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Review by David R. Henry
Written by Bill Bridges, Rick Chillot, Ken Cliffe, Mike Lee, and the “White Wolf Game Studio”
System Concept/Design by a host of mighty souls, including Justin Achilli, Andrew Bates, Philippe Boulle, Carl Bowen, Bill Bridges, Dean Burnham, John Chambers, Ken Cliffe, Conrad Hubbard, Mike Lee, Chris McDonough, Matthew McFarland, Ethan Skemp, Richard Thomas, Mike Tinney, Stephan Wieck, Stewart Wieck, and Fred Yelk
Development: Bill Bridges, Ken Cliffe
White Wolf Game Studio $19.99, 2004, 224 pages, ISBN 1588464768
So what is the new World of Darkness?
Had this review come out a year ago, I could have feasibly used that lede, but the “new” World of Darkness has had one year, two major game line releases, and over a dozen hardback books put under its charming skullish indicia. It’s now only new in that it’s been around for a lot fewer years than the “old” World of Darkness, which blew up rather nicely, thank you, and was replaced with a place less cosmic, more familiar, and more accessibly strange. Sort of like Crisis on Infinite Earths, only with Exalted playing the part of the Superman who stayed behind with the Monitor as the last vestige of half-fulfilled links to that whacked-out world of Cain, the Wyrm, and the Technocracy.
So why review it now? It could be that we can now inspect the game with the benefit of hindsight, and not immediately draw parallels with what came before, bitching about not including this throbbing bit of world-fluff gristle or that pulsing synapse of rules baggage from the corpse of the old system. It could be that I’ve recently got a job that allows me access to a bunch of games at relatively reasonable prices, and I still had a soft spot in my heart (mainly due to my love of Exalted) for the old World of Darkness, and picked up the new one recently on a whim. It could just be I’m an opinionated guy and the game inspired me enough to share my opinions.
I was an early convert of the old White Wolf games, as I was always a huge vampire fan, was heavily involved in Shadowrun and Ars Magica at the time, and the idea of a game system developed by the guys behind both systems, featuring vampires, was too good to pass up. So I was along for the Really Good Old Days of Vampire: the Masquerade, and I’ve still got my original copies of Chicago by Night and stuff like that stashed away.
But I got very annoyed with the editing (meaning, of course, the lack of such) in the early White Wolf books, and swore off Vampire just about before Werewolf came out (which was just as well, as that cleared my plate for Earthdawn, but that’s another story). Aside from picking up the original books of Wraith (I love ghost stories even more than vampires) and Changeling (a whim), I otherwise didn’t spend any time at all in the old World of Darkness. I had enough on my plate, a few degrees to get, and a lot of road to travel in my personal life.
So here I am, ready to give this old acquaintance another try. What’s the difference? Did they tighten the rules? Clean up their presentation? Not put the rules for initiative in the character creation example (which is one of the things that really pissed me off with the original Vampire)? Can I take the take they’re taking?
Well, it’s tough to resist a reboot book that starts out Chapter 1 with this:
If you blow up your original sandbox in what is possibly the best-known line-ending of gaming history, and still got the chutzpah and charm (and confidence!) to start off your new book like that…well, now, that’s golden.
*****
The new World of Darkness is a modular setting, unlike the separate-but-equal water fountains of the old World of Darkness, in which every monster type technically shared the same World, but in reality didn’t. Almost. People who tried to run crossovers in the old World of Darkness know what I’m getting at. Each game line (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, etc.) was developed to be true to itself, and White Wolf didn’t worry over much about letting game lines crossover easily. Or, when they did, you got things like the Moliated Chaos Ashtray of Doom!, which either was a sign of true inventiveness or desperation on the part of the designers.
The old game lines just didn’t play well with each other. Their back stories were contradictory, their mechanics didn’t flow together nicely, and then there was that whole Appearance-as-a-stat thing going on. A bunch of dear souls worked harder than a Qabbalist approaching Name #999,999 in figuring out how all the various gamelines fit together, aided in no part whatsoever by White Wolf’s wandering “Yes-it-is, no-it-isn’t” take on the matter.
