Quote:
Originally Posted by HeatDeath
This, in particular, feels like "Just like in real life." Highly experienced smart people become enormously capable polymaths, frighteningly more effective and capable, overall, than highly experienced powerlifters or gymnasts.
IRL, Lex Luthor circles the world three times while Superman is still putting his pants on.
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Seems to me that advantage was already modeled well enough by the direct effects of higher IQ, talents and spells.
The new system gives an additional effective advantage in character development of 500 XP for every talent or spell a character starts with, since those don't cost XP.
In the case of spells which include lower-level versions of the same spell, that can be a savings of 500 XP per spell you might otherwise want to learn using XP (except that would be dumb, because if you start with it, you don't pay anything for it, not even another IQ/talent point).
And wizards who learn an earlier version of a spell are effectively going to be 500 XP
behind the progress of wizards who wait until they can learn the higher-level version.
Overall, there's now a huge incentive for wizard to start out with as high IQ as the GM's style will allow them to survive and earn XP at, greatly penalizing lower-IQ characters in terms of their development. In the early game, this is huge, since 500 XP would otherwise buy multiple attribute points, (even more if you start as a halfling).
All of that, it seems to me, is new weird side-effects of a hasty design that was focused on trying to be simple. The result is various gamey XP payoffs, low-level PCs not being able to learn talents or spells without deferring raising several attribute points, and other weird side-effects.