FAQ & Your Questions!

[ReubanBrightwood]

Hi Thanks for the advise, I have been trying to make use of the wiki and in failing to get a definitive answer I have turned to the forums ... Below are the searches I have made, am I missing something glaringly obvious??

When I search the wiki for legacies I get:
- How to join one
- Which are banned/ changed
- The house rule over haul

When I search for Oblations I get:
- Performing them at a hallow
-Occult correspondence

When I search Legacy Oblations I get:
-This page has not been created (The crux of the problem I am having)

When I search Mana I get:
- The mana/ Gnosis Table
- Uses of Mana
- Scourging
- The house rules for the average mana pool (base + x amount per dot of hallow rating based on how many use the hallow)

Should I intuit that as legacy oblations are not mentioned anywhere they are in fact not used?? or is there a really obvious search I am missing??

Thank you for your time.

[Prunus]

I've taken a look at the rules, and I'm left with a few questions that seem potentially relevant to some of the character ideas I'm exploring. A couple of these are loosely related, and relate to character creation XP and chronology. Specifically:

• Can character creation XP be spent on "at character creation only" merits? (A literal reading of the phrases involved would seem to suggest yes, but I'm not sure whether that's actually the intent.)
• It seems clear from the description of the character creation process that in terms of meeting prerequisites, character creation dots have to come first, and character creation XP later (since any purchases with character creation XP haven't been made yet when the initial sheet needs to get approved). But is it also expected that dot purchases come before XP purchases in backstory chronology when there isn't an issue of prerequisites? In particular, is it inappropriate to use character creation XP to obtain skills that conceptually represent things a changeling learned before their durance (provided that those skills aren't prerequisites for anything on the initial character sheet)?

And a couple about rate of improvement:

• The Vampire House Rules state that Attribute, Skill, and Merit improvements are limited to 1 dot per month. The Mage House Rules only state this about skills, and the Changeling House Rules don't state it at all. Is this actually intended to differ between venues in this fashion? (Obviously, a lot of larger improvements in a short time may run into realism issues even if there isn't a blanket rule.)
• For Vampire, in any event (and for all the venues if the Vampire rules are intended to be universal), how does this interact with merits whose lowest level is 2 dots or higher? Does this mean that a character has to, for example, "work on" Quick Healer for four months before acquiring it?

And a couple changeling-specific ones:

• The "XP" article on the Wiki seems to imply that Goblin Contracts have the same structure as regular contracts (buying dots sequentially), when the Changeling core book states that each clause is purchased separately, and seems to imply that the cost is linear rather than quadratic (with Goblin Contracts' cost being listed on page 77 as "Dots x 3" XP, in contrast to the "New dots x 3" language for everything else other than Willpower). Is this actually intended to be quadratic (e.g., Lost and Found costs 45 XP), or is it intended to be linear (Lost and Found costs 15 XP), and the listing of "Total" costs on the XP wiki page is an oversight or an issue of an inflexible template and a lack of time to figure out how to modify it?
• There's a question I have that relates to the exact mechanics of harvesting glamour from emotions, that I'm having some trouble expressing both accurately and in its full generality. (And if you'd rather not try to answer it until I get it nailed down better, that's more than reasonable.) But by way of example, it's something roughly along the lines of "Is it possible to (a) try to persuade someone to do a specific thing that terrifies them, and (b) also try to harvest the fear that this provokes, without trying to make them frightened (as opposed to merely trying to get them to do the thing, and merely knowing that this will in all probability make them frightened), what are the rolls to make, and what are the results forany possible mixes of success and failure?" My intuition is that it's something like "Roll Manipulation + Persuasion to convince them to do it, and if that succeeds, roll ??? (possibly Composure + Empathy, based on the Darkling example on page 89 of the core book?) to harvest. Failure on the first roll makes the second irrelevant; success on the first roll and failure on the second means you get no glamour (and possibly also come off as an asshole who's trying to get off on their fear, again based on the Darkling example's statement about "maintaining the pretense of a grieving relative"? But maybe not?)," but the example of the "Spring Court club kid" seems to suggest that trying to do the thing (seduce the "naive young thing") and harvest from it are a single roll, which would seem to imply that succeeding at one and failing at the other (in this case, managing to get laid, but not gaining any glamour from it) is impossible. This one might or might not actually come up in practical terms, but has relevance to a couple related character ideas I'm contemplating in an "is the sort of day-to-day life I'm envisioning this character pursuing actually consistent with what the mechanics allow (and my conception of how good they are at it going to be consistent with the dots on my sheet)?" kind of way.