First - I've been surfing the boards a bit for an answer to this and haven't seen a good one yet - this feels like a FAQ question, so sorry if I'm being blind and overlooking something. Could someone either point me to a previous post or provide an example of Toughness where a catch is satisfied - maybe two exchanges worth.

I've seen a few different ways people are doing it. One seems to be to have additional boxes, restarting at a value of 1; the others seem to be adding the boxes and continuing the stress box count (i.e. 5-6-7-8). The book just says "additional stress boxes", points to p.201 which talks about stress (but nothing about stress and powers). If there is a clear example in there how this works, I can't seem to find it.

I had a fellow GM run a scenario and in his, we killed the Vamp in essentially one-shot. We both agreed it seemed very anti-climactic so I started runnign toughness differently to see how it would work. I was allowing toughness stress boxes to be fillable even when "the catch" was used - it was simply unrecoverable damage. Turned the player's next vampire fight into a difficult, memorable slugfest (as I think it should be) instead of a one-shot affair. Which leads to my next question --

Secondly - I'm unclear on how catches that work off of physical items should best be handled in a mostly inventory-free game. If a character says "I buy/make/locate a cold iron sword" I suppose now that character can satisfy the catch for a Fey (or soem other critters) at any time. It sort of takes the wind out of the "catch" system IMO.

I recall reading the books, Harry would always have some unique way of overcoming a catch - I mean something like sunshine in a handkerchief is a pretty interesting way of pulling off bypassing a vampire's catch. It's cool if handled that way because it makes the catches not able to be overcome for the rest of the campaign by a single trip to Wal-Mart or the nearest church.

Now, for the RC vampire weaknesses they did their due-diligence, It was a slow gathering of info. They had some marginal lore rolls and then over several sessions got hooked up with the St. Giles guys who were happy to spread the wor don how to kill RC vamps. Next they tapped their party Champion of God's resources / contacts for some Holy Water and Blessed Bullets. Sounds cool, but now that the flood gates are open, so to speak, most vamps should be a total push-over.

Anyway, I owe them a rules explanation and maybe a consequence reduction from their first fight with a red-court vamp (which should maybe have been an unmemorable fight  ). The way I was running it worked, made things more challenging, but now I have a player interested in adding toughness to a PC so the fuzzy "unrecoverable" stuff I was using for the NPCs, wont really work.

Thanks in adavnce!