Petwia's House of Refuge

Petwia's former residence now functions as a house of refuge, a place for the destitute to find a meal and a bed.

As Petwia is Jewish, the Catholic Church, which normally underwrites such enterprises, won't provide any aid, so the fiscal support needs to come from Petwia, summing to 8gp a month. This money covers food and upkeep costs for the boarders and caregivers.

As this 8gp a month goes towards tikkun olam, Petwia will receive 160xp each month (the value of the donation in silver pieces).

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.

Experience Rewards

When I started as a DM, I ignored experience rewards and handed out levels as rewards for accomplishing tasks in my railroads.  I then discovered the OSR and the whole world of online RPG blogging, and my perspective changed, especially after reading this post.  I use a variant of it for my LotFP games, and it has worked very well.

The crux of the rule is that it takes 10 experience to level up, and each encounter (which I define as in a situation in which the character might die) is worth 1, 2, or 3 experience correlating with the difficulty of the encounter (and I have given larger rewards for accomplishing larger goals in the world).

I had to add a caveat to this, however, as it seemed unfair that level 1 and level 5 characters would progress at the same rate.  And that is, at the beginning of each session, I calculate the average character level.  Characters at that level need 10 experience points to level up.  For every level a character is above this average, they require 2 additional experience points to level up, and for every level a character is below this average, they require 2 fewer experience points to level up.

The logic behind this is that the challenges a higher-level party will face is typically greater than that of a lower-level party, so low-level characters who survive such an encounter ought to receive more benefit from it.  Similarly, because they are mentoring and protecting the lower-level characters, higher leveled characters receive less benefit from an encounter, requiring them to get more experience to level up.

The rule has worked very well so far - as my game is often quite lethal, new characters are constantly being introduced and then rushed to a power level more in line with the rest of the group, while the longer-lived characters, who have more experience, don't outpace the rest of the group.