Important Info About Sheets
August 21st, 2015
Evening all you fellow neck bitters and Kung-fu enthusiasts,
I come to you with a service announcement about a few things of interest you need to know and adjust accordingly to your sheets.
1. Martial Arts the Ability
This ability is a thing and it exists in the World of Darkness. Therefore with a teacher and lots of time you may be able to learn it. It also takes an extreme amount of time each night to retain it. More later on that.
It consists of 3 different branches: Hard, Soft and Weapon. Weapon Martial arts is it's own thing and will be discussed later. Right now we will discuss Hard and Soft styles.
Hard and Soft Styles:
Hard and Soft style Martial Arts have some restrictions to having them. The first one is you may never ever have more than 5 ability dots TOTAL in Martial Arts Hard and Martial Arts Soft. You may not possess any levels of the Brawl Ability if you have Martial Arts.
Each dot of Hard or Soft has to have an individual style Assigned to it and only when using that style may you call upon the traits granted to you by said individual Martial Art dots.
This restriction is per the book and also means that you may not Specialize in this ability. Nor can you take merits like Home Court Advantage or Ability Aptitude to gain more traits from it. The Ability itself gives you traits and special actions you can take with each individual style of Hard or Soft.
Your only retests for Martial Arts are the ones specific to the individual Martial Art you are using at the time. Retests that use the Martial art ability does not take away from the addition they give to your traits. It will use up your ability retests though.
Weapon Style:
Weapon style is different in a few ways than Hard and Soft. While you may not have more than 5 Total in the other grouping in this one you may have 5 Martial Arts Weapon Style and 5 Melee Ability.
However for the weapon(s) you choose to have a Martial Art in. You may not use the melee ability to retest while you are weilding that weapon(s). Again as well you may only gain benifit from the amount of Martial Arts Dots devoted to that specific Weapon.
Learning and Retaining the Ability:
You may only learn up to the amount that your teacher has and never more than them unless you find someone else willing to teach. It is a rare thing to be a true Master and have 5 Martial Arts. All the Legendary Masters of their arts have stories of great sacrifice and searching for a True Master to train them. This should be something you all go through.
Retaining these teachings and skills are a different matter. For each dot of Martial Arts on your sheet you need to spend 30 minutes in training to retain it. This can be forgiven if you miss a night or two per month (not going to make you miss game). If you are doing too much other stuff in the month then we the staff will start removing the dots from your sheets until you correct your schedule and devote time to honing your skills. This also involves upkeep on weapons as part of the honing of skills.
The Ability itself is more than just a mere ability and thus costs more to raise as well. It is 3 Experience per dot of Martial Arts.
You may not use any Martial Art Ability while in Frenzy.
2. We are making Cuts
Over the last few months we have told you all that we the staff will be removing sheets from our Game on puppet if you did not place in your character name the chronicle you are based in. DC:H, S:tGC, KoNY, etc...
This will be happening at the end of this month after our next game.
Thank you all for your time.
David
