[Icelander]

I generally like PCs to gain points at a rapid enough rate to always have plenty to spare on various nifty things, but would prefer that such points were spent in consultation with the GM and even other players, in order to avoid assumption clashes, invalidating other PCs' concepts or roles and to keep the characters consistent with the campaign world.

So I'll give out 3-5 points per session, with bonus points for accomplishing certain goals or for making some kind of sacrifice (accepting more risk than otherwise required, refusing reward, adopting a Dependent in play, etc.) to roleplay character traits well. At the end of long adventures, I will additionally give a bundle of bonus points, something like 10-25 points. For epic high-point campaigns where the 'adventure' (or, you know, epic quest) has taken literal years of real-world time to play through, I might give 50-100 points, especially if some of those come in the form of divine blessings or something.

As long as the players are spending their points mostly on broading the capabilities of their PCs, picking up interesting background skills that seem like they should be natural complement to their buttock-kicking skills and using a significant portion of their skill points to make new hirelings, rescued strays or allies into Allies, so that they are trustworthy, the actual combat power of the characters grows much slower than their point value.

I have soft limits on Attributes, skill levels and such, at least in the longest-running fantasy campaign I've run. Attributes beyond 15 (20 for ST) require Unusual Background, at increasingly high values the further characters go from human scale.

Attribute + Advantagae bonus + 10 relative skill level is about the maximum I'll accept for any skill, but PCs are not allowed to just use all their earned points to improve skills to this level. When trying to reach the ranks of the best in the world at something, e.g. a weapon skill, each level they raise their skill be generally requires that they spend a long time training, spar or fight against new challenges with skill levels at least comparable, train under a master who is even better than they are (at least as far as relative skill level is concerned) and other such difficulties.

As the PCs generally have about a thousand things going on at any one time, they rarely have the time to do nothing but train full time for months or years. So while their warriors will often get to extremely high skill levels, so far, no one has reached DX+10 levels, simply because not enough time has passed for them in game for them to be able to get in the necessary training.

We seem to manage to finish 1-4 months of game time per year of real time, on average. The fastest rate was when we were younger, in college and gaming 20-40 hours a week. We finished a year and a half of game time in less than a year of gaming, without much in the way of time skips, either.

Now that we are older, about half of us with children, and half the players living in other countries (they use Skype), not to mention some of our number being involved in one or more other campaigns, our pace has slowed down to under a month of game time per year of real time. I think five months might have passed over the past six years...