Forum > Design, Development, and Gameplay
Hacking the Storyteller System
BoxCrayonTales:
As an experiment, something I wanted to do was devise a retroclone of the Storytelling System that addresses problems I perceive in the rules and settings of White Wolf's game materials. I received enough positive feedback on past snippets that I decided to make a thread here to further discuss my ideas.
This is based on Opening the Dark SRD (a retroclone of ST) [EDIT: Mirrored here if scribd is giving you trouble] with some influence from the unofficial WoD Point Buy Rules (which helpfully breaks down some recurring designs).
I don't have encyclopedic knowledge of every iteration of the ST rules, so if I make any mistakes then I appreciate being corrected or information on obscure rules that might be relevant.
I'll start with character traits. Most ST games have generally used some variation of attributes, skills, advantages/disadvantages, superpowers, and experience points. Your typical game design 101 stuff.
Attributes
I've seen essentially three methods of dealing with attributes: ST-er, ST-ing, and Everlasting.
[*]ST-er pioneered the format of nine attributes divided into Mental, Physical, and Social. The format is basically this: Mental: Intelligence, Wits, Perception; Physical: Strength, Dexterity, Stamina; Social: Charisma, Manipulation, Appearance.
[*]ST-ing adds a second axis of Power/Finesse/Resistance. This replaces Perception and Appearance with Resolve and Composure.
[*]Everlasting divides attributes into Mind, Body, and Soul. Mind and Body are identical to ST-er Mental and Physical. Soul consists of Presence, Inspiration, and Spirit. The sum of Soul attributes is used to determine the character's magic point pool.
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Attributes generally range from 1-5 for normal human beings. Characters normally can't have scores of 0, as that indicates automatic failure in most iterations of the rules. The ST rules almost never went into detail on what happens to characters with scores of 0, scores that negligible but not 0 (e.g. the attributes are human ranges, so Intelligence ratings fall apart when applied to animals), or lacked a score entirely; OtD helpfully provides some rules on this.
Abilities/Skills
The arrangement of skills is arbitrary so I don't really have much to say here. ST-er generally organizes skills by whether they are informal (talents), formal (skills), and technical (knowledge). ST-ing simply organizes them by mental, physical, and social like the attributes. The Trinity Universe games includes default pairs of attributes and skills to save time. Similar to Attributes, Skills are rated from 0-5 for normal humans; 0 indicates no training and 5 indicates you're a PhD, Olympic athlete, or whatever.
Some iterations introduced the concept of "specialties" for Attributes and/or Skills to simulate what other RPGs called sub-skills and similar.
Other Traits
This category includes most traits that aren't attributes or skills, as well as any traits derived from attributes. Examples include willpower, hit points, speed, size, etc. The specifics vary between different iterations.
Hit points are divided into several degrees of damage severity, with most ST games having at least two such degrees. Some iterations have three. Traditionally more severe damage displaces less severe damage, although OtD tracks them separately. Hit points may be fixed for all characters, or be derived from Stamina.
Soak is basically like armor and is derived from Stamina Attribute. If hit points are derived from Stamina, then Soak generally isn't used.
Willpower is used to boost the results of rolls, like similar mechanics in other games. How it is calculated and used varies immensely between different iterations. For example, V5 uses it as mental hit points.
Speed and Size generally aren't statistics in most iterations save CoD. In CoD, Speed is defined as walking rate in feet/second and is derived from the sum of Strength, Dexterity, and a "species factor" (an old periodical's optional rule adds Athletics to that equation). Size is added to Stamina to determine hit points, with the standard adult human being Size 5.
Advantages/Disadvantages
This category includes all the other miscellaneous ways that a character could be quantified. Examples include social connections, wealth, other personal quirks, etc. Advantages may be purchased with experience points or acquired/lost through roleplay.
At this point, the ranking system starts behaving differently since Advantages are not necessarily rated linearly from 0-5 like Attributes and Skills. It is common for Advantages to have "empty" ranks that serve only to increase experience costs.
