Re: Leveling up skills
 

Wizard has three attributes: ST does two jobs that are collapsed into one job, sort of, IQ does two jobs and DX has just one. So it looks like SJ was OK at the time with combining jobs into attributes. But of the two jobs IQ did I think gatekeeping spells and talents was the more important, and limiting the number of spells less.

With TFT all the talents kept those main jobs and also acquired some minor sidelines. That's been only slightly modified in Legacy.

Meanwhile in GURPS ST has spun off HT, so they kind of do one job each, sort of. And IQ is no longer doing either of the jobs it did in Wizard. So maybe the philosophy changed.

Re: Leveling up skills
 

Whoa -- the underlying principals (or "science") behind how magic in TFT manipulates reality are not that narrowly specified by the rules. How magic actually works is largely a matter of interpretation, and may vary in all kinds of ways from GM to GM. In the original campaign world I played in, we all thought of magic as a big deal, but each spell as a minor variation within that big deal. Everyone's mileage will vary on how magic actually works in Cidri or any other campaign world. We treated spells like recipes, and it didn't break anything.

Separating those two things begins to clean things up enormously. And then there is a band-aid that keeps the system from bleeding to death from the apparent imbalances this would otherwise introduce. I and my group went this route and played this way for 20 pre-Legacy years.

Talents and spells were purchased separately. Current IQ remained the cap to each. An IQ 12 figure had 12 points to spend on talents, regardless of whether they were a wizard or not. An IQ 12 wizard could learn 12 spells (which not co-incidentally was the original limit from the rules in Wizard).

So why wouldn't everyone want to be a wizard? Our band-aid was an expensive wizard's talent that entitled the figure to learn spells in the first place, but you wouldn't have to use such a wizardry talent if you don't like the idea, and you could still separate the memory tracks.

You could simply continue to charge a wizard double cost for talents, striking a similar balance to the RAW. It's just a little more elegant if you use a wizardry talent approach, because then you can drop the double-cost rule and never have to think about which talents (like Literacy) should be exempt from cost doubling -- everything can cost the same if the wizard tied up half or so of their points taking wizardry in the first place.

An IQ 12 wizard who knows 12 spells and has 6 points worth of talents is not a super-hero game breaker. Play such a character under the full ITL rules or the Wizard arena rules and it will be hard to detect any difference.

Re: Leveling up skills
 

Apologies for the tangent here, but each attribute actually has THREE jobs in full TFT. That said, while they do perform the same core functions in the game, they prioritize those functions differently.

Starting with ST:
* Primary application is a measure of the character's 'lifeforce' (a capacity metric)
* Secondary feature influences the character's damage-dealing potential (a qualifier for weapon use)
* Tertiary function is as a value to roll against for 'strength' checks (measuring capability)

DX, on the other hand:
* Primary function is rolling to resolve success/failure for the most common character actions or activities (capability)
* Secondary is determining the action order (capacity... sort of)
* Tertiary is its function as a prerequisite for certain skills (qualifier)

And finally, IQ:
* Primary function is access control to more potent talents and spells (qualifier)
* Secondary is rolls against IQ (capability)
* Tertiary is the character's pool for starting abilities, though under the 'classic' rules I would bump this function up to the secondary slot (capacity)

Re: Leveling up skills
 

We're using "separate" in quite different senses, in fact almost opposite. I'm talking about two limits on characters:

• which spells and talents you can choose
• how many spells and talents you can choose

In RAW these are both IQ. Separating them means they are purchased separately, they aren't the same any more.

You, on the other hand, seem to be suggesting splitting purchase of talents and purchase of spells so you have three quantities:

• which spells and talents you can choose
• how many spells you can choose
• how many talents you can choose

and all of them are IQ.

Nearly all modern games detach these so that the limit is on a weighted sum of all these quantities, rather than all being separately limited.

An advantage of this is that players can choose to make a character better at one at the cost of being worse at others: e.g. a Luke Skywalker type who is more talented but less experienced, or vice versa. It also avoids the Conan the Genius problem.

