11-22-2021, 04:48 PM | #11 |
Join Date: Sep 2018
Location: North Texas
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Re: Alchemy
ALCHEMY is a great area and opportunity for some creative rules expansion IMO.
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“No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.” -Vladimir Taltos |
11-22-2021, 05:02 PM | #12 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Pacheco, California
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Re: Alchemy
I have yet to attend a campaign that didn't have variant potions. (Usually some sort of super healing potion.)
What is the modifier on the IQ roll for an Alchemist (or Chemist) to identify non-standard potions? How good do they have to roll to be able to list out all of the side effects? (May cause fatal beard loss in dwarves.) A lot of settings (non-Cidrian) have alchemist enchanters who can't "cast" spells but can adapt monster parts into general magical items.
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11-22-2021, 09:25 PM | #13 | |||||||||||
Join Date: Jan 2018
Location: Portland, Maine
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Re: Alchemy
Sara, good consolidating and questions.
PvK and others, good answers that mostly align with my thoughts. I came to my conclusions, before I read everyone's answers. Quote:
My view expands on this: An alchemist laboratory is to the specs of a Wizard's lab because he is making magical items. I believe that because an alchemist does not have to be a wizard, they don't need to 'attune' the lab to themselves. Quote:
PvK, I agree with you. An alchemist is called a magician because he makes magical potions. He doesn't spend any fatigue doing it. An alchemist doesn't worry about gestures or incantations. It doesn't say he's a wizard class. Wizard or Hero pays the same point cost. Quote:
You could be your own scribe and copy it for the price of a blank book and ink, the original borrowed from a friend or library. Or learn and use the 14IQ Duplicate Writing spell. Quote:
You might think of the $50 in materials as an accountant version Lab Rental insurance. Quote:
A 'specialized library' contains symbol decoding lists, alternate procedures in cold weather, data on what 'ingredients gone bad' looks like, etc. Also you can consider it like a computer lab. Some hacker has probably bummed a sub-routine down to its fewest lines and put the tape in the drawer for others to admire and use. Quote:
The cost of the wizard doing his own manufacture is not the listed cost to buy a made potion. For example: Making a Berserker Potion requires 6 dried berserker mushrooms ($60) plus $49 in common ingredients or $109 total. And the 2 weeks in the lab. If you are going to spend the 2 weeks, you might as well buy more ingredients and go up in scale. Make a batch of 10 doses. - - - - - - - - Don't forget about Talk Like an Alchemist by Steve Jackson in Hexagram 7 page 26.
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11-23-2021, 02:31 AM | #14 |
Join Date: Apr 2019
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Re: Alchemy
Hi everyone,
Thanks very much for your feedback and input - glad to know I was pretty much in the ballpark with my summary of the RAW, so I now have a baseline to work from. I'm probably going to take a long hard look at enchanting next and see if there any interesting and cool overlaps there. I don't have Hexagram 7 yet, but I've ordered it, so will take a look at the Alchemy article as soon as it arrives! The one very obvious quick-win houserule is to tweak that 3/DX roll so that it's not a binary success/failure-and-start-again, which IMHO is a bit sucky in play. Imagine having to make 20 consecutive DX rolls to make a Revival potion - not only is that going to be quite tedious to play out, it'd be incredibly frustrating if you failed the 20th roll! I'm going to have a think about how I'd actually like that to work in play at my own table. For starters, I think an "Alchemical Mishaps and How To Survive Them" table could be great fun. One other thing that strikes me is that there's no nuance for skill or experience in the Alchemy RAW. Once you have IQ14 and DX15, you're going to be as good an alchemist as you'll ever be, no matter how old and experienced you get. The only barrier to what you can make is money and materials - sure, that's peripherally linked to how experienced your character is, but a sudden windfall could advance you rapidly, and is has nothing to do with character advancement via Experience Points. A few thoughts on refining the Alchemy RAW: - Introduce IQ as a factor when you're trying to make more complex potions. If you're trying to make that Revival potion, I'd introduce either a bonus or penalty based on how close you are to IQ19, the IQ req for the Revival spell. - Reduce the number of dice rolls. Sure, that's where the difficulty of a potion is currently centered, but 20 DX rolls feels excessive. - Maybe use the Contest (Opposed Rolls) rules in some way. For example, instead of requiring 20 DX rolls, instead require 20 "successes"; each point by which you succeed your DX roll is one "success". I realise this is introducing a rules mechanic which currently doesn't exist in TFT - something akin to a "Task Roll" - but it might be cool. It's even possible that could shorten the time required to make a potion, in the same way that failing the DX roll effectively lengthens the time. - Incorporate your own knowledge of corresponding spells or talents into the process. I grok that making a Revival potion is not the same as casting a Revival spell, but it might be cool to say that if you know the Revival spell, it gives you an advantage in either making the potion or in dealing with / fixing any mishaps. It also reinforces the idea that making an alchemical potion uses "magic" in some way - sure, you don't have to know any spells to be an alchemist, but the RAW are clear that alchemists are "magicians" in a way that chemists aren't, so presumably some kind of magical energy or working is involved. IMHO that's a cool distinction that it would be groovy to reflect in play in an indirect way. Cheers, Sarah |
11-23-2021, 03:17 PM | #15 | |||
Join Date: Jan 2018
Location: Portland, Maine
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Re: Alchemy
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Also, why are you restricting yourself to a 32 point beginning character for your alchemist. Its yours to play: Why not start it at 36 points.
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11-23-2021, 06:04 PM | #16 |
Join Date: Dec 2017
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Re: Alchemy
I know I wrote against the single-failed-roll rule above, but two things in favor of it are worth noting: 1) it is sort of realistic; anyone who has worked in challenging parts of laboratory science can attest to the fact that each of every one of several steps need to go right to end up with a successful lab experiment; and 2) it counter balances the fact that a hero with one talent and enough extra money and time can reproduce the effects of some extraordinary spells, as well as some things that no regular wizard can do. If they are going to reach for that kind of power, they should feel that it is a high wire act, not just some fete accompli. Anyway, it's not so bad for a talented, prepared character: the worst case situation is the 20 weeks required to create a Revival or Youth potion, which entail 61% chance of failure even if your adjDX is 15 (i.e., only auto-failure rolls matter). That might sound frustrating, but no one is making you plumb the depths of Alchemy's most challenging recipes - that's a lifestyle choice and its on you.
Last edited by larsdangly; 11-23-2021 at 06:11 PM. |
Tags |
alchemist, alchemy, potions |
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