Is Attribute Bloat real?

[larsdangly]

Originally Posted by Skarg

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.

It strikes me as implausible that you could go through a life of violent adventure without having attacks aimed at you. Of course you can imagine tactical approaches to avoiding attacks, or add magical items or powers that make your character more resilient than indicated by his or her point total. But there is someone else on the other side of the table who also gets to weigh in, and one can't just arbitrarily assume you get every magical item or power you might want. How that plays out is a question of the way your campaign is run and whether your GM throws fast balls or slow pitch.

My 'bottom line' point was simply that even quite powerful characters have high chances of mortality when you integrate over some moderate period of play. This is a game where you generally only get to die once. Anything that happens often and kills you one time out of every 300 will likely catch up with you.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by larsdangly

It strikes me as implausible that you could go through a life of violent adventure without having attacks aimed at you. Of course you can imagine tactical approaches to avoiding attacks, or add magical items or powers that make your character more resilient than indicated by his or her point total. But there is someone else on the other side of the table who also gets to weigh in, and one can't just arbitrarily assume you get every magical item or power you might want. How that plays out is a question of the way your campaign is run and whether your GM throws fast balls or slow pitch.

My 'bottom line' point was simply that even quite powerful characters have high chances of mortality when you integrate over some moderate period of play. This is a game where you generally only get to die once. Anything that happens often and kills you one time out of every 300 will likely catch up with you.

And my point is your statistics used numbers assuming every 32-point-ish foe you faced would get an adjDX 12 attack at you for 2d damage. Seems to me that once a fighter PC reaches 36 points or so, if they're being played smartly and the GM isn't putting them in overly hard situations all the time, getting attacked by a 32 point opponent tends to indicate something unexpected went wrong for the 36-point warrior. i.e. I think your statistics are not about the number of low-level opponents they faced, but about the number of low-level opponents who managed to get in an attack, which shouldn't happen all that often if you're playing well and have a better character. You're missing a very large unknown factor which you can't discount. Since TFT has a simple attack system where only the adjDX of the attacker matters, and as you point out here, even fine plate isn't great protection, smart play is about avoiding getting attacked by your foes as much as possible, and that IS quite possible with smart tactics, allies, and especially by having more character points than they have. So again, your statistic is not about the number of opponents faced or defeated - it's about the number of times someone gets past whatever you did to try not to get attacked.

The magic items I mentioned were about noting too that if your statistics are supposedly about someone improving through high levels and killing hundreds of people, they're probably not going to have static stats like you listed. Ours tended to get some better gear, and armor 6 isn't all that impressive.