Protect?

Can you Protect someone if you don't know where they are? Because I assumed you couldn't. But if you can't, it causes a disparity between Protect and Hunt actions, always giving the advantage to the Hunter, who can just start killing. (Not that this is likely to come up often.)

I think that if you want to look at continuity it comes down to story. If you know where the subject's Domus is and camp out outside it, great. There is nothing to say that if you don't, that you can't describe your action along the lines of keeping your ear to the ground for anyone or anything moving against the subject and then getting in the way of those individuals/things.

Nothing says that Protect actions have to be accepted. You can protect someone against their will.

In fact, I think it actually makes great sense storywise often to have two people who do not know where the target is, both racing to find the target first and interfering with the other's attempts to locate the target...one doing a Hunt, the other a Protect. Pretty classic.

Yeah, but does it work that way? You can do a Hunt immediately and it incorporates the finding. Can you do a Protect the same way?

Corral wrote:Yeah, but does it work that way? You can do a Hunt immediately and it incorporates the finding. Can you do a Protect the same way?

Only if you write it up that way so that the Storyteller has that understanding of your action.

KC downtime is very versatile in that you can actually submit stories for downtime -- and are encouraged to do so -- that help write the communal story being told. The trick is to make sure that the write-ups are reasonable for your character and the story, which is where the Storyteller veto can submission to re-work your intent into a manageable story for the game.

Trust me, if you write-up your action it generally makes things much easier for the Storyteller as they have an idea not only of the mechanics you are submitting but what the intent was behind those mechanics. It can make all the difference.

To Laura's point, yes Hunt is mechanically more advantageous than protect. Persecute is also more mechanically advantageous than Acquire. There are several other examples that follow a similar pattern. A central theme of KC is how it is significantly easier to destroy than to create (I have always assumed this was intentional on Trent's part but could also be a quirk of how he has designed the mechanics). The key I think is to have one's character behave accordingly.

... So I've gotten two different answers to the question. Storyteller?

Um. I don't see the two different answers.

For the question "Can protect be done on someone with unknown location?" I see the answers, "Yes, if you write it up that way," and "No." Maybe I'm reading something wrong.

Eliel wrote:To Laura's point, yes Hunt is mechanically more advantageous than protect.

I'm not sure that I agree with this. I guess it depends on how you consider it and what you are protecting against.

With Hunt you have to accumulate marks but in the end it comes down to an opposed roll. For Protect, yes there are diminishing returns on the bonus to the protected's secular defense; however, when protecting against hunts, so long as you get two marks you are at the scene as well. I suppose this may only be a good thing if you are personally capable of helping to protect the individual.

Then again, there are other ways to shield people from harm. You can hinder incoming attacks against someone or try to induce complications to attacks by sabotaging the people making them.

Well, I suspect if you did a protect action on someone who you don't know where they are, you'd have to provide a writeup about it, otherwise your result will be "you hang out at so-and-so's Domus and make sure nobody fucks with it" or "you follow so-and-so around all month and make sure nobody fucks with him/her".

And if, say, somebody wanted to protect an Angel that they knew people were organizing a Hunt on? Would they automatically fail?

There's no such thing as an "automatic fail".
Again, depending on the writeup, and on a dozen other factors, it's certainly something I would consider.

OK.