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Old 06-18-2019, 10:52 AM   #11
Skarg
 
Join Date: May 2015
Default Re: The (Unintentional?) MMO End Game of TFT

* Overall, I think this will not be a common issue in practice, because almost no one will ever get to these pinnacles of ability. You're talking about many cooperating high-powered wizards spending years making magic items and giving them to a few other people, which only happens if the GM thinks this is a good thing and wants it to happen. If he says his world is about this happening, then he finds out how that plays out, and if he likes it, great. If he learns it's annoying, then in future his worlds don't have lots of cooperative wizards enchanting items and giving them to a few people to make super-characters.

* The game and setting as written don't really encourage wizards collaborating to make and give powerful magic items to a few people. Only 1 in 300 people is a wizard at all, many of those are not high-powered, nor interested in spending their time making powerful magic items for other people, and it takes a lot to be able to do that and then to actually do that.

* Also the rest of the population and the combat and magic systems aren't like D&D or MMOs where if you are the best character, you can overpower the strongest forces in the world. If there were a ST 16 DX 16 IQ 24 wizard with piles of super-valuable magic items in a world I were GM'ing, I'd be thinking about how many powerful armies/organizations/aristocracies/guilds etc would be very interested in taking those magic items for their own purposes, probably regrettably requiring taking out the wizard... and there are so many ways to do that (which unlike D&D/MMOs, aren't particularly difficult to achieve, and the wizard won't generally just be brought back to life repeatedly).

* That is, TFT isn't really a game about "getting to the end" of character development, and even with the original XP table, it took years of dangerous play to get up very high.

* I was in some 5+ year TFT campaigns back in the day which did get some bloated attribute level characters, but none of them had PCs who could summon a demon or enchant a magic item, and none of the PCs ever got any Wishes or Attribute Adder items or Charms (partly because we all agreed those were cheesy, and started to dislike the effect magic items and power bloat was having on gameplay). We did however get more and more powerful characters with lots of magic items, and that was an issue which did make play much less compelling for us, but the new XP table would have actually delayed that problem. The real problem was the magic item bloat and the way combat gets less interesting when there are characters with very high DX and high armor and normal low-attribute warriors start to be like mere speed bumps and/or XP prizes.

However, I do share some of your concerns, albeit in slightly different ways. In particular:

* Greater Wishes have been made a LOT easier to get in Legacy edition. Demon IQ is now unimpressive, the contest is easier, and the consequence of losing is described as the demon attacking, without making it clear you can't cheese your way out of any danger with a pentagram and/or ready defenses/guards and/or abusing the new death rules to avoid even losing any attributes if you die. But even if you do die, it's so easy now that you could probably replace any lost attribute points easily unless your precautions fail so badly that the demon carries your body away. A GM aware of the issue can of course change things. And it is not the sort of thing players can easily do themselves without first getting a very powerful wizard character.

* The high XP cost of gaining a talent point, the low cost difference between a normal talent like Swimming or Knife versus a master-level talent like Expert Sword, combined with the high costs of higher attributes, the invitation to GMs to award any amount of XP and not have it be related to doing anything in particular in the game, and the common orientation of new players from other games towards "getting to the end" of character development and constant gratification by steady character improvements, does seem like it will tend to end up with some confused players and/or weird situations, which seems unfortunate to me.

* The issues with magic item bloat are as in the original game, and take restraint and/or experienced GMs to avoid. Basically, there are several types of magic items the power of which can easily dwarf the differences between different levels of human ability. If these are at all common and available in a game, they tend to be what determines who can kill whom, more than attribute levels do. And that has some effects that I and my friends didn't like much, because we liked having characters and their differences be important and relevant, not what magic items someone had. And, because of the general way loot works - if some NPC has a magic item, the PCs kill them and take it and use it or sell it and buy other powerful gear with it. If a PC will magic items die, they take their magic gear and use it. This tends to mean ever-increasing amounts of magic gear and/or wealth unless the party gets wiped out or captured and/or all their magic stolen.

* There is one welcome new tool for limiting that in Legacy Edition, though, which is the adjusted rules for lightning destroying magic items.
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Old 06-18-2019, 10:59 AM   #12
oldwolf
 
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Default Re: The (Unintentional?) MMO End Game of TFT

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Originally Posted by Tywyll View Post
I've never had the experience of characters achieving attribute bloat either, but many posters on these forums insist that it was a real issue in the old game.
The reason for attribute bloat in the old game was that a character could have no more spells or talents than they had IQ and there were no mana storing staffs. Attributes had to go to silly heights if one were to develop a reasonable set of spells, talents and the mana to power the spells.
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Old 06-18-2019, 11:18 AM   #13
Skarg
 
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Default Re: The (Unintentional?) MMO End Game of TFT

Seems to me that a modest IQ can still provide a pretty reasonable set of spells and talents.

Without staff mana, there were still ST batteries and apprentices casting Aid.
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Old 06-18-2019, 11:34 AM   #14
Chris Rice
 
Join Date: Dec 2017
Location: London Uk, but originally from Scotland
Default Re: The (Unintentional?) MMO End Game of TFT

These (potential) problems also exist in other systems which include mechanical character advancement. However, only a small percentage of GMs and Players will explore or exploit these limits so it is often just a theoretical problem.

In my many years of play, most characters were in the 32-42 point range and the game seemed to play best at about 36-38 points, where characters were a bit tougher than starting out but not too much that normal foes weren't any danger. I also wasn't a fan of (multiple) permanent magic items, preferring one-shot boosts like scrolls and potions.

Even original D&D, which was renowned for high level gaming, actually played best at levels 5-7 (in my opinion) and characters were expected to retire at level 9.