The disadvantage is that if you separate things enough some might become dump stats. That can be addressed to some extent by giving players free points that can only be spent in certain ways, but it gets more complex.

Not a superhero but I would definitely notice. There are some talents wizards tend to want, often because they play well with high IQ: Alertness, Detect Traps if they can get it, Naturalist, Literacy, Tactics & Strategist, Assess Value, Disguise, etc. Normally wizards are very limited in how many of these they can take because it cuts into their spell menu - Literacy and maybe Alertness tends to be it. But with 6 points of freebies there are some nice options.

Does your system have a long term growth path by which a hero, say, can have more than their IQ points of talents? Or do they basically get their generated IQ at the start and probably just a few points more as they gain experience?

Re: Leveling up skills
 

While the 'fluff' of how magic works in the game world is missing, the nature of spells is implicit in the design of the system. They have an IQ cost which means they require exactly the same kind of mental (and experiencial) capital investment as talents. TFT provides no comparable rules for an ALCHEMIST learning individual formulas, for example. They simply have access to them as a function of their talent which means that spells (as presented) are fundamentally different from that model. That's not to say that you couldn't create a similar talent dependency for spells (i.e. a WIZARDRY talent) which would support the idea of them being more like 'recipes', but I prefer the game's original assumption those abilities... that you can't gain such power without sacrificing a part of your mind and thus reducing your capacity for more mundane skills.

Re: Leveling up skills
 

I said they had fewer jobs in Wizard but acquired additional minor roles in TFT, so not sure I'm contradicting that, though I doubt the value of the multiply tripartite structure you've defined.

In Melee, at least, ST is more about weapons than about hit points.

You're right, I left out that DX also affects action order.

Re: Leveling up skills
 

Maybe because Alchemists don't bother learning recipes, they are always doing the equivalent of casting from books.

I think you're inferring things from features of the game system that were never meant to be used that way and should not be trusted in that role.

Re: Leveling up skills
 

Perhaps. For me, games rules are an abstract but authoritative source on how the game world works. If the system says spells are purchased from the same resource pool as talents then those abilities are going to be treated as equivalent and competing knowledge groups in the 'color' I add to the setting. No other inference is reasonable IMO

BTW, I'm assuming we've completely abandoned the original topic at this point, yes? If so, we should probably move this discussion to a new post to continue.

Re: Leveling up skills
 

You might not notice as much as you think, but that would be because I was suggesting a white room experiment: two IQ 12 wizards with otherwise identical stats, one with 12 spells but zero talents (created under the Wizard rules) vs one with the same 12 spells and 6 talents (created under ITL rules modified by my separated memory tracks). One on one with a Wizard playmat for the arena. How much would the 6 points of talents help the wizard who had them against the one with no talents? Very little I'd think! Of the eight talents you mentioned only Tactics might come into play, and then very little. Everything else being equal one is not going to overpower the other. Take them out of the arena to a different situation and mix in other characters and those 6 talents might make a huge difference, but now you're in an environment where all the other figures will have talents too, some even more than 6. The 12 spell/6 talent wizard may or may not do better than anyone else, except perhaps the 12 spell/0 talent wizard depending on the situation. If no one has the one talent most applicable in that situation, these two wizards are virtually equals again.

No, this was still before Legacy, and in those regards we stuck to RAW: talent costs couldn't exceed IQ points, but any increase in IQ still gave you another point to spend on talents (I wish Legacy hadn't dropped that!). Where we deviated was that increased IQ would give a wizard one more point towards talents and one more point towards spells. Not that our players really increased their characters IQs all that often anyway.

Re: Leveling up skills
 

Again, you don't need a Wizardry talent to reduce the capacity for more mundane skills. Just keep charging them double cost for talents. Heck, you could charge triple cost. Now there's an idea! Two "branches" of magic: some wizards work as under RAW, but other wizards can have as many spells as IQ points, all separate from talents, but they pay triple for talents. They'd be your specialists among specialists. Really useless except for spell casting :)