At 01:51 AM 9/1/2015, Edmund Nelson wrote:
... I've not run into a campaign with any character getting past the 42nd atribute point. Even that guy died in 1 shot to a greater demon who went on a hot streak. (2 criticals in row!) Once you get past 40 or so Magical items become much more practical methods of advancement than levelups
...Just as a data point, the highest TFT PC's I remember in our games were 46 points and 42 points, which were played up from 32 points and nearly died but didn't, and lost many many friends and comrades along the way. It took 5 or 6 years of real-time play. They were both non-wizards and the highest IQ of those was 13. Like most TFT survivors, they got there by being smart and tactical and having comrades around to distract attention, and by not getting too unlucky. One of the two higher-level ones became very hard to kill by having Warrior talent and Fine Chainmail and a self-powered Stone Flesh ring for 9 armor. The other was hard to kill because he'd have some friends in fights and mainly was picking off foes with a crossbow from out or reach.
My dad and I also got a very strong party of four by running through Death Test several times, Death Test II a few times, then Orb Quest. We lost several parties in Death Test, but once we got a good strategy and team, that team never lost anyone. I think they ended up about 42 points each.
If someone were playing TFT like many computer game players do, "farming" for XP, I could see a group becoming strong enough that it could hunt inferior targets for XP and do so pretty safely, and do better than we did in play. When one side has a distinct advantage of some sort, it can pose pretty low risk to the superior side. That's why we eventually made a house rule where relative power and equipment / magic affected XP, so beating someone who isn't actually much threat doesn't get you much XP. Progress would've been slower and risks higher if we'd used that system from the beginning.
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