Chaos Fantasy: Source

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Chapter 2: Making Characters
[ | Making Characters | Your Character Sheet | Behaviour | Experience & Costs (Player) | Experience Rules (GM) | Character Templates | ]
Giving Experience

As time goes by, the player's characters should become more and more powerful. Playing in your campaign will give them the experience necessary to grow and become more than what they were before. As the GM, it's your job to determine just how quickly this will happen.

Eventually, if any character is played long enough, they will become Tricked. Once this happens, the character is considered quite powerful and takes much more to grow and no longer gains experience as normal. This will usually happen to a character if used for more than 50 sessions (each session being a night of play). Although they can still gain experience at your discretion, their character no longer learns at such a fast rate.

Your turn, GM. Consider this carefully: does 50 sessions sound like too much or too little? It obviously depends on how often you play. If you do only 1 session a week or you want fast advancement, you may want to bump up the amount of experience you are handing out. If you do it 7 times a week or you want slower character advancement, then it's time to bump down the amount.

By normal standards, the character shouldn't be getting more than 7 or 8 experience per session. Your best players will likely get a lot more. Rewarding your players for their ingenuity is covered by the Experience Chart, read through it so you know how best to give experience to your players.

A good rule of thumb is to give your players 5 or 6 experience just for playing that night. Then add in bonus points from the charts to give the better players a nice reward.

When and How Experience is Spent

Players can't just spend the experience you give them however they wish. Players are only allowed to add levels to stats, skills, and abilities that were used during the campaign. Players are also not allowed to up anything by more than 1 level per session unless you really think it's warranted as a GM.

Players may spend 1 Ki in order to level up any skill/stat on the spot or 1 Chakra to level up any Ability. With the your permission (or encouragement), the player may spend experience to "go up a level" right in the middle of a fight!

At the end of each session, the you as the GM should allow players to spend experience gained so far.

The Powerfully Tricked Character

Once a character reaches 800 experience, the character is considered Tricked. This means that unless you the GM give explicit permission to play the character, it isn't happening. If you determine that the character is too advanced for the campaign, the player must respect this. That character has gained enough experience to seriously upset any starting campaign that is created.

A character that is tricked out should definitely only gain experience when it is really important. In other words, they should not gain anywhere near as much experience per session, simply because they have now realized their true potential; people only fly so high in life. They can still gain experience, but it should only be from things like: saving people from certain death, performing a very difficult skill, self-sacrifice or endangerment, or barely surviving combat even when near or at their best. In other words, they only get bonus experience and only when it's something critical.

This character has seen lots of stuff before, fought many different enemies, and survived many situations. Nothing is really new anymore, so why should he get experience for doing the same old routine? Players with tricked characters should consider getting experience as a blessing, since it will not happen nearly as often for them as it will for the other players.

As the GM, you can decide what the Tricked limit is. You may wish to raise or lower it depending on the power levels you wish to use for your world book. World books themselves may suggest new takes on Experience Rules.

The Experience Chart

You probably have an idea of how much you want to hand out per session. Consider the following to be perks for the better players. If the player does deductive reasoning or good judgment simply because of a skill roll, then it shouldn't count. The experience bonus is more for the player, not the character. This may not seem realistic, but it does add to the fact that this IS a game.

Also, don't give a player too much for one action. Sure they saved a bunch of people and nearly died in the process, but give them the more valuable of the two or up it by another few points or so.

1 Simply waiting it out. If the GM says "two weeks later" and the character was going about his daily business, it is assumed that a character gets 1 experience point every week or so on average.

1 Performing a skill or spell that proves extremely difficult (a severe chance of failure) or is of serious importance to the scene or plan. GMs should consider giving an experience point if the character has performed a number of skills during this session, even if they had only moderate difficulties attached.

1 Coming up with a very clever idea that nearly worked, it just ends up failing or the same player realizes it's weakness.

2 Coming up with a very clever idea that ends up working to the character or party's benefit.

2 Doing a quick action or a quick idea (improvised on the spot...if the player takes time to think, it doesn't count) that proves the character is quick on his feet. There must be a useful and important outcome in the scene because of this action.

4 A plan or action that actually saves multiple lives.

1 Endangering his own life or putting in large amounts of effort for others. This can include daring and brave acts of heroism.

4 Potential self-sacrifice. The character is willing to die to see something through.

1 Managing to negotiate with and convince someone who was first very unwilling.

1 Deductive reasoning ( such as figuring out a somewhat big plot point ).

1 Using good judgment (such as telling if someone is lying, noticing an enemy strategy or weakness, figuring out an ambush, realizing it's a trap, trusting the right person).

1 Playing in character. This should be given only once a session. However, it can become more than once per session if the player does something that is brilliantly in character.

5 Undergoing serious emotional or physical stress (such as close ones dying or he must spend Chakra in order to stay alive or perhaps he must choose who lives and who dies).

1 Defeating a menace with substantial effort, but little real physical harm comes into play. This does not include henchmen. They are worth probably nothing. But a group of henchmen is different.

3 Defeating someone only after playing some serious cat-and-mouse strategies in order to kill eachother. The character has probably taken some serious damage, but he'll recover.

5 The character manages to defeat a menace at the expenditure of most of his Ki, Chakra, HP... you name it. The character could have some serious Red on him and he still manages to win... even if he barely survived.

If the character does not win the battle, still give him some experience for losing.