Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick_Smith
Hi Jim, everyone.
Jim, if you look at George Dew's TFT knock off "Legends of the Ancient World", you will find he does do this. If you play it, you will see the strengths and disadvantages of this idea.
I think it works pretty well, but any talent that does not have a logical way to say, "each level of this gives a +1 bonus", is awkward in his system.
Warm regards, Rick.
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Though actually, I extrapolated it for my own amusement, and it's really not as hard as it would appear to make all talents work at four different levels.
For the purposes of my look at this (generally speaking) I had Level 0, Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 talents. Level 0 was the "Student" level, where you learned enough that when you tried to do something (say, use a sword) you now could roll for success on 3/ATT (where "ATT" is whatever the appropriate attribute was), instead of 4/ATT (remember, if you don't have the talent, you roll an extra die against the appropriate attribute to succeed).
At Level 1, you were at the "Apprentice" level and received a +1 bonus of some kind (in weapons, you could either take it as a +1 to your DX, or a +1 to the damage dealt, but not both at the same time, you had to pick one or the other; everything else it was generally a +1 to the attribute you needed to roll against for success for the use of that talent
only. At Level 2 "Journeyman" you received a +2 bonus, and at Level 3 "Master" you received a +3 bonus.
For weapons, at the +2 and +3 levels, the question was always can you split the bonuses (i.e., do +1 damage while rolling against your DX+1 for the "+2" bonus situation). Personally, I don't see any problem with doing that.
There were a few other special cases, by talent, in there too (e.g., Medic-1 would either allow you to heal an extra HP, or would allow you to increase your attribute for success by one, but not both -- you had to pick and choose).
That also explains where I originally came up with the "10x IQ level of the Talent" for an XP cost for the talents. The way you learned the higher levels of talents was to simply double the cost for each level. So if Sword is an IQ 7 talent, then it would cost you 70XP for Sword-0, 140 XP for Sword-1, 280 XP for Sword-2, and 560 XP for Sword-3, all of which would have to be paid in order. The total cost to become a master swordsman would thus be 1050 XP, which seems pretty reasonable for that level of expertise...and also made for interesting choices when deciding whether to increase or add a talent, or add an attribute point.
You'll note that the above XP cost system tends to flatten the skill levels over the course of the game -- as a new character, you tend to pick up a lot of Level-0 skills pretty rapidly, but that simultaneously delays your attribute increase and still doesn't provide you with much of an advantage in skill. If you really want to go hog-wild as an "early" character (that is, one that has just started his adventuring career), you can bump up Sword-0 to Sword-1, but that costs a bit more in XP than bumping up your DX, say, would. The trade-off is that while bumping up my DX by one accomplishes half of what increasing my skill level would, increasing my skill level ALSO gives me the advantage of increasing my damage instead, if I so choose; so the cost of 140 for Sword-1 is not really out of line with the cost of attributes at that point in your career, and now you are confronted with a meaningful choice on how exactly you want to spend your XP.
Arguably, for the non-weapon talents, it would still be better to take the DX point, but that choice varies more than you think simply because of in-game events, the need to boost IQ for new talents you want to gain, and so on; so again, the choices aren't either/or even in that case...instead you are confronted with competing choices to increase existing skill levels, acquire new skills, raise ST for obvious reasons, raise DX for obvious reasons, or increase IQ to gain new opportunities -- all of which have to be weighed against one another and what is actually occurring in the game itself.
I am NOT suggesting this system for talents, by the way, merely explaining a mental exercise I undertook with TFT Talents based on the DCG's skills method, and showing how it would work in a hypothetical game. Additionally, the description above is neither exhaustive nor complete, so as you pick holes in it, remember, there was more to the idea that what I wrote here. And I think I covered most (if not all) of the problems you will all quickly identify when I wrote this out for myself... ;-)