Hi - for the character generator on malleus.dk a question has popped about "selecting the same advance, from different ranks, for different XP cost."

For instance, a psyker at rank 5 has access to:

Rank 4 (Scholar Materium): Psychic Power - 200xp

Rank 5 (Scholar Medicae): Psychic Power - 100xp

I would dictate that you must select the Psychic Power at Rank 4 for 200xp before you are allowed to select the Psychic Power from Rank 5 for 100xp.

What do you do?

Regards

Thomas

I don't see any reason when a player of a rank 5 psyker should be forced to purchase an advance off the rank 4 chart once they are rank 5. If the player chooses to forgo the Psychic Power advance from rank 4, I would let them. That's just one psychic power the character doesn't have.

Thomas said:

Bear in mind that a player has to actually achieve the higher rank before they get access to the lower-costing advance. Depending on how much and how often a GM gives out XP, it may be a very long time before a character reaches that higher rank, time during which the player would be doing without that additional Psychic Power. The risk that a character, either the Psyker in question or other group members, may well die during that time due to not having that Psychic Power earlier (whatever they may have chosen) is a very real one.

Remember: it's one thing to be buying a whole bunch of stuff all at once (like you would with creating a higher-ranked character for, say, an Ascension-level campaign). It's quite another having to play through a campaign or parts of a campaign without a skill or talent, one which would make life oh-so-much easier if you had it now, XP cost be damned. Take this from somebody who played through a campaign where the GM awarded XP maybe every other session at best, and then rarely more than 150 XP at a time. Under such circumstances, it took a looooooooong time to get through ranks, and many of us did indeed pay the premium to have a talent earlier even though we could have gotten it cheaper at a higher rank.

-Kirov

I'd agree with all above and would like to add that it'd be best to keep the GREAT tool you have built as versatile as possible. Some GMs might state that you have to buy the 200xp talent before the 100xp talent, while others may not. That being the case, and with an eye to your work getting as much use from the community as possible, don't limit when a talent can or can not be purchased unless dictated by the RAW and the published prerequisites. While GMs can be as draconian as they wish, the tool should remain neutral. ;-)

Hi - thanks for the answers.

I can see your point ... and my own. Changing this would force me to modify some of the basic assumptions of the system, which in turn would be quite costly in terms of my free time (call the waaahmbulance, I hear you yell) :-)

I am a little shocked to learn how few XP you're earning pr game session. We give out around 600 xp pr game session! Then again we only play around every two months.

Cheers,

Thomas

I seem to recall some guidelines in the rulebook suggesting 200XP for 4hrs play. I try to stick roughly to this level, but give generous bonuses upon completion of major plotlines.

As for the generatoria, leave it optional