Modular Gaming Components 11 - Personal Experience

I think it was "The Shadow of Yesterday" where I first saw this.

The basic idea is that everyone has the chance to gain experience points as a group, but everyone also has the chance to gain experience individually. This basically means that players can have their own agendas rather than working together as a team and succeeding of failing based on the actions of the people around them. 

Actually, thinking back a bit further, I'm reminded of the experience point table in Rifts, where players gain a tiny amount of experience merely for attempting tasks...but still, in that game everyone has the opportunity to gain experience based on the same range of criteria. 

In TSoY, players have "keys" which indicate things that are important to their learning journey. One player might be getting experience from investigating the world, another might be getting experience for killing things, and a third might be getting experience for building stuff. Players can either earn a small amount of experience to reflect a gradual development in the area specified, but they may also choose to earn a much larger amount of experience if the story justifies it. The catch with earning the large amount of experience is that the character will need to pick a new key if they want to continue earning experience, and to do that they'll need to justify within the story how their new learning journey begins.

You could do this in a levelled game like D&D by having a "warrior" key, or "mystic", "investigator", "savage", or similar. I'd probably start with a bunch of keys generally related to the backgrounds of the characters, maybe another bunch of keys relating to the races, but not necessarily keys linked directly to the occupational classes of the characters, those get enough attention during the course of play.

One of the things that I think is cool about this idea is that it helps to flavour what's interesting and different about the characters. It might bring characters into conflict, or it might bring otherwise different characters into alignment at certain points of the story.