The Fantasy Trip

[JLV]

Originally Posted by Rick_Smith

THINGS I WAS INDIFFERENT ABOUT:

-- Starting items to begin enchantment. I saw the point, but it didn't come up much. If Steve is looking to simplify things, rather than needing a Basilisk Brain to start a 6 week enchantment, change it into 1/8 of a Basilisk Brain per week. (1/8 rather than 1/6 so you are not hooped if you miss a DX roll.) Dividing (one large) starting ingredient into (several) weekly ingredients simplifies calculations with NO COST as to how the game behaves.

I always assumed that ingredients were there primarily as a "quest invoker," that is, if you wanted someone to make something for you, you had to go out and find the Gargoyle liver required for the purpose first (they don't have one lying around, or, at least, aren't interested in giving it to you (even for cash) since they might need it themselves for their own purposes).

Originally Posted by Rick_Smith

THINGS I DISLIKED:
-- The only part of magic item creation that confused me for a while, was the purpose of notes D thru H. The purpose of these rules were not explained. I thought this was for the cost of security, but now I believe that they take into account the chance of failures (16 or 17 which waste a week's work) and disasters (an 18 which destroys the current work so far). This is a lot of complexity in order to allow lots of rolls. If a 20 week enchantment had ONE roll at the end, these notes could quietly go away. If Steve is planning to simplify magic, the thing that would give the most bang for the buck is to reduce 20 rolls to one.

This makes a lot of sense -- there's a certain amount of drudgery in the game doing all this rolling. At the very least, reduce it to monthly checks instead of weekly ones. Mind you, I'm not saying Steve's original rules weren't realistic or anything, but this is a game, not a calendar. I suspect the weekly rolls might have had something to do with the weekly job rolls ("everything is rolled for weekly"), which ALSO ought to be changed to monthly, IMHO.

Originally Posted by Rick_Smith

In summary, the current system is OK, tho it can use some polishing. A lot of values in the table are off (some items are far more profitable than others). However, if Steve does a massive revision, the things I most hope stay in TFT are the rule of 5 and the doubling costs for subsequent enchantments.

I agree. The "Rule of Five" was a very nice touch, as well as being similar to a good many fantasy novels of the time (rules of three, and rules of five seemed to be quite popular there for a while), and put some limitations on the thing players could find and buy. And doubling the costs also limited the amount of magic easily available to the players; again a real plus to the game.