Disadvantages may or may not be rated. Rated disadvantages are typically used to reduce the costs of advantages, and optionally may be bought off by paying experience points. Unrated disadvantages provide free experience points whenever they impede the character.
The CoD rules introduced rules for temporary advantages/disadvantages known as conditions/tilts. These represent the effects of, for example, poor weather, altered consciousness, broken legs, sudden realizations, etc. These cannot be purchased or removed with experience points, only roleplaying.
Emotional/Personality Traits
This category includes all the traits, rated or unrated, that were introduced to measure a character's personality, moral values, willpower refresh methods, sanity, blah blah blah. Examples include nature/demeanor, virtue/vice, humanity, aspirations, intimacies, etc. These traits have been inconsistently maligned by the fandom for years, and if you're familiar with ST games then I don't need to explain why.
The rated emotional traits were typically used to resist negative mental influences. If Resistance Attributes are being used, then those emotional traits aren't used.
I don't consider these traits remotely necessary. I do think a dark/light side mechanic would be a great way to get players to roleplay, but that's it.
Power Paths
The ST games devised several different ways to represent superpowers, such as Exalted's charms, Aberrant's enhancements, Scion's purviews, etc.
Perhaps the most common are the "power paths." These work a bit like supernatural equivalents of skills in that they are rated from 1-5, but unlike skills you cannot use them for general tasks related to the name of the path. Instead, each rank in a power path gives you one exception-based power like "give a one-word command" or "read auras."
A key problem with the power path mechanic is that it generally forces you to purchase exception-based powers linearly even if they're just a grab bag of tricks. The OtD rules point this out and state that characters may buy powers out of order if it fits their concept. Some games (like Werewolf) had rated powers but didn't place them into linear power paths.
Traditionally there is only one power per rank, but there could be any number of powers for each rank and those choices are arbitrary. The smarter implementations (like WoD Point Buy) let you purchase any number of powers if you have the prerequisite rank.
A key problem with the World of Darkness games is that every splat had to reinvent the wheel when it came to powers. I'm not remotely interested in that: like Nightlife, Everlasting, WitchCraft, or Godbound, I'm going to use universal guidelines for superpowers.
Arts and Praxis
This category is for Ars Magica-style syntactic magic. This grants you far more leeway in creating effects than power paths, with the drawback that it is much more difficult to use. Various ST games have introduced additional mechanics to make inconsiderate magic use excessively dangerous.
A Praxis may be defined however the GM wants, from narrow to broad. Like Ars Magica, a GM could decide to require two Praxis used for every effect: one to define what is being done (e.g. creation, destruction, perception, transformation) and another to define the target (e.g. birds, water, minds, death).
Syntactic magic could potentially be available to any character regardless of their build. If you're inventing a dedicated wizard splat, then it helps to either make syntactic magic unique to them or make them better at it then everyone else. I'll address this in more detail when I start brainstorming splats.
Essence
This category includes the innumerable magic point traits used over the years, often named "essence". It ranges from a simple measurement of how many power points you can hold all the way to several statistics independently measuring the potency of your powers, your resistance to others' powers, how many types of power point pools you can have, etc. The White Wolf school of design likes to be obtuse.
Experience Points
The ST rules let players accumulate experience points to spend on increasing the ranks of PCs' traits. Different iterations have used wildly different costs. Traditionally scaling costs are used, which leads to problems because character creation assigns ranks linearly. CoD introduced the concept of linear experience costs, although it introduced new problems.
I prefer linear experience costs, if only to reduce the amount of math involved.
Traits above 5
Attributes, Skills, and Advantages are traditionally capped at 5 ranks. Different variations of the ST rules have included different methods for adjudicating scores of 6 and beyond.
Commonly characters may be allowed to increase their traits to an ultimate max of 10, and/or purchase Power Paths or Epic/Mega-Attributes that boost the traits further. However, this leads to the common problem of unwieldy dice pools.
