Crazy Aido has a blog, and this is his latest post about talents and party sheets

Here is my response on his blog

"Riddle me this Aido. How do feel about a careers forcing you to buy talents as part of their advances then when you change to another career you find you cannot socket them because your card has no reputation slots?

Let’s get all “realistic about it”. I have a talent for learning string instruments faster. I “bought” this talent in my “student” career and it socketed just fine in my career sheet. Now I am on my third career of sale’s representative and it doesn’t socket in my sheet any more. Does this mean I have lost my talent permanently unless I hang around with my mates and “socket” it into their “sheet” (from which I have no idea how to relate into the real world and can only come up with homosexual jokes). I spent a good three years of my life getting that “talent” why would it leave me? PS. It hasn’t.

I am not a fan of losing these skills at all due to career transition as I believe it doesn’t make sense. While I like the idea of socketing talents into spaces (to prevent talent spam) and therefore only being allowed to use certain ones at certain times which allows a little forethought in strategy, I loathe it when a career transition penalizes me for being creative.

I’m all one for penalties but they need to make sense, do you wish to defend this mechanic, do you play it to the T in your party?"

Basically, I'm after the forums opinion on how do you guys "fix" this, or do you even fix it at all?

I am still using the mechanics regarding socketing talents. Mainly not because I like it too much, but rather because I have found that the rules of this game have a delicate equilibrium. If you remove the socketing talent rule, things like the party sheet, some career abilities, diseases (just to mention some) lose part of their relevance. The same happens with other mechanics of the game, they are so intrincately entwined that one has to be very carefull when house ruling. That is only my opinion of course.

Uppon saying that, I use a house rule to allow my players to use talents for which they have no available slot. The ideas behind it are, first, allow the PC's to use punctually talents they acquiered in previous carrers, and second, avoid that it becomes a "I socket whatever talent in whatever slot whenever I like", not because I find it is a wrong thing to do, but because this I find forces you to house rule many other things in the game. May be I am becoming lazy.

I used to be good at this...
A PC can always socket a talent into a slot which does not match the talent type. Each time a PC obtains any benefit from this talent, the GM acts as if the player would have just rolled a Delay, or an Exertion, what ever the GM finds more appropriate (even if there was no roll involved).

Fenderstat said:

I feel your "plight", we had a similar discussion in my gaming group. We don't like that talents can become obsolete, but we do like the slotting mechanic. So what I came up with as a GM was the following:

I created six new talents, two for each type of slot (reputation, focus, tactic). I was inspired by the "creative thinking" focus talent, but I felt it wasn't perfect. So I created a set of three "creative" talents which allow you to slot anything into them. I also created three "extra talent slot" talents, giving the players the option to buy extra slots for their characters. This was very well recieved in my group, and might be a solution to your problems, as you can use an advancement point to keep using "old" talents.

I only allow them to purchase one extra talent slot per rank. Furthermore it's only possible to purchase them once per talent type, which also fit the core rules where it says that you can't own multiple copies of one card. The same limitations are of applied to the creative talents.

This gives my players the oppurtunity to customize and get creative, for example playing a tactical envoy, a reputable slayer or a focused pit fighter. It even offers former Zelots a way to utilize his/her Zelot career ability, slotting the insanity into a "creative" slot. It also helps the players that choose to progress in low level (basic) careers, as they can purchase extra talent slots.

It still penalizes the players in a way, as it costs an advancement to purchase each one of the talents. But it allows the players to choose how to build their characters without getting rid of the slotting mechanic.

Here are the talents I created (using strange eons):

dl.dropbox.com/u/14855200/NewTalents.jpg

The english on the cards might not be perfect, it's not my primary language, just ask if any questions arise. The solution works really well in my group at least.

Lastly, continuing on your real world example, keeping the talent for learning string instruments was easy during your student years (you studied music?) as you could practice and use it often. During your sales representative careers you have to maintain your talent, hence buying either an extra talent slot, or one of the creative talents.

k7e9 said:

I like it. I use a similar, lightier version of you house rule.

You can never learn too much
After a character hits rank 3 and he completes a career with 3 talent slots in its career card, he permanently can socket 3 talent slots in his future career cards, even if afterwards he enters a career that has less talent slots. In this case, the “extra” talent slot must be of the same type as one of the current career talent slots. Similarly, after a character hits rank 4 and he completes a career with 4 talent slots (elite trait) in its career card, he permanently can socket 4 talent slots in his future career cards, even if afterwards he enters a career that has less talent slots. In this case, the “extra” talent slots must be of the same type as the ones of the current career talent slots.

