Armor shouldn't subtract from MA

[hcobb]

Originally Posted by David Bofinger

So what limits population? It seems pretty clear something does. We need a source of mortality that rises faster than linear with population.

Monsters, and other humanoids.

[David Bofinger]

Originally Posted by hcobb

Monsters, and other humanoids.

This won't work. What follows is an essay on why.

In historical analogue societies the population is stable, in the sense it can't get all that much bigger and probably won't get all that much smaller than its usual value. This is because the food supply is limited by available land to farm. So if the population expands past the capacity of the land then the rate of death from starvation or from diseases encouraged by hunger rises *faster than linear* as human population increases. The rate of population increase rises linearly, i.e. is proportional to current population. So at small populations the population tends to rise and at high populations it falls, which gives us a roughly stable long term population.

On the other hand: in a Cidri where, say, a quarter or more of the population knows Aid or Meal, everyone gets enough food. The ability to make food rises linearly with the number of magicians, and the need for food also rises linearly, so there's no stability. Population can increase in the classic exponential and people still get fed. There's nothing to stop Elyntia having a colossal population, a sea of suburbia as far as the eye can see, limited by the society's ability to dispose of human excrement.

In order for monsters to take the place of starvation we need deaths from monsters to rise faster than linearly as human population increases. Now there might be some kinds of dread eldritch horror for which that is true: monsters with a very large capacity for slaughter which only get agitated when the human population grows large enough to disturb them.

But the general population of ITL's bestiary aren't like that. Rather they are animal predators like wolves or perhaps sapient like dwarves and reptile folk. Such enemies can be made locally extinct, and as human population rises this becomes easier rather than harder. The chance of any particular human dying at the hands or teeth of such a threat can be expected to decline as human population rises. This doesn't give us stability.

I'm inclined to house rule that Meal collects the food from nearby. In a forest that's equivalent to foraging. In a town it's theft.

[David Bofinger]

Encumbrance is made of many factors:

1. Weight
2. Unbalancing (this is why a suit of armour in a backpack is in some ways harder to carry around than one you wear)
3. Interference with movement of limbs
4. Interference with breathing
5. Interference with vision
6. Everything else

Any system of encumbrance is going to be a dodgy mix of these elements. TFT perhaps puts more emphasis on 3 than is realistic. It might be nice to pretend that RAW's approach is a brilliant design decision, but in fact it's driven by Melee's lack of a concept of weight.

I don't know the best way to do this, but one idea would be to fold some of them into one property and call it encumbrance. Every object has it, and some have several values: a sword strapped to your pack has a different encumbrance to one carried at your belt.

But if you wanted to defend the idea that some DX penalty is ST-independent then 5 above is a good reason why.

[Bill_in_IN]

Originally Posted by JohnPaulB

This goes for the adults too. When was the last time you took a PC into the game that had a disease?

I had a reptile man that was injured by a Bog Mummy which made it to where he couldn't naturally heal. Healing potions and physicker attention would work but if injured again, he could not heal on his own. He had to find a wizard with the cleansing spell to be cured.