Distaste for Talents

Evil Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley in "Mirror, Mirror"

I buy a lot of TTRPG PDF bundles. They're usually for a good cause, they're often great value, and hey, I just like reading TTRPG rules. I like daydreaming about what system my group might run next; I like having lightweight stuff with which to throw together a novel one-shot on short notice. One of these days I'm going to have to start a series of posts where I poke through the dozens of games I've accumulated over the past few years and…I don't know, review them? Just pick out stuff I like about them? So far, I've only picked, unfairly, on design choices in games I haven't even played yet (spoiler: that's what I'm doing in this post too). Anyway, the ever-growing collection is mostly oddball lightweight indie stuff, but there are some bigger names too—Numenera, Traveller, and, as of last week, thanks to a Humble Bundle offer, Star Trek Adventures.

The rumors about STA 1e are true: These books are not laid out well. I like gonzo graphic design, I love LCARS, I enjoy a rulebook stuffed with lore and fluff…but on every count, this game went too far. It's an absolute mess, with information scattered all over the place and little or no visual distinction between essential rules and fun background material. But there's still a lot to like!

My love of lifepaths is well documented, so you'd better believe that I was especially pleased with the character creation system. It's pretty quick, it's very flavorful, it's super fun for a Trek nerd like me, and it creates characters with a ton of good roleplay direction. It just has one glaring flaw: At four different points during the process, the player is asked to choose a “talent,” which is a catch-all category of bonuses somewhat akin to feats in d20 games, although they also cover things that might elsewhere be skills or magic spells (the Vulcan mind meld, for instance, is a talent, but so is just getting some extra health, or being good with computers).

The problems, or potential problems, with feats have been discussed and debated ad nauseum all over the internet. Redditor Sleeper4 summarized them pretty well in a post on r/osr earlier this year:

1. Slows down character creation - this is a pretty easy problem to fix, you can simply give feats out at levels higher than 1.

2. The presence of feats creates situations where a character is implicitly unable to try something because there's a feat that provides the ability - aka "feat niche protection". I think with careful design, feats can be created that somewhat mitigate this problem.

3. Shifts the focus of the game - every added character power that's put in a list for player to pour over shifts the focus of the game away from "go adventure to discover riches and powerful magic items" to "make sure you pick the best character abilities from this list" - it draws the players thinking into the character building systems and away from the fantastical world they inhabit.

STA mostly avoids #2 (although in its brand new second edition, it seems to be heading the wrong way), and it fully avoids #3 (you generally can't have more talents than the four you start with), but boy does it ever bang its head on the low bar of #1. Even for the kind of dyed-in-the-wool dork who enjoys reading rulebooks (me), having to stop four times during character creation to click through hundreds of pages of material looking for talents that match a character concept is a nuisance. It's also, as ever, an invitation to min-maxers to throw roleplay out the window in favor of mechanical optimization, or, for rules-averse players, an indescribable session-zero headache.

Now, there are lots of games I like, or even love, that use feats or feat-like character building blocks. There are lots of ways to avoid the above problems, or to embrace them and have fun with them.

Stars Without Number makes foci (i.e., feats) the primary vehicle for character construction. There are a very limited number of classes, and those who don't have psychic or magical powers don't gain any class-related powers as they level up. They start with a few simple (and powerful) abilities, but as they level, they mostly just get more health, higher attack bonuses, and more points to spend on skills. Foci are the primary source of mechanical distinctiveness, there are only about two dozen of them, and they mostly just allow characters to do the same things everybody can do, but faster, more reliably, or more powerfully. Robust, flavorful, limited in number. Excellent.

FIST leans even further in this direction. On character creation, you choose (or roll) two traits and a role, and that's it: All of your character's abilities (and nearly all of their stats and starting equipment, too) come from those traits. Character creation takes all of 15 seconds (perfect for the rules-averse) and wrapping your head around your weird and possibly dissonant powers is a great source of character development, fittingly for the game's theme, with kind of an X-Men vibe of angsty mystery. Why am I this way? How does the world respond to my freakish nature? Delightful.

But in Star Trek? Especially in a game that already has a bunch of brilliant avenues for character definition and expression, like values (a way to make a character's motives and beliefs mechanically relevant, without the clumsy rigidity of D&D alignment or the like) and focuses (a very elegant, flexible way to bridge the gap between “not enough skills to articulate a character's abilities in a high-tech setting” and “way too many goddamn skills, most of which we'll never actually use”), it just seems like a half-assed sop to people for whom a character is defined by the interplay of a bunch of minute stat modifiers and not by, you know, their character.