Handling XP for new crew members.
How do you do it? For example, Shane has been playing Valos the Spider for a good while and wants to try a Whisper. Valos leaves Doskvol, returning home to deal with a “family thing”. Imlis Copperheart, a Whisper friend-of-a-friend, joins the crew. Does Imlis start from square one? Does she get the same amount as Valos (which would take some serious bookkeeping from the beginning)? Do you just allow group consensus to build Imlis?
How have groups been handling this?
John, will there be advice about this?
Personally, I’d just start them fresh. Maybe with an extra move or two if everyone else is REALLY advanced.
Earning those advances is half the fun, and the PC will pick some up quick enough.
Just spitballing, but I might ask the players what kind of Whisper they are looking for to hire. Do they want someone new who won’t demand a big cut, or do they need an experienced Whisper who is going to have some particular demands on the gang?
Then, use the base starting character, and offer them a 1:1 trade: advances for negative relationships with factions. Maybe even 1:2.
I agree that “leveling” is a big part of the fun. Adam, that’s a very good point! An experienced addition could be balanced by creation potential “fiction friction”, which as we know, is awesome.
If the newbie starts with additional XP, do they start with additional Trauma as well?
There isn’t that big of a difference in power between a brand new PC, and one that’s been on many scores. Rolling more dice gives diminishing returns, and advancements just give you more options, not necessarily more powerful ones. Not to mention playing 2 characters gives the mechanical benefit that your characters can heal all their wounds when they don’t participate in scores.
What I’m saying is, just start them from scratch.
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment of starting from scratch.
That said, if someone really wanted to make an experienced character, I’d give them 1 special ability and 1 action point for every point of Trauma they started with.
I’m thinking that, within reason, giving the new member a wee boost in “their thing” would appropriate. For example, an extra dot in Attune and maybe a ghost-whacking power. They hired the Whisper for a reason, so…
As I have very little experience with a long-running game, I was just curious how much it may break things to fiddle. We likes the fiddling, Bagginses.
Blades seems to be able to handle quite a bit of fiddling (as evidenced by all the hacks). John has mentioned many times that you won’t break the game by handing out more or less XP. The only problem I could see with this would be in a very very long game. If everyone a crew member dies, they come in with the same number of advances as the crew average then over time everyone would start with all their advances. That sounds pretty boring, but it’s more likely that the crew would implode or be destroyed and you’d start a new one.
We just had a new character start last session (to replace one who’d overindulged). Started off the same as the others did, and didn’t seem to cause any consternation (although I did start everyone off with 2 special abilities, so maybe that helped).
If they wanted to be more powerful, I’d probably say fine, but bring in some unhelpful faction histories…
My perspective is, at the heart of it, a new character brings in another stress pool. With the amount of teamwork available, there are ways around low action dice pools. If you have quick wits for offering flashbacks and are willing to be a stress sink for the party then you’ve got a lot of value even before any experience is spent.
Andrew Shields a lot of fictional treatments (especially about tight-knit crews) have “the new guy” stressing about proving themselves to be a valuable member of the team, so what you say fits that trope rather nicely!