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Old 01-25-2020, 09:49 PM   #1
CitizenK2
 
Join Date: May 2019
Default Questions about Wizard Staff

1) The Advanced Magic section of ItL notes that a spent point of staff mana can be recharged instantly by taking 5 fatigue to STR, or by meditating for half a day. Since 5 points of fatigue can be recovered with 75 minutes of rest, the half-day of meditation option seems terribly inefficient unless you are concerned about being drawn into combat midway through the process. Am I missing something here?

2) I notice that one of SJ’s pre-Kickstarter articles about TFT on this website mentioned that wizards in the new edition would be able to use the occult blast of a wizard staff without paying strength, but that contradicts what ended up in the hard copy of TFT Legacy Edition. Did the community reject this idea? Or did it just get changed in the course of development?

Thanks!
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Old 01-26-2020, 03:19 AM   #2
hcobb
 
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Default Re: Questions about Wizard Staff

Route 1) is also useful for wizards who only have 5 or less total ST or who have no fatigue at all. For example a witch shapeshifted to a household cat.

I was part of the brigade beating down Evil Stevie's initial Staff giveaways, search for "Grumpy" on this forum for a particular abuse. We still have Molly, but she's far more vulnerable to ranged and other hazards.
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Old 01-26-2020, 05:50 PM   #3
Steve Plambeck
 
Join Date: Jun 2019
Default Re: Questions about Wizard Staff

I'm planning to simplify the recharge to 1:1. If a 12 mana Staff was empty, the wizard could put 12 ST into it at the rate of 1 per 15 minutes, the same rate as she'd be recovering her fatigue. So 3 hours later the Staff would be recharged, and the wizard would still be at the ST she had when she started recharging (no net gain or loss over whatever fatigue she had at the start).

You'd never want to recharge it during combat, nor when you were in a hurry to get your own ST back up, and you wouldn't always get the opportunity to do so depending on the campaign game.

One might allow that the wizard could sleep with the Staff in hand, recharging it as she dreamed, but again she wouldn't be recovering any of her own fatigue until the Staff finished drawing on her. I really like this latter idea.
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Old 01-26-2020, 05:53 PM   #4
Skarg
 
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Default Re: Questions about Wizard Staff

I think you are mainly correct. It's faster to charge and rest.

But in addition to your consideration about being caught in the middle of resting off 5 fatigue, a GM might rule there are some circumstances where meditation is possible but rest is not.

The meditation method isn't really explained how that works.

It's left to the GM to figure out when it is possible to rest and when it's possible to meditate, and the answers might not be the same, and might be combinable with other activities (e.g. while walking or hiking or riding on a horse or in a wagon? If so, in what circumstances and at what penalties to notice things or not trip?)

Henry's points are also valid, especially in the more common circumstance where the wizard has injuries so using 5 fatigue would make them fall unconscious, or put them at ST 1-3 and so be at -3 DX for a while.
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Old 01-26-2020, 06:03 PM   #5
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Default Re: Questions about Wizard Staff

One of my postcards has a wizard with zero ST and 40 Mana, but thank Cthulhu she learned the Drain ST spell before she died.

Henry says "Watch out for abuses that let wizards regain more than 25 ST in any format in a day", then runs off to cover his staff with 50 single point powerstones to replace two apprentices for enchantments.
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Old 01-27-2020, 12:34 AM   #6
Steve Plambeck
 
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Default Re: Questions about Wizard Staff

Quote:
Originally Posted by CitizenK2 View Post
1) The Advanced Magic section of ItL notes that a spent point of staff mana can be recharged instantly by taking 5 fatigue to STR, or by meditating for half a day. Since 5 points of fatigue can be recovered with 75 minutes of rest, the half-day of meditation option seems terribly inefficient unless you are concerned about being drawn into combat midway through the process. Am I missing something here?
I thought about this again since I commented, went back and reread ITL 148 for myself, and now it strikes me as making even less sense than I thought.

Even if a "half-day in contemplation" means only half of an 8 hour work day, that's 4 hours. (It could as easily mean half a waking day or half a full 24 hour day, resulting in 8 or 12 hours respectively, but let's just assume it's the lowest possible meaning of 4 hours.) Well 4 hours sitting still, even if "contemplating", is resting in my book, which would normally recover 16 ST in fatigue. The wizard would have to be daft to sit still in a restive state long enough to have recovered 16 ST, only to put 1 point of Mana back into her staff. Or does the 16 ST of recovered fatigue stack with the 1 point of Mana for the staff, basically making it free? And the inequity just gets crazier if we're talking 8 hours or 12 hours. You could put 6 Mana back into the staff in 12 hours spending 5 ST at a time, recovering it, and spending 5 more. It's just a crazily awkward way to get at what I think is the simple intent of preventing a full staff recharge too quickly.

But the worst thing is that it introduces unnecessary bookkeeping. The wizard's ST/fatigue will always be in flux on this 75 minute cycle, and keeping track is important when you don't know when it may be interrupted.

My earlier idea to let staff Mana and wizard's fatigue recover at the same rate seems more attractive now. There is still only 1 point recovered every 15 minutes, with where it goes, to the staff or the wizard, being the wizard's choice.

It may sound much faster than the 5 ST to 1 Mana ratio, but really it's just the exact same rate of spell cost recovery we are all already used to. A wizard spends 8 points casting spells, and in 2 hours rest makes it back. Whether it was spent from and returned to the Staff or spent from and returned to the wizard's ST, it's the same 8 points of spell power.

And this way there is no bookkeeping. Whatever the adjusted ST of the wizard was when she starts recharging her staff, it will be the same adjusted ST at the moment of any interruption, because she was putting the 1 point recovered every 15 minutes into the staff instead of herself. Or looked at the reverse way, if she chose to put the ST into herself first, then the Mana balance in the staff is unchanged at the point of interruption. There's nothing extra to log, write down, or ever track.

And it still takes just as long to replace the energy spent on spell casting as it ever did. Problem solved.
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Last edited by Steve Plambeck; 01-27-2020 at 10:50 PM.
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Old 01-27-2020, 12:30 PM   #7
Skarg
 
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Default Re: Questions about Wizard Staff

It is odd, and subject to various interpretations.

I kind of think it would stack with rest, though. Meditation or "contemplation" seem to me would count as physical rest, too.

We have mentioned several cases though where you might not want to risk (or be able) to muster 5 fatigue at once, though.

Your suggestion is not the same, because mana in a staff is a different resource from ST, and usually takes 5 ST to put one in. You can prefer it anyway, because you want a higher recharge rate and/or less complicated situations, but it's not the same thing or the same rate to full charge, because RAW putting 1 ST into a staff costs 5 ST, not 1, and as we've all mentioned, being down 5 ST at once can be a problem in some situations.
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