I don't think TFT was ever really designed for high level play. If you look at the way the Attributes work; at ST14 you can use a heavy (3 dice) weapon, at DX14 you have a 90% success chance, and at IQ14 you can know the most difficult Talents. Sure, you can have attributes above that level, but the benefits become less, so I'd suggest 42 points is a reasonable cap.

That's if you want a cap. If you don't, just use the old system, or your own system.
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Old 06-18-2019, 11:58 AM   #15
Shadekeep
 
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Default Re: The (Unintentional?) MMO End Game of TFT

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Originally Posted by Tywyll View Post
Further, the tools to do what I'm talking about are in the rule book. This isn't some weird splat or crazy combo...it's in the core book. I won't be the only one to see it. And its 'necessity' is a creation of the new xp system that artificially caps growth.
As others have said, it's up to the GM as to how all this plays out in their game universe. You can have one where the halfling running the corner shop sells every flavour of +5 ring, or you can have one where magic items are insanely rare, or anything in-between. No system is without compromises and potential exploits, which is why it's useful that RPGs have a powerful and capricious god in the form of the GM.

As for the attribute cap, I think that's actually pretty realistic. There are practical upper limits to human strength, dexterity, and intelligence in reality, no reason there shouldn't be in the game as well. But I can understand the frustration some people might feel about progression not being very rewarding later in the game. My own personal experience was that my players were more interested in the story of the adventure than the level-ups at the end. Which is probably a big part of why most the adventures I write nowadays are all for the same party attribute average spread (32-36).
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Old 06-18-2019, 01:29 PM   #16
MikMod
 
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Default Re: The (Unintentional?) MMO End Game of TFT

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‘High level’ characters now need to ‘grind’ greater wishes. This is difficult and dangerous (kind of like a Raid). But it results in them being able to improve stats (that are under 16) so they can continue to develop.

This actually has another hidden impact. A character has the most advancement potential if they put all their points into a single stat. A 24, 8, 8 character could get an additional 16 character points through wishes, where as a 14, 14, 12 could only get 8 extra points.
This has been nerfed as well though. ITL p143. Greater wishes cannot raise any attribute over 14 now. So your 14,14,12 character could only gain 2 points by wishes.
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Old 06-18-2019, 08:05 PM   #17
HeatDeath
 
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Default Re: The (Unintentional?) MMO End Game of TFT

Wow.

This style of play is almost completely alien to me. I spend all my time mucking around with 32 point Melee characters. I'm starting to look seriously at playing with some basic wizards. When I get bored of that, I may eventually throw in some ITL fun-ness like dual-wielding weapons in just for kicks, maybe throw some 40 point characters into the mix to get at higher level spells, but this "I WILL BE AS A GOD" stuff? Really? Nah. Not for me.

Don't get me wrong, the Ogre Mk VI and the Doppelsoldner are fun to break out and throw at each other once in a while, but they're just not what the game engine was designed to do.

[Taken to it's extreme, not that anyone's doing that here, it reminds me of some people I knew in high school who thought Battletech was criminally incomplete, because 'Mechs topped out at 100 tons. They wanted bipedal landships and dropship-LAMS.

Heh. Left to their own devices they'd probably have invented Gurenn Lagann: "Well I throw the Local Group at you. Let's see, roll on the 20 column of the cluster table. 12 hits for 10 quadrillion hit points each." "T'is but a scratch! You haven't even breached my armor yet!"]

But it's a big game, and there's room for a lot of different ways to play it. You do you.
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Old 06-18-2019, 08:15 PM   #18
Skarg
 
Join Date: May 2015
Default Re: The (Unintentional?) MMO End Game of TFT

I hate to mention it, but I think the GM needs to do something to shut down Wish farming and/or Shapefhifting, or else unless I'm missing something, someone could shapeshift a subject into a flying squirrel or something with ST 1, then apply 13 wishes to increase ST to 14, then back to original form, then back to a ST 1 animal, then another 13 wishes... then back to another form which can have nearly any equal combination of ST + DX, for theoretically unlimited ST + DX.

Of course, it only takes one ruling or house rule (or no one knowing one of those spells) to shut that down, but I think it does need something other than RAW.
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Old 06-18-2019, 09:04 PM   #19
Shostak
 
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Default Re: The (Unintentional?) MMO End Game of TFT

I don't get the impression from the entry for Shapeshifting that one could increase a squirrel to ST 14 with wishes (I think it goes without saying that 14 is the cap for PCs, not all beings in Cidri), or that any increases magically made to the new form would remain if the figure were shapeshifted back to human.
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Old 06-18-2019, 09:56 PM   #20
Skarg
 
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Default Re: The (Unintentional?) MMO End Game of TFT

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I don't get the impression from the entry for Shapeshifting that one could increase a squirrel to ST 14 with wishes (I think it goes without saying that 14 is the cap for PCs, not all beings in Cidri), or that any increases magically made to the new form would remain if the figure were shapeshifted back to human.
Yeah, there are many ways to rule or house rule that exploit out of possibility, just no explicit ones.

Shapeshifting is relatively cheap, easy and safe RAW once you have someone with the (albeit IQ 19) spell. Squirrel is just a cheap example, but the spell says you can rearrange ST and DX as long as the values aren't unreasonably low for the species (so you could do the same thing going back and forth between any two humanoid races, just making one attribute relatively low and then pumping it up), and that you must preserve the total of ST + DX. So there needs to be some rule or ruling in the way. It's easy to make up one, or make a ruling, but RAW there's an exploit there.

Last edited by Skarg; 06-18-2019 at 10:00 PM.
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