Trying to understand self powered items
 

I was re-reading the rules on magic item creation and having trouble understanding the reasoning or system behind how self powered capabilities really work.

The general rule is clear(ish): cost in money, ST and wizards is at least 10x that of the standard version. What 'at least' means in this context isn't clear; the example a couple of pages before suggests it means you get 1 point of self powering. So what does it cost to get 2 or 3 or 4? Who knows.

More generally, quite a few items are described as having no ST cost, presumably meaning their default version is self powered. I can't make any sense of why one item has this capability and another doesn't, and judging from the costs in the tables it seems like in these cases self-powering was very cheap compared to the general rule for self powering.

Does anyone out there feel like they understand this?

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

More items are "self powered" than is apparent in the listings, say Summon X gems. This makes them more cost effective than scrolls.

https://www.hcobb.com/tft/scrolls_suck.html

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

Yeah, I think I understand it, except for the edge cases that are not explicitly defined, or defined differently in the RAW versus the original Advanced Wizard errata. See this thread for house ruling discussion about details of enchantment use for multi-hex figures and the errata.

It sounds like mainly you're not noticing the mention on ITL p.154 where it gives further examples:

The issue of some items not requiring any ST cost to maintain is I think a case of the designer originally trying to make the right choice between having items that are very useful because you can keep them on without draining your ST, versus wanting the game not to be dominated and overpowered by easy access to items that have powerful effects that don't have any drawback. In my view, several of them marked as no cost should definitely have a cost of at least 1/turn, such as Stone/Iron flesh. In any case, the logic I think at work there is the idea that some spells aren't so powerful that the base version requires ST from the user to run all the time. But I'd say GMs may want to review that for each item to see whether they agree or not.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

IMHO a lot of magic items would be better balanced at 1 ST per X minutes. Like say a Flight ring which is rarely useful at 1 ST per turn and a game changer at 0 ST required.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

I think many of the enchantments are GM calls, and may take experience to learn what the implications are. I have players who could make extremely good use of a Flight enchantment at 1 ST per turn. 1 ST per minute is a whole other category of ability.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

The whole thing is kind of a mess. Given the goals of these sorts of resource-management rules, it would be a lot better if there were just some formula relating IQ level and ST cost of spells to the ST cost of enchantment, and then a single rubric that always applies if you want to bump it up to self-powered status. It should be possible to figure out what sub-conscious algorithm was in the back of Steve's mind when he filled out the tables by just seeing what the central tendencies are. I'm not really worried about financial costs because I don't use them, but the costs in wizards and ST per day are a serious gate-keeper for players making new enchantments, so I'd like it to work in a sensible fashion.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

When I have time I'll run the numbers on alternatives to magic items. For example a wizard who could either spend 500 XP to learn a spell or buy a $5000 magic item that has the same ST cost.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

In theory that'd be great. In practice, I think a GM with years of TFT experience seeing use and abuse of many of the magic items will have a more informed view of which enchantments are how powerful with what ST costs, than Steve's original instincts. I certainly have my eye on a few things that are bargains/easy-to-enchant, and that are very powerful to be having no ST cost, that I'd rather have a ST cost.

The immediate example that comes to mind is Stone Flesh at $4000 with no ST cost - that stacks with armor / shields/ toughness and can let anyone who can fight with a few more points of armor stacked on, dominate combat against all foes without very high-damage weapons. And as hcobb has pointed out several times, it's not well-balanced in terms of effort versus the less convenient Armor Enchantment costs.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

The most important question anyone has to ask about their TFT campaign is whether magic items and potions are available for sale at the suggested rates. There is no right or wrong answer to this, but it will dictate the power balance in your game.

We often discuss TFT as a low-powered, high-risk sort of system because of the deadliness of its combat system. And now that PC's have limited ranges of stats, that risk is always there, even after lots of experience. Personally, I think that is a very good thing. But the RAW also contains another path to another sort of game, through the ready availability of magic items.

