Alternate XP progression schedule

[Steve Plambeck]

Originally Posted by phiwum

It's my opinion, Bill, that the new staff spells need no promotion. Indeed, from discussions on this forum, it seems that the PC who doesn't take Staff at level II or better is the oddity, since the ability to store mana is very useful beginning around the 35 attribute level if not before.

I may be the minority of one, but I hate the new Staff spells. Not that I dislike the mana storage feature -- that I love, just not in this form. Also, there's nothing new about that idea, it's just new to the official TFT rules via the Legacy edition. My late 70's to late 90's group added several little features to the original Staff making it much more useful to the point no wizard would want to skip having one.

If I ever manage to start a new TFT group in the modern era, I'd use house rules for the Staff from the start, some of which I've mentioned in other contexts in other threads. My main premise is that there should be only one Staff spell, with the abilities & talents of the wizard determining how much mana he or she can focus and store in it. My goal is to encourage improvement in the PC, not the stick.

Originally Posted by TippetsTX

That goal is key to my own framework as well. I have taken it a step further, however, by establishing the same construct at each 'tier' of play. [snip] This way, players continue to have hard choices between different paths of progression for their characters.

A 'tier' system for wizards (but not others) is actually what I have in mind, although not as explicitly a tier system as yours (which I've read with great interest in your other posts on the subject).

In my approach successive Staff spells get replaced by successive magical talents the wizard would have to take to improve how they'd use their Staff (among other things). Which brings us back to the discussion at hand regarding XP progression, and the costs of attributes and talents. I wouldn't "sell" Staff mana for XP points, nor new talents. The only way I'd allow PCs to improve, or wizards to improve their Staff, is by raising attributes and subsequently raising IQ for new talents -- in other words, back to the original ITL system instead of Legacy.

I'd do the exact opposite of Legacy. Instead of uncoupling new talents from IQ increases, I'd give figures TWO "talent" points for each IQ increase. That would be my way to make taking new talents cheaper than it had been under the original rules, without using the new mechanism built into Legacy. I'd flirt with "attribute bloat", or specifically "IQ bloat" before using several of the new rules.