Character Advancement and Downtime

Action Points

For each event you attend and hand in a downtime sheet you will receive action points. Action points equate to time to spend learning new skills or carrying out investigations. For each IC month between events you will receive two action points. On average there will be three IC months between events. As action points equal time, you cannot hoard them to use at a later date. Therefore if you do not use your action points within a downtime, you lose them.

Action points can be spent to buy new skills and raise attributes. They can also be made to create additional potions and solutions or to create specific crafted items or to join expeditions into the wastelands or investigate particular events. The table below show some examples of downtime actions and costs. These are just a few examples and you are in no way restricted to them.

You may not always have enough action points to learn a new skill or specialisations in one go. Don't worry if this is the case - you can spread your learning over two or more downtimes. This represents your character not having to split their attentions between other duties and learning their new skill. If you do learn a new skill over two or more downtimes, you are not considered to have that skill and as such cannot use it, until you have paid the full points cost to buy it.

Example: Rakona FitzVishreon has six action points. She wishes to learn Ballistics Advanced: Black powder, but she also wishes to join an expedition to the Wastelands. As she does not have enough points to do both, she splits them like this: she spends two points going on the Wastelands expedition and the remaining four go towards learning Ballistics Advanced. As she needs five points to buy this skill, she will not be able to complete her learning until the next downtime, but at that point, she only need spend one action point to finish learning the skill. She cannot use the skill until she has finished paying for it in her second downtime.

Downtime

When writing your downtime sheets you need to give us as much information as possible about an action. You need to include details of the other characters involved, your methods and any pertinent items or skills used. Below we have given examples of a good and bad downtime to help you. In each case, the player had six action points.

Bad Downtime

I am going to make things difficult for my rival wine merchant and try and find out if he's done anything dodgy I can exploit. I also want to advertise my own goods. Then I'll spend my left over points on starting to learn Craft Basic: Brewer.

This downtime gives nowhere near enough detail. To start off with, he doesn't tell us who his rival is. It leaves the refs guessing as to how the character plans to achieve his actions. He also does not cite a teacher for his new skill. In general, the whole downtime is too vague.

Good Downtime

I am going to spend two action points trying to damage the trade of my rival, Lars Blakelock. I am going to use the eight silver leaves left over from the last game to hire a thief to slip into his warehouse and break open several of his vats and spill their contents. I will ask him to break the vats kept nearest any dry stock he has, so that that will be damaged too. I will find a suitable thief using the Knowledge: Underworld skill. I will also ask this thief to ask around and see if my rival has any history in the underworld of "dodgy deals".

Two further points will be spent advertising my own wares and trying to build up my own trade. I will do this by sending free samples to the nobles and trying to persuade one of the public houses to exclusively sell my stock. I will use my Area Knowledge: Third Ring to try and select a suitable pub in the upper class trading area.

With my two remaining points I will begin to learn the skill Craft: Brewer. At the last session I spoke extensively with Gavriel Larkwood and he has agreed to teach me how to brew my own wine. I plan to be able to make the wine as well as sell it. I will finish learning this skill in my next downtime.

For sake of the example, this downtime is fairly simple but you can see how the player names all other PC's and NPC's that he is dealing with and all the skills he will be using. He also states specifically how he is going to do something, making it a much easier task for the refs and therefore he is far more likely to succeed.

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