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I've really picked up my pace here, because I'm tired of my WoD Core book floating around my living room at all hours of the day even after I've read it. I still have to get through God-Machine Chronicle and post it here before I can check the WIR off the to-do list because I'm a masochist, I guess, or maybe because I'm a stickler for my own incredibly arbitrary rules. The upside is that it's a rules update and it's only about a hundred pages so, since I'm going to try to hit the high notes on this one, hopefully I won't drag it on forever. I'll start in on that at roughly the time I make my character and hit any notes I missed that I meant to talk about on my first go round. For everyone who's not reading this, though, I'm sorry for spamming your wall; I mean well. At least every thing else today goes... under the cut.
Okay, Chapter 8.
This is the 'misc.' chapter. You know, I was telling Katie that I'm glad they went with the fiction tack in chapter 1 where they usually keep all the 'what is role-playing' baloney, because you can never write anything that doesn't sound either stupid or pretentious. Now I discover that they did include one, they just added it to the back before the stats for chumps you shoot (or who shoot/eat you). I feel like this is largely to their detriment because, really, I don't think I was wrong when I say people almost always come off as pretentious gits when they write one, no matter how good they normally are. Let's take a look.
Now, it comes at the end of another chapter fiction piece that doesn't have anything to do with the next chapter. I haven't been commenting on these because they're some of the weakest writing, even the weakest fiction in an otherwise strong book with some very solid gaming fiction. It might be the format the writer is forced to deal with - in fact, it probably is, but I've been ignoring them for the purpose of the WIR and I'm only mentioning them now because we're at the end and I'm basically just saying that you could lose all of these unless you're trying to add something to the read through.
The "What is Storytelling?" section starts on 188 and brings in every old canard I remember seeing from classic WoD texts. Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians. Storytelling with a capital 'S', role-playing vs. roll-playing, and both the Muse and the Ivory Tower are invoked. Not bad for just one page. I think they got almost the whole checklist, except for maybe the mutually exclusive 'realism' invocation and possible the 'mature audiences', though the latter is somewhat implied. This is about as harsh as I'm going to get with the text and the writers of an overall excellent piece of gaming literature, but this kind of writing is really pretty insipid. I'm sure it was intentional (maybe) but try not to refer to both the Ivory Tower and the classical muses and Cowboys and Indians (which I don't think anyone actually does anymore - we have Pokemon now) in the same go.
What the Storytelling system actually is, is a tool kit system designed to let you play a wide variety of games with a fairly intuitive setup of core attributes that everyone has at least a little of and measurable skills that one could reasonably pick up in real life. A player creates an alter-ego with the help of the Storyteller, who's the person who helps adjudicate potentially difficult situations in the game and nominally creates a plot that the players can interact with in their gaming group.
Besides the fairly open setup of skills and abilities which allow for the creation of a surprisingly wide variety of characters to play with, who have specialities of all different stripes, there isn't anything different about the core assumption of World of Darkness and, say, Dungeons and Dragons except what the game helps model. The assumption of WoD is that you're creating a normal person with the core book and, perhaps a supernatural character with a splat. There's nothing stopping the Storyteller from whipping up a bunch of goblins, kobolds, and god help us, dragons with the tools they have available and giving all the players swords and armor, telling them to go to town. WoD can be anything from statting up a bunch of combat die-hards and staking some grody-ass vampires to a psychological horror game where the world your characters know slowly crumbles around them as they're the focus or on the periphery of supernatural depredation before they attempt to scrounge their resources together and strike back with the fragments of knowledge they've gained at terrible costs. That's the great thing about role-playing; there's no presumption about what the game's about except what you bring with you, and Storyteller is a solid enough system to not just do either but often do both at the same time. So there's your copy; I'll clean it up a bit if someone wants to hire me.
