Within the game of Witchgates, character advancement refers to permanent changes that improve a specific character’s capabilities – specifically improving or adding to the traits on their character sheet.
Experiences are moments of impact within a character’s life; moments that shape them bit by bit. At the end of each session, players should record a short sentence or phrase to represent 1 single memorable event that occurred for their character in that session. Each of these minor experiences have a value of 1 XP point, a resource used to purchase upgrades for the character. If the players completed a major story or character defining moment, they can ask the GM to upgrade the experience to a value of 3 XP points.
Miss-Fortune can also be converted into XP points at a 2 for 1 cost. Allowing a character to directly learn from their mistakes.
Players characters can take a lengthy task to use their XP points in one of two ways:
- The player can spend the 3 XP to improve one of their character’s skills, specialties, knacks, or attributes by 1 level. These cannot be improved past level 3.
Alternatively, they can spend 3 XP to gain 1 level in a new specialty or knack. - A character can use the lengthy task to start or continue a long-term project, called a Milestone Project. A milestone projects can be used to gain a merit, though it can also be used for story-focused goals or to improve the coven’s caravan. Each lengthy task can invest up to 3 XP into the milestone project.
Projects that represent the eventual acquiring of a new merit should have a 6 box track. Other projects may have a larger or shorter track determined by the GM.
When finalizing a milestone project to create a new merit, a player should spend 2 esoterics as though making a temporary merit (TM) unless they already have a TM representing the project, in which case the TM is replaced by the permanent new merit.Projects that expand a coven’s caravan effectively trades XP for stakes. The project should have a track twice the number of stakes needed to exchange for the new additions. For example, a brand new vehicle that would cost 4 stakes would require an 8-track milestone project.
Advancement Pacing
For most games, direct character advancement should progress at a slow pace. While improved attributes and skills and new merits are exciting, they may come before players have really gotten used to the kit their character has started with. Furthermore, with too many merits a character can quickly appear too powerful, with so many options available to them causing most challenges to loose their luster. Lastly, the natural game flow should always be providing player characters with new short-term rewards in the forms of esoterics, lost words, and temporary merits.
To avoid too quick advancement, players and the game master should consider milestone projects which don’t directly improve a character. These may include:
- Improvements to the group’s caravan; adding new vehicles, helpers, modes of transportation, workstations, etc.
- Story-focused projects: to cast a ritual to create a permanent magical effect in an area, to gather allies or influence, to enact a political ploy for power.
Advancement Over Long Term Campaigns
When planning an adventure where characters may advance over several years of play, the GM and players should consider how powerful they want their character’s to become and how that might affect the story and overall gameplay. The methods below are tried and proven methods we’ve seen that are both fun and mitigate the risk of the game becoming “too easy” or “too rote.”
- First, cap the number of merits any player character can have outside of their caravan. For most games we suggest no character having more than 5 merits, but high powered campaigns may wish to raise that cap up to 8. (remember, player characters can still have temporary merits that act as further buffer from harm)
- Allow characters to collect additional merits beyond the cap at their caravan. The characters can then return to camp to swap out merits, changing their loadout for different stories and problems. This also allows them to “quick heal” by swapping out a damaged merit with one that’s been fully repaired or healed. Lastly, this makes characters most powerful at home where they have access to everything – allowing for scenes where players can revel in being overpowered without that power extending outside of camp and diminishing the stakes of the overall story.
- Allow players to create secondary characters that often stay within the caravan. People who have GM experience especially may enjoy the opportunity to play multiple characters and be less concerned about situations at camp where one character speaks to the other.
- Lastly, as mentioned in the above pacing section, encourage players to spend XP on advancements towards their caravan.