Task Resolution
Task resolution for all iterations of ST rules have involved some variation of rolling a number of dice equal to Attribute + Skill and counting all the dice that meet or exceed a value set by the GM. In my opinion, the cleanest implementation were the CoD1e rules. However, I do acknowledge minor critique of that method that is accounted for by the OtD rules. I will discuss that in more detail in future posts.
Conclusion
So the ST rules are serviceable on their own, but IMO White Wolf's writers have generally been poor at game design in general. In following posts I will outline my ideas for reform. In the mean time, I welcome any feedback, critique, advice, suggestions, etc.
trechriron:
First - this is single-handedly your BEST start to a thread like this with the BEST information. You are obviously getting more focused on what you want which can only lead to success.
Second - Another precursor to the new axis was the Action! System style attribute axis - power, finesse, defense (not sure who did it first...).
BoxCrayonTales:
--- Quote from: trechriron;1113173 ---First - this is single-handedly your BEST start to a thread like this with the BEST information. You are obviously getting more focused on what you want which can only lead to success.
Second - Another precursor to the new axis was the Action! System style attribute axis - power, finesse, defense (not sure who did it first...).
--- End quote ---
Thank you. The Action! trivia is interesting. It helps me with regard to avoid copyright claims, since I hope to potentially release work under the OGL. (I refuse to give up any rights to Storyteller's Vault, since I don't like the WoD IP anyway.)
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[STRIKE]Anyway, probably the most important topic to address is the task resolution. ST games use pass/fail dice pools to determine the result of actions. These consist of a few metrics: the Dice Pool itself (generally determined by the sum of a relevant Attribute, Skill, and Modifiers from un/favorable conditions), the Target Number (the minimum result a die needs to produce a pass), the Difficulty (the minimum number of passes required for an action to succeed), and others depending on the circumstances.
(The ST rules don't distinguish between a successful die and a successful action. For clarity, I refer to the former as "passes" to distinguish them.)
OtD uses a variation of the Revised STer mechanics from the Trinity Universe games. Basically: the Dice Pool's Modifiers range from +5 to -5, the Target Number is fixed at 7 (results of 10 count twice), and the Difficulty generally ranges from 1–5 (or potentially higher) as decided by the GM (sometimes by the GM or another player rolling an Opposed Pool). Additionally there is a Pass Threshold (the number of passes that meet or exceed the Difficulty), which is relevant for some actions (such as determining damage inflicted during combat). An optional rule is presented for Extended Tasks, in which the player rolls multiple times (each roll representing one time interval set by the GM) to accumulate passes until they meet the Difficulty (which is generally 8, 10, 15 or higher). Other rules are given but for simplicity I will be ignoring them. This gives two probability sliders: the Modifiers to the Dice Pool and the Difficulty.
The CoD1e rules from 2004 furthers adjust this in the interest of streamlining. The Difficulty is fixed at 1, except for Opposed and Extended actions. Modifiers now distinguish between sources: a modifier from a single source cannot exceed ±5, but modifiers are cumulative without limit; additionally, Modifiers operate on a "Mother May I" logic to emphasize/reward roleplaying/storytelling (e.g. the rulebook mentions wearing a purity ring provides a small bonus to resist seduction). Opposed actions with a Pass Threshold (e.g. combat) are replaced entirely: the attacker makes an unopposed roll which applies the defender's defense statistic as a penalty; this is an Automated Defense.
I personally prefer rules to start simple and provide the option of increasing complexity and alternating rules at the GM's whim. Thus, I prefer the CoD1e rules for task resolution. For comparison, STer generally requires four rolls to resolve one attack: opposed rolls between the attack roll and the defense roll, then opposed rolls between the damage roll and the soak roll (in OtD, Soak is applied as Automated Defense); STing abstracted all that into a single roll without changing the probabilities too much (at least until CoD2e introduced mandatory unnecessary complexity).
However, I do acknowledge that this approach has some flaws compared to the OtD rules. Gargling Goblin points out that it is common tendency for GMs to forget to apply Modifiers before a Dice Pool is rolled. While bonuses are easy to apply as extra dice, penalties cannot be applied without forcing a retroactive re-roll or effectively increasing the Difficulty (thereby breaking the streamlining). Additionally, the Automated Defense mechanic by nature gives the players metagame knowledge of their opponent's defense trait. There might be creative ways to deal with this without breaking the streamlining, and without resorting to apps, but I can't think of any right now.
