[mark hill]

Huh. Interesting. For myself, Ive been GMing TFT on and off for 40+ years now (Zloty me that long??) and our house rule has been, for a damn long time, that a Staff stores extra ST points equal to the wizard's IQ that regenerate the next time he/she/it gets 8 hours rest. The wise wizard uses these Staff points up first, so as to not threaten their ability to survive getting stabbed etc. Staff of Power (the only upgrade we ever used, used to be an IQ 16 spell/upgrade in the original system) did double that (ie 2x IQ in extra ST points). Simple to remember, gives wizards on a long adventure the chance to be pretty casty during, or outside of, combat without cutting their own throat .. worked good. Sometimes we experimented with an alternative, that the Staff ST regenerates 1 point only per night slept, leading to the wizard usually preferring to spend their own ST first, trying to preserve their extra power. This lead to wizards being less casty, more fearful of using too much of their power up on trivial things. (no Im NOT checking 23 orc spears and axes for magic dammit) Oh, and a broken Staff causes a Megahex fireball that does flaming damage to everyone inside the fireball equal to the ST left in the Staff (plus a SR3/ST or get knocked down). A bad roll to hit with a Staff in melee combat, or casting Break Weapon on an enemy Staff (which Staves of Power were immune to), devastating .. or a wizard could deliberately break their own Staff as a sort of suicide bomb (but not hurting themselves if they were Fireproofed lol). Both systems worked well but have different 'feel' for how magic is, like high-magic world or low-magic world. lots of comments here are on similar lines .. Id suggest avoiding the systems that are harder for newbs (or old buggers) to understand/remember, the maths-crunch heavy or bookeeping heavy ones basically. TFT is a simple game, lets not make it too GURPS .. GURPS, and tons of other games, already do stuff hyper complex, right?

On attribute caps .. dont do it, better to make it ridiculously, ABSURDLY expensive. A hard cap causes players to start a new PC, or sometimes just stop playing. Even if its tens of thousands of XP, even millions, or more, an amount that might even require thousands or millions of kills, or more time than theyll actually live in the real world, the player has the illusion they are still moving forward. RPGs are all smoke and mirrors in the end, just .. dont break the spell.

heres a good one
TAP 41 = 10,000 xp
42 = 20,000 xp
43 = 40,000 xp
44 = 80,000 xp
45 = 160,000 xp etc

its like that old fairly tale about the doubling grains of rice on the chessboard squares .. dont worry, theyll never get to even 70 TAP or probably even 50, some lowly prootwaddle will throw a rock at their eye for a triple damage or something eventually lol