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Old 07-17-2018, 01:24 AM   #1
zot
 
Join Date: May 2018
Default Setting the time it takes to max out a character

To me if you can get a group to play TFT for a whole year, it's a victory! You want stories of incredible things to come from players. The game needs to be fun at the start -- and it is -- but after a whole year of dedicated play, the players need to end up with something much greater than when they started.

I think much more than a year to max out a character will just end up with few players ever getting there. But then, where will the gaming stories come from? Will they only come from groups that have house-ruled XP and advancement?

With that in mind, I think the rules should make it easy for the GM to set the time it should take to "max out" a character (e.g. get it to D&D 5e level 20):
  • Fast: 50 sessions: a bit more than a year (roughly like D&D 5e)
  • Medium: 100 sessions: 2 - 2 1/2 years
  • Slow: 150 sessions: 3 1/2 - 4 years

Right now, it takes 9300 XP to gain 8 attributes and, at the 300XP I'm advocating per talent point, 4500XP to gain 15 talent points (roughly 50% of attribute advancement). Rick Smith's Ranger Prince and Grey Mouser look like good maxed-out characters, so I'm using them as example characters. They needed to gain about 15 talent points to get to where he had them.

Going with these numbers would put the XP rates roughly at:
  • Fast: 300 XP / session
  • Medium: 150 XP / session
  • Slow: 100 XP / session

Once the dust finally settles on XP for attributes and talents, we can recalibrate these numbers. If the standard rate takes much longer than 150 sessions to get to 40 attribute points and 15 extra talents, we might need a fourth "standard" category after "slow" :).
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Old 07-17-2018, 03:09 AM   #2
Skarg
 
Join Date: May 2015
Default Re: Setting the time it takes to max out a character

Not to say your tastes/ideas/experiences are bad or wrong, but to contrast to my own very different tastes/ideas/experiences, here's how we differ:

Quote:
Originally Posted by zot View Post
To me if you can get a group to play TFT for a whole year, it's a victory!
A year of play is a good thing, but TFT (and GURPS) campaigns I've most enjoyed have lasted for about 7 or 8 years, and I think likely would have been even more fun/interesting/challenging, and probably would have continued even longer, if PC improvement had tapered off more elegantly, so the longest-surviving PCs did not start to become too good.


Quote:
Originally Posted by zot View Post
You want stories of incredible things to come from players.
Actually I want them to have fun and to encounter real risks and consequences and enjoy it even if they lose many PCs. Stories are a bonus, and if they accomplish incredible things, I want them to be incredible because the game world was consistent enough that they really were unlikely and required some brilliant play.


Quote:
Originally Posted by zot View Post
The game needs to be fun at the start -- and it is -- but after a whole year of dedicated play, the players need to end up with something much greater than when they started.
They need to?
How about, after a year of play that involved solid adventure experience, if they started at 32 points, the survivors should be significantly more capable than they were at the start? How much would depend on too on the game-time that passed and what the PCs did in it.

PCs start at 32 points, which in theory is above average. 30 is supposedly average, meaning there are 24-29 point humans around, and even starting characters can expect to be able to have a decent (but deadly dangeous) chance against a similar number of armed humans. A 2-point difference in fighters is enough for a significant edge, and a 4-point difference generally means you're superior and can expect to win handily if you're both fighters in equal circumstances. The game (unlike D&D) is about managing circumstances so that you survive the risks as best you can.

After a year of play, I would actually tend to expect and want PCs to be around 35-36 points, and that IS much greater than they were at the start. In a self-consistent campaign world and/or the published TFT materials, regardless of the player level, the population remains average 30 with most typical opponents tending to be in the 30-34 point range, so 36 point characters who play smart are superior to most people in the world. I think 34-37 point PCs is actually the sweet spot, and slowly savoring the progression from point to point and being able to pick up a talent here or there, or maybe use XP for other things, sounds like a big improvement over the old ITL table where those points breezed by at 250 XP each. I think the new curve looks really nice, myself (thinking about traditional XP rewards, or giving out somewhere between 20 and 100 points per average "session", as suggested.


Quote:
Originally Posted by zot View Post
I think much more than a year to max out a character will just end up with few players ever getting there.
For players who only play for a year, I would certainly hope they would NOT max out their characters, because that would mean that PCs who survive for a year have nothing they can improve. That would be really disappointing for players in campaigns which would otherwise last longer than that.

