IQ gain and free talents?

[Jeff Lord]

@TippetsTX - I fully concede that the Attributes/2 "solution" is optimized for Classic TFT. Back then, it was all we had. ;)

We played with a 48 point attribute cap, so it was a little more forgiving than Legacy's 40 point cap.

And it goes without saying that every play group is different. As such, I never observed "alot more wizard/heroes and hero/wizards than your typical TFT game." Your group might have taken it in an entirely different direction. De gustibus!

@Steve Plambeck - I totally get what you're saying, especially with regards to Legacy's aforementioned 40 point cap. But, following my stated point that every play group is different, a lot of your "bugs" were seen as "features" by my players.

You wrote:
"16 points of talents for a starting character seems too much to me. . . Filling 16 slots is going to make that take much longer, causing some awkwardness at the table."

Filling all 16 points almost never happened with my players. Although I do see the problems it might present to a complete TFT novice.

Also:
"For survival reasons every character is going to want to assign those 16 initial slots to anything and everything that might help keep them alive, because staying alive is always the first priority. But then the education, the skills of the figure, are largely predetermined for the length of their career."

My players may respectfully disagree - staying alive was NOT always the first priority. :) I cannot tell you how fixated my group was (and still is!) on seemingly non-useful talents like mimic. And, again, almost everyone eschewed filling all 16 slots, so "predetermination" wasn't really a problem.

You also wrote:
"It may be the most elegant of the proposals we've been kicking around, a simple change that would address several concerns in just a few words. I love that kind of house rule."

You are most kind to say so. We thought so as well. ;) We wanted our TFT to "feel" like TFT. We thought, at the time, that this was the best "non-fiddly" way to accomplish this.

It most definitely does not mesh as well with Legacy RAW.

[TippetsTX]

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

Why though? Following RAW, the wizard will burn through their talent points twice as fast as the non-wizard, and if you follow RAW those talent points are spent on spells too. (That's not how I do it, I charge everyone the same, but require the wizards to take an expensive wizardry talent that eats up about half of their usual starting talent points anyway to get the same effect.)

True, but 16 points for starting talents and/or spells creates an opportunity for more blending of the character types than was normal. It was rare to have a starting character with more than 12 IQ in our campaign back-in-the-day.

Admittedly, that's me applying my biases today back to how we might have dealt with that kind of surplus.

[zot]

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

More importantly, a consequence of the /2 rounded down formula is that an advancing character needs two attribute increases for a new talent point. At 32 you have 16, at 33 you also have 16, at 34 you go up 1, but not until 36 do you go up one more. A 40 point character only has 4 more talent points than when they started at 32, which is a very small amount of change for the years of play it could take to get to 40 points. Yes it's nice to start with 16, but knowing you'll never get passed 20 talent points seems to take much of the fun out of the future.

Yeah, that's why I think keeping the option to buy TP at 500 a pop might be a good way to supplement that.