Okay then 150 isn't bad for 'standard'. As long as the extra XP is reasonably accessible (not universally but not all lumped into 1 skill or 1 society).

john

I'd love to see the amount of exp being given out taken down a notch, but I don't feel that half exp should go to extras. Or am I seeing extra's differently than you Tony? I assume you are talking more along the role-playing side. Handing a book you found to specific someone, or reporting movement of a faction to the goody goods in the area.

Giving huge exp portions to things like secret societies, races, churches, nations, casting source, etc may lead to big exp differences between character types.

Giving huge exp portions to things such as rare or extreme character choices will lead to frustrations.

I love the idea of rewarding people for their character choices. Having Artisan Painter, a wholly worthless skill, had big benefits during the delve. I loved that. Having Perform (X) was useful during the delve as well, despite Perform really just eating ranks otherwise. I like seeing things like when if you are a Hurrianic Aegis, this happens during the mod. The Tir Betoqi king will beg the action of a dwarven hero, and command as their king a Tir Betoqi hero.

I love the little bonuses you've been doing. Exp here and there for secret society missions. Exp for being a reaching out to your brethren in an mod here are there.

I'd be careful about dropping the XP too much. Part of the reason the hard points at least increased in XP totals in the first arc is that 5 mods for a rank felt too slow. I've seen SPs worth over 300. I do like the idea though as I mentioned of being able to tell more complete stories.

If the "standard" XP dropped to 200 for a SP with bonus added if extra conditions are met - i.e. you find out the rest of the story because it truly is appropriate for the characters there, I think that could work. It would fall back in line with old soft points, and the cap you could set as you felt was appropriate again with whatever rewards would work. Again, I would frame it as complete + bonus.

With a sweep of his hat,

Paul

Also nothing says that the "Extra XP" has to add up right to 250 XP (Max). There could be the potential to earn 300-350 XP but you can only keep 250 XP. That way if someone didn't get 1 thing (missing out on a story element, SS message, etc) but got 3 others, that might still be enough for XP.

I'd rather see 'interesting rewards' as the bonuses for completing side quests, SS missions, or otherwise rather than always XP. These can be things like Faction/Fame, special "one use favors", discounts on things, etc. whatever is appropriate.

John

To add to John's list consider adding things that are meaningful story-wise, but not necessarily mechanically. Do an awesome job for the Orthodoxy and they could present you with a rare 1st Imperium prayer book that gives an idea of how the populace worshiped then. Not the Cants side of things, just the populace. Maybe it's worth a +1 to knowledge religion checks and if not it's still cool.

Member of the Emerald Society? What about a set of fine artisan tools, passed down from one of the famous members, once used in recovering a restoring a precious artifact (little "a")? Consider the meaning to an Elorii to find a note carved by one of the races they destroyed, forgiving them for the destruction they wrought at the hands of their evil Ssanu masters. With items of rich flavor and meaning, the mechanics are secondary.

For a Knight of Milandir, consider being graced by the knight's belt or tabbard of an exceptionally brave member of the Dolphin guard in honor for their service.

The advantage you have of opening up those side stories is that you can more adequately tailor rewards of meaning beyond strict mechanics.

With a sweep of his hat,

Paul

+1 to Paul's suggestions!

Thoughts on Thoughts:

1) Challenges.
Disassociate skill checks from the idea of "challenges." There is no challenge in having the RNG spit up just what you need to open a door. I don't care about that door. It's a gate to something more interesting.

And don't get hung up on defining "winning" or any angst about "....most people don't want challenge. People want to *win*..." I recently played "Long March, Dark Coda" and as a Val'Mordane with The Knight's Code I had entire minutes of being utterly without an idea of the proper actions to take in several encounters. That kind of experience is winning.

That was challenging, too. It's got nothing to do with whether the Avoidance scores on enemies are too high or too low, and everything to do with a given character's investment in a scene. There's not much accounting for that -unless the decision comes down from above that there needs to be more mods based on the campaign character demographics.
Which could be a great idea or a terrible one, not sure.

