Monday, November 30, 2009

Fighting Fantasy, The introductory Role-playing Game

I finally had time to read through Fighting Fantasy. Some of you may have read my overview of Dungeoneer, Advanced Fighting Fantasy here and here. I bought Fighting Fantasy because I was curious how it compared to the advanced version. Well, I characterized Dungeoneer as simple. If you strip away all the "complicated" portions you have Fighting Fantasy. This thing is seriously simple. It has no provisions for character advancement, no weapons lists, nor does it allow player characters to be magic-users. Seriously simple. A five page overview of the rules can be found here. It distills the first 64 pages of the book pretty effectively. The rest of the book consists of two adventures. The first is a shorter introductory adventure, while the second is longer but similar in style. And the style is old school dungeon. Lots of men and creatures living cheek-to-jowl amongst strange traps with no visible means of support. Kinda cool actually. This simple (there I go using that word again) game would be ideal to introduce new and young players to role-playing but you would probably need to move on to the advanced rules, or another game entirely, pretty quickly. I still wish I had this when I started playing with my kids.

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