![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I quickly realized that the rules update wasn't the whole thing. I don't know why I didn't realize that sooner, but I really hadn't looked at it so when I sat down to go through it, the go-through was a lot quicker than I initially anticipated. I finished this morning, but honestly I have to admit that I committed the grave sin of generally skimming through. Yeah, I read it, but it wasn't the deep read of a philosophy text where you actually hit each word. I did that with the core book, probably didn't need to, and it took just this side of forever to complete. There's no need. I'll bold the topics I wanna hit; we're doing this whole thing right now.
The Fiction
You might recall that I liked the fiction in the core. It's old news to me by now, so every story was a re-read and all of this stuff was new. The fiction in the rules addendum all had to do directly with the God Machine and benefitted a lot from their focus. The stories in the first chapter of the core were solid and hinted at the spooks in the shadows of the World of Darkness but the chapter fiction breaks tended to be a little weak. The first story in G-M is one page and tightly written; the rest of the fiction is very good as well. I give it an A.
Scope of the Changes
I like the changes because I like just a little more granularity in the rule set than the Core provides. This is coming from someone who liked the core book enough that I consider it one of the 10 best systems I've seen. Or maybe the top 3 for ease and usability. But the changes are considerable In fact, the changes are so considerable that I can easily see a player or an ST seeing the scope of the modifications and additions of sub-systems and deciding that they're just not going to apply them and keep using the core as it was presented. Changing from using the core rules to using the updated rules mid-campaign would be incredibly difficult, since the experience point system changes dramatically and the Conditions, Aspirations, and Tilts require the Beat system to use. None of these things were present before, and many of them hinge on each other. The costs for Merits changes and Morality is changed to Integrity. Are they good changes? I like them, they're comprehensive, but they add significant complexity to the elegant simplicity of the initial core system.
I consider them to be WoD Advanced. Use at your discretion. The core system is perfectly playable and the players will need to be extensively briefed before changing. Let's go into some particulars, though.
Aspirations. Doors. V&V, Integrity, Conditions, Beats, and Tilts.
There are some minor modifications to character creation, like Attributes, Skills, Merits, and the like over a rating of 5 don't count double on initial point costs. I looked at Andrew, the character, and that doesn't matter at all to him. In fact, with the exception of some additional Merits, there isn't anything to do with him, so Andrew doesn't get updated. The change in the EXP system is sufficient enough that I'd need to rebuild him, and then he wouldn't look any different at all really, except maybe a different Virtue and Vice, and he'd have an Integrity stat at 7 instead of Morality. And maybe some Aspirations. Let's not.
Multiple Specialities can affect rolls. That's nice. There's some work done on Specialties and there are some good Merits. That's next.
The updated system introduces everything in the title. I like these things, but they complicate the game in a significant way. What they do is codify things that didn't have names in the core system but were kind of present if one thought about how the game was likely to play out.
Aspirations are things the character wants to do. They're like the Motivations listed in Exalted, and since Core was released in that shadow-time when Exalted was first hitting shelves, then 2nd Ed. Exalted hit with Motivations and the team seemed to like them, they applied the same thing to WoD. It takes kind of a long time to learn what they're for, though, so I'll just spit it out. Aspirations are goals, and it's harder to get a character to act against their goals with social rolls. Achieving a goal gives you a tick towards more EXP, and you need to set a new one. Personally, I think that achieving goals is looked at a little too lightly, and maybe should just flat-out give you 1 experience point, since it takes 5 Beats to get just one EXP.
Beats is how you get experience points, now. End of session? Beat check mark. Achieve a goal? Beat. Opt to fail big time? Beat. 5 Beats = 1 EXP. I have a problem with how the designers allocate beats, though. Finishing a session and achieving a goal is worth as much as botching rolls intentionally or being afflicted by shitty status ailments. Previously, you were rewarded for learning things and generally progressing, and now you gain significantly more experience points by screwing up or bogging game sessions down than you do for completing a characters goal. I'd probably limit the number of beats you could gain from being afflicted from 1 per scene per tilt or condition to 1 per session for any of them. I just don't like the idea of every character (let's say between 3 and 5) intentionally having guns jam and explode, getting hit by their own swords, or crashing cars constantly in each scene just to get access to sweet, sweet exp. And you know they will - if the stakes seem low enough, it'll be prat-fall sitcom land. I promise you it'll go from the dramatic ideal they initially proposed to a frustrating farce as characters strive to fuck up dramatically in every scene over fulfilling their relatively difficult goals.
