(TFT) Magic in combat and TFT...

["Craig W. Barber" <craigwbar@comcast.net>]

Loved the comments.

I just wrote a novel involving magic and modern weaponry (like it'll ever get
published!) and thought about this a lot.  In that context, what really jumps
out first is "Reverse Missiles", of course... try and think of a modern weapon
that is NOT a missile weapon!  What really struck me on more thought was the
combination of Gates, Teleports, etc, and WMD:  Infiltrate a heavy wizard or
two and destroy an enemy city.   My antagonists are from a "Middle Eastern"
fantasy state, and at the end of the book, they manage to steal a couple of
nukes.  (I also had to give up on TFT:AW as a basis for my magic, due to the
problem of short spell life.  Oh well.  I like the "times 5" idea.)  BTW, for
statistical reasons, illusions and images become nearly worthless, even for
scouting duty, when the enemy has a whole army of IQ8 guys on disbelief duty.
"If it moves, disbelieve it, Private!  If it doesn't move, disbelieve it
anyway!"

Meta-issue:

The real problem here is one that you've all talked about before.  The TFT
rules are clearly laid out for adventurers and small unit meeting engagements,
NOT for military campaign play.  Remember the discussions a few months ago
about unit sizes, LOU, and so on?  It's possible to scale up, but we need to
do a LOT of play-testing.  The comment about mass production of magic items is
an example.

Spells: Mark pointed out that you'd want to make up spells a bit different
than the ones you use when you're planning a trip to the dungeon.  That is,
you wouldn't extrapolate from 1 hex wall to 7 hex wall up to Instant Great
Wall by means of a bunch of wizards in a line: then have the wall poof out of
existence a minute or five later.  Instead, with the resources available to a
nation-state or even a city-state, it wouldn't be tough to come to battle with
a bunch of new tricks every year!  Super long-distance telepathy and mind
control, fast spell shield against them, hyper-divination, divination shield,
cloud cover, mass disguise, one way Gate, Gate shield, long-distance Word of
Command, wide-area Word of Command (a wizard with an amplifier?) and so on...
you wouldn't use the tool kit of spells from AW if you had the resources of a
whole nation to do research on specialty military spells against your enemy
and the counter-spells to protect you from your enemy's spells.

It'd get nasty, really nasty.
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