I don't really want characters to ever completely max out, but I do want them to reach diminishing returns when they get to be world-class, so the world can be consistent and feel like mortal humans who still have to worry & be clever, rather than comic-book super-heroes.


Quote:
Originally Posted by zot View Post
But then, where will the gaming stories come from? Will they only come from groups that have house-ruled XP and advancement?
No. I have great gaming stories that involve extremely humble characters - often better stories and more fun from those, in fact, than the ones who were at the top of the power curve.

Why equate the maximum character power levels with the best gaming (let alone stories)?

If you mean that players will want to play top-level characters to enjoy whatever the highest power levels are, they can always agree to start a high-level campaign, or if for whatever reason they do want to go from novice to the best in one year of play, certainly they can tweak the XP rewards as you suggest.


Quote:
Originally Posted by zot View Post
With that in mind, I think the rules should make it easy for the GM to set the time it should take to "max out" a character (e.g. get it to D&D 5e level 20):
I don't really relate to the maximum levels as a goal I want to be easily accessible. It's a limit because it's annoying if characters get much higher than that. That's why I like the steeper XP curve and am interested in what it's like if progression is much slower and hardly any PCs reach 40 points. I think that sounds like an interesting and probably better experience than speeding quickly through the moderate ability levels.

All things are relative. Our TFT games mainly involved conflicts with other humanoid characters, unlike D&D where there are thousands of monsters and highly stratified power levels and adventures designed for a certain number of a certain level of characters, and an expectation to climb through all the content.
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Old 07-17-2018, 03:19 AM   #3
zot
 
Join Date: May 2018
Default Re: Setting the time it takes to max out a character

7-year campaigns are great but if everyone has to wait a few years before they can try certain parts of the game out, how will SJG get feedback on those parts of the system?

Will they just have to publish a giant errata in 5 years because it took that long to get the feedback?

Different rates for different groups, I say.
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Old 07-17-2018, 06:10 AM   #4
Rick_Smith
 
Join Date: Apr 2014
Location: Coquitlam B.C.
Default Re: Setting the time it takes to max out a character

Quote:
Originally Posted by zot View Post
... With that in mind, I think the rules should make it easy for the GM to set the time it should take to "max out" a character (e.g. get it to D&D 5e level 20): ...

Going with these numbers would put the XP rates roughly at:
  • Fast: 300 XP / session
  • Medium: 150 XP / session
  • Slow: 100 XP / session
...

Hi Zot,
I think that this is a very useful analysis. Steve has talked about getting 50 to 100 Experience Points (XP) per session, so I expect the default will be slower than you are suggesting. I have no idea how much XP it will cost for talents so your numbers will have to be recalculated once we have a better idea of what they will cost.

In my PBEM game, I've deliberately set the rate of experience very high because email games are so slow, I want to have people enjoy improving their characters a few times a year real time.

I've created campaigns which were intended to be very fast pace and of limited duration. Some guidelines to new GM's (if you want to get this far in X sessions, you want to be giving about Y XP per session), would be useful.

Warm regards, Rick.
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Old 07-17-2018, 07:50 AM   #5
Chris Rice
 
Join Date: Dec 2017
Location: London Uk, but originally from Scotland
Default Re: Setting the time it takes to max out a character

Quote:
Originally Posted by zot View Post
7-year campaigns are great but if everyone has to wait a few years before they can try certain parts of the game out, how will SJG get feedback on those parts of the system?

Will they just have to publish a giant errata in 5 years because it took that long to get the feedback?

Different rates for different groups, I say.
There's nothing to say that you always have to start with beginning characters. I've often allowed higher power characters for one-off adventures or mini-campaigns. These days I don't have the luxury of weekly sessions where I can start characters at the beginning and gradually work them up, so I'll let them create characters appropriate to the level of game we're playing.
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Old 07-17-2018, 08:34 AM   #6
larsdangly
 
Join Date: Dec 2017
Default Re: Setting the time it takes to max out a character

I don't come to TFT with these sorts of expectations. My preference would be have the RAW version of the game maintain the same sort of power scale and dangerousness as the original (or perhaps even lower powered, as suggested by the stat caps that have been proposed), and to consign any kind of 'chanbara'/D+D version of the game to individual GM's, who are always free to jack up EXP awards, remove stat caps, add further talents, etc.
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Old 07-17-2018, 09:56 AM   #7
pyratejohn
 
