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Skarg · 05-22-2020, 10:17 PM

I don't force PCs to retire, unless a game has an agreed-upon scope, and/or I have a limit to what I want to GM.

I usually run dynamic campaigns that have situations but not plot arcs... again, unless it's a limited campaign where I'm only intending/agreeing to GM a certain context. What determines that tends to be my interest level and available time/energy. Sometimes I'm curious to run an experiment or situation but am not really up for an ongoing campaign. That's what then determines the scope of play, and it's not generally about attribute levels of PCs.

I'm also allergic to the terms "plot arc" and "big baddie" (and, well, post-Kirk Star Trek).

TFT character progression is however very interesting to me in terms of how best to handle it, and what the "breaking points" seem to be. But that's also a huge and detailed topic that everyone has their own perspectives on.

I'd say that I think if you let TFT characters start to get up to a certain point, they start to seem like super-heroes, people who totally outclass normal people, people who do everything well, people who make too many otherwise-interesting situations irrelevant because of their extreme abilities, and/or people who don't seem much like the same people they were when they were 32 points, so I do think that limiting attribute growth help prevent this, and ideally, players will continue to be interested in developing characters without feeling the need to perpetually increase their powers the way they did when going from above-average to very capable.

I'd add that magic item accumulation can break balance and power level in TFT games faster and in worse ways than high attributes do.

In our original campaigns, high power levels did start to be an issue. They led to more and more high-powered play, involving more powerful organizations and larger numbers of people in conflict at larger scale than individual fights. When we'd get burned out on one campaign, we'd switch to another, in some cases starting with lower powered characters, switching settings, and/or involving different kinds of situations that weren't just about individual character abilities.

When we had played TFT heavily for about 5-6 years, our longest-surviving (46-point) character was only using a couple of magic items (leaving several others stored to avoid attracting attention and because it was more fun/interesting) and we had added some house rules to make gaining XP require actual dangerous situations for the powerful characters, and other house rules that limited the ability to over-use magic items.

At that point, we were ready for a combat system that was interesting to us and felt more right to our detail-&-realism-thirsty tactical gaming appetites that had been amped up by playing that much hex-based tactical combat... we didn't retire our 42-46 point surviving characters... but we we found we really wanted a more detailed and unpredictable game, so we retired TFT and started redesigning the game to try to add what we wanted... and then GURPS 1e came out, and it gave us pretty much exactly what we wanted at that point, so I converted my TFT campaign and the high-powered characters to a modest-power-level version in GURPS, which worked very well.

05-22-2020, 10:17 PM	#3
Skarg Join Date: May 2015	Re: Hitting the pasture... I don't force PCs to retire, unless a game has an agreed-upon scope, and/or I have a limit to what I want to GM. I usually run dynamic campaigns that have situations but not plot arcs... again, unless it's a limited campaign where I'm only intending/agreeing to GM a certain context. What determines that tends to be my interest level and available time/energy. Sometimes I'm curious to run an experiment or situation but am not really up for an ongoing campaign. That's what then determines the scope of play, and it's not generally about attribute levels of PCs. I'm also allergic to the terms "plot arc" and "big baddie" (and, well, post-Kirk Star Trek). TFT character progression is however very interesting to me in terms of how best to handle it, and what the "breaking points" seem to be. But that's also a huge and detailed topic that everyone has their own perspectives on. I'd say that I think if you let TFT characters start to get up to a certain point, they start to seem like super-heroes, people who totally outclass normal people, people who do everything well, people who make too many otherwise-interesting situations irrelevant because of their extreme abilities, and/or people who don't seem much like the same people they were when they were 32 points, so I do think that limiting attribute growth help prevent this, and ideally, players will continue to be interested in developing characters without feeling the need to perpetually increase their powers the way they did when going from above-average to very capable. I'd add that magic item accumulation can break balance and power level in TFT games faster and in worse ways than high attributes do. In our original campaigns, high power levels did start to be an issue. They led to more and more high-powered play, involving more powerful organizations and larger numbers of people in conflict at larger scale than individual fights. When we'd get burned out on one campaign, we'd switch to another, in some cases starting with lower powered characters, switching settings, and/or involving different kinds of situations that weren't just about individual character abilities. When we had played TFT heavily for about 5-6 years, our longest-surviving (46-point) character was only using a couple of magic items (leaving several others stored to avoid attracting attention and because it was more fun/interesting) and we had added some house rules to make gaining XP require actual dangerous situations for the powerful characters, and other house rules that limited the ability to over-use magic items. At that point, we were ready for a combat system that was interesting to us and felt more right to our detail-&-realism-thirsty tactical gaming appetites that had been amped up by playing that much hex-based tactical combat... we didn't retire our 42-46 point surviving characters... but we we found we really wanted a more detailed and unpredictable game, so we retired TFT and started redesigning the game to try to add what we wanted... and then GURPS 1e came out, and it gave us pretty much exactly what we wanted at that point, so I converted my TFT campaign and the high-powered characters to a modest-power-level version in GURPS, which worked very well.