The new World of Darkness seems to have learned a lot from its earlier incarnation. Each of White Wolf’s signature “monster” game lines (Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage) will have their own new World of Darkness release, but each one is a modular addition to the base rules. Perhaps inspired by the modularity of d20 (in marketing design, not dice mechanics), the new World of Darkness book is the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide of the new game line. You pick up this book, you’ll have all the common-law rules you need, allowing not only greater commonality between the monster lines, but also freeing up lots of space in the first major monster line books, that then can be spent to give a lot more details on playing the monster or unique mechanics their magics require, as opposed to repeating the basic rules on Attributes and Skills for the fourth time. (As an addendum, I have to say I really hate calling magi “monsters,” but saying “monsters and magi” makes me sound like I’m about thirty years too late for an attempt to squeeze a portion of TSR’s market into my pocketses, precious).
So, now, your vampires and werewolves and magi – er, monsters – can easily share a game world, because they’re all using one book for their basic rules. This one. They can go at each other’s throats, pick up a late-night bowling game, go make punk calls together to Call of Cthulhu, whatever, with much more ease than the old World of Darkness. While I never actually bothered with much first-run World of Darkness playing (I ran a Vampire chronicle for a while, played a few vampires myself, did some pick-up games of Wraith and Werewolf), the ability to, say, drag in a vampire to piss off my magi players without major retrofitting of the rules carburetor appeals to me.
More importantly, the base rules of the new World of Darkness give you rules on playing a rather important thing: humans, a race of beings traditionally under-represented in earlier World of Darkness releases. And I think this is what definitely sets this incarnation of the World of Darkness free from the karmic relapses of its forebears. Because no matter how much fun angst, moody insight, or chewy-gooey faux-Gothic self-loathing you can LARP up by playing a monster of the night, the vast majority of all horror fiction – and thus all horror inspiration for the game – consist not of monsters dealing with everyday life, but everyday people dealing with monsters.
By making their new World of Darkness a modular game with a common center rulebook, White Wolf both simplified their mechanical worries and performed a neat bit of marketing jiu-jitsu, but by making mortals the logical center of their main rules, they helped give the new World of Darkness an accessible, easily playable, and fun common spirit, a realization that the most important thing in a horror story isn’t the various bloody ways the characters can die, but the characters themselves. Thus it’s a horror setting with a solidly humanist core, as opposed to the old World of Darkness with its ancient Lumleyian vampire gods and insane universal concepts and the general idea of inescapable cosmic doom. The new World of Darkness might not be a happy place, but it’s a gloomy place full of humans. Which you could, quite easily, play.
And, in fact, are invited too, right off the bat. Bam! The book opens with a series of vignettes that, to my great surprise and general warm fuzziness, cover everything from the Mar de Tetys to Mothman; about the only thing missing seems to be the alien big cats. Bigfoot, ghosts, ancient Atlantean ruins on the Moon, government conspiracies, alien machine-gods, and the spooky ol’ swimmin’ pool just down the holler – they’re all here, proudly showcasing that in the new World of Darkness it’s not the backstory that’ll getcha, it’s the lack of such. It’s a setting that can handle a simple haunting hound all the way up to a grand mecha-conspiracy of enlightened souls against Aztec death-cultists (or is it the other way around?), and it basically dares the GM not to use it for whatever they want to. This, you see, is also golden. But will the system be up to the task?
Overall, the general vibe I got out of the sample fiction is an X-Filesesque sense of a world on the edge (minus the alien invasion angle, which never was something even the old World of Darkness handled well). Like the U.S. version of The Ring, your characters suddenly find that reality has taken a 90° turn, and can either hang on or try to get off – or, if they’re really daring, hit the accelerator. And, just like the X-Files, it seems easy enough to run from a story about the mutant-of-the-week to a secluded cult of decadent but entirely mortal hillbillies to a weird science story about Henry Krasker’s radio to talk to the dead to fighting a vampire or two, and then back to the odd mutant. Or you could just take one of those themes and run with it. And all this without the slightest bit of monster-specific tie-in materials.
Yummy.
*****
The system is the latest permutation of the eternally mutating White Wolf house system: a bunch of dots strewn randomly about your page purportedly show how many dice you roll and then you roll them, while your GM goes “HA!” and tells you just exactly how much you fail by. Or maybe I’m just a bit bitter from my last Vampire: the Masquerade experience, but that’s how I remember the old game being played.
