Problems with the World of Darkness RPG System

A Brief Overview of the World of Darkness System:

First of all, let me say that I like the World of Darkness RPG system a lot. It has an extremely flexible and elegant design with a very simple basic mechanic. Roll some number of ten sided dice and if any of them come up eight or higher than you succeed. If you roll multiple dice with an eight or higher, then you succeed more. For instance, you might do more damage to that monster that is trying to gut you and your family. Another example might be that you're argument is extra persuasive and not only gets you past the guards, but it also makes the soldiers there more friendly toward you. For each ten you roll, you get to roll a bonus dice for possible extra successes.

To determine the number of dice that you get to roll, you add up all the values of factors in your favor and then subtract the values of factors that work against you. This is nice for players that aren't particularly good at math as all these numbers represent amounts of dice. A player can use the physical dice to add together bonuses and then remove dice to represent penalties and roll the remainder.



For an example of a typical dice pool, take the example of getting past the guards. First we have your character's relevant attribute (attributes represent general areas of ability which everyone has), in this case will say the relevant attribute is manipulation and that for this character it has a value of 3. Then take the relevant skill score (skills values represent more specific training) which will probably be persuasion, and we'll say it has a value of 4. Finally, the character is wearing a nice suit, which is worth 2 more dice. Penalties are simply that the soldiers have been ordered not to let anyone in who doesn't belong which we will call a -5. So the player takes 4, 3 and 2 dice for a total of 9, then removes 5, and rolls the remaining 4. My mother could do it! (In fact, she did. I got her to play Arkham Horror with me and my dad over Christmas, which uses a similar system.)

Since all these values describing your character range from 1 to 5, you get to record them on your character sheet by filling in dots. Furthermore, other aspects, such as hit points and speed, are largely determined by adding together attribute values. The system is simple enough with regard to character generation that it's possible to make a character in as little as ten minutes.

That said, there are a few things about World of Darkness that don't work so well, and my game group often finds itself trying to house rule around them. However, after years of playing, I find that  the collection of house rules we've used are still less than satisfactory and, since no ones been writing them down, they've also been a little inconsistent. For that reason, I went through the World of Darkness core book (and only the core book so far) and made an attempt to enumerate all the major problems. My end goal is to use this list as a starting point to construct a more formal set of house rules, which will likely be made available through this site when finished.

Problems with the World of Darkness System

The following is a list of problems as I see them. It is only a list of problems, not solutions. Those will hopefully be addressed in  future posts.

The Guidelines for Difficulty Modifiers: 

The guidelines for difficulty modifiers (the amount of dice you remove from a roll to represent difficulty) in the rule book probably do more harm to games than good. The book says “as a rule, a single modifier never exceeds five, whether as a bonus or a penalty” (pg. 124). The problem with this is that, in practice, -5 is only a moderate penalty, not “sorely testing” as the book claims. It's easy to see why. Suppose a player puts 4 points into both an attribute and a skill used for some task. Since this is something that the player wants the character to be good at, he or she also spends a small number of experience points to get a specialty in it, which gives an additional +1. Finally, the character has some gear that gives an additional +2. This gives a subtotal of 11 dice, less the 5 so 6 dice are rolled. Since only one dice needs to come up as 8 or higher, the character has a 88% chance of success, and what I've outlined is a very moderate build for a character. It's not uncommon for characters to have 14 or more dice in a roll and that's still with normal human characters. Supernatural characters can have significantly more dice in their pools. In short, the maximum suggested allowed difficulty under the rules won't even slow down a character that's actually good at something.

The Players Can Easily Avoid Risking Dramatic Failures:

In World of Darkness, if you have to roll a dice poll that has zero dice, what you do is roll what is called a “chance die.” That is, you roll one ten sided dice. However, only tens are counted as successes, though tens are still rerolled. Furthermore, if you roll a one on the initial dice, you get a “dramatic failure.” You fail and something bad happens; perhaps your gun jams or you hit an ally by accident, or you get caught in a lie during a negotiation.

However, in practice, players can usually avoid rolling dice pools with zero dice in them by simply choosing not to take actions that have a chance of dramatic failure. Not only does this mean that entertaining dramatic failures never happen, it also means that players almost never attempt actions with very little chance of success even when it would make sense to do so, such as firing a few parting rounds at a villain that has fled out of range.

The Order of Events During a Skill/Attribute Roll.

When you, as game master, are trying to come up with a roll for a player, it is a two step process: Figure out which traits need to be rolled, then figure out what modifiers apply to the situation. The problem for me, and many other game masters I've played with, is I always forget the second step until after the player has rolled. If I forget to give a bonus, it's easy enough to roll a few extra dice. However, if I forget to apply a penalty until after the player rolled, it's problematic to make them re-roll with less dice. If it was a good roll, then I'm robing them; if it was a bad roll, do I really want to let them try again when they failed with more dice?

