[RPG] How does a young Garou choose a tribe

There are a few issues at work here:

• It's not balanced, or at least not with the hair-trigger fineness that, say, D&D4 attempts to achieve. The characters are not meant to be equal, they're meant to be comparable. (Ultimately so much of what a Garou can do in a fight depends on their inherent Garou resilience, form changing, Gifts and aggravated-damage-claws that how the tribes and auspices balance is a detail on top.)

• It's about area of specialty. This is the World of Darkness; fighting is important to werewolves, but in the long run it's the least important decision they make. Ahroun are combat monsters; if you're looking for combat balance between a Black Fury Ahroun and a Glass Walker Theurge, then sorry, it's not there and it's not meant to be. The Ahroun would wipe the floor with the Theurge... if the Theurge is so poor at his job that he lets the challenge get to a klaive duel instead of a ritual or riddle-game or having spirits warn him about the threat.

  (Compared to any non-Garou, of course, even a Bone Gnawer Ragabash is a lethally dangerous killing machine.)

• Rage, in particular, is not all good. The balance between Rage 2 and Rage 6 is that a Rage 2 character only has 2 rage. He won't frenzy, he won't panic and run in fear at a Nexus Crawler, he won't get taunted into a berserk cannibalistic charge every time the moon is full. (Combat characters that run high-rage also need to spend plenty of freebie points and xp on Willpower, if they want to stay alive for long.)

• You've left out any mention of skills, but WoD is a modern-world roleplay and skills are very important. All characters get the same number of skill points, yet High Primal-Urge, for example, is a major Lupus advantage... because wolves aren't spending all their skill points on Drive and Law and Language and all those other pointless things the homids all seem so worried about.

  With the exact same tribes, rage and willpower, I promise you that the fight between a Brawl 4, Melee 5, Dodge 4 Get of Fenris berserker and a Brawl 1, Melee 0 Dodge 2 Ragabash will be... one sided.

  (Which serves the Ragabash right for letting it come to a fight. The Ragabash has Stealth 4, Empathy 4, Law 3. So the warrior isn't going to like the mysterious disasters that happen to him over the next few weeks. Which might just drive him into a frenzy next full moon moot. Which will seriously jeopardize his position in the sept. Being a trickster is about not needing to hit things to make your point.)

• Tribe / form Rage and Willpower are only meant to be starting points anyway; both are cheap to buy up with freebie points during character creation.

I don't have the books with me so I can not verify this, but I have always played that a simple perception roll can reveal the presence of a werewolf, or indeed a wolf-blooded character.

The idea being that a werewolf smells different than a human, and werewolves have an incredible bestial instinct and sense of smell (combined with their primal urge) they should be able to instinctively know that other werewolves are nearby at least.