Trying to understand self powered items

[larsdangly]

The whole thing is kind of a mess. Given the goals of these sorts of resource-management rules, it would be a lot better if there were just some formula relating IQ level and ST cost of spells to the ST cost of enchantment, and then a single rubric that always applies if you want to bump it up to self-powered status. It should be possible to figure out what sub-conscious algorithm was in the back of Steve's mind when he filled out the tables by just seeing what the central tendencies are. I'm not really worried about financial costs because I don't use them, but the costs in wizards and ST per day are a serious gate-keeper for players making new enchantments, so I'd like it to work in a sensible fashion.

[hcobb]

When I have time I'll run the numbers on alternatives to magic items. For example a wizard who could either spend 500 XP to learn a spell or buy a $5000 magic item that has the same ST cost.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by larsdangly

The whole thing is kind of a mess. Given the goals of these sorts of resource-management rules, it would be a lot better if there were just some formula relating IQ level and ST cost of spells to the ST cost of enchantment, and then a single rubric that always applies if you want to bump it up to self-powered status. It should be possible to figure out what sub-conscious algorithm was in the back of Steve's mind when he filled out the tables by just seeing what the central tendencies are. I'm not really worried about financial costs because I don't use them, but the costs in wizards and ST per day are a serious gate-keeper for players making new enchantments, so I'd like it to work in a sensible fashion.

In theory that'd be great. In practice, I think a GM with years of TFT experience seeing use and abuse of many of the magic items will have a more informed view of which enchantments are how powerful with what ST costs, than Steve's original instincts. I certainly have my eye on a few things that are bargains/easy-to-enchant, and that are very powerful to be having no ST cost, that I'd rather have a ST cost.

The immediate example that comes to mind is Stone Flesh at $4000 with no ST cost - that stacks with armor / shields/ toughness and can let anyone who can fight with a few more points of armor stacked on, dominate combat against all foes without very high-damage weapons. And as hcobb has pointed out several times, it's not well-balanced in terms of effort versus the less convenient Armor Enchantment costs.

[larsdangly]

The most important question anyone has to ask about their TFT campaign is whether magic items and potions are available for sale at the suggested rates. There is no right or wrong answer to this, but it will dictate the power balance in your game.

We often discuss TFT as a low-powered, high-risk sort of system because of the deadliness of its combat system. And now that PC's have limited ranges of stats, that risk is always there, even after lots of experience. Personally, I think that is a very good thing. But the RAW also contains another path to another sort of game, through the ready availability of magic items.

For a surprisingly achievable amount of money, one can have a PC who has over 20 points of armor and doles out enough damage to reliably kill a normal combatant almost every turn. As a simple example: +5 plate, +5 small shield, stone flesh ring (21 pts of armor), and, say, a +5 flaming bastard sword (3d+7 damage). Such a character could pretty easily have an adjDX of 14 or more, meaning most turns he or she will dole out close to 20 points of damage. A character like this is functionally invulnerable to mundane attacks, even from things like giants and dragons. And they can't get nuked by missile spells because of the 3-point limit. So, they only have to fear very specialized threats.

[hcobb]

That very fine flaming bastard sword is $28k and so would take a Mercenary veteran four and a half years of salary to purchase.

The +5 fine plate is only $21k of course.

[larsdangly]

True. More relevant to PC's is the fact that adventures pile up 10's of thousands of $ pretty quickly.

[Skarg]

My original campaign experienced magic item bloat. At first, I made magic items fairly available as suggested in ITL. Players who could would buy up and commission items and enjoy them. It seemed pretty fun at first, and as GM although I steadily made them less easily and affordably available for sale, my game world got established as a place where it was at least not too uncommon for there to be some experienced adventurer types who may have some magic items. So some PC-allied and enemy and neutral NPCs also had some items.

