wizards and the 'scholarly' talents

[larsdangly]

I think there should be a number of talents besides literacy that can be purchased for equal cost by wizards and heroes, both because I find it to be in keeping with the scholarly life of wizards and the sorts of things I imagine wizards having to think about when they learn magic, and because I think it opens up the diversity and interest of wizard characters without meaningfully 'messing' with the sorts of play balance that seem to bother people. It feels like a 'win' all the way around. Here's a list of the talents from the new edition I would treat this way:

Literacy
The Mundane Talents, Scribe, Astrologer and Calligrapher
Naturalist (perhaps the most controversial, as it is quite useful)
Detect Lies (seems disproportionate to make a wizard pay 4 for this)
Physicker
Writing
Priest
Expert Naturalist
Chemist
Mathematician
Scholar
Alchemist
Master Physicker
Theologian
Languages

The one major counter argument for this, I would say, is that it infringes on the purviews of character types that don't get much attention in most of our discussions of the system but that are really interesting and fun in play: practical or scholarly types who are neither wizards nor blood soaked maniacs - just skillful people making their way through a dangerous world. Some of the great heroes of fiction fit this mold (e.g., Indiana Jones). If one found that my suggestion above discouraged these sorts of PC's, I'd suggest scaling back on the list. Personally, I don't find this to be the case, simply because the players with whom I interact tend to create PCs that are interesting to themselves rather than having some idealized mixture of powers.