In general, it’s a classless dice pool stat + skill system, with the “dots” in your Attributes and Skills combining to make your dice pool. Blessedly, the design team for the new World of Darkness took the basic mechanics of the old World gently in hand, led them behind the outhouse, and whacked them bloodily about the head with a sledgehammer until they were dead, and Lord love them for it. In the old system, you’d roll (usually) your stat + skill in d10s, counting the number of 7s or higher you rolled. Each 7+ was a success, each 10 was a success plus a roll-again, and each 1 subtracted a success (which was a bit of statistical foolishness they got rid of after a while). Simple enough, one supposes, until you realize that this basic system had enough permutations to make Euler weep; depending on which monster you were playing, weapon you were using, Merit or Flaw you had purchased, and so on, to this simple roll you might have modifiers that added or subtracted dice, added or subtracted the number of successes needed, or added or subtracted the target number you needed to roll (or any multiple of the above), and that was before throwing in your Gnosis or Blood Pool or what-have-you bonus points, plus the eternal White Wolf wild card of Willpower. Gah! Then there was the first setting’s combat. On top of all those modifiers, you needed four rolls for even a mortal bar brawl – one to hit the opponent, one for the opponent to defend, now carry the successes to make a third die roll on how hard you hit the opponent, while they then roll to see how much damage they soak – egads!
Here, mercifully, the basic system is more or less changeless. You roll your d10s as normal, but all the target numbers are 8+, 10s roll again, and 1s don’t do anything at all. And that’s it. Instead of a bunch of competing dice rolls, they have streamlined as much as the system as possible to make it into a one-situation, one-roll mechanism.
They also simplified the success levels. In general, one success on any one die means that you succeeded at what you were doing. Congratulations. If you get five successes on a roll, you get an “exceptional success.” If penalties reduce your roll to zero dice or below, you then get to roll a “chance die,” with which you only succeed on a 10, and a 1 means you have a “dramatic failure” (the old botches from the previous system). Personally, I wonder why they bother with a dramatic failure rule when it seems to come up so rarely, but perhaps GMs are supposed to be liberal in assigning modifiers. More on that later.
Many rolls in the game are simple ones; you roll, if you get even one success, you succeed. Neat, quick, and keeps the scene moving. They have two forms of “resisted” rolls – one is that when your ability could have a gradated effect on someone else, you usually subtract their resistance Trait (which is always helpfully defined in the rules, even when it isn’t self-obvious). This is the sort of roll used in combat: you take your dice showing your attack skill, subtract your target’s Defense, and then find out the result. When your ability is all-or-nothing, however, you then can get an opposed roll against your target; winner of the roll takes all. The speed of resolution is increased in that you don’t even subtract your opponent’s successes from your own; if you roll 5, they roll 4, you succeed, and since you got 5 successes, that’s an exceptional success!
On top of those three basic rolls (standard, opposed by subtracting your opponent’s resistance, and contested roll), they then give a page or two to other ways a GM could tweak the mechanics of the game for special occasions; suggested mechanics for everything from using detailed plans to build a bomb to being stuck in a time warp, and how these could be used in other situations. A very nice toolbox to come home with.
To adjust these simple mechanics is the purpose of the GM, and the major way that the dice pool for any action is adjusted is through modifiers to the size of the dice pool. They give a simple rule of thumb (+/- 1-3 dice for usual things humans might have around the house or encounter in a normal city; higher dice modifiers only for unusual situations or magical encounters), and sample modifiers can be found in nearly any description of a Trait. There is also a list of equipment that people could use, but this list is one of the flaws of the book, as they include costs (as always, the costs are measured in White Wolf’s favored old Resources dot system), but generally not effects. Yeah, it’s nice to know a basic pair of lock picks will set me back Resources ●●●, but I want more game information then than “The tools typically add dice to Dexterity + Larceny rolls.” No duh! How many dice? Three? Two? The GM is supposed to eyeball the dice added to a roll, but gets a list of accepted prices in the very loosely-handled Resource mechanic? What’s up with that?
