The Fantasy Trip

[JLV]

Originally Posted by Skarg

I'd want any healing magic to be optional. Having nothing but possibly expensive low-power healing potions was a case of "less is more", for me. It means avoiding injury, and dealing with the consequences of it, is very important. When you add healing magic (unless it is extremely limited), it often has a massive effect on gameplay, making the stakes much more "all or nothing" and to me, much less interesting in comparison to all my experiences without it in TFT. Suddenly everyone needs/wants healing wizards, tactics change, people expect to be able to get cut up and be instantly all healed, etc.

There's something in what you say, but the sheer lethality of TFT combat means that either you go through a lot of characters, or you go into the dungeon, clear four or five rooms, return to town to heal up for several weeks, re-enter the dungeon, re-clear the same four or five rooms (which have since been reoccupied), return to town, heal up for several weeks, rinse, repeat...

Though I agree, magical healing ought to be fairly expensive for minimal results -- only healing a couple of points of damage (1D/2 for example, for a similar ST cost for the spell), just so the characters don't become impervious tanks shrugging off the threat of damage. Also that level of cost means the Wizard character has to seriously consider just how much personal "damage" he is willing to take to heal a little bit of damage to another character! (Edited to add: Perhaps at that point the Wizard only does healing in order to "stabilize" a character so the team can get him/her back to town for proper healing.)

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by JLV

There's something in what you say, but the sheer lethality of TFT combat means that either you go through a lot of characters, or you go into the dungeon, clear four or five rooms, return to town to heal up for several weeks, re-enter the dungeon, re-clear the same four or five rooms (which have since been reoccupied), return to town, heal up for several weeks, rinse, repeat...

Well, it means it depends on what happens in the combat, which means you need to care and do your best and think of tactics that work (and all the more reason to want a defense mechanic that Melee doesn't have without a house rule), and be ready for unexpected sudden setbacks and disasters and to deal with the developing situation that comes out of that.

One alternative method involves making sure you have enough comrades and/or hirelings and wagon/animals to be able to have some people set up a resting camp that won't get wiped out by a few wolves, and do do more scouting and bringing along semi-disposable assistants and so on. To me, that's really interesting - much moreso than having healing wizards and having injury and healing much less of an issue (or even not really an issue - see GURPS Major Healing, or not an issue at all - see D&D 5e) but the replacement issue you get is there are fewer possible outcomes other than success or death (and if you toss in revival or resurrection, not even that, so the stakes raise to Total Party Kill or else no real effect), which is a very different dynamic more typical of other RPGs, less interesting to me and less like TFT (and skewing the balance of TFT adventures), so why it seems like a good thing to make optional if it's added.

Though I agree, magical healing ought to be fairly expensive for minimal results -- only healing a couple of points of damage (1D/2 for example, for a similar ST cost for the spell), just so the characters don't become impervious tanks shrugging off the threat of damage. Also that level of cost means the Wizard character has to seriously consider just how much personal "damage" he is willing to take to heal a little bit of damage to another character! (Edited to add: Perhaps at that point the Wizard only does healing in order to "stabilize" a character so the team can get him/her back to town for proper healing.)

Yes, it becomes important to compare what you're introducing and how it will be used. 1 damage per 2 days of full rest is slower than lying down (will your GM let you do it in a wagon while traveling?) for 1 fatigue per 15 minutes by a factor of about 128 to 192 (depending on how much unbroken sleep you need and what else your wizard might want to do in a day). In other words, there's a massive difference in something very important, especially if you're talking about healing powerful characters. Such an ability starts to make a combat team look incompetent if they aren't using healing magic as much as possible, and means the balance on power more or less requires it, etc. At which point the wizards may get slightly annoyed at how much healing everyone wants them to do, etc. It's a whole other dynamic, and worth thinking about before committing to one level of magic healing for a campaign.

One of the cool things I love about Tollenkar's Lair is that it discusses the eventuality of needing to heal and replace losses for the adversary NPC groups as well. That would be quite different if the party (or adversary NPCs) has fast magical healing.