Beats aren't inherently a bad idea. But we're back to the old days where every character would strive to hit that sweet spot of 7 pts. of Flaws to get the Bonus Points for character creation because they were too sweet to pass up. Will every group do this? Probably not. But the person who does is rapidly going to out-pace their friends and people who are suckers for the drama spotlight are going to press this button as hard as they can. I know these people. Just beware.
The changes to the Virtue and Vice system and Morality is probably the best change in the book. V&V were boring. The available V&V were often too similar to each other, anyhow. It's a lot more open, and I like that. Closer to Nature and Demeanor (which wasn't really a bad system and, to me, remains a good alternative.) The writers went out of their way to discuss the problems they had with Morality in the first go-round - their intentions and their mistake, and the proposed solution of Integrity is far more interesting and character specific. They have you ask 5 questions, including 'what's the worst thing your character has ever done' and 'what have they forgotten' to set up triggers that can afflict the character. Integrity, which replaces Morality, is their ability to function autonomously.
They also throw in two new Merits - Virtuous and Vice-Ridden, where you can have 2 Virtues or Vices instead of one. I wish they had put them in the Merits section, but they didn't. I can see a lot of people taking these at tables where the ST plays legit and doesn't get huffy when you try to regain Willpower with these (which should happen frequently enough to matter.) They've also got recommendations on rate of return on Willpower in the side-bar. They talked about allowing players to hit those notes when they run low, and I thought it would have been cool to see a player running low on Willpower and try to figure out a way to access a Virtue to totally refill with something of a Devil's Bargain - put themselves at risk for access to all your WP when you need it most. Oh well, I did it for them here. Never say I didn't give you any ideas.
Conditions and Tilts are combination status-effects and flaws. Conditions apply outside of combat and Tilts are applied and apply in combat. They're just official tags for status effects which can be helpful for home-brewers to use as an officially sanctioned and recognized sub-system to integrate into new abilities, but they're part of what adds so much complexity to the system. Apply as needed.
Doors are the social system that maybe the game didn't need, but as long as they felt like they needed to add new systems for combat, they probably wanted to beef up social rolls and give those skills something to actually interact with. (I thought, "Add teeth to those gears." but I didn't know if that'd be clear enough. I just liked the wording enough to include.) Just know that WW added a significant social system that removes a lot of guesswork, and that can be either a good thing or a bad thing. Personally, I like it but I also felt that the social system they had in the Core book was already pretty robust. Like I said before, a title like 'Doors' gives you another mechanical hinge to hang new abilities on, but every time you do that you add a baroque twist to a minimalist system. It feels modular. Like, if you don't enjoy it, I don't think it's all that difficult to remove. (When you do, you slightly lessen the importance of Aspirations, but I don't know how much Aspirations are strictly needed, either.)
Merits
Most of the old Merits are here. Some are changed. Some, like Encyclopedic Knowledge, are toned down and made cheaper and others are given additional tiers. Some are given more complexity (Allies), and to my mind, you might use the old ones or the new ones as you prefer. They specify that Style Merits are different from regular Merits in that they have the Style tag appended to them, and not all the Styles are combat-oriented. One is Parkour. Another is Fast-Talking, which helps you with Doors. I'm already so 'meh' on the use of Styles, and I don't really know why. I feel they're kind of inelegant, I guess? If you like them, though, you might be pleased. There are a good number of them here! They're not bad, it's just hard for me to get excited about them in general, I suppose.
Specialties
Specialties get a lot of work, here. They get a little bit of beefing up from the rules update in general (multiple Specialties can affect the same roll if they make sense, up to a certain amount). There's a Merit that amplifies a +1 to a +2 (and I don't know why it's a Merit so much as it could easily just be a second purchase). There's one that allows a relevant Merit from another skill to apply to a skill roll. Specs are cheaper than Skill bumps, so I can easily see mid-campaign characters just stocking up on relevant Merits and Specs instead of Skills. Art imitates life.
Ghosts and Goblins
I'm not going to say too much here except that I appreciate that the free rules bump provides so much generic information on Spirits, Ghosts, and Angels. (Angels are creepy. Also good.) There's a brief but really cool description of the Underworld which implies that ghosts could be a lot more interesting than they typically are presented. They mention that things above Rank 5 exist and are basically Plot Devices, which I don't really care for. Man, I'm sick to death of the Plot Device. It's so often just lazy STing - "Nah, they're just too cool for school. Your Everything has no affect. Better do what it says or Rocks Fall." ugh. That's knee-jerk of me, but I've just been there so often.
