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Old 07-26-2018, 06:45 PM   #7
Anomylous
 
Join Date: Jul 2018
Default Re: Variant talent costs/mana

Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris Goodwin View Post
Given today's article, the cleric would have its own cheap list. Religious knowledge, physicker, a few spells, some other bits. And then choose one set from a pair of mutually exclusive lists: physical combat or advanced clerical magic.
This whole line of thought is really starting to smack of a class system. I think that ideally, all talents *and spells* would cost the same to all characters, and specialization would be encouraged by synergy effects, either written in the rules (i.e. Vet costing less to learn if you already have Physicker, various talents needing prerequisites, potentially different "colleges" of magic) or simply by strategic considerations (try to do too many things and you just suck at all of them).

Nobody should be able to do everything, but I don't want characters hedged into specific niches by the game system itself. If I liked that kind of artificial constraint, I'd be playing D&D.

EDIT:

Quote:
My Preferred Idea

You could make the lists smaller and expect characters to buy several lists. Maybe Fighter, Archer, Wilderness, Thief, Scholar, Merchant are all lists, and Wizard is several lists. So a hunter-gatherer culture character might buy Archer and Wilderness, or a druid might buy a wizard list and wilderness, or an assassin might buy Fighter and Thief, or a thief might buy Thief and Merchant. Maybe not all lists cost the same. Maybe we imagine that commoners have no lists.
On thinking about it, I actually like this idea pretty well. It seems like it wouldn't change basic character designs that much for non-magic-using characters - they're generally built around one or two roles, anyway, if they want to be effective. The big appeal of it is that it allows character designs like the "druid" or "cleric", formerly not possible with the strict hero/wizard divide.

Last edited by Anomylous; 07-29-2018 at 10:41 PM. Reason: actually thought about what I said
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