Post by Magic Rob on Aug 26, 2014 13:22:43 GMT -8
The nature of a long term LARP creates the necessity for characters to develop in ways that the original game system wasn't ever really designed to handle. Purchasing backgrounds, as a for instance, is only briefly addressed if at all. With the goal of long-term characters in mind, we are offering the ability to purchase Backgrounds with Experience points because the game really needs that feature in order to grow.
However.
It is my experience with the purchasing of merits that often times these cross a line of reality. While I can wrap my head around talking to someone enough for them to give you information reliably (Contacts), I can't really wrap my head around working on growing bigger and therefore getting Huge Size. Spending XP on a merits isn't a mechanic that makes any sense to me at all.
It also doesn't curb the cheesy response of sinking all of your flaws and freebies into other things and then building up merits later. Merits should be a rare thing (relative to world population), and they should be special in some way.
Therefore, for the foreseeable future, merits are not a thing you can spend your XP on. You buy them at creation and that makes sense, but spontaneously developing Ambidexterity or Huge Size or Iron Will just doesn't fit into my head.
That said, Languages are now a merit. So that's a merit you *can* buy. It makes perfect sense to me that you can spend your XP and time to learning how to talk good in another gooder tongue. The most balance ratio of Freebies to XP conversion is 3xp per dot of freebies. It will, therefore, cost you 3xp (and story) to purchase the Language merit after creation. This is a thing we will be watching to ensure reality is at least nodded to in its application. Learning six languages in a month is just not a thing that reality would allow, as a for instance.
Flaws are the flip side of this. Can you buy off Flaws in game?
Well, sure you can, if you can convince me that you did an appropriate amount of work on it. And reality, still, needs to be appeased. Buying off Monstrous, as a for instance, will be tricky for most vampires (even with vicissitude, it's possible that if this solution is too readily available, your flaw reacts like nosferatu would and you snap back to ugly the next day. Yeah. I'm *that* sort of storyteller). Buying off Nightmares? Should, it'll take some therapy, but you could probably convince me of it.
The process to buy off flaws is not something that can be heavily codified as each approach is different and each flaw is different and each character is different. Suffice to say that the process is detailed as: "Convince Rob that what you did was good enough and he might let you get away with it" Knowing him like I do, this will still probably be an exhaustive process that will consume your Downtime actions and possibly XP in other ways. Yup. That's hows I rolls.
Should approval find its way to you, flaws will be bought off your sheet at the rate of 3xp per dot of flaw.