Ability Deficit
Flaw · 5 pts
Whether due to poor education, lack of opportunity, or simple laziness, you’ve fallen short of your potential. You have five fewer points to distribute in one of your Ability categories: Talents, Skills, or Knowledges. Therefore, the most you could initially take in that category would be eight points, and the least would be zero. Of course, you can still spend freebie points to take Abilities in the affected category. However, you cannot have any Ability in that category at three dots or higher at the start of the game. This Flaw is particularly appropriate to lupus characters that have yet to learn much about life as Garou.
Also in BoS p. 54 — text differs from W20 (56%)
For whatever reason, you have fallen short of your potential. Maybe you’re too young to have learned a lot about life (an excellent reason for a child-mage to have this Flaw); or you’ve led a sheltered existence, honing your Knowledges but lacking in Talents. You could be a construct who only recently left the lab, or too physically frail to have mastered much in the way of Talents or Skills. There’s certainly some story-based reason for your deficient Traits, and that cause will have other effects on the chronicle as well.
In game terms, this Flaw subtracts five points from one of your Ability categories (Talents, Skills, or Knowledges), and limits your starting Traits in that category to three dots or fewer even if /when you spend freebie points to raise them. (You may, of course, raise them after the chronicle has begun.) As noted above, this makes a good Flaw for Awakened kids, constructs, and other folks who haven’t been able to “be all that you can be” just yet.
For details about young mages, see Child-Mages in Chapter
Two, pp. 115-116.
Although mages aren’t always among the most sociable of creatures, certain Awakened folk lean heavily upon the company of friends and fellow-travelers. And so, Merits that help a character move more easily through social circles can be pretty valuable. Especially in the twenty-first century, a mage of any sort can use all the friends they can get.