Misc.
I like the book. I like the modifications. I didn't see anything besides the transition of virtues and vice, and morality to be something the game really needed, though. The game line is moving forward with all of this stuff in tow, and you either like how it was and play the game with the stuff that's available (and that's considerable enough to play forever without needing new stuff) or you get on board. I don't like how they use Beats, and I think it needs work. I'm a little disappointed that it's so sloppy, really. They didn't tune the rules so much as add several new, more complicated sub-systems, and I can see someone looking over this whole thing and just thinking, "Nope. They made a hash of it." But I largely like the new subsystems. They actually make what I want to do in the future easier. Take that for what it's worth. Still, Beats are so sloppy that I don't know if I'll use them at all, even if I use the whole other system sets.
I appreciate the expanded weapons and armor charts and I see they changed the rules for minimum strength and how the Spear works. (I chuckled a little, actually.) It also seems like I'm in the book - check the rules for auto-fire, there I am. I checked the writers, but it doesn't look like any of them know me, so I guess it was just a total accident. Weston's not exactly a common name, though, so I was definitely a little surprised!
I guess I'd give the book a B-. Good overall presentation, good ideas, adds a lot of complexity to a very streamlined system but modular, and I don't like Beats. (The more I think of them, the more I don't care for them, and they're a fairly major part of the new systems, tying everything together and affecting the point values of the EXP system.) Still, they're not that hard to wrench out, and I probably will in the future in favor or arbitrary exp. amounts I've used before or the EXP system in the core book that I've actually used to fairly good effect in our Core game. (The prices of Special Powers are enough that I'd probably think again, though, when I do that.)
If this is used in the new Exalted 3 system, I'll be very interested to see how it works with Charms, but I think they've said they're not going to make that a Storyteller system game.
The Fiction
You might recall that I liked the fiction in the core. It's old news to me by now, so every story was a re-read and all of this stuff was new. The fiction in the rules addendum all had to do directly with the God Machine and benefitted a lot from their focus. The stories in the first chapter of the core were solid and hinted at the spooks in the shadows of the World of Darkness but the chapter fiction breaks tended to be a little weak. The first story in G-M is one page and tightly written; the rest of the fiction is very good as well. I give it an A.
Scope of the Changes
I like the changes because I like just a little more granularity in the rule set than the Core provides. This is coming from someone who liked the core book enough that I consider it one of the 10 best systems I've seen. Or maybe the top 3 for ease and usability. But the changes are considerable In fact, the changes are so considerable that I can easily see a player or an ST seeing the scope of the modifications and additions of sub-systems and deciding that they're just not going to apply them and keep using the core as it was presented. Changing from using the core rules to using the updated rules mid-campaign would be incredibly difficult, since the experience point system changes dramatically and the Conditions, Aspirations, and Tilts require the Beat system to use. None of these things were present before, and many of them hinge on each other. The costs for Merits changes and Morality is changed to Integrity. Are they good changes? I like them, they're comprehensive, but they add significant complexity to the elegant simplicity of the initial core system.
I consider them to be WoD Advanced. Use at your discretion. The core system is perfectly playable and the players will need to be extensively briefed before changing. Let's go into some particulars, though.
Aspirations. Doors. V&V, Integrity, Conditions, Beats, and Tilts.
There are some minor modifications to character creation, like Attributes, Skills, Merits, and the like over a rating of 5 don't count double on initial point costs. I looked at Andrew, the character, and that doesn't matter at all to him. In fact, with the exception of some additional Merits, there isn't anything to do with him, so Andrew doesn't get updated. The change in the EXP system is sufficient enough that I'd need to rebuild him, and then he wouldn't look any different at all really, except maybe a different Virtue and Vice, and he'd have an Integrity stat at 7 instead of Morality. And maybe some Aspirations. Let's not.
Multiple Specialities can affect rolls. That's nice. There's some work done on Specialties and there are some good Merits. That's next.
The updated system introduces everything in the title. I like these things, but they complicate the game in a significant way. What they do is codify things that didn't have names in the core system but were kind of present if one thought about how the game was likely to play out.
