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So the topic of experience points and how to stop players advancing too quickly came up on another thread. Without altering the way experience is given out, or the costs of skill and talent ranks, I thought of a slightly different way of handling player advancement.... Not sure how it would work to slow things down, but here are a few thoughts I put together this morning... Note that I've expanded the number of General spells in my homebrew world so that there are an additional 9 spells like the other magic paths... Any comments welcomed.

Spending Experience Points

You can use your earned Experience Points to improve your skills and talents and to learn new magic paths and spells. You can only spend Experience Points when you are not actively Journeying or Exploring.

Skills: To increase a skill level by one point, you need to spend a number of Experience Points equal to the new level, multiplied by 5. For example, to increase a skill from level 1 to 2 costs 10 Experience Points. To increase a skill from 4 to 5 costs 20 Experience Points. Each level also requires a Quarter Day’s practice to increase to the new level. So for example, reaching level 5 in a skill also requires 5 Quarter Days spent practicing before the new skill level can be used. This does not have to be consecutive Quarters, but no more than 1 Day can pass without Practice in order for it to be counted toward the progress of achieving the new level. If you go more than 1 Day without Practicing that skill, they progress must start again.

Purchasing a new skill at level 1 requires 5 Experience Points and successful use of the skill (without possessing any levels) in that session or having someone teach you (who has the skill in at least level 1) for 1 Quarter Day (the teacher or learner cannot do anything else for that Quarter Day.)

Talents: Increasing talent ranks costs three times the new rank in Experience Points, so increasing a talent from rank 1 to 2 would cost 6 Experience Points. It also requires a number of Quarter Days practice equal to the Experience Point cost. So six Quarter Days of Practice would be required to learn a rank 2 talent. As with skills, this can be split across multiple days, but at least 1 Quarter per Day must be spent Practicing. If not, the process must begin again. You also need to make a successful WITS roll at the end of the Practice period, or else the knowledge does not hold and you must start again.

Learning a new talent costs 3 Experience Points and you must spend 1 Quarter Day in Practice and make a successful WITS roll as above.

If you have a teacher with the talent at a higher rank than you, then they can help. This means that you do not need to make a WITS roll, but you both need to Practice.

Magic and Spells

Magic Paths: To learn new magic paths requires either a teacher or a spellbook. The Experience Point cost of learning a new rank in a magic path is 3 times the new rank, as with other talents, but each spell in that new rank must also be learned before they can be cast.

You are able to learn magic paths through reading a spellbook, but the Experience Point cost for doing this alone is three times the usual amount, so learning rank 2 for a spell path you have at rank 1 would cost 18 Experience Points (usually 6 points to go from rank 1 to 2.) If you have a teacher with the required rank, then it would cost the usual amount. Again, you need to Practice for a number of Quarter Days equal to the new talent rank.

To learn a new magic path, you need a teacher or else it will cost 9 Experience Points to learn the path at rank 1, rather than the regular 3.

Spells: Within each magic path there are usually three ranks of three spells, with General Magic spells being available to anyone with a magic talent, including druids. NOTE: This does not apply to Blessed, as their powers are derived from a different source.

On creating your character, you are able to cast any spell from your magic path that you have the talent rank for (i.e. you can cast all three spells in Rank 1 and if you start with Rank 2, then you can cast those spells also) but you must learn other spells as you progress. Each spell costs a number of Experience Points equal to its rank. If you don’t have a teacher, then it costs three times this. In the same way as above, you must spend a number of Quarter Days learning the spell equal to its spell rank, at the end of this period you must roll to cast the spell and NOT roll a Miscast. If you of suffer the effects of a Miscast, then you loose the Experience Points and have to start the process again in order to successfully learn the spell.

For General Magic spells, you start off knowing a number of these spells equal to your WITS score. You cannot learn a General Magic spell of a higher rank than your highest magic path talent rank. Each new spell you learn has the same cost as above and must either be learned from a book or scroll or taught by someone who knows it already. The Experience Point cost is the same as above.

So this works MOSTLY like the old ones. You added exp for spells, and I can kind of see why. Thats cool and should work.

I feel like the best way to control growth is to control the criteria for Exp and to adjust it to fit the kind of game you want to encourage.
For me, I do
1 Exp for showing up.
1-3 Exp for completing an adventure site. (depending on the complexity of the site/ scale of the events)
1 Exp for dealing with your dark secret/advancing your personal story.
1 exp for advancing the games story in some way that matters.
1 Exp for particularly good RP that night.
1 Exp for ingenuity when solving a problem.
1 Exp for particularly heroic action. (do something awesome at great risk to yourself)

Those last 3 are discussions at the table where players can nominate each other for doing cool stuff.

I didn't really want to deviate too much from the original mechanics.

I can certainly see the benefits to the awards in your post too.

Maybe a little of both to tweak it so that folks don't end up too powerful too soon.

I like this approach to learning spells.

This does not alter the costs for other classes though and if the magic user falls too far behind, I figure there’s a risk they’ll only choose the most necessary combat spells and then go for common talents. Thus losing the opportunity to use that odd spell that no one would choose but then turns out to be that awesome RP- moment.
Also, It doesn’t really solve the issue of PCs learning loads and loads of talents after a few sessions of play either. I don’t mind my PCs becoming powerful but I’d like to have it take a bit longer before they get there, while not hamper newly created PCs. After learning some 10-15 talents, even key NPCs in the campaign feels really inexperienced. I’ve been tinkering with a system to scale the XP cost as the PCs gets more and more experienced. Nothing solid so far. There is an old thread in here somwhere about XP and there was a suggestion to raise the XP cost to level up talents every 3 talents you buy. Or something like that.

Any thoughts on how to alter XP cost for none magic users?

Increasing talent costs are discussed here as well: viewtopic.php?f=104&t=5286

Thanks for the link.

My thoughts with the talents were that by adding time to learn as a factor might limit them to learning only when they are somewhere safe like a village or stronghold, rather than doing it while in the middle of adventure sites and actively travelling. But I do concede it is far from the solution.

You could just make Talents cost the same as Skills. (New rank x5 instead of new rank x3) Also, increase the skills of NPCs. I don't think people realize how good skill dice are. They cannot hurt you when you push rolls. They are (besides artifact dice) the best dice in the game. When NPCs start smashing through the players defenses because they are just flat out better than them the players are going to start worrying about those low Skill ranks.

I think the temptation (especially for fighters) is to pile points into STR and Talents first, thinking that all the bonuses are worth more than skill ranks, but as you say with higher skills the worst that will happen is you'll not get successes, whereas with more attribute die to roll you've a higher chance or rolling banes.

Maybe I might try upping the cost of both skills and talents, up to 5x level for talents and maybe 10 for skills.

If you want to discourage players from focusing on talents then don't encourage them to take them by making them cheaper than skills.

10x rank is a VERY high cost. 20 Exp just to get to rank 2 is basically insanity. The players should be able to do something once every couple sessions not once every 4-5 just to reach rank 2 in a skill. or 20 sessions to go from 4-5.

I agree. At least with a new character. The sence of progression is nice and get players to look forward to upcoming sessions. After a while, when PCs get strong enough to not have to run away every time they encounter anything and the characters personality and goals starts to develop, the need for rapid progress isn’t that essential any more. We’ve been playing more or less weekly games for one and a half years and none of my players have lost a PC. They seldom feel the need to use their XP nowadays and can store some 20-50 XP before using them. They’re always in a hurry somewhere because of intrigues or story but have become powerful enough not to need that extra dice to survive...