5 hours ago, penpenpen said:

Good idea! But in such a case, I'd give them the full amount, but advise them to not spend it all right away, and simply start picking stuff up asthey get a feel for the character and campaign. After all, not all GMs or campaigns are equal and some skills/talents that get lots of mileage in some campaigns may be barely used at all in others.

That would also be viable. One could just award them more XP per session than the pre-existing characters so that they can catch up to the rest of the group, but avoid being overwhelmed by all the options, too.

I just know that when I was new to RPGs there’s no way I would’ve followed your advice (not that it’s bad). I’d have gone crazy spending it and then felt overwhelmed. But, as you said, every gm, game, and player is different.

3 hours ago, AnomalousAuthor said:

I just know that when I was new to RPGs there’s no way I would’ve followed your advice (not that it’s bad). I’d have gone crazy spending it and then felt overwhelmed. But, as you said, every gm, game, and player is different.

Most players would be the same. The progression element of RPGs are not just rewarding, positive feedback, but also gives the player a learning curve

On 4/3/2019 at 5:41 PM, amuller93 said:

my question is being so far behind the curve is theire any way for me to catch up and be actully useful in the group

Ask the GM to bring you into parity with the rest of the group?

On 4/6/2019 at 6:16 AM, GandofGand said:

For this system that's not actually a half bad idea. Set it up as a tiered thing like fate;

Minor Milestone advance 1 skills by 1 rank (Maybe even throw in the D6 thing where they can advance one additional skill that was actually used in previous sessions.)

Major Milestone; may take 1-2 tier 1 Talents or 1 Tier 2 Talents, must have linked Talents and advance 1 skills as Minor Milestone

Significant Milestone; As Major Take plus 1 Tier 3 Talent or 2 Tier 2 Talents

Conclusion of Arc; as Significant plus take 1 Tier 4 Talent, or Tier 5 if Linked, or Add a new Spec.

...its rough and I'm just throwing stuff out there for now. Have to do some more thinking on this...

I've experimented with doing XP different in this game quite a bit. I like the RAW version of the game so I use it most of the time but I did allow XP allocation by concept in several games (give yourself whatever XP you feel you need to represent the character up to 400 XP, the closer you are to 400 the less XP you will get going forward), and I have also done a Life Path system somewhat like Traveller.

In the end the RAW system seems to work well enough but the sticking point is the award schedule.

The book is about linear advancement and even though the trees have ascending XP values it's not a significant delay or impairment to advancing. So I think what the game really needs is an ascending scale of difficulty in earning XP (the more XP you have the slower you earn it to represent that you have achieved mastery and are now just polishing your abilities). I say this because I detest power gaming but I like a system of progression that makes sense for the story.

What about resetting XP (to a certain amount, not back to zero) after every big milestone in the campaign, something that's the equivalent of a movie climax. So if you miss a session you're only behind until the next big story begins.

Maybe couple that with talking to people about what is core to their character and what they might want to change and let them re-spend XP, similar to what Marvel Heroic does.

Our campaign started with the FaD Beginner Box and is still young, but we have just added two new characters. One is a replacement character whose player didn't like the pre-generated one from the Beginner Box, and one is a new player's character. In both cases the new characters began as starting characters with no extra XP, but once they were in play the GM awarded the new characters double XP until they reached parity with the older (original) character. It seems to work so far.