Suhuy
Thanks to Erick Wujcik
How are they trying to improve? If they're competitive in Strength, they won't want the other players to overtake them. Maybe you want to be able to do more with your Trumps. Perhaps your magic sword isn't good enough yet. These are objectives too.
Maybe these kinds of goals aren't clear yet. In that case, let them develop in play, out of the things that happen to you. Try writing some ideas down though. Even if it gets changed drastically later on, it's somewhere to start.
Write out a wish list of what you want your character to achieve. It should include various types of goals, from broad achievements to small gains. Consider each aspect of your character and see what goals might be included.
Don't forget to consider whether or not any changes in personality might be occurring, and how they can be reflected in the wish list. This could include changing the amount of Stuff your character has.
Try to put all this into some sort of priority order, with the most important things at the top of the list. It doesn't have to be an exact ranking, as long as the general relationship is clear.
How many goals should be in the wish list? It's up to your character. Maybe they are really focused on only three or so goals, and they'll drop everything else until they're accomplished. Or maybe they're fairly scatty, and just do whatever seems interesting at the time: they might have ten or twelve things on the list.
As a character, they might not even consciously have a wish list. But as a player, you should still write one down because it helps to record your character's decisions to prioritise certain things over others.
The SG can use this list of goals to better figure out how to include your character's ambitions in the campaign. They can tailor the rewards for overcoming obstacles to the desires of the character concerned.
These might include approval from other Amberites, access to certain hidden secrets, control of Powers, the laying to rest of certain enmities, respect from your enemies, the rule of certain Shadows, or perhaps of ruling Amber itself.
Many of these rewards will involve further challenges. That's the fun of role-playing. If you can think of some specific rewards that you'd like your character to have, put them on the wish list and they'll probably turn up - perhaps in a slightly different form, of course.
Travel to a time-shifted Shadow, where the years fly by as the seconds crawl in Amber, and there's no limit to how much practice you can get in any skill, power or attribute. Anyone with Pattern, or Logrus, or other Powers, can figure out how to use this trick.
Were it simply a matter of time and practice, any Amberite could improve. Worse, any Amberite could get infinitely good at anything. So practice isn't enough.
True advancement, those things for which points are required, takes more than practice, more than time.
In Amber, advancement takes conflict.
In other words, without threat, there is no advancement. Likewise, without victory, there is no advancement. Characters can only advance if they actually overcome some kind of obstacles.
The points your character gets for advancement aren't important. Many story rewards can't be represented by points, after all.
So you will never know how many points your character gets. You will never be told directly how the points have been spent, either. You'll have to figure that out by trying to do things you couldn't do before. Sometimes it won't be clear at all: that's just of Amber. Usually, everyone will end up with different amounts of points.
The SG will use your wish list to decide how to spend those points, so keep your wish list current.
Within a certain Attribute, or Power, there are limits to how many points can be spent all at once. For example, only one Rank can be gained in each Attribute at a time. You cannot rise from 4th rank Warfare to 1st in one go. The 1st rank character will have just as many chances to increase their Attribute as you do, to stay ahead of the pack.
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Tuesday, August 19, 1997 Suhuy |
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