RE: (TFT) How come magic gets industrial disease?

["rsmith" <rsmith@lightspeed.ca>]

Hi Stan,
	Thanks for your thoughts, They are appreciated!

	Did you read the fantasy novel "Master of the
Five Magics"?  They had a very different system for
making alchemical potions, but it too seemed to get
industrial disease.  However, at least it was a
different TYPE of ind. dis. than the "closely modeled
on modern economic theory" system we have in TFT.


	Ignoring cannon entirely, a question to the list
in general.  If you were going to rebuild the TFT
magic item enchanting system / chemical and alchemical
potions system, what would allow:

1)	PC wizards to make magic items.
2)	Not suffer from ind. dis.
3)	Hopefully be simpler than our current system.

	Any system known which does this in an interesting
fashion?

	I would like to say, that I LIKE the TFT magic
item system, and I actually have had PC's build significant
objects / create new potions and magic items.  But I
suspect that there must be ways to do this that feel
more fantastic...

	Rick



-----Original Message-----
From: tft-owner@brainiac.com [mailto:tft-owner@brainiac.com]On Behalf Of
Stan
Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2003 3:19 AM
To: tft@brainiac.com
Subject: (TFT) How come magic gets industrial disease?


Rick,
  Regarding the industrializing of magic -- the TFT rules rather encourage
this sort of rationalization.  Everything is laid out so very nicely, to
make item X you need 3 of item Y and 57 ST/day.  The situation positively
encourages black snake ranches and professional apprentices to the point
where it almost impairs verisimilitude NOT to have them around.

It's interesting that in <that evil game> first edition, I always would see
similar behavior regarding potions (for which the ingredients are laid out
in the book) but not for other items, where the rules for making them are
wishy-washy and vague.  Of course this is an illustration of the 'crunchy
bits limit fiat' effect.  Potions are trivial enough that allowing
rationalized production is not too terrible, but allowing this for 'real'
items does have a down side.

One possible approach, that eschews wishy-washiness but doesn't give away
the whole candy store all at once: at the beginning of a campaign, the GM
simply takes the magic items list and plugs in different ingredients for
items.  The players do NOT get to see this list.  Rather, when one if them
acquires or researches the formula for making an item, then they get to know
the ingredients.

A corollary to this is the fact that knowing the formula to an item also
tells you how to make immunity to that item.  This provides an incentive the
mages to keep these things secret, rather than handing out the whole list to
anyone with a few hundred silver.

And (heh) to further encourage secrecy, perhaps if someone makes a new
*formula* for an existing item, immunity items vs. the old formula won't
work against this one.  Hm, that may be going too far.  It's a thought,
though.

Of course, all this is a half-way measure.  People still know at least some
of what items are possible, and will be interested in the most useful ones.
But it at least prevents the gross analysis of the scheme as a whole that we
have now.  Fragmenting the knowledge and making it seem more like a bunch of
secrets rather than common knowledge makes it all feel that much more less
technological.
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