Alternate Talent pricing for math heads

[Vaevictis Asmadi]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Social Skills are often some combination of Intelligence (Interpersonal and/or Thinking Speed), Perception and Charisma, with a bit of Will or Vocal Control or Face Control.

Judging by the particular deficits involved in some cases of Asperger's (like mine), I suggest that you include at least 1 part each of Hearing and Visual perception. Having scrambled sensory processing messes up my ability to perceive, let alone understand, nonverbal social cues (facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, etc.). This has a big negative impact on social skills -- growing up with this problem denied me the ability to learn social norms that weren't explicitly explained in words (and very, very few are in my culture).

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Can you provide some examples of that?

Only from memory, and sadly none of them are on the web. "Omnilexicon", as a friend of the author named it, had about 30 character attributes. I think they started as a three-way split of physical, mental and spiritual, or something like that, and had sub-attributes for strength, dexterity and agility under physical, and several things under mental that I can't remember.

While it's fairly easy to define physical capabilities in ways people can cope with, the sub-flavours of mental capability are harder to nail down. It's comparatively easy for a rules author to split them up in a way that makes sense to them, but getting everyone else involved to understand it the same way is harder than it looks.

In Sagatafl, most rolls are for Skills, and each Skill is fixedly based on the weighted average of some Attribute and sub-Attributes.

That fixing removes quite a lot of the scope for disagreements over understanding, but opens the way for disagreements over realism.

A Language Skill is based on 5 parts Intelligence and 2 parts Will, with the Intelligence being 100% weighted for the Linguistic Intelligence sub-Attribute. This means that if your Linguistic Intelligence sub-Attribute is 7 (far above average) you just use that, without needing to know what your base Intelligence is.

Most Science skills are 4 parts Intelligence (usualy 100% Logical Intelligence), 2 parts Will and 1 part Perception, With the Perception often being 100% or 25% Colour Vision. If it's 25% then you take 25% of the difference between raw Perception and Colour Vision, and apply that.

This rather echoes the problems I found reading the Sagatafl material on the web. It's quite complicated and I found that I wasn't getting a sense of how things fitted together before my short-term memory buffers filled up. To get any idea of how I liked the system, I was going to have to learn it in the way I usually do after I've got engaged with a game. And that didn't appeal.

I've seen a similar problem with a game called "MAD", which is sufficiently complicated that one can't generate characters without using the Java application that has been created in parallel with it.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Only from memory, and sadly none of them are on the web. "Omnilexicon", as a friend of the author named it, had about 30 character attributes. I think they started as a three-way split of physical, mental and spiritual, or something like that, and had sub-attributes for strength, dexterity and agility under physical, and several things under mental that I can't remember.

While it's fairly easy to define physical capabilities in ways people can cope with, the sub-flavours of mental capability are harder to nail down. It's comparatively easy for a rules author to split them up in a way that makes sense to them, but getting everyone else involved to understand it the same way is harder than it looks.

A system I wrote several years ago had a similar split: physical, mental, interpersonal, orthogonal with speed, power, accuracy and endurance. The physical side is easy: physical speed is reaction time, physical power is strength, physical accuracy is manual dexterity, physical endurance is constitution. Mental is a bit trickier: speed is thinking speed, power is maximum complexity of thought, accuracy overlaps with that a bit but could be regarded more or less as mental precision, endurance is willpower.

It gets fuzzier for interpersonal stats: power is charisma, endurance is your ability to resist influence, but speed and accuracy don't have any ready equivalents in the way people normally think about personal interactions.

(That system assumed, like GURPS 4th and many others, that a skill would normally be used with a specific stat but could be floated to others if the occasion demanded it. This is a compromise I'm happy with)

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

It gets fuzzier for interpersonal stats: power is charisma, endurance is your ability to resist influence, but speed and accuracy don't have any ready equivalents in the way people normally think about personal interactions.

Accuracy could be insight; a valuable quality in conversations where someone is trying to hide something.

Speed could well be wit: the thing we don't display when we have a great comeback five minutes too late.

But I'm not sure that these thing add up to a complete description of interpersonal capabilities.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi

Judging by the particular deficits involved in some cases of Asperger's (like mine), I suggest that you include at least 1 part each of Hearing and Visual perception. Having scrambled sensory processing messes up my ability to perceive, let alone understand, nonverbal social cues (facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, etc.). This has a big negative impact on social skills -- growing up with this problem denied me the ability to learn social norms that weren't explicitly explained in words (and very, very few are in my culture).

I'm a bit luckier in that I can easily detect auditory emotional tone, while sucking at body language for most of my life. I was 30 before I could judge my own mother's facial expressions with any useful degree of accuracy. Her stoic nature did not make it any easier.

It's quite true that even the interpreting of "obvious" sensory information is a form of intelligence. Just look at how much brain tissue is dedicated only to faces.

[Xplo]

The problem with making multiple intelligences explicit attributes, as someone noted, is that you run into problems deciding (and agreeing on) how many of those intelligences a particular task involves. The advantage of Talents here (and things like Charisma and Perception) is that those decisions have already been made, for the most part: you're good at these specific skills, or you get a bonus to these tasks, etc. You could argue over skill floating, I guess, but I don't imagine that actually happens very often.

Making it so that multiple broad Talents are not a worse deal than IQ does make choosing what skills go in a Talent somewhat easier, I think; since you can afford to have more skills in a Talent, you don't have to be so picky about only choosing the most essential skills for that Talent, and there's less worry if a few of the skills are relatively worthless.

[Vaevictis Asmadi]

I don't find the talents to be metagamey. There are so many little subsets and variables of personality and intelligence and skill and experience that intersect to make somebody better or worse than one thing over another.

A talent is also a good way to represent "general experience" that would make your defaults better without bumping the attribute. If you've informally read a lot about a subject, or if you just find it easier to remember and use some skills vs. others for whatever reason, that's easily represented by a talent.

So a talent for animal skills could be a combination of having grown up with several pets (general experience) and having a personality that fits working with animals.