For me, systems that allow the game master to determine the difficulty after the player rolls have always worked better. It's only after the player tells me how many successes they got that I stop to think “was that good enough?” “How hard should this be?” Again, I've seen this tendency in several other game masters I've played with over the years, so it isn't just me.

This also slows down combat to a certain degree. When a player declares who their trying to attack in combat, they usually know what attribute, skill, and weapon values they have toward their dice pool, but they have to stop and ask the game master how much defense the target has. This value has to be taken away from the dice pool before rolling. Then the player can roll and report back the damage which the game master records. It would be better to have the player just roll and tell the game master the number of successes; then the game master can tell the player what happens. This requires one less back and forth than the current system.

Also, the current system makes it difficult for a game master to hide what the defenses of an antagonist are. This seems a serious flaw in what is to a large degree a horror game, where suspense and the unknown are central to generating the fear and tension, the emotional fuel horror game players hunger for. If the players are battling some silent beast in the dark, the game master might want to keep it a secret whether or not they are even hitting the thing. While players require the satisfaction of hitting something, their enjoyment may actually be enhanced by having to wait until they can search the area with a light to see their kill... which also might be the moment to hit them with a surprise attack by a second beast.

When a Character is Attacked Multiple Times in a Round:

According to the rules, each time a character applies his or her defense to an on coming attack, it is reduced by one for each previous time that round it has been applied. I find that this rule often gets forgotten during actual game play. This is especially true for the game master who is likely juggling multiple characters. It also requires some number of back and forths between the attacker and defender to establish what the defense is and whether or not it actually drops according to that rule before the attack can actually be rolled. The time spent on these back and forths, in my opinion, slows down the game, confuses new players, and is not worth the added realism.

How Fire Arms and Defenses Work:

According to the rules, a character's defense score can only be applied against firearms attacks when the defending character and the attacker are within arms reach of each other. However, this situation almost never happens because the attacker with the fire arm can usually move backward before firing at the defender. However, when you think about it, everything in combat is suppose to be taking place more or less simultaneously, meaning that a character shouldn't be able to move away running backward and fire on a melee character faster than the melee character, running forward, can close the gap. My friends and I decided that this unfairly penalizes melee characters and came up with some rather awkward rules to compensate for it which I am currently less than happy with.

Also, in reality you, an ordinary person, can dodge bullets. Sure, if someone really is pointing a gun at you and fires, it will hit you before you can get out of the way. It's just getting the gun pointed at someone which is the hard part. If you give a gun to someone off the street and have them try to hit a moving person sized target, good chance they'll go through the whole clip without hitting anything, or if they do they won't do enough damage to drop the target. In other words, not applying defense against firearms doesn't make much sense. Of course, changing it might require some adjustments to how firearms work to keep the game balanced.

Targeting Body Parts, Particularly the Head:

In combat, if you want to target a particular body part with an attack, you just take a penalty as follows: torso -1, leg or arm -2, head -3, hand -4, eye -5. However, as I've already mentioned, a character that has been built to be good with fire arms probably has 12-14 dice in his or her dice pool for shooting things, so even a -5 penalty isn't going to stop them, especially if they spend will power to get an extra 3 dice. Also, since people often don't have armor on their heads or over their eyes, it's often as easy or easier to shoot some one in the head than not to.

Also, the rules don't really offer much guidance to what should happen when someone is shot in the head or in the eye. In the case of a blow to the head, the book suggests that damage might be upgraded to lethal from bashing or that the victim might be stunned (page 165). That is all well and good if someone takes a baseball bat to the noggin, but if someone takes a bullet in the head, even with a handful of successes, common sense would dictate that the victim should be killed or suffer brain damage. Given how easy this is to accomplish, if this were put into practice, it would make killing/severely maiming people way too easy for combat to be interesting. Every group I've played World of Darkness with has run into this situation and had an awkward moment of "what do we do here" when someone gets shot in the head.

Note to Self: if you change how targeting specific body parts works, you'll need to change how focused blow works (p. 111).

Attacking into a Melee:

On page 162, it states that if you have a range weapon and you attack someone who is in hand-to-hand combat with one of your allies, you take a -2 penalty to the attack for each target you don't want to hit. If you get one or more successes, you hit your intended target. If you get zero successes, you miss everyone. If you get a dramatic failure (which as I noted above, never happens), you hit are target at random. It doesn't state how much damage you do in the last case.

What this doesn't cover is what if you have an ally (or allies) in combat with multiple opponents. Do the other opponents, that we might not be shooting but won't mind hitting give a minus two to the attack roll? What if a the person making the attack decides that they don't care if they hit their “ally?”

