Advancement

The main way in which a character will become more skilled, powerful and prepared is by earning and spending experience which will be awarded by the Game Master.

During Downtime, characters can spend experience increasing the rank of their Skills or upgrading any previously existing Training Option they might have.

Whenever a player wants to get an entirely new training option for their character, they need to commit some of their downtime to an Advancement Scene set up by their Game Master. In short campaigns or one-shots Game Masters may choose to waive the need for an Advancement Scene.

Awarding Experience

The rate at which a Game Master awards experience should depend on the general power level and length they are aiming for in their Campaign. A character can accrue a maximum of 2500 total experience point through their career. There are two things for which a Game Master should award experience:

  • Completing minor or major objectives determined collaboratively by the Game Master and the Group.

  • Simply playing! Characters should receive a bit of experience every session- this allows GMs to estimate what the group’s total experience will be at the end of a certain number of sessions.

Objectives are determined by whatever it is the group is trying to accomplish at the moment, the GM can ask the group what their current objectives are at any moment and determine how significant these objectives would be and how much experience would be awarded for completing them. A group should have at least one Major Objective and two minor objectives they are working towards at any given point.

A Minor Objective might:

  • Be achievable in one or two gameplay sessions.

  • Involve a small amount of risk for the group.

  • Have minor consequences for the group if botched or abandoned.

A Major Objective might:

  • Be achievable in three or more gameplay sessions.

  • Involve a significant risk for the group.

  • Have major consequences for the group if botched or abandoned.

It is also possible that some very minor objectives or plans will not grant experience when achieved, based on the GMs judgement.

Game Masters can use the following table as a general guideline in order to award experience after every gameplay session.

Skill Upgrades

Characters can spend experience points directly upgrading their skills. The experience cost of upgrading a skill from one level to the next is represented on the following table. It is cheaper to upgrade a Specialized skill than one that isn’t.

Advancement Scenes

Advancement scenes are an optional rule that serve as a way to keep players from suddenly gaining new knowledge out of thin air in longer campaigns. In order to gain a new training option, characters need to both invest the XP and spend some time learning the new ability. To represent this, the player can explain to the GM how their character will go about learning the new ability, what kind of instruction they will use, what resources they will invest, etc. Based on this the GM can determine the number of successes the character would need to properly learn the ability.

For each half-day of Downtime the character spends working on their Advancement scene, they can make a test as determined by the GM and log their successes as progress. Once the character has obtained enough successes, they have learned the new training option successfully. GMs can use the following table to determine how many successes a character might need to learn a new training option.

Training

All training options has several levels, which are purchased by your character in order Remember that the first level of any training options requires an Advancement Scene as well as experience.

Sometimes the same level of an ability may be taken more than once, in those cases, that level will be marked with an asterisk (*), however, the specific choice made for that training level must be different each time.

Proficiency Trading

All training options has several levels, which are purchased by your character in order Remember that the first level of any training options requires an Advancement Scene as well as experience.

Sometimes the same level of an ability may be taken more than once, in those cases, that level will be marked with an asterisk (*), however, the specific choice made for that training level must be different each time.

Sometimes Training options will let a character become proficient at something they can already do or have no interest in learning. Unless otherwise specified in the training tree itself, whenever a character becomes Proficient at something, they may instead chose to gain a +1 Modifier on a skill of their choice. Each type of proficiency will allow characters to access modifiers for different skills, which can be checked on the following list:

    • Empathy

    • Medicine

    • Survival

    • Willpower

    • Athletics

    • Strike

    • Presence

    • Grapple

    • Diplomacy

    • Performance

    • Presence

    • Deception

    • Medicine

    • Fortitude

    • Knowledge

    • Survival

    • Piloting

    • Perception

    • Aim

    • Willpower

    • Mechacraft

    • Crafting

    • Knowledge

    • Investigation

    • Datacraft

    • Knowledge

    • Investigation

    • Deception

    • Medicine

    • Empathy

    • Survival

    • Vitality

    • Piloting

    • Perception

    • Survival

    • Datacraft

    • Sneak

    • Diplomacy

    • Deception

    • Performance

    • Diplomacy

    • Empathy

    • Grapple

    • Vitality

    • Aim

    • Perception

    • Sneak

    • Evasion

    • Fortitude

    • Evasion

    • Willpower

    • Presence

    • Athletics

    • Vitality

    • Crafting

    • Fortitude

    • Piloting

    • Perception

    • Mechacraft

    • Datacraft

    • Mechacraft

    • Crafting

    • Sneak

    • Investigation

    • Athletics

    • Evasion

    • Grapple

    • Strike