Another beef with the modifiers is that, at least in this book, the vast majority of them are capsulated with “Equipment”. The idea being that your Attribute + Skill is what you can do naked, more or less, but superior equipment can definitely change things in your favor. There’s a broad suggestion of the equipment given – not just in the sketchy equipment list I mentioned above, but nearly every sample roll given in the game gives ideas on Equipment modifiers. This is good. But the range seems very, well, wide-ranging – Equipment modifiers seem to cover anything from having on running shoes in a foot race (+1) to having prison tattoos when working the black market (+2), but what’s up with “good pick-up line” (+1)? “Bad mood” gives you a +1 Equipment bonus to resist seduction attempts; I’ve heard your mood can be considered baggage, but this is the first time I’ve seen rules to support that. Or there’s the “It’s been a long day” (-1) modifier for carrying heavy objects. I don’t mind these modifiers being in the game; I think they’re great examples of just what level of game realism a GM can start assigning modifiers for. But calling them “equipment” bonuses seems just daft. Yeah, a lot of the modifiers, especially bonuses, as presented are from equipment, but why they just didn’t call them all “dice modifiers” in general is beyond me.
A good example of a mini-system that uses a lot of modifiers regularly is combat, of course. The old four-roll system has been turned into a one-roll system, where your “to hit” and “to damage” are all taken care of with one roll, as mentioned above. Each success you get on an attack roll is one Health point of damage (and a normal human only has the usual White Wolf 7 Health boxes, so watch out!). The old standards of bashing, lethal, and aggravated damage are still here as well (for newcomers, that’s White Wolf’s way of detailing injuries that just bruise you, kill you, and vaporize you).
Of course in an abstracted combat system like this, the effect of more damaging weapons is that they add to your skill pool. This is pretty self-obvious when you think about how they have to model the difference between using a .45 Magnum to a BB gun to shoot someone, but it can be a bit odd for gamers coming from a much more granulated system. To ensure that a .45 pistol does more damage than your fists, you roll more dice to attack the more damaging your weapon is. Again, I’ve seen a few players “feel” this is wrong, but it works out in play (and if you want more detailed combat, there are a lot of other games for you to play).
*****
Character creation. It’s a White Wolf game. You got dots. Deal with it.
You get the usual spread of descending amount of dots you put into your Traits, with you prioritizing which group of three areas gets the most dots, which group gets the second most, and which group gets the least. Attributes and Skills are both set up this way. I note with approval that the attributes now are set up in mirror images of each other: there’s the Physical, Mental, and Social group of Attributes, but in each group there is a “Power” stat (Intelligence for Mental, Strength for Physical, Presence for Social), a Finesse stat (Wits, Dexterity, Manipulation), and a Resistance stat (Resolve, Stamina, Composure), thus allowing for quick metaphorical ad-libbing by GMs struggling to pick an Attribute appropriate to the player’s action (just the other night in my playtest game a player came up with a great opportunity to roll Manipulation + Stealth). The Skills are also broken down into the same trio of Mental, Physical, and Social.
After Attributes and Skills your only other purchase are Merits, which are also broken down into Mental, Physical, and Social Merits. They have no real link to the Attributes or the Skills, but I like the parallels and clarity here (that wasn’t there with the equipment, for instance). One could imagine a game effect (being drunk, say?) that decreases all your Physical Traits, and then you know if your Kung-Fu (which is a Physical Merit) is affected or not. I wonder if this division of Merits will continue in the doubtless many additional Merits we’ll see in the supplements?
Willpower is still here, like it always is in White Wolf. Here you can spend a Willpower point to gain +3 dice on an action you’re taking, or +2 to one Resistance Trait to try to throw off some hostile action. Willpower works with your Virtue and Vice, which are two Traits based off of the standard Christian list of such (Faith, Mercy, Charity vs. Lust, Greed, Gluttony, etc.). Besides being roleplaying guides, the only major game effect of Virtue and Vice is that they are your usual method of Willpower regeneration. If you succumb to your Vice (in so far that you actually delay your investigation into the storyline to do so), you gain back 1 Willpower. If you fulfill your Virtue at risk or loss to yourself, you regain all your Willpower. The cool thing here is that players are not forced to act out their Virtue or their Vice, and, really, if they have a full roster of Willpower points, there’s no reason to do so. It’s a carrot-over-stick approach towards getting players towards the basics of a consistent characterization – true, that’s a skill that experienced roleplayers do not need, but this is so unobtrusive and simple that it helps prod the newcomers while staying out of the way of the old hands; a great idea.
