Lacking Natural Simplicity

I have a great fondness for the original Advanced Fighting Fantasy series, even though I didn’t get them until 2011 or so. I think the the Arion Games 2nd edition of Advanced Fighting Fantasy is probably a slightly better game, especially for campaigns (it made a few adjustments, so character creation is not as random, and a few other things), but I like it’s layout and typography less. Also, there is something about the presentation of the game in Dungeoneer as something for people new to RPGs that made it appealing.

What is it about the Advanced Fighting Fantasy series that makes it so cool?

Well, the original Fighting Fantasy gamebooks were neat. The series was started by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson. (That's the British Steve Jackson, not the American one.) They included a really simple RPG and a choose your own adventure style adventure. That’s where the book is made up at numbered paragraphs, and when you get to a decision point you can choose among two or more choices, and those point you at different paragraphs depending on the choice you make. For instance, you might have a choice to attack, retreat to an earlier location, or try something off the wall. The addition of the simple RPG added a lot, in my opinion, increasing replayability. Anyway, that addition made the Fighting Fantasy books some of the most popular gamebooks. Many of them are classics of the genre. Most of them are fantasy, and set in the world of Titan, which was popular enough that there was a world book devoted to it, Titan, and a book of monsters from that word, Out of the Pit. And the art used in illustrating the books was very evocative. (I particularly liked Russ Nicholson's art (R1, R2).

The mini RPG used in the Fighting Fantasy books was really simple: the reader’s character has three stats, SKILL, which measures their general level of skill, STAMINA, which measures the character’s energy and fitness and how much damage they can take, and LUCK, which measures how lucky the character is. SKILL is 1d6+6, STAMINA is 2d6+12, LUCK is 1d6+6. NPCs and creatures just have SKILL and STAMINA. Generally, if the character is trying to do something outside combat, they roll 2d6 <= their SKILL to succeed. Combat is simple, the player rolls 2d6 and adds their skill, their opponent rolls 2d6 and adds their skill, and the one with the higher total subtracts 2 from the other’s STAMINA total. If they tie neither win. LUCK is used to see how lucky the character is. For instance, if a cave is collapsing a character will “Test their LUCK” and roll 2d6 <= their LUCK to succeed at escaping the collapse. Every time a character Tests their LUCK, they reduce their current luck by 1. Luck can also be used in Combat to increase the wounds they deal or decrease the wounds they take. If a character has wounded an opponent, they can Test their LUCK, and if they are Unlucky the opponent takes only 1 damage instead of 2, but if they are Lucky the opponent takes 4 damage instead of 2. If the character has been wounded, they can Test their Luck and if Lucky they take only 1 damage, but if they are unlucky they take 3 damage. So it is a tradeoff.

Now, that system works well for a gamebook, but doesn’t have enough detail for most RPG players. (Although it was published as an intro RPG, in Fighting Fantasy: The Introductory Role-playing Game.)

Advanced Fighting Fantasy, written by Marc Gascoigne, takes that framework and adds to it in a way that increases the interesting detail of the system, without overcomplicating it too much. Primarily, they add Special Skills, which allow characters to specialize. For instance, if a character wanted to be good with a bow and able to follow people through the forest they’d pick up the Special Skills Bow and Awareness. Then, when shooting arrows at opponents they’d add the rating for their Bow Special Skill to their SKILL. When tracking someone through the forest, they’d add their Awareness Special Skill to their SKILL. And so on. A sneaky person might have the Special Skills Locks, Sleigh of Hand, Sneaking, and Trap Knowledge. And so on. Someone from a noble background might have Etiquette, Law, and Leadership. A merchant might have Bargan, City Lore, and Evaluate.

I like that characters are competent in general, due to SKILL, but can be more competent in their areas of interest, using Special Skills.

You can build important NPCs just like characters if you want the detail, but for run-of-the-mill opponents you can just use SKILL and STAMINA, so stating out NPCs and opponents is very easy.

And Advanced Fighting Fantasy added more detail to weapons and armor, still keeping to the use of six sided dice only. So, instead of each attack doing 2 STAMINA damage every time, you roll a die and depending on the weapon, that tells you how much damage you do, by looking up the weapon’s damage chart. For instance, a dagger might do 1 damage on a 1 or 2, 2 damage on a 3 through 6, and 3 damage on a 7+ (because there are a few things that add one to the damage roll, but not directly to the resulting damage), while a great sword does 2 damage on 1, 3 damage on a 2 or 3, 4 damage on a 4 or 5, 5 damage on a 6, and 6 damage on a 7+.

