Revisiting a slightly more complex Fighting Fantasy RPG system

Hello gamebookers! Christmas is almost upon us, and I celebrated this fact today by going to the dentist. Although the experience was not painful, I sometimes feel some discomfort, mainly at the high pitched whizzing of the drills or the implement he used that reminded me of a glue gun.

I like to equate a visit to the dentist with being tortured, except torturers have the decency to not ask you for money afterwards.

In all honesty, though, I actually like my current dentist. He doesn't judge. It takes some gall to violate someone's mouth with strange implements, demand payment and then tell them off for not being good enough afterwards. At least he doesn't judge.



Anyway, enough of that. You probably wanted to read something gamebook related and I've gone off on one about oral hygene. Well, this post revisits one I wrote last year which was based on a forum game I ran ages before that.

An hour on the rack? That will
50 gold pieces. And try to be
less short next time. It
makes my job easier.

On the official FF forums, I ran a game using Fighting Fantasy rules, but with classes. I chose 6 classes and gave them special abilities. The system was based on the classes from the Conan RPG. Well, now I've gathered more experience, read more game systems and invented one of my own (realising that there are a lot of iterations when you invent a game system).

Now I've created a new version.  Tell me what you think - it reduces the importance of skill to just combat and the other skills are based on a 1d6 roll (like in Lamentations of the Flame Princess). You can use magic and there are 12 spells that adventurers can learn - none are super powerful, but they provide more options. None spellcasters have magic points too, as I thought you could incorporate magic items to use magic points to be activated (I have learnt from designing my system that a little 'wiggle room' is always needed and also just letting everyone start with 3 magic points seems simpler and doesn't mean that people have to choose to be all mage or all warrior from day 1).




So have a look and tell me what you think.  Happy gamebooking!

P.S. Now that I've got 4 years of posts, I'm going to be revisiting a lot more of my old 'big' posts with updates based on my experience. I'm trying to refine the gamebook writing experience.