Step 4: Invest Experience Points

Once you have chosen your character’s archetype, and career, you can spend experience points to further customize your character. You can spend experience points to increase your characteristics, learn new skills, or improve your existing skills. You can also spend experience points to purchase talents, which are special abilities that can be used in a variety of situations.

Improving Characteristics

During character creation, raising a characteristic to the next highest rating costs ten times the value it is being raised to. For example, raising your character’s Brawn from 3 to 4 would require 40 experience points. You must purchase each improvement sequentially. This means that raising your character’s Brawn from 3 to 5 would cost 90 experience points: 40 for raising it from 3 to 4, then 50 more for raising it from 4 to 5.

No characteristic can be increased higher than 5, either in character creation or in gameplay.

Characteristics may only be purchased with experience points during character creation, not at any later time.

TIP

Characteristics, unlike skills and talents, are a one-time investment made during character creation and cannot be increased afterwards. Therefore, careful allocation of your initial experience points to define these inherent attributes is crucial, as it shapes your character's foundational strengths and weaknesses throughout the game.

Training Skills

Each skill has five ranks of training available. Your character already has ranks in various skills. At this stage, your character may purchase more ranks in skills using their starting XP. However, regardless of any character creation options, your character cannot have any skills higher than rank 2 once character creation is finished, unless a rule specifically states otherwise.

Buying a rank in a career skill follows a cost structure similar to that for buying a rating in a characteristic; training a skill to the next highest rank costs five times the rank to which it is being raised. For example, training a skill from rank 0 (untrained) to rank 1 requires 5 experience points. Improving a rank 1 skill to rank 2 requires 10 experience points. Each rank must be purchased sequentially. This means that acquiring a rank 2 career skill during character creation costs 15 experience points (5 for raising it from zero to rank 1, then 10 more for raising it from rank 1 to rank 2).

Buying a rank in a non-career skill works mostly the same way, but costs a bit more. Each rank of a non-career skill costs five times the rank you’re purchasing, plus 5 additional experience points. So, raising a non-career skill to rank 1 costs 10 XP, while raising it from rank 1 to rank 2 costs 15 XP. As with career skills, each rank must be purchased sequentially.

See the Skills page for more information on each specific skill.

Acquiring Talents

There are five tiers of talents, each talent costs five times it's tier in experience points. For example, a tier 1 talent costs 5 experience points, while a tier 2 talent costs 10 experience points. Talents must be purchased in such a way so that after buying the new talent, your character must have more talents in the next lowest tier. So, if your character has two Tier 1 talents, they can only have a single Tier 2 talent, and can’t have any Tier 3 talents. But if your character has four Tier 1 talents, they can have three Tier 2 talents, two Tier 3 talents, and a single Tier 4 talent.

See the Talents page for more information on each specific talent.