World of Darkness: House Rules Draft 0.1

My last post was a long list of problems with one of my favorite RPG systems, World of Darkness. A couple weeks ago (4 weeks ago? 5?), I did have a sit down with two members of my gaming group and started trying to hash out some house rules. As I remember, we generally agreed what the problems were though their opinions on why those things were problems and how they should be solved sometimes surprised me.  Also, I meant to write this post the next night but I was busy, and then one week turn into two, then three and so forth, so I might be forgetting things, though I did take some notes at the time.

One of the key things we agreed on was that the World of Darkness system needs to be dark and gritty but not necessarily realistic. There are plenty of stories in the genre of dark and gritty where heroes walk off gun shots and stab wounds that should require immediate trips to the hospital. Moreover, World of Darkness is a game that needs to be fun to play, so we should avoid rules that put characters out of action for extended periods of time. Doing so only leads to having frustrated players sitting on the side lines.

Also, the following is just a draft and none of it has been play tested.

How Skill Checks Work:

We agreed that skill checks should use target numbers. However, once I actually began working through how a target number system would work, it became clear that it would involve more rewriting of the game than I wanted to do. Instead I think the best approach might be to represent difficulty by subtracting some number of successes from the result of a characters roll to get a final result.

Here's how it works: All of a character's dice polls a rolled as normal, including any bonuses or non-difficulty penalties. (An example of a non-difficulty penalty would be the penalty for having damage in one of your last three health boxes.) You get some number of successes on the roll. Then the Storyteller applies the difficulty by subtracting some number of successes from what you rolled to get the final result. Examples of how many successes the Storyteller should be subtracting are as follows:

Difficulty:

Easy	-0 successes
Moderate	-1 success
Difficult	-2 to -3 successes
Challenging	-4 to -5 successes
…
Nearly Impossible	-10 successes or more

Once you have the final number of successes, everything works as before. For instance, after the game master subtracts the difficulty number from your successes, if you still have five or more, then it's an exceptional success.

How Dramatic Failures Work:

In my previous post, I list several reasons why I don't like the way dramatic failures work, and why I don't like the effect they have on the game. We all agreed that we should get rid of the dramatic failure rule. You can still roll a chance die and a 10 will be treated normally, but 1's are no longer dramatic failures.

I also proposed a replacement rule, but I've since decided against it. Storytellers shouldn't need a special dice result to tell them that the players have messed up and bad things are going to happen.

Changes to How Defense and Armor Work:

Suggestion: defense and armor are no longer applied as a penalty to an attackers roll. Instead, the defender rolls a number of dice equal to their defense and armor combined and subtracts that number from the amount of successes the attacker got. Any amount by which the attacker's roll exceeds the defenders roll is then recorded as damage. This cuts down on time spent communicating the defender's statistics across the table, not to mention allowing that information to remain secret, and allows the two players to roll in parallel, which should also speed things up.

One of our concerns is that this change might make an already “swingy” system even more swingy. For instance, an attacker could get an amazing roll and the defender might get nothing. To help compensate for this, the defending character is given the option of paying one point of willpower to re-roll their defense and use the new result. This is subject to the one point of will power per round limit.

Defense now applies against firearms attacks.

Effects that cause you to loose your defense for the round instead make you loose your defense until your next turn. It's easier to keep track of that way.

Multiple Attacks Against a Single Target:

The current rules that involve decrementing a characters defense, for each previous attack, which the character has applied his defense against that turn, requires too much paperwork. Instead, we decided that we want to use a flanking system like D&D. If you attack someone, and you have an ally on the other side of them, you get a +2 bonus to the attack.

Attacking into a Group:

When you shoot into a melee, you may take a -2 penalty to avoid hitting any given individual. If there is more than one target you didn't take the -2 penalty for, choose which target your attack is actually rolled against at random. If you are using an attack that can hit multiple targets, such as a medium or long burst from a automatic weapon, you roll against everyone in that melee, including allies.

Charges (much needed rules clarification for my group):

World of Darkness does have rules for charges, see page 164. We might want to start using that guys!

Changes to How Called Shots Work:

Have you ever noticed that, when in a fire fight against someone who is wearing bullet proof armor, it's usually in your advantage to aim for the head? The reason is that the penalty for shooting someone in the head is -3. The penalty to shoot someone wearing a Kevlar vest in the body is -2, but this is by-passed by aiming for the head. Also, by by-passing the armor, you avoid having your damage downgraded to bashing. The number of head shots going around has reached the point of silly in our games.

My solution to this was to double the penalties for called shots. However, our groups resident gunslinger argued that the better solution was to make the unrealistic assumption that armor applies to every part of the wearer's body.

It occurs to me that we might still want a way to by-pass armor. This method would have to scale with the armor so that high-grade armor is more difficult to by-pass. The rule could be that an attacker could double the value of the target's armor. If the attacker still hits, his damage isn't downgraded. All other penalties to the attack roll or bonuses to defense still apply.

