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Old 08-29-2020, 08:24 AM   #31
TippetsTX
 
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Default Re: An Alternate Approach to Talents

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Originally Posted by hcobb View Post
Only if you allow characters to purchase Chemist and Alchemist multiple times so they don't need Molly IQs to do their fnording jobs.
This is one of those areas where our worldviews differ, I guess. You believe that any young, but extremely smart, character can simply set up shop in one of these professions after Cidrian HS. In my game, it takes years of study, training and experience before one can even acquire those talents.
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Old 08-31-2020, 09:30 AM   #32
David Bofinger
 
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Default Re: An Alternate Approach to Talents

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Originally Posted by TippetsTX View Post
You believe that any young, but extremely smart, character can simply set up shop in one of these professions after Cidrian HS. In my game, it takes years of study, training and experience before one can even acquire those talents.
It's not clear how old a 32-point character is. Random groups of soldiers or bandits will be mostly composed of characters who are around 32 points, and there's no implication I'm aware of that they are all young.
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Old 08-31-2020, 10:30 AM   #33
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Default Re: An Alternate Approach to Talents

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It's not clear how old a 32-point character is. Random groups of soldiers or bandits will be mostly composed of characters who are around 32 points, and there's no implication I'm aware of that they are all young.
ITL page 10... "You may assume that a character is 20 years old when he enters play."

I allow a good deal of flexibility around this, however, and each race will have different age ranges of course.

P.S. Specific to my comment, Henry's often-used 'Molly' example is typically characterized as a young goblin.
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Old 08-31-2020, 03:09 PM   #34
larsdangly
 
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Default Re: An Alternate Approach to Talents

I usually assume my starting characters are young adults, but freely change that as much as I want to suit a character concept. I recently played an Orthodox priest who started play as an old man, just because I saw him as a cranky old drunk with a long white beard. And another character in the same party is a skinny early-teen kid (with appropriately low starting ST) because that's how I saw him. I suppose, in principle, you could 'game' that sort of flexibility to help characters avoid the penalties of aging rules, but I don't see that really happening. No TFT adventurer worth their salt survives more than a couple of years anyway...
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Old 08-31-2020, 07:33 PM   #35
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Default Re: An Alternate Approach to Talents - Youth as handicap

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Originally Posted by larsdangly View Post
I usually assume my starting characters are young adults, but freely change that as much as I want to suit a character concept. I recently played an Orthodox priest who started play as an old man, just because I saw him as a cranky old drunk with a long white beard. And another character in the same party is a skinny early-teen kid (with appropriately low starting ST) because that's how I saw him. I suppose, in principle, you could 'game' that sort of flexibility to help characters avoid the penalties of aging rules, but I don't see that really happening. No TFT adventurer worth their salt survives more than a couple of years anyway...
I recently made a Youthful Character. I made him 16yrs old. I gave him ST = 10 and IQ = 10 and a high DX. He was a full 32 point character; he had a hard childhood.

I wanted to make sure the other players would recognize that he was in his teens, so I came up with a Handicap. It is a combination of Cuteness and Odious handicaps.

Handicap (2 pts) TFT Companion Pg 18
Odious - Teenage Youth (“Go back to bed, Yung'un!”)
This character is ‘just a kid’ and in that aspect is offensive to proper adults. Physically, victims are 1/5 of average size for their species and have a youthful face. They can learn Tactics or Strategist or even Architect and use them, but nobody else will ever take a youth seriously enough to let him command a battle or design a building. In a strategy conference, anyone wanting to take his advice must first make a 4-die roll against IQ (only very wise people will consider advice from someone so immature.)
He gets a -1 to all reaction rolls concerning “experience”.

This handicap needs to be ‘bought off’ for 300 experience points when owner reaches 18 years old.

I didn't want to raise his attribute any higher with those 2 additional points, he is supposed to be a teenager. So instead I converted that 2 attribute point to 2 additional talents points (for the beginning character) instead.


-----------------------

I also gave him a quirk:
• Defensive about his age
• Impulsive

Making this a Handicap really got the other players to chide the character and because it was a handicap it came up often.
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Old 09-01-2020, 03:16 AM   #36
Steve Plambeck
 
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Default Re: An Alternate Approach to Talents

If there ever was a soft rule, that'd be "You may assume that a character is 20 years old when he enters play."

