One of the suggestions for character adancement in Icons is that the GM occasionally give the players an extra refreshing Determination Point. That sounds sensible (kind fo necessary if people waht to by Stunts).

The only trouble is that does not give that sense of constant progress, the sense that you as a player are getting closer to an new level/advance the way XP does.

So the suggestion is simply to award each session a few "Icon points", which when they reach a certain threshold can be redeemed for a new permanent Determination Point.  

A perhaps too cutesy implementation of this idea could take inspiration form the Hangman word game. Each session you earn a few letters that make up the word "Determination", for instance "D-E" the first session, "T-E-R" the next. When you have all the letters to spell "Determination", you get your knew Determination point.

Quote from: Soylent Green;396649One of the suggestions for character adancement in Icons is that the GM occasionally give the players an extra refreshing Determination Point. That sounds sensible (kind fo necessary if people waht to by Stunts).

The only trouble is that does not give that sense of constant progress, the sense that you as a player are getting closer to an new level/advance the way XP does.

So the suggestion is simply to award each session a few "Icon points", which when they reach a certain threshold can be redeemed for a new permanent Determination Point.  

A perhaps too cutesy implementation of this idea could take inspiration form the Hangman word game. Each session you earn a few letters that make up the word "Determination", for instance "D-E" the first session, "T-E-R" the next. When you have all the letters to spell "Determination", you get your knew Determination point.

Very cute, and a little cheesy.  Probably appropriate for ICONS...=)

Heh, neat. I probably would just assign new determination when they meet some serious goal, but that's me. (You have finally put that mastermind away for a long time!)

Then again, I've also created one of the first (I think) dark Icon's villains. I like superheroes a lot, and like black and white, but I don't get too caught up in the sillier trappings of Icon's.

Thing is, as a player I'm not too bothered by character advancement, but I've noticed it does matter a lot to most of my players. And more than the actual advancement its as much the anticipation of it, the sense of progress. It also seems to provide like a context outside of the individual adventures/story arcs.

So yes, on the session they take down the mastermind you'd expect a lot of Icon points (or letters :-) ) but totally disregarding character progression until the climax might not be as engaging for my crew.

Quote from: Soylent Green;396696So yes, on the session they take down the mastermind you'd expect a lot of Icon points (or letters :-) ) but totally disregarding character progression until the climax might not be as engaging for my crew.

Understood there, I've seen a lot of people do that, I'm not sure why games created such a reward necessary expectation but they somehow did--and still do--in many ways.

I can honestly say my GMing has improved a lot ever since I started paying attention to the reward systems. I'm not sure I get it, but you can't argue with results.