The Fantasy Trip

[Rick_Smith]

Hi all,
In TFT reaction rolls are on 1d6. So if you have Charisma and are a Bard or something, having anyone dislike you is pretty darn difficult.

Even before I saw GURPS' reaction rules, I moved TFT to a 3 die system, where 3 = hate, and 18 = love. I kept the TFT modifiers for talents the same.

I suggest that this simple change is made. Or at least make reaction rolls on 2d6.

Comments are welcome!
Warm regards, Rick.

[Rick_Smith]

Hi all,
I was actually fairly happy with Advanced Wizard. So most of my suggested changes are tweaks rather than big changes. Things I think could be improved on...

-- Missile spells are too powerful. Reduce their max damage somehow.

-- Separate normal creations from Invoking demons. There are so many special rules for demons, put them in their own section. Add a couple more lower IQ Invocation spells, (e.g. Invoke Imp, Invoke Larval Spawn), for lower IQ demonologists.

-- Likewise separate Enchantments from Creations.

-- Current Illusions are too flexible. I'll discuss this in a separate post.

-- The economics of wishes make no sense. I fixed them here...

https://tft.brainiac.com/RicksTFT/GM...illsInTFT.html

... but a simple fix is to give demons a variable IQ, so it is easier for low IQ wizards to risk getting a wish, and very high IQ wizards are not perfectly safe.

-- No price was given for what you need to pay to forget a spell via Telepathy from the wizard's guild. (I use IQ of spell or talent x $100.)

-- Spell list: I've made lots of little tweaks to IQ, cost and the spell details. I won't pester you with this minutiae. I do think that fatigue spent to power spells be abbreviated as fST to distinguish this from ST damage. (In spells it is clear, but in other places it is not. The "2 ST" lost to berserking... is it fatigue or damage?) Note that some very powerful spells e.g. the Death Spell (and spells like the Death Spell) actually cost you ST rather than fST when cast.

I would be very happy if a couple dozen new spells were added.
---- A few utility spells. Spells that make you harder to spy on. Transportation spells weaker than teleport. Some variety of ward / protection spells. Spells for hiding and spying. I would say for each major adventurer 'job' (ranger, thief, cleric, spy, detective, etc.), have a spell or two that would help that character out.
---- A few divination spells. Trance is too powerful so eliminate it and make some weaker versions.
---- A few healing spells. See my previous post on this.
---- A few more area spells like Dazzle. I like spells with an area of around 5 MH. It's cool that the enemy AND your friends are effected.

-- If you invent a new spell, how many experience do you get? I use 20 exp x IQ of new spell.

-- Magic items. I never had a trouble using these so I don't agree with those people who are asking for a much simpler system. That said, the tables have LOTS of errors. With a modern spread sheet this should be easy to fix.
I should likely write a separate post on a number of small fixes for magic items.

-- Add lower powered magic items. Blur rings are very tough. A cheaper haze ring that only lowers enemies' DX by -2? Speed MA rings are awesome. How about something that just gives you a +4 (or +2) MA? Something to slow arrows rather than reverse them?

-- The cost of items with Immunity is too high.

-- Recovery from Exhaustion seems to have been missed by a lot of people (who think that wizards power spells with ST damage and not fST). I would move this up to an earlier place in the book.

Comments are welcome!
Warm regards, Rick.

[JLV]

Originally Posted by Rick_Smith

Hi all,
I am a science geek and so I LIKE metric. (Science and Engineering is at least 4 times easier with metric.)

I vote for the sensible system.

:-D

Warm regards, Rick.

Please, let's not restart that debate over here and close down yet another thread.

[Rick_Smith]

Hi all,
I've saved the big one for last. (Almost last.)

TFT starts to break down when people get highly experienced. Everyone ends up with fairly high attributes in two categories (say at least a 14 or 15 with one higher specialty). This makes experienced characters all feel alike.

Experienced figure can virtually always succeed on to hit rolls, disbelief rolls, most saving throws, etc.

Additionally wizards (traditionally bookish types) buy ST to power their spells and find themselves able to bend bars and lift gates. Where as a hero like Conan turns into a genius to get a reasonable number of talents.

This in my opinion is the biggest problem with basic TFT.

--------------

Solutions: (Listed from easiest to most effective.)

-- Start people off with fewer attributes. Let us say that most normal folk are 28 attribute figures, with starting adventurers begining at 30. There is two more attributes leeway before the system starts to break down.

– Get rid of attribute adder magic items and replace them with more interesting enchantments. Apart from being dull, these items only make a bad problem worse.

