On Sep 7, 2011, at 6:37 PM, K Peterson wrote:
One question I'd have about long term play is just basic survivability. How likely is it that a TFT PC is going to survive to even reach old age, during a career of adventuring? (Assuming an "average" level of lethality in encounters that a PC faces). An impression I got reading ITL was that there wasn't likelyThats if you keep going. The problem with the current job rules and aging rules is that it makes sense to retire after your first or second adventure and just reap in the benefits of normal jobs.... perhaps a subtle social commentary?to be many TFT retirees.
A good way to fix that, if you're having this problem, is to vastly increase the stakes- make adventuring MUCH more profitable than regular jobs, give fairly large XP bonuses, and so on.... it'll make regular work seem less worthwhile, but just like the overpowered jobs, it will result in quickly reaching high levels.... see below for how to have a lower key game without the normal problems with jobs...
I think we determined that people, on average, in standard jobs reach very high point levels (high 50's?) by the time they need to start aging checks... or even before, possibly. Adventuring for a little bit in your early years is basically just a way to tack on a few extra points from early levels. If you're power gaming, basically, it makes sense to do that... but those rules were clearly not thought out for very long campaigns, so I suggest the following adjustments....How many months (years?) of weekly gaming would it take before mega-attributes become a concern?
Due to the problems mentioned by others, when seriously using jobs and aging (so its not a relatively short term campaign focused on a few years at most), I tend to make aging harsher by starting it earlier and adding unhelpful modifiers, while also making jobs work on a bimonthly or monthly basis... sometimes I even increase that, but if you go any farther you'll want to increase pay proportionally, or else money will start to become scarce. This means that even characters who get to high levels adventuring will basically never reach the point where it makes sense to retire if they want to get BETTER.... they can just kinda level out and die in another decade, living their last years in peace. But few players make it that far- if your campaign is hard enough, most people retire when theyre ahead or die, and if your campaign is lower intensity, XP tends to be rarer anyway.I've looked through the Jobssection... and have wondered how well it would incorporate into a campaign.Whether players would be more inclined to dice-the-system and delay adventuring.
And speaking of job income, TFT doesn't provide any guidelinesfor starting wealth. I imagine that it's assumed that TFT PCs will work for a few weeks to get a little spending money before buckling swashes and headingoff for adventure?
Thats the way I do it, and I even let them just do this for as long as they wish (so you start at a young age, 18 or 20, and then get to work, gain XP, and possibly die til you stop... though you'll also hit aging after a point ).
K Peterson From: "raito@raito.com" <raito@raito.com> To: tft@brainiac.com Sent: Wednesday, September 7, 2011 11:26 AM Subject: Re: (TFT) Newb Long term play? Well... The first place to look is in ITL,specifically the Jobs stuff. PCs can get jobs to get money, or spend time while syncing with other characters, or do something useful while waitingaround. More Talents/Spells mean more money. Jobs that offer quickeradvancement in terms of attribute points are also more dangerous and morelikely to get the character killed. Second place is also in ITL in theaffects of aging. PCs start losing attribute points after a certain age, andthe loss accelerates. How well does this work? That's the question, isn't it?One of the problems with TFT is that it really doesn't scale well to PCs with mega-attributes. A human with a zillion DX still has an effective DX of 15, though he can stand a lot of adjustments. Weapon damage doesn't scale well -- a PC with hundreds of ST is better off using a club. IQ is all well and good,but are you actually going to USE all those Talents? Here's an analysis of characters living off the Jobs table: http://tft.brainiac.com/archive/1103/msg00057.html One other point about Jobsvs. adventuring is that, if the character's concern is living the longest, which in TFT terms means having as many attribute points as possible, retiring from adventuring to get a job is the best way after a certain number ofattribute points, because the number of XP required goes up so much. Neil Gilmore raito@raito.com ===== Post to the entire list by writing to tft@brainiac.com. Unsubscribe by mailing to majordomo@brainiac.com with the message body "unsubscribe tft"
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