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The Experience of a Lifetime (XP System & Rules)


Ante

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Everything you ever wanted to know about experience (in this game), but were afraid to ask:

How often will it be handed out? I'm going to be handing out xp to you guys once a month, using a system that I developed and used to good effect on a previous PbP game. Depending on how and when gameplay here officially starts, xp-handouts may be on the first of the month, the middle of the month, or even the end. Regardless, you'll all be getting your xp-fixes (you junkies, you) once per month, not once per chapter.

If it's not handed out per chapter, how do we earn it, then? I'll be handing out experience awards based on a few different things (most of which, I freely admit, I cribbed from BlueNinja's old Trans-D game).

These things are:

  • Quality and quantity of posts. Mostly quality, though. Quantity is great, but one well-written post will generally impress me more than ten one-line posts that amount to little more than raising your hand and saying 'still here'.
  • Amazing results on dice rolls. Note that while experience will, of course, be awarded for truly amazing dice rolls that represent an epic degree of success for your characters, I will also be handing out xp awards for any truly epic degree of fail, as well.
  • Major plot developments that your character was central in moving forward or completing. This one's pretty straightforward, but say so if any of you need more clarification here.
  • Good character interaction. Also pretty obvious, I think.
There may also be one or two other things that I'm forgetting about, but I think that about sums it up.

What's this new system you mention? Right. That. In this game, all xp will be divided up into four separate categories: General Experience, Trait Experience, Background Experience, and "Inspired" Experience. Each of these experience types will be usable for very specific areas of your character sheet (as listed below), with the exception of General Experience, which can be used exactly like normal xp is used in any other game.

Wait, what? Explain, please. My pleasure. Below, the four categories of experience awards are outlined.

Trait Experience: is usable for raising Attributes, Abilities, Specialties for Abilities and for Ability Mastery. Trait Experience points will be awarded for regular, and noteworthy, use of Attribute and Ability dice pools in a given month. “Noteworthy” does not necessarily mean “successful”; your character could fail in a noteworthy manner as well, and it’ll still count. When you use the experience gained to buy a dot in an Attribute or Ability, I will expect you to spend it on a Trait that was actually put to use recently (though it doesn’t have to be the trait that was used the most, I just don’t want to see someone’s Appearance suddenly going up two dots when they haven’t made use of their Appearance or related dice pools at any point in recent memory, or something).

Background Experience: is useable for raising/buying Backgrounds and Background Enhancements. Players will likely receive fewer of these points on average than any of the others, as opportunities to develop, or raise, backgrounds will probably not be very common (also, Backgrounds aren't very expensive, so you won't need as much wink ). This will be awarded on a case by case basis, as appropriate. As an example, especially good interaction between a PC and an NPC might net that PC’s player some Background Experience so that they can buy themselves an Ally or Contact (or maybe even a Nemesis). As with the Trait Experience above, Background Experience should be spent with an eye towards what is appropriate for your character at a given time. Note that you don’t have to spend experience points right when I award them, so while I may have given you 2 BEs for exceptional interaction with an NPC two months ago, if you decide to save your points until you have enough to buy the fourth dot in your Sanctum background instead (and provided there isn’t some IC reason why a fourth dot isn’t really feasible), I won’t stop you.

"Inspired" Experience: is useable for raising "Inspired" traits (Inspiration, Quantum, Psi) and their related temporary pools, buying Knacks/Modes/Powers/Etc, and raising Willpower. Inspired Experience will be awarded for clever use of knacks, powers, facets, mega-attributes, dramatic editing, and the like, as well as for noteworthy uses of the character’s Willpower dice pool/points. This will be one of the more difficult categories to score high in, but I do want you guys to be able to develop your "Inspired" traits as well as your normal ones, so I’ll keep a careful lookout for opportunities to award Inspired points to each of you.

What is, or is not, an appropriate use of Inspired Experience points at any given time will be handled on a case by case basis. In general though, I’m going to give you guys as much freedom as possible when purchasing such things.

