Ok, so I have a quandry. I’m running a brief (probably won’t go past 5-6 months weekly) investigative campaign for a group of 5 who refuse to come up with a name for their gang. The issue is, I want them to be able to reach the full potential of their characters in that span of time as we’re unlikely to do a sequel with the same characters. The current advancement system feels pretty slow, so I may want to speed it up a little bit so they can get to all the things they want their characters to get to. That said, I don’t have enough experience to be sure that by offering a little extra xp per session I won’t make them impossibly OP by the end, thus spoiling the excitement or forcing me to power creep really hard. For people who have run full campaigns before, should I speed up advancement at all, and if so how much?
For reference, they have finished 4 sessions and are only just now starting to acquire new playbook abilities
That’s up to them and the way they’re playing. If you hit all of your xp triggers for a mission multiple times that’s 6 xp, if they spend one crew upgrade in personal training then you can put all 6 xp in playbook spend one downtime action/coin to train and get a playbook advance nearly every session. That’s a lot of advancement potential that’s already in the game, it sounds like they just aren’t hitting the xp triggers of the game or are divesting most of their xp into attributes (which is fine) and aren’t making an abundance of desperate rolls for xp there either.
Edit : mathd wrong
Are they using any of their down time actions to train? That could give them a bit faster progression.
How many xp do they on average acrue pr. session? In my group we typicly get 4-5 xp pr. session. A bit less in the start, but it picked up once we got into our characters. And I feel that is close to ideal.
One thing that have taken a very long time is the crew advancement. We have been playing ca biweekly for about a year, and just now gotten to tier 1. So if you want to speed up progression, you might consider being a little more generous with handing out rep?
First of all, 6 months of weekly sessions doesn’t sound that brief to me! I would expect some badasses to come out of the base rules after ~25 sessions.
Honestly, I wouldn’t change the advancement system, but I would work with your players to help them squeeze more XP out of the system that’s already there. The end-of-session triggers can be worth 6XP, which is practically a playbook ability right there. Encourage your players to think about their beliefs and drive towards them. Encourage them to play up their traumas (or earn new ones) and bring their vices into jobs.
Also, encourage negotiation of skills and position/effect. The most reliable way to farm XP is by taking Desperate actions, which is fun for both you and the players.
Blades is a game that smart players will get better at as they play, and advancement actually tends to speed up rather than slowing down, so I wouldn’t worry about the system itself as much as I would focus on teaching your players how to play it.
All the advice above is good, but if you still want a simple hack to speed up XP, consider splitting one of the XP triggers into two parts. For instance you could make seperate triggers for “expressing heritage or background” and “expressing believes or drives”. This wouldn’t drastically change the curve, but it would give proactive players the opportunity to increase their XP gains per session. And it’s still focused on play, so it’s well within the spirit of the game.
You could always offer bonus XP for things like session write ups, fleshing out NPCs, summarising scores at start of sessions, character backstory or other fiction writings, etc. Basically anything you’d like your players to do more of. It could even be for doing cool things in game that aren’t XP triggers but feel like they should be rewarded.
Saying that, the number of sessions you’ll have, I reckon you could even keep it normal and be fine.
Oh, and depending how much you want them to nams their gang, you could offer a bonus XP to the player who comes up with the best one, or a crew upgrade even.