Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave Crowell
A thought or question about Talents/Skills in TFT: Are they exclusive abilities? That is to say if you do not have the Talent can you not do the thing? So if I do not have the Boating talent I cannot row a boat across the harbour.
Or do Talents give you a bonus to do the thing and give you extra skill and proficiency? If I do not have the Boating talent I can row across the harbour, but it will be slow and clumsy. If I have the Boating talent I can row gracefully across the harbour, know about different types of boats, can make small repairs, etc.
If in every case you cannot do the thing if you do not have the Talent then players are going to chafe that their character concept requires too many Talent slots. See the discussion above about building Aragorn in TFT.
Perhaps a note could be made about which Talents are required to do the thing at all. Physiker for example.
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For MOST talents (especially physical ones like weapons talents, swimming or running, for example), we always considered it proper to allow a 4/DX (or whatever attribute was appropriate) to accomplish the task without the talent. For CERTAIN talents (fencing, physicker, missile weapons, engineering, UC II and above, and other things that we believed it wasn't possible to do without the talent) we simply said you couldn't do them until you learned the talent.
I think, as a general rule, if the talent has a prerequisite, you can't try to do that thing until you've learned the talents for it, and also as a general rule, the more intellectual talents (phsyicker, for example) aren't possible either -- or, if they are, there is some kind of serious risk factor in attempting them; that is if you attempt to heal someone without the physicker talents (assuming the GM lets you make the attempt at all), there is a serious risk of harming the patient (inflicting
additional hits) instead of healing them.