The root of this problem is that, unlike systems that use a single die to resolve actions (thus generally limited to a single probability slider), Dice Pool and Difficulty are non-equivalent probability sliders. Translating modifiers between them requires probability math. What do we use to calculate translating between them that is easy for players? Under OtD, 1d10 has a 40% chance of rolling 1+ passes. For 2d10 64%, 3d10 78.4%, 4d10 87.04%, 5d10 92.22%, 6d10 95.33%, etc. Every 1d10 rolls an average of ½ pass. Does that mean we should count every ±1 modifier to a Dice Pool as a ±½ modifier to the Difficulty? What do you do with a ±½ modifier?
There are plenty of other potential issues to address, but I consider this the most important. What do you think? Should I treat modifiers differently based on whether they are positive or negative and whether the GM thinks the player deserves to know about it? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of trying to keep the basic rules streamlined?
EDIT: The Storypath System helpfully suggests that Dice Pools are (almost) never modified and that modifiers are represented with Difficulty and Complications. It clarifies that Difficulty instead subtracts from a character’s passes, essentially a combination of STerRev’s Difficulty and STing’s “only one pass needed to succeed” rule. I’ll try that out in following posts and see how things compare.
EDIT: So I decided that I’ll give groups the option to choose which task resolution to use, whether that’s Storytelling or Storypath in style. I’ll refer to these options as “modifiers applied to dice pool” and “modifiers applied to dice results”, respectively. The probability is messy but whatever. I’ll approximate the Storytelling System’s abstracted combat by simply providing the average result of opposed rolls a la BRP statistics blocks.
I’ll try to explain this in a following post.
Again, any feedback is appreciated.[/STRIKE]
BoxCrayonTales:
Anyway, the Story* Systems (S*Ss) uses "pass/fail dice pools" for task resolution and every iteration has felt the need to keep tinkering with this. Sometimes the task resolution is streamlined, other times it is made more complicated. Rather than just picking one iteration and telling everyone who picks up my rules to use that, I will instead provide a modular framework and give groups the option to tinker with it to their heart's content.
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The Essentials
Pass/fail dice pools use some variation of these steps for task resolution:
[*]Assemble a dice pool based on a character's traits.
[*]Roll that dice pool and count the dice that pass a threshold.
[*]Determine another value and subtract that from the passes.
[*]Determine the result of an action based on the net passes.
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The Breakdown
Below I will break these steps down in detail. Note that the jargon I am using is for this specific illustration and won't necessarily match S*S norms. The first instance of game jargon is italicized for clarity.
Step 1: A player assembles the dice pool, a set of dice (typically d6s or d10s), that will be rolled to determine the result of an action. In S*Ss this is generally the sum of two relevant statistics, such as two attributes or an attribute and a skill.
If the dice pool (or relevant attribute) is zero (0) or negative for whatever reason, then the action may automatically fail and/or roll a special dice pool depending on the iteration.
Step 2: The GM sets the target number of the task, ranging from two (2) to the maximum value of the die (6 for d6s, 10 for d10s). The player rolls the dice pool and each die that meets or exceeds TN is counted as a pass. Therefore, rolls of one (1) never count as passes and rolls of max always count as passes.
Note: If no passes are rolled in Step 2, then skip Step 3 and go straight to Step 4.
Step 3: The GM sets the difficulty class (DC) of the task, ranging from zero (0) to an arbitrary cap. This DC is subtracted from the player's passes to calculate the net passes.
If two characters are competing, then determine who is the aggressor and who is the defender. Both the aggressor and the defender roll their own dice pools. The DC set against the aggressor's passes is equal to the defender's net passes.
Note: The passes and net passes are not interchangeable. Certain systems or mechanics may rely on either/or.
