Re: (TFT) Jobs table: 100,000 simulated soldiers and farmers

["John" <johnnyboytmm@juno.com>]

What a fun discussion.

I have to agree that in my years of play, no job rolling for advancement ever came up, because the adventure is the thing.  

The job table is mostly to let characters earn between adventures, and allow employer related adventure hooks, the survival/advancement roll is just to keep it interesting.  

It's part of the game, it is not required to be realistic, and certainly not extrapolatable to the entire population (though the 10k simulation results are interesting).  It's a game thing.  The game is a little more exciting if the characters have the potential for something to go really badly for them, or really well.  Now such a thing ought to be vanishingly rare, but then why even roll for it, if the roll is so vanishingly rare that it will only come up in one campaign in a thousand.  Kinda like our old discussion on weapons being dropped and broken.  Yes it happens way too much for a real army, but it happens at just the right pace to increase the fun for player-characters. That is the point of the rolls, and of course a group should use them, change them, or avoid them, as needed to maximize their fun.

In my games, the job tables just serve as a jumping off point for understanding the implied economics of the milieu, which I then adjust accordingly to get to teh game I intend to run.  In 30+ years of playing and GMing TFT no one has ever actually rolled for survival/attribute point on the jobs table.  Jobs, and finances are all handled in play.  Dropping and breaking weapons though, that happens ALL THE TIME (or at least as often as 17 and 18 get rolled in combat.  Around 3 times out of every 216 rolls, meaning not so often that it really happens all the time, but often enough for it to add a little spice now and then, and to make getting a "well made" weapon worthwhile.  Because that is the rules combination we found most fun, everyone else will get their own "most fun" mix.

And Most Fun is always our goal.  There is almost no min-max character optimization for combat or attribute advancement around here.  The guys take mundane talents, I am swimming in linguists and scholars, drivers and seamen, apprentices with obscure prophecies deliverd by their carny-fortune-telling aunt in a moment of true trance, bards and fops galore.  All to increase the fun.


As to what the average NPC type person looks like - they look like 30 points. I figure there is a bell curve distribution around 10 points per attribute, with one standard deviation being around 3 attribute points.  So 2/3 of all attribute points are in the 7-13ish range, and 95% are in the 4-16ish range.  After that you are out in the tail 5% of all atributes everywhere.  Now it's not really a normal distribution, since you can't really go down forever, only up, so it is really more of a Poisson distribution, but you get the idea.

My point is once you are getting the advantages of great strength at 18, you are out in the top couple percent of mankind, and once you are swinging that great axe with one hand, you are way out at the statistical tail (that is my favorite example, because one of the guys got there in my last campaign).

Similarly, total points average around 30 - 32 (starting PCs), so most folk fall in the 25-37 sweet spot, with 38-42 being really above average folks, and 43+ getting rarer, and 50 being way out on the tail.

So lots of 25-30 point beggars and day laborers, 30-33 point farmers apprentices and recruits, plenty of 34-39 point military veterans, wizards, successful merchants and scholars, etc.  a handful of 40 pointers who really stand head and shoulders above the rabble, and then aftre that only rare extraordinary individuals, like teh Dread pirate Roberts, or Master Seargent Kroll Brickhammer, 20 year veteran in the dwarvish military, having served 2 tours on the line quelling orcish expansion, and 5 years pushing back the bugbear hordes from the northern border, now in semi-retirement at the age of 50, but still a deadly combatant with an attribute total closing in on 50, and contacts everywhere.

Anyway, that's how I have always understood and played the game, job tables included - the play is the thing, and we should do stuff that makes it fun.  







---------- Original Message ----------
From: PvK <pvk@oz.net>
To: <tft@brainiac.com>
Cc: <tft@brainiac.com>
Subject: Re: (TFT) Jobs table: 100,000 simulated soldiers and farmers
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 07:33:59 -0700

--- raito@raito.com wrote:

Quoting PvK <pvk@oz.net>:
>> 3) The best indicator of what typical character power levels is 
>> supposed to be,
>> is all of the NPC's in all of the published products. 
>
>There aren't that many of those. 

There aren't a ton, but it seems to me there are quite a few, especially if you include all of the microgames, Interplay articles, and Land Beyond the Mountain books. More than enough to see that the best adventurers, wizards and some politicians seem to be the highest-point characters. The most powerful characters are very rare, and are maybe 60 points. Lots of people in the 30-35-point range. Strong experienced people are fewer and tend to be say 40-45 points. There are no ordinary worker types with particularly high attributes. Skarg, the bartender of a particularly rough inn in Bendwyn, has retired from the rough stuff which gave him his unusual power level for a barkeep, but he is 39 points (IIRC).

Clearly, the mundane world is NOT rising many attribute levels from their regular jobs. They rise to what they need to do their job and then plateau.

PvK
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