Since Everway doesn’t have a hard advancement system for characters, I’m looking at existing tech to graft onto the game that won’t disrupt the feel too much. My leaning is toward goal-based advancement such as the Motivations in Exalted or the Keys in games like Lady Blackbird.
In Everway, as I mentioned before, you have a Motive for your character: the thing that drives them. You also have a Virtue and a Fault as well as a Fate that you are expected to eventually meet. For Glorious and Fearsome, the Virtue remains the same, the Fault becomes a Vice, and the Fate becomes your Destiny. Virtue and Vice are things you’re supposed to do during play; they should come up regularly, so it stands to reason that these would map well with Keys, which serve the same purpose. One downside is that Keys are tied to an “experience point” system, which doesn’t fit the feel of either Everway or Glorious and Fearsome – characters in both games, to me, feel cheapened if their routine actions translate into an economy or currency. On the upside, these Keys also have built-in mechanical incentives, like bonuses to actions, that encourage players to stick to those personality aspects in play, which I think I’m going to keep (especially since the law of karma gets highest priority for storyguides in Glorious and Fearsome when determining the outcome of actions – much like the Amber RPG, as it has been pointed out by others elsewhere).
Destiny and Ambition, by contrast, are infrequently met, even if they are acted upon regularly. They’re epic accomplishments and events, and should be rare so that they feel special. The reward should be correspondingly special as well; Exalted handles meeting a Motivation by allowing you to increase your Essence (the game’s “power stat”) immediately provided you can afford the experience cost, and then you can choose a new Motivation that is even grander in scale to reflect your character’s broadening influence on the setting. Since Glorious and Fearsome doesn’t have a corresponding “power stat”, this would be where you would receive new Mythic Points to spend on your character, the same as during character creation. There’s no intermediary “experience point” that has to be translated into a Mythic Point, it should be noted; you get the direct reward in the form you need it. The question I’m grappling with right now is whether these two goals should be on equal footing, or whether one is more likely to come up and be fulfilled during play than the other; my instinct is to say that a Mythic must confront their Destiny when its card is drawn from the Story Deck, but since Story Deck draws are comparatively rare, who knows when that will happen? Likewise, if a Mythic can accomplish their Ambition in a handful of sessions, it probably wasn’t the best choice of Ambition to begin with, and while they will replace it with a bigger one, should that be rewarded? Things to ponder.
