INSTRUCTION
Description: You’re really good at relaying information, teaching material, and helping other folks understand potentially complex principles. It’s not so much that you’re an expert on the subject at hand (though you might be), but that you’ve got a knack for taking your subject and making it easier to comprehend. A very useful Talent for mentors, professors and, of course, instructors for any given course of study, this Ability helps your character share his expertise with other characters.
In game terms, you can use Instruction to train other characters in any Skill or Knowledge that your character possesses. (At the Storyteller’s discretion, Talents might be teachable too, assuming that the student already has at least one dot in the Trait in question; this way, the instructor helps that character refine a knack she already has.) You cannot raise another character’s Trait higher than the level your own character has achieved, or teach something your own character doesn’t already have. Let’s say that Legacy Brown wants to teach Spider Chase some medical skills. Legacy has Medicine 3, so she could teach Spider up to three dots in Medicine before hitting the limits of her own knowledge. For each month of tutoring, Legacy’s player rolls her Manipulation + Instruction against a difficulty of 11, minus Spider’s Intelligence rating; if Spider has Intelligence 4, that difficulty would be 7 (11 – 4). For each success rolled, Spider’s player gets to spend an experience point; if Legacy gets four successes, Spider spends four points toward Medicine. This way, a skillful teacher can speed up the learning process for new Abilities.
As an alternate rule, the Storyteller may decide to allow each success to save one experience point from the cost of learning or raising an Ability; in this case, Spider’s player would save four points when buying and raising the Medicine Knowledge. For this option, the instructor’s player rolls only once, not once per month. This way, you can teach Abilities faster and cheaper in a chronicle where time is of the essence. This option, however, should be not combined with the normal rule. Choose one or the other, not both.
In story terms, this Talent reflects a teacher with an engaging and memorable style. Even if you don’t get into the point-spending element of education, your character is one of those teachers that students recall years or even decades after they’ve spent time under his instruction.