Potential

Every time you miss on any move, you mark potential - your character is learning and growing from their failures.

You have to mark potential five times to advance. As soon as you mark the fifth, you clear your track and take an advance. Pick one option from the advancement list and mark it oﬀ—once you’ve taken that particular advance, you can’t take it again.

Once you’ve taken five from the top list, above the line, you can start taking options from below the line.

Advancement
The main characters change drastically over the course of the game. Their Labels shift, they gain and lose Inﬂuence, and they reach their potential. All of these changes are reﬂected both in elements on the character sheets and in the fiction of your game. Like the moves, change is both fictional and mechanical.

You can gain (or lose) advancements from the fiction directly, but the most common is from marking five potential and earning an advancement. Advancement from the fiction occurs when something that happens causes a tangible, mechanical change to the way you or your team operate in the future."For his service to the strange alien Crafers, Sureshot gets a new energy bow, something that never runs out of ammunition and can fire energy bolts of myriad forms. I tell Mark he should probably record the new bow as a diﬀerent ability with something like energy control.""Skysong ﬂies her crystalline ship directly into the skyscraper-sized Dominus to take him out once and for all. The maneuver works, the energy discharge from the ship sending him to a diﬀerent dimension... but I tell Skysong to mark the ship oﬀ her sheet. She doesn’t have it anymore—it shattered when it struck him."Reaching your potential and taking advances works in the other direction. You take the advance mechanically, then you have to work out how it fits into the fiction. Chances are, you and the GM will have to work together to make sense of the change. The key, though, is that you don’t need permission to take an advance—you can take it whenever you want, and while you might need to work out a compromise about the fiction to make the advance make sense, ultimately you always get whatever you take."Huma rolls a miss trying to pierce his dad’s mask, and it’s the last potential Huma needs to advance. Rich immediately decides on Take a sanctuary from the Doomed playbook, and suggests there’s a special place, tied to the power of Huma, that his family never learned to call on. I think that’s awesome, so as soon as the scene is resolved and Huma storms away from his dad, I say that his power calls him to his new sanctuary."

Advances
Most of the advances are pretty straightforward, but here are a few notes on what they mean.
 * Adding to Labels
 * Rearrange Your Labels
 * Someone Permanently Loses Influence Over You
 * Take a Move from Your/Another Playbook.
 * Taking Another Playbook's Extra
 * Taking More Abilities
 * Unlock Your Moment of Truth

Later Advances
Some advances are listed in the playbook below a line. You can only choose these advances when you’ve already taken five advances above the line. These are generally uniform across the diﬀerent playbooks, but a few playbooks have some small changes to these advances.
 * Change Playbooks
 * Lock a Label
 * Retire from the Life
 * Take an Adult Move