Thinking About the Purpose of Mechanics from a Neo-Trad Perspective

[The-Magic-Sword]

Unfortunately, I don't have access to my CoD corebook at the moment, and its been quite some time since we did the playtesting of it for a possible use in an upcoming campaign. So I can't spell out the specifics, and if that leaves you dubious, I can't fault you. I do remember it being an impression multiple players had, but its easy to write that off as setting difficulties too high, and at the moment I can't demonstrate to the contrary.

Nah I'm not doubting you, but I've been diving the book lately to learn the game and was wondering if it might show me something I missed. I'll come across it eventually most likely, its also possible it was a lot of contested rolls which reduce the size of dice pools.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

So I ended up discussing it with my 'neo-trad player' as I sort of think of him, with most of his friction coming from when games don't align with these values, and we actually ended up agreeing that one thing we like conceptually about this system, is that the mechanics that enforce narrative offer a lot of possible counterplay through specific play strategies and character options, and that a lot of the elements are tempting but not involuntary (e.g. most of your dramatic failures are likely going to be via intentionally invoking them for beats, willpower can be used to make feeding in Vampire safer in terms of humanity so if you're conservative with willpower you have better odds of retaining humanity, and there are processes for simply shoring it up, you can avoid picking up too much Blood Potency and can have safer feeding overall) and you can guide the GM to tragedy you're comfortable with via aspirations. At the same time, there's a temptation for the player to live dangerously as a voluntary choice and invoke the dramatic spiral and descent of horrible consequences.

Essentially the game offers the player brakes to exert additional control over it's narrative mechanics, offering them power in exchange for dramatic spiral, but not gluing a brick to the gas pedal and letting them decide when their comfortable with the narrative, in tandem with a lot of advice about checking in with your players about upcoming story elements you might try and put their character through.

Its an interesting case study in the compromises between narrative enforcement and player empowerment-- the net effect is that everyone lives in a world dominated by negotiating the mechanics, but not always by the direct consequences of these mechanics. Its comparable to "what-if-I-avoid-taking-on-too-much-stress" in BITD, but with a lot more player facing tools.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Nah I'm not doubting you, but I've been diving the book lately to learn the game and was wondering if it might show me something I missed. I'll come across it eventually most likely, its also possible it was a lot of contested rolls which reduce the size of dice pools.

If I remember in the next couple days, I'll pull out the hard drive I keep all my PDFs I'm not currently using or reading and see if I can talk about it more intelligibly.

 

[Thomas Shey]

If I remember in the next couple days, I'll pull out the hard drive I keep all my PDFs I'm not currently using or reading and see if I can talk about it more intelligibly.

So, I got around to digging out my PDF of the corebook (caveat: this was the first edition of the nWOD corebook, not technically the CoD book, so its possible something changed here). It appears to me that the issue was that even people with what were avowedly at basic professional levels of skill (2 dots) and average attributes (also 2 dots) could easily find themselves failing pretty often even with a mild penalty (i.e. pushed down to 3 dice, which fails about one time in three). This wasn't a particularly unlikely situation given the points of attributes and skills involve (which were generally relatively conservative--attributes were 5/4/3 which meant at least one of the attribute categories were going to consist typically of all 2's unless you decided to sacrifice an attribute down to 1). It was much worse with a basic skill since you'd start at that level (of course you could get bonus dice too, but that was significantly harder with some skills than others).

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

So, I got around to digging out my PDF of the corebook (caveat: this was the first edition of the nWOD corebook, not technically the CoD book, so its possible something changed here). It appears to me that the issue was that even people with what were avowedly at basic professional levels of skill (2 dots) and average attributes (also 2 dots) could easily find themselves failing pretty often even with a mild penalty (i.e. pushed down to 3 dice, which fails about one time in three). This wasn't a particularly unlikely situation given the points of attributes and skills involve (which were generally relatively conservative--attributes were 5/4/3 which meant at least one of the attribute categories were going to consist typically of all 2's unless you decided to sacrifice an attribute down to 1). It was much worse with a basic skill since you'd start at that level (of course you could get bonus dice too, but that was significantly harder with some skills than others).

