Dramatic Combat Essay

An Essay on Rules WoD is a great game.  After running a WoD game for two years now, understanding more of its intricacies, I have to admit that I found myself charmed by its simplicity.  Some people call it a "mediocre" system, but I personally find that it stands up to the rigors of actual game play quite nicely and that it even has some solid strengths: Simplicity and invisibility.  You can easily call for a roll, calculate the results, and then sweep the mechanics under the rug and get back to the drama of your story without a hiccup, and it's simple enough while being interesting enough that I often choose it as an introductory game: it's easy to pick up, without being so simple that players stop and ask why we're bothering with a system at all. While essentially flawless in the sense that it won't break down on you in the middle of a game, it does lack a certain flavor and verisimilitude that I look for in alot of my games.  Combat isn't interesting enough, and leaves many players scratching their heads at the result.  None of this is new: We all know about the dreaded "gun nibble," and the way certain factors just blend together into one tasteless grey blob that quietly resolves who kills who, but never leaves your players jumping up and down about how awesome the fight was. I don't generally like to hack rules.  White Wolf isn't paying me to rewrite their rules, quite the opposite: I'm paying to play their games.  I wasted two months trying to fix 7th Sea and threw up my hands halfway through the project, as my experience left me with an even greater awareness of how flawed the game was.  On the other hand, I spent 3 weeks rewriting the WotG martial arts (using the Million Style Manual) and I was delighted with the results, and gained a greater understanding of how well put together WotG really was.  So, with a fire in my belly, I set out to fix WoD, and found it to be far more consistent and balanced than I realized when I first set out.  I wanted to share my results with you, in case anyone else had a similar love of WoD, but wanted a game that had a little more bite, a little more dazzle, to it. Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics Before I continue further, please allow me to examine the nature of the system, and how the contribute to my problems with the system, before I explain how I've attempted to fix them At its core, the WoD system has two engines masquerading, seamlessly, as one: the one-roll resolution system, and the extended roll system.  Both of these have a very different feel. The One-roll system, where you gather up your dice and roll, hoping to get that one success, relies mainly on modifiers, up and down.  Having even just a few dice tends to change the odds drastically in your favor, but after awhile, you have "enough" dice, and adding more mainly serves to offset penalties or increase the chances of getting a critical success.  In this way, the World of Darkness system resembles most other systems out there, and works pretty well. As a highlight, I want you to observe the fact that it's curved.  If you have no dice, you have almost no chance of success.  By the time you have 5, you have achieved about as much as you can, and the curve starts to level off, and further dice are mostly about improving your chances of getting a critical success. Next, we have the extended system, which is really a race to see how few rolls you can get X successes in. In contrast, this graph is almost completely linear.  It details how many successes per roll, and if you need to get, say, 10 successes and you have 3 dice, you'll get it pretty constantly in... 10 rolls.  You might have a roll that's low, and a roll that's high, but generally, you won't see much variation. That's fine, as most of these extended rolls don't have much in the way of drama in any case, and you're mostly curious if you can get that extra success or two in to get away with one or two rolls less than normal. The problem with combat, though, is that it looks too much like graph 2 and not enough like graph 1.  The result is something I like to call whittle Whiff vs Whittle Most fights in WoD are between people with relatively close dice pools, which are quite a few dice higher than defense, and generally inflict a health level or two of damage per roll:  Consider the Strength 3, Brawl 3 character in a fist Fight with a Strength 2, Dex 3, Brawl 3 character.  The result is... not much of a difference, and neither character really hitting the other very hard.  We roll off, again and again, with each character taking a point or two of bashing damage, and then someone finally drops, if the players don't fall asleep from boredom first, "whittling" one another.. You never get a sense of how powerful, how different these stats are. Everything melds together flavorlessly.  The stronger character doesn't really FEEL stronger, and the agile character doesn't feel more agile (especially if he lacks the Wits to go with that Dex).  To really feel a difference, you have to overwhelm your opponent, and that's where you start to see these maxed out character wielding great axes in battle (For that matter, most weapons feel the same, and you just reach for the "biggest" one) Compare and contrast this situation with what you typically see in GURPS, the polar opposite: in a typical GURPS exchange, neither character will hit the other.  They will constantly struggle to hit one another until one of them finally gets lucky (or outsmarts the other) and lands a devastating blow that's often enough to finish the fight (or set his opponent reeling enough that we can secure our victory in short order). Alot of people dislike this constant exchange of blows where neither character hits the other, "whiffing" one another, and we certainly don't want the complexity that GURPS brings (the simplicity and ease of WoD is its strength, remember).  However, "whiff" brings some interesting elements with it: the knowledge that an unlucky roll could have devastating consequences, or that a lucky roll would finish the fight off quite quickly.  We don't want as much whiff as GURPS has, but we do want less whittle than we currently, something to make the players hold their breath a little while the dice are falling to the table, something that helps differentiate the stats out of this mass of grey, and makes the strong characters feel strong, the quick characters feel quick, the tough characters feel tough. Thus, we must focus less on getting many successes (more successes should be gravy), but on getting one.  We should, however, make that one success count for more.  The Dogs of War solution ALMOST did it, and it served as the basis for my redesign, but it only does one of these two things: it makes a single success more lethal, but doesn't make that single success less likely.  The result is that a Shotgun is EVEN BETTER when compared to a revolver than it was before, and that a little old granny who can barely scrape together 3 dice to hit someone is just as accurate before, and even more lethal. Further Considerations Looking deeper into the rules, I discovered a few more little problems that have bothered me for awhile: You're Unconcious or you're Dying: In the World of Darkness, you're either taking bashing damage (after which, you have to make rolls to see if you stay concious) or you're taking Lethal damage (which also makes you check to see if you stay concious AND inflicts internal bleeding on your character).  In real life, it's possible to pass out from the sort of injury that WoD considers lethal (a bullet or a knife wound) without requiring immediate medical attention to stabilize your condition or risk DEATH. You mean I can dodge bullets:  It's true that you can't dodge bullets.  They move too quickly to sidestep, and you certainly can't parry them the way you can parry a weapon.  However, there is a world of difference between someone you've ambushed (no defense, not moving) and someone who is actively avoiding being shot.  It's alot easier to hit a still target than a moving one. While the rules contain "killing blow" rules, that really represents putting your gun to someone's head and firing, or stabbing someone who's been tied up, not a sniper pegging an unaware target from half a mile away (there's still a solid chance of missing such a roll completely).   Furthermore, certain ranged combat moves (Gunslinger) cost your character his defense, which isn't much of a penalty in a ranged-combat fight. Kung Fu!: Fighting Merits are questionably balanced, especially moves like Whirlwind blow.  Ideally, someone who spends X experience on Kung Fu shouldn't be any better than someone who spent the same experience on Brawl.  I know that someone people max out Brawl at character creation and then pile all of their merit points into Kung Fu, but it shouldn't surprise anyone that he's a better hand-to-hand fighter than someone who maxed out brawl and then spent all his Merit points on Resources and Contacts. The Rules can be found here.