Advancing Your Character

    So you have played your first full weekend event with us at Realms of Adventure. Maybe you battled Orcs and rescued a farmer from harm. Maybe you met some people in some sort of local guild that organizes “free spirits” such as yourself and you robbed the mage’s guild together. Maybe you met a great group of folks and they invited you to join their adventuring group. You may have noticed some other characters in town that seemed more powerful or skilled than yourself, and want to one day achieve the same level of prowess. The questions may enter your mind; “Where do I go from here?” “How do I get to be THAT skilled?” Or simply “In other games I get experience points and go up levels. How do I do something similar here?” As you continue to play your character, you gain more “experience” in the form of character points. In this way you can measure your character’s progress in points as well as accomplishments. All skills, abilities and knowledge at RoA are broken up into points. This provides a fair “measuring stick” for every player to measure their progress by. There is no randomness to progression, and you do not gain levels. Your character is YOURS to build up and enjoy. By purchasing more skills and abilities for your character you can develop him or her in the way YOU envision.

   As we mentioned earlier, at Realms of Adventure, every player begins the game with 55 character points. If the player submits a detailed character background, in writing, by the beginning of their first event, they will receive an additional 5 character points for a total of 60. Every time you participate in a full weekend event you will receive an additional 3 character points, and if you submit a “Post Event Letter” in the specified time (usually two weeks before the next event) you will get another 3 character points. In this way your character can gain up to 6 character points worth of experience in a weekend. Once again a PEL (Post Event Letter) is greatly to your benefit to complete. It lets us know what you liked, what you didn’t like, and is a great place to tell us about goals you have set for your character, what types of things you’d like to learn, what kind of activities you’d like to participate in and again gives us the ability to write plot for you! Basically it is best said as the more you give us, the more we can give you! If you never tell us what your character is like or what he wants to do, we will have a hard time providing what you will enjoy.

    So you have completed an event and just sent off your PEL (Post event letter), and you know you will have 6 points to spend, now what? There are three things you can do…

• The first thing you can do is run right over and spend those points! Take a look at the page for your particular class (Bard, Cleric, Fighter, Mage, Merchant-Artisan, Monk, Rogue, Scholar or Shaman). When you made up your character you spent your points from the skills and abilities listed on that page. The cost to buy those skills in your new character points is the same! Let’s say you are a Rogue and decide you want to try your hand at archery. You look down the skill list and find the “Bow” skill, with a cost of 4 points listed. You spend 4 of your 6 points from above and take the bow skill. Now you have 2 more points to spend! It is now that the value of writing a PEL is inherently obvious. Not only is a PEL valuable to help the plot team to write interesting plots for your character and let us know what you enjoyed (and maybe did not enjoy) about the event, had you not submitted a timely PEL you would have only received 3 character points and the bow skill would still be out of reach. It is important to note one thing however; the ONLY skills you can learn in this fashion without a teacher are skills that have a “Yes” listed in the self-taught column. Any skill that has a “No” listed MUST be taught to you in game by a qualified teacher if you did not begin game with it.

 

• The second option you have is to “BANK” your points. This is probably not very realistic in the beginning because you have a multitude of choices on your list that you no doubt want to purchase. Consider this from the first option however, “Any skill that has a “No” listed MUST be taught to you in game by a qualified teacher.” Let’s say you are the rogue from the above example and want to learn how to disarm traps. For this skill, “No” is listed in the Self-taught column. You will need to find a teacher for this skill! If you are pretty sure you can find someone to teach this to you in game next event (Maybe you met someone who offered to do so next event), it might be a good idea to save those 4 points so you can easily learn the skill next game. Your teacher should role-play the teaching of the skill and beginning the NEXT event you attend you may now use that skill. Additionally there are MANY hidden skills in the world of RoA, as time goes on you may want to save points for those in case you stumble across them in game! Lastly multi-classing your character is expensive, but lets say after you have played for a year or so you decide you would like your rogue to learn the arcane arts. You would need to save the required points before being allowed to buy an additional class. With regards to being taught skills in game you are ALWAYS considered to have 3 points banked! We do this as a courtesy to you. This way if it is your first event (and naturally you have spent all your starting points, I mean who wouldn’t?), and you find someone willing to teach you a non-self-taught or hidden skill you may be able to learn it (provided it is 3 points or less). Since you are guaranteed to gain at least 3 points for your event we don’t mind doing this. We regret however that we cannot extend this courtesy regarding character points gained through submitting a PEL or cashing in Service points. Only 6 points may be withdrawn from the bank per event attended and may be used in addition to any points earned that event including service point conversions. The ONLY exception to this rule is in the event a player wished to purchase a second (or third) class OR SINGLE skill that costs in excess of 12 points. In this case he may draw up to the amount needed to purchase that class or skill. IE – if the player wished to purchase a skill that cost 20 character points, and had access to that skill, he would be permitted to draw 14 character points from his bank as opposed to the usual 6. This is the ONLY exception and it must be for ONE CLASS OR SKILL, AND ONE PURCHASE of said skill. In this way you couldn’t buy a 20 point skill 4 times in one shot simply because your bank would allow for it or buy a second class and several skills.When determining how many points you need to withdraw from your bank in order to purchase something you couldn’t afford otherwise, you must do so after already counting all of your earned points towards that purchase, not the other way around.
  
  Example: John earned 11 points between an event, his PEL, two buy-in points, and 3 service point conversions. He has 10 points banked, and wants to multi-class into mage (15 points) and pick up two purchases of mana (6 points). However, he cannot do this, because he only needs to withdraw 4 points from his bank to meet the cost of the mage class, and in doing so has used up 4 of his 6 possible banked points for this update period. While he is free to spend those two points should he so choose, he is unable to make even a single purchase of mana.

 

• The third option is any combination of the above two! In the first example maybe you want to buy the bow skill and really cannot decide what to do with the other 2 points. By banking them you effectively have 5 points banked going into next event. Not too shabby if you still want that Disarm Traps skill. Now if only you could find a teacher….

The majority of the rules for advancement of your character are above. The last thing you need to know is how to let US know what skills you want to take. At this time the only two methods we are accepting is either sending it via email to updates@realmsofadventure.net (preferred) or by snail mail to our mailing address. Shortly the functionality to submit your character and updates will be given online. All character updates are due THE SECOND FRIDAY AFTER the last event YOU attended. Please understand that we must adhere to this ruling so we have adequate time to print character sheets and make sure all point calculations are correct, as well as enter the changes into our database. We will do our best to get back to you via e-mail within 3 business days of sending in your character to let you know we received it. If we do not contact you let us know! PLEASE DO NOT use this method as a means to attempting to “extend” your personal deadline by 3 days. If you wait until the last minute to send in changes we will have no choice but to assume you have done this and will not allow any updates after the deadline has passed. At times, if our events happen to be particularly close (sometimes this cannot be avoided with camp schedules being what they are), this restriction will be relaxed but in that case we will let you know. If you snail mail us your changes we cannot reply unless we receive a self-addressed stamp envelope with your update. In addition to updating your character in this way you MUST make sure that if anyone teaches you a skill or spell in game that both you and that person submit the teaching summary sheet at the end of the event in your envelope.