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 :)

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.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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?

`````````````````````````````````````````````````` ```
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.

Re: Leveling up skills
 

Yes, that's what I'm talking about as well.

For a 32 point character a 2-point talent costs 1,000 XP and attributes cost 100 XP. There's no decision: attributes are clearly a better buy.

For a 41-point character a 2-point talent still costs 1,000 XP but an attribute costs 8,000. It's unlikely by this stage that anyone is buying attributes. Again, no decision.

In between there's a brief period where attributes and talents are both possible and there's an actual decision but it doesn't last very long, maybe only 1 point, maybe 2. That's why I say in principle yes, there's a decision, but in practice there isn't.

Re: Leveling up skills
 

I wonder if there would be any value to making the two factors of our PC, Attributes and Talents, share the same progressive cost in XP?
Or
Match the flat cost system of talents for attributes?

Obviously TFT has an exponential xp cost to discourage characters from becoming 40+ point super heroes so the 1st option would seem to keep the "tough decision" you wish to embrace while not breaking the original level cap as written.

A thought just occurred to me. What if talents (even spells?) did not have IQ costs of 1,2, or 3, but instead had xp costs? You keep the minimum IQ requirement and or ST,DX,Base Talent prerequesets but turn something like "chemist" into a 2k xp cost.
Not sure how you could marry this with character creation but maybe you get a value of "life skill" experience based on IQ to spend only on talents when designing a new toon?

Re: Leveling up skills
 

Absolutely. That was one of the primary drivers for my 'tiers' framework. I redesigned the XP progression scale so that attributes and abilities stay close (in XP costs) within their respective power levels or stages of gameplay.


I don't see any reason to discourage advancement beyond 40 TAP which is also reflected in my preferred progression scheme.


You've clearly been tapping into the same divine source of righteous game design as me. ;)

In my game, all post-creation additions to the character are XP-driven. I did opt to replace IQ requirements for talents/spells w/ TAP-based milestones, but IQ costs/weights are gone once play starts. I'm fine w/ there being a different process for pre- and post-creation phases of the game.

So here's the framework I use...

TAP up to 30 - 50 XP per increase (this should generally only be applicable to characters brought back from death or otherwise dropped below their starting attribute level)

31st to 32nd AP - 100 XP per point (relevant for the above scenario as well as 'halflings' and other 30-point races)
33rd to 34th AP - 200 XP
35th to 36th AP - 300 XP
37th to 39th AP - 500 XP
40th to 42nd AP - 700 XP
43rd to 45th AP - 900 XP
46th to 49th AP - 1200 XP
50th to 53rd AP - 1500 XP
54th to 57th AP - 1800 XP
(progression past this point is possible, but unlikely)

TAP 31-36 represents the NOVICE tier in my system
TAP 37-45 is the VETERAN tier
TAP 46-57 is the LEGENDARY tier

Each tier (which is determined by TAP... see above) has two levels of talents; Basic and Advanced. In the NOVICE tier, for example, the talents in those groups roughly correspond to items that previously cost 1 and 2 IQ points respectively. Talents in the two VETERAN tier categories roughly correspond to talents that cost 2 and 3 IQ points respectively, but the IQ 'weights' are no longer relevant past character creation and I've changed and shifted around a decent number of the original RAW choices (as well as adding many new talents).

NOVICE Tier:
Basic = 250 XP
Advanced = 400 XP
(most are revised IQ 7-11 talents and spells)

VETERAN Tier:
Basic = 600 XP
Advanced = 850 XP
(many of these are new or expanded versions of IQ 11-14 abilities)

LEGENDARY Tier:
Basic = 1150 XP
Advanced = 1500 XP
(these talents are all new)

Re: Leveling up skills
 

That's more or less what mIQ does. It allows tradeoff of attributes against talents, the way most modern designs do.

RAW doesn't do this and it's intentional. SJ fears attribute bloat, which he defines, more or less, as attributes rising to such a level that the standard 3/whatever rolls becoming too easy. He therefore wants a limit on character attributes. But he doesn't see breadth as a problem in the same way, so RAW doesn't impose a limit on gaining talents and spells.

I have huge issues with RAW experience. The Great Talent Desert is a terrible consequence and I think it's unrealistic to expect every campaign to use the same attribute cap.

Plus worrying about those 3/? rolls is the tail wagging the dog: I want ST 19 to use a great sword in one hand, not to pass ST rolls. I want IQ 16 for three spells with "seven hexes" in their description, not to pass IQ rolls, I want DX 17 not to pass DX rolls but so I can have adjDX 12 in improved plate and a large shield. It's not the player's fault that acquiring those capabilities inevitably makes them breeze through attribute checks as well.

That said, the principle does have something behind it. An experienced character having a lot of breadth makes sense, whereas one with godlike attributes can easily get silly.

A compromise might be to make talents start cheap like attributes (maybe 50?) and go up like they do, but more slowly and cap the talent points at 500. That would at least address the Great Talent Desert.

Re: Leveling up skills
 

Amen to everything you just said David. That's actually a great "state of the union" address for where we're at with the Legacy version of TFT.

Why couldn't we have one simple blanket rule wherein all attribute check rolls are made against a fixed maximum attribute value, independent of any character's actual attribute.

Wait -- it occurs to me we already actually have that built into the Critical Success and Failure rule (ITL 9). Doesn't that alone vaccinate us against any ill effects of "attribute bloat"? If success rates for attribute checks are already capped by automatic failure, then higher attribute numbers can't really hurt the game, can they? What am I missing?

True it would be a pretty dull game if everyone could crank all three attributes up to 15. Every roll would have a 96-98% chance of success, and that may be the specific thing SJ was trying to avoid. But we do want some attributes to get well above 14 for purposes other than making attribute checks, as in all those good examples David brought up.

Now I wonder if lowering the threshold for automatic failure to 15 on 3 dice instead of 16 (or even as low as 14!) would so mitigate the effects of attribute bloat we could drastically cut the Experience Point costs of everything else, without any more rule changes than those.