[DF] Talents for the Standard Templates

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Gnome

The thief seems like he could be fun, but he's really not that great at anything of essential importance. A powerful Talent could help with this by making the thief really awesome at what he does for fewer points.

This is really dependent on how you run the game, I think. I've run plenty of fantasy in GURPS, including three campaigns that contributed very directly to Dungeon Fantasy, and there were few issues with thieves being useful despite me not restricting wizards whatsoever. A big part of that was making the collection of skills important . . . Warriors could often sneak and climb, wizards had spells for seeing secrets and opening locks, but only the thief could sneak in, climb up, find the secret, open it up, avoid the trap, steal the right thing, reset the trap, relock the door, climb down, and sneak out without using magic that would trigger detection and without ever fighting anyone. And I made most MacGuffins at least that hard to get, because if the plot hinged on a MacGuffin, I wasn't going to make it easy to grab.

Sure, there were lots of lower-stakes situations where wizards could just walk up to a door and cast Short-Circuit Plot, or warriors could use Stealth to scout, but that's not something I consider unique to thieves anyway. I expect all PCs to have a way to sneak, climb, and get past barriers – Climbing, Forced Entry, and Stealth, or magical equivalents, are everyman skills. What thieves have is many ways to do all of those things well and at once. When sneaking is the central point of the plot, a thief is useful. The rest of the time, he's just another guy who can sneak and fight . . . like everybody else.

Which isn't to say that I disagree that magic can usurp roles, because it can. But I've never found "thief" to be the worst victim of this. In 26 years of running GURPS, the biggest anti-wizard complaints came not from the players of thieves, but from those playing warriors and sages. The players of warriors got pretty tired of Deathtouch and Invisibility, and the players of sages got sick of most of the Knowledge college. In fact, in one particular campaign, the net result was a preponderance of thieves, because with wizards handling killing, healing, and divination, the main role left was putting oneself in mortal danger to deal with unspecified traps and guardians in order to snatch plot tokens.

[Anthony]

My experience was that the difference between 'thief' and 'warrior' was the relative expenditure of points spent on ST vs DX; the thief had ST 9-11, the warrior might have more. Much of that was from 3rd edition, 4th edition might throw in talents, but IME talents costing more than 5/level aren't very popular unless they're split between DX and IQ.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Anthony

The thing is, there's really nothing wrong, conceptually, with a character who uses magic instead of a lockpick to open locks, or really, any other role. The problem is that for a wizard the cost of being effective in many areas is only marginally higher than the cost of being effective in a single area, and thus the entire design of GURPS Magic encourages stepping on other people's schticks, because that's what magic is actually best at doing (well, that and casting Destroy Plot spells).

Yes. GURPS Magic is built around a "most wizards are generalists" paradigm.

[b-dog]

I agree that thieves aren't the only class that gets overshadowed by wizards. I was just using Lockmaster as an example of how a wizard can put a point into a spell and can easily overshadow the thief. The Scholar gets hosed the most because the wizard can laern information spells at IQ + Magery and does not have to carry a bunch of books and then can cast combat and defensives spells as well.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by b-dog

The Scholar gets hosed the most because the wizard can laern information spells at IQ + Magery and does not have to carry a bunch of books and then can cast combat and defensives spells as well.

The scholar gets hosed for the same reason anyone with a high IQ gets hosed: because the price of magical spells is front-loaded into the IQ attribute, and so once you have a high IQ, you're not that many points away from getting access to the magic spells.

Compare the difference. It's a matter of whether magic spells is better than Wild Talent and Modular Abilities. Which it is. The spells aren't priced in relation to those things.

If you were to separate IQ from the spells, then it would no longer be an issue. Make a Wizard use a sixth attribute that costs 20/level and see how he compares to the Scholar then.

[b-dog]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

The scholar gets hosed for the same reason anyone with a high IQ gets hosed: because the price of magical spells is front-loaded into the IQ attribute, and so once you have a high IQ, you're not that many points away from getting access to the magic spells.

Compare the difference. It's a matter of whether magic spells is better than Wild Talent and Modular Abilities. Which it is. The spells aren't priced in relation to those things.

If you were to separate IQ from the spells, then it would no longer be an issue. Make a Wizard use a sixth attribute that costs 20/level and see how he compares to the Scholar then.

Maybe the base level of Magery could be 10 for spending 5 points and increasing 10 points per level for each +1 as someone already posted.

From one stand point IQ and Magical ability may not have to be related. Maybe to use magic is purely mystical while IQ is based on logic and reason so they have little to do with each other. But wizards may still want high IQs so they can decipher spell books and other magical tomes. But other wizards may not be so scholarly and they only learned magic for the fun of it or whatever. Thus wizards may typically have IQs in the 12 to 13 range and Magery 3 which would give them a 13 level for learning spells. In any case IQ may not translate into high mystical ability. The same would be true of clerics who use faith for powering their magic rather that logic and reason which is what IQ represents.

With this scenario the Scholar and Artificer would be the true geniuses while wizards would tend to be smart but they would not know everything. If you want a really smart wizard maybe you could have a mixed class Scholar/Wizard which would fit the traditional Gandalf image.

