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The "World of Darkness Core Rulebook" is the latest in a series of attempts to streamline the Storyteller system. It’s dicepool-based stat/skill system had critics and detractors – but over the past couple of years, starting with "Vampire Revised" (a.k.a. "Vampire 3rd ed.") Moving into the Trinity Universe Line, and eventually into "Exalted," the Storyteller system became more streamlined and, in many ways, more robust.
Indeed, a number of the innovations which first appeared in "Trinity" (and related products) make it’s way into the "Storytelling" system (A.k.a. ST 4.0), such as fixed target numbers and subtracted, rather than rolled, defense. But other changes, unique to this newest revision, seem to be counterproductive.
For the three of you reading this article who have never heard of the Storyteller system before, the core mechanic of ST 4.0 requires rolling a number of 10-sided dice, usually equal to the sum of a broad attribute, a definite skill, and, if applicable, a specialty. Every number that shows an 8 or higher equals a "success" – one success means that you’ve generally succeeded at a task – more than one success means that you’ve done even better than the bare minimum. If any 10s show up on the dice, you get to re-roll them and add them to your final total. Like in "Trinity," favorable conditions add dice, unfavorable conditions subtract dice.
New to this iteration is the elimination of the "botch" mechanic. For neophytes, let me explain: Early versions of the system had players subtracting successes when 1s showed up on the dice, with a catastrophic failure (known as a "botch," analogous to a critical miss in d20) occurring when the number of "ones" outnumbered the number of successes. This odd mechanic made the chances of success or catastrophic failure equal for certain difficulty levels, and made it more likely that you would fail catastrophically the better your dicepool was. "Vampire Revised" instituted a rule that if the dice (or willpower expenditure) showed at least one success, then the worst possible result was a normal failure. This was taken into the "Trinity" system, which eliminated the need to count ones unless all the dice failed. In other words, ones could still cause a "botch" but did not subtract successes like in previous systems. Here, the idea of counting ones is eliminated; so long as you have even one die in your pool to make the roll, ones don’t matter.
A "dramatic failure" mechanic has replaced the "botch" mechanic. A character with zero or less dice in a pool rolls a single "blind chance" die. Numbers 2-9 represent failure on this die, and only a 10 represents success. A 1 on this "chance die," however, represents, well, pretty much the same things that botches used to.
Character creation – as with all versions of the Storyteller system (with the possible exception of "Exalted") remains simple and clear cut, assigning points to different pools by prioritizing them. However, there are a few superficial changes to the system. The numbers have changed a bit. The familiar 7/5/3 has been replaced by 5/4/3 for attributes; the attributes themselves have changed to fit a "power/finesse/resistance" scale for all three ability groups. Gone is Perception, Charisma, and Appearance – they have been supplanted by Resolve (a mental resistance attribute,) Presence (A combination of Charisma/Appearance) and Composure. You get less skill points, but that’s okay because there are fewer skills to worry about, and instead of being grouped into Talents/Skills/Knowledges, they’ve been grouped, like the attributes, into Mental/Physical/Social.
There are some derived statistics – Health, Defense, Initiative, Speed, and Willpower – none of which can be raised separately from the attributes that compose them.
Virtue/Vice, a mechanic picked up from "Adventure!", has replaced the Nature/Demeanor system from the previous WoD system. Even so, it did not survive the transition intact – Virtue/Vice here is based on the seven major virtues and the seven deadly sins.
I don’t want to get on a rant here, but I won’t be using this system in my games and find it almost a deal-killer – I loved it in "Adventure!", when the virtues and vices were tied to character archetypes, the virtues allowed you to regain willpower, and the vices required you to spend willpower to avoid engaging in it. Here, the virtues allow you to regain all spent willpower to act in accordance with the virtue when at great personal cost – the vices allow you to regain one willpower when you engage in the vice at a cost to yourself or others.
