For new players just setting out to design their first characters, 25 skills is a lot to take in (especially considering all of the trappings associated with them).  I’ve been working on a way to make the available skills a little easier to grok.

I’ve noticed is that skills tend to group by triplets quite easily.  So, with a few repetitions, I drew up this rough categorization of triplets covering all 25 skills.  I am sure I’ve overlooked several things, so please offer your comments – it will greatly help my understanding of how the skills can be used, and in turn help my players.  If others find this useful, I will keep this first post updated with any changes.

Brute Physical: Athletics, Endurance, Might
Agile Physical: Athletics, Driving, Stealth
Physical Attacks: Fists, Guns, Weapons
Physical Defense: Athletics, Fists, Weapons

Social Attacks: Deceit, Intimidation, Rapport
Social Defense: Discipline, Empathy, Rapport

Stress Tracks: Conviction, Endurance, Presence

Magic Know-How:  Conviction, Discipline, Lore
Mundane Knowledge Gathering: Contacts, Investigation, Scholarship
Perception: Alertness, Empathy, Lore

Acquisitions: Contacts, Craftsmanship, Resources
Covert Ops: Burglary, Deceit, Stealth
Character-Defining*: Performance, Presence, Survival

* As is always the case with brute-force categorizations like the above, this is my “miscellaneous” category.  Originally containing only Performance and Survival, I noticed both of those skills seemed like they’d go largely ignored except by characters whose concepts strongly suggested them.  Presence only seemed to fit that bill when I reread its description -- Presence is a lot narrower than I initially thought, more of a "leadership" skill than a social skill, so I added it here to emphasize that (i.e. players might be disappointed if they took Presence only to discover they really meant to take Rapport).

So, there we have it.  Do any of those triplets grate on you as missing something, having fuzzy edges, or having one skill too few/too many?  On the last point, I was considering adding Presence to Social Attacks, but YW215 (directly under the picture of Harry demonstrating that Chivalry Is Not Dead, Dammit) suggests otherwise: the main text mentions the three “main” social attack skills as above.  And, though the marginalia to the right argues against using Discipline as a social defense like I've done, it does strike me as the go-to defense for your garden-variety Intimidation attack.

Thanks in advance for your input!

Man, do I and my players really love this system (and setting, of course — been reading the books for years)!  We're a small group, with myself and two players.  Their characters are an unconventional Fellowship of St. Giles partnership investigating the sudden disappearance of the whole of House Skavis from Detroit, its traditional stronghold.

• Sabine, [Rebel Jewel Of House Skavis]: A WCv+ ("White Court Virgin-Plus" ) — I let her take the option on YW 85 to grab Feeding Dependency and upgrade her Incite Emotion with At Range, on condition that she also grabbed some aspects emphasizing herself as a juicy target for Skavis recruitment, given her unique potency for a virgin.
  
• Salem, [Sorceress On The Wagon]: A Sorcerer with the Trouble [Addicted to Pure, Arcane Release], who relies on her Skavis buddy to dampen her ecstatic addiction — ["Sabine, Keepin' Me On The Straight And Sorrow"] (n00b tip: this addiction Trouble has proven to be AWESOME—I often compelled it right before her evocation Discipline roll to have her throw more shifts into her spell than she needed to, and/or take Fallout over Backlash if she failed. And you thought Harry Dresden had a penchant for setting buildings on fire!)
  

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Background aside (provided in case you more experienced players have insights I haven't thought to ask about): We had our first session last night, and while it took about three hours to run our first conflict, we had a blast doing it.  A few questions popped up during the course of the session, and so I come to you fine folk for the answers!

1) How does vampire hunger work?
We spent quite a while bouncing back between Emotional Vampire and Feeding Dependency, trying to figure out how they worked.  Here's what we couldn't figure out:

How effectively does Emotional Vampire let a Skavis sense, detect or gauge despair?  YW 189 describes WCVs being "drawn" to things like orgies or mobs, so does that mean they can sense these big events going down from a distance?  I tend to think yes, because it's interesting, but a more difficult question arises at the small-scale: In close proximity to a potential victim, does a Skavis WCV need to rely on Empathy to detect despair like anyone else would, or can she "smell" it in some supernatural fashion?  The latter seems to be implied by the Feeding Frenzy effect, but it's never really stated outright and it struck me as something that would be.

Am I making "feeding failure" too weak? At YW 85, the option for a WCv to take some WCV powers (to become a "WCv+" — sorry if these acronyms are confusing!) carries the disclaimer that "using them will leave you ravenous and in some pretty dire straits in short order."  But that's never going to be the case for a WCv+ who takes Discipline at any reasonable level: At the end of each scene, my intrepid Skavis only needs to defend against a Fair (+2) attack with her Great (+4) Discipline.  As long as she rolls higher than -3 (which she can guarantee with Fate), she never has to worry about hunger.  Moreover, this would appear to be the case for any WCv+, since the "+" option is intended to grant only a few powers: This makes for an end-of-scene feeding failure attack that will rarely be stronger than +2.  Even a WCv+ with Discipline at Fair or Good would succeed more often than fail — and even if she does fail, that failure will cost only a point or two of stress.  All of this does not sound like what that "ravenous"/"dire straits in short order" warning intended, to say the least!

The only thing I can think of is that maybe I'm meant to count up each use of Incite Emotion, which would indeed make for some big end-of-scene feeding failure attacks.  But this interpretation makes no sense for passive abilities like Inhuman Toughness (which is the example actually given for feeding failure): Do we add another 2 to the feeding failure attack strength every time someone with Inhuman Toughness takes a hit that's absorbed by Armor:1, or fills one of the extra two physical stress boxes?

How DOES one clear out that hunger stress? The powers section describes only two ways to clear out hunger stress — skip an equivalent number of whole scenes of play, or kill.  Am I missing the part in the rules that describes how shifts on a feeding attack clear a certain amount of hunger stress?  Skipping scenes can't be the only way to clear hunger stress without killing: This I know for a fact, because the designers are clearly too bright for that.  But I also figure it's so fundamental that it has to be included in the rules somewhere... we found it very weird that both Feeding Touch (YW 189) and Drink Blood (YW 188) describe "feeding" to deal stress to an opponent, but make no mention of how the vampire benefits from that feeding.

2) Why are the Tattoos of St. Giles restricted to the Red Court?
I'm actually surprised that a search didn't turn up a previous discussion of this here on the forums.  Every effect under the tattoos is effortlessly transferable to the White Court, mechanically at least, yet the books seem uncharacteristically adamant about that Red Court restriction, mentioning it quite a few times in very strong language, while never even hinting at the possibility of sticking them on a WCV/v/v+.  It's as if Tattoos-on-a-WCV/v/v+ never even occurred to the authors.  This concerns me... have I walked into some subtle game-unbalancing trap by doing just that?

Thanks for taking the time to read, and thanks again in advance for any insight you can provide.  We're still learning the rules, and we all come from a long history of playing White Wolf World of Darkness, so it's distinctly possible we're bringing some of our WoD assumptions in without realizing it.  I do feel like I'm missing something fundamental, and hopefully the above questions will shine some light on what that might be.