Using all Talents to Advance & Talent Optionals

[PiXeL01]

In our group we use the optional rule "Use all Talents to Advance" and have encountered a minor "problem" that might be straight forward to solve, so I may simply just need confirmation.

According to the rules (quote p. 457 PG)
If a character has learned a Talent Option that is a Discipline Talent for a new Discipline, that talent becomes a Discipline Talent as soon as the character qualifies to learn it from the new Discipline. From then on they use the Legend Point cost for the new Discipline. Until then it is treated as a Talent Option for the old Discipline. Once it becomes a Discipline Talent, the Talent Option slot is freed up, and the character may learn a new Talent Option from the old Discipline.

Now, if a character "loses" a Talent Option this way and therefore not have enough to fulfill the circle requirement of the first Discipline would he then

1 - lose a circle in the discipline where he lost a talent?
2 - be required to train up a new talent to replace the one that was lost in order to advance further?

[etherial]

In our group we use the optional rule "Use all Talents to Advance" and have encountered a minor "problem" that might be straight forward to solve, so I may simply just need confirmation.

According to the rules (quote p. 457 PG)
If a character has learned a Talent Option that is a Discipline Talent for a new Discipline, that talent becomes a Discipline Talent as soon as the character qualifies to learn it from the new Discipline. From then on they use the Legend Point cost for the new Discipline. Until then it is treated as a Talent Option for the old Discipline. Once it becomes a Discipline Talent, the Talent Option slot is freed up, and the character may learn a new Talent Option from the old Discipline.

Now, if a character "loses" a Talent Option this way and therefore not have enough to fulfill the circle requirement of the first Discipline would he then

1 - lose a circle in the discipline where he lost a talent?
2 - be required to train up a new talent to replace the one that was lost in order to advance further?

We used option 2 in our game because it involved no crying, screaming, or table flipping.

[Mataxes]

Yeah, that's the way I would go. No lost Circles, you just need a little more effort to qualify for that next advancement.

I mean... they still know the talent. It's just no longer going to count for the purposes of advancing Discipline A.

[ChrisDDickey]

I am not certain about the premise of this question.

OK, so lets say we are using the "using all talents to advance" optional rule, and lets say I have a Wizard.
At third circle, I decide I don't want to take "Tenacious Weave" and instead pick the Talent Option "Conversation" which I bring up to rank 4, and use it to advance to 4th circle. Lets say I don't have any other Talent Options at rank 4.
Lets say I then decide to multi-discipline into Illusionist.
I already know Spellcasting and Patterncraft at rank 4, so I already know 2 of the 5 Illusionist 1st circle Discipline talents. I just need to learn First Impression, False Sight, and Illusionism. I am now a Wizard 4, Illusionist 1.

Are you saying that when I circle up to being an Illusionist 3, and Conversation transforms from being treated as a Wizard Talent Option and starts being accounted as an Illusionist Discipline Talent, I can no longer count it as fulfilling the requirements to advance as a Wizard?
Why? I mean I am counting spellcasting and patterncraft as fulfilling the requirements of both disciplines. And "Conversation" is still a talent that is "available" to the Wizard discipline. I am not certain why you are saying can't be counted.

For that matter, a Wizard will have learned "Astral Sight", which is a Talent Option for Illusionists. If there was some Illusionist Discipline Talents that the adept does not want to bother with, it seems to me that Astral Sight could count as a Talent that was "available to the discipline" and was the requisite rank, even if it was not an Illusionist Discipline Talent, nor was or ever had occupied an Illusionist Talent Option slot.

I guess what I am saying is that I thought that with multi-discipline characters and this optional rule, so long as you had enough Discipline Talents plus Talent Options for each discipline of the required rank, you were OK. It does not really matter what "slot" you learned them as.

[etherial]

I am not certain about the premise of this question.

OK, so lets say we are using the "using all talents to advance" optional rule, and lets say I have a Wizard.
At third circle, I decide I don't want to take "Tenacious Weave" and instead pick the Talent Option "Conversation" which I bring up to rank 4, and use it to advance to 4th circle. Lets say I don't have any other Talent Options at rank 4.

Well, I can at least solve your confusion.

Optional Rule: Instead of being required to know all his Discipline Talents at a rank equal to the next Circle, a character can know a certain number of talents available to his Discipline at a minimum rank (either Discipline Talents or Talent Options), and one of those talents must be from his current Circle. The requirements are summarized on the Optional Advancement Table.

