This guide will walk you through the basics of earning and spending experience to build your characters. Some venues may have specific guidelines that enhance the following information, so be sure to check your venue’s Player Guide.

If you require help on how to properly format your request or using the request queue in general. Please be sure to read over Requests for further help

Earning Experience

For logging in with your sanctioned character and role playing, you automatically 3XP per month (awarded on the 1st).

Beats are not being used at the current time. Instead, whenever a game mechanic would cause to you gain a beat, you gain a point of Willpower instead. Willpower will not be gained automatically each day, to make up for this. You’re still limited to one “beat” Willpower per source per scene.

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Spending XP

With the exception of the below listed merits and special abilities, purchasing an attribute, skill, merit, supernatural tolerance, or special ability up to and including 3 dots does not require Justification, just a basic explanation about how it’s being gained/improved.

4+ dots in anything requires Justification as this demonstrates an expertise or mastery, as does any of the following:

• NPC Cohorts (Familiars, Retainers, Totems, etc.)
• Supernatural Items (Fetishes, Enchanted Objects, Mementos, etc)
• Uncommon Supernatural Powers (other clans’ main Disciplines, Pure Gifts, etc)
• Renown at 3 dots.
• Wolf-Blood Tells treat the number of purchases of the Tell merit as a power rating; purchasing it the 4th time needs a Justification, for instance (see 5+ Power Justifications below)

All purchases require an explanation when submitting a request, but not formal justification. They do, however, need to also meet all requirements listed in the books.

Justification Includes

• Scene Participation (Narrator-run or PRP)
  • Please make use of the Scene Tool!
• Bluebooks
• Player-driven Scene Logs
• Running PRPs gets you a floating Justification that counts as an ST-run scene. Only 1 may apply per request.
• Other special possibilities at Narrator/ST discretion

In all cases, the Justification of course must make sense for the trait in question.

For Supernatural Tolerance (Blood Potency, Lair, etc) and Powers at 5, either/or of the following:

• Scene participation (PRP or staff-run)
• Player-drive Scene Logs (3+)

Note that Supernatural Merits fall under normal Justifications at 5 dots, not the Tolerance/Power rules. Similarly, buying additional rituals or similar add-ons for a “main” power, like Devotions or Blood Sorcery, requires only a normal Justification.

For Supernatural Tolerance at 6+:
All of:

• Minimum total XP of 50+:
• 1 ST, Narrator or PRP scene (at High Risk or Deadly)
• 3 normal Justifications (As above)

Narrative Traits:

Some traits require narrative Justification, meaning that the Narrators or Storymasters will ultimately need to approve them; they need Justification as normal, but the approval will also depend on external circumstances, whether character influences, NPC views, time passing, or likewise.

The following traits need narrative approval:

• Status of any kind.
• Merits representing positions in a supernatural organization, such as the Notary merit for Invictus Vampires.
• Mystery Cult Initiation; for PC groups, the approval of a max-level MCI founder is enough.
• Renown at 4+.

Purchase Limits

There is no formal time-barrier to making a purchase, however, a trait cannot be raised by more than 1 per request. In order to submit a request to raise a trait again, the previous request must have been approved. Remember, however, that XP requests are themselves limited to 2 per month.

• If Player A submits a request to raise his Strength to 3, that request must be approved before he can create and submit the request to raise his Strength to 4.
• If Player B submits a request to purchase a Discipline, she must submit a request to purchase the first dot. She cannot create and submit a request to raise that same Discipline to 2 until the original request has been approved.

Note that this doesn’t prevent purchase of Scaled merits at higher than their minimum value if it makes sense for the merit in question (it’s easy enough to hire a 4 dot Retainer instead of training one from the ground up, for instance) but improving them beyond that still follows the ‘1 dot per request’ rule. This will generally never apply to Styles and other merits that give a separate effect per dot, just those with a single scaling effect. Similarly, if another trait would give you a discount on a merit, you may buy however many dots would cost 1 xp at once.

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Character Creation: Build XP

Characters that are created anew receive the same Experience that other characters have received automatically:
Please Note. Game starting xp will be 25, plus the 3 xp everyone auto gets for start of the month. The dates below are currently just an example; the game is NOT currently going.

Cults and other Groups

See the Cult System for rules on spending XP for Coteries, Cults, Packs, and Krewes. By default, all player-created groups are assumed to have XP equal to the XP PCs gain (not including the 25 base), no matter when they’re created. The equivalent chart for this is provided below for quick calculation:

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