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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cryptos" data-source="post: 4611551" data-attributes="member: 58439">White Wolf, for old WoD and also new, also suggests that a storyteller can do something similar in terms of rewards.  You can give out generic experience that a character can spend on anything, or you can give out experience that can only be spent on specific things such as skills you've used in play, stuff you've practiced, things someone might be able to teach you.  For instance, you might award a Mage with experience specifically for learning new rotes (formulated spells) which they would have to learn from a mentor or a grimoire, or you might award someone experience that can only be spent on skills they used during gameplay, or in a blurb I was just re-reading about converting a mortal character with psychic merits into a Vampire, it suggests converting those merits into experience that can only be spent on psychic-like Vampire disciplines: Auspex, Dominate, etc.Both the old and new systems have always been pretty flexible in that they don't just give you, say 80 experience points for killing that goblin, but rather suggest a general guideline (and only a guideline) of one experience point per chapter, plus one for resolving a plot or story, plus bonus rewards of different types as a storyteller sees fit: roleplay XP, training XP, XP for giving yourself drawbacks the storyteller can exploit or for overcoming extreme circumstances, or whatever the storyteller wants to hand out XP for.  But I've found that having the ability to say, "This experience goes into a seperate pool for you to spend on X" does a lot to add to the immersiveness of character development.  It's always good to get generic XP that you can spent willy-nilly, but it's also kind of interesting to say that you're only going to allow players to spend XP (or a chunk of it) on things they actually used or practiced during the game... it gets people using their skills and abilities in more ways more often, thinking about trying everything their character would try.  My storyteller in an old Vampire chronicle did this... we could only improve on things with in-game justification as to why the character should get better at it.  You wound up having players come up with activities for their characters to be involved in (taking a class, researching something, engaging in a sport or activity, actually practicing non-story related larceny rather than just calling themselves a 'thief', etc) and working it into the game.  He'd then also give us generic bonus XP when our play warranted it.It's easier to do in systems where character building is point buy or primarily point buy: Hero, M&M, WoD, etc.  You can make the points or experience you reward represent anything that goes into building a character... skill XP, power XP, etc.I think one interesting way to do it in a level based system could be to take what 4e has done a step further and completely divorce combat abilities and basic attributes from things like skills, rituals, and perhaps some types of feats (skill feats, things like linguist, etc.)  Let the level-based advancement handle the combat side and then let DMs reward points for players to invest on the other, non-combat side.</blockquote>

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