Character Development

Much of the fun from Nightmare RPG is from watching the characters develop, and become more skilled as the story progresses. This (brief!) page will help you spend your hard earned experience to make you character better. Let's dive right in!

Experience
Like many RPG's, Nightmare uses an experience system to objectively measure the growth and development of your character. Experience is awarded for overcoming obstacles, advancing the story, good role-playing, and being creative and innovative. A typical gaming session will net a character between 1 and 5 experience, with each individual character being awarded experience independent of his party. Be sure to include a place on your character sheet to list how much experience you currently have, and how much you have been awarded in total.

This chart serves as a general guideline for how much experience you will earn for a chapter, but your individual experience will vary.
 * Session Completion (1xp) - This is experience for surviving to the end of a session. Everybody gets this one experience regardless of their contributions.
 * Role-playing Bonus (1xp-3xp) - This bonus is for players who made the game more interesting and enjoyable by immersing themselves into their character.
 * Chapter Completion (2xp-5xp) - This is for successfully completing a chapter of game-play. It's a nice bonus for overcoming the hurdles needed to advance the story this far.
 * Team-player Bonus (1xp) - This is awarded to players who interacted with the group in meaningful and interesting ways, while progressing the plot.

Attributes
Attributes are not a common increase, but are necessary to make sure that your character can increase his chosen skills. They are expensive, but more than worth it.

From                       To                           Cost

Terrible                    Poor                         3xp

Poor                         Mediocre                 3xp

Mediocre                  Fair                          3xp

Fair                          Good                       6xp

Good                        Great                      12xp

Great                        Superb                    24xp

Superb                     Legendary               48xp + GM Permission

Social Attributes
While it is possible to use experience to increase one's social attributes, they are generally increased and decreased through in-game choices. Players that focus on acquiring wealth by investing in businesses and doing jobs for wealthy NPCs will see their wealth increase. Naturally, players that spend frivolously and don't find ways of acquiring more money will find that their wealth attribute decreases. The same idea holds true for Status.

Players that still want to spend experience to increase these attributes most obtain GM permission to do so.

Skills
Skills are a very common increase, as they have the most immediate benefit to a character. The diversity in skills also means that players many areas to work on, so deciding which to improve can be difficult.

From                       To                         Cost

Terrible                    Poor                       1xp

Poor                         Mediocre                1xp

Mediocre                  Fair                        1xp

Fair                          Good                      2xp

Good                        Great                     4xp

Great                        Superb                  8xp

Superb                     Legendary             16xp

New skills can be obtained for 0xp if they fall into the Most category, 1xp if they are Hard, and 2xp if they are Supernatural. These skills always start at Terrible, but may be advanced normally.

Gifts
Gifts are often a good improvement when a player is looking to enhance a single quality, without wanting to deal with the mechanical stats.

Gifts cost 6xp + GM approval.

Powers
Adding a new power should be a well thought out decision. They are expensive, divert your focus, and can slow your progression, but can also make for powerful additions.

A new power costs 12xp + GM approval.

Talents
Adding new talents is often a high priority for power-based characters (monstrous or magic), and is often a good pick if skills and attributes are up-to-date.

A new talent costs 3xp + GM approval.