Undiscovered Talents

[hcobb]

At character creation only a character may put aside any number of "IQ points" into Undiscovered Talents instead of talents, spells or languages. Note down the number of points and move on.

At some later time the character may declare in the middle of an adventure that they've suddenly remembered their Naturalist lectures from school (or whatever) and trade in the UT points needed to learn the talent, spell, language, but with an asterisk next to it. As long as that asterisk is marked the talent works, but at one more die for any rolls using it until a critical success is rolled. Once one critical success is made the talent or spell is then a normal talent.

Note that a character could at creation hold back skill points and then apply these to a higher IQ talent once they've trained up their IQ that much.

A wizard who knows the basic Fire spell could suddenly know the 3-hex fire spell (for zero cost) once they've raised their IQ to 12, but it would operate as an asterisk marked spell as above, rolling 4/DX to cast until a critical success was made.

[JLV]

Interesting! But I probably won't use it, because it seems like an unnecessary complication at this point. Maybe after the same group had played three or four campaigns, something like this would be a great way to shake up everyone's understanding of the rules and end "player complacency", though. Especially if the Villains get to do it too! ;-)