For instance, here's the damage for Dagger, Club, and Two-handed Sword:

That's an interesting way to get variable damage when you are limited to using just six sided dice.

And of course there was a Magic Special Skill, and if you learned that you could learn and cast spells, each spell costing an amount of STAMINA to cast.

And Advanced Fighting Fantasy had a nice mass combat system, and lots of setting detail from Titan and opponents from Out of the Pit (both republished in trade paperback to go with the AFF trade paperbacks), and so forth.

Anyway, Advanced Fighting Fantasy (AFF1e) was published in three trade paperback sized books, Dungeoneer (1989), Blacksand (1990), and Allansia (1994). Titan and Out of the Pit, were republished in 1989 in trade paperback sized books to match. Dungeoneer had the basic rules, Blacksand added more options and described the city of Blacksand (a fantasy hive of scum and villainy), and Allansia added more options and described the continent of Allansia in more detail. The books were less available in the US than in Great Britain where they originated, and I never saw them in either bookstores (where they were sold alongside the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, hence the trade paperback size) or in gaming stores. I got my copies in 2011, when AFF 2nd Edition came out, for comparison.

In 2011 Graham Bottley of Arion Games got the license to publish a 2nd edition of Advanced Fighting Fantasy (AFF2e). It was a more familiar A4 sized book (the international paper size closest to the US Letter paper size), and while I didn’t particularly care for its layout choices, I did like the way it made the game better for running campaigns (character creation was less random, and gave characters more room for growth), its addition of a MAGIC stat and Magic Points from which the costs for spells were deducted instead of STAMINA, and its additions of multiple types of magic (one, Sorcery, was based on a different gamebook series, the Sorcery! series, from Steve Jackson), and talents, which were special things a character could do. I wasn’t so thrilled that priests now used a completely separate magic system not based on casting spells costing Magic Points; in 1st Edition priests had different spell lists they could learn from, but otherwise used the same mechanics as Mages. AFF2e also added more detailed armour, which works similarly to damage — roll a die, look up how much damage is blocked on the armour chart.

Here's Leather Cuirass and Plate Armour:

AFF1e, by contrast, said that the Damage Table had been carefully constructed to take into account armour (Dungeoneer, p. 163), and assumed Heroes (the player characters) and their adversaries all wore armor (Dungeoneer, p. 164), and if anyone took off their armour, then any Damage Rolls (which was an index into a table, remember, not the actual damage) had 2 added to them. I expect this explains why the damage values on the Weapon chart all changed in AFF2e.

Anyway, I played some AFF 1st Edition games with the kids, which was a lot of fun. I also played some AFF 2nd Edition games with some of them, which was also fun. I played AFF1E with some of the folks from work, and it was fun, but they wanted something with more detailed combat. I could see why, even AFF2e combat is fairly simple. They rest of the game they liked.

And Arion Games has gone on to publish slightly more than a book a year since 2011, covering the same ground as the original AFF’s three books did, plus a lot more, including two more monster books (Beyond the Pit and Return to the Pit), more options for heroes in the Heroes Companion, a new area of Titan (Travels in Arion), a herbal, and a smaller book on creatures from a particular area of Titan (Creatures of Mishna). And just recently they published the Combat Companion, which adds extra options for combat that the gamers from my work mentioned earlier would have liked.

And Titan, the world of Fighting Fantasy and Advanced Fighting Fantasy is a very nice little bit of everything fantasy setting, anchored by locations and characters from 59 Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.

In summary, Advanced Fighting Fantasy is a role-playing game with simple mechanics that still provide ample detail, set in an interesting fantasy world.

Arion Games also publishes Stellar Adventures, a science fiction game that uses the same rules, customized for science fiction adventures, which has several supplements as well. The Stellar Adventures and Advanced Fighting Fantasy, 2nd Edition lines are all available in PDF on DriveThruRPG.com, with most available in print-on-demand as well, very important in these days of online gaming.

Last edited: 2021-08-09 12:10:07 EDT