Merits are special capabilities or knacks that add individuality to your character. They’re purchased during character creation or with experience points over the course of your chronicle.
The Merits in this chapter are organized alphabetically into three broad categories: Physical, Mental and Social. Some apply to your character’s basic traits to enhance them in particular situations. Some have prerequisites that must be met before they can be purchased. For example, a character with the Gunslinger Merit must have a Dexterity of 3 and Firearms of 3 or higher to be able to accurately fire two weapons at the same time. By the same token, some Merits apply drawbacks that balance out their inherent advantages. A character with the Fame Merit, for example, is treated like a star wherever he goes — but has a hard time blending into the crowd when he wants to.
Each Merit has a number of dots (•) associated with it. These dots represent the number of points that must be spent to purchase the Merit. Some Merits allow for a range of dots (say, • to •••). These allow you to purchase a low rating if it’s appropriate to your character concept, or you can start with a low level and increase it over time with experience points.
A character is born with some Merits or develops them early in life, while others can be acquired through trail and error, training and effort later in life.
The first kind can be acquired at character creation only and are labeled as such. The second kind can be acquired during play with experience points.
Merit dots must be purchased sequentially with experience points. You have to buy • and then •• before your character can have ••• or more.
The character has a reciprocal relationship with a Storyteller character, in which he has at least some emotional investment — the more dots, the more significant the relationship.
This relationship is a source of strength and aid. It could be a parent, a sibling, a child. It could be a lover or an ex-lover. The relationship doesn’t have to be a positive one: that ex-wife who you’ve got to see every week because she’s got custody of the kids is still important to you, even if love turned horribly sour long ago. Your feelings for your going-right-offthe-rails teenage son may be appallingly conflicted, but he’s still central in your world.
Each purchase of the Merit counts for a relationship with one specific Storyteller character. The character can be human or supernatural.
Once per scene, you may add your dots in the Relationship Merit to one, and only one dice pool, provided that you can give a plausible rationale as to why the relationship should aid you. If it is plausible, the Storyteller must accommodate the rationale.
It can reward any dice pool at all. You can even get the bonus relationship dice while using supernatural powers (if you have any), but only in a circumstance when the player can justify the bonus.
Be creative with your rationale for getting the dice.
Sometimes, this is simple: when you’re trying to convince your ex-wife that you need to see the kids a day early because you’re going to be out of town (and no, you can’t tell her you’re off risking your life), add your relationship dice to your Manipulation + Persuasion roll.
The relationship might be at stake in some way: you’d get the bonus while trying to convince the head teacher at your deadbeat teenage son’s school not to expel him for truancy and the stuff they found in his locker.
You might decide that the object of the relationship is doing something to help your character (or hinder your character): you’re trying to talk a vampire you know out of coming into your house, and you say “my five-year-old daughter calls down the stairs and says ‘Daddy, who’s that?’ and I decide that I mustn’t let her see him…” And you take the dice for your relationship with your daughter.
You might even take the bonus for a person with whom you have an adversarial relationship turning up. You’re desperately fighting a horde of zombies; you declare: “But each zombie carries an amulet around his neck, exactly like the one (my arch-enemy) wears! He sent them! He must have learned how to make them!” And you take the dice, and if the Storyteller hasn’t already decided that your character’s archenemy did send the zombies, he has to re-jig the story to cover that.
Drawback: Relationships are reciprocal and complicated. The Storyteller character with whom you have the relationship gets the same bonus on dice pools when it’s relevant to you. Also, relationships need to be kept alive. You actually need to have some contact with the character with whom you’ve got the relationship — phone, face-to-face contact, running arguments, office conflict, whatever — or risk losing dots in the Merit. The Storyteller can decide what constitutes a reasonable interval for lack of contact (perhaps if the character doesn’t engage in the relationship once per game session, a dot in the Merit is thrown into jeopardy for the next session). Finally, if the subject of a character’s Relationship Merit dies, the Merit is lost.
Secret is a unique Merit in that its value is set by the Storyteller and it costs nothing. It can be taken in conjunction with the Flaw of the same name, and it is designed to represent secrets with somewhat higher stakes, like shadowy patronage or an illicit background. It’s appropriate to the sort of secret that includes benefits that last only as long as the secret stays hidden.
The benefit of this Merit is that it allows the character to take two free dots of Merits for each dot of secrets. These merits cannot be intrinsic things (like Quick Draw or Striking Looks), rather they must be Merits that could potentially be lost, like most Social Merits. So long as the character’s secret remains hidden, these Merits remain; if the secret ever goes public, they are immediately lost.
When taking this Merit, the player describes the secret, and the Storyteller assigns its value. Practically speaking, this allows the Storyteller to set the maximum value of Secrets in his game. Secrets above •• are very powerful, and are best suited to games with a heavy emphasis on intrigue and politics. In such games, allowing a high threshold of secrets is a quick and dirty way to allow characters to be movers and shakers without also making them combat monsters.
(You’ll also find information on secrets earlier in this book, on p. 132.)
A veteran character is one with at least five years of experience in a specific field. These characters haven’t yet experienced enough of the oddities of the World of Darkness to truly recognize everything isn’t as it seems, but they’ve had more real-world experience than is typical of your average starting character. For each dot spent on this Merit, the character gains one Specialty in a Skill that relates to her field. Stacking Specialties (above) is recommended in coordination with this Merit.
Examples of appropriate Skills to enhance with Specialties by way of this Merit include:
Cop: Computer, Investigation, any Physical Skill except Survival, any Social Skill (including Animal Ken for K-9 units) except Socialize.
Blue Collar Laborer: Computer, Crafts, possibly Medicine by field, Athletics, Drive, any Social Skill except Streetwise.
Professor: Any Mental Skill except Occult, Athletics, Drive, any Social Skill except Streetwise.
Professional Thief: Computer, Crafts, Investigation, any Physical Skill except Survival, any Social Skill except Animal Ken.
White Collar Laborer: Any Mental Skill except Crafts and Occult, Athletics, Drive, any Social Skill except Animal Ken and Streetwise.
Soldier: Academics, Computers, Crafts, Medicine, any Physical Skill except Larceny, any Social Skill except Animal Ken and Streetwise.
Street Thug: Crafts, Investigation, any Physical Skill except Survival, any Social Skill except Animal Ken and Empathy.
Example: Stew decides he wants to make a beat cop with several years experience on the job. He invests three dots into the Veteran Merit, which allows him to select three Skills to enhance with a Specialty. Stew figures his character has in-depth knowledge of Drive, Firearms, and Investigation and so the character begins play with a Specialty in each of those Skills. Likely choices for Narrow Choice Specialties include Drive (Police Cruiser), Firearms (Pistol), and Investigation (Crime Scene).
Drawback: Time on the job frequently comes with some disadvantages and the longer you spend on the same job; the more problems are likely to come up. Buying this Merit at three dots or above means beginning play with one Flaw. A construction worker might lose hearing after being around loud equipment day after day, a cop is likely to make some enemies during the course of his duties, or an accountant might take to slugging back the booze to drown out the numbers dancing in his head. Select Flaws that seem in-character and use them as possible future plot points and roleplaying opportunities. Don’t feel bound by the Flaws presented in the World of Darkness Rulebook (p. 218) either. Be creative and design Flaws that say something about the character.
Example: Continuing with the example above, since Stew took three dots in the Veteran Merit, he must select one Flaw. Stew decides that his cop’s time on the job has made him cynical about human behavior, which makes him hard to deal with at times and imposes a –2 penalty to Socialize rolls.