Re: (TFT) Re: Forgetting: GURPS talents

[Pasha and or Rick Smith <pnrsmith@istar.ca>]

> 
> > 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. 

	I would ask how many total hours you spent skiing
and building RLC circuits.  I bet that the number of hours 
skiing are a lot more.

>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.

	I agree.

>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. 

	I agree.  The part of GURPS talents that I don't 
like is that a high IQ figure can become fairly expert at 
virtually any mental IQ talent for 1/2 a point.  Throw in
Eidetic Memory (that power gamer staple) and you get 
all these characters that feel the same since they are expert
at everything.
	This encourages people to take dozens and dozens
of talents.

	Another nice thing about GURPS talents is that
they are planned from the ground up to be expandable by
putting more points into them.  There are _SO MANY_
design elements that are very nice in GURPS, but I'm always
filled with wonder that GURPS was not more fun.


>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.


	In my campaign I have a lower level of cleric talents 
'Acolyte', and would have various specialties of scholar talent.
See my Religions in TFT that was posted to the list a long
time ago.  (How is that  for a useful hyper link!!!)

	Rick

>
>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>
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