The only improvement to Ignobles...

Message:

Personally I've always loved Ignobles as and advancement mechanism. It's certainly superior to XP. (I've noticed in Red's more recent campaign/tables a growing desire to overly define certain Ignobles, like needing X amount of purses to attain level X, and they discussion in this thread about a table of flaws with the implication that players need to gain flaws from the new table for Growth, which works against the looser storytelling style, and, dare I think say, player agency of earlier games, but that's me.)

And the only thing I think improved the concept is what Red did in Free-Style EPT. 14 total Ignobles, check 9 to level up. The fee extra Ignobles allowed, yes, potentially EASIER levelling, but also allowed more organic levelling without their occasional, "OK >Player< only needs Sea Battles to level up, so the next Encounter card which vaguely could lead to a sea battle will be be a sea battle - oh, you're level 6 going for level 7, and most of the rest of the party today is level 1-3? Have fun with the high DefMod!" which happens.

Yup, if I were to do a new addition of Cutlass I'd try to expand the Ignobles. Easily something involving religion since Cutlass now has rules for the Protestant Reformation. If I put my mind to it, I could expand the Cutlass list from 9 to 14.

Although it was a fun challenge to try the pacifist character in Cutlass, who managed to get to lvl 7 without killing anyone. With three Ignobles requiring combat that was a combination of picking methods to minimize killing cards and the dice being nice enough to roll low when forced into a potential kill... Ah, making Swash with a character who never took life would have been brag worthy...


Yours,