Silver Insanity

Well, they only lose the first time. And it's not a rout, either, though neither is it a case where they had good odds...

A word to the wise: trying to lead an army through shadow tends to result in a much smaller army at the other end.

So, I added the idea of Bonus points into the XP rules. What do people think?

Some ideas: Arden (Sadie) basically has been insanely active. As such, I am letting him control Prescilla when she shows up. This is spending BP on a 1 point "Ally in Amber". Again, you can do this without spending any points, but the BP system gives me a way to do this, and reward active people by letting them help the game more.

BP lets me know what's important to your character. Like which of her suiters is Alys going to pay attention to?

It also allows for a variation of deficit spending on items and objects. It helps me know what you're planning on doing. It also helps me award things like "I ask the dwarves to make me epic platemail. I'll spend BP cause I don't have the XP now..." without making it completely arbitrary or requiring you shadow walk for everything.

I chose not to lump powers into that, although I guess it could make the consequences of gaining such things less severe. (You'd still have to dump all gained XP toward the power...) Not sure how people feel about that, so for now, that's not a possibility.

Joshua wrote:So, I added the idea of Bonus points into the XP rules. What do people think?

Seems good.

Joshua wrote:I chose not to lump powers into that, although I guess it could make the consequences of gaining such things less severe. (You'd still have to dump all gained XP toward the power...) Not sure how people feel about that, so for now, that's not a possibility.

I'd be perfectly fine with this - especially for pattern, where the initial 25 point cost could easily push a character into nearly unplayable levels of bad stuff. (Consider, for an example, what happens to Coral in the books...) That said, I'd also be perfectly fine with not-this, if other people prefer. I would, however, suggest limiting this to Powers (such as Pattern & Logrus) that are gained more or less instantaneously via some specific in-game action; there's no need to allow such for, for example, Sorcery, where it's broken all the way down to nice five point chunks to start with and if you don't have the points yet, well, you can spend another decade trying to learn it.

I can agree with this sentiment, especially for things as John said, pattern. Help lessen the bad stuff on certain players. Fortunately some of us have enough regular xp/cp banked for such a scenario, but if we didn't...