Talents & Martial Arts

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Icelander

What do you perceive as the problem with Talents?

High levels of talent don't scale well against low levels. If you've got a Talent that is pts efficient at 4 levels it may not be pts efficient at 1 or 2 levels. It certainty won't be as efficient. Thus the norm seems to be always to buy the
Talent at maximum ;levels.

I believe this distorts character creation and given the choice of seeing DX16 v. DX12+ Talent 4 I'd take the DX-monster just for the greater simplicity.

Talents also tend to produce clusters of all the Skills in the Talent at equally high levels whether that actually fits the character concept or not. Should all Outdoorsmen be as good at Fishing as they are at Survival? For practical catching of things to eat I would have the character use Survival anyway. Angling is a peculiar Hobby Skill.

There's the general issue of total complexity of the game too. I haven't actually seen the problem of Gurps being too simplistic in the way it handles this sort of thing. Talents are just 0one more thing I would have to explain to new players "No, you probably don't want to get into Gurps at this level of complexity. Your character isn't badly designed f he doesn't have a talent.".

So Talents appear generally counterproductive to me.