Keep doing something, and you are bound to get good at it, whether you are a Champion on your way to glory, or a Mortal who has survived enough unpleasantness to start dishing it out yourself. Characters improve over time. At the end of each Episode (or game session if the Episode lasts more than a session), you should give players experience points. These points can be used to improve Attributes or skills, to gain new Qualities or buy off Drawbacks, or to buy Drama Points.

Typically, each player should receive between one and five experience points in a game session. Everybody who participates gets one experience point (call it the “You Showed Up To Play … and Didn't Fall Asleep” award) if you like. If the characters succeeded in thwarting evil through teamwork, heroic butt-kicking and creative thinking, an additional one or two points should be awarded. Players who stayed in character and helped move the story along should get another one or two points. At the end of major story arcs, another point should be awarded to everyone in the group, plus one more at the end of the Season Finale. Individual GMs may vary in how they handle this, when they give awards out, etc.

With a set number of experience point awards, the rate of character advancement is highly dependent on the frequency of game sessions and the specifics of the Episodes played. Groups that play more often will see their characters become very powerful very quickly. The same is true for groups that are more intensely focused on moving through your storylines, and thus have more opportunities of experience point awards. On the flip side, a group that meets only infrequently or treats their sessions more as social gatherings may find their characters stagnate a bit. To avoid these problems, experience awards can be adjusted to suit your group's playing frequency and style.

Occasional Gaming: These groups meet relatively infrequently or take their time advancing the storyline. A campaign is more likely to avoid the typical episodic structure of most television shows, unwinding more like a movie or mini-series. Cast Members should earn up to seven points per session and rarely less than two or three (unless they prove to be real sloppy).

Short Campaign: Under this option, you have planned out a continuous campaign over the course of twelve major adventures or so (like the pilot season of a series, for those of you who thrive on the television metaphor). The characters are still considered to experience a year's worth of storylines. This is the default level where characters earn between one and five experience points per session.

Extended Campaign: This is the complete set. You all have the time and craving to run full-throttle with this game, so you plot out a full campaign (at least twenty or so adventures per year, and planning on continuing for several years.) To keep the incidences of uber-Cast Member down, award at most three points per session.

Experience points help characters improve in several ways. They represent wisdom from fighting and investigating the supernatural (after months of reading occult books, some knowledge is bound to stick, for example), physical improvements due to the Champion's Complete Body and Soul Workout, and learned abilities (maybe something from high school or college managed to stick).

In general, all experience point expenditures and ability improvements should be explained in some manner. Practice, training, a new teacher, special equipment, and storyline events are all possibilities. “I want to” as a rationale should be frowned upon. This is particularly true for Quality gains or Drawback losses.

IMPROVING ATTRIBUTES: Swing axes enough and your axe-swinging arm is going to get stronger. Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution can be improved through physical training. Explaining improvements in Mental Attributes is a bit harder, but not impossible. Perception can get better if the character learns to pay more attention to the world around her. Willpower improves after undergoing severe ordeals; whatever doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, and all that jazz. Intelligence might get better as a result of maturity and simple exercise - give those neurons a workout and they may start improving. Usually, humans can improve their attributes only up to 6; supernatural entities can improve them up to level 12. Some beings have Attributes well above level 12, but they are not meant to be Player Characters. They should also be approached very respectfully.

ATTRIBUTES: Improving an Attribute costs five times the next level, with a minimum of fifteen. So, raising an Attribute from one to two costs fifteen points; raising it from five to six costs 30 points. The player must pay for each level increase. The Attribute Improvement Cost Table summarizes these costs.

SKILLS: Raising a skill has a cost equal to the new level times two (i.e., to raise a skill 3 to skill 4 costs eight experience points). A skill cannot be improved by more than one level at the end of a game session. There is no limit to skill levels. The Skill Improvement Cost Table runs these costs down. Getting a brand-new skill (i.e., one that is at level zero at the beginning of the game) costs five experience points for the first level. After that, it improves normally. This assumes the Cast Member was able to learn the skill somehow, either by having a teacher or through plain old practice.

LANGUAGE: Language is a special case; no matter how active the characters are, they are not going to pick up a new language from one adventure to the next. To improve this skill, the character needs to spend at least a month studying each language intensively. Only then can she spend the points to gain it.

