Steve Jackson Games Forums - View Single Post - New use for XP

Skarg · 01-22-2019, 11:41 AM

Costs are relative.

If learning Climbing or Swimming or Horsemanship or Knife costs 500 XP, then 500 XP seems low for a magic super power, relative to those.

If going from a 29-point character to a 34-point character is 500 XP, then 500 XP for a minor magic super-power won't seem like a deal except to higher-point characters.

Sadly, in RAW both are true, which makes XP is a hard standard to use to judge what a good cost is.

My reading of that situation however is that it's supposed to be like original TFT in that most NPC people stay around 30 points, and exceptional people get XP from surviving exceptional experiences, and there are other ways to learn talents, so 500 XP per talent point is the cost for "pushing beyond" what most people are able to learn and practice, not the usual difficulty of learning to swim. In which case, I think your costs are mostly fine.

But there's also the matter of what the abilities do. If you standardize every person with these special abilities as they have standardized cost schedules and a limit of five, that sort of implies you will try to balance their power levels, which is a bit subjective and limiting in what you can do. One alternative could be pricing each tier in each portfolio as what you think it's worth... or just how difficult you feel it should be to learn (possibly for non-balance reasons). Or maybe just having some exceptions. Or not. ;-)

01-22-2019, 11:41 AM	#104
Skarg Join Date: May 2015	Re: New use for XP - Heroic Exploits Costs are relative. If learning Climbing or Swimming or Horsemanship or Knife costs 500 XP, then 500 XP seems low for a magic super power, relative to those. If going from a 29-point character to a 34-point character is 500 XP, then 500 XP for a minor magic super-power won't seem like a deal except to higher-point characters. Sadly, in RAW both are true, which makes XP is a hard standard to use to judge what a good cost is. My reading of that situation however is that it's supposed to be like original TFT in that most NPC people stay around 30 points, and exceptional people get XP from surviving exceptional experiences, and there are other ways to learn talents, so 500 XP per talent point is the cost for "pushing beyond" what most people are able to learn and practice, not the usual difficulty of learning to swim. In which case, I think your costs are mostly fine. But there's also the matter of what the abilities do. If you standardize every person with these special abilities as they have standardized cost schedules and a limit of five, that sort of implies you will try to balance their power levels, which is a bit subjective and limiting in what you can do. One alternative could be pricing each tier in each portfolio as what you think it's worth... or just how difficult you feel it should be to learn (possibly for non-balance reasons). Or maybe just having some exceptions. Or not. ;-)