Re: Leveling up skills
 

I think we are still on topic: adjusting the cost structure for acquiring talents. Since under RAW spells are paid for from the same source, you can't tamper with the cost of one without tampering with the other. We've just gotten into the nittygritty.

Re: Leveling up skills
 

OK, but aren't you using or proposing this system for ITL roleplay? So if your simplified scenario fails to capture the important effect then that's a problem with the scenario, not an interesting conclusion.

In RAW, assuming for the sake of argument IQ 10, heroes are somewhere on the straight line between (talent points, spell points) = (10, 0) and (4, 2), while wizards are between (4, 2) and (0, 10). (The point (4, 2) is where the hero and wizard lines cross.) You've instead allowed wizards to go to (5, 10), which is quite a lot nicer place to live, and IIUC given no corresponding benefit to fighters. It's going to push things in favour of wizards, relative to RAW, and wizards were already doing well.

It also takes a choice away from the wizard, he can no longer trade off spells vs talents, which might be a shame, hard to say.

The most important reason to buy a higher IQ is to make available spells or talents that weren't previously available. If you don't get to do that much, because you've only been given 1 extra point for it, then increasing IQ is not very useful. So I'm not surprised your players rarely increased IQ, but I wouldn't take it as evidence there wasn't a problem - rather, the not taking of IQ is caused by the problem. It's a problem Classic and Legacy have too.

Re: Leveling up skills
 

Good point. In creating my examples I was automatically thinking in terms of my 80s and 90s group play, wherein we had another house rule that's gone unmentioned: wizards and only wizards could learn spells, so we never had any heroes with a talent/spell point spread where the denominator (spell count) was other than zero.

That particular house rule grew naturally out of all the players (6 of us at the time) having preexisting PCs and the GMs (3 of us) having preexisting NPCs created under the Melee/Wizard rules starting in 1977. That put us 3 years into our campaign world before the first version of ITL even appeared! Old-timers may remember under those Microgame rules heroes never got to have spells (and wizards always got a spell count equal to IQ). So we ignored a few parts of the newly arrived ITL in 1980 just to ease the transition of so many characters to the new rules. Non-wizards ineligible to take spells was just something that carried over and stuck.

Keeping it that way dovetailed nicely when we subsequently added our Wizardry Talent because that talent itself became the requirement, the gatekeeper for practicing magic. It simply was consistent with other talents being mandatory for attempting certain high level skills. You can't even attempt to make potions without Alchemist, or make a sword without Armourer, so saying you couldn't even cast a spell without Wizardry was totally consistent with the game structure.

Excluding heroes from using spells was one of the things that kept magic special.

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An aside to Tippets TX: I think the above actually addresses one of your major concerns, where you argued against spells and talents being paid for from separate memory pools. You said: "but I prefer the game's original assumption those abilities... that you can't gain such power [magic spells] without sacrificing a part of your mind and thus reducing your capacity for more mundane skills." But the capacity for mundane skills actually is reduced when a part of your mind has to be sacrificed for a special skill that is set as the only thing enabling you to wield such magical powers. Yes, I propose the number of spells be paid for separately from talents, but if you want to be a wizard you have to sacrifice about 50% of your mundane talents to pay for the wizardry talent. The spirit of the game's original assumption is fully maintained, even though spells and talents are split into separate payment accounts to simplify not the game itself, but the bookkeeping.
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That's only how it worked back in the day, because classic ITL said so: it gave you only 1 point of additional memory space for increasing IQ a point, and I totally agree that wasn't nearly useful enough. Some may have used house rules to alter that, although I never did. I just thought about it for the last few decades :)

Point of clarification: in my old group, folk rarely raised IQ not because they couldn't. They just usually preferred kicking ST or DX up a point when they had the XP saved up to do it. It was usually more bang for the buck precisely because ITL only gave you that single point for buying a spell or talent if you put your XP on an IQ increase. Think of an IQ 12 wizard who wants an IQ 15 spell. Under classic RAW they'd have to earn enough XP to raise IQ three times to do so, and that was expensive. And you'd have to wait all that time. But if you have enough XP to buy 1 Attribute point right now, the temptation to get more DX or ST you could use immediately can be too strong to resist, so they never get around to upping their IQ from 12 to 15 and getting the talent or spell they wanted.

Legacy aims to fix that very thing by letting one buy spells or talents directly with XP, and depending on where your career is at that can be cheaper than buying an Attribute increase. Well sure, you might have the XP for buying 3 points of talents or 3 spells, but none of them will be the one you want if you are still stuck at IQ 12 and the thing you want is at IQ 15. Memory capacity and skill difficulty used to rise together, but they don't anymore. In fact now they compete with each other, so in some ways things have gotten worse, not better, when it comes to advancing or fleshing out a PC. Here we are, still talking about how to fix all that.

Re: Leveling up skills
 

I expressed concern that your house rules were all good for wizards at the expense of heroes, and you answered that you also imposed an additional restriction on heroes. Which makes it worse...

I think allowing heroes to learn a few spells might have come out of e.g. Gray Mouser learning spells? Or maybe SJ just wanted to allow it.

In my opinion, aims and misses. It just costs too much and therefore takes too long.

For really advanced characters they do. For the vast bulk of characters that actually get played, there just is no memory capacity increase.

I would be happy with a system where they actually competed. It's how practically every modern system works. But we don't have that in RAW.

Fleshing out is another issue and I think it's related to what I shall call the talent usefulness spectrum. At the top end we have the talents that are frequently useful, mostly because they are good for combat or pre-combat or clues: Sword, Shield Expertise, Running, Alertness, Charisma, maybe Remove Traps. In the middle are the occasionally-useful adventure-adjacent talents like Swimming. At the bottom end are the talents from which no practical application is anticipated, like Beekeeper and Poet.

