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I suppose I should start this review by explaining the context in which I write it. I have never played, read, or even seen any previous editions of the World of Darkness setting/system or its many associated products. I’m therefore coming to this cold and judging the book solely on its own merits, and as compared with other RPGs with which I’m familiar.
Layout, Artwork and General Feel
I have to give very high marks indeed here. The book’s cover is especially nice, with a suitably dark and mysterious photograph and “The World of Darkness” in an impressive font. It also seems to be remarkably well-constructed, and that combined with the fact that it’s a good bit thinner than your average RPG setting book (222 pages all told) leaves with few worries as to it disintegrating in the near future. The artwork is generally excellent, though the number of different artists used leaves it a bit lacking in consistent style. None of it, however, is in any way bad. I question the wisdom of beginning every chapter with a 2-page spread consisting of a full-page picture and a single page with a (very) short piece of fiction- it adds to the atmosphere, but at the cost of space.
The text is in a very readable font and size, with small margins (artwork in these changes from chapter to chapter. Section headings are in a rather odd font, but this isn’t enough to be distracting. The overall appearance of the book is very good indeed.
I spotted no spelling or grammatical errors (there was one punctuation error), and no printing mistakes. There were a few cases where information provided was contradictory, confusing or obviously missing, but these were exceptions rather than persistent problems. Really good proof-reading should have spotted them, though.
The general layout of the book is good- information is where you expect it to be, and is presented in a sensible order. This ought to be de-rigueur, but I’ve found it to be otherwise in many an RPG book.
The book makes very frequent use of examples when illustrating its mechanics. This is much appreciated.
Introductory Fiction and Opening Chapter
There are no fewer than seven distinct pieces of fiction of varying length before the start of chapter 2, which is where the first text in the way of rules begins. These are all good, and a couple of them are truly superb. Again, I’m not sure how much I want too much of this sort of thing in a setting book- they make a good read, and perhaps convey a few ideas to GMs (Yes, OK White Wolf insists on calling them Storytellers. But I’ll stick with GM, I think.), but not as well as a good chapter on GMing would do (Of course, this book doesn’t have a good chapter on GMing, so perhaps the fiction does serve some purpose- more on that later). Simply put, they take up space which could better be filled with something you’re going to read more than once. Anyway, I’m not sure, and if it has to be there, this is damn good stuff.
We then get four double-pages containing a Rules Summary, Character Creation Summary, Rolls and Traits Summary and Glossary. This is all excellent- well presented and invaluable. Why, though, couldn’t this have been put at the beginning or end of the book so that it could be referred to more quickly? Instead we have it 30-odd pages in. A minor point, I admit.
Core System
The basic WoD system consist of rolling 10-sided dice equal to either Attribute+Another Attribute, or more commonly Attribute+Skill. Rolls of 8,9 or 10 are considered successes. Get at least one success and you succeed at what you were trying to do. Difficult situations may call for negative modifier to the number of dice you get, five or more successes is an “exceptional success”, and there are more rules for contested rolls, extended rolls, and chance rolls. I’ll comment more on all this later, but I’ll just say here that I like the basic system a lot. I’m very glad to get away from percentile-based (Unknown Armies) and d20-based (err.. d20) systems, both of which produce a flat distribution of rolls, which doesn’t, in my opinion, accurately reflect the chance of succeeding at something in any way.
Attributes
Characters, it seems, have nine different Attributes in WoD. We have the almost-ubiquitous Strength, Dexterity, Stamina and Intelligence, supplemented by Wits (Perception, largely, though with some leaning towards simple common-sense as well), Resolve (Willpower, though that word has an entirely different meaning in this system) (Quick note- I’m extremely glad to see these last two distinguished. One of the innumerable things that annoys me about D&D is that Wisdom is used for both of these attributes, when really they ought to have nothing to do with one another), Presence (also quite common- think appearance/charisma), Manipulation (Social skills), and Composure (Kind of like a social version of Resolve- resistance to persuasion is also a good way of describing it). These are divided into three categories- Mental, Physical and Social. Now I like these attributes. Of them all, Composure is the hardest to immediately grasp and seems to me likely to come up least often. I think I’d have been happier with only eight, but that would spoil the nice three per category symmetry, so I can live with this lot. Many basic tasks and derived traits use two attributes combined in any case. My only complaint here is the method in which characters are supposed to allocate points (called “dots” here and everywhere else in the system) to their attributes. Attributes are rated 1-5 (again, I like this-no need for unnecessarily fine granularity) and all characters start with 1 dot in each. They then prioritise the three categories and assign 5/4/3 extra dots to each depending on order. So for example, I might assign 5 dots to Mental attributes (say, 4 Intelligence, 2 Wits, 1 Resolve), 4 to Physical (2 Strength, 3 Dexterity, 2 Stamina, say) and 3 to Social (2 Presence, 2 Composure, 2 Manipulation). The fifth dot in any attribute costs 2 dots to purchase. My problem with this is that it makes it impossible to specialise at all- this system forces you to spread your points extremely thinly. If you want to have a Presence of 5, say, your Manipulation and Composure are going to have to be 1 each. Why can’t I have a character with good all-round social skills? Now this may discourage min-maxing to some extent, but if and when I get round to running a game with the system I’ll probably just dole out 12 points and let players assign them as they wish.
