Standard for memory points?

[hcobb]

What is the standard way of indicating on a character sheet that the figure has spent XPs to learn talents, languages and spells totaling to a higher combined cost than their starting IQ?

[larsdangly]

There seems to be no suggested way of doing this, just based on the official character sheets we've seen or the cards for advanced NPCs (the wizards and high talent heroes from the DoD sets). All I can suggest is putting a running tally of total talent points expended in the corner of whatever space you use to list talents.

[FireHorse]

How would you like to record that data?

It doesn't seem important enough to put on the small card you use during combat; it's more comparable the list of all items (and their weights), from the larger character sheet. So if you were redesigning that character sheet, where would you put that information?

[Shostak]

Jot it down in a character journal.

[TippetsTX]

I recall that we had a section on our old handwritten character sheets where we tracked the talents being studied. I'm keeping that concept with the new rules so when I get around to making a new character sheet, I will have a spot next to that info to track XP spent as well as earned.

[Skarg]

I think the "standard" way, as evidenced by every character I remember seeing published in or after Legacy, as well as those before it, is:

Simply list the talents and spells known.

There is no reason to do anything else in the rules-as-written, except to help people do the lookup and addition. On character sheets though often people use the format from the Talent list, i.e. writing the number of memory points in parens after the talent name: Literacy (1) Bow (2) etc.

Now, with house rules, there may well be reasons, but that doesn't apply to the published stuff. (A common way to write mIQ is with a slash, after base IQ: 11/13, but that's a little messy since mIQ isn't used for anything other than learning things.)

[JimmyPlenty]

Use bold type. (or vise versa)

[larsdangly]

I guess the ideal solution would depend a bit on the goal. Since your current number of talents and spells known doesn't influence XP costs for new advancements, I can think of only two reasons why you would want to keep track of this: 1) you want to rank characters according to the total number of XP that would be required to 'build' them; and 2) you want to check someone's math to make sure they didn't exceed the number of talents they could know given their XP totals. Either way, you will need to also know a character's accumulated XP total to use the information.

[hcobb]

So a typical ST 6, DX 14, IQ 14 figure with 14 memory points either started with IQ 14 and then spent 200 XP to raise DX by two or started with DX 14 and then spent 1200 XP to raise IQ by two and add two memory points?

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by hcobb

So a typical ST 6, DX 14, IQ 14 figure with 14 memory points either started with IQ 14 and then spent 200 XP to raise DX by two or started with DX 14 and then spent 1200 XP to raise IQ by two and add two memory points?

That's the consensus about what the RAW in Legacy ITL mean. Most veteran players I know don't like that (since it's a huge gamey XP incentive to take as much IQ as you can stand to at start, and it also means it takes huge amounts of XP (relative to the cost of attributes for new characters) for a PC to learn any new talents), but that seems to be the RAW literal intent.