Career Advancement

By Eldenward, in WFRP House Rules

Hello everyone. So I'm introducing a new group to WFRP a few weekends from now, and I stumbled across an two ideas for career advancement that I'd like to bounce of you.

I did a search to see if it had been suggested before, but I couldn't find anything. I'm surprised, because it seems so simple.

First off, let me say that one of the biggest issues my previous groups have had is the speedy advancement. That said, I started to only give 1 XP for each game session (4-6 hours), and chose to reward the characters who improved the overall game experience in other ways. That worked to some extent.

However, this morning I came up with an idea that I think might be even better, as it will still allow me to give a 2nd XP point reward in very special circumstances, while maintaining a slower rate of advancement after Rank 1.

What if it took "x" number of experience points based on the character Rank to gain a useable point of experience? That said, at Rank 1, nothing changes. Each experienced point earned will translate to a useable experience point. But, once the character has hit Rank 2, it would then take 2 points of XP to obtain 1 useable experience point. At Rank 3, it would take 3 XP, and so on.

So, instead of 30 points of XP allowing the character to reach Rank 4 with the original system, it would take 60 points, effectively taking twice the time to reach that same Rank. (10 XP to reach Rank 2, 30 to reach Rank 3, and 60 to reach Rank 4).

The second idea could overlay on the first. To help prevent the min-maxer from gaming the system (which I readily admit can also be done by the GM saying "no", but I avoid that when can), what if the players were prevented from changing careers until they complete their first career progression? This forces them to stay within the system during the first Rank (when each XP still equals 1 usable XP). Then, once they move into a new career, advances cost 2 XP and will potentially stem their desire to career hop to simply gain yellow die in different skills.

I'd love to hear your opinions and suggestions! Happy Warhammering.

My own WFRP campaign only started a few months ago. We've done three sessions, and we play about 4-6 hours a session usually. I've been hewing closely to the "1XP a session, plus 1XP for finishing an adventure", as well as I give out a bonus XP for doing some backstory or character building outside of game which two of my players have taken me up on. They've also attended all 3 sessions so they're at 7XP now, which is making me nervous because they are approaching the end of their first career and will probably hit it soon.

The big problem I see with this is there are no adventures that are recommended for people in their 3rd or 4th careers that were published, and even 2nd is a bit pushing it. There are a bunch of 2nd edition adventures that a friend of mine is willing to lend me so I'm not too concerned, but it does mean their characters will only get about 30 sessions (so far we've been done-in-one but that'll probably change) before they cap out the experience and be living legends.

On the other hand, that's also roughly 240 hours of playtime, or 10 actual days they will have invested into playing and expanding their characters to turn them into nameless nobodies into powerhouses who probably have their own whispered stories told about them, so I'm okay with that tradeoff. You could finish the original Enemy Within campaign in 30 sessions without too much difficulty, and that ends with you reshaping the political system of the Empire which seems a decent capstone for any campaign.

If we hit the 30 session (or even before that) and the game's feeling unbalanced, I'm also okay with telling my players that they need to roll up some new PCs for certain adventures because either it's taking place in another reason, or I'm introducing a new character I don't want to feel overshadowed, or they just want to play a new perspective. Or give them out better equipment instead of XP or something similar, but I don't see it - yet - as needing a problem that can be resolved by artificially slowing down their XP gain.

I've noticed the same, though as a player. Try handing out an xp per every other session. I'm finding that I usually don't spend my points, especially if my character only rolled once or twice in the session. At the start I found I was gaining abilities faster than I could keep track of them. Our sessions are a shorter (on-line), which only compounds the issue, I find. We probably only play for three or four hours a session.

The career change is another issue as we've had players switching careers mid adventure, when only a day or three of game time has past.

I give 1XP per session to each player, no more and no less. I also suggested to my gaming group that we make non-career advances mandatory, which they felt was ok. That way they need to invest at least 15 XP in each career before they can begin to spend XP to change careers. 10 + at least 4 for non-career advances + 1 for dedication. I also made sure that I have no Reiklanders in the group (Hero's call introduces rules for the other provinces) so at least 16 sessions before anyone has a new career, often more. I've also made character rank = number of career cards. It's easier to keep track of and means that the character rank improves slower as well.

Compared to when I had only Human Reiklanders (characters created before the release of Hero's call) who did not have to get non-career advances it's almost 50% slower to complete a career. In that campain I also gave more than 1XP some sessions. So that change has worked well in my group.

However, when playing Reiklandes and advancing fast (players often changing careers after 11 XP) we did not have a problem running a 50 session long campaign. It was an epic campaign and the players ended up having 5 careers. But that seemed appropriate after more than one year of gaming.

We made stat increses a non-career thing, but it can be reduced in price by fortune dice gained from the stat (so the career helped advance that stat). So say I wizard wants to increase his Int by 1, in one career slot he gains a fortune die in Int and then the player spends 4 non career points on Int and trades in the Fortune die for a blue die.

This could slow down advancement and give them some incentive to increase their expensive stats with hard earned points.