The Gift: Does the Penalty Always Stack

I have a scene in my head where magi arrive at court (perhaps in Venice). They are instantly recognized as a noble and are treated well. The magi slowly realize that the gift has it's normal effect, but that the court is so laden with intrigue that almost all the high nobles have reputations for dishonesty and undeserved privilege. This should probably worry the players.

In game terms, are their situations where the Gift penalty becomes largely inapplicable as many of the mundanes have poor reputations of equal strength?

IMO, they Gift should apply always, and in other ways completely disadvantageous to the magus in social settings, otherwise you simply devalue the Gentle Gift in similar circumstances. If there aren't any Gently Gifted magi in the troupe, then it's much less of an issue, although it might be if there's a prominent NPC with the Gentle Gift.

For example, some might consider a particular noble dishonest, but he adheres to the letter of all of his agreements, but not the spirit. In comparison a magus character would be expected to break the agreement without any pretense at honoring the letter of the agreement. Who do you want to make a deal with? Well, neither, but presume that you can craft an agreement with the one who honors all of his agreements to the letter, you're going to make the deal with that guy.

In other words, give your nobles one redeeming quality that someone could rely upon, or even a horrible quality, but it can be used as a tool for measuring the character and gauging how the other party expects the agreement to go down. Magi have none of these qualities, and once more are complete unknowns. Everyone probably thinks they're working for or with their greatest enemy in the court, always, no matter the evidence to the contrary.

The only time I'd allow that is with mystical interference.

For instance, perhaps a demon is sowing distrust; creating a mystical penalty equivalent to the gift between everyone. Or someone used the Curse of Mars on them...

The Gift should still mean that the magi are considered to be (amongst) the worst of those available (unless there are equivalent supernatural reputations active).

It all depends on context, of course, but if it is reasonable to suppose that every member of the court is a double-crossing ne'er-do-well, then people would suspect that characters with The Gift were actively, right now, attempting to double-cross them. Alternatively, Gifted characters would be (regardless of apparent evidence) suspected of the worst possible intrigues available (treason, assassination, etc) whereas a suspicious but unGifted character will be judged more on the apparent evidence.

Likewise, say a traveller is ambushed by a group of grogs and Gifted magi. The traveller is unlikely to think well of anybody ambushing him. However, a claim that "if the traveller surrenders his wealth he won't be harmed" is going to be much more believable if it comes from an unGifted grog. And such a claim would be even more believable if the Gifted magus was not there at all.

Don't this view then devalue the Blatant Gift? At last from the value of the Gift "Only" gives -3 to social actions and so should be able to overcome if someone focus enough on social abilities, Characteristics and Reputation.

Well, I hadn't considered the Blatant Gift, to be sure. But, yes, the premise in the OP negates the penalty for the Blatant Gift, too.

In our saga we tend to moderate the gift's effects based on relative details of the character and any reputations they have.

We're working hard on getting our resident Tremare the reputation of "Hero of Acre" because of his actions on crusade. This, plus his vaguely nordic features (Verangian ancestory) result in him being regarded as 'Dangerous, scary, vaguely psychopathic." as a result of his gift, an option of appearance shared by the Space Marines of WH40k. People are not inclined to trust him with regard to things because they aren't sure if he won't decide killing them is the easier solution, but if he gives his word, he will stick to it. To the letter of it, and always in a manner that favours him, no matter what, but still.

Personally I'd have pushed for the gentle gift to give NO penalty, but people still treat you as odd and slightly mad. Not the "unsafe, might snap and kill us all" kind of mad that the Gift provokes. Not the "He'll kill us all and use our bodies to make soup!" kind of mad that the Blatant gift does, but the "... he'd rather read books than go hunting with us?" sort of mad.

In our saga we tend to moderate the gift's effects based on relative details of the character and any reputations they have.

We're working hard on getting our resident Tremare the reputation of "Hero of Acre" because of his actions on crusade. This, plus his vaguely nordic features (Verangian ancestory) result in him being regarded as 'Dangerous, scary, vaguely psychopathic." as a result of his gift, an option of appearance shared by the Space Marines of WH40k. People are not inclined to trust him with regard to things because they aren't sure if he won't decide killing them is the easier solution, but if he gives his word, he will stick to it. To the letter of it, and always in a manner that favours him, no matter what, but still.

Personally I'd have pushed for the gentle gift to give NO penalty, but people still treat you as odd and slightly mad. Not the "unsafe, might snap and kill us all" kind of mad that the Gift provokes. Not the "He'll kill us all and use our bodies to make soup!" kind of mad that the Blatant gift does, but the "... he'd rather read books than go hunting with us?" sort of mad.

