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Old 09-30-2018, 12:32 PM   #51
Skarg
 
Join Date: May 2015
Default Re: IQ rise and talents

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Originally Posted by platimus View Post
Using my XP costs above, it would seem sufficient to make every point after 40 cost 5000XP - especially if you MUST spend XP to learn new talents/spells (no entitlements due to IQ increase). What do you think about this little home-rule of mine?
I think 5000 XP for infinite attributes on that scale doesn't seem like a problem. Each +1 would cost the same as 12.5 talent/spell points. It's still a very large cost, and of more concern becomes how easy is it for PCs to ever possibly get to that point, what are you assigning to NPCs, and above all, what do you want your game to be like.

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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Old 09-30-2018, 12:33 PM   #52
TippetsTX
 
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Default 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).
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Old 09-30-2018, 12:44 PM   #53
JLV
 
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Default 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.
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Old 09-30-2018, 12:51 PM   #54
Skarg
 
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Default 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.
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Old 09-30-2018, 01:03 PM   #55
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Default 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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Old 09-30-2018, 01:19 PM   #56
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Default Re: IQ rise and talents

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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.
Wonderfully said. This is why you shouldn't have to jack-up IQ to learn new things. Also, regarding the old system, automatically getting a new talent/spell just because your IQ went up seemed strange to me. I suppose that is why there were elaborate rules about declaring what you were learning to begin with.

(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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Old 09-30-2018, 01:41 PM   #57
Wayne
 
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Default 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.
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Old 09-30-2018, 02:26 PM   #58
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Default 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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Old 09-30-2018, 02:46 PM   #59
Chris Goodwin
 
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Default Re: IQ rise and talents

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I guess I'm glad I raised the topic because there is a lot of uncertainty in people's minds. But the correct approach using the new edition seems very clear to me: After character creation your IQ score has no bearing on how many points worth of talents or spells you know. This seems to me like a sharp enough set of rules that I would feel confident ruling any 'unspent' talent points left over after character creation are lost.
I think that if it were perfectly clear we wouldn't be having this conversation. :) I wouldn't mind seeing a paragraph spelling it out for sure, or a page reference if it's in the new ITL somewhere.

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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Old 09-30-2018, 03:06 PM   #60
Skarg
 
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Default 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.
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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