Throughout your journey, you can earn advancement points as you face challenges and grow through experience. Advancement points are awarded in the following ways:
- Adversity: Advancement points are earned by overcoming setbacks, learning from mistakes, and enduring the consequences of risky decisions. Failure is often the greatest teacher.
- Pain: Gain 1 advancement point whenever your character is defeated during a conflict or significant confrontation.
- Failure: Gain 1 advancement point when you fail a task with a Difficulty of 3 or higher.
- Peril: Gain 1 advancement point whenever the GM spends four or more points of Threat in a single moment to escalate the stakes.
- Invoking Essence or Struggle: Gain 1 advancement point whenever you invoke your Essence for a positive benefit. Gain 1 advancement point whenever your Struggle is invoked to cause a complication. Gain 1 advancement point if you challenge either.
- Impressing the Crew: If your team feels a particular plan, moment of roleplaying, or heroic act deserves extra recognition, the group may decide to award an additional advancement point to the player responsible. Such rewards are limited to one per player per game session.
Between episodes, you can use advancement points to improve your character’s capabilities or resources. These points reflect the growth and experience gained through your actions. You may purchase only one advancement per downtime period.
- Skill Advancement: Increase one of your skills by +1. A skill may only be advanced this way once, and no skill may exceed a rating of 8. This costs 10 advancement points, plus 1 additional point for every previous skill advancement purchased.
- Specialty Acquisition: Add a new specialty. This costs advancement points equal to the number of specialties you already have.
- Talent Acquisition: Unlock an additional talent from those available to you. This costs advancement points equal to three times the number of talents you already have.
- Credit Rating Improvement: You may improve your credit rating. This costs 5 times your current Credit Rating and cannot exceede
6.
Characters in RFI: Freelancers can also shift their focus by retraining abilities, allowing old skills or talents to fade while developing new ones. Retraining reduces the advancement point cost of new abilities by half (rounded up) but comes with trade-offs:
- Skills: If you retrain a skill, reduce one of your other skills by 1, down to a minimum of 4. This does not count as an advancement for the skill.
- Focuses: If you retrain a focus, you must remove a focus you already possess.
- Talents: If you retrain a talent, you must forfeit one talent you already have.
Certain aspects of a character, such as their traits, essence and struggle, cannot be directly changed through advancement. These elements represent the core of who the character is and must evolve through roleplay and storytelling.
The rules for changing Traits can be found here.