# What side effects might arise from modifying the XP cost to increase traits in the Storytelling system by category primacy?

Currently, the Storytelling and Storyteller Systems have primary/secondary/tertiary skills/abilities, and at character creation, the primary have more points, whereas the tertiary have less points.

For example, in the New World of Darkness, the following points are given at creation

            | Attributes | Skills
------------+------------+---------
primary    |      5     |   11
secondary  |      4     |    7
tertiary   |      3     |    4
------------+------------+---------


But once the character starts to play (i.e. winning XP), the difference between primary/secondary/tertiary traits are lost.

One of the consequences (undesired for us, ST in our group, for multiple reasons), is that characters are not specialized enough. We want to tweak the system to have the characters keep the physical/mental/social "specialization" they applied at creation.

The solution is the following: Change the XP cost of those traits.

            | Attributes | Old Cost | New cost
------------+------------+----------+----------
| primary    |    5     |    4
Attributes | secondary  |    5     |    5
| tertiary   |    5     |    6
------------+------------+----------+----------
| primary    |    3     |    2
Skills     | secondary  |    3     |    3
| tertiary   |    3     |    4
------------+------------+----------+----------


We believe the system is good to produce the results we want, but I wanted to have feedback about the pros and the cons (we could have missed) of this tweak.

What's your viewpoint on the tweaked system?

• How many XP does each player typically receive at the end of each session in your games? It will help in coming up with an answer. – Jadasc Sep 30 '11 at 20:43
• @Jadasc : As defined in the rules. We add one or two XPs for things like "Did your character really acted as a vampire?" and "Did you helped make this story go smoothly/better/in a surprising direction?", but nothing more. I guess and answer with standard XPs allowance is more than enough (i.e. Something like 2 to 4 XPs per session, IIRC) – paercebal Sep 30 '11 at 22:58