Kindly explain the World of Darkness system to me.

[Komodo]

I should mention, I have played a bit of Old World of Darkness, I think it was Vampire: the Dark Ages or something. However, that eventually descended into Grad Theft Blood: Extra Wacky Edition, so I never really got a feel for the World of Darkness as a whole. What bugs me, though, is the dice-system, and that's specifically what I wanted to ask about.

Let me use the example of a simple skill test; off the top of my head, sneaking past security. I know that you roll a number of d10s equal to the dots you have in the relevant attribute (Dexterity) and the relevant skill (Stealth). If memory serves, a roll of 6 or better is a success. The more successes you have, the better your performance.

What bothers me is this: it's too easy. A single die pool has a fifty percent success rate, and almost every action will have at least a single die pool unless the character has been weakened in some way. When performing an action for which you have a not-unreasonable die pool of four, your chances of failing to roll a single success is around 1/16. I remember back in my old game, a challenging task was said to have basically failed because I had only rolled one success. This was because my die pool was high enough that it was nearly inconceivable that I could fail, so the ST added the two-success stipulation to keep things from getting too easy.

Even worse than too easy, though, is that I think the system is meant to encourage degrees of success. Unfortunately, this doesn't work, as far as I've seen. Sure, five successes might be a critical success, but how do you discriminate between one success and four? Systems need a way of providing a binary pass/fail condition in order to be useable. Here, failure seems nearly impossible for anything the character's trained for (seriously, a mortal human character in one of my earlier games managed a 9-die pool just after character creation. I'm not saying that they shouldn't be good at things, but failure should at least be possible for most games, and especially horror games), and "success" isn't a binary condition so much as a confusing stepping ladder of "more successful."

Do I have it right, here, or have I overlooked something? Have there been any other popular complaints/concerns about the system that I haven't listed here? Currently, I'm reading through Genius: the Transgression, and it's excellent, and I understand that a lot of the other of the WoD books are also popular and well-written. WoD does worldbuilding excellently; it's the basic system that bothers me, and I'd like to ask those of you who have had more experience with it if you have also had these problems, what other problems you have seen, and how you've gotten around them. Thank you!

[The Rose Dragon]

One: there are a lot of differences between classic World of Darkness and new World of Darkness. Just so you know that each system are almost entirely different games, and most people agree that new is much better built, mechanically, than classic.

Two: in World of Darkness, one success is rarely enough. This is especially true in classic, where you might easily need 3 or 4 successes to perform anything more difficult than tying your shoes. There are other variables that make things more difficult, such as penalties (that either reduce dice or successes) and target number increases (at least in classic, staking the heart counted only 9 and 10 as successes). A single success in your dice pool does not mean success for the whole action.

Three: for most actions, extra successes are their own reward, in that they either add to your progress in extended actions, prevent others from opposing you in contested actions, and dealing more damage and taking less in combat.

[Mr.Bookworm]

If memory serves, a roll of 6 or better is a success. The more successes you have, the better your performance.

This is one of the main things you're missing. The target number (what you need to roll to get a success) changes depending on the action. 6 is the standard, but doing something really difficult could change that to 9.

As well, there are degrees of success. One success is considered to marginal. You can fix your car, but it's only gonna run for another mile before it craps out again. The default is three successes for a complete success.

But, yeah, the oWoD system does have it's problems, although I am by no means anything close to an expert.

[GolemsVoice]

Yep, the devil lies in the details. One success is often enough to get you SOMETHING, but not very much. So even a character who has 4 dots in the attribute and 4 dots in the skill will, on average, roll 4 successes (if 6+ is a success) which is enough to get him a good result, but this is a character who has trained heavily for this task and is fit to do it, physically or mentally, and 6+ represents a fairly standard task.

So a good character with good stats will more often than not get good results on fairly easy checks belonging to a field he has specialised in. Fair enough, no?

Now, raise the target number, and lower the number of dices available, and suddenly, as would happen with a difficult task or a character not specialised for this (or worse, both), and things are looking pretty grim.

[comicshorse]

Also roll a 1 on a dice and it subtracts a success from your roll. Get into negative successes and you've just botched.

[Khedrac]

Also roll a 1 on a dice and it subtracts a success from your roll. Get into negative successes and you've just botched.So true and well worth remembering.

It also makes this a system where anyone can fail, but to truly mess it up takes an expert - such as the time when my stealth-merchant vampire rolling 8 dice (I think) managed 5 botches when scout stealthily. No mere mortal could fail that badly...

[Teln]

Also roll a 1 on a dice and it subtracts a success from your roll. Get into negative successes and you've just botched.

A popular houserule that later became official is that rolling a 1 does not subtract a success, and you only botch if you roll zero successes and a 1.

[Komodo]

Thank you all for the helpful responses. I'm realizing that a lot of my concerns did come from mixing old and new WoD. Looking back through my handbook, apparently the new standard is an 8+ on a d10 is a success, which makes more sense... But still strikes me as not enough, as you have a 51% chance of at least one success with just two dice (do the math). I can see how this would work for combat and dealing damage, but not for simpler tasks. Also, this:


In World of Darkness, one success is rarely enough.