For a surprisingly achievable amount of money, one can have a PC who has over 20 points of armor and doles out enough damage to reliably kill a normal combatant almost every turn. As a simple example: +5 plate, +5 small shield, stone flesh ring (21 pts of armor), and, say, a +5 flaming bastard sword (3d+7 damage). Such a character could pretty easily have an adjDX of 14 or more, meaning most turns he or she will dole out close to 20 points of damage. A character like this is functionally invulnerable to mundane attacks, even from things like giants and dragons. And they can't get nuked by missile spells because of the 3-point limit. So, they only have to fear very specialized threats.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

That very fine flaming bastard sword is $28k and so would take a Mercenary veteran four and a half years of salary to purchase.

The +5 fine plate is only $21k of course.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

True. More relevant to PC's is the fact that adventures pile up 10's of thousands of $ pretty quickly.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

My original campaign experienced magic item bloat. At first, I made magic items fairly available as suggested in ITL. Players who could would buy up and commission items and enjoy them. It seemed pretty fun at first, and as GM although I steadily made them less easily and affordably available for sale, my game world got established as a place where it was at least not too uncommon for there to be some experienced adventurer types who may have some magic items. So some PC-allied and enemy and neutral NPCs also had some items.

Well, but what happened was, naturally, that as adventures happened and characters died, the surviving PCs would tend to acquire the magic items of the dead... at first, cool, interesting, fun loot, right? Well, yes... but... what do players who get more and more magic items do? Naturally they use all the ones they can, as most fits their characters, and never part from those items, and the things that don't make sense for them to use... they sell, and then shop for more magic items that will work with what they have, and/or equip their comrades, commission more gear, etc.

And that tends to accumulate pretty quickly if you assume even a very few magic items may be looted on each serious adventure.

And so whatever they cost, that leads to the surviving PCs have a fair number of items. Which sooner or later makes them rather better than people without magic items.

And once some PCs have enough magic items that they're superior to most normal fighters without magic, then the nice tactical combat game TFT offers starts to fade away. And what determines who wins fights starts to be more about who has and uses what magic first.

And... TFT does have several rather deadly and effective ways to deal even with people with powerful magic items... but then it starts to come down to which of those the NPC enemies choose to use on a party that has really powerful magic items. And unless the PCs manage to avoid being identified as such and located, they may naturally be targets for smart people wanting to take all those very valuable magic items.

And that may or may not be all that fun and interesting. I mean, it can be pretty fantastic, but it's a different sort of game.

Some of our players ended up trying to be much more subtle about their magic use to avoid attention, and to make the game more interesting. +5 swords and invisibility rings were left hidden at home. It was still a bit dull being even someone with "just" armor 9 who can usually attack first and kill anyone they face who doesn't have magic.

That's when we started really limiting things and adding house rules, and eventually switching to GURPS.

But we did have a LOT of fun with TFT with RAW magic (and some quite powerful characters) at first, for some years of heavy play, until we realized what was happening to gameplay and thought we'd prefer something more about people and less about the magic they have.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

I think there is a place for a magic-item-heavy mode of play in TFT, but that it is much better suited to something like an extended one-shot, where your goal is to 'finish' a big dungeon, and not well suited to campaign play. If you want to play a few sessions of competitive dungeon crawling, where the way to win is to find and take advantage of powerful items (a sort of proto video game approach), then I think this could be great. But if you want the character to be more central than the item, then you need to pull wayyyyy back on the distribution. My rule of thumb in campaign play is the same rule that applies to managing small children who want to climb things: 'You can do it if you YOU CAN DO IT' (i.e., I'm not going to help you up into that tree, but if you can climb it yourself, god bless). So, other than the occasional +1 sword or something, most major magic items are things PC's have created. That might sound doable in a white-room sort of way, but not many players are willing to make that investmet.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

"The most important question anyone has to ask about their TFT campaign is whether magic items and potions are available for sale at the suggested rates. There is no right or wrong answer to this, but it will dictate the power balance in your game."

