priest and theologian

[JLV]

Originally Posted by Jackal

@tbeard1999: I like those archetypes. Thanks for posting that.

But I think keeping heals to just P+MP talents will limit the long-term viability of TFT.

Perhaps our games were excessive. But we found that adding 3 ST to each figure (which is effectively what P+MP does) didn't make much of dent in damage.

We did add some additional talents to augment P+MP: they upped the ST +5 all told. Better, but still problematic.

It wasn't until we broke down and added full-on healing that the dungeon crawls could really start. The situations a party can face are just too limited otherwise -- or at least that's what we found.

Now granted, we were balancing encounters from a D&D perspective: having a Cleric throwing Heal Light/Serious/Critical/etc Wounds pretty much whenever we needed it meant our combats were over the top, perhaps.

But I suspect that younger players coming from MMORPGs or combat-heavy games like 4e or Pathfinder may expect to play the same sorts of scenarios. And if that's the case, P+MP ain't gonna cut it at all.

I would also note that P+MP doesn't scale with level. So our toons get squishier just as we get more attached -- not a good balance for longevity, me thinks.

Thoughts?

You know, that's a pretty good point, and one which I and others made a couple of months ago on these threads.

Under the rules as written, dungeon crawls are pretty much a non-event (unless the dungeon has racks of healing potions in various rooms scattered throughout the place), because basically you wind up getting wounded pretty badly in fairly short order and have to disengage and return to town for a few weeks of leisurely healing. By the time you come back, at least some of the rooms you "cleared" previously have been reoccupied, perhaps had new traps set up and old ones re-set, maybe even had some new construction in the form of new walls or doors put up. In short, you would NEVER be able to clear a dungeon like Castle Greyhawk or Rappan Athuk under TFT rules -- at least not with a "normal" party of say, six to eight PCs (unless attribute bloat had had several hundred hours of play to rear its hoary head). The only way it could be done with even "mid-level" characters (say 40 attribute points or so) would be to just keep feeding characters by the hundreds into the meatgrinder non-stop in a steady war of attrition...

I sincerely hope that Steve comes up with some clever way to help "fix" this; healing spells will help, but honestly not as much as in other games, because the caster needs to then rest up for a while to "recharge" his fatigue. So even with them, "dungeon crawling" will become more like "dungeon peristalsis;" with frequent stops and starts, given the overall greater lethality of TFT as compared to say, D&D...