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 establish a trod which goes to the Summer Lands, and then establish another in a second city, then the results are inescapable: they can travel from their local trod to the Summer Lands, then from the Summer Lands to the second city. They can now teleport to that second city.

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.

So I was making a better combat system for World of Darkness games, and eventually started remaking the whole thing.

Overview

Merits are stupid. Merits are gone.

Let’s look at the merits, and keep in mind the golden rule when designing a game

It’s not complete when nothing can be added. It’s complete when nothing can be taken away.

Let’s look at what we can take away:

List Analysis

Acute Sense

This adds a -2 difficulty to rolls which rely on a particular sense.

Automatic dungeon generators are rubbish. Some are pretty, but all of them are completely unusable.

You enter a room, it has a goblin, or treasure, or nothing. Next room.

It makes no sense. Why was the goblin sitting there? Why was there treasure in the next room, and why didn’t the goblin take it? Everything looks like 8am after an underground rave - pointless, meaningless, and with random items and stragglers lying about.

‘Session 0’ is the pre-game evening to talk about the game, without having the game. I don’t see any reason for five people to lose an evening, planning future evenings.

The notion of a session 0 has become so ubiquitous that blogs and vlogs seem to assume it. They say ‘during your session zero’, not ‘if you have a session zero’.

Why Bother?

I can’t find a single good reason in favour of spending this non-event.

Character Creation

While I’m remaking the World of Darkness Combat system, I’m starting to feel that Character Creation could stand to be a lot more balanced.

But it’s more of a Storytelling system. This isn’t about killing trolls for gold pieces - it’s adult story-crafting.

…that’s what I hear the books echo back to me.

And okay, “story crafting” sounds great, but why do players receive Experience Points for certain behaviours?

A hundred paces down the dark tunnel, you see dozens of goblins dancing round a fire and singing about eating anything that moves.

At this point the crew begin to plot.

• Could we just stay here and shoot at the goblins? We should be able to get a load of arrows off in three rounds.
• If we run back to where we avoided that pit trap, maybe the goblins would trigger it, if we can get their attention.
• We have three people with shields and spears. If two at the back take the spears, could we make a shield wall in this small corridor?

These plans form the in-breath of the game, and it executes on the out-breath.

Every fantasy work has two characters: magic and the landscape.

Landscape

In Earthsea, the water compartmentalizes the locations. Here, Ged grew up. There, he learnt about magic. And every time we want to know more about this land, water provides punctuation to the story and isolates the area.

Middle Earth has a very different personality. The wide land demands horses, or a lot of walking. Tolkien goes into depth in every chapter of every book, uncovering new aspects of this or that part of the land; here we find gnarled trees, there mountains, later will be a rocky landscape.