Advancement

As characters adventure and successfully overcome challenges they become better at what they do. Swords of Infinity handles this by rewarding them with Experience Points (XP) that can be spent to improve the characters capabilities.

Gaining XP

Storytellers have two options for awarding XP to player's characters, and may choose to use one exclusively over the other or combine them as makes sense in the story.

Success Based

The success based method of awarding XP is the most straight forward one, but also involves the most book keeping on the part of players. With this method, whenever a character gets a passing success roll, without the aid of pushing past their limits, they gain one XP. Some players enjoy watching their XP tally up, while for others this method is a tedious chore, Storytellers should choose the method that suits their players the best.

Storyteller's Note: Success based XP rewards have the potential to slow down the flow of the game if players are frequently taking breaks to spend their XP between encounters. If this is happening in your game, you may want to consider limiting the times when players do this to downtime (i.e. when their characters are resting, or even in between play sessions).

Story Based

Using the story based method of rewarding players with XP involves giving out experience levels (EL, blocks of 10 XP) in response to players reaching some kind of milestone in the story. Story based rewards are subjective, and their magnitude and frequency is entirely up to the Storyteller. Using this method is useful in situations where the storyteller needs to control a party's capabilities in order to guarantee that the story is either challenging enough or not too challenging to the players, and it also saves players from having to do a lot of book keeping.

Spending XP

As a character gains XP she can spend them on improving her capabilities.

Improving or Adding Skills

Skill Specializations are improved or added using XP, just like in character creation. New Skills always cost 10 XP while improvements are made using the scale in the following table, which represents a character's learning curve as they strive toward mastery -- making quick improvements in the beginning and slower improvements at higher levels of skill.

Skill Tier	Skill Bonus	Tier XP Cost	Cumulative XP Cost
1	+10	1	1
2	+20	2	3
3	+30	3	6
4	+40	4	10
5	+50	5	15
6	+60	6	21
7	+70	7	28
8	+80	8	36
9	+90	9	45
10	+100	10	55

Improving Ability Scores

The Skills that players buy as they gain experience improve the character's ability scores. The key ability associated with it is increased by 1 for each tier of the specialization.

Example: Holtsmeistur just added a Tier 1 specialization in dodging (a +10 Skill bonus), which is keyed to Dexterity, this specialization improves his original Dexterity score of 20 to 21

Adding New Special Abilities

Players are able to give their characters new Special Abilities when they level up. New Special Abilities cost 1 XP each.

Adding or Improving Traits

Players are able to give their characters new Traits or improve Traits that allow it. The cost for improving a Trait can be found on the following table.

Trait Tier	XP Cost	Cumulative Cost	Trait Bonus
1	1	1	+10
2	2	3	+20
3	3	6	+30
4	4	10	+40
5	5	15	+50