I am trying to understand how the Abilities-as-Pretenses thing works for Faeries, particularly in connection to the Faerie Trainer free virtue. Faeries gain prenteses at a yearly pace dictated by their virtues/flaws, from one season a year for Aloof, to four a year for Ostentatious. They also gain them (only) thorugh adventures in which they play a supporting role to someone who's gaining xp in the corresponding ability.
Must one to play out every adventure or (more likely) simply translate seasons into xps?
In the latter case how many xps do you gain seasonally or yearly? A number equal to the "multiplier" for character creation?
How does this combine with a Faerie who also takes Fairie Trainer - could it spend two seasons a year (the "standard", free virtue) gaining pretenses and the other two training as a human?
For the same number of seasons, is there any advantage in not choosing Faerie Trainer as a free virtue? After all, gaining xps as a human almost always produces more xp and/or allows one more freedom in spending them.
How many starting "human" xps (not pretenses) does a character with Faerie Trainer start with? 0? Or can one exchange initial pretense points for xps on a 1 to 1 basis?
PC faeries don't necessarily gain pretenses each year as dictated by the vitues on page 63-4. As they say, in the text themselves, they make these gains during character creation. This is quite like how the Wealth virtue gives you extra Abilities during character creation. Once the character is actually in play, Wealth doesn't give you extra Ability experience, although it does give you free time which you can convert across. Once a faerie is in play, what it actually does determines what points it gets. A faerie who adventures a lot, despite, say, an Aloof attitude to humans, does gain substatinally more experience than other Aloof faeries.
For NPCs, or for players that make a cogent argument as to why they should get the points, I'd allow them to get the points. In sagas which you expect won't last all that long, the player needs the points as a fairness issue. In longer games, I'd note though that faeries really do need stories to get their points, and I think "While the rest of you were in the lab, I was off on a story with some grogs..." is a bit poor, given your character is an immortal. You can afford a slower pace of skill acquisition.
Ask your troupe. IMC, it depends on campaign pace. For campaigns I expect to have a few game years then stop, they do. For longer ones, no, they don't.
Yes, arguably, although some faeries might get the points in a less smooth way (as a lump sum when they finish their story and change role, for example).
I'd be happy with that, sure, but remember that as soon as you add pretenses to a Faerie Trainer Ability, it becomes a pretense. Once its a pretense, it stays a pretense. You can't mix and match your sources of apparent skill.
Sure:
every Virtue costs a Flaw.
you have a limited number of Virtues, so every virtue precludes one you might choose instead.
highest possible scores simply aren't the point in many games. Why would you ever play grogs?
the question itself assumes your faerie is Highly Cognizant, which is itself a cost in terms of other virtues forgone and flaws taken. That is narrowly cognizant faeries don't want versatlitiy in where they spend their points and can't use it even if they have it.
human abilities can only do strictly reasonable things, pretenses can do unreasonable things that sound right for the story, as permitted by your troupe. Pretenses are a sort of permissible cheating.
Pretenses are cheaper than Abilities. A knight who is human needs many abilities to do his thing. A faerie knight may just need "Chivalrous Combat" and "Courtly Manners", as decided by the troupe. You can't have human training in these pretenses because they aren't Abilities, so you are handing back your discount.
the intention, with limitations as guided by your troupe, is that the Human Trainer Virtues only covers one or more skills that are strongly related to your character's story role. That is, if you are a knight you might perhaps have two human weapon Abilities and Animal Handling. It's not meant to read as "well, all of my Abilities suit the condtion of "one or more"".
You really also ought to train a human at some point. It's there on the tin.
The second one, IMC, as vetted by the troupe for reasonableness in their saga.