acurrier wrote:
Instead of making a whole new talent, why not just errata the following:
[Tiered Talents]
Special: Any tiered talent can be taken up to twice in any tier, but a character can not benefit from a tiered ability until they are that tier or higher.
Because I could repeat my extreme example either starting in Tier 3, completing in Tier 5, or starting in Tier 4 for both Divine and Psionic with 2 tiers of ASC and 2 tiers of DSC in each of 4 and 5. You wouldn't make Tier 5 of the casting talent, but that's not necessarily a huge deal at this point. It may become more relevant later.
Scott's suggestion provides a way to "fix" a limited number of outages without opening the doors wide open. It also costs an "Any Talent" each tier you want to use it which provides another limiter on its power. Actually to clarify, I would recommend that if Scott's talent is adopted it does not fall into one of the 4 double choice options - skill, combat, devout, arcane so as to avoid any archetype gaining undue benefit.
Part of it comes down to a philosophical question of whether true masters (5 Tiers worth of progress) should be more rare or more common. The benefit is also disproportionately easier for Experts to take advantage of than other Archetypes as they have the most flexibility with skill ranks. In fantasy games spellcasting gets more powerful as you rise in power moreso than non-casters. Arcanis I believe does a better job with this than most but that mechanical discrepancy is still likely to be there. The more expansions that come out, the greater the likelihood of that discrepancy growing. Codex of Heroes certainly contributed to it.
Right now if you want to be good at casting and something else you need to make that decision early and work hard at it. You have to find a way to get Prestidigitation and your primary spell casting talent in Tier 1 or forever be behind. If you don't start as a primary caster, you run the risk of being too many skill ranks behind as well which is another point of balance.
Allow people to push that decision / needed investment off until tier 2, 3 or 4 and in my opinion you do 2 things. First you increase the number of powerful casters at higher tiers, and especially the ones who are multi-threat as they will have spent their first several tiers mastering / setting up another specialty. This means the threats to challenge them also need to increase to compensate. Second you effectively diminish the meaningfulness of folks who've spent their characters entire lives focusing on their specialty. This second item is completely subjective. The mechanical impact of the first is not.
As it stands there seems to be disagreement over the existing rule about tiered talents and what happens if you gain 2 tiers worth if you're already missing a tier. If you're currently caught up, the talent is pushed off and gained as soon as you hit the next tier. I had thought that was the case regardless of whether it would exceed tier or not. Say if you're at Tier 2 and select Leadership for the first time and then get it via a Path. I would expect that 2nd tier of Leadership to be pushed off until Tier 3, potentially repeating the cycle. I think people stated that if it didn't exceed tier they expected you'd just get it then effectively catching up.
If that ends up being the case then existing paths are biased towards allowing casters to catch up but not weapon masters as weapon training is rarely given in paths. Martial techniques are usually granted instead. In casting paths, the 2nd tier of the path typically grants the spell casting talent.
To a certain extent it's going to come back to what the game designers want to see from heroes in the higher tiers.
With a sweep of his hat,
Paul
