[How To Play] Savage Worlds, Part 3: Advancement

During our second session, Charley and I talked over advancement for his character and I explained how Savage Worlds advancement works. Every 5 experience points is considered an advance and every advance allows the character to improve skills or attributes or gain edges. Sir Nicholas is currently a Novice character and will remain so until he earns 20 experience points, then he'll be a Seasoned character. Another 20 experience points will bring him to Veteran, and another 20 to Heroic. At 80 experience points, Sir Nicholas will be Legendary, that's 16 advances during the game.

For every advance, the player can choose to improve his character by:

• gaining a new edge, or
• buying a new skill at d4, or
• once every rank (Novice, Seasoned, etc) increase an attribute by a die, or
• increase two skills that are less then their linked attribute by a die, or
• increase one skill that is greater than or equal to it's linked attribute by a die.

Charley thought this through and came up with a rough list of how he's going to advance Sir Nick, barring any unforeseen problems:

0 XP: Novice - starting out.
5: Agility to d10.
10: Increase Fighting and Riding to d10.
15: Brawny (Toughness +1).
20: Seasoned - Smarts to d6.
25: Quick.
30:
35: Great Luck (+1 Bennie).
40: Veteran - Spirit to d8.
45: Hard to Kill.
50:
55: Block (Parry +1).
60: Heroic - Strength to d10.
65:
70:
75: Harder to Kill.
80: Legendary - Vigor to d8.

Charley leaves four of the advances blank to allow for any changes he might want to make (or be forced to make by circumstances) to his character. With that partially completed, we moved on to some of the other bits about the system.