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Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Columbia, Maryland
Default Re: Setting the time it takes to max out a character

Quote:
Originally Posted by zot View Post
To me if you can get a group to play TFT for a whole year, it's a victory!
If I can convince myself to stick to a game for a whole year that's gonna be one helluva game. Seriously, I'm usually good for about eight months, and start getting the "wandering game eye" at about nine. At ten I'm actively planning what is next and readying the current end game session. Maybe I'm an outlier in this, but that seems to be my pattern.

That being said, I like to run things in rotation, and I'm looking at putting TFT in that rotation. But even then, maxing out a character is something I doubt I will ever see.
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Old 07-17-2018, 11:10 AM   #8
Skarg
 
Join Date: May 2015
Default Re: Setting the time it takes to max out a character

Quote:
Originally Posted by zot View Post
7-year campaigns are great but if everyone has to wait a few years before they can try certain parts of the game out, how will SJG get feedback on those parts of the system?
Just off the top of my head:

* Some people with TFT experience should playtest character advancement. They use their experience & imagination to invent what happened in some sessions until they get to a place they can rest and spend XP. Then they look at the PCs & choose what to improve, if anything. Then they imagine another set of events up until the next XP/rest/spend point, rinse & repeat.

* Some people (with and without TFT experience) should playtest playing a game with 38-40-point characters and/or maxed & nearly-maxed talents. (Try both with letting players point-buy, and with handing them pregens created by the playtest mode mentioned above, or have them do the exercise above and then start play with the resulting PC.) What is gameplay like at that level? Is it fun or annoying/problematic in some ways? What is interesting or challenging about that? Fix that & repeat, and put lessons learned in the book for the benefit of new players.


Quote:
Originally Posted by zot View Post
Will they just have to publish a giant errata in 5 years because it took that long to get the feedback?
No.


Quote:
Originally Posted by zot View Post
Different rates for different groups, I say.
I don't disagree with different rates for different groups. No doubt many people will share you're orientation, especially if they're coming from a game that does that.


Another not-just-subjective issue with having one year of gameplay result in a character going from 32 to 40 in one year of adventuring experience, is continuity. What are the implications of character development rating for a logical setting? Well, what really matters is actually game time, not real time, and what the players experience & do in that game time. (It could be they advanced time many years, or it could be they've been playing out daily activities in detail, and about a year of game time has passed as they've just traveled around the Duchy of Dran chasing rumors and intrigue, and have only just figured out where Tollenkar's lair probably is.)

Suppose a character does advance from 32 to 40 in a year or less of game-world time: that sounds like quite a Mercurial transformation to me. If that makes sense, how many NPCs in the population also have similar kinds of experience that the players played out in that time, and shouldn't many of them also be 40 points? What does that imply about the point spread of the NPCs in a consistent game world? Do they also all stop learning and get locked into a certain set of talents? It seems like logically, there would be many 40-point NPCs out there, and the Wizard's Guild might be fairly busy erasing people's talents so people can shift their talents and spells around to meet current situations. And that seems really weird to me.

Of course, I think probably the idea you had in mind was more like D&D, where there is a range of NPC abilities in the world that's fairly static, and the PCs are special exceptions (of which there may be NPCs who have the same gift). And/or, the idea is the game is designed to be played from 32 to 40 points and then stop.
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Old 07-18-2018, 01:56 PM   #9
Steve Jackson
President and EIC
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Default Re: Setting the time it takes to max out a character

"You can be Conan or Gandalf, but not Superman or Dr. Strange" ?

Gandalf may be a bad example - he was very powerful but also very restrained or constrained.
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Old 07-18-2018, 02:03 PM   #10
Chris Rice
 
Join Date: Dec 2017
Location: London Uk, but originally from Scotland
Default Re: Setting the time it takes to max out a character

Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jackson View Post
"You can be Conan or Gandalf, but not Superman or Dr. Strange" ?

Gandalf may be a bad example - he was very powerful but also very restrained or constrained.
Yes, Gandalf is a terrible example because he was a Demi-God!
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