How and when a character gets better is an important question in most roleplaying games. A lot have experience points as currency to purchase either directly new abilities, or wholesale levels. And there are a lot of different ways on how you get those points too – per fiat decision by the referee or DM, as compensation for failed roles, bought with gold, and so on.

In the earlier iterations of this game, I went with the fiat decision: The referee was to give out one to three Advancements per player at the end of the session. To make it less arbitrary, I also included some guidelines of what earned one how many Advancements, but it really was quite a loose mechanic.

But I’ve always liked the idea of Carousing: Once the heroes are back at home safely, they should throw a party, spend their newly found fortunes, make friends and maybe some foes over a drink, sniff out rumours, and so on!

The other reason I wanted to implement this is because until now, finding and collecting treasure was a bit pointless. There wasn’t really anything pressing in the rules and background that encouraged characters to go gung-ho on treasure.

Enter the new Carousing rules. They boil down to this: You spend a lot of gold on a great party, roll some dice and the successes translate to Advancements. Especially low or high rolls trigger interesting events, ranging from waking up naked in an alley to gaining special attention of a deity.

As with all the new systems, this will require a bit more playtesting, but my own simulations look very promising. The downside is that I now need to think about gold, item values and such a lot more. I guess that’ll add another dozen pages to the book… 🙂