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Originally Posted by Gnome
The problem with custom Talents that perfectly match a character's skill list is that it messes with balance between characters and forces decisions into a narrower band.
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Agreed.
This is how I described my own touchstones for talents a million years ago:
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1) Talents should have an underlying "common trait" that can be described and that ties all the related skills together.
For a realistic talent, we ought to be able to identify what the skills in question have in common. Cinematic Talents need no such justification -- they just really need a common theme -- but they're not really what this post is about.
2) Talents shouldn't be "must have advantages" for a particular character archetype.
Talents work best, it seems to me, when they're used to make characters distinctive. Any talent that covers all the bases for a particular character "type" such that all characters of that type will want the talent, don't appeal to me.
3) Talents should be applicable to more than one Genre or Character Type.
Sort of the flip side of the above. A talent should be a conceivable add-on for more than one type of character, or should be applicable to more than one genre. (I recognize that this puts me at odds with some official talents that have shown up in genre books! As always, this is strictly my opinion about things.)
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