I've heard this come up as a quick fix from others for longer-style campaigns. It's one I'm def. thinking of implementing.
If you are planning to go for a long term campaign it is a must.
Benefit from my experience:
Double the XP for PC's and castle upgrades after 6 sessions. In the first six adventures you likely encounter a new vaesen each time, which should give the PC's and advance each session. This will give them a little turbo boost to their survivability...
This would let the Players get a few skill and talents to round their PC's out before advancement slows down. And even at a slowed rate they will get an advance every 2-3 adventures on average.
The
'annals of the society' should be the #1 first upgrade they get for the Castle.
A Must Buy; +1 XP per adventure. If your players don't notice this, point it out. Or they will be missing out on a lot of XP until they get it.
(All assuming one 4 hour session = 1 full adventure. I have had a handful of adventures carry across sessions, but the average generally holds.)
As PC attributes cannot be advanced RAW;
there is no point in making middle aged or Old PC's. Their decreased stats will eventually catch up to them. Fear, and Critical hit recovery rolls are 100% attribute reliant, good GM's don't let their players create gimped PC's.
Talents:
'Safety in numbers' a must have each PC for Fear tests. They will not like failing Fear tests. Ever.
If the PC is going to fight
'Defensive' is a must have.
PC's will also want to look at
anything that reduces Action penalties, and/or Condition penalties for rolls, for their character concept.
They must also memorize and burn into their soul the fourth sentence of the first paragraph of p.22:
"You can use your memento once per session to heal two Conditions."
This might be a matter of taste, but I think their games rely a little too heavily on their various push mechanics. I remember having a discussion over on a Swedish RPG forum about probabilities and how even someone with fairly high stat+skill would often fail, particularly on things requiring multiple successes (I think the discussion may have been based on the MYZ Gearhead's class skill, where you need two or more successes in order to build a thing that lasts for more than one use). At some point one of the designers chimed in that the probabilities looked a lot better if you included pushing, because they pretty much assume that that's a thing you'll be doing a lot.
Nonsensical. They need to playtest more.
The instant you push in Vaesen you immediately give your PC die penalties for all further actions of that kind. Nobody wants to intentionally inflict penalties on themselves. This makes the PC's hyper conservative to use pushing.
Pushing
in actual play is only done in desperation. Healing is to precious and too important to use just because you pushed a roll.
To use the Medicine skill requires a
Entire Day of Treatment. In the overwhelming majority of published adventures put out for the game (and I've ran them all), a day off to heal means that the Vaesen will likely win.
Getting damaged all the way to Broken, then having someone make a medicine skill test is literally the fastest way to heal a PC to full health in the game, RAW.
I also mentioned in another thread here recently that only succeeding on a 6 does some wonky things with probabilities, in that it becomes very swingy. This was especially notable when we were playing Coriolis and someone was wearing armor. Heavy armor (the best without getting into advanced tech) has an armor rating of 6 which sounds impressive... until you realize that it means a 1/3 chance of being as effective as goggles (i.e. doing nothing).
Tell me about it.
Some of my players were waxing nostalgic about the good old days playing beginning CoC PC's when the percentile dice could be relied upon to give repeatable results...