Leveling up skills

[David Bofinger]

Originally Posted by timm meyers

I wonder if there would be any value to making the two factors of our PC, Attributes and Talents, share the same progressive cost in XP?

That's more or less what mIQ does. It allows tradeoff of attributes against talents, the way most modern designs do.

RAW doesn't do this and it's intentional. SJ fears attribute bloat, which he defines, more or less, as attributes rising to such a level that the standard 3/whatever rolls becoming too easy. He therefore wants a limit on character attributes. But he doesn't see breadth as a problem in the same way, so RAW doesn't impose a limit on gaining talents and spells.

I have huge issues with RAW experience. The Great Talent Desert is a terrible consequence and I think it's unrealistic to expect every campaign to use the same attribute cap.

Plus worrying about those 3/? rolls is the tail wagging the dog: I want ST 19 to use a great sword in one hand, not to pass ST rolls. I want IQ 16 for three spells with "seven hexes" in their description, not to pass IQ rolls, I want DX 17 not to pass DX rolls but so I can have adjDX 12 in improved plate and a large shield. It's not the player's fault that acquiring those capabilities inevitably makes them breeze through attribute checks as well.

That said, the principle does have something behind it. An experienced character having a lot of breadth makes sense, whereas one with godlike attributes can easily get silly.

A compromise might be to make talents start cheap like attributes (maybe 50?) and go up like they do, but more slowly and cap the talent points at 500. That would at least address the Great Talent Desert.