So it's not that the Wizard can take Conversation instead of Tenacious Weave, the Wizard still has to buy Tenacious Weave, they just never have to raise it. The Wizard simply gets to choose every time they Circle which Wizard Talents count toward Circling as a Wizard. But when that Wizard becomes a Third Circle Illusionist, Conversation suddenly stops being a Wizard Talent Option and becomes an Illusionist Discipline Talent. This is mostly a game balance thing for when not using this Optional Rule, preventing you from raising it at the lower Legend Cost of one Discipline but counting it towards the other Discipline, but may be relevant also when the Talent Knack rules come out. It also frees up a Wizard Talent Option slot that can be used for something else.

The question put here is "What happens when a Wizard Talent Option I've been using to Circle suddenly becomes not a Wizard Talent at all because it's been reclassified on my sheet as an Illusionist Discipline Talent instead?"

[Mataxes]

And, jumping off of that, part of it relates to having "optional" talents at all.

If I use my 4th Circle Wizard Option on a talent -- and options are a limited resource -- and that talent is later gained as a Discipline talent in a new Discipline... it can feel like you've "wasted" it for something that you would have otherwise gained without spending that limited resource.

So you allow the player to get back that resource to be used again -- but if they learn another optional talent in that slot, the original talent that was there isn't really a Wizard option anymore, is it?

The GM can take the approach of, "Sorry, you chose poorly. Suck it up," and not give back the optional slot. In that case, I wouldn't object to using it to qualify for both.

[ChrisDDickey]

So it's not that the Wizard can take Conversation instead of Tenacious Weave, the Wizard still has to buy Tenacious Weave, they just never have to raise it.

and one of those talents must be from his current Circle.

I think the rule quote above is a holdover from the editions when each circle you had two new talents and had to raise a minimum of one to your next circle rank. However with the current edition you have one Discipline Talent, and one Talent Option each circle. And the way this holdover phrase reads, you could use ether for your advancement requirements. It should probably read "and one of those talents must be the discipline talent from his current Circle". But the way it is written it seems to allow the Talent Option choice to be used instead, and the discipline talent to never be taken at all if the player so chooses.

[ChrisDDickey]

The Wizard simply gets to choose every time they Circle which Wizard Talents count toward Circling as a Wizard. But when that Wizard becomes a Third Circle Illusionist, Conversation suddenly stops being a Wizard Talent Option and becomes an Illusionist Discipline Talent. This is mostly a game balance thing for when not using this Optional Rule, preventing you from raising it at the lower Legend Cost of one Discipline but counting it towards the other Discipline, but may be relevant also when the Talent Knack rules come out. It also frees up a Wizard Talent Option slot that can be used for something else.

The question put here is "What happens when a Wizard Talent Option I've been using to Circle suddenly becomes not a Wizard Talent at all because it's been reclassified on my sheet as an Illusionist Discipline Talent instead?"

But I don't think that it ever says or even implies that a talent stops being a Talent Option for discipline #1 just because it became a Discipline Talent for discipline #2. And it most certainly does not stop being a "Talent available to his Discipline" It does specifically say that you need to pay the LP cost of it as a discipline talent, but that is it. It becomes treated as a Discipline Talent, and a Talent Option slot is freed up, but nether of those things implies that it stops counting as a Talent Option for discipline #1.

Talent Options available through multiple Disciplines are handled separately. If a character has learned a Talent Option for a Discipline, he uses the appropriate Legend Point cost for that Discipline to raise the talent based on its Circle—even if it is available as a Talent Option at a lower tier for a new Discipline.
If a character has learned a Talent Option that is a Discipline Talent for a new Discipline, that talent becomes a Discipline Talent as soon as the character qualifies to learn it from the new Discipline. From then on they use the Legend Point cost for the new Discipline. Until then it is treated as a Talent Option for the old Discipline. Once it becomes a Discipline Talent, the Talent Option slot is freed up, and the character may learn a new Talent Option from the old Discipline.

All of that has to do with how much it costs to raise a Talent Rank. It says that a Talent that is an Option for multiple Disciplines only takes a "slot" in one of them, but does not in any way say that it does not count as a Talent available to multiple disciplines.

