Character Advancement

Nothing ever stays the same, least of all the player characters. As a Saga Machine campaign continues, most characters achieve their goals, grow and advance in their abilities.

Ambitions

Each player character has three personal ambitions and either the group works together to come up with, or the GM assigns, a fourth party ambition. These are statements about what your character hopes to accomplish. Two of these ambitions should be short-term personal goals, such as might be achieved during a single session. The third personal ambition should be a longer-term goal, taking multiple sessions to complete. The party ambition may be either a short-term or a long-term goal. Examples include:

  • Get a job with a megacorp.

  • Pick a fight with Wu’s scrappers.

  • Discover who sabotaged the ship.

Using Ambitions

The GM can use the characters’ Ambitions to inform her plans when preparing a session, helping her tailor the game to the players’ interests. Additionally, during a session, you might look over your character’s Ambitions if you want a reminder of what to do next.

Achieving Ambitions

When your character achieves one of her ambitions, you should point this out during the game. If the GM agrees, an experience is added to the group pool (see page XXX). Then pick a new ambition to replace the one that was just achieved.

Ambitions may also grant an experience at the end of any session during which your character made substantial progress towards them (GM’s discretion on what qualifies). When this happens, you do not need to erase the ambition until it has actually been achieved.

Leaving Ambitions Blank

If you don’t know what your character plans to achieve next, it’s okay to leave an ambition blank for a while. Ideally, some goal will present itself before long. Just take the time to think things through and declare the ambition once you have something in mind.

Abandoning Ambitions

Ambitions that are no longer relevant to your character may be swapped out between sessions, during downtime, when your character rests for the night or with the GM’s permission.

No Double Dipping!

Every ambition should be individual and discrete, with as little overlap as possible. You may never resolve two ambitions by undertaking the same task!

What Makes a Good Ambition?

Ambitions serve several purposes. They help give direction to players who are at a loss about what to do next, they allow the GM to more easily plan the next session and they serve as interesting fodder for roleplaying and dramatic conflicts. Ambitions are also a way for players to outline the parts of the game they find most interesting and to reward them for being proactive.

Good ambitions serve each of these goals. In addition, a well-chosen ambition should be:

  • Measurable, finite and quantifiable. It should be clear exactly when an ambition has been achieved and what is necessary to achieve it.

  • Trigger, add to or resolve a conflict. In short, an ambition should add something interesting to the game. It should heighten the drama or further the plot in some way.

  • Be interesting to the player. Pick something that you want to pursue and play through in the game. Don’t pick boring ambitions!

Experiences

Over the course of a campaign, as the characters achieve ambitions, they will accumulate experiences. Between sessions or during downtime, these may be spent to increase stats, advance skills or purchase new traits.

For a plausible rate of growth, each character should earn somewhere around three experiences per session.

Group Experience Pool

When experiences are earned, they go into a group experience pool. At the end of each session, these experiences are paid out evenly to all player characters, with any remainder left in the pool. This means that player characters always gain an equal number of experiences.

There are five player characters in Miles’ campaign. Over the course of this session they earned 17 experiences. At the end of the session, 3 experiences are distributed to each character, with 2 experiences remaining in the group pool.

Increasing Stats & Skills

Increasing a stat or a skill costs a number of experiences equal to the stat or skill’s new value. For example, this means that it would take five experiences to increase from Strength 4 to Strength 5. Purchasing two skill ranks at a time, it would take seven experiences to increase from Stealth 2 to Stealth 4.

Skills may not go above five. Stats may not be advanced beyond 10.

Purchasing Traits

A number of traits are available for purchase (see page XXX). Every trait has a listed experience cost which must be spent to acquire it. Some traits also have other requirements, which must be met before purchase. Unless specified otherwise, each trait may only be purchased once.