Spending Experience Points
Most XP are spent on rerolls, player intrusions, and advancement. More rarely, they might be spent on lucky shots.
XP are meant to be used. Hoarding them is not a good idea. If you save up 10 or more, the GM might make you spend some on an advancement.
Experience points should not be a goal unto themselves. Instead, they are a game mechanic to simulate how—through experience, time, toil, travail, and so on—you become more skilled, more able, and more powerful.
Some players want to use all their XP for advancement and never use it on rerolls. Others spend it freely on rerolls and barely have any left for advancement. Neither option creates a well-rounded experience for the character or the group. As a compromise, you can split your XP, using half for things that happen during gameplay (such as rerolls and player intrusions) and the other half for advancements.
Alternatively, you might be required to use XP from GM intrusions only for rerolls and player intrusions, and use XP from character arcs and story awards only for advancements.
Rerolling
The most straightforward way to use XP is to reroll any roll in the game (yours or another player’s). This costs 1 XP per reroll, and you use the better of the two rolls. For example, if you’re trying to dodge a dragon’s bite and you roll a 4, you can spend 1 XP to reroll it and take whichever of the two rolls is better.
Most players use this to reroll a d20 for a skill, attack, or defense task, but you could use it on a recovery or an artifact depletion roll if you think it’s worth it.
You can reroll as many times as you wish, taking the best of all the rolls, as long as you have the XP to spend for each reroll.
Don't throw away good XP after bad by rerolling the same task over and over!
Player Intrusion
You can spend 1 XP for a player intrusion, altering something in the campaign to benefit your character.
Character Advancement
A beginning character is tier 1. Progressing to the next tier involves four steps, each costing 4 XP. You can buy these advancements in any order, but only once per tier. In other words, you have to buy all four advancements, which moves you up to the next tier. At each new tier, the four advancement options are available for you to buy again. The four main advancements are as follows. (In addition to the indicated benefit, each time you advance your character you also gain 1 resource point.)
See Resource Points for more details.
- Increasing Capabilities: Permanently add 4 to your stat Pools, allocating the points among your Pools however you wish.
- Moving Toward Perfection: Increase one of your Edge stats by +1.
- Extra Effort: Increase your Effort score by +1. (Your Effort has a maximum of 6; no matter how advanced your character is, you can't go beyond Effort 6.)
- Skill: Become trained in a skill, such as athletics, or persuasion.
- You can use this advancement to cancel out an inability in a skill.
- If you are tier 2 or higher, you can use the skill advancement to improve that skill from trained to specialized.
- If you are tier 2 or higher, you can use the skill advancement to become trained in an attack skill or defense skill.
- You can use this advancement to become trained in one of your abilities that requires a roll, like a Mage becoming trained in attacking with the Blast ability (assuming you are tier 2 or higher if the ability is an attack, like Blast).
- If you are tier 4 or higher, you can use the skill advancement to improve one of your attack or defense skills from trained to specialized.
In place of one of the above advancements, you can choose from the following options. (Your other three advancements have to be from the options listed above.)
- Other: Choose one of the four special options:
- Recovery: Add +2 to your recoveries.
- Focus: Choose another focus ability of your current tier or lower, according to your focus's flowchart.
- Armor: Be able to freely use all kinds of armor.
- Weapons: Be able to freely use all kinds of weapons.
- Genre: If you are tier 3 or higher, choose another genre ability.
Instead of getting XP from character arcs or story awards, some GMs might just tell you (and the other players) that it's time to advance your characters a step. That way, every character is the same tier.
Reaching a New Tier
When you've bought four advancements and reach a new tier, you automatically get one new focus ability for free.
Your focus has a flowchart showing how its early abilities connect to and unlock its later abilities. Your new focus ability can be anything on the flowchart as long as it's your current tier or lower and connected by a line to an ability you already have.
For example, if your focus is Abides in Stone and your tier 1 abilities are Intimidating Presence and Stoneknowing, on the flowchart those are connected to the tier 2 abilities Stone Bash and Field of Stones, so both of those are options for you. Neither of your abilities is connected to Golem Grip, so you can't choose that when you reach tier 2.
This happens again for each tier—buy four advancements, automatically get a new focus ability for free, and repeat.
In videogames, the ability flowchart for your character is often called a skill tree.
Tier 3: Upon reaching tier 3, you automatically get a new genre ability for free. Choose this ability from the appropriate list for the genre of the game you're playing. You get to do this again at tier 6 and (if the game advances past tier 6) every three tiers thereafter (tier 9, 12, and so on).
Lucky Shot
Sometimes you might know there's a foe nearby but you don't have any idea where they are, such as if they're invisible, you're blinded, or you're in complete darkness. Under these circumstances, you usually can't attack them—your attack automatically fails. However, you have the option of spending 1 XP to make a lucky shot in their general area. If you do this, your attack is hindered by four steps.
Making a lucky shot is a rare use of XP. Some characters may go an entire campaign without doing either of these.
React to a GM Intrusion
A player can't refuse a GM intrusion. However, on your next turn you could choose to use a player intrusion to ameliorate the effects of the GM's intrusion. For instance, if the GM uses an intrusion to say you're out of ammo, on your turn you could spend 1 XP (the cost of a player intrusion) to find an extra clip of ammo hidden in your equipment. If the GM's intrusion is that you fall into the river, on your turn you can use a player intrusion (assuming you have 1 XP to spend) to snag a branch from a nearby tree with a low-hanging branch. You haven't undone the GM intrusion, but you've found a way to react positively to it.