Re: Attribute Adding Magic Items
 

Why did I get a sudden vision of the medieval fire marshals condemning your building as a firetrap, filled with improperly secured hazardous materials, and impounding your materials for not having the appropriate tax stamps affixed or otherwise violating local import laws, after serving you with a summons from both the local Ducal court and the local religious court? ;-)

Re: Attribute Adding Magic Items
 

In THEIR game. Not in THE game. That argument is as stupid as any argument that that consists of: "I don't need it so no one should be allowed to have/use it."

If a GM is to weak minded for them to work in his or her game it is not the faulty of the GMs with more than 2 brain cells to rub together.

Re: Attribute Adding Magic Items
 

Hi ecz.
Let us imagine a new GM with new players. The players get enough money to buy a +1 sword, so they go to the magic guild and buy one. No problem, they get their sword.

They get more money and go to the magic guild and order a Blur ring that costs 1 fatigue ST per 3 turns. No problem, they get their ring.

They get a bit more money and go to the wizard's guild and order a +3 DX ring. How does the new GM know that he is supposed to throw up problems? That he is supposed to say that the wizard's are backlogged and that the PC's should come back in a year? That the Thieves Guild needs to interfere? That when they pay want to buy this item that the King has ordered the guild to produce items only for him?

***

If the TFT rules say that PC's can go to a Magic Guild and order magic items at such and such a price, then the vast majority of players in the game will do just that. If this particular item is too powerful, then it should be either removed or made more expensive. If ALL items are too powerful, and you don't want PC's buying them or making their own, then why have the several pages of rules that allow this?

Warm regards, Rick.

Re: Attribute Adding Magic Items
 

Hi Kevin.
I believe that it is not weak mindedness on my part. Rather that attribute adders are dull items, and too powerful. I think that they will not enhance TFT for new GM's, and that including them will make it easy for new GM's to end up with their campaign going into areas where TFT does not play as well.

Further as they are written now, they are far too cheap. I have an advanced character with 40 attributes. It would take me dozens of sessions to gain enough experience to raise his DX one point. (Say a half a year in real time.) But I can buy a +3 DX ring for $8,000.

Currently I can adventure for years and earn +8 attributes. But a rich character can BUY +15 attributes (assuming that you interpret the A type magic item to mean that you can get a maximum of +5 ST from attribute adders to ST.)

I think that the new TFT would have better design, if players were able to earn 10 attributes (rather than 8) and could buy 0 attributes (rather than 15).

The purpose of these discussions is to help Steve make the new TFT better. I also note that if he replaces these items with a magic item which he thinks is more interesting, nothing prevents you from adding them into your campaign. Heck, you could make the cost of them 1/4 what they currently are, if you so wished to do so.

Warm regards, Rick.

Re: Attribute Adding Magic Items
 

The default game is the rules all-inclusive, save those marked optional.

That needs to be well balanced for a wide variety of GMs.

The adders have been a major problem for a lot of people (myself included, but not a severe one). They need to be addressed with at least a cautionary sidebar in a revised edition.

Re: Attribute Adding Magic Items
 

Hi KevinJ, I think Oneiros was just rephrasing what Steve posted when he made the thread. The point of this thread is to help Steve work this out because apparently he's convinced, well, that the arguments against allowing these were cogent:

Re: Attribute Adding Magic Items
 

Myself, I don’t love Attribute-adding items because they are (forgive me) metagaming, not roleplaying. Anything that is generically referred to and functional only as a reference to the system rather than the setting is a suspect that the GM should watch closely. It encourages playing the rules rather than the game.

I agree that the best magic items are ones that are described within the game world in the terms those characters would use, with the actual game-rules effects largely defined by the GM.

An example: The adventurers combat a band of bandits, who almost beats them because the somewhat-corpulent bandit leader moves more deftly than a man his size would be thought to do, and swings a sword as if it was part of his own body. There is no obvious wizard in the bandit group. After some investigation with magical sensory enhancement, the source of the unusual skill appears to be the ring the bandit was wearing — a silver ring with a band of lapis encircling it that looks like an elongated bolt of blue lightning.

