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Old 01-08-2018, 03:50 PM   #199
JLV
 
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Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Arizona
Default Re: The Fantasy Trip

Quote:
Originally Posted by tbeard1999 View Post
One criticism of TFT was that it was usually better to increase DX rather than ST.

Not sure I totally agreed with that, but the idea was that if you took 2 points of ST, you could take two more points of damage, one time.

If you took 2 points of DX, you could then wear leather armor and take two more points of damage in every attack. (Or 3 if you took a tower shield).

Of course, you could do more damage with higher ST.

My groups always tended to have a couple of big strong fighters and a couple of quick smaller fighters, so I don't think they made that calculus. Plus, I made ST 12+ magic swords and axes a LOT more common than magic foils and cutlasses.

Anyhow...was this a real problem for anyone?
I'm wondering, though, if that isn't too narrow an observation (not by you, but by the folks that said "it's better to take 2 pts of DX..."). ST does not purely equate to extra HITS -- I mean that's part of it, but not all of it. ST also equates to what weapons you can wield -- which in turn increases your ability to inflict damage. (And I'm not even addressing the "Advantages of Great Strength.") And if we look at it in the wider scope of the campaign, it also increases the load you can carry (extra food, extra arrows for the wimpy (but high DX) archer fella, and so on. So the trade-off is actually a bit more complex than a straight either/or question. In the long run, in a campaign, the extra ST might actually have more utility as an early choice, than the extra DX.

Still, I still think it really comes down to player's style in a lot of cases -- I had players that preferred high DX because they wanted to fight in certain ways, and others that preferred high ST because they wanted to something different from the high DX guys. And each type swore by their preferred techniques and thought the other guy was just plain wrong. From everything I could see, there was no special advantage to either choice -- except in so far as one or the other worked better with the player's chosen play style.
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