Quote:
Originally Posted by larsdangly
To be fair, I would guess that the number of PC's spending their first few hundred XP on IQ so that they could learn new talents was always pretty low. The new rules lead to characters who experience an initial blossoming of native abilities (stats), which then settle in at whatever they are like around 38-40, and then the long game of shaping the spells and skills they know sets in.
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It was more like the fighters, who would generally start with IQ 8 or 9 so they could have an edge as fighters, were actually in a fair hurry to not be IQ 8-9, and to have some interesting ability other than killing things. And they may not have spent all their IQ/talent points to start. Often our fighters were interested in adding some non-combat talents during play, often in reaction to getting into their character and the game world situation and seeing a desire (or even serious game-situation need) to have some talents they didn't start out with. Such as horsemanship, swimming, detect traps, animal handling, woodsman, training that the military they joined required them to learn, new spells, even carpentry.
My memory is this interest started out quite early in play, and was a concern in the period when PCs were in the 32-35 point range, which was a fun time and as far as many PCs made it. So if it's 400 XP to 35 attributes, or 500 XP to add even one talent point after play starts, it just seems really weird, also because it seems like getting to 35-36 points makes someone rather more capable than most people in the world, yet the effort to get there is comparable to learning a talent or spell, and in competition with it for how XP is spent.
So although it wouldn't be my ideal system, keeping the old ability to learn talents and spells by (playing out the training time/circumstances at least in a token way and) allocating new or old unused IQ/talent points, would address that issue in the steep shift in the XP curve to add talents versus the fixed XP cost to add talents.