I’ve had Fighting Fantasy on my mind recently. I have always loved the solo gamebooks, I think I wrote about them back when I started this blog. The three stats, Skill for fighting and doing stuff, Stamina for taking damage and Luck for everything else were more than enough to define your character and see you through all the adventures they wrote, whether they were Fantasy, SF or whatever. There have been a number of attempts to convert the system for use as a tabletop multiplayer game over the years, I have tried running them and I have tried fixing them, after a while I gave up.
The biggest issue is the Skill stat. This is how good your character is. At everything. You generate your character’s Skill by rolling d6+6, so you can have one character with a Skill of 7 who is mediocre at everything, and another with a 12 who literally can’t fail at anything. The Advanced Fighting Fantasy game, which started with Dungeoneer in the late ‘80s tried to address this but it didn’t really work. Characters were given Special Skills, small areas of expertise where they could shine. What it meant was the crappy characters were now reasonable while the crazy good ones were even better.
In the ‘90s when I was running a Fighting Fantasy campaign, I tried to fix this myself by splitting the Skill stat into three. I think I had Prowess, Reflexes and Intelligence or something. I wanted to split the Special Skill list into three equal groups. It was fine, but it was a little dull. Some of the magic had gotten lost along the way. About six years ago Arion Games released AFF 2nd edition, which kept the Skill stat and the Special Skills but basically made everyone start with the same low score for Skill. Again, it did technically fix the problem, but it didn’t feel right.
Both these fixes took what had been a light hearted game where anything could happen, and left us with a generic fantasy game. I was one of the GMs for the AFF2 playtest and after we finished I was left wondering if it was even possible to capture the flowing madcap nature of the gamebooks without getting bogged down in the same old RPG procedures of skill values, target numbers, initiative, spell points, XP… I want a game where you start off wrestling a man eating jungle tentacle then you fall into an abandoned luxury cave complex where you meet a suspicious old lady who just happens to be the owner of the diary you found a few pages from at the start of the session… Without ever having to stop and think about the rules.
I mean, it’s not like we are short on detailed RPG systems which make sense, couldn’t we have one which made fun instead?
Anyway, I moved on and found other games to play instead. I forgot all about it until everyone started going mad for Troika! last year. Troika takes the basis of AFF to make an impressively weird multiverse fantasy game. It fixes the Skill stat somewhat by making it lower (d3+3 rather than d6+6) and then layering a random outrageous character template on top. I haven’t had a chance to play it yet but I intend to shortly. Troika! Is great, but it isn’t the game I had in mind when I thought back to replicating the experience of my gamebooks for a table full of nerd friends, it did bring the whole concept back to mind though.
I found the dpercentile podcast on Anchor. In one episode he talks about the old Fighting Fantasy RPG, but not Advanced Fighting Fantasy, the earlier wee orange book, Fighting Fantasy The Introductory RPG. This version didn’t worry about Skills or magic or differentiating between a sword or an axe. It gave characters Skill, Stamina, Luck, 1 Sword, 1 Lantern and 4 Provisions then dumped them at the entrance of the nearest dungeon. The fifty-odd large-type paperback pages of rules covered everything you might have to adjudicate in a dungeon. Combat, sneaking, traps, breaking doors, picking locks, bribing guards… The works. And every single rule was either, “The player should test the Skill,” or it was, “The player should test their Luck,” or if that didn’t make sense the book briefly explains probability and says that giving things a one-in-six or two-in-six chance is probably fine so just pick a number and roll a dice. Frankly, it was way ahead of its time.
I was left wondering if the solution could really have been this obvious all along. Should I have been looking backwards instead of forward? The wee orange Fighting Fantasy RPG (it’s official title in my head) still has the issue that Skill is the most important number on your sheet and so one player could have a much more competent character than another. Also with no skills, or anything else really to pin down the characters, you could argue that they are a bit samey.
I dug out one of my FF gamebooks to get my thoughts in order. Rebel Planet. Pulp SF with laser swords, lizard men and grotty space hostels. It worked! I found my solution because this gamebook does something slightly different to how I remember others working: it defaults to having the player Tests their Luck rather than Testing their Skill. If that doesn’t sound like much of a change, it’s important to know that the Luck stat depletes when you use it, so what you actually have in this book is a Skill stat for combat, a Stamina score for taking damage, and a Luck score for chancing your arm, sticking your neck out and having a go in every other way. This was enough for me to fix my issues with the Fighting Fantasy system without losing it’s wonderful light touch simulation.