This chapter also provides rules on rolls that use Attribute+Another Attribute. These generally make good sense- remembering things is Intelligence+Composure, Lifting Things is Strength+Stamina, etc. No real complaints here.
Skills
Like the attributes, the skills are very well constructed. There are eight in each of the three categories (Mental, Physical, Social), for a total of twenty four, though the assignation is somewhat arbitrary- skills don’t necessarily tend to couple with Attributes in the same category. These seem to cover most stuff and without too much overlap. Once again, players prioritise the three categories (not necessarily the same way they prioritised Attributes) and assign 11/7/5 dots to them (again, Skills are rated 1 to 5). I’m less irritated by this than with the Attributes- there’s a bit more room for maneveur with 11 points. Using a skill untrained (no dots) invokes a -1 penalty, except for Mental skills, which are at a -3 penalty untrained. Skills can also have Specialities- characters gain +1 die whenever using their Speciality. While most skills tend to couple to the same Attribute each time (Academics goes with Intelligence, Drive with Dexterity), some couple to different Attributes depending on circumstances. Athletics is added to Strength for climbing, Dexterity for throwing things, and Stamina for running. This generally makes good sense.
Some Skills are detailed much more than others. For some, such as Empathy, Science and Politics, the book doesn’t even suggest which Attribute might be appropriate to add and gives no example of using the skill (I’d guess Composure and Intelligence for the first two, but Politics could be Intelligence, Wits, Presence, Manipulation or Composure depending on circumstances and we aren’t given any guidance at all). I have no idea why one creates pieces of art (painting, sculptures etc.) using Intelligence+Crafts. Surely Wits or Dexterity would be more appropriate? While we’re on that subject, the skill Crafts is too broad. This is applied to everything from oil painting to fixing a car. One can only go so far with Specialities (only one is allowed per Skill). Healing Wounds is a use of the Medicine skill treated very confusingly. It allows you to, amongst other things, restore Bashing (the least severe type) wounds to someone being treated at the rate of 1 per day. Which would be fine, except that Bashing wounds heal naturally at the rate of 1 per 15 minutes. Eh?!
In general though, barring a few such oddities, this section is pretty solid.
Advantages
Advantages is an odd name for what are really derived traits. These can’t be increased on their own, only indirectly as the result of improving Attributes that they depend on. Examples are Defence (lower of Wits/Dexterity), Initiative (Sum of Dexterity and Composure) and Health (Stamina+5). Now I have no problem with any of these, nor with Willpower (Resolve+Composure) which can be spent to gain extra dice for rolls. There’s also Morality, which starts at 7. Now this is where I think this section begins to go astray. Whenever your character performs some act that is more immoral than their current morality (example, at 7, petty theft or worse), they make a Degeneration roll. Failure reduces their Morality by 1. As Morality drops, your actions need to be more and more heinous to actually trigger a Degeneration roll. If your Morality reaches 0 your character is essentially unplayable- a monstrous psychopath. So far, so good. My problem with all this is that whenever your Morality drops a point and is left below 7 you also make a Morality roll. Fail, and your character develops some Mental Illness decided by the GM, such as Narcissism, a Phobia, or Schizophrenia. This suggests that only immoral people become insane, or at very least that insanity is the result of immoral behaviour. What the hell is going on here? This is complete nonsense. While this is undoubtedly the chapter’s biggest blunder, I’m not entirely sure about the Virtues/Vices system either. Basically, each character has a Virtue and a Vice. Whenever they act in accordance with their Virtue to their own disadvantage over the course of a game session, they recover all spent Willpower. Whenever they act in accordance with their Vice over the course of a single scene, they recover one Willpower. Now this would be fine, except that characters are limited to the traditional “Seven Deadly Sins” as Vices, and the four Cardinal Virtues plus the Christian Faith, Hope and Charity as Virtues. Now quite apart from the fact that I find it hard to see Faith as a virtue, and that I find Prudence too close to Temperance (particularly in the way the book writes it up) for useful distinction, or even that some Vice/Virtue combinations are basically incompatible (Gluttony/Temperance, anyone? Or Charity/Avarice?), there simply aren’t enough Vices and Virtues available. I’ll certainly permit players to come up with their own suggestions to flesh these out a bit.
