Next Fighting Fantasy LP - Unexplored Authors
Posted: Tue Jun 23, 2020 4:38 am
The last time I run a FF LP here, I narrowed the options down to Keith Martin's books after I learned of his passing and ended up hosting the (previously unfinished) Tower of Destruction. So this time I thought I'd narrow it down by authors again....more specifically, I wanted to see if there's any interest in trying the books of authors that we've mostly been ignoring.
The poll isn't completely accurate when it comes to authors whose books we've never attempted: Marc Gascoigne and Martin Allen are missing because I either never got or misplaced the one book they've written (Battleblade Warrior for the former, Sky Lord for latter). Steve Williams technically ought to be listed as well, but both of his books are co-written with Mason (FF32 & 42), so I think all his books are covered anyway. Robin Waterfield technically shouldn't belong there because there's been an LP of one of his books (Rebel Planet), but his books have largely not been attempted either, so I included him.
Any interest in trying any of them?
New house rules on stat-rolling for future FF LPs
For the past few FF LPs, I've been running them with Max-stats PCs (12/24/12) as a way to deal with extremely difficult books). Those work well for books written by Ian Livingstone and Keith Martin, but the difficulty of the books don't always lie in high-stat enemies and passing mandatory stat-tests. A few of these books in my poll actually doom PCs that start with maximum SKILL or LUCK or make them more difficult for such characters, so moving forward, I'd be using a method that I read on one of the blogs that does gamebook playthroughs: manually assigning rolled numbers to chosen stats. Instead of always rolling for SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK in sequence like I used to, I'd just roll 4 dice to start and let the players vote on which dice's result to assign to which stat.
The poll isn't completely accurate when it comes to authors whose books we've never attempted: Marc Gascoigne and Martin Allen are missing because I either never got or misplaced the one book they've written (Battleblade Warrior for the former, Sky Lord for latter). Steve Williams technically ought to be listed as well, but both of his books are co-written with Mason (FF32 & 42), so I think all his books are covered anyway. Robin Waterfield technically shouldn't belong there because there's been an LP of one of his books (Rebel Planet), but his books have largely not been attempted either, so I included him.
Any interest in trying any of them?
New house rules on stat-rolling for future FF LPs
For the past few FF LPs, I've been running them with Max-stats PCs (12/24/12) as a way to deal with extremely difficult books). Those work well for books written by Ian Livingstone and Keith Martin, but the difficulty of the books don't always lie in high-stat enemies and passing mandatory stat-tests. A few of these books in my poll actually doom PCs that start with maximum SKILL or LUCK or make them more difficult for such characters, so moving forward, I'd be using a method that I read on one of the blogs that does gamebook playthroughs: manually assigning rolled numbers to chosen stats. Instead of always rolling for SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK in sequence like I used to, I'd just roll 4 dice to start and let the players vote on which dice's result to assign to which stat.