On Experience

When everything your character does improves on level-up, earning experience gets a little funky. Because experience is a single pool which drives leveling up, the question of what activities provide experience becomes crucially important.

The general desire is to restrict experience-gaining activities to ones that are related to the bulk of what improves. This is how we get OD&D's gp=xp system (but only coin gained from "adventuring" activities) or Alexis' ruling that only combat provides experience. The squiggly bit enters as soon as characters are able to perform actions that do not directly contribute towards experience acquisition, like fishing or cobbling, or whatever. How are these skills improved? If tied to level, as most games do, then it seems a little strange (although explainable) that one's battle prowess (or personal wealth) directly improves one's ability to fish or make shoes, but it also would be strange for making shoes to improve either one's fishing abilities or one's combat prowess. On the other hand, if fishing is not tied to level, we've added in a secondary progression mechanic orthogonal to everything else in the game, and now a lot of the skills previously lumped into the old xp framework might better fit into the secondary one, which certainly makes the previously elegant level system much clunkier. Some people like clunk, others don't: YMMV.

One of the goals of my discipline system was to try and clean this up, providing a single mechanic that can reasonably account for both types of experience. As I've now personally seen in Alexis' games, having recourse to Sage Abilities (and the huge implications of choosing one's initial specialization on overall character development) is a huge part of having a fully-fleshed-out character.

I've discussed this before, but I'll summarize. Each discipline (skill) has its own xp track, measured in notches. Certain amounts of notches correlate to significant leaps in ability (rolling 1d4+1d6 instead of 1d6, for example). Notches are gained in one of two ways.

The simplest way is through training: characters pay some amount of money and spend 6 months to gain a notch, with the idea being that after a successful adventure characters will spend their winnings on training and equipment, taking on another adventure in a year's time.

The second way comes from using the discipline in-game: whenever the player rolls a critical result (critical success or critical failure), the player marks it on their sheet.  When the number of these marks equals the number of notches possessed in that discipline, the character gains a notch. There is one problem with this rule: currently, characters require 1 notch to progress from Novice (untrained) to Apprentice (a little trained). Consequently, a player has a 2/6 chance (rolling a 1 or 6 on a d6) to jump a tier and significantly improve the character. I don't like this for two reasons: the first is that this negates much of the advantage of skill-heavy classes - since most characters enter play with perhaps one or two Journeyman disciplines (the tier above Apprentice), some Apprentice, and mostly Novice, the general expertise that I want these skill-heavy trades to have is quickly (and easily) matched by everyone else at the table. The second reason is that the in-world logic doesn't make a ton of sense - it’s the same as saying that someone can, after playing a single game of soccer,  be on equal footing with someone of equal physical ability who has been playing for 6 months - while also removing the usefulness of training.

Because of this, I have ruled that gaining notches in this way cannot allow the character to increase that discipline's tier - criticals still tally, so that after the final notch is gained and the tier is improved the character might gain an additional notch or two, but the actual mechanical benefits do not manifest until the character has trained. While I don't think my players (when I get some…) will like this very much, I do think that they will understand it and not whine too terribly much.