8d6 and high attribute characters
 

Is there any practical reason to even bother with an 8d6 check? You would need an ATT of 27-28 to even have a 50% chance to pass it.

Has anyone ever played with characters that high?

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

Highest rolls I've ever required anyone to make was 6d and the highest attribute ever attained was an 18.

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

PCs aren't the only ones who might have to roll extra dice to do things.

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

What's wrong with checks in-game that people aren't expected to pass?

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

I have played some games where there were a few characters with some very high attributes, but that's not the only reason for 8d or even higher rolls for some things.

Things to consider:

* Why would you want characters to have a 50% chance of something that's extremely difficult?

* One of the underlying principles of TFT is having a game that represents a situation in a way that it plays like the thing it is, so it's internally consistent and makes sense, which includes having worlds where some things may be very unlikely to happen, or almost impossible to do, but there is still some measurable chance.

* One very common example is rolls to notice something that's extremely subtle. In ITL, it mentions that essentially no trap should be absolutely impossible to detect, but some may be extremely difficult to detect. Imagine there's a gas bomb flask hidden under a floor tile that has been expertly replaced so that the hider could see nothing else to do to make it more hidden. Someone noticing it would need to notice something like a suspicious difference in the dust compared to other tiles, or an ant going into a crack between stones, or something. No matter how smart and observant someone is, it probably wouldn't be very common for anyone to notice that.

* Some talents and spells or situations etc may increase or reduce the number of dice required to do or notice some things.

* Some tasks just realistically should be nearly impossible to do and would require both incredible ability and good luck to pull off. Requiring many dice is a way to represent that in the game.

* For ST rolls, there are some very strong figures (e.g. giants, bears, dragons), some tasks have ways figures can combine their ST, and there's really no limit on how heavy something can be that someone might want to try to push over or something.

* It's not impossible to have a DX 18 or so archer with Missile Weapons +3, and a magic bow that increases their to-hit chances, and for them to aim for a couple of turns (see Waiting For an Opening), and/or to be shooting at a large target.

* The Aid spell exists.

* Wizards with IQ 20 seem to exist. Even ones at IQ 25 who could research an IQ 20 spell.

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

With a stat of a thousand you still have only a 45.95% of making an 8d roll due to automatic failure. c.f. three hex jump.

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

Thanks for the replies. Basically, I just see TFT as too deadly for anyone to get very high attribute wise. To get any stat to those levels...I mean...how many sessions do you have to play to get a person to that level (unless of course you started there).

I am generally always playing with 32 point charcters, so I guess my experience with much higher figures is clouded.

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

The actual "impossible to spot" traps in the adventures are 5/IQ rolls, i.e. an 84.1% chance by a typical 32 attribute point wizard with IQ 17 and Alertness.

If you run a party of four such wizards past 25 such traps then you're likely to get one of them.

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

The highest imaginable stat for a normal humanoid player character is 24, but you won't see this outside of a 'white room' thought exercise. In practice, 16-18 is about the highest value you will see for a PC stat. These statements don't really change when you imagine a character with massive amounts of XP because you are almost always better off investing those points in something other than raising a stat from very high to slightly more very high.

More generally, the deadliness of TFT is an outgrowth of the fact that it is built on top of a competitive board game, and competitive board games in which one side can't lose aren't any fun. This can be hard to adapt to if your reference point is post-1980 D+D. But it isn't so tricky: populate your adventures with lots of things that are tricky but not automatically lethal (swarms, slimes, 3d traps, rickety bridges, etc.) and think of all serious fights as 'boss fights' (I hate that phrase but everyone knows what it means).

Also, 8d saving throws aren't really something that arise in play. If they appear in an adventure they mean: your survival is a coin-flip, no matter who you are.

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

Eh, that just determines scenario balance. It's certainly possible to set up coinflip fights in D&D, it's just that the encounter design rules don't recommend doing so because it's hard to run an ongoing campaign when the entire party dies in the second combat.

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

First I'd say that it sounds like you may be bringing in expectations from D&D or computer RPGs where characters start out lame and the goal and expectation is to get them to be super-human and max out their potential abilities, and I would say that is not really what TFT is like. Legacy edition ITL in particular effectively caps attribute totals at about 40, maybe more by exploiting greater wishes. In any edition, I don't really recommend rushing to higher power levels. I think the sweet spot of fun and interesting gameplay is with PCs in the 32 to 38 point range facing a world with most NPCs in the 28 to 36 range with some exceptions.

Most importantly, TFT is a game about facing dangerous situations and applying tactics and cunning to find ways to overcome them, or die trying. It is not so much (like many other games) about slowly safely levelling your PCs to uberness.

The game system itself is not too deadly to get experienced characters.

It does take situations that are survivable. Whether each situation is survivable depends on the game situation, the way the GM runs it, and the ways the players approach it (and/or avoid it).

