Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck
Long and hard have I pondered these matters since Legacy came out, writing up, rereading, and then tearing up every house rule I could come up with to reconcile the old way of handling IQ and talents with the new way, and with what actually feels right to me. Total attributes getting out of synch with total XP feels dead wrong. Increasing IQ but not getting to add a new talent (gaining a "Talent Point", or TP for short) feels even worse, a real inequity. But the ability to increase overall talents and speed up their acquisition, as compared to original ITL, does seem like a very desirable outcome, yet I still don't like how Legacy goes about it. So here's my latest stab at it, a compromise I'm fairly sure I can live with. Feel free to poke holes in it.
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Initially, each new PC starts with Talent Points (TP) equal to their starting IQ (so far that's RAW under both old and Legacy ITL, but here the resemblances begin to end). Wizards may also know one Spell per point of IQ, separate from Talents, and all characters may know as many Talents as they can afford with their TP. [Side note: in my game wizards have to buy an expensive wizardry talent, so they still have only about half the room for non-magical talents as a non-wizard would. The benefit here is that all Talents can cost the same TP for everyone at all times.]
The TP you started with may be increased in only one way: every time a character increases its IQ Attribute 1 point, it receives two (2) additional Talent Points. (For wizards, increasing IQ by 1 point also means they may now choose one additional Spell in addition to having these 2 more Talent Points.)
As the XP cost for increasing any Attribute goes up steeply the higher the number of total Attributes the character already has, it becomes proportionately more expensive to increase IQ (and by extension, Talent Points) the more advanced a PC becomes, but at least you get two additional TP for whatever you pay for one point of IQ. And while the XP cost to increase an Attribute depends on a PC’s total Attribute Points, that total never includes Talent Points. Talent Points don’t count when adding up one’s Attributes.
This can result in two characters, after they’ve been advancing awhile, having different numbers of Talent Points even when they have the same total count of Attributes. Two 37-point characters, even starting with the same IQ, won’t have the same number of Talent Points if one has been spending their XP to increase ST or DX while the other has been increasing IQ. It will have cost both of them the exact same number of XP to get to 37 total Attributes, but depending on how often they used those XP to increase IQ over the other Attributes one figure could end up with more Talents than the other.
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