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.
AttributesI'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.
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/SkillsThe 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 TraitsThis 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/DisadvantagesThis 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 TraitsThis 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 PathsThe 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 PraxisThis 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.
EssenceThis 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 PointsThe 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 5Attributes, 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 ResolutionTask 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.
ConclusionSo 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.
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