(split) WoD 2.0, Coherence, and Guided Drift

[Landon Darkwood]

Sure. During playtest, I was very concerned with the idea of what was being simulated -- but not completely. The end design is not as representational a system as the old design. It is designed to *generate outcomes* more than *describe actions.* How did you get out of the way of a kife or a bullet? That's ceded to the play group instead of being a chunk of emergent info from the fact that you used Defense X and Soak Y.

That gives the game a very different character from its predecessors.

Well... sort of. The old WoD resolution mechanics didn't do much in the way of describing actions either. What WoD 2.0 does, especially in the area of combat, is take what used to be separate input-based modifiers and collapse them all into the same roll. What used to be skill vs. Dodge, then damage vs. armor + soak, is now skill - Dodge + damage - armor.

That doesn't change how the input-based factors affect things, nor does it change their significance to description: if a person has 3 armor, 1 Dexterity and the attacker has 6 dice in his pool, you know what's responsible for affecting the outcome the most. If the attacker fails and the description of the event doesn't have anything to do with the defender's armor, you're not really being true to the simulation. The fact that the structure of the rolls has changed doesn't take away the reliance on input-based factors to determine outcomes.

On the other hand, collapsing it all into one roll makes things a lot more speedy and efficient, and scaling weapon damage and armor ratings (and equipment ratings, too, if you extrapolate) on the same 1-5 scale keeps the probability curve solid even when lots of modifiers are introduced. So I generally like the change.

The reason the advice is the way it is comes from (among otyher things) the fact that the WoD is not really Gamist. The ST has no ECL, CR or other way to keep from truncating the game with inappropriate encounters with adversity. Combat does not have the choices needed to create sufficiently variegated tactics. By "inappropriate" I do not mean, "too tough" or "unbalanced." I mean things that bar the continuation of play. Characters are expected to encounter the supernatural as anything from a mood to an overwhelming threat -- and each of these things must have significance.

You're right. None of this, however, suggests support for Narrativist play. It just means that, left to their own devices, the dice will tell you that a group of mortals going up against anything else in the other game lines will likely get pasted into red grime. The cold fact of the statistics that you give whatever adversity the PC's face carries a significance of its own, and story doesn't have anything to do with it.

But, as I've been trying to say repeatedly, I don't look at this as a weakness in the system necessarily.

In White Wolf parlance, story is simply the act of giving significance to events. The chapter is advice about the importance of that and how to go about it.

The act of giving dramatic significance to events in a White Wolf game, though, is not something that occurs through assistance by the system - it's just a decision made by the GM. Even the players can't really do this in a way where it has credibility with everyone at the table. The two things are wholly separate from one another, system and story.

By itself, the system makes no effort to distinguish what has "story importance" in play, nor who controls that, nor how it is established through the process of playing the game. It's just a mathematical model for, like you said, generating outcomes to events. Even Willpower as a means of affecting dice outcomes has a lack of focus in terms of "making story", because it isn't connected to any kind of thematic property of the character. It's thoroughly, to my mind, a Sim-supporting game. Only a heavy, heavy mechanics rewrite could see it supporting Narrativist play at all.

But let me be absolutely clear on something, because I don't want to sound like I'm spilling indie-designer vitriol at the White Wolf. I do believe that WoD 2.0 can be played coherently, and that in terms of system alone, no Drift is really required to achieve that coherence. If you're not interested in getting Nar play, WoD 2.0 plays just fine and stands as a vast improvement over the previous edition's mechanics. And the setting material for Vampire: The Requiem is far more attractive to me than the previous game's was.

And I'm not even saying that it can't be played with Narrativism as a goal. What I'm saying is that, as has been the case for previous editions, there is no clear support for Narrativism in the system despite that fact that it seems to be the intented mode of play advertised by the "how to Storytell" text in the book. It doesn't really offer any insight as to who has the credibility and authority to "make story", other than to say that the GM can alter whatever he sees fit to make sure the emergent theme he chose is preserved.

I've seen newbies playing Storyteller get into arguments that emerge from this precise confusion and quit the hobby over it. Now, sure, that's not entirely the game's fault. But neither, I think, is it a correct position to say, "well, those are just idiots" and wash one's hands of it.

All this having been said, I wanted to discuss the following few things relative to this topic, not necessarily at the same time:

What are useful techniques that can be incorporated in a game text to "guide" Drift to one mode or the other when the game system supports a little bit of both? I'll agree that it's nice when a system can easily be adapted to multiple modes of play, when there's flexibility there for a group to adapt the game to its needs. And there's a problem with games being played incoherently that are easily Drifted.

So, let's talk about solutions: how do we get a game text to encourage coherent Drift play at a table without unifying its system structure around a single mode of play? How firmly do those boundaries need to be set in the text, i.e. "if you're playing in this mode use this system, and if in this mode use this one"? At what point do you get to a place where you're really designing two games instead of one?

To what degree, do you guys think, is incoherence okay to have between members at a gaming table so long as everyone is aware of the different priorities and can modify their play accordingly? Is it assumed that everyone's going to have less fun if everyone knows the other people don't grok the same stuff in play that he/she does?

What mainstream games currently on the market have the best potential for improvement with this kind of "how to Drift this game" explanatory text? Which have the easiest Drift potential?

Finally, what do you guys think is the probability of commercial success for putting the Storyteller System out there as a stripped down, Purist for System "generic" game, as an alternative to the inescapably "level and loot" based d20 and the crunchy point-math Hero and GURPS? Is it coherent enough from a Sim perspective to be able to support this kind of thing in its current form, or would it have to vastly change?

I know, I'm sort of flailing at a bunch of topics here: if the thread replies center around one or the other of them, I'll narrow the focus in a subsequent post.


-Landon Darkwood