That's where I'll stop it, though. There is good advice in this chapter; it's just that it's difficult to write that first part without sounding like a tool. Chapter 8 goes through what the books will mean when they refer to chapters, stories, and chronicles as well as how to demonstrate themes and mood, and even getting through the arc of a typical story. Most of the recommendations are pretty solid, but the biggest recommendation may not be stressed enough. Talk to your players. Talk to them one on one and get everyone in a group and talk to them, make sure you're on the same page. Go over the theme you're interested in dealing with, go over the tone, go over what you expect the characters to be and make sure they're compatible. Role-playing is subject to all of the same communication problems any close relationship can be. Everyone brings expectations and wants to the table - very few players are the same. I don't see that enough here, despite the generally sound advice on other things.
There's 10 Commandments in a sub-section and I think they're all fairly solid. This is the closest thing to what I was talking about above - Involve Players, Be Aware of Expectations, Work things out in advance, the old story first - rules second canard (which I get tired of), ect. et al. The writers wait all the way until the chapter nobody is really going to read except for the bestiary to include the rule of thumbs for Resistance traits (which should have been in Dramatic Systems), though the rules themselves are solid.
So, that above stuff might really be mission critical for a large set of newer players, but it's kind of old hat for me. Except for stuff I kinda want to lambast, I'm biased towards skipping over it in the WIR because it's generally obligatory in books but rarely mold-breaking. I'm trying to excuse my poor reading, but that's what it really is. You might rightfully judge me harsher than the book, which is only trying to inspire and assist, but we are moving onto Animals, Non-Combatants, and Combatants nevertheless.
These are just various types of stat blocks for when the ST needs something on hand and doesn't feel the need to stat them up. We're pretty weak on sheer numbers of animals, but we do have classics like the Raven/Crow, Bats, Cats, Dogs, and Horses. Actually, that's all of them. I would have tossed in a Bear and Crocodile/Alligator just to round them out, but words are at a premium and it shouldn't be too hard to just write them up with something here to go on already. Bats have this weird thing where they almost inexplicably to more damage than Cats (1 L vs. 0 L) and I don't really get that. I'd move that around or just give Cats the 1 L, or give all the animals smaller than dogs 0 L. (1 L, after all, is a knife.)
We have a modest spread of non-coms basically designed to give you some very basic dice pools and to show that it's okay just to write up a character who's not statted out - when they're not doing anything, just give them a dice pool based on what you figure their knowledge would be for that role. The combatants are where things get interesting and I'm not going to give the writers anymore trouble because we've already done that on gaming forums everywhere. I just want to give you a moral.
Now, there are only four combatants, the 'gangbanger', the police officer, the SWAT team mate, and the 'monster hunter'. Seeing the word gangbanger always makes me do a combination chuckle/cringe because, well, gang-bang. The gang member probably has the most reasonable stats of the four, and are more or less designed to be the low-level grunts, but try not to forget that they have a 6 dice pool on a pistol (including the equipment dice). Guns ignore Defense and most people aren't wearing armor right out of the gate, so without good cover, they might be rolling a straight 6 at you. Reasonably, we can assume that they'll probably only roll 2 successes - this is the vaunted 'gun-nibble' of gaming forums.
That doesn't bother me, though, and I'll tell you why; lethality has always been a problem for WoD and someone going first usually just wins the combat. (Celerity and Time are what I'm most familiar with, and they're deadly.) A lot of gunfights are just people depressing a lever and hoping that making a fist at someone makes them go away. A lot of gunfire is so inaccurate that many times it's not really even intended to kill anyone so much as frighten them, and people totally unrelated to the conflict are accidently shot. So, two successes on a roll - two health levels, represents graves, minor locations hit, and scratches from nearby shrapnel - an abstraction as much as a d4 knife wound is in Dungeons and Dragons. Really experienced shooters with really high-end guns are significantly more dangerous, and that's PC territory.
Now, there was a Guy Ritchie-esque scenario I ran once for Mage where a fight broke out and a player almost accidently rolled 5 successes on their firearms roll, almost literally blowing the brains out of a combatant when they expected the gun-nibble. Just be aware that any time the damage isn't static, there's the chance you just roll almost sickeningly well.
