🏅 Character-point awards

How heroes grow between sessions — what the GM gives, what it is for, and a rough scale to keep awards consistent across a campaign.

What are character points, again?

Character points are the same currency you spent during character creation — the budget that pays for stats, skills, advantages, calculated stat levels, and powers. After play begins, the GM hands out more of them at the end of a session. You spend them by editing your character, following the same cost curves as creation.

See Base statistics, Skills, and Powers for the cost tables that growth follows.

When awards happen

At wrap-up — the recap at the end of a session. The GM thinks about the table, and gives each character an amount. Awards land on individual characters, not on the party as a block, so two players at the same session can earn slightly different totals.

See Flow of the game for the rest of the session arc.

What the GM is rewarding

  • Overall progress. Did the party move the needle on the main objective? Even partial progress earns something.
  • Creative roleplay — in character. Choices that flowed from who your character is, not from optimal play. A bad decision made for the right reason still counts.
  • Side quests completed. Threads the party chose to follow through on, even when nobody required them to.
  • Useful failure. Trying the right thing and missing the roll still moves the story; the GM notices.

The point is to reinforce the play you want to see again — not to total up combat kills or puzzles solved on a checklist.

A rough sense of scale

Award When
1 point You were on the adventure. The minimum for showing up and playing.
2–3 points A solid session: real progress, in-character choices, a moment or two worth retelling.
4 points A stand-out session: an objective hit, hard decisions taken in character, a side quest closed.
5+ points Only for long, gruelling sessions with epic results and stellar roleplay. Rare on purpose.

A campaign that hands out 4–5 every week loses its meaning by month three. Keep the upper end rare.

What to spend them on

Awarded points behave exactly like creation points. Spend them by editing your character and following the same cost curves.

  • Push a base stat. Cheap at the bottom, steep above 13 — usually worth it for one stat that matters most.
  • Buy a skill level. A new skill at level 1 costs 1 point; raising a level-3 skill to 4 costs 4.
  • Lift a calculated stat. Same skill curve. Often the cheapest way to be a touch more perceptive, faster, or hardier without paying for the whole base stat.
  • Settle a disadvantage. Buying off a disadvantage costs points; the table may want to mark the in-fiction reason.
  • Save them. Holding points back across sessions is fine — let the next big purchase pay for itself.

How awards reach your character sheet

In a tabletop game the GM tells you the number and you note it on your sheet. The same principle applies in the app: the player updates their own character — the GM does not touch a player's device.

Use the End Session action. It opens a dialog titled End session with a row per party member and a Points to add field. Enter the award the GM gave each character, then press Apply. The amount is added to each character's total points and the campaign is saved on the spot — the new total shows up as Available points the next time you open the character editor.

Two equivalent entry points open the same dialog:

  • On the Active Player Campaign screen (Player Game), the footer action bar has an End Session button — natural at the end of a play session.
  • On Edit Player Campaign Party, the Campaign players panel has an End session button at the bottom — handy when you want to apply awards after the fact, without re-entering play.

Rows with Points to add left at 0 are skipped, so a partial-attendance session is fine — just enter points for the characters who were there.

See also