Merits
The book continues with its pattern of each chapter being a little worse than the preceding one. Merits are essentially a lot like D&D’s feats (hardly something to recommend them), in that they provide a character with a small bonus to certain actions under certain circumstances, or allow a character to do something not normally permitted. Some of them, like Common Sense, have a fixed dot cost (a starting character may spend 5 dots on Merits), while others are ranked 1 to X (maximum 5) and get better as a character spends more dots.
The best ones are the Social ones (again we have three categories, though there’s no prioritising here). These are almost all rated 1 to 5, and included Allies, Status, Contacts (within particular organisations), Resources (essentially wealth), Retainer, Mentor (a particularly helpful ally in both cases) and Fame. These essentially behave like Skills, except that they don’t actually get rolled, but are more guides to the GM as to how much you can do. I have no problem with these. Its’ worth noting here, though, that unless you actually want your character to be penniless (a homeless beggar, say), you have to spend at least one dot on Resources. That reduces your allocation to Merits to 4. Some of the skills are bizarrely costed. For example, Strong Lungs, which gives you a +2 Stamina bonus for holding your breath (hardly something that’s going to come up often), costs 3 dots. That’ll set you back more experience than actually buying another dot in Stamina. Common Sense costs an amazing 4 dots, and lets you make a roll (which may not succeed) once per game session, with the GM’s permission, to get a hint about what to do next.
There are three “Fighting Style” feats that are rated 1 to 5 and let you do increasingly cool things in combat. Actually a lot of the Physical Merits are strictly combat-related. Basically, many of the Merits are near-useless, and a lot of those that aren’t are strictly combat. Most Merits have some pre-requisites to acquire them, but these haven’t been thought out well at all- for example Stunt Driver doesn’t require any dots in the Drive skill!
Dramatic Systems (This is essentially the core of the game system)
OK, time to comment a bit more on the system. The rules for Extended actions work like this. Your character makes a series of rolls of the appropriate dice pool (Attribute+ Attribute or Attribute+Skill), each representing a certain time spent in effort. You require a certain number of total successes, determined by the GM, to succeed. The fewer rolls you make, the faster it gets done. This is a good way of adding dramatic tension to a long task, and gives the GM plenty of scope for an interesting description of what’s going on. The trouble with this, though, is that it assumes every such action will succeed eventually. Now the book addresses this itself eventually, but not in this chapter- that waits until the Storytelling section. Their suggestion, which makes good sense in a lot of situations, is that either there is some hurry imposed by the circumstances (for example, in bypassing a security system, if you take too long, the alarm goes off), or, if there is no possibility of this (say the character is researching something, or picking a lock while under no time pressure) that the maximum number of rolls allowed be equal to Attribute+Skill. Personally, in certain situations, like hacking into a computer system, I’d simply impose a Success penalty to the roll (probably -1), and if that brings the total below 0, something unpleasant happens.
There are also Contested Actions. In this case two characters roll dice pools (possibly the same Attribute+Skill, possibly different ones) and the most successes wins. Fine, but for some odd reason Exceptional Success still depends on your raw roll. So if you get 12 successes, and your opponent gets 11, you get an Exceptional Success because you got more than 5. Surely this should be based on the difference?
If you have fewer than 1 dice in your pool (because of negative modifiers- for example, say you have Dexterity 1, Athletics 1, and try to throw something at someone with Defence 2. 1+1-2 is then 0), you get to make a “Chance Roll”. This is one dice and succeeds only on a 10. If you roll a 1 on this roll, you fail spectacularly in some particularly unpleasant way. This seems OK, except that it means that if your chance to succeed at something is less than 30% (the chance on one dice), your skill level becomes irrelevant- you’re reduced to 10% chance whether your pool is exactly 0 or -10. One way around this is to occasionally require multiple successes to succeed at a roll (say 2, or 3). The book tends to discourage this as an idea, perhaps as a reaction against previous versions of the system, which I understand from other reviews had penalties/bonuses to dice pools, penalties/bonuses to successes, penalties/bonuses number of success required and penalties/bonuses to number required for a success. This was apparently somewhat confusing, which I can understand. I think, if used sparingly, that could work, though.
