Doing away with XP

[Andrew Morris]

Thomas,

Oops...you got me! Read it as "any element may potentially vary" instead of "everything varies" and it'll convey what I meant. I suppose even this could be contested as an absolute, but like you said, you understood the point.

[LoreTG]

An alternate form of advancement that I toyed with in one of my early design attempts was called Fallback (I think, that is what it was called, its been a few years...like 10..lol). Anyway - basically characters earned 1 Fallback point per adventure or session, GM preference.. They could call on these points to "add" a skill during play. For example, a player could suddenly remember  that he went to a school on how to drive Sherman Tanks when he used to be in the army and therefore would gain the appropiate skill. These could not be used to advance existing skills though. A character had to spend time training and applying the skill to advancement, and only when the GM agreed could the skill be advanced one rank. Likewise, a skill that was not being used frequently could degrade on GM discretion. The one problem we had with this was that it was a lot on the group to actually pause every few games and go through your character sheets to see what kills you had and had not been using. Overall it worked well, but in the end simply did not fit the feel for the system I was working on at the time.