Otherwise that’s it; there’s a handful of derived Traits (such as Speed, Initiative, Health, and so on – did I leave off Morality? More on that one in a bit), but character creation is short and sweet. Intriguingly, this is the first White Wolf game I can think of that left off bonus points. In other versions of the Dot System, you made your character, and then got bonus points to further boost your character in any place you wanted them. There are no bonus points in the basic rules of the new World of Darkness. In fact, there are no bonus points anywhere. An optional table lists rough levels of experience that a GM can start players at if they want to have a higher-powered campaign, but otherwise you just spend the points you have and get to work with what you got.
Again, that’s to-the-point and refreshing (a common trait in this game). Basic characters seem pretty basic. They’re average adults, and assuming that you don’t spread your points so thin that you can see through them to the floor, you should be competent in what your concept is without being world-class, while still having some rough skill in hobbies and any place you have a strong Attribute. Again, this works great for the humanist core of the new World of Darkness. The basic character is not specially-trained ghost hunters; they’re average adults doing average jobs, and thus their exposure to the supernatural or conspiratorial aspects of the setting can seem all that more drastic.
*****
But the basic characters are just what we are – normal humans. There’s no spell list in the game, no magic items, no psychic powers (although there is a mystic Merit that lets you detect supernatural critters). You’re a human, thrust into the world of the supernatural. Use your wits, use your skills, but you can’t use magic, because you’re not magical.
Sanity in this game, usually an important mechanic for horror games, is handled by the Morality Trait, which runs from 0-10 (humans all start at 7). For each rank of Morality, there’s a sample roster of sins (shoplifting is a 7, arson is 5, serial murder is 2). If you commit a sin in the game equal or lower to your current Morality, you must roll a number of dice based on the severity of the sin (the nastier the sin, the less dice you get). If you make the roll, no effect; if you fail, you lose one Morality, and then must roll another set of dice to see if you gain a mental derangement. Such derangements are permanent until cured through roleplaying or by buying up your Morality again by experience (which represents the same thing as playing out your cure, just behind the scenes).
This is in many ways the inverse of the classic Call of Cthulhu Sanity system. In Cthulhu, you lost Sanity as you experienced the hidden truth of the universe. In the World of Darkness, experiencing the supernatural does nothing to permanently drive you insane; it is your character-chosen [U]reactions[/U] to it that do. This is a subtle but powerful difference, and while I’m an old-time Cthulhu GM and thus probably prefer that style, I have to say that this makes the moral choices of your reactions in the World of Darkness important, and that shades the sort of horror stories that this game does well. Cthulhu is good at bizarre threats beyond time and space which you can encounter on some blasted heath far from civilization; the Morality system here works best with you deep in your normal life, which then pulls you in difficult ways as you struggle to maintain your sane lifestyle while trying to escape (or investigate) the supernatural you now know about. As such, I think this is a superior system for the X-Files-style conspiratorial supernatural setting that the rulebook plays up so much.
The main rules are not without a touch of the supernatural, however. While none of the big three monsters are even given sample stats (guess if you want a vampire, you gotta buy the new Vampire book), the only “monsters” given stats in the main rules are ghosts, which is, again, appropriate. One way or another, ghosts are the heart of nearly all horror stories, appearing in more stories through the ages than any other monster type. Ghosts are given a simplified Trait listing (they really only have three dice Traits), and a laundry list of typical ghostly powers with which to bedevil your players. Four sample types of ghosts are given (such as poltergeists or ghosts who like possessing the living).
My major concern with the ghost rules as written comes from a strange little addition to their rules on manifesting. Before a ghost can affect the mortal world, they have to manifest, which is fine, and they have to roll dice to manifest, which is also fine. But there’s a subclause – if a ghost manifests within one yard of their anchor (the object or person that keeps them from passing on) they don’t have to roll any dice; manifestation is automatic. Given that a classic haunted house could easily act as an anchor for any number of ghosts, I’m wondering how many future scenarios for the game will remember the manifesting-roll rule; why include it if it is so easy for a ghost to get around it?
*****
An important thing to consider is how a horror game plays with a system in which you have a 30% chance of doing anything at the minimum of 1 die (ok, technically the chance die is even less, but we’re discounting that for now). Even without spending Willpower, World of Darkness characters can expect to get by with four or five dice, as that should give you good odds to get one success, and one success is all you normally need in non-contested rolls. How does this affect the story types the system can tell?