Yepesnopes said:

We haven't advanced enough for my players to have a problem with this, and if they did I think this is a reasonable house-rule. Is there a rule out there that you can only buy talents that your career has socket for? If not (and I don't think there is) I think it would be a good addition to the rule.

let me try to explain how I dealt with the talent ' socketing issue.

1/the number of talent which can be socketed depends from the character rank not instead of being related to the current career.

rank 1 or 2 = 2 talents / rank 2 or 3 = 3 talents / rank 4 or 5= 4 talents.

Talents shown on the career cards are the talent you can buy with a cost of 1 xp/advance.

So if you are a first rank character and your career is troll slayer (2 tactic) you can buy 2 talent of this specific kind spending only 1 advance but if you want another tactic talent (would be the third) or another kind of talent you are bound to pay the increased cost.

Here’s an example from the real world…

I used to work for a bank, and I was a fraud investigator. I knew the regulations and procedures by heart. In WFRP I would have Talent: Focus- “Transponster (bonus points if you know the reference) You gain FF on any check of fraud regulations from the bank”

I no longer work for that bank, I work for a Consulting firm. My career progressed, I am Now no longer a Fraud analyst but a Forensic examiner. the previous talent is no longer relevant, even though I still possess it. it served me well when I needed it to, and may be useful to impress my friends with bits of minutia, but why would I need it slotted now?

Just like in Real life, in WFRP you choose your career path, so isn’t it a bit disingenuous to complain about not being able to use talents from a previous career in the new career that you chose?

I tend to agree with Tarthonis there. We use the talent rules as written and have had no real issues. I have had talents become useless for a time since i was in a career that didnt have that slot. but it makes sense, that career is not focused on those things, and your career is who you are to an extent, or at least what aspect of life you are focusing on. if i was some dwarven merchant and became a slayer, i sure as hell wouldnt be terribly concerned with my reputation, my concern, is dying in glorious battle. and the talents refelect that

Universal Talent Slots is the answer...

Been playing this way since I bought the game when it came out. Same amount of talents in the career but they are universal, meaning you can socket any talent you have already bought as an advance. You still can only buy the type of talents that the career has to offer, however.

Only thing this option hurts are the careers that allow you to change a type of talent, but you can easily house rule that

Yes, feeeeed my desire for internet attention yesssssssssss...

Seriously though, first, my response to Dan's post is here, second, I don't think it would actually hurt your game too much if you decided to go with another solution, I just think it will change the approach that your game takes(slightly), also, as you can see in my response, I wilted slightly under Dan's logic and revealed that I have tweaked slotting just a little for my own game.

Aido's Ode to "I hope this doesn't turn into a flame war".

See here’s the thing. You are not losing those skills. You’ve taken a rank in playing the guitar, you still have the SKILL. You more than likely have a specialisation in it as well, since you finished the career. Look at what you are actually losing. If it’s a talent where you benefit a particular skill that means the talent itself gives you, at best, an extra fortune dice to your roll. Now consider what your character has done. He’s gone from his airy fairy student life into a world of people shoving numbers down his throat and having to meet targets. Some part of his mentality is likely to change, that’s where the talent difference comes from. He wakes up, he directs all his mental capacity towards the remainder of the day. It grants him slightly less abilities as a social chameleon, but he becomes more FOCUSED. (See what I did there?)

I like characters being creative as well, I like when they pick careers that don’t follow the typical routine we might expect, my wizard recently transited into physician, since he does most of the healing. I was inclined to let him slot his swizard school into one of his focus slots, (I also gave him dark magic, so it suits me to give him access to it aswell.) Basically, you might consider allowing a character an “open slot” if they have a well grounded reason for it, especially if they’ve taken the less than beaten track to character advancement. They most likely reason you’ll have for this is that a character has taken a career where talents are almost diametrically opposite to what he had before and you don’t want to penalise the player too much for taking a roleplaying based decision on character advancement. This is the kind of call that should stay very firmly in the hands of the GM if it is going to get made, just like deciding on whether to use the slotting mechanic at all.

Finally, party sheet talents. I’m going to use a team sports analogy despite the fact that know sweet fanny adams about it. Visualise the party sheet representing a level of teamwork between several players. They practice a few things together, they have a preferred style of play. Jim knows Bob likes to run, so he makes sure he can at least keep up with him. Better yet, consider it like this, a group of wannabe adventurer’s that takes a deep sigh of regret every time their dopy ass witch hunter goes charging into another fight. Ricknar is glad he picked up those silly stepping excercises off Anierra, they make him that bit more difficult to hit. Anierra is just glad she can count on Ricknar’s clear-mindedness. Klaus gets eaten by a dragon, we all get ice-cream.

