We are currently working on adding additional support to the World of Darkness setting, including a clearer split between the Old and New World of Darkness into separate systems. This split will allow a little more specialization in the character sheet for the different versions of those two systems.
But since that is still being worked on, I want to focus on a different minor change that we made to the World of Darkness character sheet this week, where we altered the way experience is saved. The image below shows the old and new versions, and while the difference may seem rather immaterial, there are some intricacies behind the decision to make the change.
In essence, you no longer fill in your free experience, but your spent experience and the free experience is calculated for you (it is simply your total experience minus your spent experience). While it is certainly useful to know how much xp you spent, the change to track spent rather than free experience (and calculate the other) was not just made on a whim.
When you gain experience, for example for completing a quest, you need to update your character sheet. In the old setup, this meant updating both your free experience and your total experience, and it was important to ensure they were both updated by the same amount, lest you lose track of experience you earned. The new setup means you only need to change your total experience, and your free experience is updated automatically.
An alternative might have been to track Free and Spent experience and add them up for the total — this would have the same benefit since you just add to your free experience when completing a quest. But this also means that when you spend experience, to buy an extra point of Dexterity for example, you have to update both your free and spent experience. By tracking spent and total as we do now, you can simply update the Spent experience when buying stat points, and the Total when gaining experience. In either case, you only have to change one field.
In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a very big addition (and it is not the only change we made this week, as you can read in this week’s changelog!), but it is a good example of the sort of polish we are trying to add to our system. Do you have anything you’d like to see improved? Be sure to let us know in the forums!