The SWAT character is almost ridiculous and resembles nothing so much as a heavily armed end-boss, but the issues of the system are best represented by your typical beat cop stats. Why? If you're been following the line since the beginning, there was this issue with the cop being totally over-statted. That's because the job of making the stats was handed off to someone and they did what any typical ST would do in that situation, and just gave him a bunch of stats based on what the writer figured a cop would need. They didn't actually sit down with the rules and determine how much EXP they'd have, they just kind of winged it. That's the kind of thing that happens almost literally all the time. Here's what happened.
The officer has above average stats in every attribute except Manipulation and Presence. They have a Composure of 4, which is listed as being Exceptional. They are above average physically and mentally in every way. They have an Academics of 3, which is one step above making a living at it, and a Specialty in Criminology, which makes them roll 7 dice on that. They have Drive 3, roll the same 7 dice in Investigation, have a listing in every combat skill at 2 or more, Fast Reflexes, Stunt Driver, and a 7 morality in the World of Darkness (keeping in mind this doesn't actually do much). The SWAT team is flat out excessive compared to this, but someone figured out how many EXP this would take and it was sitting at somewhere like 80 after starting. Your average beat cop is sitting at somewhere between Expert and Heroic, which seems to be a little much.
My point is this; try to figure out in your games what you actually expect dots to mean. Some people pump their skills way up, and that's a really reasonable way to play considering how easy it can be to go into exp. debt trying to buy up your abilities in a high-power game. If your session is all about murdering the hell out of vampires or being high-value spies, or anything else like that, you should have a lot of EXP and feel free to spend it in getting really ripped in your specialties. (I guess just don't be too surprised if you get called on to have to drive or negotiate or something and you're terrible at it.) On the other end of that, there's games like mine, where 2 dots is considered to be a general level professional and you've got gear, equipment, and you're trying to angle for favorable situations. Katie's character Henry has one or two dots in a large number of skills making him generally competent and able to navigate a dangerous and complicated environment by himself and in groups. He has specializations and areas where he's better than average (Occult, for example) and areas where he's weaker (combat), but he's designed to be a well-rounded adult. Just determine what level you're playing at and be consistent; if 80 points is a baseline and your characters are specialized, that cop doesn't look all that impressive anymore, but compared to Henry, he's a killing machine. FYI.
There's this bit at the end where they talk about ghosts, and I want you to know that I read everything from Numina and the examples to exorcism (which is where Morality is actually important). If you oust Morality, this is the one place where you'll need to find a replacement or ignore the penalties and bonuses of Morality altogether. They included ghosts and not vampires or magicians probably because they get their own major splats but ghosts don't get a Wraith-equivalent in this game, but what they get here is pretty solid. There are ways for dealing with them and they've got all your typical ghost powers. I've run them against mortals and with mages, and they hold up pretty well. Running them right can even give your players some real chills. I mean, there isn't all that much to say except that the core book does give you some general tools for helpers and baddies, who are mostly mortal but also there are ghosts I guess and the ghosts are good.
I wouldn't have minded some kind of ghoul or zombie-type thing here, though. For a game about spooky supernatural shindigs, we're really light on mechanical supernatural representation. That's one of the biggest failings of the book for me, in a real, functional way. Even a two-page list of some general supernatural powers would be helpful (though you can shove ghostly Numina into service, if you want). I totally acknowledge that the book gives you plenty of tools to infer supernatural abilities by reverse engineering advice about things like Stamina, Defense, Resistance, and the like and I haven't actually had any problems, but I've been at this a while. I'm just saying it'd be nice, is all.
That's it. Except for this note here about the Index.
