Talent/Spell of the Week: Aid

Steve Plambeck · 01-03-2023, 02:42 AM

How often do you see Aid being used in combat situations?
Frankly, never. Consequently our group's players and GMs (over the course of 20 some years) rarely if ever bothered to give it to any characters, except occasionally just to list on their curriculum vitae if their backstory included formal training at one of our institutes of magic. We mostly just considered it a wasted slot that could have gone to a spell the wizard (or party) might really need.

The reason we all found it so useless is because the rules of TFT force starting 32 point wizards to be anemic. Unless it's going to be a very low IQ wizard or a very ineffectual one, neither of which anyone ever wanted to play, it's going to start with a ST of 8 or 9 -- 10 at the very most -- and that little ST doesn't go very far when you're casting spells, especially the combat-useful spells. By the time you've spent 2 or 3 points on spells and taken a couple hits, you're on death's door and at -3 DX for low ST to boot. So nobody was about to start sharing the little ST they had with anyone else.

Now it might get to be a little different in Legacy ITL because of Staff Mana, but even then it won't make much difference for new wizards unless they can survive long enough to actually acquire significant Staff Mana.

The only real significance of the Aid spell in TFT seems to be as the deus ex machina that makes magic item creation possible, while providing jobs for apprentice wizards. I never really liked the economics of all that, but it was academic anyway for my group because the consensus of our 3 GMs was that characters were never allowed to create magic items. In our Secondary World (to use Tolkien's term for what most of us call a "campaign") all enchanted items were artifacts from a lost age, and could only be introduced by the GM in the context of a story. So that was the other reason Aid never mattered to us.

01-03-2023, 02:42 AM	#10
Steve Plambeck Join Date: Jun 2019	Re: Talent/Spell of the Week: Aid How often do you see Aid being used in combat situations? Frankly, never. Consequently our group's players and GMs (over the course of 20 some years) rarely if ever bothered to give it to any characters, except occasionally just to list on their curriculum vitae if their backstory included formal training at one of our institutes of magic. We mostly just considered it a wasted slot that could have gone to a spell the wizard (or party) might really need. The reason we all found it so useless is because the rules of TFT force starting 32 point wizards to be anemic. Unless it's going to be a very low IQ wizard or a very ineffectual one, neither of which anyone ever wanted to play, it's going to start with a ST of 8 or 9 -- 10 at the very most -- and that little ST doesn't go very far when you're casting spells, especially the combat-useful spells. By the time you've spent 2 or 3 points on spells and taken a couple hits, you're on death's door and at -3 DX for low ST to boot. So nobody was about to start sharing the little ST they had with anyone else. Now it might get to be a little different in Legacy ITL because of Staff Mana, but even then it won't make much difference for new wizards unless they can survive long enough to actually acquire significant Staff Mana. The only real significance of the Aid spell in TFT seems to be as the deus ex machina that makes magic item creation possible, while providing jobs for apprentice wizards. I never really liked the economics of all that, but it was academic anyway for my group because the consensus of our 3 GMs was that characters were never allowed to create magic items. In our Secondary World (to use Tolkien's term for what most of us call a "campaign") all enchanted items were artifacts from a lost age, and could only be introduced by the GM in the context of a story. So that was the other reason Aid never mattered to us. __________________ "I'm not arguing. I'm just explaining why I'm right."