[Skarg]

I don't think I have the time/energy available right now to properly break down and explain what I see is going on with TFT IQ / Talents / Spells, but I can't resist mentioning a few things that seem important to mention at this point:

* It seems to me that the main issue with just letting people buy as many talents as they can at a flat EP price (as SJ's previous two EP drafts did) is that it removes an important effect of the old ITL system, which is that characters can only choose a few of the specialized talents (including adding spells) before it becomes impractical due to the total memory needed. That meant that there was an important choice about what to specialize in, and even a 32-point character could have specialized talents that much more experienced characters likely might not have, etc.

* I think part (but not all) of the above problem may just be perception due to not enough experience/playtesting of what it's actually like to have to choose what to allocate EP to. There IS still a choice to make, but it's hard to get a feel for what it's like when it's 1500 EP instead of 3 memory points.

* There are several issues with the old ITL system that would be helped by dropping the memory cap at IQ. Knights needing IQ 14+, and several other reasonable character designs (including many PCs) who run out of memory seemingly too early, talents that are really gifts hogging memory (people with Acute Hearing can learn 3 IQ less?), people needing to be high-IQ just in order to be able to have some mix of talents that shouldn't need high IQ (such as physical training, gifts, and some mental talents).

* I think the best solution would be to add some other limit to solve the above problem (and the other remaining problems with Talents), rather than backing up to the old ITL memory system.

* One idea is that characters could add talents of types that can be learned with training/study, but the requirement is not IQ nor EP, but actually doing an in-game training program requiring a serious way to learn, adequate aptitude, and a serious amount of time spent training it. It would also be really helpful to have a way to think about what talents NPCs can learn and what it takes, and it'd be nice not to be able to "learn" Acute Hearing, so this sort of approach could be a win-win-win, it seems to me.


And, apparently I can't resist going on a rambling brainstorm either, so make what you will of this:

As for what Talents might be cheaper, well the problem I think is not that some are too expensive, but that TFT is so far stuck in one dimension for learning talents (which is also collapsed with the other uses/meanings of IQ). It shouldn't really be about IQ, but about fortune and opportunity and learning experiences.

Some people have Sex Appeal, Charisma, or Acute Hearing, and others don't, and only a few of the people who don't would ever be able to learn it, and it is NOT because they are "out of memory" to do so - it's because of their ears or genes or psychology or personality or genus or whatever. If anything, people with those "talents" have an easier time learning things, not a harder time, and the way to compensate is not to make them need to get higher IQ than characters who lack those gifts. (There IS a need to not have all characters have access to all talents, but the memory limit only has that result accidentally, not in a way that makes sense.)

Then there's the difference between physical and mental talents. Yes, there are some people who are mainly physical or mainly mental in their talents, but there are also people who manage to have both types, and their IQ should not need to be the sum of those - it's far too severe a trade-off, which can't be well-represented by just reducing the points needed and letting everyone take whatever they want.

Many talents take some time and opportunity and perhaps some (again, innate gift) aptitude to learn, but then don't require particular effort to maintain, nor do they fill up people's brains preventing further learning, nor does happening to have many of them mean that person needs to be above-average intelligence. Social skills, basic physical skills, languages - some of them might get rusty if you have some you don't use, but you're not going to forget how to behave, or how not to drown in water, etc.

I think part of the solution may be looking at the suggestion people sometimes make about "cultural norm" talents and assigning them zero memory to learn (the elf example above, and the several people in the previous thread where people were mentioning their own talents and assigning zero points to all their cultural-norm talents).

It seems to me what the "choice" of what talents a person has is not about memory but about opportunity. Everyone is born with different gifts and a genius but many people often don't know what their own ones are. Then we each get a family, a culture, peers, an education, and experience, and all those things can give us talents, and we can choose to maintain them or not. But it's not really like how smart we are gives us a memory pool and then we run out.