Training Charms and Experience?

[Citadel97501]

Hello all,
I was wondering how you all deal with training charms affecting your players? Is there a limit you allow your players to have of Experience Debt? Or some other method?

[WarDragon]

Generally, you can't use a training charm if you're already in xp debt.

[heroicantagonist]

Unless there's some stealth errata somewhere, there's no limit. I just checked the core under the explanation of the Training keyword and did Control+F for the word "training" in the 2.5 errata and did not find anything relevant. You have to pay a minimum of 1/2 all your earned XP toward paying off the XP debt unless it's paid in full.

[Kylar]

Training Charms usually hard bake the limit in (you do not get more until you finish paying off what you owe).

[webkilla]

You still have to pay XP for an ability learned - be it super fast, or at a normal pace.

The fun comes when you realize that NPCs don't track xp - so you can train and teach an army in just a few months, turning a mob of peasants into warrior poets so fine it makes all of Lookshy weep

[Exthalion]

You still have to pay XP for an ability learned - be it super fast, or at a normal pace.

The fun comes when you realize that NPCs don't track xp - so you can train and teach an army in just a few months, turning a mob of peasants into warrior poets so fine it makes all of Lookshy weep

I believe this was the part of the Transcendent Emptiness Endowment problem. You could easy train up mortals as guided missiles to accomplish your goals, but in so doing you shunted the interesting events over to other people.

[heroicantagonist]

Basically, it sounds awesome for players until you realize that spending your XP on Charms is way more fun than boosting all your Abilities to 4, and paying back the XP debt slows that way the hell down. So then your character becomes bottom-heavy, where you're kind of awesome at first, but then the other players eclipse you because they can turn a palace to rubble in a single punch and jump over mountains while you're just really good at a bunch of miscellaneous shit that you could've trained an Extra to do instead.

[webkilla]

Basically, it sounds awesome for players until you realize that spending your XP on Charms is way more fun than boosting all your Abilities to 4, and paying back the XP debt slows that way the hell down. So then your character becomes bottom-heavy, where you're kind of awesome at first, but then the other players eclipse you because they can turn a palace to rubble in a single punch and jump over mountains while you're just really good at a bunch of miscellaneous shit that you could've trained an Extra to do instead.

True

However, I have a houserule that makes solar training charms far more interesting:

Since HAM says that it requires Five or more hours of training in a given week to pay off, well... that's not very much time to spend over a week. So with things like HAM, or the war training charm, I houserule that you do not have to engage in downtime for that - only spend a single hour a day (as a minimum) in meditatino/training/whatnot for the charm to work. This means that its removes the downtime from the training, while also speeding up the training ludicrously.

I know that might sound OP - but considering how much adventure can be had in a week of ingame time in Exalted, then I've yet to see this ever become a problem. One more dot here and there has yet to derail a game, and if the players really need something like "Ok, we all need a few dots in occult before going into that shadowland... and maybe some occult charms to see and fight spirits" then you make camp and do a proper downtime time-skip

[Nephtys]

Hello all,
I was wondering how you all deal with training charms affecting your players? Is there a limit you allow your players to have of Experience Debt? Or some other method?

Going into debt is only worth it if you get access to Charms capable of compensating the long term loss. Everything other than Charms is just not worth their XP. Most luckily, there are not many ways to give Charms as a Training effect. VEE for example has the hard cap of only allowing 1 purchase into debt.

[The Wizard of Oz]

As does the Sidereal charm for teaching charms.

Things like the Solar stuff don't because they don't teach charms, so it's less important (I assume... considering the way VEE works, it might just be because they were written earlier in the game-line).

Two of the PCs in the game I ran went to a Cult of the Illuminated training camp, and got huge amounts of training in a short time, one of them had over 100xp of experience debt.
In the long run, this wasn't a good thing for them, power-wise. All the characters had the same XP, so I don't think any of them were massively more powerful than any of the others, but if I had to rate them, I'd probably put those two near the bottom of the PCs, once they'd paid off their XP debt. So it wasn't a problem. None of the other players complained that those two had got this huge boost.

Mostly, I think training is most useful for stuff you absolutely need right now. In the long run, you have to spend the xp back anyway. But if, say, you suddenly find yourself in a situation where you really need a charm now, but can't buy it for 2 sessions, then you can ask your Malefactor pal for a hand and pay for it over the next 2 sessions anyway.