A few RPG creators might make bank, but for the most part, we don’t.
For the most part, people don’t even want to make it their entire career - they have a particular vision of a game they want to make.
I think if indie designers want to see their ideas succeed, they should release them and start working with others, because nobody has all the skills needed to create an RPG.
So there you are, storytelling a twisted tale of modern horror about a coterie of vampires, when an odd ability crops up.
One of your players has focused on controlling people so much with the Dominate Discipline that she can now enter other people’s bodies, taking them over as if they were her own.
So we know that the ‘soul’ - that is, the mobile part of the mind, the non-brain part of the mind, has just shifted over into a new body.
One might expect the experience to be quite harrowing, for the vampire to collapse like a newly born deer or a stroke victim, and later slowly learn how to walk and speak.
But apparently it’s quite easy; the vampire’s mind (or soul) steps into the new body like a comfortable suit.
We can only conclude that all the muscle memory is part of the body - and where else could it reside except the brain?
So the brain allows a translation of the soul and the soul just does the general work.
So while dyspraxia is about clumsiness in thought and clumsiness in the body, a dyspraxic vampire should, in theory, be able to wander into the body of a dextrous athlete and become dextrous.
When Star Trek fans wanted to make a Star Trek (ST) chess-board, there were two schools of thought - one reconstructed the rules from actors who were moving pieces randomly, and another created a game from the same board, but with their own rules.
All-in-all, I think the second method produces more interesting results, and in fact is more authentic, because onlookers seeing someone play ST chess will think ’that looks like some real nerd shit’, which is what it’s meant to look like, and probably what the actors at the time were thinking.
RPG Vloggers chatting about Gygax note on real-world time-synchronization have got me thinking about really using this rule.
In case you haven’t heard the idea - Gygax demanded that every day which passes in the real-world, one day passes in the game.
The troupe starts and ends their games somewhere safe, like a tavern in town.
It sounds like a bizarre concept at first, but when you view it from another angle, it makes perfect sense.
Vampires could never feel really plausible, but Vampire: The Masquerade created a lot of fantastic reasons to buy into the World of Darkness.
Enough that once the reader allows the vampires and their magical powers, the masquerade they all keep - the mass conspiracy that they don’t exist - feels easy to swallow.
Pull yourself, dear reader, back to the 90’s, where the only way to get on television was to apply to prove you could read pre-approved lines, and the only way to publish a letter to the country was to have a newspaper accept your message.
I feel the World of Darkness could have done better by having the various spirit worlds accessible only through some trance, where someone enters that world in spirit-alone, and leaves their body behind.
Unintended Teleportation
Garou traversing the umbral planes, Giovanni vampires wandering into the land of the dead, and Changelings, wandering the dreaming lands of happy Boggan villages, all imply the same thing: anyone traversing through the spirit-realm can essentially teleport, i.e. they can move from one place to another without going through the spaces between.
If a group of changelings in New York wander a trod to the Summer Lands while others do the same from Mexico and Glasgow, then the results are inescapable: all three groups can teleport between cities.
In the new Contest System for the Storyteller system books, both players roll the same Attribute + Ability combination for ‘Extended and Resisted’, so Subterfuge is used to lie and spot lies, and Investigation allows someone to uncover crime as well as hide it.
This has made a number of people online strangely irate, so this seems like a great time to speak about non-obvious system benefits, and why just going with your gut doesn’t always produce great results.
White Wolf’s Attributes were surprisingly revolutionary, as D&D had set such a strong precedent with ‘S,D,C,I,W,Cha’.
The deviation’s great, but they retained some bizarre ideas from D&D.
Dexterity
‘Dexterity’ should really refer to coordination, but it was soon used as a ‘speed’ stat, showing how fast someone can run.
It seems to pull in bodily-awareness (to dodge attacks), sprinting, the coordination one needs for a gun, for bows, and for swords.
Specializations in White Wolf rules are a nuisance, in need of an overhaul.
How They Work
Specializations in White Wolf allow someone with a rating of 4 or more in a Trait to re-roll any ‘10’s for a chance at an extra success.
Expertise (not used in all books, but present in the Dark Ages), allows a character +1 success.
Problems
Both rules are crap, for many reasons.
Mechanical Problems
White Wolf’s basic rules have a wonderful purity - you grab the dice, cast them like so many runes across the table, and then read the result.
This ruins the experience, forcing other players to wait as someone nit-picks through the right dice, and roll again.