Yeah, that makes complete sense, it's probably something that would be good to remember when we eventually play it to not overdo it with penalties that come from me (as opposed to those the system dictates) It's actually kind of interesting because the game frames 2 dots as professional, but it's out of 5 dots, so it's still in the bottom half.

Looking over it, the main saving grace to avoid that is actually willpower I think, you get Resolve + Composure, and recharge one spent one every night of sleep, and it applies a 3 die bonus to the roll, and you can further recharge it via the anchors. But I can certainly imagine it running out or players trying to hoard it for 'important' rolls, or even skimping out on those two attributes and not having more than the default of two willpower.

But if you can use willpower, your 3 die pool (already after the penalty you applied in your example) pops straight up to 6 dice, which is a lot better. Honestly I did not realize willpower was this powerful in the system, in a lot of situations like the ones you're talking about it'll straight double your dice pool, when I'd seen reference to it my brain had actually pegged it as being one additional die.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, that makes complete sense, it's probably something that would be good to remember when we eventually play it to not overdo it with penalties that come from me (as opposed to those the system dictates) It's actually kind of interesting because the game frames 2 dots as professional, but it's out of 5 dots, so it's still in the bottom half.

Looking over it, the main saving grace to avoid that is actually willpower I think, you get Resolve + Composure, and recharge one spent one every night of sleep, and it applies a 3 die bonus to the roll, and you can further recharge it via the anchors. But I can certainly imagine it running out or players trying to hoard it for 'important' rolls, or even skimping out on those two attributes and not having more than the default of two willpower.

But if you can use willpower, your 3 die pool (already after the penalty you applied in your example) pops straight up to 6 dice, which is a lot better. Honestly I did not realize willpower was this powerful in the system, in a lot of situations like the ones you're talking about it'll straight double your dice pool, when I'd seen reference to it my brain had actually pegged it as being one additional die.

The kicker is you don't necessarily, as you note, have a lot of WP, and dealing with even two rolls you can't afford to miss can blow through most of what you have. I don't think I was penalizing things outside the normal scope of the game, and people were failing all over the place as soon as things got at all stressful.

That said, I'll compliment them on one thing; a die penalty isn't nearly as severe as messing with successes needed would be.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

The kicker is you don't necessarily, as you note, have a lot of WP, and dealing with even two rolls you can't afford to miss can blow through most of what you have. I don't think I was penalizing things outside the normal scope of the game, and people were failing all over the place as soon as things got at all stressful.

That said, I'll compliment them on one thing; a die penalty isn't nearly as severe as messing with successes needed would be.

Yeah, I totally get that-- if anything it also seems like a little bit of a possible trap for new players too, because the effect is strong enough to make spending at least a dot each on Resolve and Composure even if they're not your focus to bring your regular total up to 4 or more really smart on basically every character, but the actual baseline of someone who doesn't realize that, and doesn't happen to take those anyway for some other reason, is 2.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, I totally get that-- if anything it also seems like a little bit of a possible trap for new players too, because the effect is strong enough to make spending at least a dot each on Resolve and Composure even if they're not your focus to bring your regular total up to 4 or more really smart on basically every character, but the actual baseline of someone who doesn't realize that, and doesn't happen to take those anyway for some other reason, is 2.

Honestly, even four is only going to get you so far, if you have a fast paced sequence of events. The real issue was the game's definition of competence and how high the failure was in any meaningful roll can easily seem off to a lot of people.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Honestly, even four is only going to get you so far, if you have a fast paced sequence of events. The real issue was the game's definition of competence and how high the failure was in any meaningful roll can easily seem off to a lot of people.

Coming back to this, we're really enjoying Vampire the Requiem now, but humorously I've now seen a player roll 11 dice firsthand and not roll a single success, so now I see what you mean.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Coming back to this, we're really enjoying Vampire the Requiem now, but humorously I've now seen a player roll 11 dice firsthand and not roll a single success, so now I see what you mean.

And of course down in the more normal range, its much easier for that sort of thing (or its milder kin) to happen.