Talent Trees & D&D

[DarkKestral]

Well, I've always thought of talents as the 'building block' special abilities.. they're only available to certain classes, so you can't take them unless you've already got levels in a class, and they level up in a class-based manner. Feats could then be those abilities that don't require a class-specific ability and don't power up with level.

Thus, the total number of classes needed to emulate a given set of classes is reduced, because you can throw different classes special stuff that overlaps away and reduce it to one tree. With a sufficient number of trees, you can pretty well emulate any given archetype.

 

[Garnfellow]

I think talent trees would be a beautiful addition to D&D: a nice, clean, unified and modular mechanic for customizing characters -- and if trees were implemented correctly could do away with the proliferation of base classes and prestige classes.

Just have six or so base classes, and then use talent trees, feats, and a smaller number of prestige classes to customize your characters.

Also, a lot of the mechanics used now for races (like substitution levels or alternate class features) could just become new talent trees.

 

[painandgreed]

I'm not advocating trees over feats, or the other way around, but I don't see how a tree is more complicated. Can you give an example of what you mean?

Why have a another system in addition to one that is already in place? They both do about the same thing and you could have talent trees or feat trees, I don't see a reason to have both since they effectivly do the same thing. Not that I don't think the entire game could use a 4.0 edition to clean up the bad design in the 3.x edition (but still not sure I'd buy it though).

It seems that many of the new mechanics they're coming up with could just be feats or spells to begin with and no need the addtional mechanics. If I was a suspcious type, I'd suspect it was done merely as a form of rights management so that it becomes harder to use new material without the book it comes out of.

 

[Nyeshet]

Its been a long while since I looked at it, but isn't Iron Heroes feat system more or less a talent tree? Or something akin to a fusion of the ideas of talent trees and feats?

 

[GlassJaw]

I'm a huge fan of talent trees as opposed to locked-in class abilities. Grim Tales is my favorite d20 class system for that reason.

 

[Tonguez]

Nothing wrong with talent trees as such. But you need to sweep off the board classes, skills, and feats if you seriously want a mass market game (but maybe you don't).

Personally I think this would be great!

I'd love to see a character creation system based on Talent Trees instead of a pilifieration of PrCs and alt-Base Classes.
Feats to give access to non-standard Talents and other 'one off' abilities.
PrCs would be a set of Talents which a PC can access (by joining a new organisation or being struck by Lightning - whatever)

By mixing talents you'd create whatever class you desire...

 

[JohnSnow]

Its been a long while since I looked at it, but isn't Iron Heroes feat system more or less a talent tree? Or something akin to a fusion of the ideas of talent trees and feats?

Yes.

Iron Heroes uses feat masteries. The character gets better mastery in some categories than others, allowing some classes earlier (but not exclusive) access to the different mastery feats. You have to have the base feat in the chain to take the higher mastery feats. Mastery feats have levels (1-10) rather than prerequisites. Interestingly, if you have "full mastery" in something, mastery levels are gained at the same time as a character gets spells of Level = Mastery - 1 (so Mastery 10 feats at level 17). There's secondary, tertiary, and quaternary mastery levels as well.

In addition, many of the Iron Heroes classes also have class abilities that are quite comparable to talents - their token-based abilities are more like class features. They are things that can only be taken by characters of the appropriate class. IMO, it preserves the class system in a good way.

In my opinion, the feat mastery system is genius, allowing you to have some truly powerful feats for higher-level characters. That is something that should perhaps be considered for talents as well. However, it is the general consensus of those on the Iron Heroes boards that the mastery system almost eliminates the need for Prestige Classes.

Frankly, if I were rewriting the IH classes in a system that used a talent/feat system, I'd make some feats into talents and turn some class features into feats.

 

[Psion]

Personally I think this would be great!

I'd love to see a character creation system based on Talent Trees instead of a pilifieration of PrCs and alt-Base Classes.
Feats to give access to non-standard Talents and other 'one off' abilities.
PrCs would be a set of Talents which a PC can access (by joining a new organisation or being struck by Lightning - whatever)

By mixing talents you'd create whatever class you desire...

This may or may not surprise you, but such a product exists now. There's been some discussion of it over on the D20 modern and other forum.

POSTMODERN: Fantastic Classes

 

[Ranger REG]

I love the idea, and think not only is it the future, but it would not be hard to retrocon the idea onto the exsisting classes.

Tell me about it. I've been trying to do a 20-level fighter class and my first talent tree I've been trying to come up with is the Archer talent tree.

Mind you, talent trees are not new to me being a d20 Modern fan. One can "adapt" the talent tree concept from the Modern System Reference Document into a class-by-profession.

 

[RFisher]

What exactly is the difference between talents & feats? Feats can be arranged into trees by prerequisites. Feats can include class/level prerequisites. What am I missing?