Another suggestion has been to have called shots require an additional action to aim.

The other question was what happens if someone without armor gets shot in the head? For that matter, what happens if someone gets hit in the leg, or their gun hand? What we ended up agreeing upon was that, ordinarily, combat should not include the possibility of permanent debilitation other than death, nor should it include an instant kill option such as getting a head shot.

So, if someone gets shot in the head, it is the same as being shot anywhere else in the body, with one exception: If any attack to the head deals damage greater than or equal to the targets size, the victim has to make a stamina roll or get knocked unconscious for a number of rounds equal to the damage dealt. See page 168 of the World of Darkness core rules.

Following the above example, if someone gets shot in the leg and the damage exceeds the targets size, the target is hobbled and can only move at half speed. This condition remains until the victim gets appropriate medical treatment, usually a trip to the hospital or until the damage heals. If someone gets hobbled twice they fall prone and can only crawl.

If someone is hit in a hand they are holding something in, they have to make a strength check with a penalty equal to damage dealt or drop whatever it was they were holding.

If someone is hit in the arm or hand and the damage exceeds the their size, they receive a -3 penalty to all checks with that arm/hand. This condition remains until the victim gets appropriate medical treatment, usually a trip to the hospital or until the damage heals. This penalty can be stacked multiple times.

Note that when we say “ordinarily, combat should not include the possibility of permanent debilitation other than death, nor should it include an instant kill option,” we're leaving open the option for the Storyteller to through in special characters with the ability to give characters lasting penalties or lava pits that instantly kill any PCs unlucky enough to fall into them. The point is that anything debilitating that requires more than a few hours at the hospital to heal is something special and should only come up occasionally.

Changes to How Recovery From Damage Works:

All characters heal one bashing damage each round at the end of their turn. Even vampires gain this benefit, though they still need to spend blood to heal anything more than bashing damage, and it is in addition to their ability to spend a point of blood to heal two bashing. This is also in addition to the one point of bashing damage werewolves already heal each round.Scratch that, I don't know how I got talked into that one. Another idea: we can address the same issue by just doubling hit points for everyone, or maybe even having hit points = size x 2 + stamina x3.

Secondly, we decided that if you have your last hit point box filled in with bashing damage, you immediately fall unconscious (Unless you have an ability that says otherwise.). You continue to heal as above, but you do not regain consciousness when you heal the right most box of bashing damage. Instead, you make a stamina roll each round at the start of your turn. When you accumulate a total of 4 successes (if this number is too high, we can try 3), you come back around and can act on that turn. When this happens, clear any bashing damage off the last three boxes on your hit point track. You heal bashing as before.

Once per day, outside of combat, you may roll stamina or stamina + medicine. Heal that many points of lethal damage. An ally can make an appropriate medicine roll to aid you using teamwork rules. Vampires do not gain this benefit; they must spend blood to rid themselves of lethal damage. Werewolves still heal at one point of lethal damage every 15 minutes. 

After a full nights rest you gain two benefits related to healing: One, heal one point of lethal damage, if you have any. If you have any aggravated damage, roll stamina and record the result. For every 4 successes  you accumulate this way, heal one point of aggravated damage. Vampires may instead heal two points of aggravated damage each day while they sleep at a cost of five blood each.

If you are bleeding out, roll stamina each minute. If the total number of successes you accumulate this way equals or exceeds the amount of aggravated damage you have on your hit point track, you stabilize and don't have to make further rolls. Each round you have not accumulated enough successes, take one aggravated damage (which raises the total number of successes you need to roll). If someone is making medicine rolls to try to stabilize you, this counts as team work.

Quick Healer Merit (****)
Prerequisite: Stamina ****
Effect: Your character has a remarkable ability to shank off and recover from injuries. You heal bashing damage at double the normal rate. You also get a +4 bonus to stamina rolls to recover lethal and aggravated hit points.  

Changes to Resources:

The first three dots of resources work as before. The benefits of the forth dot are now obtained at dot 5. If the game master allows it, the benefits of the 5th dot can be obtained at dot 7. For example, if a starting character wants to have gear with a four dot price tag, he would have to spend all of his free merit dots to get the fifth dot in resources.

Chainsaws:

A while back I was playing around with alternative rules for weapons in World of Darkness. For the most part, I decided against trying to integrate those rules into my games. However, the rule I came up with for the chain saw was one that I still would like to play with:

Type:	Damage	Size	Cost	Special
Chainsaw	-5(L)	3	**	If you deal damage with with your attack roll, roll 10 more dice and add any successes as extra damage.

Conclusion:

Again, these house rules are decidedly a work in progress. If you have comments, I'd love to hear them. Also, I'll probably do at least one more post on this and when I have a rule set I'm reasonably happy with, I'll probably add a new page to this blog with a more finished version of the rules for easy reference. Once that's done, some test playing would be good too.