Instead. .. a character can know a certain number of talents available to his Discipline at a minimum rank (either Discipline Talents or Talent Options),

I think we are all agreed that one Talent can "count" as a Discipline Talent for two or more disciplines. I don't see why everybody assumes that one Talent can't "count" as both a Discipline Talent, and "a talent available to his Discipline" for more than one Discipline.

Now for all of these issues, it is a question of what optional rules the GM wants, how liberal a game they want, and how he/she wants to interpret and balance them.

The core rules state these are the specific talents that are core to being a (whatever). Some people feel straitjacketed by the vision of the design team. So this optional rule allows a great deal more flexibility in customizing your characters. Unfortunately, this optional rule also makes multi-disciplining much cheaper. And different interpretation and/or house rules could make it cheaper still, or try to hold the line and minimize the effect.

The overlap between any two disciplines discipline talent and talent option lists is much, much greater than between the discipline talent lists. Therefor in order that multi-disciplining does not become too cheap, I recommend playing like you have been discussing. My point is that I don't think that it is the rules as they are written.

I think that a good house rule, for a GM that does want to allow maximum flexibility, but does not want multi-disciplining to become too inexpensive, would be to count for advancement only those Talents that were Discipline Talents, or that were Talent Options that are occupying a Talent Option slot for the Discipline being advanced. However I would allow unused TO slots to temporarily count Talents from the TO list that are discipline talents for other disciplines, or that are occupying a TO slot from some other Discipline. IE: in the example above, I would allow a Wizard to keep counting "conversation" as one of the talents that fulfills his requirements, so long as he keeps increasing it's rank, and so long as he still has an empty Wizard TO slot for it.

So once again, you only count Wizard Discipline Talents, and other Talents on the Wizard TO list, that are ether occupying a Wizard TO slot, or that you have an empty Wizard TO slot for. Other house rules are certainly possible, some more liberal, some more confining (for example, what was discussed above, or "if it is on your talent option list, it counts). But this one seems like a good balance. But once again, it is a house rule, because the RAW don't really address this.

[Slimcreeper]

I'd like preface this by saying I've never been totally comfortable with the multiple discipline rules, so I don't know if this is a good thought or not:

To prevent making the second discipline cheaper, if there are duplicate talents, could we simply require the adept to take an additional optional talent in the second discipline and declare it a discipline talent. This could also model the flexibility of thinking required to take on a second discipline, and explain why many adepts might hesitate to train a multi-disciplined character.

[ChrisDDickey]

To prevent making the second discipline cheaper, if there are duplicate talents, could we simply require the adept to take an additional optional talent in the second discipline and declare it a discipline talent. This could also model the flexibility of thinking required to take on a second discipline, and explain why many adepts might hesitate to train a multi-disciplined character.

I don't think there is any need to change the the multi-disciplining rules when the optional rule for using all talents to advance is not being used. And I don't think there is a problem with overlapping discipline talents. The optional rule on all talents being used to advance is designed to make advancement faster and cheaper, since a character is not required to purchase ranks in a discipline talent he does not really want or need just to fulfill an arbitrary requirement. He is freer to spend the LP where he wants to. I only see a potential problem of advancement becoming too cheap if the optional rule on all talents being used to advance is being used with multi-disciplining.

With the exception of Wizards and Nethermancers which share 4 of the 7 non-spellcasting novice discipline talents, for the most part the overlap between discipline talents is fairly small. I think the most any of the others overlap in novice discipline talents is 2 or less. And it makes sense that somebody can more easily learn a more closely related field. Thus a Wizard should be able to learn Elementalism more easily than he could learn to be a Swordmaster. And it would make sense that a beastmaster who already knows Awareness, Tracking, Stealthy Stride and Wilderness Survival (some from Talent Options), would be easier to learn to be a scout. I mean if he has picked up those Talent Options, he has probably been serving as his groups scout anyway. And his having picked up scouting talents from the beastmaster TO pool should not be penalized.

But I do think there could potentially be a problem if a characters 2nd discipline TO list had a lot of talents that the adept already had from his 1st discipline, and the character decided to forgo his actual discipline talents in favor of the talent options he already had.
I don't know that this would be an actual problem or just a potential problem, and I don't know that it is worth writing a hard and fast rule about. But it is probably something a GM should be aware and wary of. Remind players that all multi-disciplining, including advancement is at the discretion of the GM and his NPC trainers.