Anatomy of Failed Design: nWoD

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Anatomy of Failed Design: nWoD

Post by Username17 »

First off, as part of this series on failed design we are going to talk about nWoD. Which pretty much means that we are talking about Vampire, because any and all discussions of nWoD Werewolf or Mage pretty much boil down to doing Cat Duck Reviews. Seriously those games are the Matrix 2 of WoD: none of the conflicts matter or solve anything so you're better off just leaving rather than interacting with the plot on any level.

But who cares, right? People don't care about the world of darkness because of Werewolf, they care about it because I've played Vampire with every single woman I've had sex with - and I'm not alone. So the very real problems that the nWoD has in its non-vampire spinoffs will hae to be reviewed elsewhere because the world of darkness sinks or swims on the merits of its vampire line alone.

Well... the world of darkness is sinking. Not in a manner in which you might expect where the imaginary world is going to hell in a handbasket - but that the actual publishing line is collapsing like a wet paper bag. Stores don't order new White Wolf material and no one even fucking notices. You don't know what the latest White Wolf release was and neither do I because White Wolf is dying.. White Wolf doesn't release specific sales figures, but they proudly claimed that they had over 5.5 million total book sales (as in, ever) back when nWoD hit the shelves. And they claim over seven million total sales today. Which puts nWoD sales at slightly over a quarter of what the oWoD sales were. Further, they also claimed over seen million sales last year, meaning that either they stopped updating their home page or they suck now. Also, at the end of oWoD's print run they confidently stated that they had a 26% market share of the rpg industry, and now they don't mention their market share at all. So how did this happen? How did nWoD fail so badly? Let's look at their design goals, as explained by Justin Achilli:

Clean Up the World!
This is a design goal that even diehard True Brujah players would grudgingly admit had to be attempted. The oWoD was too complicated and had too much bullshit supernatural crap in it. I mean, did you know that it had dragons, manticores, and harpies in it? Secret manticores. I don't know how that works. But even worse, they had to retcon out an entire book because a secret society of assassins inside a slightly less secret society of assassins inside a secret vampire cult dedicated to ending the secrecy of vampire cults that was secretly run by an evil ancient sleeping vampire god in a secret city in the land of the dead who was in turn the pawn of a secret alien space virus was apparently going too far (see: Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand). It didn't help that literally four of those secret organizations were called "The Black Hand."

But the result... wasn't clean. And more importantly, it wasn't interesting. I mean sure, they failed to live up to their promise to not have any secret vampire assassin cults led by a secret evil space virus (see: VII). And while the prospect of Bloodline Bloat is actually a lot easier to take than Clan bloat, because a Bloodline could literally be like six vampires rather than requiring a whole new secret clan structure every time you visit a new town and meet a guy with a new power - the fact remains that the very instant that you have a bloodline composed of just Vampire Prostitutes who make Vampire Perfume you setting has exploded the fucking fridge. But that's not the part that sucks. The part that sucks is that the new setting has no reason to give a shit about any of it. With the removal of the metaplot (unless you count the space virus thing) came a rudderless existence.

The introduction of the whole "vampires fight like vulcans in heat when they meet in person" meant that not only had they left the game without any fucking political disagreements that you knew or cared about, they actually made it so that vampires couldn't engage in politics of any kind without just stabbing each other. If four PC vamps walk into a room with four NPC vamps in it, all four PCs and all four NPCs have to make a resolve check to keep from flipping out for each vampire in the other group. That's literally thirty-two rolls just to determine if your audience with a minor functionary and his pals turns into a blood bath. So not only is the coterie very unlikely to actually be able to have a chat with any other vampires without having it turn to bloodshed, but any possible tension has been bled out of the scene like black bile from a stone before you even get that far while the Storyteller rolls die roll after die roll. Combine this with the fact that Aura reading is now a secret discipline, so the supposed restrictions on diablerie basically don't even matter and you've got a recipe for mindless hack and slash because there is nothing else to do now. Sure hope the combat system is sound...

Clean Up the System
So World of Darkness now has a book just for the system and a separate one for Vampire. This is explicitly an attempt to get all the rules together so you didn't have the old bullshit where the melee combat rules changed beyond recognition within the same edition based on whether you were a mortal police officer looked at from the perspective of vampires or werewolves. Also the "worst excesses" of the combat system have been reigned in. And the system for success and failure has been standardized.

