As established in the previous article , the World of Darkness' combat system sucks. But the right system can make everything better. (If you want to skip the system explanations, you can just download the revised White Wolf pdf ) No Combat Emphasis First off, I'm not making a combat system. The World of Darkness …

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Using real-world time in RPGs has worked out great in my last fantasy campaign, so I'm thinking of using it for a Dark Ages: Vampire Campaign. I want to create a game where every single neonate in the city has a player. I want to see a dozen players, all with a chatroom online, called 'Elysium', shooting the shit, …

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My favourite WoD RPG will always be Changeling. I've run one campaign, and I wish I had time to run more. I don't know if I'll ever have time to re-write it, like I did with Vampire, but I have plenty of concrete plans for changes. Seelie vs Unseelie The book began by saying 'Seelie' does not mean 'good', and …

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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 …

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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 …

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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, …

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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, …

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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. Mechanical Problems The specialization rule clearly has to go. White Wolf's basic rules …

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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 …

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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 …

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