Attribute Bloat 'Re-Deux'

[larsdangly]

How many XP do people imagine characters will ever earn? I don't think it is plausible that anyone will earn more than a few 10's of thousands, at least not in the foreseeable future. If a typical dedicated player averages one session per week, that will yield something like 5k per year, so you aren't going to get over 20-40k over the time scale I have in mind. Really, most people switch games, start new campaigns, etc. more often than that. Also, I suspect that players presented with the XP costs in the RAW are not going to sit on 8-16k EP for years on end to gain their 41st, 42nd, stat stat point; instead, they are going to spend those on talents, spells, staff power and lesser wishes.

[ColBosch]

My suggestion is to not sweat it. I agree that most campaigns will never reach those limits. Also, just because you could have a 30 year old wizard who bends all of space and time to his whim doesn't mean that your game world will be filled with them. Adventurers are the exception, not the norm. They're the Navy SEALs and multiple-doctorates of their worlds, not the average Joes.

[JLV]

Originally Posted by ecz

note I use the old system to assign experience ( my players have totally rejected the new way to assign experience for Legacy Rules)

I have to admit that I'm leaning in the same direction -- the old rules at least had a basis in both logic and actual in-game performance. Plus, they were something everyone could understand and didn't lead to potential accusations of favoritism or DM manipulation. If I was going to do anything with the new rules, what I might go with would be the "peer evaluation" system -- whoever gets the most votes as best role-player for a session (the DM gets a vote too -- and the balloting would be secret) might earn an extra 5 or 10 XP or something -- just enough to encourage role-playing, but not enough to encourage cut-throat politicking for the extra XP...

Mind you, I haven't actually TRIED the new rules yet, and until I at least give them a spin, I'll probably refrain from changing anything. I think I ought to at least see how they play before I throw the new "XP earning" rules completely out. Though I might just use them in a few quick one-shots and so on to see how I and any players I manage to come up with like them, before committing to an actual campaign with them.

Originally Posted by larsdangly

How many XP do people imagine characters will ever earn? I don't think it is plausible that anyone will earn more than a few 10's of thousands, at least not in the foreseeable future. If a typical dedicated player averages one session per week, that will yield something like 5k per year, so you aren't going to get over 20-40k over the time scale I have in mind. Really, most people switch games, start new campaigns, etc. more often than that. Also, I suspect that players presented with the XP costs in the RAW are not going to sit on 8-16k EP for years on end to gain their 41st, 42nd, stat stat point; instead, they are going to spend those on talents, spells, staff power and lesser wishes.

I pretty much totally agree with this. I think that most campaigns won't reach the stage where this becomes an actual problem for at least four or five years (though you just watch, some teenagers out there will play 10 hours for every day over the entire summer vacation this year and BOOM, they'll prove (or disprove) the problem in a year or so), and most players won't have the discipline to retain XP for an attribute increase beyond the 38-40 point range -- the temptation to spend them on things of more immediate benefit will be overwhelming!

[ecz]

Originally Posted by JLV

(...)

Mind you, I haven't actually TRIED the new rules yet, and until I at least give them a spin, I'll probably refrain from changing anything. I think I ought to at least see how they play before I throw the new "XP earning" rules completely out. Though I might just use them in a few quick one-shots and so on to see how I and any players I manage to come up with like them, before committing to an actual campaign with them.

If memory serves, in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, second edition, EXP is assigned in a way very very very similar to the rules of the new Legacy Edition.
As I played WFRP for a while, I already know how the new EXP thing could work.

And it can work.

But we prefer the old original TFT rules because they are simply better and perfect for our purposes (reward players for good play and let their PCs to grow).

Also note that assign points per Legacy rules requires an extra effort for the GM totally not existent under the old rules.
Besides it is an extra effort required at the very end of the session, tipically at late night, usually when the GM is tired... Errors or simply wrong judgments, from the GM or from the players does not matter, it's the same, are easy when you are tired and under stress and can ruin a whole session at the end.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by larsdangly

How many XP do people imagine characters will ever earn? I don't think it is plausible that anyone will earn more than a few 10's of thousands, at least not in the foreseeable future. If a typical dedicated player averages one session per week, that will yield something like 5k per year, so you aren't going to get over 20-40k over the time scale I have in mind. Really, most people switch games, start new campaigns, etc. more often than that. Also, I suspect that players presented with the XP costs in the RAW are not going to sit on 8-16k EP for years on end to gain their 41st, 42nd, stat stat point; instead, they are going to spend those on talents, spells, staff power and lesser wishes.

Our experience was playing about once a week but each character getting much less experience per year than you estimate, though partly because the same characters were not always in every session - we alternated between 2 main settings and some other alternate settings. We used the original experience system, and then later our revised version of that system, but we kept playing longer than you expect - 5 or 6 years before attribute-and-magic-item-bloat had us wanting something else (and then GURPS showed up).

But as actual data points, a six-year survivor maybe averaging play every other week ended up with over 9,500 EP. A five-year survivor averaging play a bit less often ended up with over 3,500 EP.

That meant 46-point and 42-point human characters, respectively, in the old system.

[larsdangly]

I felt like I was putting out a high estimate for XP, but only because I know the other end of the spectrum in the discussion is an order of magnitude higher; I too think most PC's in most campaigns will be working with a few thousand XP after a couple of years.

