8d6 and high attribute characters

[larsdangly]

Originally Posted by JimmyPlenty

Thanks for the replies. Basically, I just see TFT as too deadly for anyone to get very high attribute wise. To get any stat to those levels...I mean...how many sessions do you have to play to get a person to that level (unless of course you started there).

I am generally always playing with 32 point charcters, so I guess my experience with much higher figures is clouded.

The highest imaginable stat for a normal humanoid player character is 24, but you won't see this outside of a 'white room' thought exercise. In practice, 16-18 is about the highest value you will see for a PC stat. These statements don't really change when you imagine a character with massive amounts of XP because you are almost always better off investing those points in something other than raising a stat from very high to slightly more very high.

More generally, the deadliness of TFT is an outgrowth of the fact that it is built on top of a competitive board game, and competitive board games in which one side can't lose aren't any fun. This can be hard to adapt to if your reference point is post-1980 D+D. But it isn't so tricky: populate your adventures with lots of things that are tricky but not automatically lethal (swarms, slimes, 3d traps, rickety bridges, etc.) and think of all serious fights as 'boss fights' (I hate that phrase but everyone knows what it means).

Also, 8d saving throws aren't really something that arise in play. If they appear in an adventure they mean: your survival is a coin-flip, no matter who you are.