Aspirations are things the character wants to do. They're like the Motivations listed in Exalted, and since Core was released in that shadow-time when Exalted was first hitting shelves, then 2nd Ed. Exalted hit with Motivations and the team seemed to like them, they applied the same thing to WoD. It takes kind of a long time to learn what they're for, though, so I'll just spit it out. Aspirations are goals, and it's harder to get a character to act against their goals with social rolls. Achieving a goal gives you a tick towards more EXP, and you need to set a new one. Personally, I think that achieving goals is looked at a little too lightly, and maybe should just flat-out give you 1 experience point, since it takes 5 Beats to get just one EXP.
Beats is how you get experience points, now. End of session? Beat check mark. Achieve a goal? Beat. Opt to fail big time? Beat. 5 Beats = 1 EXP. I have a problem with how the designers allocate beats, though. Finishing a session and achieving a goal is worth as much as botching rolls intentionally or being afflicted by shitty status ailments. Previously, you were rewarded for learning things and generally progressing, and now you gain significantly more experience points by screwing up or bogging game sessions down than you do for completing a characters goal. I'd probably limit the number of beats you could gain from being afflicted from 1 per scene per tilt or condition to 1 per session for any of them. I just don't like the idea of every character (let's say between 3 and 5) intentionally having guns jam and explode, getting hit by their own swords, or crashing cars constantly in each scene just to get access to sweet, sweet exp. And you know they will - if the stakes seem low enough, it'll be prat-fall sitcom land. I promise you it'll go from the dramatic ideal they initially proposed to a frustrating farce as characters strive to fuck up dramatically in every scene over fulfilling their relatively difficult goals.
Beats aren't inherently a bad idea. But we're back to the old days where every character would strive to hit that sweet spot of 7 pts. of Flaws to get the Bonus Points for character creation because they were too sweet to pass up. Will every group do this? Probably not. But the person who does is rapidly going to out-pace their friends and people who are suckers for the drama spotlight are going to press this button as hard as they can. I know these people. Just beware.
The changes to the Virtue and Vice system and Morality is probably the best change in the book. V&V were boring. The available V&V were often too similar to each other, anyhow. It's a lot more open, and I like that. Closer to Nature and Demeanor (which wasn't really a bad system and, to me, remains a good alternative.) The writers went out of their way to discuss the problems they had with Morality in the first go-round - their intentions and their mistake, and the proposed solution of Integrity is far more interesting and character specific. They have you ask 5 questions, including 'what's the worst thing your character has ever done' and 'what have they forgotten' to set up triggers that can afflict the character. Integrity, which replaces Morality, is their ability to function autonomously.
They also throw in two new Merits - Virtuous and Vice-Ridden, where you can have 2 Virtues or Vices instead of one. I wish they had put them in the Merits section, but they didn't. I can see a lot of people taking these at tables where the ST plays legit and doesn't get huffy when you try to regain Willpower with these (which should happen frequently enough to matter.) They've also got recommendations on rate of return on Willpower in the side-bar. They talked about allowing players to hit those notes when they run low, and I thought it would have been cool to see a player running low on Willpower and try to figure out a way to access a Virtue to totally refill with something of a Devil's Bargain - put themselves at risk for access to all your WP when you need it most. Oh well, I did it for them here. Never say I didn't give you any ideas.
Conditions and Tilts are combination status-effects and flaws. Conditions apply outside of combat and Tilts are applied and apply in combat. They're just official tags for status effects which can be helpful for home-brewers to use as an officially sanctioned and recognized sub-system to integrate into new abilities, but they're part of what adds so much complexity to the system. Apply as needed.
Doors are the social system that maybe the game didn't need, but as long as they felt like they needed to add new systems for combat, they probably wanted to beef up social rolls and give those skills something to actually interact with. (I thought, "Add teeth to those gears." but I didn't know if that'd be clear enough. I just liked the wording enough to include.) Just know that WW added a significant social system that removes a lot of guesswork, and that can be either a good thing or a bad thing. Personally, I like it but I also felt that the social system they had in the Core book was already pretty robust. Like I said before, a title like 'Doors' gives you another mechanical hinge to hang new abilities on, but every time you do that you add a baroque twist to a minimalist system. It feels modular. Like, if you don't enjoy it, I don't think it's all that difficult to remove. (When you do, you slightly lessen the importance of Aspirations, but I don't know how much Aspirations are strictly needed, either.)
