[Skarg]

Originally Posted by David Bofinger

[*]The system encourages an evening-up of attributes, and for experienced characters talents are cheap so an experienced character will probably buy lots of them. That might reduce the variety of characters, especially at the upper end. This is something to worry about.

I think it deserves looking at, testing, running some examples and looking at the math. My first impression though from the cases that come to mind is that there's a tension decision between going for several lower attributes sooner (e.g. 13/13/14), versus going for something less even more slowly, but it seems to me that the slower targets (at least, many of them) tend to be more powerful. Certainly fighters at 40 points tend to be more formidable with more points in ST and DX than IQ: 15/15/10 tends to have a very strong advantage over 13/13/14 in weapon combat, and wizards get more and more impressive spells the higher they can get their IQ.

Originally Posted by Anthony

It's always a problem when the xp system doesn't match the character creation system, because it encourages you to take a dump stat as it reduces the xp cost to reach your final goal. For example, let's say my goal is stats of 16/16/8.

If I start at 12/12/8, it will cost me 6,600 xp to reach my goal. If I start at 16/8/8, it will cost me 4,700 xp.

Originally Posted by JLV

That's a very good point...except for the fact that a starting DX of 8 has never been a very successful survival trait in most of the TFT games I've played (you can't hit anything very well, and you sure can't wear any armor, which makes you the one voted "most likely to die" at the start of the game). Of course, you could go with 8/16/8 and get the same effect, except that if the enemy gets a good double-damage hit on you at any point, odds are you'll die... I'm guessing, in other words, that given the lethality of TFT combat, the odds of such a "min/max" character surviving are not great.

Yes, 16/8/8 is clumsy and dumb. 8/16/8 gets easily one-shotted to death and can hit but does little damage. It's a trade-off of survivable balance versus precarious concentration, which seems ok to me, though as you already wrote:

Originally Posted by JLV

Still, it's a good point, and should probably be playtested some. Redmond Simonsen, the father of modern wargame graphics, once said that a lesson he'd learned in the early days at SPI was to "playtest the crazy plans and ideas too" because they were often the ones that would reveal a big loophole in the rules that were written with the normal outcome in mind... (Which is not to say that Steve might not already have fully considered that, but simply that I don't know if he did or didn't!)

Originally Posted by JLV

I'm wondering if a flat rate for all spells isn't making them too easy to acquire... (Of course, not seeing the totality of Steve's revisions, it's hard to say what the reality is, and making Spells easy to acquire might be a "feature" and not a "bug" in the system.)

But, if Spells are "too easy," maybe it should be something like a Flat Rate times the IQ Level of the Spell.

So, for example, you could pick some standardized flat rate in XP (say, purely for example, "20," or "25," or "50") and multiply that times the IQ Level of the Spell.

Just working with 20XP as our flat rate, that would make an IQ 8 Spell worth 160 XP to learn, while an IQ 20 Spell would cost 400 XP to learn. Which seems like a reasonable progression to me...

That might help push back the cross-over point at which Wizards become the all-powerful characters and Warriors are comparatively "less" capable...

Yeah, I think that's a good idea. There are already rules in Advanced Wizard for the variable amount of time it takes to learn a spell (and I would definitely keep those rather than have EP be usable to instantly learn things), so it would seem consistent to have the EP cost vary in a parallel way. I also think it might help reduce the amount of fighters who tack on spells, which I expect will be more common and possibly an issue at some point.