Re: (TFT) Rick's Archery Rules -- Rick's comments.

[Rick Smith <rick_ww@lightspeed.ca>]

Hi David, everyone.
  Thanks for the kind words.

  The big changes (IMHO), are:

---  bows do on average less damage than in old TFT.  This is because 
the ability to do ranged damage is a huge advantage and I wanted it 
toned down.

--- bows now do Xd-Y, style damage since they are impaling weapons,
which means that the arrow can do little damage, or it can do a lot.
This makes them scary and unpredictable.  Heavy (non-chain) armor
is very important against archers.

--- To fire bows twice a turn (or 3 times a turn with a talent), your ST has
to be 3 above the min ST needed to fire it once per turn.  This is done 
for both realism, and game balance.  Firing twice per turn is a huge 
advantage.  You need to be able to span the bow easily and quickly
to do so.

--- In my game, everything that allows you do do multiple things in the
same turn requires high speed.  So many people, (not just bowmen), 
have to think about the trade off between DX and sDX.  To fire three
times per turn, requires a REALLY high speed, so this trade off bites
archers hardest and most obviously.

  I've been playing with these rules for quite a while.  One player, 
Matt, looked at them and said he thought that archers had been nerfed
too much by them.  So he wrote up an archer, and eventually got 
scary powerful firing a pretty big bow three times per turn.  He said at
the end, that they had not been nerfed too much.

  :-D

*****************************************************

  I've been building a wiki for rules for the Slope, pbem game.  It can
be found here....

http://theslope.brainiac.com/pmwiki.php?n=Main.HomePage

  The rules I've put on Joe's main site are the ones I feel most 
confident about.  As far as I'm concerned, everyone should love these
rules and be in awe of them and use them unreservedly at all times.

;-P

  The rules on the Slope wiki are ones I am less confident about, or 
which are written specifically for the Slope and would not be 
applicable to most game worlds.

  To look at the talents that govern archery, my talents are on the wiki
and are put on the page titled "Talents". 

*****************************************************

  Re: your idea about perception pIQ superscript.  

  After the superscript rules were polished, we started making lots more
superscrips.  Power pST, Agility aDX, perception pIQ were all tried.
We even started to make superscripts for talents.   Agility (which 
helped on acrobatics and acrobatic style saving throws), was less 
useful and eventually dropped.

  This meant some attributes had more superscripts than others.

  I found it hard to make all of the superscripts equally powerful and
desirable.

  After a while, I found I was unhappy with the proliferation of super-
scripts and dialed it back to just one superscript per talent.

  However, you are welcome to experiment with extra superscripts.
We allowed players who had +1 fST & +1 pST to lower each by one,
and spend one third of an attribute to raise the main attribute. You
can do this if you want, or disallow cashing in superscripts for the
main attribute.  Both would work.

  Warm regards, Rick.

  


On 2016-05-30, at 10:32 PM, David Bofinger wrote:
> I've been analysing Rick's archery rules. Some thoughts:
> 
> * In regular TFT archers pretty much shoot twice a turn at whatever
> size of bow they can handle. But using Rick's rules I've managed to
> construct viable archer characters at moderate point totals who shoot
> once, twice or thrice a turn, and even specialist crossbowcritters get
> a look in.
> 
> * There's a talent lets you take double damage shots at some range or
> other, I'm not sure what impact that would have because I don't think
> I have all the rules for it.
> 
> * Speed (sDX) shines here. No more industrial archers whose every shot
> is a hit. Character design now involves sDX-vs-DX tradeoffs. This is a
> good thing.
> 
> * Archers armour up just like melee fighters. I don't know if that's
> better or worse than regular TFT, neither is ideal IMO.
> 
> * Which design works best depends on circumstance, which is as it
> should be. Level of enemy armour is the main driver.
> 
> * The three-shots-a-turn is enabled by a low IQ talent. It generally
> won't be very exploitable at the time the talent becomes buyable,
> which is maybe a little odd but not actively harmful.
> 
> * Not really sure yet about the archer-versus-fighter balance, but the
> existence of chain armours will help there.
> 
> All in all I think Rick's done something very useful here and we
> should tell him good job.
> 
> --
> 
> Would perception (pIQ) make a good subscript? It gets around the
> problem that an expert woodsman who always sees the bad guys coming
> has to be a genius. Well, he can stretch the talents to some extent.
> But in general pIQ would help by providing a subset of IQ capabilities
> just like fST provides some of ST capabiliies, sDX is a subset of DX
> capabilities.
> 
> --
> David
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