My question now is what exactly this means. Looking specifically at NWoD here, I did not see any indication of situations requiring multiple successes to be "successful," except that one success is only kinda successful and five is extremely so. This is not really helpful for tasks that are challenging but nonetheless have a very fine line of successfullness: either your Genuis's wonder works or it doesn't. You break through the door or you don't. You either drive out of the incoming spell's range or it hits you. I can realize that, with time, you all might explain to me degrees of success for nearly any action, but be realistic: when DM'ing, a lot of skill tests will be mostly improvised, and your main concern will be looking for a binary pass/fail response on the roll.

Don't get me wrong here: I'm not trying to bash the system, but I am interested in the World of Darkness and want to try and understand these concerns before launching into another game. So then, for those of you with more experience than myself: how do you deal with the "degrees of success" issue? Is one success on a roll really enough to say they've failed, or is it just enough to say "you succeed but stipulation stipulation stipulation"? Do you typically find that failure is a reasonable possibility on rolls without negative die modifiers? (Rememer, just focusing on the New World right now)

Thank you in advance!

[Thrudd]

Thank you all for the helpful responses. I'm realizing that a lot of my concerns did come from mixing old and new WoD. Looking back through my handbook, apparently the new standard is an 8+ on a d10 is a success, which makes more sense... But still strikes me as not enough, as you have a 51% chance of at least one success with just two dice (do the math). I can see how this would work for combat and dealing damage, but not for simpler tasks. Also, this:



My question now is what exactly this means. Looking specifically at NWoD here, I did not see any indication of situations requiring multiple successes to be "successful," except that one success is only kinda successful and five is extremely so. This is not really helpful for tasks that are challenging but nonetheless have a very fine line of successfullness: either your Genuis's wonder works or it doesn't. You break through the door or you don't. You either drive out of the incoming spell's range or it hits you. I can realize that, with time, you all might explain to me degrees of success for nearly any action, but be realistic: when DM'ing, a lot of skill tests will be mostly improvised, and your main concern will be looking for a binary pass/fail response on the roll.

Don't get me wrong here: I'm not trying to bash the system, but I am interested in the World of Darkness and want to try and understand these concerns before launching into another game. So then, for those of you with more experience than myself: how do you deal with the "degrees of success" issue? Is one success on a roll really enough to say they've failed, or is it just enough to say "you succeed but stipulation stipulation stipulation"? Do you typically find that failure is a reasonable possibility on rolls without negative die modifiers? (Rememer, just focusing on the New World right now)

Thank you in advance!


There are no hard and fast rules regarding how to interpret successes. As with most things in the WoD/storyteller system, it is up to the storyteller. In pass/fail situations, the number of successes required is at the storyteller's discretion, as is how to describe or interpret what getting too few successes may mean, if anything.
In opposed rolls, obviously the higher number of successes wins, and almost anything you attempt to do to another person will be an opposed roll. Defenses (mental, physical and social) in oWoD are usually active, not passive. The mechanic can also easily be used for cumulative and cooperative use of skills, such as breaking something. You can hit the door, and hit it again, and when you've made X number of successes, it breaks. In my experience the difficulty number is variable, sometimes set at storyteller's discretion, and sometimes set explicitly in the rules for certain effects. I have only played Old WoD, however, and understand New WoD may suggest a non-variable difficulty of 8 for everything. Think of rolling the dice and the number of successes as just a tool to assist the storyteller in describing the effect of a players' actions.

[TheCountAlucard]

Thing is, the ST is also encouraged to assign bonuses and penalties to rolls.

Sure, you might only need one success to get past the door lock, but if your distracted fumbling with a credit card is penalized enough, you're reduced down to a chance die, where ONLY a ten is a success, and if you roll a one… well, failing to get the door open will no longer be the worst of your problems; perhaps that werewolf you thought you threw off has found your trail again, and you're too busy with the door to notice it sneaking up on you.

[erikun]

I should also point out that, in new World of Darkness, the dicepools of your opponent are subtracted from yours before making a roll. If an opponent's Wits + Composure is around 6 points, then you're loosing 6 dice from your dicepool. As Count Alucard mentioned, getting reduced to 0 dice is a pretty bad situation to be forced into.

Also, you should probably only be using Standard Actions for very common actions, like making a single leap or a bluff from a single sentence. Most actions that are going to be an involved situations would call of Extended Actions, requiring more successes and more chance of failure than just a single roll. Of course, as the Storyteller you can choose what is important (Extended Actions) and what just gets glossed over (Standard Actions) to highlight what you want.

[One Tin Soldier]

I should also point out that, in new World of Darkness, the dicepools of your opponent are subtracted from yours before making a roll. If an opponent's Wits + Composure is around 6 points, then you're loosing 6 dice from your dicepool. As Count Alucard mentioned, getting reduced to 0 dice is a pretty bad situation to be forced into.

Um... No. This is only true in specific situations, where resistance is passive instead of active. And even then, it usually only uses one of their stats and maybe their power stat to subtract from your roll. This doesn't apply for every contested roll, and it definitely doesn't apply for frigging perception checks. :smallconfused: