Advancement Question

[Durgil]

The rules state
Generally, Men and Orcs won't have the points to start off with Gray shades; they must earn themShort of what the section entitled "Artha" says, how does a character raise a skill or stat to the Gray or White shade? I couldn't find anything on it in the chapter on "Advancement," and I didn't see anything in the CB.

[Kublai]

Technically, there is no way to advance your skill to a higher shade. It can be done only through an Epiphany. Epiphanies happen only with the use of Artha. It's supposed to take a long time and should be the goal of several campaigns. It's certainly not expected to happen in an adventure or two.

[luke]

Kublai's correct on that one. Shifting a Shade is something different than pushing up those numbers. Numbers are advanced with experience/tests. Shades are shifted using artha, luck and divine inspiration.

-abzu

[eruditus]

I believe in PAGE 187 (or 188) you can find the epiphany rules for skills and stats.

There are also a few different ways in the works for handling this. I really like Luke's newest Artha rules (look through the posts... I haven't figured out how to do thoses links yet) yet I find them to be overly complicated :)

This is my way of handling epiphanies (which will probably appear as an optional rule in future works):

Award Artha as normal.
Each skill and stat has six new pips after them.
When you spend Artha on something then you mark the appropriate number of pips with a slash. Every six Artha you spend in this way you fill in a pip.
Once all six pips are filled in (36 Artha) then you are ready to change shading on that skill/stat
The only other requirement is that you spend 10 Artha for a temporary epiphany (one scene) at some point. If you spend it in the end that is fine, then its not temporary :) Extra Artha is "lost" meaning if you spend Artha that runs over the 36 required to shift your shade before doing an epiphany or your temp epiphany brings you past the 36 none carries over.

[luke]

interesting that this comes up again, as i've been thinking about it a bit.

while i like my new artha system much more than the old, i don't think it is 100%.

what it does better: rewards the playing of BITs, personal achievement and higher achievement. The other system wasn't clear or explicit enough about these.

It also allows for a GM to better control artha and epiphany. A GM can dump tons of Fate and Persona points on players as rewards for various little bits of roleplay -- especially playing BITs. But these rewards do not lead to players becoming bloated with artha and epiphanies. This is very important to me.

However, the new system is slightly less intuitive than just handing out points. (i'll bet if I released the game with this system already in place, no one would have batted an eye.)

I was thinking about this last night, how this system encourages play and what kind of play it encourages. I am very (very) tempted to scrap the whole artha concept and go a more ROS route, where you can ONLY get artha-type benefits when you play into your BITs. No points are given. It is up to the player to create appropriate "points."

Appropriate Roleplay/Traits allow you to open-end (after the roll) or add a die before the roll, or reroll a traitor from an open-ended test. This way, character and call-on traits become influential in gaining epiphanies, while die traits bonuses are already in place so they don't help with artha/epiphany.

Instincts appropriately played would allow a double diced roll, or to just supercede dice/obviate a roll (as they do now).

Beliefs allow you to reroll a failure.

Epiphanies are earned through activating/playing these BITs. Make a check next to each B, I or T when you use them. 10 Ts, 10 Is and 5 Bs must be checked off. After that the player may choose one appropriate skill, stat or attribute to epiphany. This ability must be in the idiom of the BITs, and must have been tested in the majority of the aforementioned BITs play.


just a thought.
My point being, I HATE the current artha system. HATE HATE HATE (insert ranting imp here).
But I love Epiphanies.
And I love BITs.

::sigh::
-abzu

[eruditus]

Hey, I think you have something here. It might have taken a few tries but your right. Why not handle BITs like skills and stats with pips. Instead of advancement it notes solid use and the trait dictates what good use gives the player. Excellent idea.

Hmmmmm, *hard at work scribbling*