Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeff Lord
FWIW, I proposed the idea of "Attributes/2" back in July of 2018.
The thread: http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread...=158370&page=7
I wrote:
"...
Our "fix" for this perceived dilemma was to simply allow a character to have points of talents/spells/languages equal to half his character points round down. So a starting 32 point character would be able to take 16 points, a 36 point character would have 18 points and so on.
IQ minimums still applied... |
Hi Jeff! I think I may have read your suggestion, but back then I'd just found & joined the forum, and that thread was a couple hundred posts long, so I did a lot of quick skimming.
It may be the most elegant of the proposals we've been kicking around, a simple change that would address several concerns in just a few words. I love that kind of house rule.
It has a couple consequences to worry about though, so I'll go on preferring my solution.
16 points of talents for a starting character seems too much to me. One problem with that, and this applies more to new players, is that it will sure take longer to build a new character owing to having so many talents to choose from. I've known players who would go crazy dealing with that :) While no one has to allocate their points all at once, I know there's folk who would insist on it. Under RAW (or my own proposed variant) a fighter, if not a wizard, can be created in 5 minutes easy. Filling 16 slots is going to make that take much longer, causing some awkwardness at the table.
More importantly, a consequence of the /2 rounded down formula is that an advancing character needs two attribute increases for a new talent point. At 32 you have 16, at 33 you also have 16, at 34 you go up 1, but not until 36 do you go up one more. A 40 point character only has 4 more talent points than when they started at 32, which is a very small amount of change for the years of play it could take to get to 40 points. Yes it's nice to start with 16, but knowing you'll never get passed 20 talent points seems to take much of the fun out of the future.
For survival reasons every character is going to want to assign those 16 initial slots to anything and everything that might help keep them alive, because staying alive is always the first priority. But then the education, the skills of the figure, are largely predetermined for the length of their career.
I'll consider changing my proposal from 2 TP for each IQ increase to 2 TP for
any attribute increase -- I have to think more on that. But I'll still want to limit initial talent points at equal to starting IQ, or 8 points, or something else along those lines. Now doing it this way, progressing from 32 to 40 points will result in a 16 talent point increase, which is something to look forward to.
I fear though that without requiring more earned IQ to gain talents, IQ will turn into a dump stat for all but wizards.