At the end of a session, every player gets 4 XP to spend on his character. Favored entities can be increased without training time, but most other statistics take time and often a tutor to increase. Those who perform useful or particularly entertaining activities related to the game get an extra XP. Those who acheive some special success in-character receive an extra XP. In addition, a character should track Legend Points. When a character performs a legendarily heroic (or heroicly legendary) action, his player rolls the associated virtue and accumulates one Legend Point per success. Particularly anti-heroic actions can cause you to roll the relevant virtue and lose one LP per success. Legend Points are tracked on four scales: Glory (Valor), Mettle (Conviction), Succor (Compassion), and Wisdom (Temperance). In order to advance, a character needs to have a certain total number of LP; the distribution is not important for advancement. Characters start with the minimum LP for their Essence, distributed at the whim of the player. You can buy the Legend background for your character to get more (see ExaltedHackingBackgrounds). Getting to higher Circles requires more:
Old CircleCircle TitleEssenceMin. LP
1-3Apprentice220
3-5Journeyman350
5-7Master Journeyman490
7-9Journeyman Master5140
9-11Master6200
12-14Warden7270
15Master Warden8350
If you fall below the minimum Legend requirement for your Essence, you lose access to that point of Essence until it's back up again. You can spend the XP or do the meditations without having the minimum Legend, but it doesn't do any good until you meet all three requirements. I'd still like to implement a mechanic whereby you need to go tell stories about your Legendary Deeds; the Lunar mechanic of doing so at Face advancement (i.e. Circle advancement) time doesn't quite apply to us. I'm thinking about having LP accumulate "Unsung," and then you go have them Sung and they get moved to "real" LP where you can use them for advancement. Successes on your Performace roll to tell the stories shouldn't modify how many you get, but rather how long it takes to get your Legend spread around among enough people: normal people might need to spend months talking about those Kobolds they skewered, but a Troubadour can do it faster. -Brian
Still under consideration is an old Legend Point mechanic: In addition, particularly legendary actions are rewarded with some number of Unsung Legend Points. You can't do anything with these yet: they're just a note that you've done something and it was pretty cool. Any roll with more than five net successes is usually worth ULP (1 per success over 5). Impressive recovery from a critical failure is often Legendary. Certainly, it is Legendary to Have Adventures and Vanquish Horrors. Once you get back to civilization, it's time to get drunk and tell stories. You tell the story of one of your Adventures, and convert Unsung Legend Points to spendable points at a ratio proportional to your degree of success. Hey, maybe *that's* why Sir Robin carries a minstrel around, and Adepts tend to take Troubadours along with them. Unsung Legend Points should be transferable: if the story is told about how cool your sword was as it plunged into the dragon's heart, then your sword gets to spend some points. This is a nice way to mechanic enchantment-by-use, a common feature of the Earthdawn setting. The mechanic is easy: A Charisma+Performance roll capped at a number of dice equal to the number of ULPs contributing to the story being told. Each success is an ULP that just converted to an XP; each failure is a lost ULP. It's intended that everyone will get about 4 XP from this mechanic per session, and that you can tell your own stories for small events, but want a Troudadour for big stuff. You can get 4 XP from 8 1-point stories or from 1 8-point story, if you have a good troubadour. Here's a second idea for what to do with ULPs: since you already have to note what event they came from, note a bit about its flavor. You can trade an ULP in to edit in a karmicly appropriate event: if you have 3 ULP sitting around from saving a bunch of kids, you could spend them to have street urchins come to your defense later.
For better propoganda converting ULP to SLP faster, you might use this system: you get one Charisma+Performance Legend-building roll per unit time (per legend?). Each success converts one ULP into a SLP. --zebediah I like that. --bts If you want us climbing to high essence fast, the LP restrictions are something to consider--particularly how fast you want us aquiring LP. Essence 5 in 20ish runs (8ish total adventures) up from essence 2 means 15ish+ LP per adventure, or upwards of 7 LP a run...that's something like four or five virtue rolls to generate LP, and then twoish Legend Singing rolls on top of that, for highly spiffy mundane performers...assuming nothing gets lost from craven behaviour. I'm being overly numeric, and my numbers are a bit off, but the point bears consideration--using your XP from the first two runs to buy essence 3 just aint going to happen--jesse cox. 120 LP accumulated over 20 sessions implies 6 LP per session, though my shorter goal of Essence 3 in four sessions requires 30/4 = 7.5 LP/session. Assuming everybody has a Virtue of 3, that's five rolls, figure six and a loss, which means an average of at least one Heroic Action per player-hour. That doesn't sound unrealistic, actually. Singing LP only takes character time, not player time, so I'm not as worried about that. --bts Here's a suggestion that came up while talking to Andy and Justin: the LP aren't minima. When you go to buy Essence , either all your LP count as XP spent towards buying Essence, or you hve to buy Essence at full cost, but then your LP buy you more toys as if they were XP. That last is a particularly neat fishhook... --bts