Costs of spells and talents - requirements.

[Rick_Smith]

SECOND POINT:

To cast a spell you have to pay it's cost. This cost is measured in fatigue ST (fST) for all spells (except the Death spell which you pay in ST damage).

IMHO these costs are pretty good. Each spell is an independent little package, it gives you a benefit, and the appropriate cost is built in.

But with talents, there is no cost for using the talent. So the old TFT prevented you from buying all of them by the amount of mIQ they took up.

This is weird. Really quite strange. If I learn how to ride a Horse and I'm IQ 10, then I've filled up 1/10 of all I can learn???

It is not the only way to do things. Many RPG's allow you to master many skills. Let us look at Serenity RPG. Given enough time, what stops you from mastering every skill in the game? Nothing. Except time. It take time (a lot of it) to gain the experience to raise these skills from a d4 to a d12. If you are tracking game time, the character would get old and die before all talents were maxed out. And if you are in dangerous adventures, you are very likely to die first.

As a nod to JLV, he has run a TFT game with this mechanic. Steve was thinking about doing this a while ago... I was shocked but got used to the idea. But Steve changed his mind back.

Now TFT (even using this no memory system) is more restrictive than Serenity, because of attribute prerequisites. In TFT, some talents require a high IQ, others a high ST and others a high DX. With the absolute attribute limit, TFT is more restrictive than Serenity - you can't get all TFT talents, in Serenity you could.

But Steve wants to apply an additional cost to talents. What can this cost be?
It can't be fST. So it has to be... ?

-- It could be learning time.
-- It could be XP needed to buy it.
-- It could be prerequisites. (Example the long lines of dull spells in GURPS magic before you get to the cool ones.)

But the key cost for talents is memory.

This is the solution to the killer problem mentioned above. If you have awesome talents, which everyone would like, you need to have a non-trivial cost to keep them exclusive.