------- Part I: ------- Well I just purchased Talisman 2nd Edition after not having it for about 7 years (had it back when it first came out) and ideas have been floating around my head, figure I'd share them. They may have already come up, but here goes: EXPERIENCE REDUCES RANDOMNESS: 1. Seperate the decks into regular, medium, high, and super powerful cards... these are perhaps subjective choices, but you would probably not find any magic objects in the regular deck for example. 2. A player of course gains experience from killing a monster, 5 strength monster dead, a character gets 5 experience. When picking a card from the deck, a regular deck pull is free, but pulling from the other decks cost experience points (Note: original experience usage is gone, there are PLENTY of other ways to gain lives, strength, and craft). E.G. Pulling from Medium Deck costs 5 experience, from high = 10, and super = 15... 3. Perhaps even you can remove the super deck, and combine it with the high-powered deck. In this variation, a player spends 10 to pull from it as usual; or 15 to pull from it super-charged. The creature doubles up its abilities (5 strength becomes 10 strength). And the results of winning this battle is pulling from the high-powered deck until a magic object is encountered, discarding the rest of the cards as they are pulled. (Some other reward can be conjured up too, house rules here) TALISMAN MASTER = NO MORE RANDOMNESS: Well I know someone mentioned this already, I practically stole the idea but he didn't flesh it out. Simply NO MORE RANDOMNESS. The Talisman Master controls all aspects of the game; picks adventure cards, creates events as necessary, assigns quests as necessary via game-playing elements. No limits here and the game can actually become a roleplaying adventure. If that is too much control for either the TM or the players, the TM can create little random adventure stacks that he can pick from (as above, high powered, low powered etc, but the TM can create any "type" of stack he wants - hill cards, forest cards, dragon cards, magic items, etc.) THE QUEST Well this idea is everywhere, but I thought I might have something to add to it. Here are some Ideas: Card types are again seperated as subjectively decided. E.G. magic items one pile, high powered monsters another, etc. A player declares a quest and two cards are placed, one from high powered monster, one from magic item. A. No adventure cards are encountered on the way. This makes the larger quest sacrificial to the smaller gains from the events. But the problem HERE is "where is the quest?"... B. Same as above, but only monsters are encountered, and you discard anything else into the discard pile as it is pulled. Hey the game is random anyway, just pretend those cards weren't next in the pile :) C. Create Quest Cards instead of seperating the pile etc. Basically a special card pile that is pulled when a player declares a quest. It describes necessary goals and gains from acheiving the quest. (Similar to one of the mid-section boards (can't remember which one), but with many more options). An easy way of doing this is also make a percentile table of 100 possible quests, and roll on the table with percentile dice. This is a lot of work sure, but I may make one soon enough if inspired :) D. Players don't "declare" quests, but other events bring them on. For example, gaining 20 experience points (whether they are spent or not has no relevance). Or every 10th adventure card pulled is really a quest card. Or perhaps, every 5th turn a quest is activated. ROLLING PER ADVENTURE CARD: Everytime an adventure card is pulled, a roll of the die determines the extremity of the event. For Example, a 1-4 means pull from standard adventure deck, 5 means pull from High Powered Monster deck, 6 means pull from high powered monster and magic item deck. With Two dice, this can have even more possibilities... Or AGAIN you can use a percentile table to make all kinds of possibilites (e.g. 1-50 standard card pull, 50-60, medium deck pull, uhhh, 74 pick two cards, hmmm 94 lose 2 gold and pick a card... etc etc) this INCREASES randomness, but still reduces the chance of running into all kinds of high-powered stuff just as easily as low-powered stuff... -------- Part II: -------- Oooh I forgot one very important one... (BTW, just read your section and noticed the quest idea in there. Well I like long games, just not Long Boring games :) ) FRACTIONAL GAINS IN STRENGTH AND CRAFT: A chart is made up, and I will include an example chart. This chart explains how many craft, strength or life must be gained to gain one full point. For example, if a character has 5 strength, then he must gain three more strength points to get to 6. So there are two types of points: ACTUAL STRENGTH (Or craft) and FRACTIONAL STRENGTH (or whatever you want to call it)... Glance at the following chart and perhaps it will make more sense: To have X ACTUAL Strength, you must have Y FRACTIONAL Strength 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 5 5 7 6 10 7 15 8 23 9 35 So if a person has 10 strength in the standard rules, their strength effectively is ONLY 6. If their strength is 20, their strength is effectively ONLY 7. This chart can be manipulated however necessary of course, I just came up with it on the spot, and craft may have a completely different ratio to it. But this makes it more like real adventure games, where levels are harder to achieve as you go up. Note even magic objects or master characters fall under this rule. For example gaining 2 strength from an object could very well not gain any Real strenght yet. In addition, any temporary objects, like a potion will gain REAL strength, not temporary fractional strength. I can't think of any major complications on this one, but pretty much of anything has a definitive duration (temporary), then act as if it is full strength bonus (not fractional). If there is a tie in any situation, the character's fractional strength can be used to determine the outcome. Character vs. Character, the one with more fractional strength points win. For creature vs. character, perhaps a roll of the die vs your fractional points above your actual points may help determine the win (the creature could have fractional points too). In any case, I think this has MANY benefits, similarly described in your ideas (but over 8 IS possible, just much harder to achieve and not likely)... P.S. In this variation, the experience points may be used to gain fractional points as usual (7 per 1 fractional point)... and you may want to still use that idea with seperate deck pulls for point costs, but perhaps through using a different method... like experience has dual spending capability (each point can be spent twice, once on a deck pull, and once towards craft/strength gain)... Haven't really thought much further into that one yet. --------- Part III: --------- Ok, This may already be getting old, but I had another interesting idea... As I email them to you I keep them here on my Hard Drive too, so... Character Levels: This is a two-fold idea. One part is how do players gain levels, second part is what is gained from levels. Well the first one may need some ideas thrown around, but the second part is where this idea began. All decks are seperated into piles, level piles. A player picks from the pile which corresponds to the level he is at. These piles are seperated before the game begins into perhaps subjective level piles, maybe 10 piles would work (for 10 possible levels). Another variation of this deck seperation is simply adding attributes to monsters for higher level players (but this limits them to low-level items still, which may still want to keep as a possibility). Of course this allows for greater experience point gain and perhaps other optional advantages or disadvantages house rules can come up with. This can also be used in reverse, for example level one players reduce their prey by one point, or only low-level items can be found for them. Another variation, is do this ONLY for the monsters, and keep the items in pile as usual. You may want to seperate the items into two or three piles still for other reasons involving levels, but just because you kill a high-level creature, or are a high-level player, doesn't mean you'll find 10 bags of gold with the monster. But I think you should at least be level 5 (as an example) to find higher level items (like magic items). The problem is how do you determine which pile to pick from in the first place - the monsters or the items. You may just want to roll a die or something (50-50). This idea can be fleshed out further. Now how do players gain levels... Well you can do the old classic gaining levels with experience points, and a chart is made to determine the experience points necessary to gain those levels. Or perhaps when a person reaches a certain attribute level, they are also a certain experience level (for example, 6 strength may mean the player is now level 3). All house rules etc too. By the way, NONE of these ideas I have sent have been play-tested. House rules and variations may be necessary to flesh them out of course. But I think they all have merit, and the simple ones (like the fractional strength points) can be immediately and easily implemented into the game without difficulty. The chart the fractional points are based on may need some play-testing however :)... David Altman davidaltman@bigfoot.com