Musings from Myriangia

[Oneiros]

Originally Posted by Shostak

I picked them up through Amazon. Here’s the product page.

Just wanted to come back and say, those worked perfectly. Thanks for the recommendation.

I also got the 12-pocket pages, which work well for holding 3-hex creatures, like giants. I'm thinking of getting the 3-pocket paper currency ones to hold the 7-hex dragons and similar large tokens.

[Shostak]

Glad it helped. Don't be shy to send some photos!

Now we all need to figure out an excellent solution for our Megahex Tiles!

[Shostak]

In my most recent blogpost, I muse about thaumapharmacology, a.k.a. alchemy.

[Shostak]

My latest blog post is lean on aesthetics, but I hope meaty in terms of useful info about Handicaps and a way to forestall the Attribute Stall Point.

[hcobb]

Just have Handicaps grant extra starting memory points instead.

[Shostak]

That is an attractive approach, but it retains the limitations built into the IQ prerequisite system. It also doesn’t do anything to push the attribute stall point higher to allow characters to progress to stats that otherwise are extremely expensive to buy.

[Shostak]

It's been a while, but here is a recent blog post about creating tactical maps for playing TFT, especially in a VTT.

[EKB]

Originally Posted by hcobb

Just have Handicaps grant extra starting memory points instead.

That's the solution I adopted: "Negative" talents that give points back to the character. Back in the day, the old Space Gamer article on handicaps giving additional attribute points struck me as Not The Right Solution, at least for me and my games, and I've never had reason to change my mind.

[David Bofinger]

Originally Posted by Shostak

[...] doesn’t do anything to push the attribute stall point higher to allow characters to progress to stats that otherwise are extremely expensive to buy.

I think if you want to increase the attribute total cap then just increase it. Don't rely on disadvantages - an essentially unrelated idea - to do that job for you. It keeps the rules simple and clean if you don't have to worry about interactions between unrelated rules.

[David Bofinger]

Originally Posted by hcobb

Just have Handicaps grant extra starting memory points instead.

I've always found disadvantages unsatisfactory when they give you any benefit at generation.

• One player takes the disadvantage "Claustrophobic", that's going to be a much bigger handicap if the campaign is about underground exploration than if it's hexcrawling.
• Once the compensation has been paid the player has a perverse incentive to forget the disadvantage exists and sure, not all will but some.
• Some popular disadvantages like "Hunted" are only relevant if the hunter keeps showing up and sure, the GM can modify their plot to include that NPC but that's distorting the story they were planning to tell and probably means more work.

Instead I favour giving an award whenever the disadvantage causes something bad to happen. If it's bad for that character give it to the character; if it's bad for the party as a whole then give the party as a whole an award. There's no longer an incentive to forget the disadvantage. Basically if the disadvantage doesn't have an effect on play, or has a very large effect, then the system more or less copes.

The award can be lots of things, maybe a microwish of some kind, a get out of jail free card, experience points, or a "I would like something good to happen now, please," request.