Well said Nils! Importantly, this is an exceedingly comprehensive post on the matters of Experience Points and character advancement because you've enumerated all the interrelated parts to the system. Talking about the costs of attributes, talents and spells, staff mana and even gold separately, fails to reveal the full extent to which these diverse sounding elements are truly interrelated.
They are linked because all get "purchased" with Experience Points, thus forming one self-contained sub-system to the rules. And right now it's like a machine where the parts don't fit or get along with each other. And there's no tweaking one part without affecting all the others, and thence the overall function of the entire sub-system.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nils_Lindeberg
<snip>
The second problem is the mix of exponential costs and static costs. Two such system will never match without strange side effects like no one picking talents until they have gained at least some attributes first. Or no one picking mana at the start for their staff because for the same price you can gain two whole ST points, except that for a good end build at 38p+ you don't want to over invest in ST early on, so you take DX first and then mana instead of the other way around for no good in game reason.
<snip>
And then on top of this you change the rules about talents/spells after character generation and before. So that you in essence get a 500xp bonus for starting out a little smarter (as long as that IQ is within your final goal for the character). So one guy going 10/10/12 and then level up to 10/12/12, compared to 10/12/10 leveling up to the exact same 10/12/12 just lost 1000 XP and that "mistake" penalize you with more than 10 game nights without any XP?!?
|
That is the smoking gun. If two characters belonging to different players reach identical builds, but haven't "paid" an identical cost to get there, something is very wrong. That frustrates me, as does the fact you can no longer look at an advancing character and figure out from their stats how many XP they earned and spent to get where they are. The canary in the coal mine is looking very unhealthy.
What has changed since original TFT is that we can now advance characters in ways that
do not increase the cost of further advancement in the same way. Formerly increasing any attribute meant the
next attribute added would be more expensive, and there was no way to improve a character otherwise, except monetarily. You had to increase one attribute or the other to increase anything else: hits points, talents, or the amount of armor you could wear for the same effective DX. It was a self-regulating system.
Every character improvement should have to go through the filter of the XP-to-Attribute conversion table. That's what kept things balanced.
When talents or spells or mana or even gold (which translates to better net attributes with better gear) can increase without going through that XP-to-Attribute conversion table, it literally creates a short-circuit in the sub-system, which no longer can work as intended.
Currently, if you expend XP for a new talent, the
next talent won't cost more. Buy a new spell, but the
next spell won't cost more. Increase your staff mana capacity, but the
next increase will still cost the same. And while this last example goes back to original ITL, spend XP on some amount of gold, and get the
same amount of gold later for the
same XP (but those of us who want to ignore this rule already ignore it).
Short of a roll-back to original ITL, there is no single, simple solution to each of these things. But I was indeed happier when an IQ increase was necessary for additional spells and talents. Maybe it's just me, but I'm not afraid of PCs reaching higher and higher IQs. If a farmboy runs off to become a soldier, and one day he's an IQ 20 tactical genius, well he got there by passing on attaining ST 20 or DX 20. It was the players choice. As long as that figure spent the same XP to get there as someone else who aimed for ST 20 or DX 20, I'm satisfied. Outside of learning and "memory capacity" IQ rarely factors into the game, and I'd rather put a couple minor tweaks on the cases that do come up (disbelief, contests of will, etc) than see "talent bloat" become a thing.
I've
contrived a method to gain staff mana without spending XP directly on it, but this post is too long already.
Needless to say, I just think all direct character improvements need to be made through increasing attributes, or things will remain gamey and off-kilter.