Swordplay You Say?

Talents are one of the few big tweaks that came with Tunnels and Trolls 7.x. There was also obviously a couple of new attributes thrown into the mix and, the way you measured character level changed significantly. Experience points were spent as well as earned but all of this was pretty black and white.

Talents however where left (quite intentionally it would seem) ambiguous. They could be pretty much anything you wanted them to be and, you don't even have to declare them from the get go. Which is all well and good but, I'd be lying if I didn't say that the vague nature of the official ruling didn't bug me just a little.

It's all well and good when you're constructing a vanilla Talent, such as Climbing say. It's bonus applies when you're climbing, but what of Talents with a combat or magical focus. You know a player will want to take one eventually. Just how do you handle it?

If you're playing it by the rulebook Talents don't do anything for improving how well you fight, which I frankly don't agree with. In the example given in the rulebook Fang uses his Swordplay Talent to disarm an opponent when he is outnumbered, which logically suggests that he is armed with a sword of some description. Yet his Talent affords him no bonus directly to his combat total.. Which just doesn't add up to me.

He should get a bonus, but what exactly? The value of his Talent (not his Talent plus his Attribute) in adds? In dice? Something else completely?