(TFT) Re: Forgetting

[Brett Slocum <BSlocum@ancept.com>]

From: Joe Hartley <jh@brainiac.com>
> I also question the forgetting of a skill.  I have not ridden a
> bicycle in a long time, but I have no doubt that if I were to get
> on one now, I'd be riding well in moments.
> 
> I had taken a long break from astronomy after I got married, and it
> was only in the past couple of years that I got back into it.  The
> constellations were right where I'd left them, and I remembered 
> them all quickly.

[deletions]
 
> I think that whoever said most of us ignore the forgetting rules was
> probably right.

I agree that forgetting is not easy. But I truely couldn't design a simple
RLC circuit from my electrical engineering degree in college. I'd have to
learn it all over with perhaps a speedier recovery time. I think mental 
skills are easier to forget than physical ones. I hadn't gone downhill 
skiing for decades and picked it back up in a matter of hours. 

The real question though is how does this affect TFT talents? TFT puts
limits
on how many talents you can have for game balance purposes. I think I'd
let people freely drop skills they don't want anymore to make room for those
they want. Either that or implement one of the adjIQ or skill point schemes
presented here previously.

Now, GURPS has done this part correctly. IQ does not limit how many skills
you
can have. Age does. The younger you are, the less time you've had to develop
skills, and therefore the lower your skill point maximum. And this limit is
optional. The limit is given as Age * 2. So an 18 year old has a maximum of
36 skill points, which is still pretty substantial. I have had very few
characters
that had to be older to accommodate a high skill point total.

While we are on the topic of GURPS skills, I would agree that GURPS is
rather
inconsistent on the breadth and depth of individual skills. Some are
extremely
broad, like most TFT talents, and others are very narrow areas of expertise.

There is also some overlap between some skills. Mostly this was caused by
the
development of GURPS over 15 years by numerous authors, unlike TFT's
development
over a much shorter time by essentially one person. This is something that
needs 
to be addressed in future editions of GURPS (if there ever is a 4th
Edition).

I happen to like the GURPS approach, for it allows *much* more variation
within
a particular character type. Sometimes, TFT characters start looking kinda
cookie
cutter alike. This became particularly evident when I started 
creating a TFT Tekumel conversion. On Tekumel, in the temples, there are
three 
main types of priests: administrative-, ritual- and scholar-priests.
Administrative 
priests mostly run the temples properties and lands. Ritual priests perform
the 
rituals and sacrifices. The scholar priests study anything from ancient
languages 
to magic. They each have religious training, but have specialized in
different 
areas. Their amounts of religious and ritual training differ vastly.
Requiring
all of them to take 2 points for Priest in TFT seemed too much. My GURPS
Tekumel 
conversion simply required different minimum skill levels in Theology, 
Performance (ritual), etc. But the TFT talent system was too chunky for my
tastes
in this particular instance (this is not in general a problem for me). I
ended 
up abandoning the TFT conversion until a later date due to my desire to get
it 
closer to "true" Tekumel.

Not that I won't run Tekumel with TFT. But it's not something I'm going to 
net-publish soon.
-----
Brett Slocum <bslocum@ancept.com>
=====
Post to the entire list by writing to tft@brainiac.com.
Unsubscribe by mailing to majordomo@brainiac.com with the message body
"unsubscribe tft"