General Experience: is useable for anything that regular xp can be used for. Players will almost always be awarded at least one point of General Experience each month, though the exact amount will likely vary each time. General Experience is the most flexible of all the experience types, and can be used to purchase dots in any part of the char sheet. Firstly, you can add General Experience to the experience you’ve saved up in any of the other three categories to purchase things you might not otherwise be able to afford. So if you’ve managed to save up 5 points of Inspired Experience during the last two months, and you’ve also managed to save up another 5 points of General Experience, you can add the two together for a total of 10xp and buy yourself an Heroic knack (if you're playing a Daredevil, anyway). Second, you could use the 5 points of General Experience to purchase dots in a category that you don’t currently have any xp in at all. Or third, you could just keep saving.

I will award General Experience points for such things as outstanding posts, and post regularity. I will also award General Experience anytime I think a player deserves experience for something, but can’t decide which of the other categories to put it in. wink

But why, man?! The reason I'm doing things like this (and the reason I've done it this way with PbP games in the past), is because I don't like the incredibly slow rate at which players generally accrue xp in a normal PbP game. At the same time, I can understand why STs are leery of just handing out gobs of xp every month or so, because of the temptation that it presents to players to buy up lots of high-powered goodness in only a few weeks or even days of IC-time. On the other hand, I have always been incredibly frustrated at how difficult, not to mention generally unrewarding it is to spend that hard-won xp on base Attributes or Abilities, or on Backgrounds and the like, when you know that once those points are gone it might well be as much as six months - or even as much as a year - before you'll have enough points to raise that Level 3 power to 4 or 5 dots, or buy that 10th dot of Psi, or what have you. Sure, in IC-time it may be that only a month has passed, but just in case any of us have forgotten, we all live in real time. And a year of time, during which your character's sheet just sits there and stagnates is a long, long time.

For those players who care about the dots on their character's sheets, it's difficult to maintain interest, or to feel like one's character is undergoing any concrete development. For players who generally don't worry as much about dots on a page, it tends to encourage the kind of loose-and-lossy thinking that leads to those awkward moments that periodically pop up in PbP games, when it suddenly becomes apparent that one or more players have no idea what their characters are actually capable of. Obsessing over how many dots are on your char-sheet isn't a good thing, but neither is completely forgetting how many dots are on the thing, either.

And so I've come up with my own system for handing out xp specifically to deal with this conundrum. Splitting up the xp like this gives players the opportunity to raise all those mundane traits and backgrounds that normally get ignored once play begins. It also bypasses the temptation to spend what would otherwise seem like rather a lot of xp (for a PbP game, anyway) to raise your nova's Quantum rating to a 6, or buy up every Knack in the book and all the player-created ones to boot. But mostly, what it does is provide you guys with regular, concrete rewards for the investment that you put into your characters and into this game. My hope is that being able to see your characters regularly grow and change in small ways, and occasionally in big ways as well, will keep them fresh and interesting in your minds, and greatly increase your overall sense of satisfaction and enjoyment in playing.

If all goes to plan, this system of xp-awards will not only keep out the xp-greedy would-be munchkins who wouldn't know character development if it jumped off the page and kicked them in their soft, pudgy asses with skills honed through many long years in the school of 'hard knocks and tough life-lessons'; it should also keep out all the 'rewl play-ahs' who get annoyed when you remind them that, while their character's highly intelligent and well-researched monologue on modern forensic techniques was both informative and entertaining, the fact of the matter is that their character has no dots in Science, Medicine, or Investigation, and only two dots in Intelligence ("Oh. Right. Well, I can edit the post if you want - or just delete it - but honestly, after all the work I put into the thing, it just seems like a waste." "Yes. It does. Perhaps next time, you'll take two-flipping-seconds to review your character sheet and, in so doing, avoid such flagrant waste in the future, yes?").

Ok, well that's a lot to take in all at once, but how many experience points are we actually talking about here? The total amount of xp awarded in a given month will vary; not only from month to month, but from player to player. In terms of actual numbers, I will rarely award more than 3 or 4xp in a single category in a single month. 5, or even 6xp is possible in the Inspired category (though not likely) and more than 1 or 2xp in the Backgrounds category would be very unusual. Also, it is possible to not earn any experience in one or more categories, if there's simply nothing to reward (though I doubt that this will happen very often). Between the four categories, I would expect to get between 5 and 12xp in total each month, sometimes less, very rarely more.

