Re: (TFT) long talent/skill lists

[PvK <pvk@oz.net>]

If I were going to run TFT and wanted house rules for many-Talented characters, I'd probably just use the house rules Rick used in the campaign I played in with him as GM. They seemed quite simple and solved the problem.

However if I didn't like that and wanted to keep the IQ limit, I might add a system where you can learn a new talent, but if you don't "have room", you need to neglect attention on an old talent, which you still have but it becomes officially Rusty or Neglected and has some penalty to use it - maybe even with a system where the penalty is based on how long you neglect it, or how many neglected talents you have.

The other Talent issue is that I'd want to be able to represent both masters (Talent+1,+2, etc.) and dabblers (people who have some competence but not enough to be counted as the full Talent). That _would_ allow the kind of skill development I was talking about from the GURPS campaign, albeit with a less grainy system.

--- mejobo@comcast.net wrote:

>My one objection on this would be that I think UC 1 or maybe 2 would be considered the level of UC that most weapon masters would have. 3 seems like its a bit high for your character but I suppose it depends on the other characters you play with.

I could see calling it UC 1 with high DX, or UC 1 at +2 through some house rule, as he does not know advanced martial arts - he's just very strong at brawling and wrestling. But the thing is, if a not-so-talented-nor-so-experienced martial artist tried to fight him, he probably couldn't lay a hand on him unless he used some unexpected trick or got lucky. Yes you can just pile on DX, but then you get a character who can do almost anything physical really well.

You sort of COULD represent that character in TFT with a silly-high DX and massively prune the Talent list to, say:
Quarterstaff
Unarmed Combat I
Alertness
Naturalist
Physicker
Literacy
2 main foreign languages

That's about 13 IQ points. Then you could just mention the 60 other things on his GURPS sheet as notes. Again though, it means you need to rely on the GM to replace what GURPS provides in detail for what the character should be able to do compared to other people based on memory (as opposed to rules and record-keeping) of his experiences.

It makes me think of the difference between playing combat with a hex map versus relying on the GM to keep track of who should be able to attack whom when.

> Ultimately I think this is a limit of the whole system. I really like TFT and GURPS (for slightly different things) but I've always found that they were games that worked best in certain circumstances... the XP and advancement systems being one of the main problems. They're great for what they usually need to do but they can be a problem in other situations (ie see how if you use the job tables most peasants will be in the high 50's for attributes when in their middle age).

Agreed.

PvK
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