(TFT) TFT: Attack Order

["Dave Seagraves" <dseagraves@austin.rr.com>]

Srydzews writes . . .

>(Well, there is one exception...a HtH attempt beats a pole arm!)

   Wow . . .  I never thought about this before.  Attempts to enter HtH
combat happen during /movement/ . . .  not actions.  The guy who plays the
archer in my campaign has been badgering me about the attack order issue,
but I've been avoiding making yet another change to the written rules.  I'll
have to seriously rethink this again.


Dan writes . . .

>If you read the example of play in the back of the Wizard
>rules booklet, it seems clear to me that fST was intended
>to count towards killing people.  Not counting fST toward
>death seems to bias the game even more in favor of wizards.
>Have you noticed any negative effect on playability due to
>this rule?

   Of course you mean /play balance/ here, not playability (two slightly
different things).  I haven't seen a problem at all with play balance in the
two campaigns I run.  In fact I actually had to encourage someone to play a
wizard when the only wiz player left the group to go back to school.  Heroes
are popular in my campaign, for some reason.
   The presence of ST batteries in a mature campaign mitigates any balance
problem, anyway.


Michael writes . . .

>If you want to, that's fine, but it's an awful lot of extra
>bookkeeping . . .

   (Here's where playability comes in.)
   Assessing wounds and fatigue separately against ST is actually /easier/
than in combination, and with no more bookkeeping.  "By the book" players
have to subtract hits taken and wounds taken from ST to determine ST
remaining, i.e. "Okay I've taken 5 hits and 4 fatigue and I have a base ST
of 12, so how much ST do I have left?  Uh . . ."  It may be an easy
calculation, but players have to do this little calculation /every time/
they want to know their characters' well being, and a GM has to do it every
time an NPC takes hits or fatigue (to check for the victim falling to 3 ST
or less) . . .  too much time-energy used here, and too much room for error
(like failing to notice when an NPC wizard should have died two turns ago).
   With the new method (which it seems almost all TFT players use anyway)
players keep track of Hits Left and Fatigue Left and don't have to bother
subtracting except when updating these two variables.  "Okay, I have 7 hits
and 8 fatigue left . . .  great."  It's also immediately plain to see when a
figure falls to 3ST, 1ST, or 0ST.  Very easy; very simple . . .
/especially/ for us poor GM's keeping track of several dozen NPC's in a
single fight.
   From my campaign's ground rules . . .

Wounds and Fatigue
   Wounds and fatigue are now assessed separately against
a figure's ST and are not added together.  (Normally these
two are added together when determining a figure's status.)
So a ST 12 figure now has 12 "hit points" and 12 "fatigue
points."  A ST 12 wizard with 4 hits of damage on him can
still have up to 12 fatigue points left to cast spells, not
just 8.  This simplifies bookkeeping for players and GM
alike, and is actually more realistic as well.
   Changing when figures die also changes the way fatigue
is handled.  A figure with at least one "fatigue point"
left (i.e. at least 1 ST) is still conscious and may act
normally.  That same figure driven to 0 ST (such as through
spell casting or other strenuous activity) immediately
/falls down/ and may do /nothing/ until he has rested for
15 minutes, but the figure is still somewhat aware of
events around him and may defend himself so enemies don't
get automatic hits against him.

   [Before formalizing the above rule change, I had considered tracking
wounding and fatigue with little "damage circles" like used for Ogres in
/Ogre/.  (Make a line of circles equal to your ST.  Wounds are marked off
the left side and fatigue off the right.  Three circles left means -3 DX;
one circle left and you go unconscious; none left and you go dead.)  The
method is intuitive, easy to use, and looks good on a laser-printed
character sheet; but it would have been hard to implement on a spreadsheet (
where I keep track of all my NPC's), and it still didn't solve the (IMO)
problem with spellcasters dying left and right.]

Dave Seagraves
Seagraves Computers   dseagraves@austin.rr.com   1 (512) 255-2760
Taco Bell: Good food, false advertising, chintzy portions, criminal staff


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