Attribute Bloat 'Re-Deux'

[JLV]

Originally Posted by JohnPaulB

This is what you can spend XP on other than Attributes, Spells or Talents (ITL page 45):

• For gold! Sweet, sweet gold!
• For a Limited Wish, which can save your life on the day that luck turns against you.
• To improve your staff’s Mana stat, if you are a wizard. This lets you cast more spells.

I might expand this to include:

• Bribes
• Favors
• Lawyer
• Establishing a business or farm
• Contacts
• Bookings on Journeys
• Investing in something that brings in continual returns

(ITL page 46) A character who needs mundane wealth between adventures may, if the GM permits, cash XP in for 1 gold piece each. The player must offer a good in-game explanation of where the money came from. “Found it in the street” should work zero times, and “Rich uncle died” once at most.

As per Talents, Contacts & Favors could be something that you were working on all year long and finally one decided to present themselves. Or you could save a Contact (not have a particular person selected) Slot waiting until you needed one in game and then that slot would be given over to that NPC. The same contact is available for other games until you screw them or they die. Favors get used up once.

Lawyers can be put on retainer. Though if you are going to travel, you might want to get a Letter of Retainer from the Lawyer's Guild.

You can save up your XP and buy a business. The GM can determine how much that new business costs. When you have enough XP cash it in. It could represent $ you've been saving all along or the buying out from the previous owner or even a business you got from your dead uncle.

If you need to journey by ship and don't have the $, you could cash in some XP and get passage. This might be by contacts or getting in good with the Captain or (if the GM is surly) being shanghaid.

The GM and the Players can get creative on what else this could be expanded into.

So Sandbagging XP might be the alternative to spending it on Attributes or Talents.

I LIKE the contacts thing -- and think some thought should be given to it in the official rules; as it stands, you really don't have any guidelines for something like that, but in "real life" how many times have you wound up "lucking into" something simply because you knew someone or a friend tipped you off about something? Honestly, a good "contacts" system would tremendously aid roleplaying and also help the GM figure out all kinds of extra adventure hooks just by running such a system.

I'm vaguely remembering some such system in another role-playing game (maybe Thieves' Guild? Or maybe it was some kind of Noir Investigative game? I can't remember off the top of my head -- I know I ran across it several years ago and sort of "bookmarked" it my mind for future thinking, but haven't thought about it in years...). Anyway, whatever game it was, it was really an engine that helped move the players through the adventure and provide additional information/clues/support/opportunities to the players in a structural way (instead of "you happen to talk to the old geezer seated on the bench in front of the tavern" schtick that so many of us use all the time).