Help / Player guide / Growing your character
Growing your character
Earning rewards
As mentioned previously, when you complete Subplots and Goals, you earn the reward of a free wild Strength card. This is a powerful prize because it gives you yet another flexible way to overcome whatever challenge the narrator throws at you.
Completing a Subplot or a Goal means playing every card in its corresponding stack. Subplots always start with five cards in a stack, while Goals can vary depending on the narrator’s choices.
Refreshing your Strengths and Weaknesses
Once you have used up all of your Strength and Weakness cards (including any wild cards), you get to refresh them when the next scene begins. This means picking three new Strength cards and three new Weakness cards, from among the cards you most recently played. You also receive fresh wild Strength and Weakness cards.
The refresh process gives you the opportunity to shift your character’s focus over time. You can do this by choosing to retain wild cards you played previously, dropping some of your original Strength or Weakness cards to make room.
For example, if your character began the game with three “Stealthy” Strength cards, and then you played a wild Strength card called “Well-connected,” during the refresh process you could choose just two “Stealthy” cards and replace the third with “Well-connected” card. Your character has now changed in terms of the ways they can overcome challenges in the story.
Since your cards refresh when used up, it is always in your interest to play all of your cards, including your Weaknesses.
Defining a new Subplot
Every character always has a stack of Subplot cards. Once you’ve played the last one, you must pick a new Subplot when the next scene begins.
If you feel that your prior Subplot was truly resolved in the story, you should feel free to choose a different one. This can be a Subplot that was provided with your game’s world, or it can be one that you create from scratch.
If you feel that your Subplot was not fully resolved in the story, you can choose the same one again and keep working toward it in the scenes that follow.