Trollworld's Got Talent

One of the nice ideas in T&T is Talents. Those little things that your character has a knack for. These can be quite broad reaching such as a talent for wilderness survival, or very narrow and focused, a talent for Five Card Stud Poker.

A character gains a new talent with each advance in level. This helps to make character levels meaningful in the game. However existing Talents do not automatically improve when a character improves in level. Currently the only way to improve a Talent is to improve he base attribute for that Talent. This doesn't really change the effectiveness of the talent, it remains fixed at the same. Bonus rolled when the character first gained the talent.

My proposal is to allow characters to purchase improvements to Talents in e exact same way they purchase improvements to Attributes. Thus for a cost of 10 AP times the current level of the Talent they can improve it by +1. Talents are recorded as Attribute+Talent, for example Climbing DEX+3. For 30 AP a character could improve this to Climbing DEX+4.

This allows talents to improve over time independent of their base attributes. It is for the player to judge whether it is cost effective to improve talents or if the AP would be better spent improving attributes. If a character has several talents tied to the same attribute it will probably be better to raise the attribute, thus raising the chance of success for SRs applicable to ALL the talents. This is especially so if the attribute is a prime attribute for the character as passing a level threshold allows he character to add their increased level to SRs as well.

This change does make Talents a bit more like skills and increases their effect on the game.