Keep telling strong stories. That's where the real challenge is found. Locally 4th Ed. D&D's LFR campaign sunk because if RPG'ing is supported by 3 legs -mechanics, camaraderie, and setting investment LFR decided to be a two-legged stool, and eventually enough people walked away to greener pastures. Like this one.

2) The Obscurity - Utility skill slider.
Nothing to be done about this. The removal of Making a Living made this problem worse. I've got a hero with Ranks in Craft: Swordsmithing as flavor. They're now literally useless.

The best solution I've ever seen was in Shadowrun. The designers gave PC's a huge bonus skill pool and said, "spend this on whatever, but it has to be cool and non-Combat." Perform, Craft skills, and superfluous Knowledge skills like "Knowledge: history of the gladius" or "Knowledge: Horticulture" are perfect candidates.

3) The Arms Race.
Skip it. It's ultimately bad for the campaign overall, because somewhere in there is one more reason for someone to quit. A TN 30 Lock is a TN 30 Lock. Scenery can take a pass on being challenging anyway if it's not serving the narrative.

A PC who was part of the destruction of Ubraxicitit got mauled by a Shadow Lion a few days ago. Survived a brawl with a demon king and banished The D*******, yet she got her butt raked by a giant cat. Try not to think about it too much, but more importantly try not to keep having this happen. It is quite possible to humiliate a PC out of playing.

I've complained about armor mechanics before and it's not a good idea to ask faith of a player that Slow is worth tolerating solely because somewhere in the dozens of points of Stamina lost to that cat the difference between 4 and 5 DR is proven. Then why wear Gothic Plate at all? Because it's the character's choice. Because being a intimidating tower of plates and metal is part of who that person is, which is the best reason to do anything in an RPG. Choices like that show investment. So do non-optimal weapon selections. The Arms Races harms all these things.

4) Skill Gating.
Make sure you really want to gate some piece of lore behind a a check and not a personal choice. In Living Arcanis the eloran "Past Lives" feats were the very incarnation of what a bad idea this was. First you took a feat that served no other purpose. Then you waited. Eventually you made a roll with a high variability of outcome and no retries, and held your breath. Maybe you learned something new. Maybe you were reminded of a clue you could have gotten some other way or already had.
In the end an opportunity cost far in excess of the benefit and detrimental to the player type Arcanis seems to want to cultivate: the people who love the lore.
As a positive example: Secret Societies. Flavor-loaded, varied and multifaceted, and free to get into, but not without consequences. Fantastic, where do I sign up Under the bridge? With the three-fingered woman? Terrific, I'll be there with lunch.

5) Errata.
I'm far better at these kinds of discussions in person instead of online. I can measure tone of voice and body posture and facial expression and eye movement and whatever else makes the difference. That matters because I care, I want to have a voice in these topics, but I struggle with expressing myself in a way that's adequate for conveying my passion for the topic without being inflammatory.
I don't want to pick a fight, but I do want even just a token nod when I observe that bastard swords are everywhere but heavy armor isn't and polearms are virtually non-existent. This suggests to me a problem, though probably not a huge one. No, I don't have a statistical model of usage. I couldn't get a big enough sample size to be useful, and my references would be ultimately anecdotal. But when the spectrum of player types from "performance focused" to "fluff-effectiveness balanced" keep coming up with the same combinations, something's out of whack.
See also Martial Archetypes and Sweeping Strikes/Mighty Swing advanced maneuver combinations. I'm sure this homogeneity will even out as the tiers climb, but I'm not playing Tier 3 -I'm playing Tier 1 and 2 and right now there could be a problem because this combo's practically mandatory and I start to get antsy when every Might based warrior looks the same.

