New Skills

[Rick_Smith]

Originally Posted by Skarg

An observation: Limiting talent "slots" to IQ would tend to make it seem optimal to have as many talents as possible be 3's or 2's rather than 1's, which sort of reverses the way they were originally designed. ...

Hi Skarg, I agree.
It is not the way I would solve the problem. Warm regards, Rick.

[Rick_Smith]

Originally Posted by zot

What about limiting [memory] to 2x IQ total talent points?

Hi Zot,
Guy suggested something like that, but Steve shot it down. Right now the amount of memory is nicely balanced for wizards. If you said that memory IQ (mIQ) = 2 times IQ, then wizards would get too many spells.

What might work is mIQ = 2 x IQ, AND spells all cost 2 memory slots.

Warm regards, Rick.

[zot]

Or just add "you can't have more spells than your IQ" and keep them costing one point.

[JLV]

Originally Posted by tomc

Pardon my imprecision re: attribute bloat.

I agree that experience should determine how many talents you can learn, and IQ should limit which talents are available to you. Lots of people are never going to grok calculus, but have mastered enough skills to put their IQ in the upper teens (at least) in the old system.

I agree with you 100%. (And your example is spot on.)

Originally Posted by zot

Or just add "you can't have more spells than your IQ" and keep them costing one point.

Simple. Elegant. Effective. What's not to like? (If Steve's going to insist on limiting Talents in some way...)

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by zot

Limiting number of talents to IQ seems to be roughly a 50% increase in maximum talents (19 talents for 32 talent points in your Mouser example).

If you think a maximum of double IQ in talent points is the sweet spot, what about this?

• Starting characters get IQ talent points (as with classic TFT)
• Characters buy new talents by paying for talent points with XP (as with Steve's new XP rules)
• Characters can have no more than 2 * IQ talent points, total

This would allow up to double the TFT-classic talent points instead of up to roughly 1 1/2 TFT classic talent points.

* I like the first two lines of this, but the mechanic for limiting total talents/spells needs more attention, and 2 x IQ isn't quite it for all purposes (especially spells at 1 IQ each), which I think is the main reason why:

Originally Posted by Rick_Smith

Guy suggested something like that, but Steve shot it down. Right now the amount of memory is nicely balanced for wizards. If you said that memory IQ (mIQ) = 2 times IQ, then wizards would get too many spells.

What might work is mIQ = 2 x IQ, AND spells all cost 2 memory slots.

Originally Posted by zot

Or just add "you can't have more spells than your IQ" and keep them costing one point.

* I agree that spells limited to no more than IQ is good to keep.
* Also relevant to this is the subject of whether any spells should be harder to learn than others.
* I think that spells may not be the only reason Steve shot down the 2 x IQ limit, but I'm not sure what exactly he was thinking, nor whether there's a work-around or not.

It feels to me like there should be a better way, that avoids a weird "out of memory" problem and makes it theoretically possible to keep learning whatever, but also makes it really take a lot to learn a lot so there are trade-offs and to have exceptional abilities requires exceptional something that represents the real-world aptitude/genius/training/effort/experience/focus that would require (as opposed to it being an easy/natural/available-to-many option to have all sorts of abilities.

What that something should be, I'm not certain, but I don't like it being bloated IQ, especially not when there's a 40-point cap. I don't think "Bob" from my example above should need to have IQ 14 - I think realistically he could be IQ 10 or maybe even 8, and still be able to learn something else.

I think it could just be XP if it were the right amount... but setting that amount may be tricky. The advantage of Rick's way of using mIQ that doesn't increase IQ proper, but still obeys the XP curve, I think actually may be a good way to do it.

I also think if campaign training & experience time limits for learning were taken seriously, that could also do it (but I think many players would ignore that, and one-offs or flexible new character rules would want to then list not just points for starting characters but training/experience time as well, which I'd be happy with but probably doesn't fit the complexity & expectations of this design.)

[Steve Jackson]

It would certainly be possible to write a chart that escalated XP costs depending on how many spells or talents you already had. Don't know whether that is a good idea or not - certainly makes character advancement a bit more mathy. But it would be an infinite XP sink and would always allow the character to get One More Ability. Until they run out of abilities to get . . .