Aside from the last sentence, that’s sort of how a party sheet should (could?) work. Not so much everyone suddenly learning everyone else’s skills, but a set kind of group mentality that allows certain people’s skill sets to shine.

As I said, I am pro talent socketing.

I also think we would not be having this discussion if the developers of the game, instead of talents, would have called them, I don't know...career
wits, or career endowments or so. Because indeed, "talent" sounds more to something intrinsic to the character, like being ambidextrous, having a good eyesight or being good at learning languages.

Heh. You guys know how I feel.

Socketing is gone from my game. We still use the "you can only buy what you have access to" though. So if you change from a career that had Focus to a career that doesn't have focus, you can no longer buy focus talents. Not too game breaking is there's a talent for just about everything nowadays

I respect you guys that like it, but for my game style, I consider "socketing" a goofy, clunky, unnecessary mechanic that is just another accounting mechanism unnecessary for the fun of my RolePlaying Games. I've not found any equilibrium to be upset by this technique. I think the system is strong enough, and allows enough GM intervention to weather the removal of socketing (except for the dwarf runecrafter).

jh

1) Very funny picture Emirikol

2) Although I like socketing, sometimes I have troubles imagining it. I have this situation in my group. A Troll Slayer with the Robust talent. So far so god. The problem comes when he sockets the talent in the party sheet. Therefore, all the party gains the benefit of the talent while they try to recover from critical wounds while resting. How the hell you justify something like this!?

Easy, you ask the player who is doing it to explain how he's doing it. If he can come up with a good explanation, done, if not, he can't socket the talent to the party sheet.

I have found in my games that players actually enjoy being asked these kinds of questions rather than just blindly rolling dice or fiddling with the game bits.

Wrote this up a while back, focusing on the idea of switching active talents, but also glancing upon the topic at hand:

www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp

Emirikol said:

See what I'd really like to do is maybe do a follow up, and if I could get a brief bit on how your games run, I can compare them maybe against mine. How would you feel about writing something up? I would like to have both sides of the story...

Sure, no problem. Not much to write up though. Not socketing just takes a step out of the game (we don't use party sheets either). I'll invite my players to describe as well.

My games run very fast and with a lot of narrative detail for players to explore in the midst of "everything feels like a zombie apocalypse and every clue is like picking another scab off of a severe burn." They are sandboxy within the realm of a scenario but I foster action over inaction. I use wounds, insanity, disease, and mutation as "events" themselves and since I have players keep a back-up character on the ready, I'm not worried about losing some major investment of time and energy in character development.

I encourage players to use every resource at their disposal, and hence why not having a talent "at the ready" never sat well with me considering the character longevity isn't that great, it's tough to kill a character off on a technicality because he "didn't have a socket loaded." Mainly though, I do it to eliminate card shuffling time-consumption.

Maybe I'll get a recording of an upcoming session. I wish I'd have recorded "The pig, the witch, and her lover" and the recent session of False Pretenses because they contain lots of investigative and social situations with minimal combat..and obligatory running away from 'the things in the dark..."

More later.

jh

Superchunk said:

It is an interesting approach. Is that what you ask your players? And do you have like default explanations? I mean, you as a player to role play the socketing of a talent in the party sheet, then he end ups with a nice explanation and the talent is socketed; the next time he doest it he can use the same explanation, over and over again? or do you ask every time a new one?

Emirikol said:

As a player in Emirikol's game, I greatly appreciate dispensing with socketing. It's clunky and (imo) dumb. As stated earlier, talents must be relevant to a given career. During the game if an observation check is called for I will declare, "Using my 'Keen Eyes' I scan the crowd." Or perhaps when analyzing foliage my scout might say, "'I Seem to Recall' similar plants near my home village in Stirland." I glance over and see if the GM gives a nod to use the extra white die or whatever. It ends up being pretty seamless and leads to better play. Do I really want to spend time predicting what a given encounter might be (is this social interaction or combat? are we sneaking or investigating?) and then have to declare socketing/unsocketing/fiddle with bits or simply have the talent "on" all the time? I understand this might tip game balance but are Keen Eyes and Combat Reflexes really incompatible when "on" at the same time??

The last two sessions (each at least 3.5 to 4 hours in length) we only had ONE brief combat. All was role-playing and investigating. The pig/witch/lover scenario was as much fun as I've had playing WFRP *ever*!