Vampire: The Masquerade

[herald]

But the rule that most people forget is that if the difficulty number matches your die poll number, you can forgo rolling the dice and declare automatic success.

I.E. I have a dice poll of 12 and the difficultly is 9. I can declare an automatic success because 12>9.

Granted, this is considered "minimal" success and many things require "multiple" successes. But by and large when I ran games, you could bypass the need to roll on many insignifigant things and only rolled when you really had to.

 

[Cedric]

Damn rule of "1's"

The most recent edition of Vampire went a long ways towards fixing this...in what just happens to be the same way I've always house ruled it for WoD games.

In order to "botch" you have to roll some 1's and no successes. If you have just one success, you will not botch.

Now if you are trying the insanely difficult diff 10 task...then for something that hard there should be a chance of spectacularly failing. But if you are bound and determined to at least not royally screw up...spend a willpower point. Problem solved. You may not succeed, but you won't botch either.

I've also house ruled it so that if you have more dice then the difficulty of the task. You ignore a single one to determine whether you botch. And for every 2 more dice you have then the difficulty, ignore another 1.

So if it's a diff 6 task and you have 10 dice. You ignore two 1's only for determining if you botch.

Cedric

 

[Kesh]

bit blurry, and it would take more work on the part of the players to create that connection.

I think, personally, that World of Darkness games tend not to address this. They just sort of reason that because I am Critter X, I am compelled to give a you-know-what about Issue or Situation Y. I could imagine that if I were a neophyte vampire, I would be more concerned about dealing with my insatiable bloodlust than with what some Toreador harpy thinks about my fashion sense. Likewise, if I were a newly changed werewolf, I would focus most of my time trying to figure out a way to keep my loved ones safe without resorting to suicide. I probably would not take kindly to some religious zealot telling me, "It's a good thing. Really."

Thing is, that's part of the whole setting. Vampires in the WoD are territorial creatures of habit. If your neophyte vampire doesn't play the politics, he could feed on someone who's protected by another vampire or part of their 'herd'. He'd be dead pretty quick.

 

[Cedric]

I could imagine that if I were a neophyte vampire, I would be more concerned about dealing with my insatiable bloodlust than with what some Toreador harpy thinks about my fashion sense.

It's recommended in the books, and I follow this in my game...that the players are not "newly turned" vampires. They are perhaps neophytes in the social world of vampires. But have had their year or two or education to grow accustomed to day to day life (night to night unlife?) and the eternal struggles of food and (un)living.

Cedric