It's solid. I've used it. The bolded page numbers are really helpful for zeroing in on the information I need and the Index actually has the stuff I want to find in it. Fucking Thank You. This had been a problem since the literal beginning of WoD and the Exalted books were terrible. You were more likely to find a goddamned joke than you where to find a mention of the rules you were looking for. (Sidereals, I'm looking at you.) I shouldn't have to comment on the Index, because we should assume it's solid. But this time it is. Kudos. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it.
I'll do the wrap up and character next time. Thanks for being patient, everyone.
Okay, Chapter 8.
This is the 'misc.' chapter. You know, I was telling Katie that I'm glad they went with the fiction tack in chapter 1 where they usually keep all the 'what is role-playing' baloney, because you can never write anything that doesn't sound either stupid or pretentious. Now I discover that they did include one, they just added it to the back before the stats for chumps you shoot (or who shoot/eat you). I feel like this is largely to their detriment because, really, I don't think I was wrong when I say people almost always come off as pretentious gits when they write one, no matter how good they normally are. Let's take a look.
Now, it comes at the end of another chapter fiction piece that doesn't have anything to do with the next chapter. I haven't been commenting on these because they're some of the weakest writing, even the weakest fiction in an otherwise strong book with some very solid gaming fiction. It might be the format the writer is forced to deal with - in fact, it probably is, but I've been ignoring them for the purpose of the WIR and I'm only mentioning them now because we're at the end and I'm basically just saying that you could lose all of these unless you're trying to add something to the read through.
The "What is Storytelling?" section starts on 188 and brings in every old canard I remember seeing from classic WoD texts. Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians. Storytelling with a capital 'S', role-playing vs. roll-playing, and both the Muse and the Ivory Tower are invoked. Not bad for just one page. I think they got almost the whole checklist, except for maybe the mutually exclusive 'realism' invocation and possible the 'mature audiences', though the latter is somewhat implied. This is about as harsh as I'm going to get with the text and the writers of an overall excellent piece of gaming literature, but this kind of writing is really pretty insipid. I'm sure it was intentional (maybe) but try not to refer to both the Ivory Tower and the classical muses and Cowboys and Indians (which I don't think anyone actually does anymore - we have Pokemon now) in the same go.
What the Storytelling system actually is, is a tool kit system designed to let you play a wide variety of games with a fairly intuitive setup of core attributes that everyone has at least a little of and measurable skills that one could reasonably pick up in real life. A player creates an alter-ego with the help of the Storyteller, who's the person who helps adjudicate potentially difficult situations in the game and nominally creates a plot that the players can interact with in their gaming group.
Besides the fairly open setup of skills and abilities which allow for the creation of a surprisingly wide variety of characters to play with, who have specialities of all different stripes, there isn't anything different about the core assumption of World of Darkness and, say, Dungeons and Dragons except what the game helps model. The assumption of WoD is that you're creating a normal person with the core book and, perhaps a supernatural character with a splat. There's nothing stopping the Storyteller from whipping up a bunch of goblins, kobolds, and god help us, dragons with the tools they have available and giving all the players swords and armor, telling them to go to town. WoD can be anything from statting up a bunch of combat die-hards and staking some grody-ass vampires to a psychological horror game where the world your characters know slowly crumbles around them as they're the focus or on the periphery of supernatural depredation before they attempt to scrounge their resources together and strike back with the fragments of knowledge they've gained at terrible costs. That's the great thing about role-playing; there's no presumption about what the game's about except what you bring with you, and Storyteller is a solid enough system to not just do either but often do both at the same time. So there's your copy; I'll clean it up a bit if someone wants to hire me.
That's where I'll stop it, though. There is good advice in this chapter; it's just that it's difficult to write that first part without sounding like a tool. Chapter 8 goes through what the books will mean when they refer to chapters, stories, and chronicles as well as how to demonstrate themes and mood, and even getting through the arc of a typical story. Most of the recommendations are pretty solid, but the biggest recommendation may not be stressed enough. Talk to your players. Talk to them one on one and get everyone in a group and talk to them, make sure you're on the same page. Go over the theme you're interested in dealing with, go over the tone, go over what you expect the characters to be and make sure they're compatible. Role-playing is subject to all of the same communication problems any close relationship can be. Everyone brings expectations and wants to the table - very few players are the same. I don't see that enough here, despite the generally sound advice on other things.
