About the advancements. I feel it’s very easy to get the Playbook special abilities: the players rolls a lot during the mission, so they get lot of XPs for their “favorite” actions attempted, for their Desperate rolls, and for expressing their character’s various aspects.
On the opposite, it’s VERY difficult to simply get a single Dot in the skills list! First of all, they should have 3 Crew upgrades (if they want to have the chance to train… and of course every character want different Training area!), and the Crew is rarely upgraded! So, a lot of missions before to have even a single Training crew upgrade, a lot more to get the 3 different upgrades.
THEN, even if they choose to Train in Downtime (rare, ’cause they often have to remove Stress AND Harm, pretty long and difficult process), however, even if they choose the Train action, they need to choose it 6 times to get a Dot! So, about 6 missions for a dot!
How you are facing that in your games?
It sounds like you are using an old version of the rules, because basically none of what you are talking about still applies in 3f.
XP instead just gets assigned wherever you want when you earn it, but there is less of it overall.
Actually, I’m reading the 3F. However, now I see “Choose any of your four tracks to mark.”.
Still, the need of the Crew Advancement is a pain.
In my game, I’m simply telliung the players that they need a friend/ally well trained in the area they want to improve, as “narrative requirement” alternative to the Crew Advancement. Also, sometime I require a roll (something like “Try to convince your friend to train you for a while”).
I don’t understand – what do you mean by “the need of the Crew Advancement”? Are you talking about the fact that you can no longer just train? That doesn’t seem like that big a deal, since, as you say, people often have other things they need to do.
If you think the XP rate is just too low, you’re free to tamper with it, but that “six missions for a dot” is silly – if you actually WANT that dot, you should be doing more than just wasting downtime actions to train in it.
Ok, I understand. So, if they don’t have the crew upgrade, they can’t choose the Train action. BUT, they don’t need the upgrade, because they can put they XPs even on the skills, “freely”.
All clear, now.
Andrea Parducci
Yes! Sorry! I guess I didn’t understand what the question was. The “training” option is only there to allow you to spend downtime actions to advance a category. All other XP can be placed wherever you want. It’s true that advancement still isn’t very fast, but like I implied, I think that’s a deliberate design decision earlier. If you want to speed it up a little, you could consider bringing back to the 3E rule where each person gets 1 XP towards an action category “for free” at the end of the session.
I’ll revise to make this clearer.