But being both a genius and being able to cast magic seems like it is unfair to those who have smart PCs who can't cast spells.

Magery 0 5 points Base 10
Magery 1 15points Base 11
Magery 2 25points Base 12
Magery 3 35 points Base 13
Magery 4 45 points Base 14
etc.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Much of that was from 3rd edition, 4th edition might throw in talents, but IME talents costing more than 5/level aren't very popular unless they're split between DX and IQ.

Part of what talents split between two attributes do is makes it much more complex to compute relative value. That's where real choices get added back in.

There's no choices to be made if one option gets you Thingamabob at 10$, and the other option gets you the exact same Thingamabob at 2$. Technically you can take the first, but you can immediately see the second option is better and you'd be foolish to take the first option. This isn't even a Homo economicus sort of distinction, because the two theoretical thingamabobs really are identical - say two exactly identical iPods, both legal, both brand new, etc.

Three different people, same choice, because it's obvious.

A talent for skills controlled by one attribute is more complicated than "Attribute (<talent> only, -XX%)" because the talent has some other small benefits and helps even when you float skills around to other attributes, but the single-Attribute talent is still simple enough that you can reasonably compare to "Attribute (<talent> only, -XX%)" or even just "Attribute".

You're still likely to get three different people making the same choice, if they think about it a little bit. Doesn't take much thinking though in most cases.

A multi-Attribute talent starts getting into genuine choices. There are real trade offs, real decisions to be made - like "This car has better gas millage, that car has better performance, this third car has good millage and reasonable performance, and it's cheap, but it has a terrible reputation for maintenance. I could get an extended warranty, that makes it much cheaper to maintain, but less cheap to buy..."

This is where three different people might make three different choices - one wants max Talent, one goes for attributes, one goes for a blend, say.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Part of what talents split between two attributes do is makes it much more complex to compute relative value.

Most of what it does it make it so you can't just raise the attribute. DX! (DX, sell back basic speed -- or just decide that +0.25 basic speed worth 5 points) is 15 points/level, and talents affecting combat skills (which are a big reason to take DX) have historically been firewalled off, so if you want a combat skill (and its DF, you do) talents costing over 11 are always a bad choice, and unless you have zero skills unaffected by your talent and never expect to make raw DX rolls or defaults, the maximum value is lower and probably lower than 10. IQ! (IQ, sell back Will and Per -- or decide you want them anyway, both are essentially guaranteed useful in DF) is 10 points, so the same calculations apply. If, however, it affects skills of both types, it may cost as much as 21 points to gain equivalent benefits from raising stats.

If you're using the rules for training during downtime (I have never met a GM who did, but they do exist) this calculation changes somewhat, as you have to guess how much training time you expect to gain over the course of the game. If the reaction bonus applies to a particularly useful group (talents are wildly random here), again, the value is increased.

[Kromm]

I agree with those saying "The problem is IQ." In every one of my campaigns where wizards became the source of player-player friction over niches, the issue was less "Wah! She can cheaply increase her effective IQ for spells by getting Magery!" than "Wah! She has a huge IQ that helps her master spells and everything else mental!" In fact, the single biggest source of grumpiness was the IQ 18 sorceress who had Lockpicking-17, Poisons-16, Savoir-Faire-18, etc. . . . That she also had Magery 3 and was casting spells at 19 was neither here nor there in the dispute. Nobody much cared about the Magery.

So far, the best fix mentioned would be to schlep spells off onto a new attribute, which starts at 10 and can't be reduced for points. Keeping the cost at 10 points/level, like Magery, should be fine. That won't gimp dedicated wizards in the slightest . . . at magic. It will, however, mean that they aren't high-IQ, -Will, and -Per monsters who are better at all nonmagical tasks by dint of being smart. And if they want to be good at Hidden Lore, Occultism, Thaumatology, etc., they'll still need IQ. This will put them in the same boat as warriors who need ST [10/level] and DX [20/level] to do their job. (Everybody needs HT, IMO, so I'm not counting that.) If you really want to be mean, limit all spells to Thaumatology level, so that wizards need to up that or IQ to be effective.

Then you could simply make Magery 0 a switch – call it "Magical Awareness" – that lets people perceive magic and use this fifth attribute. Price it however you like.

[Peter V. Dell'Orto]

Originally Posted by Kromm

This is really dependent on how you run the game, I think.

<SNIP!>

Which isn't to say that I disagree that magic can usurp roles, because it can. But I've never found "thief" to be the worst victim of this. In 26 years of running GURPS, the biggest anti-wizard complaints came not from the players of thieves, but from those playing warriors and sages.

I got it from thieves and sages. Warriors were just too damn good at killing, especially if further enhanced by the wizards. Great Haste + Flight + Shield + Dexterity + Invisibility + Deathtouch equals a nasty wizard. Drop Deathtouch and put it on the high-DX, high-ST, Weapon Master fighter and you've got a death machine. So we ended up with a party of wizards + fighters, with thiefly skills mostly dealt with by mages, or mages casting them on the lighter fighter types.

Different campaign styles, to be sure.