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Potential
The Potential field displays the inherent flexibility of a character, and represents their ability to learn new things easily. In PathRunner, this is represented through two factors - Paths and Hero Points.
Unique abilities relegated to what other systems may call “Classes” are categorized into Paths. Individual abilities within a Path are called Talents, and a successive list of Talents which you must progress through to get stronger abilities are called Trails. To this end, a Path contains one or several Trails, which contain individual Talents.
For every new Path you wish to learn during your character’s adventure, you must spend a scaling amount of Experience to unlock the Path in question, unless you select a high Potential on the Priority Chart. You do not need to choose which Paths the Potential is spent on immediately, but you must spend your Potential before you may begin buying Paths with Experience.
Your bonus Paths from Potential or from your Race selection are not counted towards your total for calculating the EXP cost of new Paths. For example, if you possess 3 bonus Paths from Potential, you are still considered to only possess the single “bonus” Path received at character creation, meaning that your 5th Path is actually considered your 2nd Path for the purpose of Experience purchasing, meaning that it only costs you 10 EXP.
Secondly, for every Path you unlock, you gain an additional Hero Point. This means that a character with Priority Level A in Potential receives 4 additional Hero Points at the start of the game. On account of all characters beginning with one free Path of their choosing, all characters begin the game with 1 Hero Point.