While I realize some groups play this way, I haven't seen any support for it in the text. Have I missed something? As noted previously, I wasn't able to find any mention of templates in the character advancement section at all.
The book does state templates are "crucial" to character creation...but they don't seem to matter much afterwards. Which makes sense given the growth of characters in later novels.
Here are a couple of quotes:
You must take all of the powers that are mandatory for the character template you’re using, so make sure you have those figured out first. After that, you may only take powers that fit your character template and the high concept selected for your character—a vampire can take powers that would give him supernatural strength and speed, but a wizard cannot.
Supernatural powers also come at a greater price beyond the simple math of your character’s refresh rate. No supernatural ability may exist in a vacuum—it must come about due to specific reasons rooted in your character’s concept. At the very least, this usually means that the supernatural abilities must clearly derive from your character’s high concept (page 54), but other requirements may exist as well—see the Types & Templates chapter starting on page 72 for the particulars for each character type. The end effect is that all supernatural abilities have requirements that must be fulfilled before they can be added to your character; these are usually outlined in the template you have chosen for your character.
As to Scions, they are a custom template, with the Changeling presented as an example. And even "Changeling" is more of a meta-template; any given Changeling doesn't necessary have access to all of the options listed in the Changeling template (which is why the options section says the following, in effect requiring the Changeling template to be further tailored:
During character creation, you and your GM must work out a set of supernatural powers that the character could inherit from his faerie parent (usually by looking at the list of musts and options for the appropriate faerie template in What Goes Bump).
Other Scions templates would behave the same way: you create a list of
potential powers that are appropriate to the Scion based on his heritage, and the Scion can choose powers from that list to start with, and draw further powers from them later as the Scion's heritage begins to make itself more apparent.
And, as I pointed out before, another option is to add a further template to your character; I see this as starting by adding an 'apprentice' version of the template, with all of the 'musts' treated as 'options' and the 'options' unavailable until the 'musts' are filled out.
Note: the following paragraph contains some possible spoilers for those still reading the series. I've put spoiler marks on the information that this board considers to be spoilers, but those still reading the series might want to skip the following anyway.For example, Dresden has dabbled with several added templates. In Summer Knight, he effectively borrowed (temporarily) from the Emissary of Power (Winter Court) or Knight of a Faerie Court (Winter) template, taking the Marked by Power -- and Mab offered to make it a more permanent arrangement. I think it was in Dead Beat that he began using Hellfire; he was basically delving into a template that would probably count as either Emissary of Power (The Fallen). In Small Favor, he moves on to Emissary of Power (Uriel), learning Soulfire. And later, in Changes,
he took on the Knight of a Faerie Court (Winter) template.
In Ghost Story, of course,
he replaces most of his character with an entirely new template
So to summarize, my take is that each templates is meant to be fairly firm, but that there is lots of room for flexibility in creating new templates (which in turn should be firm and reasonably created), and also in taking multiple templates.
@sinker: To a large extent, high concept = template. So long as you're reasonable in what powers you consider "related directly" to your high concept, then you are basically implementing a template; after all, template creation is basically a matter of making those decisions in advance and writing down the results.