The intent is probably that you take a -2 penalty for every participant in the hand-to-hand combat other than the one you are aiming for. None the less, my group has stopped games on several occasions to debate how this rule should be applied.

Resistances: They don't do very much...

When someone attacks your character, you get to oppose the attack with your defense score, which you can double by giving up your own attacks, plus any armor your character might be wearing. This sub-system is fairly balanced and I don't have any issues with it. On the other hand, when you get hit with some sort of supernatural power, all you usually get to resist with is one attribute score, either resolve, stamina or composure. Your average character has 2 in any one of these scores. The attacking character, however, might easily have 12+ dice to mind control your character, drive them insane, or even just hurt or kill them. Often all that is needed to get a devastating effect is one dice to get an 8 or higher. Even other supernatural characters aren't much better off. They sometimes get their “supernatural rank” trait added to their defense, but for most characters the players are likely to have, that's usually only another 1 to 3 dice.

Granted, there's nothing wrong with a vampire being able to consistently apply his mind control powers against various NPCs but it seems like PC should have some way to defend themselves other than shoot more first. It seems like there should be some equivalent to armor for resistance traits, perhaps religious symbols or amulets.

Healing:

According to the rule book on page 61, all that is needed to stop a character, who has lost all his or her hit points to lethal damage, from bleeding out is one success on an appropriate medical roll. Also according to page 61, in the example of play, it states that to stop a character, who has lost all his or her hit points to lethal damage, from bleeding out is requires a number of successes equal to the amount of damage they've taken. Looks like someone missed something in editing. Personally, I like the second one better since it leads to more dramatic scenes of trying to keep a fallen comrade alive or trying to stabilize a victim you've found before it's too late. However, it also means that character's with higher stamina, who are in theory super survivable are actually more difficult to stabilize.

Incapacitation:

According to the rules, when a character has lost his or her last hit point to bashing damage, they have to make a stamina roll each round or fall unconscious. This continues until the character heals a point of bashing damage, which happens in 15 minutes or about 300 rounds. In other words, no matter how high your stamina, you'll eventually fall unconscious, even if it is several minutes later. This strikes me as odd. Surely getting hit by something should either drop you or not. I tried a house rule which said you only had to roll once in this situation to stay up. This led to rather protracted fights where both sides would keep fighting much longer than normal because a character with 2 or 3 stamina has a better than 50% chance of making that roll.

What the Heck is the Point of the Contacts Merit:

Each dot of the contacts merit gives your character an area in which he or she knows how to gather information. For instance, for 20 experience points, a player could buy four dots in contacts with the police, city hall, the local news paper, and the black market. These contacts can be used to get information the character needs. However, information is a reasonable request from a one dot ally and you buy each area of the allies merit separately. In other words, you could buy one dot in each of allies police, city hall, the local news paper, and the black market for a mere 8 experience points and get more or less the same benefits. See page 114-115.

The Rules for Derangements:

In my opinion, the rules for derangements go too far in describing penalties a character takes, what sets them off and so forth. Frankly, I've found that if you just tell a player that their character has a derangement and let them run with it, the results are often more entertaining. Most players, even the ones not particularly into role-playing are willing to do this, and are likely to come up with ways of expressing their characters insanity which are much more interesting than what's in the book. You can even encourage players to do some research on their character's flavor of mental illness. The only time that the rules for derangements should actually be used is if a player isn't playing along or is having trouble coming up with a way to act crazy.

Pepper Spray: 

According to the rules, beings that are no longer alive but that walk and talk are not affected by pepper spray. I'm pretty sure vampires, which is what they are referring to here, have full sensory perception, including pain. For instance, they take dice pool penalties for large amounts of damage, the same as mortals. Hence, they should be affected by pepper spray. In fact, it should have a chance to send them into frenzy. Furthermore, if a vampire is using Auspex, they are likely to be especially vulnerable to this form of assault.

On the other hand, the fact that vampires in World of Darkness aren't effected by tasers is adequately explained. They move their bodies through supernatural means, not nerve impulses. They are dead after all.

Also, have you ever read the rules for pepper spray? It is a totally broken weapon.

Rules for Vehicle Damage:

Getting hit by a bus moving 60mph only does 9 bashing damage on average. WTF!?! 145-147. Ok, it does knock the person down, but still...

Conclusion:

Part of the reason why I'm posting this here, as well as why I started this blog in the first place, is so that I can get opinions on what I write. Do you think my critique here was fair? Have you had similar experiences playing World of Darkness? Have you had other problems with the system that I didn't mention above? Am I missing something in the rules that would correct for one of the problems I listed? (It's been known to happen). Do you have any good house rules you use with World of Darkness? Please, leave a comment!