My only complaint about the core system is the necessity of re-rolling 10s. This makes what should be one dice roll into several (easily up to three). Some way of getting more successes than your pool should exist, though, and I can’t think of a good alternative.
Then we have a lot of rules for objects- hardness, structure, cover provided and so on. There’s also a (much too short) section on equipment. Prices for items are given in dots. If you have Resources at least equal to an item’s dots, you can buy it, otherwise not. This is nice and simple, and shouldn’t cause any problems unless players try hard to abuse it.
Then we have five pages on Vehicles. This is too much detail, given the sparseness of equipment. I really don’t need all that information on stats for vehicles, ramming other vehicles, jumping from moving vehicles- this isn’t supposed to be an action game, right? This should have been much shorter, if indeed it was present at all.
Combat
We then get an extraordinarily long chapter on combat (it’s the longest in the book). Much of this is exactly what you’d expect. There’s a minor quibble in that damage dealt by a weapon and chance to hit with that weapon aren’t distinguished (it’s all one roll), but this does admittedly make for a more simple combat system. There are the usual rules for Initiative, Delaying Actions, Attack Rolls, Range modifiers, cover- all stuff that’s pretty much universal. There’s also a list of weapons. The really odd thing about this is that all Firearms have a strength required to wield them (fair enough), but no Melee Weapons do (and this list includes a battle-axe, a greatsword and a katana). I can only assume this was an oversight.
There are also a few very strange minor rules that obviously haven’t been thought through. One example. A Sap (and only a Sap of the weapons listed) has the knockout ability. Consequently, if you hit a target’s head (headshots are a -3 penalty) and get at least five successes, the target has to make a stamina roll to avoid being knocked out. Now suppose you have Strength 5, Brawl 5, Speciality Saps, spend a Willpower point to add to your attack (+3), and that your opponent has no Defence (this is an absolute best-case scenario). Your pool is 10+1+3+1 (for the Sap’s damage rating)-3 (headshot). That’s 12. Your chance of rolling 5+ successes is still well under 50%. Knockout is therefore almost totally useless.
The rules for damage (there are three types- Bashing, Lethal and Aggravated) and healing are actually very good indeed (though I’d rule that Aggravated damage didn’t heal at all without treatment, and conferred permanent injuries if not treated within a week or so). I’m not going to go over them here, since they sound quite complicated, but applying them in practice is very simple and they provide a very realistic-feeling system of injury. Big thumbs up here. This chapter ends with an “Example of Play”. This is pretty good, serving as an extended example, and should probably clear up anything that wasn’t clear (not that the rules are in any way unclear).
Storytelling
This section is crap. It is almost entirely vague fluff that is no use to anyone. It also fails completely to expand upon the setting. This leaves virtually all the job of portraying the setting in the hands of the fiction scattered throughout the book. While this isn’t actually bad, as I’ve said, it doesn’t really leave a prospective GM with much to go on.
Well, OK, I’m being a little unfair. The chapter ends with a bit on Ghosts, which isn’t bad at all, giving them some stats and special powers, though again it doesn’t really give much advice on how to use them. Oh, and there’s a bit on NPCs. Ah, yes. Let me quote a short passage:
“When they aren’t going to Class or sleeping in their dorm rooms, students can be found wandering campus grounds or haunting the bars, clubs or café’s (note: apostrophe not mine), around town. Usually young and often night owls, students trend to look for out-of-the-way places to study, or avoid it all together.”
I almost burst out laughing reading this. It sounds like an excerpt from a Guide to Birdwatching, or something. This section is possibly the least useful one in the entire book (though it does face some stiff competition).
Lastly
There’s a very serviceable index.
SUMMARY
As a setting book, this fails miserably. It seems to be trying to give you a survival horror game, but the lack of enough information about the sort of horror one might encounter or any real good advice to a GM as to how to run such a game stymies this attempt totally. I appreciate that it is also acting as a Core Rulebook for a number of add-on games (Vampire, Werewolf and Mage at the moment, though I don’t doubt others will follow), and perhaps it does a better job of that (I’d need to read one of those setting books to be sure), but I do think this could have been done better. Fictional passages are not the way to create a setting.
So how about the system? I’ve probably sounded very critical throughout most of this review, but in all honesty, it isn’t half bad. The basic mechanics are great- when the system goes astray, as it does often, it does so on the details. It’s also quite adaptable- if you don’t like something, you can probably change it without too much difficulty. There’s no doubt that I will be using this system, or something very like it as a GM in the future. So I don’t feel I wasted my money. And this is cheap compared with most core rulebooks (£15 here in the UK).
Style: 4
Substance: 3
