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[Stupid Loserman]

A ceremony is like an exorcism. It's not a supernatural power internal to you. It's a ritual that, if followed correctly, harnesses the occult laws of the universe to achieve a given result. Anyone can perform a ceremony. The reason you need to buy it as a Merit is that they're not well known and have to be studied and draw on sufficient associations and symbols of power to be carried out successfully. It's the same as how anyone can physically administer medical treatments, but you need dots of Medicine to actually know how to do it right....

[Stupid Loserman]

To add on to Satchel's point, don't mistake "if they're under the umbrella of the Free Council then they're not technically Nameless Orders anymore" for "they've lost their distinct identities and dissolved into the Libertine identity." The Councillors are a lot less unified in their culture and precepts than the Diamond Orders are, and while they now benefit from sharing rote knowledge and resources amongst each other rather than each internal school having its own distinct Nameless Order Merit benefits, their Order Tool of Techné models a wide breadth of methodologies that...

[Stupid Loserman]

If Physical is your primary set, Strength ●●●●● Dexterity ● Stamina ●● is a valid spread, even before applying the Favored Attribute from the Kindred template.

[Stupid Loserman]

It appears that this passage was copy and pasted from the God-Machine Rules Update, which was the first presentation of the second edition rules, framed as a patch meant to apply on top of the first edition rules. Thus the GMRU text would be meant to append on top of the 1e World of Darkness Rulebook passage on firearms in close combat, which asserted that as an exception to the general rules, a firearms attack in close combat did not deny the target their Defense: the GMRU text is thus stating that in 2e rules, not only does a close combat target of a firearms attack get to keep their Defense,...

[Stupid Loserman]

In Second Edition rules, when you purchase a dot of a trait, you just pay the experience cost of the new dot.

If you start with no dots in Favored Form...

• ...and you buy Favored Form ●, you pay 1 experience, the cost of one new Merit dot. You receive the benefits listed for Favored Form ●.
• ...and you buy Favored Form ●●, you pay 2 experiences, the cost of two new Merit dots. You receive the benefits listed for Favored Form ● and for Favored Form ●●.
• ...and you buy Favored Form ●●●, you pay 3 experiences, the cost of three new Merit dots. You receive the benefits

...

[Stupid Loserman]

First or second edition?

First edition Requiem came at the very beginning of nWoD feeling out where to balance supernatural powers in the context of trying to avoid oWoD's moments of excess and plan ahead to put the main three splats in a comparable ballpark. The end result is that compared to where the gamelines were later on, Requiem vampires felt a little muted and conservatively designed, aside from the customary strengths of White Wolf vampires (the Vinculum was always a potent tool in your pocket) and a few balancing blips that didn't reflect where later rules went (1e Protean...

[Stupid Loserman]

Translocation (p. 134) will let you teleport through space, though not really on the scale of across the entire planet. Sacred Flesh (p. 151) allows you to bestow the use of a particular Variation (say, Translocation) on another character. A creative reflavoring of the Fragment form of Sacred Flesh could represent imbuing a particular threshold or entryway with Translocation. Homebrew might be necessary to get closer to the method you're seeking; for example, a form of Sacred Flesh that works like Token, but the portal lasts either for one scene or until (Scar Power) people pass through, whichever...

[Stupid Loserman]

CofD has plenty of setting lore. What it has less of is a) metaplot developments where actions occur and the setting changes over time (these exist but are rare, such as Vampire's material on New Orleans reflecting the effects of Hurricane Katrina) and b) major NPCs whose backgrounds snake their way through many different books in ways that change the understanding of who they are, like arguing about the background of Ur-Shulgi or plots by Mithras.

One major reason is that CofD books, for the most part, try to avoid content that requires you to be buying multiple supplement books...

[Stupid Loserman]

If you especially like a blend of magic and science fiction elements, Mage: The Awakening is lighter on that than Mage: The Ascension, being more of a story of secrets and sorcery, ideology and hidden worlds, and not having much in the way of specifically technological aesthetics. (It is definitely possible to use magic to control or enchant technological devices, but it's simply one more dimension of the world to influence, without an industrially-flavored Technocracy faction. The Seers of the Throne are more likely to dispatch once-human servants with transformed and weaponized souls than machine...

[Stupid Loserman]

Not every conspiracy action has to be a Conspiracy Action, which models mass action and organizational effort the group puts forth.

If you're just looking at internal strife, you might simply leave it as one hierarchical node whose infighting could change the conspiracy's priorities from action to action. You might do something like give one hierarchical node two linchpins and enable it to continue functioning even if one is taken out, or give it an Icon representing flexibility that allows the conspiracy to act on alternate Principles and Anchors based on which faction is ascendant....

[Stupid Loserman]

The most important rules distinction between oWoD and nWoD is the elimination of multiple-axis difficulty.

oWoD had three meters to measure the difficulty of an action: the size of your dice pool, the Difficulty or target number for an individual success, and the threshold of successes needed for a given result. nWoD eliminates Difficulty and mostly removes threshold success. The relative ease or difficulty of a roll is measured by the size of the dice pool, with circumstantial dice modifiers being common to give out: -2 to take a shot in heavy fog, say, or +1 when using appropriate...