-- Trim back places where people get exp. Give a flat 100 (or 50!) exp for succeeding in a job roll. Reduce most experience rewards from 2/3 to 1/2 of what they are now.

-- Major change to experience system. Do something more GURPS like where you get a flat reward per session.

-- Give people more places to spend experience points on. I allow races to get 'power ups' for experience. (For example, dwarves can pay 4 attributes worth of exp and gain a limited dark vision.) Humans can spend attributes and buy knacks. I doubt Steve will use this, but a half page or rules for my superscript fixed all of the problems listed above.

https://tft.brainiac.com/RicksTFT/Ch...rtVersion.html

This is the problem I most hope Steve fixes.

Any comments welcome.
Warm regards, Rick

[Rick_Smith]

Originally Posted by JLV

Please, let's not restart that debate over here and close down yet another thread.

Hi JLV,
I saw a couple mentions on this thread on the subject. I've not read any TFT threads, other than this one. So my apologies, I had no desire to restart a debate that the moderators had put to bed.

Warm regards, Rick.

[JLV]

Originally Posted by Rick_Smith

Hi JLV,
I saw a couple mentions on this thread on the subject. I've not read any TFT threads, other than this one. So my apologies, I had no desire to restart a debate that the moderators had put to bed.

Warm regards, Rick.

You certainly don't need to apologize. I had assumed you were aware of the thread (it's still on the board, but now locked), and were sort of making a joke while still making your opinion known. So I responded somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but also hoping to head off what had become a quite contentious issue over on the now-locked thread.

So MY apologies for assuming something that simply wasn't true!

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by Rick_Smith

– Get rid of attribute adder magic items and replace them with more interesting enchantments. Apart from being dull, these items only make a bad problem worse.

On the one hand, yes, these seemed a bit bland and cheesy and we almost never used them because of that by choice. I think there might be nice creative ways to just make them more interesting and limited in some ways. We eventually added some interesting limits to all magic items...

Originally Posted by Rick_Smith

-- Trim back places where people get exp. Give a flat 100 (or 50!) exp for succeeding in a job roll. Reduce most experience rewards from 2/3 to 1/2 of what they are now.

Job success rewards are just broken for higher-point-total characters and should be fixed as you say, yes. But bloat can happen without using jobs.

Reducing experience rewards is I think a good idea, by steepening the curve so it gets really steep before the point where it becomes a problem.

Originally Posted by Rick_Smith

-- Major change to experience system. Do something more GURPS like where you get a flat reward per session.

I've seen far worse bloat from people doing this in GURPS than I ever did in TFT. I don't see how it helps the problem you're talking about at all, unless you mean to give PCs fewer and fewer EP as they get more powerful (which we did, but by using a rule-based experience system that took into account relative difficulty: e.g. 1 EP for a 40-point character defeating a 28-point character).

Originally Posted by Rick_Smith

-- Give people more places to spend experience points on. I allow races to get 'power ups' for experience. (For example, dwarves can pay 4 attributes worth of exp and gain a limited dark vision.) Humans can spend attributes and buy knacks. I doubt Steve will use this, but a half page or rules for my superscript fixed all of the problems listed above.

Yes. I like this, especially if there are more talents/abilities to get, and they don't require increasing your attributes to high levels to get them.

[JLV]

Originally Posted by Rick_Smith

Hi all,
I've saved the big one for last. (Almost last.)

TFT starts to break down when people get highly experienced. Everyone ends up with fairly high attributes in two categories (say at least a 14 or 15 with one higher specialty). This makes experienced characters all feel alike.

Experienced figure can virtually always succeed on to hit rolls, disbelief rolls, most saving throws, etc.

Additionally wizards (traditionally bookish types) buy ST to power their spells and find themselves able to bend bars and lift gates. Where as a hero like Conan turns into a genius to get a reasonable number of talents.

This in my opinion is the biggest problem with basic TFT.

--------------

Solutions: (Listed from easiest to most effective.)

-- Start people off with fewer attributes. Let us say that most normal folk are 28 attribute figures, with starting adventurers begining at 30. There is two more attributes leeway before the system starts to break down.

– Get rid of attribute adder magic items and replace them with more interesting enchantments. Apart from being dull, these items only make a bad problem worse.

-- Trim back places where people get exp. Give a flat 100 (or 50!) exp for succeeding in a job roll. Reduce most experience rewards from 2/3 to 1/2 of what they are now.

-- Major change to experience system. Do something more GURPS like where you get a flat reward per session.

