>From: Gavain Sweetman <gavain.sweetman_at_...>
>
>I've been giving out 1 per season for each season they aren't distracted by
>outside issues and are dedicated to training.
Sounds good, but I think that training for more than one season is pretty unrealistic. That is, training ends at some point, and work begins.
The periods that I give most HP for are ones in which I assume that they actually are being "distracted." For instance, in one case the characters were busy surviving by evading an army of undead. As I figure it, that kind of forcible "on the job training" is the fastest there is.
Where I go one per year is when the character is just doing their job on a day-to-day basis, going through the motions of life. That's when one develops least, it seems to me. It's all too easy to become complacent.
But anyhow we seem to agree that it's a question of what has happened in the intervening time.
Think of this as not so much "advancing" the character, but creating a new one based upon the old one. And you're giving the new character enough "advanced experience" to represent the time he's spent doing whatever he's done. Just as though you were creating him from scratch. In that case, of course you'd consider the nature of the character's background in terms of figuring out what their keyword levels should be.
Note that I give out "points" to be spent raising keywords...I don't raise them all the same amount. Yes, this often means that the homeland keyword gets shorted. I think that this is fine. A character learns most of what he needs to know about his own traditions by age 17 (which I imagine is where many starting characters start, simply because it follows the one level per year rule). So I also tend to give out relatively more levels, to account for the need to raise multiple keywords. I may cap the number spent on any one keyword, however, to enforce some breadth, and so that one keyword doesn't get spiked to too high a level than the passing time period should represent.
Mike
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