Some new advancements has been made in the regards of Character Advancement within the world of Seventh.
Overview
Whenever you complete a mission/quest/adventure in Seventh you gain experience points. So far this will be familiar to most people but what might be new is that the more experience points you gather the slower you learn and the more difficult it gets in game terms. But I feel I need to lay out the motivation behind this to give an understanding of what this is about.
Example
Imagine that you have a lot of information to sort. That can sometimes take time together with focused attention to get something out of that information. Then think that you on top of all this information you have to learn just as much more information to learn but from different areas of knowledge. This makes it even more difficult to sort out and learn something from it.
All this information comes from your senses and this information is not fully processed until you do something with this information like, for example that you put it into practice or that you reason around it. But up until the moment that you actually process the sensory information, the information itself does not mean that much to you. If there is to much unprocessed information it can have a negative effect on you, such as shorter attention span and not being able to focus on one thing properly.
How does it work in the game?
Now we skip into the world of Seventh. When your character are out on all the adventures and gains experience points these experience points represent all this unprocessed information. To make something out of this information the character needs to realize it by practical or mental studies. If the character does not focus his or her information into something that can be learnt from, then the experience points will give the character a shorter attention span and lesser ability to focus.
How do a character focus the experience points into something of value?
When a character choose to focus all the experience points into something useful the character is leveling up. There are two ways a character can do this. The first option is to find someone who agrees to teach them something. This means that you need to find the right mentor for what you want to study. So, asking a Mage to train you in Fighting will not work.
The second option is to be creative and learn on your own merit, ie the teacher is yourself. This will give your character lesser chances to channel the experience points into something useful but these two ways of advancing your characters abilities will create a balance that any player can strategically utilise.
What is the balance important for?
If your character is out on adventure in a remote place where there are no teachers available but is still gaining experience points, it can lead to too much experience points. To much experience points will make it more difficult for your character to succeed with skill checks, faculty checks, sensory checks and so on. So the character needs to make a decision wheather he wants to save all the experience points until he finds a proper teacher which will make adventuring more difficult or the character can choose to be his own teacher and so get rid of experience points but will develop skills and so on in a lower rate compared to learning from a techer.
Please ask any questions you might have.
Seventh 