I don't think anyone's out to screw anyone else, but we've also clearly got differing opinions on what balance is. I was debating bringing up the Wings of the Fiend talent chain for examination as the basis of a claim of that it's overcosted and underperforming. For example I think the Tier 3 part should very clearly state that as long as the character wing's aren't restrained they can fall a possibly infinite distance without injury on landing. And they can -as long as the Storyteller interprets their ability to glide downward like that. Because if the source talent doesn't say that, that hair will be split. I've seen it.

I can't appropriately express how much I hate that kind of mentality in these games, but it's as reliable as dice and battle maps. Your endless quibbling about weapon handedness and casting and shields as weapons is "clearly important and consequential," but my concerns about a niche racial feat are pointless and unnecessary because you can directly quantify the stakes in hard numerical terms and I can mostly just tell "something's not right."

You're not out to screw me just because you think there's no reasonable issue there, but that's the result when in actuality the difference is just opinion. I hate "reasonable." I hate "designer intentions." In the context of rules and laws they mean nothing substantive on a practical level, and more directly I'm not buying a system that thinks Rule Zero is preferable solution to anything.

If you were sweating a Tick in gear juggling at the table I'd tell you not to worry about it because it's holding up the game. Take your turn, do your thing, move the narrative along. I trust you to know your character -yeah, you can cheat that Tick. I'm not really worried about it. Not because I trust you, but because I actually care about how much fun the rest of the table is having and wasting time on minutiae tends not to be entertainment.
But if I decide to try to assault a fortified canyon position from the unclimbable back face by gliding in and you think it'd be "more realistic/fair/plausible/funny" to instead work out how many Wounds I take when I pancake from 70' up then you've screwed me, and it doesn't mean a damn thing that you didn't intend to. Sure the result was painful, but the process -an opinion rendered from a position of superior authority, was legitimate and isn't that what really matters?

No. No it's not. But it's likely we disagree, so let's try to keep an eye on the actual stakes and likely outcomes instead of justifying the Ends with the Means.

Yes, this.
Small, targeted gestures can be incredibly powerful.

Example: year 1 of LA just about every Elorii player I knew tried to buy the random "Eloran Artifact" hanging on a bar wall in some module who's name escapes me. It was worth 1,000 gp, and utterly mundane. But because those players thought they had some duty to reclaim lost ancestral tokens, they all tried to find some way to negotiate for it.
Nobody could afford it, of course. Everyone was level 1 or 2 and owned virtually nothing besides their necessary kit.
People tried anyway, offered arms and armor and ammo and favors all over some utterly inconsequential bit of fluff that didn't even merit a sentence of description besides "looks Elorii made."
That was a decade ago, but it still stands out in my mind.

Hell, I remember the bitter debates about the Staff of Endrade. In Seeds of Our Destruction it was like 80% of the treasure value, and rather niche. Most tables diced over the Helm of Nevanos and sold the staff, but I did see (and personally offer) some passionate debate for the merits of keeping it. I can look back and see that really it didn't have enough merit, not at the sacrifice required of the rest of the party, but all the same it was and remains a bloody fine bit of Elorii history and a rather nice (and unique) item graphic.
Or Sea Hawk. I saw very few of those intact compared to the windfall of hawking it (ha ha) and splitting the proceeds. I'd argue that Sea Hawk lacked the "cool value" of the Staff of Endrade though.

I agree with Paul, as well. And my suggestion would be to make the bonus XP no more than 25% - 30% of the total. And in addition, not every adventure should have it. Even though it's called, "bonus XP", if it begins to feel mandatory, it doesn't matter what you call it.

Lastly, the "bonus" stuff should not always be XP. Sometimes it should be information, nifty items, favors, etc. Any little extra "reward" for doing something can be reward enough. Heck, personally, I'd rather get the extra piece of lore or an unusual thingamajiggy than bonus XP any time. They add flavor and story. (Bonus XP just adds bigger, meaner monsters, next time.) But that's just me.


Scott

Scott, I agree on the % and the rewards not always being XP. As long as the thingamajiggy is interesting or the lore is, that can certainly suffice.

With a sweep of his hat,

Paul