Step 4: The net passes are used to calculate the degree of success or failure. If net passes are positive, then the action succeeds (possibly a critical success). If net passes are zero (0) or negative, or no passes were rolled in Step 2, then the action fails (possibly a critical failure).
The S*Ss have a bunch of different ways to adjudicate modifiers (e.g. conditions, tilts, enhancements, complications) and the degree of success (e.g. botches, dramatic failures, exceptional successes, conditions, stunts, consolations). More recent editions have introduced variations of a "nothing never happens" rule (as Qwixalted calls its) that says that events shouldn't come to a screeching halt whenever an action fails. Furthermore, the text reiterates that the games' design intends for players to roll only when sensible and "dramatically" appropriate but not for every single trivial or impossible task because the point of the game is to have fun. This approach should be common sense, but apparently it needs to be explicitly explained for some groups.
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Probability Sliders
Anyway, this gives at least four "probability sliders" for groups to mess with: the dice pool, the difficulty class, the target number, and the passes.
Dice Pool: The size of dice pools always varies based on the PCs traits. In Storyteller and Storytelling further modifiers are applied, in Storypath modifiers are (almost) never applied.
Storytelling 2e introduces various "conditions" that modify dice pools, inspired by the "aspects" mechanic in FATE.
Allowing dice pools to be reduced to zero or negative values requires adding a second task resolution mechanic to account for such instances. In Storytelling, this simply forces a lone die roll against TN10 and DC0 with the risk of fumble pass (see below). In Opening the Dark, a scaling "faint hope" pool (equal to inverted value of original dice pool +2) is rolled against DC=((DC of original pool)+(faint hope dice pool -1)). EDIT: If you think that seems clunky, you aren't alone. Somehow a house rule for Storytelling is much simpler.
Difficulty Class: The difficulty class may be fixed or variable. In Storyteller and Storypath it scales with the "difficulty" of an action, whereas in Storytelling it is fixed at 0 for simple actions.
Target Number: The target number may be fixed or variable. In Storyteller it is variable, in Storytelling and Storypath it is (generally) fixed at 7 or 8.
Additional thresholds may be added to determine whether a die roll produces a special pass (see below).
Special Passes: The passes may be modified by introducing "exploding" passes, "double" passes, "negative" passes, and "fumble" passes.
A die that rolls the max value (6 for d6, 10 for d10) may produce an exploding pass or a double pass. An exploding pass counts as one pass and grants one bonus die for the player to roll (thus potentially increase their passes), while a double pass simply counts as two passes. Sub-systems may provide situations that lower the threshold for these bonus passes. Storytelling uses exploding passes ("#-again"), while Storypath uses double passes ("double-#s").
A negative pass occurs if a die rolls one (1), and each negative pass increases the difficulty class by one. In other words, negative passes are subtracted from passes to determine net passes. Storyteller applies negative passes to all rolls, whereas Storytelling only applies them under certain circumstances ("1s-subtract").
A fumble pass occurs if a die rolls one (1). This has no effect on its own. However, a failure may be worsened to a critical failure if the player rolled any fumble passes. When combined with negative passes, this produces weird results; a typical revision is that this only occurs if the failure was due to a lack of passes, and not if net passes were reduced to zero or negative after subtracting difficulty class.
What's the difference? Each rule affects the results of rolls differently. Modifiers to dice pool or DC alter the average and maximum number of passes. Modifiers to TN alter the average number of passes but not the maximum possible passes. Exploding passes and double passes increase the average and maximum passes. Negative passes reduce the average passes but not the maximum passes.
Modifiers to dice pool or DC become increasingly irrelevant as a character's traits increase. By contrast, the effect of varying TN, bonus passes, and negative passes scale with character traits. However, I suspect that you can accomplish a similar effect by forcing characters to roll twice and take the lower roll.
Can this get clunky? Totally. The Story* Systems have a tendency to use more probability sliders than they really need, sometimes redundantly. The really annoying part is that they never explain the math behind the probabilities or their motivations for using any particular slider.