Merits
Most of the old Merits are here. Some are changed. Some, like Encyclopedic Knowledge, are toned down and made cheaper and others are given additional tiers. Some are given more complexity (Allies), and to my mind, you might use the old ones or the new ones as you prefer. They specify that Style Merits are different from regular Merits in that they have the Style tag appended to them, and not all the Styles are combat-oriented. One is Parkour. Another is Fast-Talking, which helps you with Doors. I'm already so 'meh' on the use of Styles, and I don't really know why. I feel they're kind of inelegant, I guess? If you like them, though, you might be pleased. There are a good number of them here! They're not bad, it's just hard for me to get excited about them in general, I suppose.
Specialties
Specialties get a lot of work, here. They get a little bit of beefing up from the rules update in general (multiple Specialties can affect the same roll if they make sense, up to a certain amount). There's a Merit that amplifies a +1 to a +2 (and I don't know why it's a Merit so much as it could easily just be a second purchase). There's one that allows a relevant Merit from another skill to apply to a skill roll. Specs are cheaper than Skill bumps, so I can easily see mid-campaign characters just stocking up on relevant Merits and Specs instead of Skills. Art imitates life.
Ghosts and Goblins
I'm not going to say too much here except that I appreciate that the free rules bump provides so much generic information on Spirits, Ghosts, and Angels. (Angels are creepy. Also good.) There's a brief but really cool description of the Underworld which implies that ghosts could be a lot more interesting than they typically are presented. They mention that things above Rank 5 exist and are basically Plot Devices, which I don't really care for. Man, I'm sick to death of the Plot Device. It's so often just lazy STing - "Nah, they're just too cool for school. Your Everything has no affect. Better do what it says or Rocks Fall." ugh. That's knee-jerk of me, but I've just been there so often.
Misc.
I like the book. I like the modifications. I didn't see anything besides the transition of virtues and vice, and morality to be something the game really needed, though. The game line is moving forward with all of this stuff in tow, and you either like how it was and play the game with the stuff that's available (and that's considerable enough to play forever without needing new stuff) or you get on board. I don't like how they use Beats, and I think it needs work. I'm a little disappointed that it's so sloppy, really. They didn't tune the rules so much as add several new, more complicated sub-systems, and I can see someone looking over this whole thing and just thinking, "Nope. They made a hash of it." But I largely like the new subsystems. They actually make what I want to do in the future easier. Take that for what it's worth. Still, Beats are so sloppy that I don't know if I'll use them at all, even if I use the whole other system sets.
I appreciate the expanded weapons and armor charts and I see they changed the rules for minimum strength and how the Spear works. (I chuckled a little, actually.) It also seems like I'm in the book - check the rules for auto-fire, there I am. I checked the writers, but it doesn't look like any of them know me, so I guess it was just a total accident. Weston's not exactly a common name, though, so I was definitely a little surprised!
I guess I'd give the book a B-. Good overall presentation, good ideas, adds a lot of complexity to a very streamlined system but modular, and I don't like Beats. (The more I think of them, the more I don't care for them, and they're a fairly major part of the new systems, tying everything together and affecting the point values of the EXP system.) Still, they're not that hard to wrench out, and I probably will in the future in favor or arbitrary exp. amounts I've used before or the EXP system in the core book that I've actually used to fairly good effect in our Core game. (The prices of Special Powers are enough that I'd probably think again, though, when I do that.)
If this is used in the new Exalted 3 system, I'll be very interested to see how it works with Charms, but I think they've said they're not going to make that a Storyteller system game.
Tags:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
You've managed to put into words what I suspected about Beats, but couldn't verbalize. Overall, the only rules updates I'd likely adopt are Specialties and Integrity. I missed the Underworld stuff - is it consistent with the Underworld as presented in Book of the Dead?
From:
no subject
I was surprised that more of the fixes weren't just collating data from other games and integrating the new setting. Beats, Tilts, Doors, and Conditions seem like good optional subsystems, and Aspirations don't actually do much.
I liked the changes to Virtues, Vices, and Morality enough that I was really positive going into the book and actually felt kind of disappointed by the time I finished. Probably because I felt that the core was a solid 'A' in terms of quality and even a 'B', which is normally very good (these are really rough qualities) is still kind of a letdown.
I like the book, but not without considerable reservation, and I'm a little let down that I don't feel that I could switch my game to the new rules set in mid-campaign without re-tooling everything.