Well, for one, it helps balance out the general low-powered nature of the mortal characters (which is great for the setting, again). Assuming they have a few dots in something, the characters will usually accomplish it, given time, lack of tension, and no obvious screaming vampiric death squads leaping at them. This helps the players feel competent and in control, and also, for instance, means the GM can more easily leave clues and such around the scenes of the story and assume that there’s a darn good chance the players will find them. It also allows a safety net, in that while the PCs will have a basic low level of competency, spending a Willpower on most rolls will give them enough to get out of all but the worst scrapes, which frees the GM into devising a wider range of plot bumps and derailments. Because unless the GM has stacked the deck so badly that the players are at -3 or more to all their rolls, there’s a good chance the players can escape from any enemy lair, deathtrap, or ambush. Not without effort, not without a good plan, but [U]they can do it[/U]. The new World of Darkness has competent characters without being superhuman, which is an interesting power level to arrive at.
Combat also fits the X-Files TV drama theme. Gunshots are dangerous, yes, but even a good professional gunner will usually only do 5 or so damage on a pistol shot, thanks to the bell curve effect on the one-roll-only combat. With an average of 7 Health levels, this makes combat dangerous, but rarely one-shot-kill deadly. This allows a GM to dip into potential fight scenes without worrying too much about PC survival (unless their players are idiots, but when does that not go without saying?); PCs can take a roughing up by some thugs sent by the bad guy and most likely still be walking home, for instance, or it easily sets up scenes where you have to go back into the Bad Lab to rescue your unconscious friend from the Thing that Makes It Bad, because said Thing hit your buddy hard enough to knock them out...but not kill them.
Of course, what’s good for the players is also good for the NPCs, who will remain as easily competent in their areas of expertise as the players are in theirs. There are very simple rules for playing mooks in the game (too simple, in my mind; they’re not nearly mookish enough to fall over with Feng Shui ease), but any major NPCs you make will be able to overcome most half-hearted player attempts to best them, which might be good or bad depending on your needs. I suppose if nothing else, the heavily bell-curved combat system could make for dramatic fights between the players and the End Boss, but given the sample powers that even ghosts get, I’m not so sure that players will want to get into a final showdown with the Big Bad (and really, that’s not in style for most horror stories anyway).
Perhaps the most subtle aspect of the mechanics on storytelling is the fact that this is a system – and, thus, a world – that rewards [U]doing[/U] something. Consider: any character with average skill will probably accomplish what they are trying, given time and effort. You get larger bonuses from your Willpower to act versus reacting. These are hardly overwhelming advantages, but the unspoken push from the system seems to encourage players to go out and do something, anything. Even in combat, the gentle assumption is that your opponents will more than likely still be able to hurt you even if you go on full defense, so the best thing you can do is strike first. Of course, the game (in and out of combat) is far from being instantly lethal, but the subtle mechanisms of proactivity guide players towards taking an active roll in their stories, which is also a great mechanic.
Indeed, about the only thing close to an instant-kill in the system, so far, seems to be some of the ghost powers, which seem immensely powerful when used against hapless mortals (of course, us normal humans don’t have any supernatural abilities to defend ourselves, just our wits and Scooby Snacks). They don’t kill people, but a few of the powers can affect whole crowds of people or remove someone from the storyline for a very long time, one way or another. If the three main monsters have powers of equal potency, it might be very tough to be a human in this World of Darkness – but isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be?
*****
So you have a system which generates competent yet not overwhelming characters who can survive a few mistakes without dying immediately. It plays fast, the basic mechanics are very easy to learn and easy to modify, and that means you can keep in the mood of the setting and story (vital to any horror game). It is set up to be the common bridge between all the upcoming White Wolf monster mash modular releases, yet at the same time fully enabling and allowing endless amounts of pure mortal investigation into the unknown. The sample supernatural critters included are the most widely used such creatures in folk lore and fictional horror stories, and thus can also fit into a wide range of other campaigns, even those involving vampires or magi. It gives a human center to a very dismal and gloomy setting, yet those humans are not without hope nor chance, thanks to the mechanics of the game.
I’d say this is a keeper. Well done, one and all!
I guess next I have to buy Vampire...
