Occams Razor

Looked on the forums, but couldn't find an answer.

There are some skills/ qualities you can buy that say: "Choose one of your Research pools. It increases by 1." What if you don't have a Header/ Specialization that has a Research Pool? Can you select Paranormal/ Intrinsic/ Technological and "create" one? Or is it inferred you would require a Header/ Specialization that already had a Research Pool?

Sorry for all the questions.

When you create your character via the database, it requires you to pick one of the Genres. that will be what you can pick for your research

Actually, I bought one of those skills in just such a manner, the database allows you to choose which kind of pool you put it into.

Gaelic wolf is correct, I honestly didn't think that would work...

There's stuff like the psychic scanner that represents picking up stray thoughts; no reason a paranormal psychic couldn't pick up intrinsic factoids...

Thanks guys! Saw that in the DB, but wasn't sure.

From anyone with prior practical experience, how important are research pools in an event? Should everyone have at least one, or are they optional?

Research pools are used to conduct research between games, and as such are completely optional.

The points from a pool are spent to represent a character digging through their books / writing colleagues / searching StackOverflow / etc. Basically they submit a topic of research and receive an answer from us based on the topic, how many points they invested, as well as a few other determining factors.

This is just my personal opinion, based on years of LARPing. Your mileage may vary, and our lovely staff may have different thoughts on the subject.

Aside from the mandatory, zero point racial skills, any skill should be considered optional. Do you actually need a research skill to play the game? No. Would it be helpful if you wished to directly poke at and to a certain extent drive plot? Yes.

Whether or not you should invest CP in a research pool really all depends on how you plan/tend to interact with the game world. Some players have a knack for finding all the plot they crave (and then some) just by talking to every NPC ever and being in the right place at the right time. They probably don't need such a skill, although it certainly wouldn't hurt them to have one since, lets be honest, info skills can come in handy. Other players, for whatever reason, don't have that particular knack and would likely derive a ton of benefit from one because it allows them to get hooked into plots they might not otherwise find on their own by providing them with information they can act on or share with other players who are hooked into the same plots.

If you are the kind of player who is good at social networking/engineering and are having trouble deciding how to spend your all-too-quickly-spent initial CP, you might benefit from holding off on a pool. Otherwise, you may wish to reconsider that extra point(s) of marksmanship/willpower/Earth/Air/Fire/Water/Void in lieu of a point or two of research.

Awesome answer. Thanks for the honest reply.