QUALITIES AND DRAWBACKS: A few Qualities may be acquired after character creation. Most are inborn, and if a character doesn't have them now, she will never have them (Acute Senses, for example; vision or hearing rarely improves with time). However, since this is the CharLoft, perhaps the character discovers a talent they never had before? Perhaps exposure to the supernatural has awakened something in them that lay dormant until now? Or perhaps they just had a spell cast on them to grant them a Quality. This shouldn't be abused, of course. Don't feel afraid to tell your players “Nice try, wiseguy” when they start wanting to buy 5 levels of sorcery after seeing a spell occur. Likewise, a character might become an Cop or an Occult Investigator during the course of a Season, but that doesn't grant her the Quality of the same name (which represents years of training and preparation). Qualities cost 5 experience points per Quality Point, where allowed; leveled Qualities can be increased up to the limits written in the Quality. Qualities that physically transform the character (becoming a Vampire, for instance) can also be paid for by accepting an appropriate amount of Drawbacks (some good choices include psychological effects such as Mental Problems, Emotional Problems, Anti-Social Impulses, Recurring Nightmares, or general ill fortune such as Bad Luck.)

In some cases, the Quality costs no points - if the character becomes rich through her own efforts, she should not be charged for the increase in Resources Level, for example. Regardless of how the Quality is attained, it needs a compelling story rationale. Saying “I've got some experience points burning a hole in my Capri pants and I want my character to be a Witch now” or “Hey, I want to be a vampire now” is just not going to cut it. You GMs should always feel free to deny the purchase of any given Quality if it doesn't fit your “vision” or you don't buy the rationale.

Similarly, some Drawbacks can be “bought” off, although again some reason for the change should be provided. The change in the character should develop over time, culminating in some eye-opening, life-changing, pants-wetting (perhaps) event. In other instances, a Drawback is imposed on a character for the sake of the storyline. A Mortal might get bitten by a werewolf and become one. That character would gain the 3-point Werewolf Drawback, but would not get three Quality points to spend elsewhere. Buying off a Drawback costs five points per Drawback point, in addition to any other consequences.

DRAMA POINTS: Players can also buy Drama Points with experience points, at the rate of one Drama Point per two experience points spent if the character's Character Type is Champion or greater, and one for one if he is a Mortal.

After a sufficiently large number of sessions of the CharLoft RPG, and the experience point awards that follow, Mortals can become quite powerful. They will even begin to make the starting Champions and Monster Character Type seem puny. At some point well beyond the realm of Badass Mortal, you may want to declare that the Mortal has ascended to Champion. This eliminates the Mortal's ability to purchase Drama Points with experience points on a one-for-one basis (they must now pay two experience points per Drama Point) and takes away their ability to Support Your Local Champion, but may grant them eligibility for attributes higher than 6, at the GM's option, as they ascend above mortality.

Alternatively, leave them as Mortals and just make a point to throw more nasties in their direction. Up to you, really.

Just as you can vary the amount of experience points you award to keep the power levels among characters to a dull roar, so too you can adjust the costs of improvements. If Attributes and skills seem to be rising too fast, bump up their cost by a multiple of one to five. Another adjustment could be to charge twice or thrice the amount of points for any new or increased Qualities. If you go that route though, you may want to think about expanding the Qualities available for purchase. The rationales for the improvements are going to get harder to swallow, but hey, it's a wild and wacky world out there. No reason the characters can't be also.

GMs may wish to allow characters to 'bank' experience towards specific goals – for instance, paying off their desire to become better at Getting Medieval one point at a time. Particularly generous GMs may use this as a method of awarding bonus experience - giving an experience point to a skill the PC used regularly, or an Attribute or Quality the GM feels was improved along the way. 'Banked' experience cannot be spent on anything else once it has been banked. However, multiple banked objectives can be completed simultaneously (for example, if you banked experience in Crime and Getting Medieval, you could complete both 'banks' simultaneously, whereas normally you can only make one purchase at a time.)

Similarly, PCs may opt to take classes in a skill to attempt to develop their proficiency (or gain some understanding of the basics.) It is up to the GM as to how many sessions of training equal one point of banked experience; experience earned in this way, obviously, only goes towards the target skill or attribute. GMs should limit tutorial experience to one or two points between major game sessions.