Breaking (Bad) Scholars
 

Scholar is a big expensive broad talent, so maybe it would be a good idea to split it up into pieces. It's basically about anthropology, history and just being educated, so my plan is to break up the talent into roughly those pieces.
Issue: Cultured seems like it should be linked to Courtly Graces, and Cosmopolitan seems like it should be linked to Diplomacy. But how?

Usually I dislike ladders but it seems natural here. Is there an alternative?

Are there other talents I could add in the Scholar space? Arcana, for instance?

Re: Breaking (Bad) Scholars
 

In a fantasy game, generic scholar is not inappropriate. Knowledge was not nearly as specialized.

However a number of professions encourage scholarship as an occupational aid. Cleric. Bard or Skald (Snorri was obviously very learned). Highly technical things like military engineer or ship building. Strategy (generals always reference the lore of their trade). Mage, and so on.

It was far more possible to be a renaissance man in the Middle ages (or of course the renaissance) because there was far less data to master.

Re: Breaking (Bad) Scholars
 

I'd prefer them to not be a ladder, so separate elements could be learned independent of each other.

I'd also make the breakdown Arts & Letters, which would cover languages, literature, and art history; Historian, which would cover both history and geography; and Anthropologist (yes, I realize that this is human-centric), which would deal with folklore, costume, customs, religions, cuisine. One could add a fourth scholarly talent: Occultist, which would deal with the history and theory of magic and hidden knowledge.

If doing this, some discounts might be appropriate. For instance, someone with Arts & Letters might learn languages or Bard at a lower XP cost. Similarly, if one had any of them, maybe Mathematician could cost 1 point less.

For more discussion of Scholar, see this thread on the main forum.

Re: Breaking (Bad) Scholars
 

A few months back, I was playing around with a framework using SCHOLAR as a type of specialization (a concept that I've applied to various other talent trees in my revised ruleset). The prerequisite talent is called ACADEMICS which replaces the original SCHOLAR as a generalist skill for academic knowledge and research, but w/o the RAW emphasis on language. When adding my new SCHOLAR talent then, the character would select a specific school of knowledge and expertise, several of which are stand-alone talents in RAW... MATHEMATICIAN, NATURALIST, STRATEGIST, LINGUIST, HISTORIAN, THEOLOGIAN, ARCANIST, etc.

I suppose I could just drop the 'scholar' pretense, but I like the idea of those talents sharing a set of common mechanics. I didn't get too far with the idea, though.

Re: Breaking (Bad) Scholars
 

Basically RAW Scholar is about (a) knowing about foreign cultures i.e. cultural anthropology renaissance version and (b) knowing about extinct cultures i.e. history and archaeology renaissance version. If History doesn't depend on Cultural Anthropology then we have characters who know about extinct cultures but not about those which exist today. Which is kind of strange. But maybe it's possible, if you say that historical knowledge is broader and less deep.

Geography is a tough one because it's really naturally a part of both Historian and Anthropology. I guess if it's current geography then Anthropologist is better?

Anthropologist is a bit too modern a word but I don't know a better.

I really wanted to have a Scholar-light to represent a classical education. A lot of characters might want something like this.

I was thinking of calling it Arcana, because given the place of magic in Cidri I don't think the talent should imply secrecy.

I think the natural discount would be two languages for the price of one. Whether at generation or during experience. Being a linguist needs to be cheaper anyway.

Bard I'm not so sure about. I know in some settings and some games Bards are great travellers who can make lore rolls to speak of distant times and places but that's not a TFT thing.

I don't think so, there isn't any subject matter in common and the fact they both need high IQ is link enough. And CP Snow is on my side.

Good thoughts, thanks.

Re: Breaking (Bad) Scholars
 

The fact that academic knowledge is interdisciplinary rather than wholly compartmentalized means that there will always be some overlap between the different talents. Arts & Letters would reasonably include at least some folklore, for example, and History & Geography would include at least some information about cultures and customs. But that could be solved by requiring a roll for information rather than simply giving it, or, if already requiring a roll, adding a die or more for those with only cursory knowledge.

Re: Breaking (Bad) Scholars
 

I'm not sure what you mean by "folklore" but to me it pretty much by definition is stuff the folk pass around, i.e. not elite culture and not intelligentsia but common people. Though of course some things start as elite culture and filter down, like Perrault's fairy tales. Generally I doubt the classically educated know any more current folklore than do, well, the folk.

Re: Breaking (Bad) Scholars
 

In my campaign/house rules, I've rewritten the Scholar talent as follows:

----
Scholar (3): This talent represents the knowledge of a sage or loremaster. A character with this talent rolls against IQ to remember a fact or recognize an unusual object or condition. The number of dice rolled depends on how obscure the fact, object, or condition is. Characters without this talent roll twice as many dice.

Note that the Literacy talent is *not* a prerequisite for Scholar. Non-literate, oral tradition scholars will often be called “Loremasters.”

The Scholar talent has the same base cost for wizards as for non-wizards.
----

Further thoughts:

The Scholar talent is culture-dependent with different cultures having different versions. "Twice as many dice" is for non-scholars of the same culture, with members of different cultures likely needing to roll more or fewer dice. Common knowledge in the Million Kingdoms may be obscure in the Empire of the South or among the Northern Barbarians, and vice versa.

A +1 reaction bonus from the Scholar talent is *highly* situation-dependent; I prefer to downplay it and even to give a -1 reaction penalty in some cases ("damn prissy egghead..."). So I left out that bonus as a "standard" part of the talent.

The Scholar talent will give the character a big vocabulary in the languages he speaks, which is not quite the same thing as a high level of fluency. It will be more a matter of being able to speak in a "scholarly" register, if desired.

Recognizing languages is not specifically called out in my version, but would fall under an "object" (for writing) or "condition" (for spoken language). So a Scholar would automatically (2 dice vs IQ 13+) recognize languages that a non-scholar would need to roll 4 dice vs IQ to recognize, 3 dice to recognize 6 die obscure languages, 4 dice to recognize 8 die obscure languages, etc.

I'm in the camp of "In a medieval or renaissance world, scholarship will be more unified, rather than specialized the way it is in modern times." Which is why I'm disinclined to split up the talent as suggested in this thread.

Re: Breaking (Bad) Scholars
 

Big call to make a talent have a negative effect.

I think it can still be split up, for several reasons:

• It's perfectly reasonable to play a character who knows a bit about scholarly stuff but isn't a full expert yet. Some GMs choose to represent this with studies or in some other way but multiple talents is a simple method in the style of TFT.
• It's reasonable to have a character who is fascinated by history, or by traveller's tales, or whatever. Even if a formal degree at a university teaches all these subjects, some people (autodidacts, dropouts, etc.) are going to only learn some of them.
• The character who has had a classical education, taught by a scholar, but isn't a scholar themselves, is a common trope in fiction and certainly existed in reality.

Re: Breaking (Bad) Scholars
 

Another nice aspect of splitting the talent (and other multi-benefit talents) is that getting incremental benefits realistically models incremental learning as opposed to huge leaps of ability.