My copy of the new Star Wars Saga RPG has yet to arrive, but I love the fact that Talent Trees were used for the various classes.
Monte Cook recently posted something about feats on his website and noted there is something of a problem with feats because of the finite nature of how many you get, and the idea that a feat needs to stay relatively constant in value over the life of a character, many flavorful feats are ignored for more practical feats like say Power Attack.
Monte theorized you could solve this by dividing feats into Tier 1 and Tier 2 categories with one category being weighed more heavily than the other.
I think talents solves this problem, and gives a further opportunity to add flavor and focus to a character. In a case like a Druid, where as now there are different feats that allow one to expand upon the forms you can take in Wildshape, those type of abilities can be handled by having a Wildshape Talent tree...the same can be done for Animal Companions, and even spell casting as well.
Imagine instead of Divine Feats based off Turn Undead, you had instead a Holy Aura Talent tree, that incorporates Divine style feats. With Talents a class ability like Turn Undead does not even have to be a mandatory power, it could be an optional ability from a Talent Tree.
Likewise, certain overlapping classes can be combined. In Star Wars the Fringer class was condensed to being a talent tree, the same realistically could be done for the Scout class, wrapping it into the Ranger class. Paladin and Ranger spellcasting instead of being an automatic class ability could instead be an option granted by a Talent tree, letting those that do not like the idea of spellcasting warriors, play the concept they want w/o special rules, or alternative classes.
The best thing of all, is since World of Warcraft is a very popular game, many people are already familiar with the concept.
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.
Monte Cook recently posted something about feats on his website and noted there is something of a problem with feats because of the finite nature of how many you get, and the idea that a feat needs to stay relatively constant in value over the life of a character, many flavorful feats are ignored for more practical feats like say Power Attack.
Monte theorized you could solve this by dividing feats into Tier 1 and Tier 2 categories with one category being weighed more heavily than the other.
I think talents solves this problem, and gives a further opportunity to add flavor and focus to a character. In a case like a Druid, where as now there are different feats that allow one to expand upon the forms you can take in Wildshape, those type of abilities can be handled by having a Wildshape Talent tree...the same can be done for Animal Companions, and even spell casting as well.
Imagine instead of Divine Feats based off Turn Undead, you had instead a Holy Aura Talent tree, that incorporates Divine style feats. With Talents a class ability like Turn Undead does not even have to be a mandatory power, it could be an optional ability from a Talent Tree.
Likewise, certain overlapping classes can be combined. In Star Wars the Fringer class was condensed to being a talent tree, the same realistically could be done for the Scout class, wrapping it into the Ranger class. Paladin and Ranger spellcasting instead of being an automatic class ability could instead be an option granted by a Talent tree, letting those that do not like the idea of spellcasting warriors, play the concept they want w/o special rules, or alternative classes.
The best thing of all, is since World of Warcraft is a very popular game, many people are already familiar with the concept.
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.
