Characters in T3 are built from the ground up using Experience Points. You can always tell how powerful a character is by looking at his total experience points: characters will have spent their points more or less effectively, and there is always the joys of overspecialization, but in general, experience points give a fair guide to each character's ability. 800 points is a typical beginning character, with 1000 points being heroic. We have played 2400-point characters, and the game still ran smoothly.

Experience Point Costs

All costs are for a single point of increase, or for a single extra schtick. All costs are cumulative. I have ready-made formulas for calculation the cost of having a game value to a certain level, and use a spreadsheet.

Attributes

Primary Attribute: Attribute value after increase.
Your primary attribute is always equal to the highest of the secondary attributes it governs. This has almost no effect in itself, but is required for the secondary attributes, se next entry.

Secondary Attribute Value: Attribute value after increase.
You can never increase a secondary attribute to a value higher than the value of primary attribute that governs it. Thus, in order to increase your highest secondary attribute, you must simultaneously increase your primary attribute.

Skills

Skills are divided into Primary and Secondary; all skills but your best are secondary. As the primary skill is four times more expensive (see below), there is an extra cost for increasing your maximum skill value, similar to the concept of increasing in "level" in other systems.

Which skill is the primary can vary over a character's career. If you have several skills at the "best" level, the first one you increase pays the higher cost. The rest then become secondary skills.

Secondary Skill:
Up to 5: 1 point
From 6 to 10: 2 points
Beyond 10: Half the value you want to increase to (round up)

Primary Skill: Four times the cost for the same increase to a secondary skill.

Schticks

Most schticks cost 8 + X experience points, where X is the number of schticks you will have once you've purchased this one. Buying an extra schtick when you already have two, thus costs 11 points (8 points, plus 3 for this being the third schtick).

You calculate the cost separately for each type of schtick, unless noted each chapter for schticks counts as a type of it's own.

The major exemption to the 8 + X rule is that Sorcery schticks cost 16 + X and Fu schticks come cheap at 3 + X.