The system isn’t what I have a problem with. It’s just that there are so few virtues (seven) and vices (seven) that it’s very easy to think of characters for which choosing one from each list could not be appropriate – furthermore, it assumes a universal morality based pretty directly on a Judeo-Christian ethos. In other words, if you don’t believe what the authors believe, it’s going to seriously grind on you and make play less fun. For example, I think "faith" is not a virtue and would have a hard time approving characters who wish to use it as such – and this is definitely going to cause problems with politics at the table. I just think it’s a very poor choice, when the previous system did it better.
All characters in all WoD games will now have a "morality" stat – pretty much the same thing as "Vampire’s" "humanity" or "Demon’s" "torment" mechanics. Degeneration in humanity now no longer is based on a "conscience" statistic, it’s just based on how bad what you did actually is. Degeneration also leads to derangements. Derangements, no longer the sole purview of "Vampire," were done poorly. Some, like Phobia, are spot-on as to how people really act. Others, such as Anxiety, are incorrect, more dealing with the public perception of the problem rather than the actual problem (and even if that was intentional, I don't much like the perpetuation of the stereotype.) "Multiple Personalities" made the cut, even though there are a number of studies coming out which may conclude that that disorder doesn't even exist except in the minds of psychologists and the patients they have misguidedly convinced. I'm sure you can google for more information on that if you're interested, but it made me particularly pissed that WW didn't bother to do the most basic of research on this, a sensitive subject.
The Merit system seems to be a combination of "Backgrounds" from the previous Storyteller games, (most of which made the transition as "social merits"), and the other Storyteller merits… there are, however, a number of physical merits, which, I hate to say, seem similar in concept to d20’s "feats" – and are just about as boring and useless. They do provide some benefit, but mostly it’s some minor combat trick that has just as much of a drawback as an advantage – there are some gems – mental merits seem to be just as powerful as they were during previous incarnations of the game system, and "language" has moved from a skill to a merit – but others seem to take advantage of "gaps" in the combat system. I’m going to mention "Stunt Driver" particularly – it allows you to take an action, such as firing a gun – while driving. I get more into this when I detail the combat section – but this falls into the d20 trap of "You need to have the merit in order to even attempt this action." In Storyteller’s previous incarnations, drive-and-fire, a classic shtick in any genre, you could do so by taking a penalty to both your firearms roll and your driving roll – a multiple action. In this new Storyteller version there ARE no multiple actions – thus, the merit. I’m not happy with that at all. Other merits – Strong Back and Strong Lungs, for example, are almost never likely to come up in play. Oh, wait… "Igor! I cannot cross running water myself! You must carry me! Across the river!" "Yes, master…"
Flaws are an optional rule – and they don’t give back points – they give extra experience when the flaw comes up in actual play and hinders a character, like in Deadlands. I like that change.
There are no "freebies" – either in concept or in character creation – in the game. Everything additional costs experience points. A GM could hand out a number of experience points at the beginning of the game, but it’s an optional suggestion, not a part of the canon. Experience point costs have also been streamlined. Every level of a skill costs the same amount (no expensive buy-in,) and it’s clear that the designers mean new – rather than current – point cost.
One thing I do like is that there are some improvements in organization. Frequent actions that may occur in game outside of combat (like shadowing, memorizing, giving a speech) are listed with the exact roll on two opposing pages near the beginning of the book in a "Roll and Trait summary."
Of particular note are the reasonably good car-chase mechanics.
This brings us into Combat, reworked from the ground-up to provide a streamlined combat experience – fast and deadly. Initiative rolls last all combat, there’s no need to "declare" actions, and there’s no dodge, soak, or damage rolls – its just one roll per attack. This produces problems.
First, the more damage you do with a weapon, the more likely you are to hit, since attack and damage are condensed into one roll. Yes, it’s easier to wield a great-ax with finesse than to do the same thing with a rapier. The system, eliminating not just soak rolls but also soak as even an abstract concept means that it doesn’t much matter how tough you are – even with bare-knuckles brawling. Resisting punches by being "tough" really don’t enter into the equation – characters with more stamina only get more health levels. In other words, under the storyteller system, boxers would go down after, at most, 10 punches landed, no matter how tough they were. To me, that’s a Murphy’s Rule.