32 points is when the PC "joins the story". Every character must be a lot less than 32 points at birth, and of course everyone progresses at a different rate. And they could be markedly different rates depending on the backstory! I'd suppose a human baby is born with maybe 12 points, and the fortunate will reach 32 by their mid-teens, but others that grow up with malnutrition and disease and a lack of opportunity won't reach 32 until actual 32! Some will never reach 32. And any number of characters might be just shy of reaching 32 points, then hit a protracted period where their development gets stalled for any number of in-story reasons.

32 points is just the maximum a fictional character within the story of your campaign world can reach before being "disqualified" from joining the ranks of player characters. It's kinda implied in the structure of RPGs that every character was an NPC first. To keep the playing field level, you can't "adopt" one after their attributes pass a certain point. None of which really has much to do with biological age.

How old is too old to become a PC? One of mine was a little old man who'd lead a calm and sedate life. He was a wizard, but never practiced magic in deference to his wife; she belonged to a religion that forbade the use of magic, even persecuted those that used it. Then he became a lonely widower, and went off to become an adventuring wizard among people that appreciated wizards. He was 32 points because that's what the rules require. Maybe he'd been stronger or quicker when he was younger, but let those things atrophy. Now he was active, risk-taking, traveling, and with success and new experiences his attributes were finally headed upwards despite his age.
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Old 09-01-2020, 06:42 AM   #37
David Bofinger
 
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Default Re: An Alternate Approach to Talents

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Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck View Post
Every character must be a lot less than 32 points at birth [...] I'd suppose a human baby is born with maybe 12 points
I suppose Väinämöinen would be an exception.

Based on mass and helplessness I'm guessing a baby probably has ST 2. The DX is well below what's required to pass most 1/DX tests, maybe 1-2? I'm not sure what the IQ is. But in total I think well below 12 points total.
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Old 09-07-2020, 08:25 AM   #38
phiwum
 
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Default Re: An Alternate Approach to Talents

I've been thinking along the same lines as Steve.

Maybe the issue could be solved by making the cost for new Talents lower. 500XP per level of talent is pretty steep (five sessions or so?). New PCs will never go for Talents and just improve attributes. Once attributes get too expensive, advancement will slow to a crawl.

I'm thinking about slashing that cost to 200XP. We only play TFT on occasion (my son hasn't taken much of a liking to it, I'm afraid) and gaining different talents on a faster pace would allow for quicker differentiation of the characters. Too often, I find starting characters to be quite similar. The sooner they diverge in their roles, the better.

This would have the result that characters who have been in play for a long time will be jacks-of-all-trades, which again would harm diversification, but I don't think that will be an issue in my group (of two).
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Old 09-07-2020, 01:43 PM   #39
phiwum
 
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Default Re: An Alternate Approach to Talents

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Originally Posted by larsdangly View Post
I wholeheartedly agree that TFT provides the simplest path to the greatest diversity of character types of any game I can easily think of; you can do anything from Elric of Melnibone to Aragorn to the Grey Mouser to Tarzan to Ged to Conan and on and on without a single house rule.

But I do disagree re. the supposed problem with knights. The following character is clearly a knight, clearly hard to kill, easily achieved after moderate amounts of experience, and not a baffoon:

ST 13 DX 15(11) IQ 10
Armor: Fine plate, small shield (+expertise), Toughness I: 9 pts of armor, -1 to hit in melee
Weapons: Lance, Bastard sword, Dagger
Talents: Sword, shield, pole weapons, toughness, shield expertise, horsemanship

You could come up with pretty good versions like this at 35-37 points as well. A decent 32 point 'knight-like' figure might be:

ST 10 DX 14(10) IQ 8
Armor: Fine plate, small shield: 7 pts of armor
Weapons: saber, dagger
Talents: Sword, shield, horsemanship
To be fair, fine plate is a $5000 item. It will be a while before a beginning character gets to have that item surely.
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Old 09-07-2020, 04:37 PM   #40
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Default Re: An Alternate Approach to Talents

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Originally Posted by phiwum View Post
To be fair, fine plate is a $5000 item. It will be a while before a beginning character gets to have that item surely.
You have 500 XP and can trade them in for only one of the following, which do you choose?
  1. A suit of Fine Plate
  2. A very fine silver dagger with +2 damage enchantment
  3. A stone flesh ring
  4. A lesser wish
  5. or one memory point of talents or spells.
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