09-30-2018, 12:32 PM | #51 | |
Join Date: May 2015
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Re: IQ rise and talents
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It's tricky really getting a sense of how these things will play out, especially with the various other uses for XP, the subjective per-sessions XP awards, and permission to GMs to be stingy or generous with XP as they please. I just noticed that the relative XP costs of things still seem fairly understandable, hence my other comments. |
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09-30-2018, 12:33 PM | #52 |
Join Date: Sep 2018
Location: North Texas
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Re: IQ rise and talents
While I appreciate all of the solutions being proposed as well as the ongoing debate, can anyone tell me what the flaw was with the original rules? Why did SJ decide that XP to increase IQ in order to 'purchase' new spells and talents was insufficient?
The old rules forced players to make very intentional decisions when raising stats and advancing their character abilities. You had to weigh the options carefully which I found to be both very simple from a design standpoint as well as realistic. And I apologize in advance if this was stated in an older thread somewhere, but I am new to the forum and wasn't aware that all of these rule revisions started being hashed out months ago. The recent PDF drop was my first time seeing these changes (which I suspect is also true for a vast majority of old-timers like me who backed the Legacy edition). |
09-30-2018, 12:44 PM | #53 |
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Arizona
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Re: IQ rise and talents
Back when this discussion was hashed out (around the turn of the year, if memory serves, but perhaps it was as late as March or so), I seem to remember the discussion revolving around the highly artificial limit on what people could learn (which never tracked with anyone's real-world experience in learning things), the sheer oddness of the "forgetting" rules, the fact that the system drove players to create Conan the Wizard type characters (and in general encouraged attribute bloat), and the general cumbersomeness of the entire rules subset for this material. The consensus was; remove the limit (which simultaneously resolves both of the first two issues, as well as addressing the third and fourth to a major degree) and just make sure it's expensive to learn a new talent/spell. I'm sure there were many other useful points raised at the time, but I'm trying to just sum it all up in fairly general terms -- anyone who feels I'm missing something important/fundamental should definitely weigh in, here!
While it's obvious you are a huge fan of the original rules with all their inherent complexities, what the debate mostly seems to be about currently is "how expensive/difficult should it be to learn a new talent/spell" and to my mind, that's more a subject for GM tweaking if you think the sweet spot was missed by the RAW. Naturally, if you preferred the original rules, you should probably stick with them (assuming your gaming group agrees) and just disregard the new rules. |
09-30-2018, 12:51 PM | #54 |
Join Date: May 2015
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Re: IQ rise and talents
Yeah, one main reason was attribute bloat especially IQ bloat. Some skilled professions (e.g. knight, courier) and other reasonable character concepts ended up needing to have quite a high IQ to have the talents they need, which implies they must also be smart and observant and great at doing all the things IQ rolls do, leading to characters that make almost all their IQ rolls but the reason they're high IQ is just so they can have a colorful talent or two in addition to being a knight or courier, or whatever.
Another is to have experienced long-surviving characters develop in a more natural and believable way that doesn't drown out their character concept and leave them with few/any limitations just because they keep getting experience and the only thing to do with it used to be to keep jacking up attributes. |
09-30-2018, 01:03 PM | #55 |
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Arizona
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Re: IQ rise and talents
Yep. That was a main argument against the old rules. Basically, no one thought that a great knight should also be the smartest guy in creation; in fact, most of the better ones were no more than bright, based on our discussion at the time (and some were frighteningly stupid), but in order to learn all the skills they needed to BE a powerful knight, they had to have an IQ up in the high teens at the absolute minimum. Which, in turn, made them almost 100% successful at things that had nothing to do with being a knight. In short, with the talents divorced from the IQ points, and "buyable" via XP, you could have a normal human being who had all of Conan's talents, and didn't have to be "Einstein the Barbarian" in order to support that.
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09-30-2018, 01:19 PM | #56 | |
Join Date: Dec 2017
Location: behind you
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Re: IQ rise and talents
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(Side Note: I really like the "Einstein the Barbarian" term as "Conan the Librarian" would seem more applicable to a Wizard that jacks his ST up to pay for spells and take damage.) |
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09-30-2018, 01:41 PM | #57 |
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Geelong, Australia
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Re: IQ rise and talents
I think we’ve strayed somewhat.
This discussion has moved into house rules. I think what’s more important is removing ambiguity in the rules. |
09-30-2018, 02:26 PM | #58 |
Join Date: Mar 2018
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Re: IQ rise and talents
I agree, even if the rules aren't technically ambiguous, it would be helpful to be more clear given that majority of players are going to be coming into this new edition with conflicting way of operating from the previous one.
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09-30-2018, 02:46 PM | #59 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Hillsboro, Oregon, USA
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Re: IQ rise and talents
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I don't like the idea at all of losing unspent talent or spell points; I would certainly house rule against that if it were to become official and explicit.
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Chris Goodwin I've started a subreddit for discussion of INWO and Illuminati. Check it out! |
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09-30-2018, 03:06 PM | #60 |
Join Date: May 2015
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Re: IQ rise and talents
Yes, also as it means if a PC starts out without taking talents to match his IQ, from a game/munchkin perspective, he's wasting a spectacular amount of value in terms of XP. (And again, an amount that dwarfs the listed XP needed to go from 32 to 35 points, even if he's just delaying learning one spell or minor talent)
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