Talents & Martial Arts

[Peter V. Dell'Orto]

Originally Posted by DangerousThing

Martial Arts has a solution for adding a martial arts talent: Wildcard Styles. If a wildcard for all skills in the style is 12 points in all skills in a style is fair (debatable, but I like it) then a talent that covers every skill in a style should cost about this or more if the talent has other advantages.

The thing with pricing a martial arts talent is you have to decide how it applies, and what it applies to. Does it apply to all the parts of the style (and thus its techniques), just the physical skills, etc. Does it fold in some of the perks - turning Style Familiarity into a free feature of the talent at its first level, say. Or come with additional benefits?

A Wildcard is pretty broad, and comes with its own pros and cons that won't suit all games.

You might not want to have both in a campaign. Or be able to usefully benefit from both, if they are both in a campaign.

I can see Talents as fitting into a niche that neither raw skill nor Style! covers, but it's a hard niche to have if you are trying to balance them all together. That's probably not a great idea - Style! makes zero attempt to price styles as anything other than a single skill, no matter how narrow or broad the martial arts style is. Talents would price out depending on the contents of the styles.

I do like the idea of style talents, but I'm still pretty unsure of how I'd want to implement them if I used them myself.