Re. the new XP allocation rules, I was pretty skeptical about about them but quickly decided they basically just remove something that was kind of a head ache and not actually very fair. You used to get no XP for 3d rolls under stress, even though they represent a lot of your risk of failure (particularly now that few characters have adjusted DX scores over 15). And, the balance of pts earned vs. risk in combat was actually pretty good in original Melee/Wizard but not in ITL. You just don't earn much for taking on someone who has a solid chance of murdering you. So, I haven't looked back after switching to a system where I basically award ~50 points per hour of normal intensity play and ~100 points per hour of high intensity play. I don't have any sense that anyone feels cheated. It is a little more than the rate at which people earned XP in the old system, gets doled out fairly, and now everyone can stop the nit picky accounting.

[JohnPaulB]

Originally Posted by hcobb

How do you avoid talent bloat? Other than a wizard who is GMICy and knows UC V would be ST 12 DX 14 IQ 20 and hence 46 attribute points, the last of which costs a quarter of a million of the half million total XPs.

This is what you can spend XP on other than Attributes, Spells or Talents (ITL page 45):

• For gold! Sweet, sweet gold!
• For a Limited Wish, which can save your life on the day that luck turns against you.
• To improve your staff’s Mana stat, if you are a wizard. This lets you cast more spells.

I might expand this to include:

• Bribes
• Favors
• Lawyer
• Establishing a business or farm
• Contacts
• Bookings on Journeys
• Investing in something that brings in continual returns

(ITL page 46) A character who needs mundane wealth between adventures may, if the GM permits, cash XP in for 1 gold piece each. The player must offer a good in-game explanation of where the money came from. “Found it in the street” should work zero times, and “Rich uncle died” once at most.

As per Talents, Contacts & Favors could be something that you were working on all year long and finally one decided to present themselves. Or you could save a Contact (not have a particular person selected) Slot waiting until you needed one in game and then that slot would be given over to that NPC. The same contact is available for other games until you screw them or they die. Favors get used up once.

Lawyers can be put on retainer. Though if you are going to travel, you might want to get a Letter of Retainer from the Lawyer's Guild.

You can save up your XP and buy a business. The GM can determine how much that new business costs. When you have enough XP cash it in. It could represent $ you've been saving all along or the buying out from the previous owner or even a business you got from your dead uncle.

If you need to journey by ship and don't have the $, you could cash in some XP and get passage. This might be by contacts or getting in good with the Captain or (if the GM is surly) being shanghaid.

The GM and the Players can get creative on what else this could be expanded into.

So Sandbagging XP might be the alternative to spending it on Attributes or Talents.

[larsdangly]

I think Lesser Wishes are a currently under appreciated way for people to spend XP. The cost is such that you can only earn one ever ~3-4 sessions, at best, and they are very useful at keeping your favorite experienced character alive. I imagine quite a few players will end up spending thousands of XP on them over the years.

[TippetsTX]

So I'd like to put the points about the rate of earned XP made by Lars and Skarg above into context with my previous post...

How long should it take to experience the full lifecycle of character progression? What is a reasonable and realistic pace for a player to experience the 'novice' thru 'legend' phases of gameplay?

If you look at the current trends in organized play and structured campaign 'paths' used by some of the most popular fantasy RPGs in the market today, the answer is 2 to 3 years, typically. I'm not saying that is right pace for everyone, but it does seem likely that it would be a common assumption of folks that are new to TFT. And don't get me wrong, I would love to see TFT pull players away from those 'other' games (especially since I believe it is a superior system in many respects), but I fear that the slow rate of advancement coupled with the forced limits on the level of power that characters can achieve may be a barrier to that goal.

As a specific example, let's look at the UC focused hero... to aquire UC V requires a 40-point character minimum and when you add that to the cost of the UC talents themselves, you are looking at nearly 13,000 XP (assuming you didn't spend XP on anything else). That's 4 to 5 years of regular weekly play using the default RAW rate of earned XP per session. That seems like a long time to reach what I consider to be the top end of only the 'veteran' tier.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by TippetsTX

How long should it take to experience the full lifecycle of character progression? What is a reasonable and realistic pace for a player to experience the 'novice' thru 'legend' phases of gameplay?

It seems to me that the words "realistic" and "legend" are near-opposite ends of a spectrum. And, that the answer will be subjective and handled (or not) in different ways by different GMs.

Originally Posted by TippetsTX

If you look at the current trends in organized play and structured campaign 'paths' used by some of the most popular fantasy RPGs in the market today, the answer is 2 to 3 years, typically. I'm not saying that is right pace for everyone, but it does seem likely that it would be a common assumption of folks that are new to TFT. ...

I can think of at least twenty other inaccurate assumptions that players from other RPGs may tend to have, none of which would I recommend changing TFT to comply with.


If a GM wants to have relatively inexperienced/slightly-above-average PCs become legendary best-in-the-world sorts of people during X amount of play, I would suggest they think about why and how they want that to happen, and then make it so. e.g. say they're all blessed by the goddess or savants or ate mutant pizza and then give them 1000 XP per session.


Personally, I'd stick to giving characters XP for things the characters actually eXPerience, having nothing to do with play sessions, real-world time, or zero-to-hero expectations.

One way I and other GM's I've played with have handled desires to have characters move to a whole other level of ability, is to have the characters actually receive a bunch of training and experience by advancing time (and/or playing other characters) while the characters are taking the years to develop to that point, then restarting play after that. It might only be half an hour of real-time.

Another way is to play different characters. Maybe play follows a certain quest or situation rather than sticking to a set of characters. One set of characters' adventure is about learning about a situation and reporting that information to other people. The next adventure is about the result, which might be that more powerful different people take action to do something about information. Then the results of those actions leads to consequences, which leads to play by yet other characters at yet another level of power.

Or, just add characters at the desired power level to an ongoing or different game situation.

Often after our best characters had become quite powerful, we would choose to play a battle or adventure or side campaign at a lower power level.

So many options...