Stunts that modify additional trappings given by other stunts?

[Fenrir423]

I was kicking around a modern day Sherlock Holmes skill set up (thanks to the BBC series, Sherlock) and thought about his ability to read people. It's covered by Empathy, normally, but for Holmes it is clearly more of a feat of Investigation (or arguably Awareness, given how instantaneous it is for him but that's another topic entirely). Now that's an easy enough solution, make a stunt to give the Reading People trapping of Empathy to Investigation. Now what if I want to apply a stunt like Read the Surface to the Investigation based additional trapping making the inspection require 1 minute of interaction instead of 10?

The book doesn't really go into it but I'm sure it's just a matter of not thinking to take the rules that far. So would you allow it in your game: Two stunts to provide an enhanced, additional trapping to a skill?

[Sanctaphrax]

I would definitely allow it. Why should a transplanted trapping be any more difficult to enhance then a normal one?

Be careful with attack trappings, though.

[Sitrein]

I would allow it under one condition: Justify it to me. If you can justify something to me with a logical, well put-together defense, I'll allow just about anything you want. On the other hand, I will never allow justifications like, "It would be really cool!" or "Because it's magic!" but maybe that's just because I like players to have to think a tiny bit.

Past that, I personally like the idea. Currently as the game scales, power-wise, pure mortals tend to trail behind magical folk due to stunts just not having the same bang that powers do. Creatively stacking stunts like this is a pretty good counter that I've been toying with.

[Aminar]

Considering the character is Sherlock Holmes given 3 pages of reading the general justification is, "Because that's what Holmes does."  That said, the idea is pretty brilliant.  I've been debating doing some kind of Holmes referencing somewhere in my Campaign.

[Buscadera]

In the Tampa game I play in on the PbP section of the boards, my character is an in-the-know cop with plenty of contacts in the supernatural community. He's a really nice guy (Great Rapport), but his skill setup didn't allow me to pump up Contacts like I wanted to especially since I needed the Gathering Information and Knowing People trappings.

So I took a stunt that adds those trappings to the Rapport skill instead (Everybody's Friend) and I have two other stunts that add bonuses to those trappings (I Know Just The Guy and Friends in Strange Places) even though those trappings aren't normally part of the skill. The GM allowed it and it doesn't seem unbalancing at all.

In short, I'd find those stunts to be balanced based on personal experience.