I would say if you find yourself in a situation where everyone has a bad reputation of -3, then either it is a small group where everyone knows everyone else except the mage- in which case they simply have a -3 reaction which is the approximate same as everyone else, or else being associated with the group will itself give you a temporary -3 reputation which means you have a total of -6 or -9 if you have the blatant gift.

I would point out that "The Gentle Gift" is a Hermetic Virtue, and so can be taught, without your Art scores penalizing you. If your Covenant is having issues with the Gift, fix it! (In context of another recent thread, I would say that the Gentle Gift has just recently been "turned" into a Hermetic Virtue, and in a few more generations, most Magi will have it at "Character Creation").

Virtues can be taught? Would you care to site that?

Sure... Getting the SQ to teach it is easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.
The base target is 21 to teach a Major Hermetic Virtue.
Each minor Hermetic Virtue adds +3, each Major Hermetic Virtue adds +9. It scales linearly, so we can just say each point of Hermetic Virtues adds +3
Say we pick a character who has only 5 points in Hermetic virtues (five is about the minimum I've seen, 7 or 8 is more common). So a typical character without the Gentle Gift has to be taught by someone with a SQ of 36, or if they're willing to receive a major Hermetic flaw from the teacher, it is actually only a 27.
So let's go with 27. What kind of teacher generates an SQ of 27.
6 is from the single student bonus, 3 is the standard constant, for a total of 9, meaning we need to get to SQ 18.
So 18 points needs to come from Teaching, Com and Virtues. Good Teacher gives you 5, Great Comx2 and 6 points of characteristics or several ritual spells gives you another 5, meaning another 8 needs to come from the teaching ability score. A bit of a high hurdle to get there...

Page 41 of Apprentices. It's also a central premise of Stealing the Future.

Okay, I've only done a few apprentices, and they have generally had innate virtues that were 'hereditary', with the rules for the free house virtues being used with 10 seasons of teaching allowing them to pick up a free virtue...

you do realize this breaks the game, as major virtues can be taught in a season, and now you can theoretically teach someone to have a personal vis source...

Maybe. You can only teach virtues your character possesses. If the Personal Vis Source is part of the person, the body, then maybe it is possible to teach it. Why not? If it was a tree that dropped herbam pine cones, then no, I'd generally agree that you can't teach that, but even then, maybe it's little more than some specific rituals in making any tree a personal vis source.

the problem is that once a virtue becomes teachable in a single season, without the need for a mystagoge etc. then it can spread through the order like wildfire. Consider puissant and affinity for mentem and creo, build up scores n these, then a spell to increase com to +5, getting good teachers becomes easier and the cycle refines itself...

I have to say that I LOVE this idea!!!! :smiley:

I disagree with the other posters: you are NOT negating the effect of the gift, just the contrary: reputations are so dodgy around, that everybody has a -3 on social interaction. What happens is that people's expectations are so low that you are also lowering the target number for social interaction for pleasantries, chatty chat, bargaining minor things and other nonsense. For trust and really serious matters, advancing your ideas will be extremely difficult (normal target number with the -3 for all the actors present). That will create a situation where people will band with their sde, and where sides will be far from willing to compromise. A great place for intermediaries to work in.

Reminds me of some of the meetings I have to do with politicians from different parties.

Cheers,
Xavi

I see this commonly said in the forums, that it's easy to use stat boosting rituals. But the ease of this is a function of the saga. Houses of Hermes:True Lineages suggests that the Cult of Heroes has these lab texts. It's not impossible for others to have these lab texts, but they probably don't get shared all that much. Cult of Heroes, being Mercurian or tied to the Cult of Mercury and/or Neo-Mercurians have some pretty good benefits for casting these rituals more safely, too. And if you were the intrepid individual to invent a personal ranged spell for yourself, it's a 55th level spell, which suggests a lab total of at least 60 to make the development time reasonable. 60 is not a super high lab total, granted. But a magus does have a lot of demands upon his time, and the +1 bonus has a long payoff horizon...

If everyone is distrusted or hated, I have trouble seeing why the magi wouldn't be distrusted more. First, they have the Gift, and second they are new to the scene. Why wouldn't one alliance suspect another alliance of bringing in these yahoos (the magi), thus giving them some undeserved reputation penalty, and besides, they smell/talk/act funny, too!

But you should as well read the post of the author of Apprentices from Saturday, May 26th 2012, 11:04 pm on this forum. He makes very clear that any decision about what can be taught this way is taken by the troupe, and that arguing 'RAW' here is nonsense.

Cheers