Different players have different ideas about these, but common beliefs include:

1. The top end talents should be limited for starting characters.
2. It would be nice if at least experienced adventurers had some middle-rank talents.
3. Every character, or at least every hero, should have some bottom end talents for flavour, and as a souvenir of their non-adventuring childhood.

I certainly like 2 and 3, and think 1 depends on campaign.

Re: Leveling up skills
 

Can't you make the same argument that this is what happens when you learn a talent? That learning to swim must sacrifice a part of your mind, because it reduces how many other talents you can buy?

Re: Leveling up skills
 

We were specifically talking about spells, but yes. The point is that I prefer the old IQ cap on aquired abilities (though my own implementation is slightly different), one pool that represents the character's capacity for learning talents or spells.

Re: Leveling up skills
 

There's an excellent thread on this topic already so I don't want to rehash my position here. Suffice to say that while I appreciate the creative solution of your WIZARDRY talent and acknowledge the logic of it in addressing the specific issues that your gaming group encountered in migrating from a Melee/Wizard-based game to ITL, I prefer to maintain the latter's non-talent dependency on being a wizard.

The following is recommended to anyone interested in the full details of Steve's proposal...
https://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=164761

Re: Leveling up skills
 

Spells being something that just anyone could learn never sat well with my group. We were all deeply into fantasy literature (being how we all met and were all friends in the first place) and imaginary worlds that work that way are the exception rather than the rule. Notwithstanding those magnificent stories by Fritz Leiber, we didn't want to add that to our game when ITL first introduced the idea. We were three years into it and no hero had suffered for a lack of magic; we even had the Gray Mouser in our campaign; he was a wonderful cat burglar and dangerous fighter even without any spells. Quite the charmer with the ladies too as I recall.

Wizards with a repertroire of spells as large as their IQs were never greatly advantaged by it over spell-less heroes. I know because that's how the game started well before ITL was ever published -- you could say it was play-tested to death by then. The only thing of note was that wizards were so "anemic" in mixed combat with mundane fighters, they almost never lasted long enough to earn even 200 XP, and we were starting new replacement wizards almost every game session. And that was with the full complement of spells they'd been allowed under Wizard rules, and while still only fighting heroes that had no spells under the Melee rules. It's not like we had mana staves, and even now those are only marginally helpful. We were not about to make them any weaker by taking away half their spells in exchange for letting them have one quarter as many talents as a hero of the same IQ.

[Laughing on the side, recalling the most common talent our first ITL-based wizards always took was Driver. Someone had to drive the cart for the party, but the fighters wanted as many combat talents as possible. The other reason parties wanted a wizard along was as the torch-bearer, so the heroes had both hands free for other things - LOL!]

Well, more to the point, if there's any house rules in your game that only benefit fighters (as I'm sure some of us do), isn't allowing an IQ 12 wizard 12 spells instead of 6 the very least we can do to maintain some balanced?

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Now where I wrote "Memory capacity and skill difficulty used to rise together, but they don't anymore. In fact now they compete with each other" you replied:
You must not be counting talents added by direct purchase after character creation as "more memory", but I am. A PC that started at IQ 10 had 10 points worth of talents. Once they've bought a 2-point talent later, they have 12 points worth of talents. I call that a memory capacity increase.

It is a competition already. If you spend XP to buy more talents, you can't put that XP towards raising IQ. If you spend that XP to raise your IQ, you can't get more talents that way (not since Legacy). After character creation is completed, additional talents and spells are in direct competition with IQ for the same XP. IQ was already in competition with ST and DX under the classic rules, but now it is much worse off. I preferred the system when Attributes were only in competition with other Attributes.

But maybe the worst thing is that in order to add a talent (or spell) a level above your current IQ, you must first earn all the XP to raise your IQ to that level, but you still don't get that talent (or spell). Instead, you must start over earning more XP until you have enough to then finally buy the talent (or spell). You have to pay for everything twice! And that's just evil.

Re: Leveling up skills
 

I am counting it, and I said such increases only happened "for really advanced characters". Given the RAW experience system buying a talent isn't really worth it until the character has played, rough estimate, 75 sessions. YMMV but by my standards that's a lot. Nearly all games I've played in the characters have been less advanced than that.

In theory but not really in practice.

Initially attributes are so much cheaper than talents that nobody buys talents, there's ST vs DX competition (DX usually wins but it does depend on the character) and in theory IQ is an option but nobody gets it because it's not much use.

Then there's a brief period, as the attributes approach the soft cap, where there is true competition between attributes and talents. This is when IQ gets bought, because of what comes next...

... which is the regime where attributes have priced themselves out of the market and all the XP goes on talents (and/or spells), And the IQ increases of the previous phase allow the purchase of talents that weren't available at generation.

So a character will buy all sorts of things in their career, but there's far less choice at any moment of the character's career. Which is IMO bad. Also, as remarked above, the vast majority of characters never get past the attribute-buying phase.

It's arguably not good game design, because it damages the feedback. Someone, might have been SJ, said one of the great things about TFT was that you spent XPs and the character immediately got better, you could see it happen and you chose what would happen. If the gratification is delayed by the need to buy several things then the connection between action and consequence is weakened and that probably isn't a good thing. But also probably not catastrophic.

Re: Leveling up skills
 

There's one mechanic among the choices at character creation, and another mechanic going forwards after creation. All my recent comments were specifically aimed at the workings of the latter. Not that the former isn't worthy of discussion, it's just not what I've been talking about.