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 100 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 acquiring new Skill Specializations or Special Abilities, or improving existing ones.

Improving Skill Specializations and Special Abilities

Skill Specializations and Special Abilities are improved or purchased using their XP, just like in character creation. They are improved or purchased 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.

Score	Point Cost	Cost to Next Level	Total Experience Spent to Next Level
1-10	1	10	10
11-20	2	20	30
21-30	3	30	60
31-40	4	40	100
41-50	5	50	150
51-60	6	60	210
61-70	7	70	280
71-80	8	80	360
81-90	9	90	450
91-100	10	100	550

Improving Abilities

The Skill Specializations 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 ten's place in the specialization.

Example: Holtsmeistur just added a specialization of 10 in dodging (a ten's place of 1), which is keyed to Dexterity, this specialization improves his original Dexterity score of 20 to 21