Advanced Fighting Gumshoe

A few weeks ago my group had a go at Gumshoe -- why do they capitalise it? Is it an acronym? Are they shouting? -- with The Esoterrorists and in the past few days Doctor Bargle has been thinking about alternative skill systems for Advanced Fighting Fantasy. As is the way with these things some cross-fertilisation occurred in my addled mind and I started to wonder how a Gumshoe -- I'm not doing it -- type system would work with AFF.

The first edition of AFF has a skill system that could be considered a little bit broken. In the basic game a character has a SKILL -- okay, I'm a hypocrite, what of it? -- score that is used to determine if she could jump a crevasse, climb a wall, or hit an ORC; for general use 2d6 is rolled and a success is a result that is equal to or less than the character's SKILL, while in combat the roll is added to the score to generate an Attack Strength -- italicised but not capitalised, because I don't know why -- that is compared with that of the opponent. Simple.

In AFF special skills are introduced. If a character wants to be better at jumping her player can spend points and add those to the character's SKILL score to get a new value, so Alice of Zengis may have a SKILL of 9 and spend two points to get Jump 11. Fair enough, except the number of points available to spend is equal to the character's SKILL score, so someone who has a good score gets more points than someone who doesn't and their skills will all be better too, in a spectacular cascading clusterfudge of wonky maths.

Oops.

In Graham Bottley's second edition of AFF starting SKILL is not random and does not affect the availability of skill points, the same number of which are available to every character. This is all much more sensible and doesn't need fixing, but I will propose an alternative anyway.

There are many versions of Gumshoe -- stop it -- but in general active skill -- something like jumping, climbing, or fighting -- use succeeds on a d6 roll above a number determined by the gamemaster; skill points are spent before rolling to reduce the target number -- or add to the roll; I'm not sure which and I'm not sure it matters -- to increase chances of success. If the difficulty is 4+ a player can spend three points for an automatic success, for example.

Let us now put AFF in one Brundle pod and Gumshoe in another and observe the results. Open your copybook now.


In this misbegotten hybrid of two games systems that were doing quite well enough without my tinkering Alice of Zengis would have a SKILL of 9 and Jump of 2 as before, but that latter value represents not a constant bonus as it does in AFF but rather a number of points that can be spent to influence a jumping roll. In other words, Alice could spend two points to give her an effective SKILL of 11 for one jump or one point for a SKILL of 10 on two different occasions; once out of points Alice would have to rely on her raw ability for all her leaping needs.

The pool of eight or so skill points given in AFF2 is a bit stingy in this context so I would perhaps allow sixteen to twenty points to be allocated during character generation. Spent skill points would be restored at  the end of the adventure -- however that is defined -- just as LUCK is in AFF2.

I have a suspicion that this is an elaborate fix for a problem that doesn't exist -- a charge I've often laid at the Gumshoe system, as it happens -- and it seems a bit of a mean-spirited limitation, or "nerfing" as the Colonials would have it. I also have no idea how or if it would work in play as I haven't played AFF this century but it was buzzing around in my head, clamouring for release, so there it is.