Re: (TFT) Focus, grasshopper.

["" <pvk@oz.net>]

It's a great and very true point that the real world isn't balanced, in the sense of game balance or fairness, and also in the sense that whatever situation exists in terms of the effectiveness of things like weapons, armor, tactics, skills, human abilities, and so on, reality is something different from what each person thinks it is. That's how it is that some people's views on tactics can seem so insightful and effective compared to their contemporaries (e.g. Alexander the Great, Napoleon...).

On the other hand, it seems to me that that's not exactly what's going on in Richard's example of adding Quickdraw talents to TFT. Sometimes a game provides a view of reality at one level of abstraction, and adding detailed pieces at a more detailed level can skew balance and not really be more realistic. In this example, I can think of at least two arguments why adding quickdraw talents might not be realistic: 

1) The culture may not have invented it yet, so even if the players have the idea, it doesn't follow they should be added. In a genre where it is _missing_ however (e.g. Wild West or Samurai Japan), it might be very appropriate. In a fantasy world, of course, the GM says.

2) While it may be possible to quickdraw something, maybe TFT intends to model mental readiness as well as physical readiness only at the level it already does: with Initiative, Tactics and Strategy talent, DX, the Ready maneuver, etc. If you give a talent that asserts that characters can be immune from having to Ready, it might over-model the impact of how long it takes to physically get a weapon in hand - which in reality is only a second or two at most even without any quickdraw practice - In other words, maybe Ready abstractly represents more than the physical time to ready a weapon in hand. 

Also it has an impact on the IQ talent capacity system... Hmm, I only have 1 IQ point "left": do I choose to become literate, or to learn quickdraw? 

PvK
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