Level Up!
When you win a fight or achieve something else notable, you receive Experience Points (otherwise known as Star Points).
Your GM may choose to roll dice to decide on your reward, calculate it in some way, or just choose arbitrarily – but in any case, you're rewarded for your effort, with more difficult challenges earning more Experience Points.
As a general rule, overcoming anything noteworthy may earn you about 5-20 Experience Points, and truly gruelling challenges like boss fights around 20-40.
Whenever you receive 100 or more Experience Points, you immediately level up!
When you level up, take away 100 Experience Points; you immediately recover all HP and FP, and you receive the following:
- +1 to a Stat
- +1 to a Skill relating to that Stat (e.g. Heart and Coordination)
- Either +1 to a different Skill relating to that Stat, or a Skill Specialisation for any Skill
- The option to tweak one of your existing Techniques; you can add a positive trait, add a negative trait, remove a positive trait and/or remove a negative trait.
If your GM agrees, you can make more drastic changes, but you should always try to keep the spirit of the original Technique. - At every 5th level, the ability to learn a new Technique, and increase your Power by +1!
It's recommended that Paper Story campaigns are played within the range of levels 1 to 20, and with a hard limit on 4 known Techniques, in line with the power level of the original games – but that's just a suggestion. Do whatever works best for your game!