Character Creation and Advancement

This section contains a variety of options that the GM may wish to employ when having her group create a new team of characters. These can help make the character creation process more flexible, more focused or more adapted to the type of campaign she has in mind.

Session Zero

Saga Machine is written with the assumption that the players and GM will sit down and create characters together before the campaign. Call this Session Zero. It gives everyone the chance to discuss the game, the characters that are created and to ensure that everyone is on board with the same assumptions. This makes the game better.

Mission Ambitions

In some campaigns it might make sense to explicitly track and offer experience rewards for missions that the player characters have accepted. This can be accomplished by the GM assigning a “mission ambition” for each such task. These function exactly like any long- or short-term ambition, and add an experience to the group pool for each character once the quest has been completed.

Experience Awards

The GM may wish to award all characters an experience, or even a few experiences, at the end of every session. This helps round out advancement for characters who didn’t manage to achieve many ambitions.

Experience awards such as this might also be used in lieu of ambitions for groups who prefer a steady and unconditional rate of advancement. In this case, the GM should consider awarding somewhere around three experiences per session.

Individual Experience

Some GMs might prefer for individual characters to directly earn experiences for the ambitions they personally achieve. To accomplish this, simply skip the group experience pool, instead distributing an experience to the character directly when an ambition is achieved.