The Beauty of the World of Darkness System
The classic World of Darkness system has some impressive features.
System Summary
- Add the character's Attribute + Ability,
- And roll that number of D10's.
- Each die which meets the difficulty number (default: 6) means one 'success'.
Bust in the Door!
- Strength
3
+ Crafts3
=6
- Roll 6D10 (difficulty 7): 7, 4, 4, 3, 1, 6.
- Result: 1 success (bottom of door cracks open, letting you squeeze through).
Outrun the Cops
- Dexterity
3
+ Athletics1
=4
- Roll 5D10 (difficulty 6): 10, 8, 7, 3.
- Cops roll 6D10 (difficulty 6): 2, 4, 8, 7, 8.
- Result: draw!
Track Down a Drug Dealer
- Manipulation
2
+ Streetwise3
=5
- Roll 5D10 (difficulty 6): 4, 4, 2, 2, 1.
- Result: 0 successes = failure.
No Wasted Rolls
Difficult actions need a roll to succeed, easy actions do not, and the great grey line between them is determined by GM-fiat. If a roll has a 90% chance to break into a garage, do we really need to roll? But that's the wrong question. At the table, the real question is 'what number do I need to roll?'.
In a D20 system, the GM says '16', entirely unaware that the player has a +13 Bonus. So the player rolls anyway, and throughout the night, the number of mostly-pointless rolls increases.
But with the World of Darkness, no roll is wasted.
Roll | Result |
---|---|
1 success | Alarm disabled, but a neighbour saw you. His lights are on, and you see his shadow on the phone. |
2 successes | Alarm disabled, but you broke the box - everyone will see it once the Sun rises. |
3 successes | Alarm disabled. |
4 successes | Alarm disabled, and you can change the code to turn it off. |
In effect, the number of successes work very much like a 'yes, and/ no, but' system, but less demanding. Players don't actually expect a Storyteller to come up with some extra prize once they succeed, but the option make sense.
Adjusting Reliability
When two people play chess, the person with more training will win. But in a gun-fight, anything might happen. Skill always matters, but sometimes luck matters a lot too.
D20 systems simply have no way to represent this distinction.
But using a pool of D10's, the Storyteller can just set the difficulty. With difficulty 4, someone with 5 dice will beat someone with 2 almost every time. At difficulty 6, exceptions creep in. At difficulty 8, anything might happen, even if someone has a dice pool of 10.
This shift can represent tricky actions, like suggesting a blood-hunt to the prince; or represent difficult circumstances, such as fighting on the ice. It could even represent decisions from the players - races might start by asking the players just how fast they want to go, and setting the difficulty equal to the mph/10.
Demanding Skill through Multiple Successes
Some tasks require expertise. Not everyone can fix a motorbike or build a website - it's not something anyone does with a bit of luck.
Most RPG systems would have to represent something as 'experts only' by demanding that the player roll a high number, but this also makes experts unlikely to succeed.
If a D20 system wants to represent the notion that only a mechanic can fix a motorbike, then the GM might demand the roll of 22 to complete the task, so characters with no 'motorbike' Skill cannot succeed. However, this also means that someone with +10 in their motorbike Skill needs to roll 12 or more, meaning that they fail 55% of the time. That hardly sounds like an expert! Over the course of a campaign, a professional might roll their Skill perhaps 5 times, so the mechanic-character could plausibly fail every single attempt at fixing motorbikes that comes up.
But for the White Wolf system, the Storyteller can simply set the difficulty for a tricky repair to 4. At this point, someone with a dice pool of 5 (representing a professional) will achieve around 2 to 4 successes, while someone with 2 dice (representing an untrained and average person) can only achieve 2 successes (a mostly-working fix) about half the time.
Extensibility
These advantages allow the basic system to be extended without any extra rules; each example exists within the core rules. This lets people writing think about the best way to represent a dramatic scene, and how it progresses over time, without anyone trying to compute average deviations in their head at the table.