Well, but what happened was, naturally, that as adventures happened and characters died, the surviving PCs would tend to acquire the magic items of the dead... at first, cool, interesting, fun loot, right? Well, yes... but... what do players who get more and more magic items do? Naturally they use all the ones they can, as most fits their characters, and never part from those items, and the things that don't make sense for them to use... they sell, and then shop for more magic items that will work with what they have, and/or equip their comrades, commission more gear, etc.

And that tends to accumulate pretty quickly if you assume even a very few magic items may be looted on each serious adventure.

And so whatever they cost, that leads to the surviving PCs have a fair number of items. Which sooner or later makes them rather better than people without magic items.

And once some PCs have enough magic items that they're superior to most normal fighters without magic, then the nice tactical combat game TFT offers starts to fade away. And what determines who wins fights starts to be more about who has and uses what magic first.

And... TFT does have several rather deadly and effective ways to deal even with people with powerful magic items... but then it starts to come down to which of those the NPC enemies choose to use on a party that has really powerful magic items. And unless the PCs manage to avoid being identified as such and located, they may naturally be targets for smart people wanting to take all those very valuable magic items.

And that may or may not be all that fun and interesting. I mean, it can be pretty fantastic, but it's a different sort of game.

Some of our players ended up trying to be much more subtle about their magic use to avoid attention, and to make the game more interesting. +5 swords and invisibility rings were left hidden at home. It was still a bit dull being even someone with "just" armor 9 who can usually attack first and kill anyone they face who doesn't have magic.

That's when we started really limiting things and adding house rules, and eventually switching to GURPS.

But we did have a LOT of fun with TFT with RAW magic (and some quite powerful characters) at first, for some years of heavy play, until we realized what was happening to gameplay and thought we'd prefer something more about people and less about the magic they have.

[larsdangly]

I think there is a place for a magic-item-heavy mode of play in TFT, but that it is much better suited to something like an extended one-shot, where your goal is to 'finish' a big dungeon, and not well suited to campaign play. If you want to play a few sessions of competitive dungeon crawling, where the way to win is to find and take advantage of powerful items (a sort of proto video game approach), then I think this could be great. But if you want the character to be more central than the item, then you need to pull wayyyyy back on the distribution. My rule of thumb in campaign play is the same rule that applies to managing small children who want to climb things: 'You can do it if you YOU CAN DO IT' (i.e., I'm not going to help you up into that tree, but if you can climb it yourself, god bless). So, other than the occasional +1 sword or something, most major magic items are things PC's have created. That might sound doable in a white-room sort of way, but not many players are willing to make that investmet.

[Chris Rice]

"The most important question anyone has to ask about their TFT campaign is whether magic items and potions are available for sale at the suggested rates. There is no right or wrong answer to this, but it will dictate the power balance in your game."

I don't use the magic item rules from the game as anything other than a reference; one of the reasons I ditched D&D back in the day was the over abundance of magical items which I felt spoiled the game. As a result, I ran TFT as very low in magic item availability. Although we had plenty of potions and other "one-shot" items, the number of permanently enchanted items I made available was extremely low, and nobody every just bought one at Ye Olde Magike Shoppe.

Stone Flesh/Iron Flesh rings are classic example of items that change the game in a big way yet are cheap to buy if you use the rules as is.

I would recommend extreme caution in using the rules as they are or you'll end up with everyone marching around like magic fuelled superheroes. If you want that sort of game that's fine, but at least understand that at the outset.

[Shadekeep]

One way of tamping down the overpowered-ness of some self-powered items is to give them a battery charge level. Self-powered items are described as drawing power from ambient mana. It makes sense that this is a low-level power field, otherwise wizards would call on it all the time instead of using their own ST. So self-powered items might need to build up a charge, similar to a battery charging from an inductive power source.

Therefore a magic item might have a 10 ST capacitance, or 20 ST, or whatever, and this charge is used when the item is active. Once it runs down, then it might recharge at about 1 ST per hour or so.

Naturally, this comes with more bookkeeping, and you'd need some kind of rule about how much it costs to give an item X ST capacitance. It also takes away some of the high fantasy element of a magic item that is perpetually "on". But it's once way to stop self-powered items from being too powerful.