Quote:
Originally Posted by larsdangly
The scope of talents is a tricky one. There is a natural instinct to want to play with the list, adding things that will be fun or open up new possibilities for characters. On the other hand, the end game of that process is you are now playing GURPS using a talent point economy. In addition to opening up the complexity of the game, the fact that GURPS lets you trade any kind of strength for any kind of weakness allows you to build characters in a way that would degrade one of TFT's strengths: it is a well balanced competitive combat engine. There are many options to building a character in TFT, but there is no recipe for creating characters who are clearly stronger in combat than others.
People have their personal preferences for higher ST or DX, more or less armor, etc. But the fact is most of that design space contains characters who match up fairly well against one another in an open one on one fight. When you can trade off your combat strength against narcolepsy or having a funny hair cut or something, it is pretty obvious how you should game the system to build a maximally powerful character. Some groups are graced with players who won't take advantage of that sort of system, but in my experience people take whatever opportunities you give them. So, I feel like TFT is at its strongest when you are making well balanced trade offs of one strength against another, with enough constraints that you can't just 'build-a-bear' your way to a monster.
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Plus, honestly, too much talent bloat will cause us to lose the ability to keep most of the book in our heads, and we'll spend our time head-down in the books like we always did with D&D, or even, alas, GURPS... A few new ones would be nice -- especially ones that support broader roleplaying opportunities, but other than that, it would be a shame to bury us in a sea of new talents.