-- Give people more places to spend experience points on. I allow races to get 'power ups' for experience. (For example, dwarves can pay 4 attributes worth of exp and gain a limited dark vision.) Humans can spend attributes and buy knacks. I doubt Steve will use this, but a half page or rules for my superscript fixed all of the problems listed above.

https://tft.brainiac.com/RicksTFT/Ch...rtVersion.html

This is the problem I most hope Steve fixes.

Any comments welcome.
Warm regards, Rick

I have to agree. Attribute bloat isn't really even the issue -- it's the way that it shuts down the game by making everyone a carbon-copy and virtually ensuring success in anything they do. In effect, it makes the later game boring.

This is based on two issues -- one, there are a fairly limited number of spells and talents in the game as written (yes, I know, GMs can and do add their own, but let's just focus on the RAW for right now), which means that at some point, when everyone reaches the higher attribute totals, everyone has all the talents/Spells relevant to their character, regardless of how they started out; and two, the 3d6 bell curve does not respond to numbers in excess of 18 or 20 very well, so there is almost no chance of failure at the higher numbers in ANY attribute.

I personally prefer to keep the 3d6 bell curve -- it's simple, and just "feels" right to me for TFT. I also prefer to keep the three Attribute system -- it's one of the features of TFT that makes it so easy to "memorize" the rules. The rules are consistent and generally (with a few glaring exceptions) consistently applied -- which makes for a better game IMHO; you're playing the game instead of flipping through rules books.

So what to do to fix the issue? Well, we've all given lots of ideas and thoughts on the matter to Steve; often in the form of "work-arounds" that can at least delay the problem if not outright solve it, so I suspect he has plenty to think about as he works on the game. I also suspect that at least some of the playtesting will be done at much higher experience levels than may have occurred in the past, just to see how things are affected by whatever changes he does make in the system...

I can hardly wait to see what he comes up with!

[Rick_Smith]

Originally Posted by Skarg

...
Reducing experience rewards is I think a good idea, by steepening the curve so it gets really steep before the point where it becomes a problem.
...

Hi Skarg, everyone.
Strange how I never thought of this one. (I guess I just liked how the experience kept doubling. Nice and simple.)

But yes, if you steepen the experience curve at around 40 to 45 attributes, it would also make it slower to get very high attribute figures.

Thanks!
Warm regards, Rick.

[JLV]

For those of you who don't get the Daily Illuminator, here's one of today's entries:

March 3, 2018: Inspirations Come . . .

from the darndest places. I'm at home today, catching up on chores and working on TFT. While sorting through old minis, I came across a little model of an obviously sorcerous mirror. And the next thing I know, I had written descriptions for six magical mirrors.

Sometimes it works like that. Cudgel your brain for inspiration and nothing will come out. Get away for a while, think random thoughts, but pay attention to what you're thinking - and voila! Well, sometimes voila.

I'm also coming up with a lot of punny potential titles for cards in the next Munchkin CCG supplement. Sorry, can't give examples, because the theme has not been announced. So it's probably mean of me to mention it.

As partial apology, here's one of my magic mirrors. No stats yet, just effects. Assume it would be a very costly item, and the optimum size would be a couple of feet on a side. Bigger or smaller ones get really hard to make.

Trap Mirrors

These must be created as a pair, of identical appearance, and if one is broken, the other becomes an ordinary mirror.

When the mirrors are placed so that they reflect each other from no more than 10 feet apart, anyone reflected in both at once will vanish! Their frozen image will be visible in both mirrors, from any angle. No time passes for the victim.

Depending on the spell, a mirror trap may work just once, holding a victim until he is released – or it may take a new victim and release the old one each time someone new comes within its zone.

To release a mirror prisoner, you may either cover both mirrors at exactly the same time, so that they can "see" nothing at all, or smash them both at exactly the same time while they can "see" each other. The victim will reappear midway between the mirrors.

If the mirrors are taken away from each other, the victim's reflection will vanish, but will return if the mirrors can once again "see" each other.

If one mirror in the set is broken, and the other one is not broken at the same time or almost instantly afterward (GMs may choose to be merciful), then the prisoner is simply lost (again, unless the GM wants to introduce a rescue quest involving the highest of mirror magics).

Adventure idea: A party member is caught in the trap. His capture releases the previous victim, who is a very interesting person who can help the party or be helped by them. Probably both.

Perverse complication: Perhaps a right-handed person will come out of the mirror left-handed, and must go through again to be put, so to speak, to rights.

-- Steve Jackson

I LOVE this. Wonder why I never did anything like it? I mean, magic mirrors are all over the fiction, but somehow it just never occurred to me...