Okay, so that's all the questions regarding this topic I can think of, but if you guys have more then ask away. smile

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Can our Trait XP be used to purchase Enhancements or Mega-Atts? (Since those are attributes ... sort of)

Is General XP the only way to purchase Merits or buy off Flaws? (I think this is a yes, I can't think of a reason to make its own category.)

What's up with the Uncle Creepy avatar?

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No, Trait XP cannot be used on Mega-Attributes or Enhancements. I could easily write a small paper on why megas are not, in any way, basic Traits, but suffice it to say that they aren't and that, therefore, Trait XP cannot be used for purchasing them.

General XP would be the only way to buy up Merits or buy off Flaws, yes. Merits and Flaws are two of those things that no character has to have, but many do, and so it neither has its own category, nor does it really fit into any of the others.

The "Uncle Creepy" avatar: There's a reason for that (as there is a reason for virtually everything I put into my stories, even if I never get around to making it obvious what that reason is), however it's probably going to be a while before that reason becomes apparent.

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Hmm. I think I'm getting a good sense of the appropriate differentiating which category gains XP from a notable event or occurance. But still could you be willing to give some hypothetical in-game examples?

One, it never hurts to get a stronger understanding. Two, I want to get a sneak peak at the game's flavor.

Please?

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I'm not going to write up a series of mini-fics just so you can get a "sneak peek". Sorry, Mel. wink

As for examples:

Repeated in-game use of your Ability dice pools will certainly net you some experience in the Trait category, but not much if all you're doing is repeatedly declaring "I hit the guy with my fist".

The last PbP game I ran, in which I used this XP-system, was a zombie-apocalypse game called American Revenants, and one of my players had a character who had been a stripper before the world all went to hell. Her name was 'Bunny'. Anyway, Bunny once got cornered in the 12th floor hallway of a New York apartment building by a small herd of zombies. She'd already used up her stash of kitchen-cum-throwing knives and was still looking at three zombies who were quickly bearing down on her.

So, weaponless, she took down two zombies simultaneously by leaping clear over a third zombie and punching a big ol' hole in each of the brain pans of the other two with the heels of her stripper stilettos. The maneuver quickly became known OOCly as "The Stiletto Leap of Doom!" amongst all the other players, and you had better believe that 'Bunny' got a fat stack of Trait Experience at the end of the month for coming up with such an off-the-wall, entertaining and yet highly effective method for using her Brawl dice pool to kill zombies.

Later on, in the same game, a close-quarters encounter between one of the PCs, a small squad of US troops and a large pack of zombies didn't go quite as well as everyone might've hoped. I had one of the soldiers crack under the pressure and unleash a full-auto blast into the crowd of zombies. Unfortunately, this sudden panic attack left one of his fellow soldiers distracted just long enough to fall to a group of zombies. The rest of the soldiers killed the attacking undead in a hurry, but were still left with a mortally wounded companion screaming on the ground and another having a nervous breakdown with a loaded assault rifle.

It was messy.

The player involved (a mesmerist) reacted by activating Inspirational Aura, delivering an impressive speech, and keeping the entire situation from imploding on itself as soldier turned against soldier. Needless to say, I awarded Inspired Experience to that character's player for using a primarily combat-oriented Knack to cleverly defuse a pontentially violent situation. He thought outside the box, and was rewarded for it.

Those are two examples for how to use your character's Stats cleverly and thus earn extra xp. I hope they helped. smile

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Originally Posted By: Mel Ganker
Well, that works smile

Still, the peek would have been nice. laugh

You could pick up the graphic novels from your local library. I've talked with Cent extensively to get a feel for the game, and was immediately gratified when there was a panel in in the graphic novel that illistrated exactly what he was talking about. He's basing it off the comics, so reading at least one of the graphic novels will be a very nice 'sneak' at what is coming, I suspect. Or at least, for the feel that Cent is going for.
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