There's 10 Commandments in a sub-section and I think they're all fairly solid. This is the closest thing to what I was talking about above - Involve Players, Be Aware of Expectations, Work things out in advance, the old story first - rules second canard (which I get tired of), ect. et al. The writers wait all the way until the chapter nobody is really going to read except for the bestiary to include the rule of thumbs for Resistance traits (which should have been in Dramatic Systems), though the rules themselves are solid.
So, that above stuff might really be mission critical for a large set of newer players, but it's kind of old hat for me. Except for stuff I kinda want to lambast, I'm biased towards skipping over it in the WIR because it's generally obligatory in books but rarely mold-breaking. I'm trying to excuse my poor reading, but that's what it really is. You might rightfully judge me harsher than the book, which is only trying to inspire and assist, but we are moving onto Animals, Non-Combatants, and Combatants nevertheless.
These are just various types of stat blocks for when the ST needs something on hand and doesn't feel the need to stat them up. We're pretty weak on sheer numbers of animals, but we do have classics like the Raven/Crow, Bats, Cats, Dogs, and Horses. Actually, that's all of them. I would have tossed in a Bear and Crocodile/Alligator just to round them out, but words are at a premium and it shouldn't be too hard to just write them up with something here to go on already. Bats have this weird thing where they almost inexplicably to more damage than Cats (1 L vs. 0 L) and I don't really get that. I'd move that around or just give Cats the 1 L, or give all the animals smaller than dogs 0 L. (1 L, after all, is a knife.)
We have a modest spread of non-coms basically designed to give you some very basic dice pools and to show that it's okay just to write up a character who's not statted out - when they're not doing anything, just give them a dice pool based on what you figure their knowledge would be for that role. The combatants are where things get interesting and I'm not going to give the writers anymore trouble because we've already done that on gaming forums everywhere. I just want to give you a moral.
Now, there are only four combatants, the 'gangbanger', the police officer, the SWAT team mate, and the 'monster hunter'. Seeing the word gangbanger always makes me do a combination chuckle/cringe because, well, gang-bang. The gang member probably has the most reasonable stats of the four, and are more or less designed to be the low-level grunts, but try not to forget that they have a 6 dice pool on a pistol (including the equipment dice). Guns ignore Defense and most people aren't wearing armor right out of the gate, so without good cover, they might be rolling a straight 6 at you. Reasonably, we can assume that they'll probably only roll 2 successes - this is the vaunted 'gun-nibble' of gaming forums.
That doesn't bother me, though, and I'll tell you why; lethality has always been a problem for WoD and someone going first usually just wins the combat. (Celerity and Time are what I'm most familiar with, and they're deadly.) A lot of gunfights are just people depressing a lever and hoping that making a fist at someone makes them go away. A lot of gunfire is so inaccurate that many times it's not really even intended to kill anyone so much as frighten them, and people totally unrelated to the conflict are accidently shot. So, two successes on a roll - two health levels, represents graves, minor locations hit, and scratches from nearby shrapnel - an abstraction as much as a d4 knife wound is in Dungeons and Dragons. Really experienced shooters with really high-end guns are significantly more dangerous, and that's PC territory.
Now, there was a Guy Ritchie-esque scenario I ran once for Mage where a fight broke out and a player almost accidently rolled 5 successes on their firearms roll, almost literally blowing the brains out of a combatant when they expected the gun-nibble. Just be aware that any time the damage isn't static, there's the chance you just roll almost sickeningly well.