I don't use the magic item rules from the game as anything other than a reference; one of the reasons I ditched D&D back in the day was the over abundance of magical items which I felt spoiled the game. As a result, I ran TFT as very low in magic item availability. Although we had plenty of potions and other "one-shot" items, the number of permanently enchanted items I made available was extremely low, and nobody every just bought one at Ye Olde Magike Shoppe.

Stone Flesh/Iron Flesh rings are classic example of items that change the game in a big way yet are cheap to buy if you use the rules as is.

I would recommend extreme caution in using the rules as they are or you'll end up with everyone marching around like magic fuelled superheroes. If you want that sort of game that's fine, but at least understand that at the outset.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

One way of tamping down the overpowered-ness of some self-powered items is to give them a battery charge level. Self-powered items are described as drawing power from ambient mana. It makes sense that this is a low-level power field, otherwise wizards would call on it all the time instead of using their own ST. So self-powered items might need to build up a charge, similar to a battery charging from an inductive power source.

Therefore a magic item might have a 10 ST capacitance, or 20 ST, or whatever, and this charge is used when the item is active. Once it runs down, then it might recharge at about 1 ST per hour or so.

Naturally, this comes with more bookkeeping, and you'd need some kind of rule about how much it costs to give an item X ST capacitance. It also takes away some of the high fantasy element of a magic item that is perpetually "on". But it's once way to stop self-powered items from being too powerful.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

A fun variant idea: magic weapons and armor are in the mix, up to high bonuses, but require fatigue expenditure, just like non-self-powered magic items. I.e., your +5 sword can definitely cleave someone in half, but you have to summon your mojo when you want it to do that.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

That could be neat for weapons. You could also portray the magic damage as leeching life from the target. So the +X magic damage on a sword might be inflicted as fatigue damage.

Probably wouldn't work as well for armor. Taking fatigue damage as the cost of stopping "real" damage is technically cheaper (easier to recover from), but can still lead to death in a combat situation. So statistically that kind of magical armor wouldn't make you less likely to be killed, it would just make recovery from survivable encounters quicker.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

Our house rule fix, which I've continued to use in most campaigns since, adds a chance for magic items to break down and wear out when you use them, so people only use them when they need to, not just keeping them on all the time in every fight.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

That works too, and could be tied to critical rolls. For example, a critical success hit of 3 against magic armor might have a chance of damaging the armor in such a way that it breaks the enchantment. And critical failure of 18 with a magic weapon might do likewise.

A bit of an odd idea that just struck me is that there might be microbes or ethereal creatures that are drawn to magic, and wearing/carrying self-powered items might attract these to oneself. I'm thinking of effects along similar lines to the Tillinghast resonator in the Lovecraft story "From Beyond".

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

Rolling a break weapon result breaks your magic sword because the only way to get immunity to break weapon is to cast Staff II or higher.

Your +5 Fine plate stops 440 total damage and is then destroyed.

A 3d wizard's wraith lightning bolt has a 26% chance of destroying a Stone Flesh ring.

An excellent way to hand the players a temporary boost that they will soon lose is to have them find a steel magic weapon that isn't Very Fine. One non-fine weapon per fifty potions or scrolls found is about the right balance.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

Also, rods do not have the 3 point limitation so a 20 point Wizard's Wrath is possible from a rod.

I have introduced the limitation that no Wizard's Guild chapter has more than 4 wizards so items with a 4th enchantment or above +3 can only be found items or they are extremely rare and extremely expensive and take very long to make. How many Wizards are willing to tie up their lives making an item that takes them 2 or 5 years to make? and how many adventurers are willing to wait that amount of time for an item to become available after they have paid for it? Cash up front only.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

Limiting the maximum wizards in a circle doesn't make items more expensive. It just reduces the value of high IQ, low DX wizards.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

That depends on how you play it. And IMHO high IQ low DX wizards distort the game since they can only be NPC's.

