06-07-2018, 02:41 AM | #131 |
Join Date: Jan 2018
Location: Sydney, Australia
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Re: HEAL spell?
Skarg - I can't speak for Anthony, but here's my rephrase of what he might have meant:
Let us divide all possible fights into two categories: those where the PCs know they will win without anyone they care about being seriously hurt, and the rest. In the absence of convenient healing the first category is the only kind of fight it's wise to seek, but the second category is the only kind of fight that's interesting. Therefore in the absence of convenient healing it's usually wise to avoid any fight that might be interesting. I would add that this is undesirable from a role-playing point of view, and therefore convenient healing is, for most campaigns, a good thing. |
06-07-2018, 03:03 AM | #132 | |
Join Date: Jan 2018
Location: Sydney, Australia
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Re: HEAL spell?
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If they don't have healing they might rest for 8 days, after which one character would be down 2 hits and everyone else is fine. Or 12 days and then everyone is 100%. If they have Healing I then they need to recover 6+4*(2+4+6) fatigue which would be 14 hours (7 if someone knew Aid, more if they miss some rolls). If they have Healing II then they need 11 hours. If they have Healing III it's 8 hours. Now the Healing II and Healing III improvements are useful I guess, but the effect is pretty modest by comparison with that huge jump from none to I. So this rule isn't bad as far as I see, but neither is it terribly significant. It's icing on the cake. My idea was that Healing I allowed healing between battles, and Healing II allowed healing between battles or during a battle. What Healing III did I don't know. |
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06-07-2018, 11:42 AM | #133 | ||
Join Date: Apr 2014
Location: Coquitlam B.C.
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Re: Levels of HEAL spells?
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First, I like having a few levels for a spell. It encourages a wizard to GET that IQ 22, and that makes the wizard more different from other characters, than if he got IQ 15, then dumped his other attributes into DX. Second, the wizard would not forget the earlier spells. In TFT, spells usually INCLUDE earlier spells in a related series, for no memory (mIQ) cost. Where as talent, usually REQUIRE you to take both, paying mIQ for each. (Which is another reason why experienced heroes are unpowered compared to experienced wizards. So if your spells list worked like most, then the wizard would get all of the healing spells for the same price. Quote:
Fourth, I am not troubled by there being a point of diminishing returns. Is the utility of powerful spells, a bit less than the early ones? Shrug. That is the way it often works. Consider the effort to learn how to swim. It is not hard to learn a basic competency, a small amount of effort gives you a life long skill. But consider the amount of effort it takes to be become and maintain an olympic level of skill. Warm regards, Rick. |
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06-07-2018, 04:22 PM | #134 | |
Join Date: May 2015
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Re: HEAL spell?
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What I'd tend to say about that instead is: if you're confident that no one important will die if you fight some weaker foes, but there's still a chance some of you will take some moderate injury that will take time to heal or else make tougher fights more dangerous in future, then that makes the lesser fights into interesting calculated risks where the way you manage risk is still possibly going to make a big difference. (This, it seems to me, is one of the main elements of play in all of the MicroQuests.) But if healing is fast and trivial, then that consideration is removed, making both the easy fights and the harder fights, as well as the combined experience, less interesting. Moreover, it seems to me that hopefully players cannot predict danger level too accurately, or they (or I, anyway) will stop being interested in general. For us, after 4 or so years of steady play, TFT did reach a point where we started to be able to predict the danger level of the outcomes as long as we were right about how capable the opponents were. And that was about the point we stopped wanting to play (and started re-designing instead, until we found GURPS). As far as what's "wise", it may not be "wise" (more accurately, not "safe") from in the sense that it's dangerous, but it seems to me that is the point where a game becomes more interesting - that is, where the situation requires unsafe choices, or at least where there is temptation to do not entirely safe things. And easy healing tends to make everything safer. It also seems to me that it's not really an accurate summary anyway, because if there's risk of death, there's risk of death regardless of healing (as long as it's not healing during combat and easy revival). The thing easy healing removes from play is lasting injury. I've mostly played without easy healing for serious wounds, and quite appreciated having lasting wounds as an interesting situation created by what exactly happened in combat, and I didn't notice it blocking interesting play. I've sometimes played with easy healing, and while it can enable "unstoppable buzzsaw" mode, which can be fun for a bit, I mainly notice that it removes the middle-ground between dead and no effect, from the list of possible consequences to consider. What I've noticed fast/easy healing doing to the gameplay experience, is trivializing major injuries, having players take combat threats/injuries less seriously, removing the meta-level effect on the situation where a specific fight led to wounds that has the party needing to deal with the injuries, a removal of serious lasting injuries to powerful people as a situation, reduction or removal of recovery as an element in struggles between groups, and also a tendency of players to just keep attacking more and more powerful opponents until they get killed. |
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06-07-2018, 04:56 PM | #135 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: HEAL spell?
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06-07-2018, 05:01 PM | #136 |
Join Date: Apr 2014
Location: Coquitlam B.C.
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Re: HEAL spell?
A lot of times the players do not know what the fight will be, or how tough it is.
They are wandering along, and a screaming horde of hasted, giant, rabid whatsits burst out of the undergrowth and charge at the party. A significant amount of the combat in my game is more like this, than the players knowing in advance what they are fighting and how tough it is. Warm regards, Rick. |
06-07-2018, 05:19 PM | #137 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: HEAL spell?
That sort of doesn't matter. If you're presenting your players with fights, either you balance almost all of them into one-sided beatdowns that can be converted to 'roll for wandering damage', or you just discard those fights completely and only run the fights that the PCs might lose.
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06-08-2018, 12:02 AM | #138 | |
Join Date: Jan 2018
Location: Sydney, Australia
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Re: HEAL spell?
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Yes, there are fights the players don't choose, but Anthony's statement as I understood it was discussing fights they do choose. Which is an important subject, in most games. |
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06-08-2018, 12:28 AM | #139 | ||
Join Date: Jan 2018
Location: Sydney, Australia
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Re: HEAL spell?
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TFT as originally published is 2, except some MicroQuests might be 1. TFT with the proposed healing spell would be something between 2 and 3 (lots of resting). D&D is a hybrid of something between 2 and 3 (clerics take a night to get their spells back) and 4. The key point is that as healing gets better it becomes practical to make the monsters more powerful, so simplistic ideas like "healing makes the players better off" don't apply. Quote:
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06-08-2018, 12:36 AM | #140 | |
Join Date: May 2015
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Re: HEAL spell?
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Last edited by Skarg; 06-08-2018 at 12:38 AM. Reason: Added the quote I was responding to. |
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