The SWAT character is almost ridiculous and resembles nothing so much as a heavily armed end-boss, but the issues of the system are best represented by your typical beat cop stats. Why? If you're been following the line since the beginning, there was this issue with the cop being totally over-statted. That's because the job of making the stats was handed off to someone and they did what any typical ST would do in that situation, and just gave him a bunch of stats based on what the writer figured a cop would need. They didn't actually sit down with the rules and determine how much EXP they'd have, they just kind of winged it. That's the kind of thing that happens almost literally all the time. Here's what happened.
The officer has above average stats in every attribute except Manipulation and Presence. They have a Composure of 4, which is listed as being Exceptional. They are above average physically and mentally in every way. They have an Academics of 3, which is one step above making a living at it, and a Specialty in Criminology, which makes them roll 7 dice on that. They have Drive 3, roll the same 7 dice in Investigation, have a listing in every combat skill at 2 or more, Fast Reflexes, Stunt Driver, and a 7 morality in the World of Darkness (keeping in mind this doesn't actually do much). The SWAT team is flat out excessive compared to this, but someone figured out how many EXP this would take and it was sitting at somewhere like 80 after starting. Your average beat cop is sitting at somewhere between Expert and Heroic, which seems to be a little much.
My point is this; try to figure out in your games what you actually expect dots to mean. Some people pump their skills way up, and that's a really reasonable way to play considering how easy it can be to go into exp. debt trying to buy up your abilities in a high-power game. If your session is all about murdering the hell out of vampires or being high-value spies, or anything else like that, you should have a lot of EXP and feel free to spend it in getting really ripped in your specialties. (I guess just don't be too surprised if you get called on to have to drive or negotiate or something and you're terrible at it.) On the other end of that, there's games like mine, where 2 dots is considered to be a general level professional and you've got gear, equipment, and you're trying to angle for favorable situations. Katie's character Henry has one or two dots in a large number of skills making him generally competent and able to navigate a dangerous and complicated environment by himself and in groups. He has specializations and areas where he's better than average (Occult, for example) and areas where he's weaker (combat), but he's designed to be a well-rounded adult. Just determine what level you're playing at and be consistent; if 80 points is a baseline and your characters are specialized, that cop doesn't look all that impressive anymore, but compared to Henry, he's a killing machine. FYI.
There's this bit at the end where they talk about ghosts, and I want you to know that I read everything from Numina and the examples to exorcism (which is where Morality is actually important). If you oust Morality, this is the one place where you'll need to find a replacement or ignore the penalties and bonuses of Morality altogether. They included ghosts and not vampires or magicians probably because they get their own major splats but ghosts don't get a Wraith-equivalent in this game, but what they get here is pretty solid. There are ways for dealing with them and they've got all your typical ghost powers. I've run them against mortals and with mages, and they hold up pretty well. Running them right can even give your players some real chills. I mean, there isn't all that much to say except that the core book does give you some general tools for helpers and baddies, who are mostly mortal but also there are ghosts I guess and the ghosts are good.
I wouldn't have minded some kind of ghoul or zombie-type thing here, though. For a game about spooky supernatural shindigs, we're really light on mechanical supernatural representation. That's one of the biggest failings of the book for me, in a real, functional way. Even a two-page list of some general supernatural powers would be helpful (though you can shove ghostly Numina into service, if you want). I totally acknowledge that the book gives you plenty of tools to infer supernatural abilities by reverse engineering advice about things like Stamina, Defense, Resistance, and the like and I haven't actually had any problems, but I've been at this a while. I'm just saying it'd be nice, is all.
That's it. Except for this note here about the Index.
It's solid. I've used it. The bolded page numbers are really helpful for zeroing in on the information I need and the Index actually has the stuff I want to find in it. Fucking Thank You. This had been a problem since the literal beginning of WoD and the Exalted books were terrible. You were more likely to find a goddamned joke than you where to find a mention of the rules you were looking for. (Sidereals, I'm looking at you.) I shouldn't have to comment on the Index, because we should assume it's solid. But this time it is. Kudos. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it.
I'll do the wrap up and character next time. Thanks for being patient, everyone.
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