If your aim is to be as streamlined as possible and never worry about needing to introduce new probability sliders to cover oversights, then you will want to use a single probability slider that affects all characters equally regardless of how high their traits are. In my extremely unscientific estimation, and correct me if I'm wrong, the only single probability slider that does so is TN or the presence/absence of exploding/subtracting dice.
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Roll Results
The Story* systems generally recognize around two to four degrees of success and failure. These include success ("yes"), failure ("no"), and critical versions thereof ("yes, and", "no, and"). More recent editions have tried to introduce other degrees ("yes, but", "no, but").
On a success ("yes"), multiple net passes are often used to boost the qualitative and/or quantitative effect. Typically the net passes affect severity, duration, range, area of effect, etc. In Storytelling, successful actions with binary outcomes count the passes (not just net passes) to determine whether the success is upgraded to a critical success ("yes, and").
Storypath introduces complications to cover situations where success comes at a cost ("yes, but"); net passes may be spent to produce stunts or counter complications.
A failure ("no") may be "upgraded" to a critical failure ("no, and") under certain circumstances. More recent editions add more detailed effects to failures, such as Storytelling's conditions or Storypath's consolations ("no, but").
Critical failures ("no, and") have varied noticeably between editions in terms how they happen and their effects. In Storyteller, a critical failure occurs if a roll fails and shows any fumbles (i.e. "botches"). In Storytelling, a critical failure occurs if a chance die fumbles; the problem with this was that players could simply decide not to attempt actions they knew could result in critical failure. In Storytelling 2e, players may upgrade a failure to a critical failure for free XP (and critical failures have been reduced in severity across the board compared to 1e).
RPGs in general seemingly train us to fear failures, but I think that adopting a pass/pass philosophy over a pass/fail philosophy helps a lot. If you're going to put so much thought into detailing degrees of success, then it makes sense to me to put the same amount of detail into degrees of failure.
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Conclusion
I've been writing this for several hours, so I'm forcing myself to stop now.
There's various other minor stuff I haven't mentioned, but that's the gist of it.
I personally prefer simplicity and streamlining. I do acknowledge that others might prefer clunky rules or that streamlined rules may introduce their own flaws.
What do you think? Any feedback is appreciated.
Stephen Tannhauser:
--- Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1113341 ---What do you think? Any feedback is appreciated.
--- End quote ---
I think you've done a very useful analysis/breakdown of the various systems here. In terms of managing the number of probability-adjustment gauges, I myself have always favoured the basic three with a fixed definition of their "role" in the process:
1) Dice Pool size always reflects PC ability. Any modifiers that specifically alter the individual character's capacity to perform a task are applied here. These are mostly applied by the referee, but some rules might allow players to deliberately take a penalty or bonus in return for a countereffect of some other type (e.g. a die bonus for taking extra time on an action, or a die pool penalty on an attack in return for gaining a bonus on defense).
2) Target Number (TN) always reflects innate task difficulty. Any modifiers that affect or determine how difficult the task is to perform for any relevant attempting character are applied here. These are almost always applied by the referee, although the effects of one roll might allow players to modify the TN of a follow-up roll.
3) Number of "Passes" (to use your terminology, although I prefer "successes" myself) always reflects degree of outcome. A single pass on a roll allows the attempted action to accomplish its absolute minimum possible effect; whether this outcome is adequate for the character's purposes is a different measure. I generally prefer a mechanic where a single pass will usually get you the absolute minimum to get by with (if the player is willing to settle for that) and passes beyond that improve your results, rather than a "second difficulty rating" where you have to beat not only a given TN but beat it a given number of times. (In practice, the effect works out much the same, but the difference between a target chosen by the player as a bonus and a requirement imposed by the referee as a minimum does have a significant psychological effect, I think.)
In general, one key probability note I find useful for die-pool systems with floating TNs is this:
-- When TN is in the middle of its range, modifiers to die pools make more difference. In a d6 pool, gaining +4d at the price of going from TN 3 to TN 4 is well worth it.
-- When TN is near the high or low end of its range, modifiers to TN make more difference. Reducing TN 10 to TN 9 in a d10 pool literally doubles your success chances per die.
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