But in my experience, if players develop some skill in playing, and exercise caution, and the GM runs a game in such a way as to give players chances to assess situations before they are in combat, and to avoid combat and/or act so as to not expose themselves to too many risks, the PC death rate can be quite low, and PCs can survive to become quite powerful, eventually.

In our original games using the original XP system and rules (where it was actually easier to die than in Legacy, and the main source of XP was combat, and we had LOTS of combat), it took PCs a few adventures to get to be 34-36 points and therefore better than most people, and maybe 2 years of play to get up to about 38 points IIRC, and the most experienced characters (with the old XP rules) got up to beyond what's feasible in the current system, 42-46 points, after about 3-5 years of play. Add in magic items, and experienced allies using tactics, and they were very powerful.

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

Well put.

In any event, TFT is a blast to play when PC's are in the zone of stat scores around which the main rules were crafted, and quickly gets boring or stupid as you raise stats above that zone. Even with the restrictions imposed in the Legacy Edition, it is imaginable, at least as a white-room exercise, to have a PC with somewhere around 52 stat points (start at 8, 8, 16; go to 8, 8, 24 using XP, then to 14, 14, 24 using wishes). But I don't think you will have any more fun than you would have had writing up a scrappy norm-core 32 point PC and just seeing where your adventures lead you.

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

Also: with the current rules, you can create highly survivable characters without magic items (e.g., fine plate + Toughness, + shield expertise and a shield = anywhere from 9 to 12 armor points - effectively immune to most physical threats). If you want to go up, up and away from that base, magic items will definitely get you there. A character with +5 fine plate and a top-end magic weapon is both nearly invulnerable and able to kill or incapacitate most things in 1-2 turns. It is hard to know what you would want beyond that.

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

This is where HTH is an equalizer. Lesser foes can get this character into HTH, then grapple while friends then are free to dispatch the helpless "invulnerable" hero in any way they please.

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

Get yon rondel dagger into HTH and make an aimed shot for the eyes (+4 DX for HTH, -6 DX for the head shot) and see how tough Sir Shugsitoff's eyeballs are.

Note that Dagger expertise works in HTH...

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

TBH, I think the auto-fail threshold on 8d6 is way too high to be useful in real gameplay (28 or higher). As others have pointed out, it would be simpler to flip a coin, though certainly less satisfying.

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

An 8d6 roll with a 99 adjusted stat is less likely to succeed than a coin flip.

Hence my house Health rules that give big figures cheap ST at the same time as they roll more dice on health saves does them no favor.

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

Generic auto-success and auto-failure often don't seem appropriate to me for unusual numbers of dice. ITL already mentions the GM may want to ignore them in some cases.

Ideally the GM would consider what they actually feel the auto success/fail chances ought to be and adjust accordingly.

For example, some 8-die tasks might indeed be unlikely to succeed very often no matter how good the person attempting it is, because there are factors other than skill/DX/IQ/ST/whatever that may result in failure a certain amount of the time anyway, in which case the auto-fail number can be set appropriately.

For others, maybe it is mostly or all about ability, and the auto-success/fail chances should not slide, or should even not be used at all. The clearest case might be simple tests of ST, or maybe some spot rolls or anything very unlikely but only doable (or failable) by ability and not by luck.

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

How do you apply critical/auto failure and success in contested rolls?

The big chances of failure for several dice rolls are there partially to defend the niches for two kinds of characters:

Type A: Spent the XP points for the talents
and
Type B: Spent the cash for the Wizard's Chest and Big Book of Spells.

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

I'm cool with wrestling and HTH dagger pokes as ways to crack open a heavily armored opponent. That is completely realistic.

One of the things I love about TFT is that its simple rules might not be perfect models of reality but they drive you to make realistic tactical approaches, so the end result is actually better than more complex games that try to 'brute force' their realism with a huge pile of modifiers and die rolls.

That said, a heavily armored fighter is a very valid 'build' for tactical combat in TFT. There is a big range of of attacks that simply won't work against them, meaning the foe is forced to do just a few predictable things. In a game that is basically balanced, the best you can ask for is a tactical edge that lets you guess what your foe will try. Combatants with ST 6 and no obvious defenses don't have this luxury - basically any valid form of attack at any range could drop them.

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

Personally, I prefer the way my group opted to deal with extra dice back in the '80. We used the crit success/fail thresholds with whatever dice rolls were needed. So, if you rolled 5d6, it was impossible to get double damage, and if you rolled 6d6 it was impossible to have an auto success. The more dice you had to roll, the easier it became to roll an auto fail, dropped, or broken weapon. And there was no table to have to look up as long as you remembered the standards for 3d6, albeit weighted to broken weapons.

Re: 8d6 and high attribute characters
 

Interesting. We went the other direction. We figured that rolling 6 'ones' was so unlikely that if you pulled it off, you deserved a truly epic insta-kill. Same with the top-end of the scale... you absolutely DID NOT want to roll a '36'.