Should you have to be smart to be a weapon master?

[Steve Plambeck]

High IQ for certain skills (like weapon mastery) made a little more sense under original ITL than it does under Legacy ITL. Formerly you could look at IQ as representing (among other things) the accumulation of the experience needed to learn or master anything, because you literally spent XP on IQ to learn everything. Putting XP on IQ was a mechanism to regulate one's amount of training/learning in proportion to the XP that was not getting spent on ST or DX. Now that mechanism no longer exists (except for initial character creation) because talent advancement must be paid for by XP directly. Increasing IQ and learning things used to compliment each other, but now they compete with each other for the same XP just like ST and DX do. Now it doesn't make sense anymore to have minimum IQ requirements for talents, but if you abandon that then something else breaks: regulation of skills would no longer be tied to overall intelligence. That doesn't work either!

The original rules were less problematic.

[pzmcgwire]

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

High IQ for certain skills (like weapon mastery) made a little more sense under original ITL than it does under Legacy ITL. ... Increasing IQ and learning things used to compliment each other, but now they compete with each other for the same XP just like ST and DX do. Now it doesn't make sense anymore to have minimum IQ requirements for talents, but if you abandon that then something else breaks: regulation of skills would no longer be tied to overall intelligence. That doesn't work either!

The original rules were less problematic.

I agree. Talents like IQ14 for Alchemy and others probably should still have appropriate IQ Minimums but some like Weapon Expertise and Unarmed Combat may have too high an IQ requirement especially as they not only have an IQ requirement, but DX and ST as well. I suppose this keeps beginner character from becoming immediate combat monsters, but maybe a rethink of the IQ minimums for some talents is needed.

I find it interesting that Lawyer is only an IQ8 talent.....

There probably should be a Master Mathematician talent for calculus knowledge and above, though not sure what game effect that extra knowledge would have.