Auras and supernatural abilities

How do most people handle the issue of aura interaction and supernatural abilities.

The big one is that most supernatural abilities are very heavy xp cost (they are abilities after all) so you have a character + ability that you are rolling, usually for a target of 9 or greater. PRoblem is that most of them are faerie or magic this means in a divine aura of town with a 2 aura, you are at a -6 to your rolls (-6 to shape shift, -6 to dowse, -6 to spot things with second sight, -6 to enchanting music). Sometimes you are in stronger auras. It almost seems as if being in dominion means supernatural abilities practically don't exist.

How do people handle this in their sagas?

Except those Supernatural Abilities aligned with the Divine.

We play this exactly as written. Which means that people with faerie / magical / infernal aligned abilities are generally not found in towns. Faeries live in forests. Magi send the grogs to town. Enchanted items (Hermetic or otherwise) that affect mundanes are also good for town work --- as they don't need to Penetrate they don't need to worry about penalties to Penetration or targets getting bonuses to Magic Resistance.

It is, of course, possible for towns to have regios (or just patches) with other auras. For example, the parts of towns associated with slaughter-houses, tanneries and the like, commonly have an infernal aura, or at least during night-time they might.

Richard +1.

Find a Learned Magician (pages 90 & 92) to make you an amulet to give a bonus to a particular S/N ability.
Take Major/Minor Essential Virtue (page 43) from RoP: Magic.
Use Divine Lore to gain a temporary bonus of +01 to +03.

In my last saga, I changed aura interaction for ability so Divine only penalized supernatural ability at -1/aura level instead of -3/aura (but keeping -3/aura for spellcasting). It worked fine. In my current saga, I'm experimenting with doing away with the penalty altogether and having auras which usually penalize grant magic resistance instead. We haven't played long enough to have a good sense for how it's working.

We do the same as Lucius. Auras penalize abilities at -1/level (and grant bonuses at +1/level as well), not -3/level. We have been doing this so long that it just hit me it is a house rule :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Xavi

That sounds like a good House Rule. We don't use Supernatural Abilities much IIRC, but I know we've never remembered to modify them.

Much of the time, by completely forgetting or ignoring the penalty... :mrgreen:
Supernatural abilities should be cool, not "oh dear i can hear a church bell from here just barely so i cant shapeshift at all until i get much better at it!"...

It is much worse than that:
Dominion aura 2 means -6 this means your stamina+shapeshift+stress roll needs to be a 15. This is town or village. You get to a city and dominion is 3-5 that you are at -9 to -15. Since supernatural abilities are 5x level to go. Getting a 5 means 75 xp that even with a good stamina, you will usually fail in a city. (stamina 3, shapeshift 5=8+simple die needing an 18 (9 + 9 more vs -9 from aura) or 1 in 10 for aura. dominion 4, forget using any supernatural ability with a roll. This goes for second sight, dowsing and almost all the standard core supernatural abilities. Good luck finding any sort of regio in a city.

I know hermetic magic is meant to be far superior and even with -9 to -12 most hermetic mages can get off some pretty impressive feats in their specialties (and no penalty for magic items). Still supernatural abilities should be able to generate stories and such in a town or city. (In one play by post game, my companion just had her supernatural abilities aligned to dominion so there is never any penalty but I can't justify that for every character with supernatural powers.).

You could introduce a Houserule based on the 3 favoured abilities option.
You have 3 favoured abilities that do not get a learning penalty from other supernatural abilities.
Simply decide that these same abilities are not affected negatively by a Divine aura as well.

Allow an Aura acclimatization , similar to that with mundanes and the Gift.
You don't "get used" to all Divine auras , but one or more specific auras do not affect you ,
if you frequent them on a regular basis.