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Experience Costs
May. 17th, 2006 07:55 amHmmkay. I got news on board XP expenditure.
First thing I asked about was Primal Urge, which I somehow neglected to buy at character creation. Generally speaking, you need to have a thread on the boards showing where you'd practiced to learn whatever the hell it is you're learning, but they'll make exceptions if it's an obvious background hole. Now here, I had both bases covered; while it wasn't my first XP session, I had at least two threads where Primal Urge had kicked in to detect Garou, which I figured might count as practice. I was right, and can have a dot in Primal Urge shortly.
Then I asked about Spirit Speech, a level 1 Werewolf Gift that lets you talk to spirits and address them on their own level -- good for summonings and such. Now, you can learn this from any spirit, so I thought that the easiest way to learn this was to find a friendly spirit and learn from them. This is actually fairly simple, because the character learning this has a little merit called Machine Affinity. According to the merits listing, this not only gives bonuses when dealing with any technological spirit but means that the spirits of machines tend to spontaneously awaken in the character's presence. The character, being a dancer and a lover of music (Galliard), has a battered old discman that she's been carrying around on her travels and such for the last six years or so. You'd figure that, after six years and more, the spirit of that machine will be a) well and truly awake and b) rather kindly disposed towards my character. So a great spirit to ask for that sort of Gift; after all, she gave it life, in a sense, and has been feeding it batteries and good music and generally keeping it in as much repair as possible for six years, so teaching her to talk and listen to it properly seems a small enough boon.
However, the head ST decided that the call on that one should be made by the Werewolf ST. I have spoken of the Werewolf ST in previous rants. She has decreed that the character must travel to the Umbra (okay...) and deal with the spirit directly (well, duh) and barter goods or services, which apparently will involve some kind of quest.
...Okay. Say what? Look, I get that in general, you don't want to make this shit too easy to learn, but it's a Level 1 Gift that, quite frankly, guarantees nothing. Just because you can talk to them doesn't necessarily mean they're going to listen, after all. If I was asking for Control Complex Machine or Paw of the Newborn Cub, I would understand, but this? Seems overkill. But even still, okay, fine ... if it was anybody else STing. However, I'm not seeing where the ST in question is going to be particularly helpful in running a quest, frankly. The last thread I was involved in with her was with her as that bloody kid mage, and I spent over a week trapped in that thread, waiting for time to tick on so I could actually game at all. And that was when she wasn't doing anything else on the boards at the time. Now, though, she's got three characters involved in two separate threads, one of which is particularly traffic-heavy and important, so given the circumstances and following on trends at this point, I'm thinking I'll pencil my 'quest' in for a three-week time slot somewhere around half-past 2008.
Seriously, come on. No, it shouldn't be phenomenally easy to get Gifts etc all the time. However, if someone wants to spend their XP on one of the simpler Gifts and has a good story to back it up (which you have already stated will result in a good bit of business in a thread somewhere), why not bloody well let them get on with it? What's the point of having XP if you won't let your characters bloody well spend it without going through gods-know-what to even get something simple? Why is there no flexibility here? *sigh* If it weren't for the fact that my Caregiver-natured character is currently associated with an emotionally scarred eclipse-born Ahroun who'd go mental and/or harano if the first real friend she's made in four years went AWOL, I'd be gone like a cool breeze. As it is, I don't know what I'm going to do. If Spirit Speech is this hard to get, requesting answers from the City Father? Probably not gonna happen. Shit.
First thing I asked about was Primal Urge, which I somehow neglected to buy at character creation. Generally speaking, you need to have a thread on the boards showing where you'd practiced to learn whatever the hell it is you're learning, but they'll make exceptions if it's an obvious background hole. Now here, I had both bases covered; while it wasn't my first XP session, I had at least two threads where Primal Urge had kicked in to detect Garou, which I figured might count as practice. I was right, and can have a dot in Primal Urge shortly.
Then I asked about Spirit Speech, a level 1 Werewolf Gift that lets you talk to spirits and address them on their own level -- good for summonings and such. Now, you can learn this from any spirit, so I thought that the easiest way to learn this was to find a friendly spirit and learn from them. This is actually fairly simple, because the character learning this has a little merit called Machine Affinity. According to the merits listing, this not only gives bonuses when dealing with any technological spirit but means that the spirits of machines tend to spontaneously awaken in the character's presence. The character, being a dancer and a lover of music (Galliard), has a battered old discman that she's been carrying around on her travels and such for the last six years or so. You'd figure that, after six years and more, the spirit of that machine will be a) well and truly awake and b) rather kindly disposed towards my character. So a great spirit to ask for that sort of Gift; after all, she gave it life, in a sense, and has been feeding it batteries and good music and generally keeping it in as much repair as possible for six years, so teaching her to talk and listen to it properly seems a small enough boon.
However, the head ST decided that the call on that one should be made by the Werewolf ST. I have spoken of the Werewolf ST in previous rants. She has decreed that the character must travel to the Umbra (okay...) and deal with the spirit directly (well, duh) and barter goods or services, which apparently will involve some kind of quest.
...Okay. Say what? Look, I get that in general, you don't want to make this shit too easy to learn, but it's a Level 1 Gift that, quite frankly, guarantees nothing. Just because you can talk to them doesn't necessarily mean they're going to listen, after all. If I was asking for Control Complex Machine or Paw of the Newborn Cub, I would understand, but this? Seems overkill. But even still, okay, fine ... if it was anybody else STing. However, I'm not seeing where the ST in question is going to be particularly helpful in running a quest, frankly. The last thread I was involved in with her was with her as that bloody kid mage, and I spent over a week trapped in that thread, waiting for time to tick on so I could actually game at all. And that was when she wasn't doing anything else on the boards at the time. Now, though, she's got three characters involved in two separate threads, one of which is particularly traffic-heavy and important, so given the circumstances and following on trends at this point, I'm thinking I'll pencil my 'quest' in for a three-week time slot somewhere around half-past 2008.
Seriously, come on. No, it shouldn't be phenomenally easy to get Gifts etc all the time. However, if someone wants to spend their XP on one of the simpler Gifts and has a good story to back it up (which you have already stated will result in a good bit of business in a thread somewhere), why not bloody well let them get on with it? What's the point of having XP if you won't let your characters bloody well spend it without going through gods-know-what to even get something simple? Why is there no flexibility here? *sigh* If it weren't for the fact that my Caregiver-natured character is currently associated with an emotionally scarred eclipse-born Ahroun who'd go mental and/or harano if the first real friend she's made in four years went AWOL, I'd be gone like a cool breeze. As it is, I don't know what I'm going to do. If Spirit Speech is this hard to get, requesting answers from the City Father? Probably not gonna happen. Shit.