further each time before discovering that I needed the random widget of doom that I could have had if I’d immersed my hand in the boiling water that you clearly shouldn’t be immersing your hand in etc. Gah. You can see I’m slightly bitter. (But, also, slightly addicted.)

I might follow others from the blogosphere and recant my steps through the books I play in a humorous fashion such as http://fightingdantasy.blogspot.co.uk/ and http://turnto400.blogspot.co.uk/ But before I finish this post, I will briefly dwell on the system. As I say, the way its set up in the books is kinda sucky – the difference between SKILL 7 and 12 is huge and makes a marked affect on the game experience. With SKILL 7 you may as well just not bother; with SKILL 12 the random element of the book is greatly reduced (and the random element was, I guess, meant to be a fun thing to include otherwise why else include it? So excluding it is surely a bad thing just because you scored high on the initial roll.) But what works poorly, I think, in the gamebook actually looks set to be an excellent overall game system for a role-playing game.

That’s right: I’m defending F&F as a serious RPG system.

The merits are fairly straightforward. It’s exceedingly simple, meaning that most things can be resolved quite quickly. You’d have to tack on a skill system  as, say, Advanced Fighting Fantasy does. However that system strikes me as creating a very cut down D&D-esque experience (as, indeed, the core SKILL/STAMINA/LUCK system of the basic books is intended to be a cut down D&D esque combat system.) And I don’t think that F&F suits that. Part of the joy of things like D&D (and Pathfinder) is lots of things of complexity so that (i) the mechanical parts of the game, like climbing, picking locks, sneaking past monsters etc. can be determined by extended dice rolling and so require some level of engagement; (ii) the rest of system dovetails with that complexity so you can have items and skills that, say, make you ever-so slightly being better at being a thief in one regard versus being ever-so slightly better at being a thief in some other regard (e.g. varying whether one boosts sneak versus boosting pickpocketing) and by having lots of variation in numbers – rather than that afforded by a d6 – you get room to give rewards like magic items at every stage in a campaign and have a continual reward process of building power. Similarly, this level of complexity also affords you what I call a ‘Magic the Gathering effect’ of players figuring out cool ways to combine rules (and items and powers etc.) in some unforeseen manner (which is always fulfilling); (iii) as combat and such things play such an integral role to the system, you want them to be drawn out a bit – it is, after all, what you’ve turned up for. F&F could be tweaked to meet (i) and (ii) but never (iii). Being dead simple, and allowing combat resolution quite quickly, is what F&F does. Change that, and you may as well be playing a different system. So why even bother trying. DON’T think D&D; DO think storyteller-esque systems.

That’s right: I’m defending F&F as a serious storytelling RPG system.

At least, I am if you stuck on a relatively straightforward skill system. I would suggest something like this: you have a list of skills (Seduce, Pickpocket, Sneak etc.) and if you have a skill you can do it, and if you don’t have it then you can’t. You can even have it that you get some Hero Points such that if you attempt to do something the GM may say you can only do it if you expend the Hero Points. You earn hero points by completing adventures etc. Done: a simple storytelling system whereby the GM can control the action, but (with Hero Points) the PCs can control the action as well, taking it away from some pre-plotted storyline to avoid the problem of your GM being merely a frustrated author.

But I digress. Where, you might ask, does the F&F bit come in? After all, that system can be tacked onto any system. The F&F part is, basically, just the vehicle for combat. The joy is this: it’s simple and it’s quick. Better, and this is crucial, at every stage in combat you have a chance to make a CHOICE. When struck by a weapon you can choose to use LUCK to avoid damage or use LUCK when hitting someone to make your own blows cause more. Using LUCK lowers it, thus making it harder to use later on, so you don’t always have a no-brainer decision of using LUCK for, of course, you might need to make a LUCK roll later (to avoid the falling statue, to seduce the princess etc.) or, obviously, use it in some later combat. So the choice is always there, and is always one buoyed with downsides. Always. That is what is called genius. Unlike other games, where there are no combat choices, or the ‘choices’ are always illusory (e.g. because there is always some better choice, even if it takes ages to figure out what that best choice is because of the complexity of the system – something I’ve seen in all sorts of systems, such as 3E where taking the weapon destroyer feats and shattering every weapon you come across was frankly a game breaker as it was always a good idea to do it, even though it might not have occurred to you when reading the rules the first time around) there is almost never an illusory choice to be made with F&F combat. So it’s a good system, and the speed of it fits a storytelling game quite well.

Defence rests. I hope you enjoyed my first non-40K post.