Your character has completed a task, so now what? Well - he gets experience points. Duh.
Our experience system is a hybrid point buy/milestone system. Experience points are spent to allow a character to increase his Primary and Secondary Type scores (maybe other stats?). As he hits certain amounts of XP spent, his Fate score increases. So, a starting character with 5 Fate has spent 10 XP increasing his Type scores, and has spent enough to earn a 6th point in Fate. Tada!
The Characters Primary Type must ALWAYS be greater than his Secondary Type - if the Prime is 5, the Second may go no higher than 4.
I'm also throwing around the idea of allowing the character to purchase additional Secondary Types. Perhaps a Smart, Sly character has taken up body building, he can add Strong to his template. For the purpose of calculating health, only the highest ranked Secondary Type is used, and only one Secondary Type may be used at a time for the purposes of rolls.
As just a first pass idea, additional Secondary Type points would cost 2, Primary Type points 3 or 4, and if we go with the idea, new Secondary Types would cost 5, and would start at 0 points.
Experience is earned in smaller amounts - completing the mission would get each character a couple, maybe certain harrowing encounters could get a point, surviving a Cinematic Event could add a point or two.
In case you couldn't tell, we like small numbers.
I actually really like this system, I like how as you improve on specific traits about yourself (Types) your overall ability to "win the day" increases (Fate), sorta mimicking character growth in a film. We all know Rocky's fate increased as he spent his experience on building strength during his montages.
ReplyDeleteIs there a limit to how many Secondary Types a character can pick? I don't think you should allow too many, to stop the game from turning into a "gotta catch them all" skills system. Each character should only excel at a very few things (like a character archetype in a movie) and let Fate dictate his ability with everything else.
There are some cinematic characters who are fast, strong, nimble, smart, etc. You'd be hurting yourself, though, it'd be 48 points to get a single dot in each secondary skill. That's enough to get you 9 points each in your Primary and default Secondary. You'd end up being average at a whole lot, where as the straight through character would excel at 2 things. It'd actually work pretty well, that way - your fate would end up being the same, but you'd have to be rolling a whole lot less for stuff. If 10 points of XP spent is enough for a new fate point, your highest trait would be 11, where as the character who dumped it all into his core prime and second would have a highest trait of what, 21? Your lowest trait would be 10 and his would be 9. It gets worse if you start including Genre specific Secondary Types. If we keep the XP hand outs fairly small, it shouldn't be a problem.
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