[ericthered]

Character growth is something that I handle differently for each campaign, because the rate of point advancement has a strong impact on how the game is played.

For some games, I don't do advancement. These are often shorter games, but in generally the characters should come "Complete", heroes that learn comparatively little from adventure to adventure. I usually have ample starting budgets for this style of play.

For games in which the players have ample opportunity to pick up skills they don't start with (Which I tend to run a lot), I generally award points based on in game time. In my current game, this is a rate of 4 points per month of game time. The player has to either already have the skill or find a way to learn it. These points generally get spent on languages, shoring up unexpected weaknesses, or new skills like magic or technology. This doesn't happen every session, and it probably doesn't happen every 4 sessions. though I have short, 2 hour sessions.