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Hello,

So I’m running a game that just started recently and I was slightly confused as to when players should receive xp. The book says to do this at the end of the session, but many of the questions imply it’s per mystery (like development points). I’m curious as our groups sessions tend to run short and I don’t want to overload then with advances right away, if that’s not intended. Any idea?

Experience Points is gained by each character at the end of each session based on the questions on p.25.

Development Points is gained by the group at the end of the mystery based on the questions on p.87.

I know what you mean. Officially it's meant to be by session, but my sessions are quite shorts and frequent. So I use the old rule (alpha version) of 10 XP for an advance instead of 5, and I let them have the XP each session. They still progress steadily. They already have reached 5 advances each (yes, we played a lot. ) during the 3 and a half mysteries we played.
Development points, however, are per mystery. Which is only logical: they need to return to HQ in order to improve them!

Perhaps it should be mentioned that a "session" is 2-5 hours so you might adjust Experience Points after how long your sessions are and how fast you want the characters to progress. In our group for example we play every other Sunday, from 1 PM to 9 PM, with a pizza break (or whatever food people like) in the middle, so I have to adjust the xp after that so my players get a decent amount of xp (i usually treat such a long session as two sessions).

Perfect, thanks for the advice. I'm going to keep an eye on session length but mostly it seems like it should be fine. We're usually just over 2 hours of game time, but sometimes it can be less.

On the topic of advances, from my reading it seems that players cannot increase their attributes, is this correct? Only increase a skill or buy a talent? It definitely reads that way to me.

Correct. Their attributes are their general capacities, they can't increase that. They can, however, increase their skills by using them. And learn new Talents along the way.

I like having it after a mystery, just because it makes sense to "level up" between mysteries, as time pass.
Both were written in the rulebook during alpha, but ended up with session for PCs and Mystery for the HQ dev points.