Like Button: Talent Trees

There was a period of time before D&D 4e came out during which it was rumored that WotC's Star Wars: Saga Edition RPG could be considered a preview of the design philosophy for D&D 4e. Upon hearing that news, I drove out to my local book store to page through the game and ended up purchasing it instead of perusing. One of the things that I really liked as I read the SW:SE rules were the talent trees. I remembered being pleased with how talent trees worked in d20 Modern, and the ones in SW:SE were clever and evocative.

I see several benefits in the use of talent trees for character building and progression in RPGs.

They're great for organization - Want your character to be a master of deception? Page over to the Con-Man talent tree and take a look. Odds are the talents that you need are all in one tree. Where a character class in an RPG tends to be broad and general, a talent tree (which might be a component of a character class) tends to contain all of the qualitative character widgets needed to make a character perform in a particular fashion. It's one-stop shopping!

Prerequisites create a sense of progression in play - Imagine an "Airborne" talent tree consisting of spells that get the caster or target into the sky. Maybe the first talent is Great Leap, letting the caster enhance natural jumping abilities. That could be a prerequisite for Levitate, which could in turn be a prerequisite for Flight, which could be a prerequisite for Flight Mastery. A structure like this produces a history of increasing mastery over flight in play, and the player can look back on his or her character's achievement with a satisfying sense of knowing where current abilities came from. Contrast this with choosing a Flight spell at level X. Suddenly, the character can fly in play. It adds little to nothing to the continuing story.

They give players benchmarks for power in the setting - This point assumes that antagonists are constructed using a system at least a bit similar to the one for PCs, but even if that isn't the case, when a four-armed sword-wielding horror shows up to mince the characters, the fact that it's making four attacks each round gives the players something to compare their characters' power levels to. They can glance at a Dual Wielding talent tree for example and see when a PC would have a comparable level of power, and be impressed or relieved accordingly.

I've thought from time to time about writing my own RPG. If I were aiming for a moderate to high level of rules complexity, I would likely end up using talent trees as a basis for PC progression.