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Message: <blockquote data-quote="HeapThaumaturgist" data-source="post: 2636082" data-attributes="member: 12332">Hrm.  Now, True20 does things more or less that way, with feats every level and the whole thing being left up to the player to choose.For me, I'm not sure.  Talents are a little different than feats in terms of flavor.  They give the classes a little definition, and most aren't as powerful as feats until 2nd rank in a tree or so, when they generally become MORE powerful than feats and give out abilities that are more or less unavailable.At lvl 1, for instance, the Smart talent "Savant" is pretty poor, it's just "your Smart level" added to a skill.  So +1.  But at levels past 3rd, that ability has become more powerful than Skill Focus or the Dedicated Skill Emphasis.  How do you turn that into a feat?  Base it on level?  It's too powerful, then, even with a 15 Stat req.  (Generally stat reqs are odd numbers)  A 6th level Strong/Dedicated with +6 to Research or Electronics?The Dedicated Skill Emphasis talent is pretty much crap, out of the box.  It's Skill Focus.  But opens up Faith, which is pretty bombtacular, and if I could buy-in on that without dipping into Dedicated ... oh boy.  All day.Here's the other thing that I see as a problem.  If there's a campaign focus, people are going to choose class not on the abilities they're interested in, but in what will give them the greatest edge in the campaign.  If we know it's going to be combat focused, instead of building a sniper out of Dedicated for access to things like Faith and Dead Aim, they're going to put a high score in Wis and run straight up Strong for full BAB and depend entirely on tanking their Strength and using Wisdom to replace the need for dipping into another class that doesn't have full BAB.As to whether you find that a problem or not, I don't know.  Strong is always a hard buy.  You'd LIKE that full BAB in a gunfighter game, but at the same time, there's pretty specifically no gunfighting feats/talents in the Strong pool.  You have to give up good gunfighter progression for full BAB progression ... now, that might lead to hard choices but that's part of balance.  If you can get everything you want whenever you want it, you might as well be playing GURPS with all the problems inherent in point buy systems.  The various class strengths and weaknesses are part of their balancing factors.  If you remove the hard and fast requirements then the game really comes down to playing Strong, Fast, or Smart characters with high ability scores in whatever they want to really buy things in and pimping the basic statistics of the classes for what they offer.  Strong for BAB, Fast for Defense, Smart for Skill Points.  The other three classes have abilities that are pretty unique and make them attractive, but they're mixtures of the core class FEATURES of the other classes ... Dedicated doesn't get FULL BAB, but decent, nor LOADS of SP, but decent, etc etc.  If you can totally replace the talent choices by simply raising your BAB, there's no longer any point in having a finite class for it, y'know?  You then choose Strong, Fast, or Smart based on what you want to concentrate on in core class features.Where are the guidelines that the writers of SC2.0 put out?  I'd be interested in looking over their considerations.--fje</blockquote>

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