Merit XP

I want players to be able to acquire merits with XP over the course of the game, but it can also be very interesting to acquire merits over the course of the story. To try to balance those two realities I have decided to use a general XP pool for everything besides merits and have a separate merit XP pool. How I'd like it to work is that the minimum anyone has to do is let me know what merit he/she would like to work toward at the moment and give a one- or two-sentence description of what the character is currently doing to work toward that end. Usually we will just assume that your character works on that merit in his/her spare time, and I gradually give you XP for it. If acquiring one of your merits sounds like it will make for an interesting story, I will throw a plot your way that will relate to gaining the merit. I'm trying to decide how the XP should work in that case. I would like to give extra merit XP if your merit gives me storytelling material. On the other hand, I wouldn't want the XP awards to get too uneven. If everyone's ok with it, I might just give extra merit XP to the whole party.