- If you are having a fight or rolling a test for something which is the focus of your character, test your Skill.
- If you are rolling for anything else, something your character probably hasn’t had much experience with, test your Luck.
That’s it, that’s the fix. Now Luck is going to be as important as Skill which will help balance different characters and high Skill isn’t the game breaker that it was. It should also be fun to see the group get out of their element which will be fine as long as their Luck holds out, but should inexorably snowball to hilarious disaster as they fail Luck rolls and don’t have enough Luck to get out of whatever situation they have gotten themselves into. Perfect.
Characters will need some form of backgrounds. I’m thinking literally one or two words. Soldier. Elf Ranger. Barbarian Thief. Pretend Wizzard. Perhaps the lower the Skill, the more background words they get. Like, a Skill 10 swordsman might be able to cut down anyone who gets in his way, but all he knows how to do is fight, he’s going to be relying on Luck for everything else. While a Skill 8 Thief, Entertainer can sing and steal all night long.
Something like that anyway. I’ll give it a go and let you know how I get on.
[Further thoughts here]
Ominosity 
Intriguing. I’ve seen a lot of FF variants and also wondered if the very accessible rules could be tweaked to make variable SKILL less of a potential imbalance factor, without losing the overall simplicity of the system. I like the idea of extending skills into LUCK. My thought would be if a character had a suitable background they could “push their luck” in addition to relying on SKILl. Their experience would allow them to test their luck as if they were rolling again SKILL.
So a skilled thief would see just the right moment to chance it and steal a coin purse from lord. And if the thief had a moderate SKILL but. high LUCK, the thief could still play as a successful rogue.
Well I do hope you’re in the Fighting Fantasy Facebook group, keeping up to date with all FF news and sampling the modern gamebook authors works.
May your STAMINA never fail, Jam
I don’t do Facebook, but thanks for the invite all the same!
I’ve been running a campaign with the original Dungeoneer rules for about a year and 9 months now. I think they work fine for if you want a campaign that doesn’t get bogged down in technical stuff – I’m sure that second edition fixed alot of things from a certain perspective, but Dungeoneer is just so easy. I actually simplified it as well in a few ways (initially because I thought more novice roleplayers may be playing – but at the end I’m happier anyway). I ditched variable damage and mighty blows and fumbles. I stipulated that Skill can’t go above 12. I also said people should reroll if they get a 1 for Skill. I think that special skills are important to give a bit of flavour for players to flesh out their characters – particularly if it’s a long campaign – but for shorter stuff what your suggesting looks really sound for me. One guy literally picked his skills as he went along working out who the character is.
Every now and again, someone wants to climb a wall, so I go and look up the rules about falling damage etc. It’s rarely something I feel I couldn’t have approximated myself, which I think is a good thing, as it suggests the whole thing is pretty simple. My only complaint is that the lay out of that first book sometimes and lack of a proper index sometimes means it takes me a bit to find some particular thing.
On a related note, I’ve never really understood the old complaint about the characters becoming too powerful too easily in Dungeoneer. Can’t you just make the enemies more powerful or the environments more dangerous as GM (or Director, rather!) if you want? I’m not so fussed about killing off player characters, anyway, really – if they do really stupid things or they are facing something really dangerous, fair enough, but it all depends on what the goals for the players are – if they end up a bunch of hulking meatheads stood on top of a hill, watching the city they were meant to save burn to the ground because they managed to ignore or misunderstand every clue I served up their way as to what they needed to do (or what even made bare sense in the situation), the fact that they survived isn’t on itself isn’t going to make me dish up max experience points (The minimal experience point system in Dungeoneer lends itself to this as well).
I’m glad to hear your campaign is going well, you must have started at about the same time I wrote this blog post!
Since then I’ve run a short campaign of Troika! which was an awfully lot of fun. It’s mostly the same rules as Dungeoneer but with a very bizarre selection of backgrounds to give PCs their skills and equipment. Troika reduces Initial Skill to d3+3 and even then I think I’d rather it was set to 5 or just done away with completely (but leaving the Special Skills for character definition).