When wearing the ring later, the bearer gets into combat and fails a combat roll — and is told by the GM that no, the roll was successful after all. It may take a bit for the bearer to figure out the magnitude and scope of the effect. Does it just help the bearer in combat? How does it affect other actions? Is there any tradeoff for the enhancement, or occasional glitch in how it works?

The effect of the introduction of such a ring to a campaign is far more entertaining than to find a “Ring of +2 DX”. It may also be less unbalancing because there may be things about the ring the character doesn’t know until circumstances reveal them. For example, a character may miss an attack roll with a main-gauche, revealing that the enhancement only applies to the hand and arm on which the ring is worn.

Let a paid NPC analyze the ring magically, and you may get the information only in the setting’s context, not the game’s. “This band reeks of elven magic. The wearer will be more adept in combat, or at any task where hands and eyes must be sharp. There may be more, but my vision of these things grows cloudy...”

And for magic attribute-enhancement items the player characters make themselves? I’d advise GMs to apply similar appropriate limitations on them which may not be discovered immediately. These differences can be subtle and very specialized (like the one-hand-only limit on the ring mentioned here). They could be capricious and even a bit funny. (Imagine the ring only increasing DX when outdoors under sunlight. In the labyrinth by torchlight or at night — no help. Now imagine discovering that when suddenly All the Orcs in the World (TM) pour down the corridor.

Rules that treat magic like a science or manufacturing (certainly a viable option) can still remain interesting and surprising if the GM is clever and flexible. For games with a GM, I like situations where game rules give me both “the rules” and guidance as to how the rules can be implemented creatively.

Re: Attribute Adding Magic Items
 

A ring of Strength makes perfect non-mechanical sense. So does a ring of Dexterity. And a crown of Intellect. And boots of speed. Logically, all these directly map to an obvious attribute, and thus, given the realities of play, provide full bonuses...

The thing is, given the 4 attributes (ST DX IQ MA), the other natural concepts — Rings of Agility, rings of endurance, rings of stamina, rings of awareness, crowns of knowledge — all are, mechanically, either going to map to the same attributes, or are going to result in essentially being half-as-valuable as one of the ones that maps directly to the attributes...

But the attributes themselves map out to many functions
Strength - Maximum weapon size, hit points, lifting strength, stamina/fatigue-capacity
Dexterity - Manual dexterity (use of hands), agility (use of whole body, excepting movement), ranged accuracy (which involves perception), melee accuracy (which involves perception, as well)
Intelligence - Willpower, Charisma, Knowledge, mental acuity/problem-solving, maximum complexity of learned abilities...
MA - movement speed. (It's the only one narrowly construed, and thus often ignored as an attribute, especially since it's racially fixed.)

Re: Attribute Adding Magic Items
 

Frankly, this is by far the most cogent argument I've read on the subject since this thread started.

And yes, the GM should NEVER just announce, "It's a ring of +2 DX." Figuring out what a magic item is and what it does should be a process and an experience (and an adventure) all by itself; otherwise, you're just wasting an opportunity.

Re: Attribute Adding Magic Items
 

That was exactly what I was doing. Thanks, zot.

We are talking about changes to THE game. I don't know what you mean by "That argument" in your response to me, because I merely stated a preference for Anthony's suggestion of limiting the total bonus of adders based on the Rule of Five.

However, the designer of THE game has said there have been some well presented and convincing arguments to remove them. He's started this thread for people to make similar arguments for the opposing view. I don't think saying someone is "weak minded" for not wanting them qualifies as such an argument.

In fact, I haven't seen too many arguments in this thread in general for WHY adders should be kept in - other than "it's tradition" - only HOW they might be kept in with some system tweaks.

Also, irony alert: "it is not the faulty of the GMs with more than 2 brain cells to rub together"