Hi guys, forum-newbie. I’m trying to get Scholar of the Correspondence (which, as far as I can tell, is necessary for all the higher-level Watchful content) but, due to RP reasons, I’ve got no Dangerous whatsoever. The final bit of the expedition to get the stones that allow me to get SotC needs a Dangerous quality, and presumably rather a high one. I would absolutely hate to have to grind up Dangerous, get the stones, and then bottled oblivion it out of my mind again (especially since BO is indiscriminate and I’d lose an inordinate amount of progress in all my other skills, really not helpful when intermittent mind-rinsing has delayed POSI for well over a month as-is).
Is there any alternative way to acquire the quality in question or the stones that give it? Or am I basically stuck?
You would have needed to raise your Dangerous Quality eventually, it is quite useful to your professional gains and for becoming a Person of Some Importance. I know that being a Master Artist, Unparallelled Thief, Renowned Detective and Feared Fighter all on one character might seem distasteful to a good role-player but the game was built so that these skills complimented each other. Just take some time out to raise your dangerous quality, maybe buy equipment that is suitably suited for such work, and come back when you are more prepared.
Now of course there are ways to raise the Scholar or the Correspondence quality but you have to either have become a POSI or have already completed the major storylet in the Forgotten Quarters - at least to my knowledge.
You could brute force it using the second chance trick. Check to use a Hard-earned Lesson, and hit Perhaps not if you fail. You’ll still need to raise it until you can hit 100 using equipment to become a POSI (unless you’re willing to spend Fate/Nex to bypass the requirement), but at least you won’t have to work on Dangerous right this moment.
In theory if you wanted more targeted stats loss you could use an eyeless skull and only play the specific skill loss card desired. However, as someone who has tried that before I will say it is extremely unwieldy especially if you don’t have a four card lodging or better. You’ll end up having a deck choked with ‘can’t discard’ cards that aren’t the one you want and then you have to practice deck flushing with activities like heists or visitng the mirror marches, or possibly even pickpocketing on the promenade in spite. Its doable, just very impractical for high levels of loss. You would honestly be better off just using the oblivion in my opinion due to the loss of cards being a big draw back to the more targeted method of stats loss.
That said, Sara Hysaro’s idea of the second chance brute forcing is probably your best bet. You will still gain some stats on failure and on success which you will need to flush, but the second chance gives you a free second try without stats gain. You only gain stats on the first attempt with a second chance. You can effectively halve the cp dangerous you will have to clear later. Or alternatively, if failing the action is costly you can perhaps not out of the second action and take no menace/item loss/etc. Going perhaps not out of a hard earned lesson second chance doesn’t give you the same action usage and stats reduction benefits as actually trying a second time though. Additional complication: the actions that give hard earned lessons give cp of dangerous stats. So you don’t really get a lot of benefit from using them later. I suppose in a way it offsets the fact you don’t take a stats gain on the second attempt of an action, and it reduces the cp to what you would get from an easy challenge down from a difficult one.
Long story short, give second chances a try. Its a mixed bag, and you will gain cp of dangerous no matter what, but for your case just spamming the action and hoping for a rare success is probably better than actually grinding the stats and then burning everything.
I mean it’d also be fairly easy to have an IC justification the dangerous you gained from the final check. (eg they learned at a little bit about how to kick away snakes that’re trying to swarm you, but they have little intention of ever going through that again if they can help it)
Be warned that once you reach POSI levels you’ll need to spend fate to progress there if you don’t want to raise dangerous, and even then a lot of stuff (eg at zee) is going to assume you have high Dangerous.