Is Attribute Bloat real?

[ak_aramis]

My experience with TFT is that the problem begins in solo play when AdjDX exceeds the AdjDX "cap" of 15. (The point where the autofail on 16+ rule applies)

Above that, once adjusted for armor worn, further Dex is almost useless.

Strength is always useful, if for no other reason than taking more damage. In solo play, I've worked characters up to ST 35 and higher. At ST 35 and DX 20, pretty much all the combats in the solos become a cake-walk.

IQ is always useful, too. Unlike ST, however, it's growth isn't vital for solo-play.

Advanced Wizard has only spells to IQ 20, and those can be game breaking as is.

I've had multiple characters that I played to the point that they ceased being even amusing to my obsessive-compulsive-when-manic self, using a mixture of the jobs tables and the various solo adventures. So, from a simple, "Constant success is boring" aspect, bloat is a problem.

I've often used a "Personal Limit" of either 10 or the "bonus" (from the races table) over starting purchased scores. As this puts every spell in the book available to wizards who start at IQ 10, it's not an onerous limit. Where it hurts is the fighter-types - the "Full Combatant" At 10 over, humans can go to 62 total points. (24 base + 8 "bonus" in CGen, +30 for three atts 10 above there)... which is still above the point totals expected on ITL page 11.

The real bloat is on page 25 of ITL...

Originally Posted by ITL page 25, §Jobs ¶6

The RISK of the job is shown by two numbers - one low and one high. Each week, roll 3 dice for each character who is holding a job. If you roll the LOW number (or less), the character had a notable success of some kind; immediately give him/her just enough experience points to raise one attribute.

That's how I've built all my übermenschen. It should instead be a flat 100, IMNSHO; otherwise, it results in rather impressive characters once you hit the 3d cap of 15 on an attribute.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by larsdangly

TFT is intrinsically dangerous and 'swingy', even for high stat characters (god bless it!). 50 point characters get close to 'saturating' the value of further stat increases, but the are not invincible by any means. I'm sure everyone is debating the point in good faith, but I have a feeling that this is more of a 'white room' problem than an actual play problem.

No. Maybe it's a matter of taste, but it was real for me and the people I played with. After about 3 years of play, the surviving PCs started being reliably able to count on smearing most regular (30-32-point) fighters in the world. We played for 2-3 more years but it got increasingly predictable and unsatisfying, and we stopped playing and started inventing a new system until GURPS came out and we were very happy switching to that because it didn't have the problems TFT had.

TFT is NOT all that intrinsically dangerous and swingy when you have several attribute points over your opponents (say about 36-37 vs 32-pointers), have some similar friends with you, and use good tactics. Especially if you have good equipment or even magic items. Unless you face similar-strength foes, are greatly outnumbered or maneuvered or surprised, face wizards, or the situation is evil, general fights against regular opponents (i.e. when the players are being smart and the GM isn't forcing things to be hard for them), get quite predictable. The better PCs don't let themselves get engaged by multiple enemies, they have higher DX so they go first, they mostly hit and mostly take down the people they hit, they probably do something competent like have some people backing them up (so if they don't take down someone they're facing who could hurt them, that person gets taken out first by an ally), and they may have armor and so on. Add a few more attribute points and/or better equipment, and there isn't much chance at all for normal people to beat them.

Yeah, there are ways for there to be dangers and for anyone to be taken out, but they start to get either rare or contrived, and/or they're not particularly fun.

Give opponents magic items and the PCs will likely end up getting them and so the ante just gets worse.

Call it bad GMing to have 32-point foes and good GM-ing to always have the PCs only at their level, and that's just a surreal inconsistent game world.

The game that exists for lower-point characters, where attributes feel like they're in the plausible human range, and people can't count on hitting, and everyone's at risk, starts to vanish and be more about figuring out who is actually a threat or not, and normal-level fighters being mostly inconsequential victims in combat (and juicy easy EP rewards if you don't fix the ITL EP system). And it starts really taking something for someone to be a threat when they need to beat adjDX 16, 3d+3 damage, and 9 or more points of armor.

[Skarg]

Rate of experience depends a lot on what happens in a game. One recent example was about 18 months ago I played GrailQuest for fun with one knight, a warhorse, and eventually a squire. The knight started at 36 points with ST 12 DX 13 IQ 11, and I managed to win the quest, by the end of which I had got to 40 points and 598 EP.

[ecz]

Originally Posted by ak_aramis

(...)
The real bloat is on page 25 of ITL...

That's how I've built all my übermenschen. It should instead be a flat 100, IMNSHO; otherwise, it results in rather impressive characters once you hit the 3d cap of 15 on an attribute.

Exactly.
One of the main problems of the manual that Steve will fix one way or another.

In my games I limited the job rolls to one after four weeks of job in a row and also I reduced the numbers for success and failure making them harder to appear and still mantaining a certain difference among the different kind of profession.

My players found boring stay at work more than the necessary.

Nobody exchanged the ordinary jobs of the table for a shortcut to heroism.