A character’s defense doesn’t apply against guns. Since there’s no multiple-actions rule, it’s assumed that people fighting are also ducking and weaving, which provides the basis for the defense score – the defense is doubled when you go for a full-dodge, and lost when you go for certain "full attack" maneuvers like charging or several of the fighting merits. That makes a certain amount of sense, until you realize that armor adds to your attacker’s penalties, just as a dodge would. In other words, like in D&D or in Gurps 3rd edition, armor makes your character more likely to avoid an attack completely, Unlike Gurps 3rd edition, but like D&D, once the attack actually hits, the armor does nothing – the exception to this seems to be Kevlar, which converts lethal damage to bashing… but that’s not exactly a "big whoop" in the new WoD.
Allow me to explain. Since there’s no "soak" – there’s no real difference between lethal and bashing damage when it comes to putting a guy down. Cumberland Games’ "Fly From Evil" was toying with this idea the last I heard about it, but this seems to have beaten them to the punch (no pun intended.) The difference is, however, that Cumberland Games "Fly From Evil" was designed to emulate the 1920s crime-novel and private-eye shtick – where a single punch could knock a guy flat on his ass as easily as a single gunshot (the only difference was after combat was over, one character lived while the other died.) The difference here is that a single punch – nor a single gunshot – is not very likely to knock a guy on his ass. If this is an attempt to bring in some play-balance and get players to rely on things other than firearms all the time, I can understand it… but the end result is that if you have a monster in your presence, and there’s a revolver, a hatchet, and an aluminum baseball bat within arm’s reach – use the bat. (If the bat was wooden, it would be kind of a toss-up.)
The main difference between Bashing and Lethal damage in ST 4.0 is the healing times. That’s it. It’s a step backwards towards 2nd edition Storyteller when punches and guns did the same type of damage.
As for the setting: There’s not much meat on the bones. Normally with a system book, that wouldn’t be saying much, but there is a lot of fiction "fluff" text which is supposed to give the mood of the unified WoD2 games. Most of it is utterly boring, with the primary exception of "Voice of the Angel" on page 26, a "secret history" conspiracy theory which gives off Greg Stolze/Kenneth Hite vibes. You do have enough of a setting to play a mortals game with this book. Kind of like a "teaser" to start players off, some rudimentary rules for ghosts are part of the main book. (And yes, they are very similar to ghosts in Wraith/Orpheus.)
Sadly though, much of the game comes off as "wanting to be just as spooky as Unknown Armies" without any of the interest of Unknown Armies. Let me explain what I mean by that – with the exception of the Voice of the Angel piece, a lot of the pieces make a point to be scary – or about scary things, at least – but they don’t make any attempt to make the mystery behind them interesting. We, as readers, allow ourselves to get set up for the scare because, like investigators, we want to figure out what’s really going on with the conspiracy. If you’re not really interested in finding out what’s really going on, you really can’t get hooked enough for the scare. Voice of the Angel (and Unknown Armies) manages to hook the reader by providing these interesting and far-out ideas that defy clichés, and adds the horror to the tail end – WoD’s other stories play up to the clichés. The other "generic horror/urban fantasy" game out there – Eden Studios’ "Buffy/Angel" line, hooks the reader by actively using the clichés to misdirect the reader. It makes WoD look absolutely juvenile in comparison.
The bottom line: If you’re happy with the rule set provided in Vampire Revised or Adventure!, there’s no real compelling reason to upgrade, and a few compelling reasons to give it a miss. Take the Adventure! System fixed target numbers, add Vampire or Demon’s humanity/torment stat, or better yet, just ditch it all and go with Cinematic Unisystem. Wait a few weeks and I’m sure there will be conversions galore.
