In some ways these Quickstart rules do not do the full rules credit. The pre-generated characters you are provided with have notably fewer Special Skills and one of the greatest strengths of 2nd edition Advanced Fighting Fantasy is that you can very quickly create heroes as capable as those in films and books and not have the problem of not being able to have enough skills, like in many RPGs.

On the other hand, if the pre-generated characters had actually been created using the actual 2nd edition Advanced Fighting Fantasy rules, which they definitely have not been, it would have been very easy to work out the character creation.

In one of the other reviews of these Quickstart rules the system has been criticised for the combat system not featuring any options other than just making the same dice rolls. Fortunately the full rules do include various combat options, which are absent here.

I am a huge fan of quickstarts, that allow a player to try out some simplified games before buying the whole ruleset and this quickstart is a perfect introduction to Advanced Fighting Fantasy, leaving out character generation, talents and most magic, but providing the basic "engine" of the game (2d6) and some flavour. This was a very good idea and I hope a similar treatment will be soon given also to Stellar Adventures, that is the sci-fi version of the ruleset.

sorry but it just seemed lacking quite a lot to be a non gamebook system.

I LOVE this!!! I've always loved Fighting Fantasy and this supplement really hits the mark! It's one of the only preview pdf's that caused me to go a buy the full version. Well worth it!!!

This is comparable to many of the quick-start products available for free at Drivethru. The premise here is to give you enough rules to play at least one game, to include said game, and to showcase the general feel enough to entice gamers to purchase the full product. I picked this up as I loved the ‘Fighting Fantasy’ series as a child and teenager and haven’t revisted the series for many years. I recall that it was easy to play, didn’t take itself too seriously, and had a definite old-school feel akin to ‘Dragon Warriors’ and first edition D&D. In reading over this title, I found nothing to contradict my fond memories.

The rules take up 2 ½ pages of the seventeen allocated to this product, and you’ll also find eight pre-generated characters, and a short adventure. This would easily serve the purpose of filling in a regular game night, or acting as a promotional games days product at your FLGS. The average person should take about five minutes to master the rules (which does make me curious as to the longevity of AFF campaigns), and this would suit new players very well. The art is consistent with the older FF books and suits this very well. I will be most pleased if this is the standard for the rest of the AFF books (which I am now tracking down).

The adventure is a very standard dungeon crawl, that can be run with little preparation and includes many of the familiar fantasy tropes from evil spellcasters, hidden treasure (and traps!) and magic chalices. The map is very rough-drawn (it looks like the author designed it on a napkin whilst at the local pub), but does inventively leave space for the Director (AFF’s name for the GM) to draw in some of their own details. The adventure is not to be taken too seriously (when you meet the two dwarves, you’ll see my point), but does promise a lot of fun.

There certainly wouldn’t be a lack of material to draw from when running this game – I’d consider grabbing an old FF novel and adapting it for a night’s play. As a free tester, the title does well and it has enticed me to dust off my ‘Fighting Fantasy’ novels once more, and also look at the newer products in the range.

Originally posted at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2013/01/10/tabletop-review-advanced-fighting-fantasy-quickstart/

I am a huge fan of the Fighting Fantasy line of game books, even though I have only made it through the first ten and am working on the eleventh. All told, there are fifty-five of them in the original series, with most books after the tenth being written by authors other than the two that started it all: Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. I have eyed the Advanced Fighting Fantasy core books before, but could not bring myself to actually purchase them as I was unsure of what they did to the system to make it worth building a full game around. You see, the strength of the books lies on the way that the decisions play with the reader’s mind.

A book will present you with an innocuous peasant merely asking for a coin, and if you give this peasant a coin something awesome might happen, or they might turn out to be the lookout for a group of brigands behind the trees ready to rob you blind. Most of the time, you just never know. The weakness in the system, being more or less finalized as it was in 1984, was (is) its simplicity and reliance on die rolls. Most rolls in the game books are simply based on one of your character’s three attributes: Stamina, Skill, and Luck. Even your attributes are determined by adding a die roll to a base number, so it’s possible to start out with ridiculously low scores.

So, when I saw these sample rules up for free I grabbed them in order to get a picture of what Advanced Fighting Fantasy has to offer.

Basics Only

There are no character creation rules in this booklet, you simply get a handful of pre-gens (five) at the end to work with. As those who read my articles may know, this is totally fine with me. I would rather look through pre-gens and pick one that I like most of the time than roll up a new character. So, since there is no need to create characters, a group can just pick up these rules, read through the basic explanation of combat and tests and then start playing the introductory adventure included. This adventure, titled “The Well”, was the first adventure in the original Fighting Fantasy role-playing game (also from 1984, not a solo game book) and I have played it a few times with people just for kicks. This new version of the adventure is different, and missing some of the interesting mind games and social encounters of the old version, which is a shame.

Combat is as basic as ever, except there has been a change made that I really like. Let me explain how combat works first: you roll two six-sided dice and add the number to your Skill score, then the GM (the Director in this game) rolls two six-sided dice and adds the number to your opponent’s Skill score. Whoever has the highest number hits the other. Sounds simple and logical right? Well, in practice this simplistic and die-dependent mechanism can be really frustrating in combat. There are simply no tactical choices to make in a fight, it’s just die roll after die roll and hoping you come out on top (hint: you are much more likely to win and easily if your Skill is even a point higher than your opponent’s). So, besides the sad fact that this has not changed with the “advanced” version, they have introduced one interesting aspect. When someone hits with a weapon, they now roll a die and consult a table to see how good the hit was. If you roll a “6” after hitting, your weapon will do its best damage, the opposite with a “1”. In addition, the recipient of the blow will be able to roll a die for their armor and prevent an amount of damage depending on how well they roll. In the universe of Fighting Fantasy mechanisms, this is huge!

Another improvement they added is the attribute of Magic to characters. In the solo books, this was an additional attribute in The Citadel of Chaos, as well as being wonderfully implemented in the Sorcery! series in a very ingenious way. In Advanced Fighting Fantasy it seems that they have more or less opted for a standard magic system, using utilitarian descriptive names and costing the wizard Magic Points that will be replenished the next day. Seems like a necessary addition, I just really like the way it was implemented in some of the solo books and wish they could bring that ingenuity to this game. Looking at the character sheets, one can see that now heroes also have “Special Skills” that differentiate them from other heroes. Ah, but it’s starting to look more like a retro-clone all the time…

Advanced Fantasy, Simple Game

As I said earlier, the real magic in the solo books came from the brilliant writing and difficult adventures with a gritty feel. In Advanced Fighting Fantasy the game master has to become that brilliant and imaginative writer, or this will be just another simple fantasy RPG. Simply adding in more complex elements will not a great RPG make, but there is also a wealth of setting information in the source books Out of the Pit and Titan, which contain creatures and information about the world Fighting Fantasy is set in respectively. I love the world, I love the stories, and I really want to love Advanced Fighting Fantasy, but I would like to have seen some more innovation in the combat mechanisms, which are quite antiquated. If I do pursue this game in the future, and I plan to, then I will do some tinkering of my own to see if I can come up with a solution. Other than that, I do recommend these quick start rules, especially if you are looking to jump into a fantasy adventure right away with a small to medium group. Further to my delight, who else publishes the books but Cubicle 7 Entertainment?