[larsdangly]

FYI, I made a mathematical model that calculates the integrated probabilities of advancing or dying just using your job rolls alone, assuming you start and stay in the most advantageous Risk roll category (5/16) and distribute your stats advances in some way that the program user specifies.

The bottom line is if you are lucky enough to survive, you will get to a stat total of 50 in about 8 years of game time, no matter what stat advance strategy you employ.

Most generally rational ways of assigning stats (i.e., making a character you coudl stand to play) will give you a 50:50 chance of dying before you can make it to 50 total points (with most of that risk coming before you reach 40 points, total; so if you take a high Risk job, you'll move up a couple stat points per year, but with a 50:50 chance of dying within 3 or 4 years).

The most extreme way to 'game' the system is to start with ST 15 and apply gained stat points only to ST until it reaches 25, at which point you can't die from job rolls and can start putting points elsewhere. It is hard to imagine anyone actually doing this, but if you are trying to cook up a monster PC in a job-roll lab, this is how you would do it. It would take the same amount of time, but you would have a 93% chance of succeeding instead of dying along the way. The main controls of your survival chances are: the amount of time it takes you to get a stat of 15 or higher, and your ST score (which dictates your odds of survival).

If you take a maximally safe, boring job (Risk roll 3/18), your odds of survival to reach each stat point total don't change appreciably, but it takes you 75 years or so of game time to reach 50 points total if you don't use Aging rules. If you do use Aging rolls, you will almost certainly die before your safe job will get you past 40 total attribute points, because your rate of loss greatly exceeds your rate of advancement.

[Jim Kane]

Outstanding analysis Lars; excellent.

JK

[larsdangly]

A simpler, but more important sort of calculation.

I have a script that resolves probabilities of outcomes for various sorts of combinations of adj.DX and damage, which can be used to get a rough feel for combat odds (recognizing that the actual value of different combinations of weapons, armor and shields is influenced by range and other tactical considerations).

One simple prediction of this script is that a 'maxed out' melee fighter - someone approaching 50 total points, having ST 16 and fine plate armor, has a 0.31 % chance of being instantly killed from a single attack by a 'myrmedon' sort of fighter (someone with adj.DX of 12 and doing 2d base damage).

One could argue about how often you imagine such a character would kill such a foe before that foe could attempt an attack. But the useful benchmark is that you have an integrated chance of being instantly killed with a single shot (i.e., going from totally healthy to ready for burial in 1 attack) of 26.5 % after receiving 100 attack attempts, 46 % after receiving 200, 78.5 % after receiving 500, and 95.4 % after receiving 1000.

If you imagine that, on average, every lesser foe more or less like this gets to attempt 1 attack before you kill it, then you will typically earn 24 EXP per attack attempt you receive. In this case, round numbers, your chance of dying from a freak lucky hit before you can earn enough points through combat to rise from 50 to 51 total stat points is 47.2 %. And, of course, this is only your chance of dying from one shot, and does not consider your chances of dying after taking a wound that puts you on a downward spiral, what happens when you face a stronger foe, etc.

Basically, whether it is intended or not, the game's balance of risk vs. cost of stat rises through experience is designed to kill you before you can rise much higher than the low to mid 40's in total stat points.

Edit: If you are contemplating more complex outcomes (besides getting instantly nuked by a lucky shot), another sobering thought: Given the power balance described above, every single attack aimed at your hero in fine plate armor has a 7.4 % chance of doing at least 5 points of damage, through armor. So, you are going to get your nose bloodied pretty often, even when fighting mooks.

[JLV]

Which is all well and good...and totally misses the point. The fact of the matter is that the effects of "attribute bloat" are felt long before you get to 50 points, and your continuing to base your arguments on that particular point total is irrelevant to the issue.

If you're trying to convince me that a problem I and many others have experienced (and developed rules to overcome) does not actually exist, you are not succeeding. It's like you're trying to convince us that mathematically, a bumble bee cannot fly. And yet, there it is...

[larsdangly]

Those posts are not attacking anyone, they are just trying to offer some objective perspectives on one of the several sides of this issue - how easily you can reach a given stat total without getting murdered.

So, if you don't like 50 points as 'bloated', what threshold would you set. Give me a number I can think about.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by larsdangly

If you imagine that, on average, every lesser foe more or less like this gets to attempt 1 attack before you kill it ... So, you are going to get your nose bloodied pretty often, even when fighting mooks.

Ok, I'm imagining someone staying at ST 16, with fine plate but adjDX 11 (or in some other ways failing to learn how to play to avoid getting attacked by everyone they fight), no shield, no warrior/veteran, no Stone Flesh, no enchanted armor... as they fight hundreds of opponents who all get to attack them... but survive and start creeping up above 40 points...

Sounds to me relatively hard to remain that incompetent for that long. I'd think the player would tend to learn some tactics, get some friiends, or accidentally increase their adjDX or armor or something somewhere along the line.

The players I had started out smart and got smarter. The chance of someone like a Myrmidon with DX 12 and a broadsword against 36+-point PCs not getting taken out of combat before getting a chance to attack was uncommon.