In GURPS, in the cases I don't just remove the healing spells, I tend to nerf them by adding expensive spell ingredients that get used up, and limiting the amount of healing they can do (e.g. 1 per wound, or an amount per character per time) and/or adding risks of mishap that are scary and get more and more likely the more frequently someone tries healing magic on the same person in a certain time frame.

In any case, I think it's about being conscious of what the healing rate you're creating is, and who has access to it, how much it costs, and what the limits are, so you can get a grasp of how it will affect both play and the expectations and practices of the competent people in the world.

Since I started with TFT and played it for years and got to really like having to deal with all the injuries and having healing potion be a rare, limited, fragile and expensive commodity, I grew to really like and appreciate that.

[Chris Rice]

Defence: Back in the day I used a simple resolution table to solve this perceived problem. I set the median value at 11, so that two fighters of the same skill would have just over a 50 per cent chance to hit each other. Actually, there was no real need for the table. Start each figure at 11 and adjust as follows based on the values of their adjDX:

Take the difference between the two values and halve it. Add one half to the value of the figure with the higher score and remove the other half from the lower score. If there is an odd number add the spare 1 to the higher value. Example...

DX14 v DX14 (difference 0) =11v11
DX14 v DX13 (difference 1) =12v11
DX14 v DX12 (difference 2) =12v10
DX14 v DX11 (difference 3) =13v10
DX14 v DX10 (difference 4) =13v9 and so on...

I felt this fixed a number of problems with the original rules, including reigning back the power of the polearm charging character with 14 adjDX who almost never missed and did massive damage, without taking away the value of having a higher DX score completely.

For simplicities sake, and where there are multiple combatants, allow the figures to perform actions in the order of their adjDX before applying the resolution adjustment.

Later on I used this idea for other things such as casting spells; IQ of spell v IQ of caster, etc

[larsdangly]

There is a pretty simple house rule (or set of house rules) that I instituted in my TFT campaigns 20+ years ago, and it addresses both the survivability issue and the issues people have noted when everyone's adjusted DX is above 16. It involves a couple of interlocking parts:

Any 'Attack' action (not charge attacks; normal attacks) can be executed as any number of sub-actions, where each sub-action could be an attack, a parry or a dodge. But, for every sub-action performed after the first, you must add 1 more die to every roll for every sub action performed that turn. E.g., two attacks and a parry would normally mean every roll is made on 5 dice.

A parry is a standard (usually 3d) roll vs. adjDX, directed at one specified attack. If it succeeds, it blocks 3x the damage points that would normally be stopped if the parrying object (weapon or shield) had been used to block like a shield. So, a dagger or buckler parry stops 3; a sword or standard shield parry stops 6, and a great sword or tower shield 9. If a weapon or shield is used to parry it does not provide its normal block score protection on the same turn (and visa versa)

A dodge is a new action that just lets you avoid a single melee or missile attack. It is rolled on 3d, and requires a 1 point talent to do at normal adj.DX and otherwise has a -4 penalty (so it is like a weapon skill in this sense).

The biggest constraint is that no single part of you (sword, buckler, fist, foot, etc.) can perform more than one sub-action, with the exception of 'balanced' weapons (most swords, quarterstaff, one or two others), which can make 2, and dodges, which can be made any number of times. Thus, a very ambitious person might choose to dodge, attack and parry with a sword (which is a balanced weapon) and deliver a stout kick. This person will get two pretty good 'active' defenses that turn, potentially negating two separate attacks, and will deliver two attacks himself. On the other hand, he or she is going to have to roll 6d6 vs. adjDX for every sub-action. With an average roll of 21, the DX score better be high!

This might sound complicated on a first read through, but I've used it for literally thousands of hours of play over many years, and it works awesome as a riff on standard Melee rules. It's the sort of thing that becomes second nature once you understand it and doesn't really slow play.