I only use them as sages or patrons

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

Nobody else sees how effective a ST 6, DX 9, IQ 17 wizard is?

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

Even as a free action, the occult strike still requires an AdjDX roll even though it is at +3DX. On any spell, the superwizard still misses more than 50% of the time

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

Which is why Molly takes several roll vs IQ spells.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

Very effective with a flock of assistants with Aid.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

High IQ (which now generally means low ST and DX) wizards are definitely interesting characters, but I really don't get the frequent suggestions here that they make for good skirmish combatants. Every version I've seen would be mowed down in the first or second turn of a fight against opponents who are also capable and make reasonable choices. The fragility of such characters in combat may be part of the reason why I've never seen one as a PC at my table.

But they do have an excellent role to play as non combatants. Obviously the roster of NPCs in any campaign should probably include a few. And some day an interesting player who understands all the potentialities of characters who don't do much fighting might bring a PC like this to my group.

Re: Trying to understand self powered items
 

-- Sorry for going off-topic a little --

The high IQ guy, that tries to hide behind his fellow party members, and aid them with a few 1d+2 hits against the more heavy armored enemies. And when caught in melee, goes defensive and do the same, is a viable character. Not the best, but a viable character in most balanced parties. Or if the fight seems to be a long one, a staff to snake casting, maybe an illusion, etc. And you can rest back your fatigue just as quickly when you ST 6 as if you have ST 16, still just 1 per 15min.

Outside of combat, they shine with exceptional IQ saves, or maybe one of the many IQ based spells. They can even pick a talent or three and still have plenty of IQ left for spells.

Then outside the dungeon, they can be of immense help depending on their spell choices. Maybe hire a few apprentices for some fun higher ST castings. Or join an enchantment circle and get paid in items? Some single high IQ spells are a potential career in and off themselves.

And this is at their 32 point level. If you let them get a couple of thousand XP, they will be powerhouses (a few attributes and some extra mana in the staff). The opposite will not be true. If you go with just a high IQ like 14 and not exceptional IQ. You will have almost the same disadvantages, not much more survivability and it will cost you those 2000xp just to get 4 high-level spells (at 500xp a piece) that the IQ 17 guys already have "for free" at the start. On top of that, it takes a lot of downtime to learn three or four spells. And if you start with a standard IQ 11, you will most likely never get to those high-level spells at all.

So IQ 17 characters are a short term investment and not an immediate powerhouse. But they are not as weak as a D&D d4 HP wizard of old that used to be a very long term investment.

But just like it is very valuable to start an expertise or mastery talented guy with as high an IQ as possible (and preferable with the talents already taken), it is not the best for the first few dungeon delves.

A 6/14/13 spear master has a huuuge advantage XP wise if he survives until he gets to 11/14/13, compared to a 10/12/11 spear expert or a vanilla 11/14/8 spear fighter that wants to get to 11/14/13 with spear mastery. (And yes these are 33p point elven characters, since no 32p standard starting character can start with mastery unless they take a handicap or start play with a +1DX item). They are all built with the same goal, but the way there will be waaay longer for two of them, even if it will be safer in the beginning.

Sure that first 6/14/13 guy will have a tough time surviving while jabbing at people with a 1d-1 DX11 attacks. But with charge bonuses, to hit from standing still and the option of going defensive with 6d he might survive. And if an opponent turns their backs or side to him when they get frustrated with their 6d attacks with -2DX. The spear master will charge their back for 3d+1 at DX11. And with berserk, a balanced spear or a very finely made spear (at 400$) he will not be completely worthless in a fight. And after +3 ST so he can wield that javelin without penalties he will be quite nasty. If you want you could even add a shield and shield expertise for some more protection or a talent like physicker to help the rest of the party through the first few dungeons until he can pull his own weight.

In short, starting talents should either be 8 points for everyone, or +1 IQ from XP should include +1 talent/spell point. Or at the very least you should be able to save talent points and not use them all from the start.