I don't at all mind the idea of a wizard having a lot of spells, but it should be a, pardon the expression, ADVANCED wizard.

This is related to something I want to broach later - I have a list of subjects I want to discuss and if I open them all at once I know I will lose track.

[Terquem]

I think I've said something like this before, but in my experience when a game decides that it needs more "skill" options for the 'discriminating" player it will very quickly become a game that is not played by anyone other than "discriminating" players

You know what I mean?

So you can end up with a game that becomes a "Character Creation Game" where no one is able to play a simple character because everyone is optimizing complex characters and simple characters are not viable

I feel that this particular game should not set its goal "too high" and at every step examine the change to decide if it adds complexity for the sake of character advantages (imho-bad), or adds complexity for the sake of game flavor and environment (imho-good).

[Rick_Smith]

Originally Posted by tbeard1999

I’m very opposed to turning TFT into a game where you can create characters who effectively can do everything (or almost everything) well. The fact that this *might* describe certain fantasy characters doesn’t matter to me for several reasons. ...

Hi Ty,
I sat down and added up how much memory you would need to get all talents in the old TFT, and got 196 memory points. (I may be off by a bit, I didn't double check. On the other hand, that didn't include any languages.) If you doubled the memory of heroes, you would still be a LONG, LONG way from knowing everything, or even almost everything.

Originally Posted by tbeard1999

Second, these characters may be “one-in-a-million” characters; designing the rules to allow such characters anytime turns the game into a parody of Monty Haul campaigning.

I completely disagree. Cadfael, my Master Merchant, my duel class character who is a Pirate AND a Thief, the Bandit Lord who is also a Ranger, are hardly one in a million characters. And I can pull out biographies of interesting people from history who should clearly be given 20+ memory of talents.

The Grey Mouser is perhaps a 1/1,000,000 character, but TFT does not map well to him, as it does not even BEGIN to model his skill at the sword.

Originally Posted by tbeard1999

Third, this type of approach is bad (very bad in my opinion) for gameplay. I’ve found that campaigns tend to work best when each PC can do at least one important thing significantly better than anyone else in the party. Allowing characters who can effectively do everything eliminates this and makes everyone more or less the same. BOOORING. It also robs us of what I consider to be a real TFT strength - players have to make serious tradeoffs.

As I showed above, an IQ 15 character with 30 memory is a LONG, LONG way from being able to do everything.

I would like to play competent characters and I suspect I am not alone in this desire. Playing a competent pirate who also is a thief, is not boring, in my opinion.

But I think we will have to agree to disagree. The fact that there are so many house rules to allow people to cheat in large or small ways on memory, is strong evidence that I'm not alone in this desire.

Warm regards, Rick.

[Rick_Smith]

Originally Posted by Chris Rice

Ok, having spent a couple of hours going through on-line indexes for the Space Gamer, I came up blank. That's because it was actually in issue 15 of Different Worlds, "A Modest Proposal for The Fantasy Trip" by David R. Durham. In my defence, I will say it was a long time ago!

Hi Chris,
Thank you very much for taking the time to look this up. I've read and reread the TFT articles in TSG, and couldn't imagine having missed something like that! (Am I going crazy???)

Warm regards, and thanks! Rick.

[Rick_Smith]

Originally Posted by Skarg

An observation: Limiting talent "slots" to IQ would tend to make it seem optimal to have as many talents as possible be 3's or 2's rather than 1's, which sort of reverses the way they were originally designed.

Slots would also seem to favor taking large chunky talents over ones that come in detailed levels (still mainly UC at this point), but it also discourages knowing a few different weapon talents. (I could learn Tactics and Strategy now, if only I hadn't learned Knife and Shield in addition to Ax/Mace... what?)


If the proposal is to let EP be spent for talents but only limited to slots equal to IQ, then: ... <Many good examples which hammer home this point elided>

This doesn't seem very fair or logical to me.

Hi Skarg, everyone.
You make a very good point, and I TOTALLY agree. This is not my suggestion, and I think it is sub-optimal. The rule encourages people to buy tough talents and ignore easy ones which is the opposite of what is wanted.

But to be fair, it is better than nothing.

Warm regards, Rick.