(TFT) Thoughts on some old threads...

["Quite Confused" <Confused3141@hotmail.com>]

Working my way through the archives and can't keep my mouth shut. Along the
lines of the Wizard Guild Membership thread I'd like to offer the
following.....

May I suggest a reason for the existence of guilds?

Consider Joe Average ST:10.6 DX:10.6 IQ:10.6 = 32pt
This will also be the average of any group of Joe's.
So let's take 1000 Joe's and run them through somebody's Job table that
won't get us into copyright trouble...... hummmmmmmmm....... how about
http://www.skypoint.com/~slocum/tft/jobs.html ?
using guestamation and assuming Joe to have an 11 in any stat singly and 22
as the sum of any two of his stats we look at the required attributes and
see that it seems Joe has 4 career choices.

Mercenaries: Garrison duty = risk(4/17) fail(2*(2d-1)) avg. fail dam12 kills
Joe

Guildsman (Miscellaneous Jobs): Each required job skill is controlled by a
guild. risk(4/17 avg. all miscellaneous jobs) fail(>11 avg. dam so assume
death for Joe)

Wizard: First you study for 2 ranks (1CP each?). I wonder what this is,
somekind of basic training? Or is it more like being at some english
boarding school? Maybe it's akin to being cloistered... anyway, then you
learn Aid and start getting paid. risk(4/17) fail(2*(2d+1)) Joe croaks
again.

Thief: risk(3/17) fail(2d) So you have the lowest success chance but Joe
doesn't die on avg either.....

Now look what this does to your group of Joe's.

250 Garrison @ 4/17 = 5 succeses, 240 normal and 5 fails.
(1exp per week gives 1CP after about 10 years)

250 Guildsmen @ 4/17 = 5 successes, 240 normal and 5 fails.
(2exp avg. per week gives 1CP after about 5 years)

250 Wizards @ 4/17 = 5 successes, 240 normal and 5 fails.
(2exp per week gives 1CP after about 5years so 10 years to become Neophyte
and learn Aid)

250 Thieves @ 3/17 = 1 success, 244 normal and 5 fails.
(2exp per week gives 1CP after about 5years)

Total results 16 successes, 964 normal and 20 fails. Of those 20 about 60%
will make their save leaving 8 who fail and 6 of those are in professions
that kill Joe on the avg. fail dam.

Assuming that the successes get promoted (500exp) and that there is a supply
of Joe's to replace the promoted and dead then in one month there would be
64 successes and 24 dead. 768 successes and 288 deaths in one year. So
basically if my city had a population of 2000 or so and I put half of them
to work in town I could improve about 1/3rd of them to 33pt characters in a
year.

What's all this got to do with guilds?



In looking at this guys categories for magic there are two positions that
Joe can qualify for before he must know Aid and starts getting paid. This
smacks of guild all over it. Ergo the guild controls the Aid spell and if
you know Aid then you might learn a little real magic, maybe even become a
Wizard (TM).

You see, if "I" was in charge of a city/parish/country I'd make sure I built
these guilds if they weren't already in place. This allows for several
levels of control of the population.

 First; I get to improve the overall average of my workforce above 32pts
which makes them more flexible by allowing them to learn skills as a group
for instance.

 Second; since a primary function of a Guild House is to provide a location
for training one can control the direction in which your improving
population develops by requiring all new Wizards to learn whatever spell
you'd want a whole group of Wizards to be able to use together. I'd have a
spell that all Wizards in my city are required to learn first, before
anything else.

 Third; By establishing central authority I gain a level of control over the
actions of ALL the Wizards in town so I'd have a city that could field a
unit of Wizards that can all cast Wizards Wrath say, or produce a pretty
good magic item or whathaveyou.


 If I make buildings come with certain advantages I can make a city that's
fun to control and begs to be built up from a PCs point of view. Like any
Party of adventurers requires at least a Tavern(too deeply rooted in fantasy
genera not to acknowledge) a Smithy (has the weapons/armor price list) and a
General Store (has the food and equipment price list) to support it.
Additional buildings in an area like a Bank add advantage to Party's
supported there. It also adds vectors of attack for the GM and helps drive
the storyline beyond simple hack and slash gaming, not to mention being a
reason to spend that treasure. In "my" city I'd probably make the Wizards
guild a Temple and tie a religion to magic for added control.


Did anyone here ever play one of the Chaosium games called Pendragon? It was
a King Authur genera and one of the things I loved about this one was a
couple of nifty features of character development they added.

 For one thing your character could get married and if you had male kids who
survived then you could play them later if your current character died or
got too old. I used to start my players in the years of Uther and run them
through the major battles, let them be present at a few of the major events,
build up their fame and have a few kids. We'd go through this pretty quick
and when we got to the King Authur stuff these guys were on new characters
but didn't seem to care because daddy was famous. The new character had a
history and that seemed to make up for the loss of power in giving up the
old character. Killing off the last of a bloodline MEANT something.

 Then there was this system for what we called Down Time. Basically they
were a set of tables that you rolled on at the end of each year to determine
things like if your wife had a baby or how much money your tin mine made
this year. You could use this procedure to pass a decade with just a few
rolls and a couple of minutes of game time. I always liked this for plot
devices and it begs a question. What is the goal of your campaign?

Anyway just some thoughts on the fly for an older topic I wanted to drop my
two cents in on......

Jay
=====
Post to the entire list by writing to tft@brainiac.com.
Unsubscribe by mailing to majordomo@brainiac.com with the message body
"unsubscribe tft"