Progression: Ascensions
Sooner or later a character runs out of room to grow: skills near their caps, the lifetime XP budget spent (see Skills), nowhere left to climb. Ascension is the way through. You reset your character back to the beginning and start the climb over, but you come back permanently stronger and able to reach higher than you did before.
If you've played MUDs, this is remort. You give up your hard-won progress and run it again, except each time around you keep more and reach further.
What you keep, gain, and give up
- Keep: all your stuff. Gear, supplies, and possessions carry across the reset, so you're starting the climb again rather than starting destitute.
- Gain: a permanent bonus that sticks with you through this life and every one after, plus a higher lifetime XP cap than you had before.
- Give up: your accumulated progress. Skills and levels reset to the beginning, and you earn them back from scratch.
That trade is the point. You spend everything you built to come back with a higher ceiling and a standing bonus, then do it all again — and each loop leaves you stronger than the last.
The loop
Why it works this way
(conjecture) A flat XP cap (see Skills) means an ordinary character eventually finishes growing. Ascension turns that ceiling into a staircase: rather than one long grind that ends, progression becomes a series of runs, each a little stronger than the one before. Keeping your stuff softens the reset so it reads as climbing rather than punishment, while the permanent bonus and raised cap make every ascension keep paying out long after the run that earned it. Veterans pull ahead of newcomers by how many times they've gone around.
Ascension vs. augmentation
It's easy to lump ascension in with augmentation — mutations and cyberware — but they're separate tracks that both make you more powerful:
| What it changes | How | |
|---|---|---|
| Ascension | Your potential | Reset for a permanent bonus and a higher XP cap. |
| Augmentation | Your body | Permanent stat bonuses, damage soak, and abilities, installed and kept. |
A character does both over a long enough life: ascend to raise the ceiling and bank bonuses, augment to spend that growth on a body that breaks the usual rules.
See also
- Progression: Skills — the trained, capped half of progression that ascension resets and extends.
- Augmentation — mutations and cyberware, the other way to grow past baseline.