Thread: New Skills
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Old 07-15-2018, 05:16 PM   #185
Skarg
 
Join Date: May 2015
Default Re: Memory cost of skills.

Quote:
Originally Posted by zot View Post
Limiting number of talents to IQ seems to be roughly a 50% increase in maximum talents (19 talents for 32 talent points in your Mouser example).

If you think a maximum of double IQ in talent points is the sweet spot, what about this?
  • Starting characters get IQ talent points (as with classic TFT)
  • Characters buy new talents by paying for talent points with XP (as with Steve's new XP rules)
  • Characters can have no more than 2 * IQ talent points, total

This would allow up to double the TFT-classic talent points instead of up to roughly 1 1/2 TFT classic talent points.
* I like the first two lines of this, but the mechanic for limiting total talents/spells needs more attention, and 2 x IQ isn't quite it for all purposes (especially spells at 1 IQ each), which I think is the main reason why:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick_Smith View Post
Guy suggested something like that, but Steve shot it down. Right now the amount of memory is nicely balanced for wizards. If you said that memory IQ (mIQ) = 2 times IQ, then wizards would get too many spells.

What might work is mIQ = 2 x IQ, AND spells all cost 2 memory slots.
Quote:
Originally Posted by zot View Post
Or just add "you can't have more spells than your IQ" and keep them costing one point.
* I agree that spells limited to no more than IQ is good to keep.
* Also relevant to this is the subject of whether any spells should be harder to learn than others.
* I think that spells may not be the only reason Steve shot down the 2 x IQ limit, but I'm not sure what exactly he was thinking, nor whether there's a work-around or not.

It feels to me like there should be a better way, that avoids a weird "out of memory" problem and makes it theoretically possible to keep learning whatever, but also makes it really take a lot to learn a lot so there are trade-offs and to have exceptional abilities requires exceptional something that represents the real-world aptitude/genius/training/effort/experience/focus that would require (as opposed to it being an easy/natural/available-to-many option to have all sorts of abilities.

What that something should be, I'm not certain, but I don't like it being bloated IQ, especially not when there's a 40-point cap. I don't think "Bob" from my example above should need to have IQ 14 - I think realistically he could be IQ 10 or maybe even 8, and still be able to learn something else.

I think it could just be XP if it were the right amount... but setting that amount may be tricky. The advantage of Rick's way of using mIQ that doesn't increase IQ proper, but still obeys the XP curve, I think actually may be a good way to do it.

I also think if campaign training & experience time limits for learning were taken seriously, that could also do it (but I think many players would ignore that, and one-offs or flexible new character rules would want to then list not just points for starting characters but training/experience time as well, which I'd be happy with but probably doesn't fit the complexity & expectations of this design.)
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