Quote:
Originally Posted by JLV
You know, that's a pretty good point, and one which I and others made a couple of months ago on these threads.
Under the rules as written, dungeon crawls are pretty much a non-event (unless the dungeon has racks of healing potions in various rooms scattered throughout the place), because basically you wind up getting wounded pretty badly in fairly short order and have to disengage and return to town for a few weeks of leisurely healing. By the time you come back, at least some of the rooms you "cleared" previously have been reoccupied, perhaps had new traps set up and old ones re-set, maybe even had some new construction in the form of new walls or doors put up. In short, you would NEVER be able to clear a dungeon like Castle Greyhawk or Rappan Athuk under TFT rules -- at least not with a "normal" party of say, six to eight PCs (unless attribute bloat had had several hundred hours of play to rear its hoary head). The only way it could be done with even "mid-level" characters (say 40 attribute points or so) would be to just keep feeding characters by the hundreds into the meatgrinder non-stop in a steady war of attrition...
I sincerely hope that Steve comes up with some clever way to help "fix" this; healing spells will help, but honestly not as much as in other games, because the caster needs to then rest up for a while to "recharge" his fatigue. So even with them, "dungeon crawling" will become more like "dungeon peristalsis;" with frequent stops and starts, given the overall greater lethality of TFT as compared to say, D&D...
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To be fair, the original old school dungeons such as Greyhawk and Rappan Athuck were never meant to be 'cleared'. The 15 minute work day was common. Over extending yourself in a dungeon lead to TPK. You explored a few rooms then went home and, yes, when you got back some of those cleared rooms might have refilled (in fact many old dungeons have restocking tables). That's why discovering secret doors and mapping were so important: you wanted to save time getting from level 1 to level 2 to avoid the resource drain.
That said, yes, the problem is worse in TFT.