Well apparently the worst excesses of the combat system were best summed up by the idea that immortal vampires with super speed could take on a second grade special ed class in a stick fight and take out more than two of the vicious children before they were brought down. I don't think this can be said enough times: there is no fucking damage roll. No damage, no soak. Your to-hit roll is also your damage roll. And it's a dicepool system. If I roll 2 dice I am handing out exactly and linearly half as much damage as a guy rolling 4 dice. If there are two of me, we are handing out the same damage (actually more, because there are multiple attacker bonuses, but you get the idea). This means that a handful of anyone with sticks has the combined offensive output of anything in the whole game. So actual combat is pretty much just War with the cards replaced by piles of dice. My side has a pile of dice, so does your side. The biggest pile almost invariably wins and no one cares.

But remember that unified system? Yeah, they bork it immediately. It's a fixed target number dice pool system, except that they allow you to change the numbers on which you get extra dice and count negative successes. Which means that while an 8 is always a success, the actual average successes per die aren't constant at all, making you wonder why they bothered. The average successes per die vary from 22-42%. And that's just for starting characters. Anyone with some XP behind their eyes is in for a horrible revelation: the action resolution system does not take into account high powered characters. High end characters get critical success against each other, because the determination of whether you critical or not is based on the absolute rather than relative number of successes they score. Furthermore, they don't even stick to the rules in the rulebook. Special cases for unique electricity, explosives, and even falling damage weave in and out of the books like clockwork men.

Personalize the Horror

There is a concerted effort to take things off the scale of the divine and profane and fit into a more introspective story of... oh blech.I can't even stomach regurgitating this pretentious jackassery, I'll just let Justin rant for a bit on his own:
Justin Achilli wrote:The setting's new antagonists fit the far more localized experience. Things like Nexus Crawlers and rampaging Antediluvians don't fit the xenophobic, isolated moods of the games, so we scale down their power or otherwise configure their stories so that defeating one isn't a matter of 'Save the world!' It's more, 'We saved our own asses.' I think there's a lot more grayscale morality in the new World of Darkness, and a lot less room for the players' characters to be overt heroes. The antagonists reflect that. Check out Promethean's qashmallim, for example. They're incarnate pillars of flame that embody the utterly amoral Divine Spark. How do you even deal with something like that, let alone cast it in the light of right or wrong?
A lot of the personalization seems to take the form of haphazardly dumping Christian messages all over everything. You literally have to take a Catholic celestial virtue and deadly sin. I'm not kidding. But a lot more of it is just scaling things down so that it's just about you and your city block or some shit. Like literally the Crips want to move in on Myrtle and Montgomery to drive your drugs off the market with their shipment of cheap Peruvian. But you know what? I don't fucking care! If the antagonists can't be classified as right or wrong and the shit they want does not - in the larger picture - make any fucking difference, why are we fighting again? How about instead of risking our immortality on some gray scale conflict that specifically doesn't mean two shits - we just don't do that. Fucking walk away. Because you can. It's like fighting in Iraq: there's nothing to win so you should just leave.

Maybe this is all supposed to teach you some stupid fucking Christian message about turning the other cheek. I don't even care. Considering that this game used to have the largest collection of half naked pagan goth women in the hobby their smothering of everything in senseless Christianity can only be seen in the light of trying to skull fuck eggs out of the golden goose.

Now while we're on the subject, there are a lot of minor things that piss the fuck out of me. For example there's the thing where people wrote rules without reading other rules. Like how you can start with a Bloodline discipline that isn't yours and cannot ever pick it up again ever if you don't. Or how the Khaibit get the special bloodline power to pay blood to get shitty darkvision when they have to be Mekhet and therefore get no-restrictions darkvision for fucking free.

And then there's the fact that in their zealousness to purge the world of celerific combat monsters they for some reason thought that leaving social monsters with Save or Lose effects would somehow be OK. And there's the fact that Stamina doesn't do anything because there aren't any fucking soak rolls.

But really I think the reason that no one cares is because the world has been left without anything to care about. You can't do vampire politics because you can't talk to other vampires safely and it wouldn't matter anyway because vampires don't run anything in the new world of darkness.

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Post by CatharzGodfoot »

Frank, if there are rules for skullfucking golden geese, I'm there.
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Post by sake »

Don't forget one of the more bat shit crazy examples of why nWoD combat is screwed over: Finger of Death in Can.

No, really for just a dot in resources you can buy Bear Mace which will not only completly disable a Werewolf, but outright kills mortals in a single shot. Hell, even regular mace is deadly as all hell by nWoD rules, since it will put anything short of a werewolf or vamp down long enough to do anything you want to them.

Seriously, forget super powers, forget swords, forget shotguns loaded with silver shot, forget rocket launchers... this would be the most powerful weapon in nWoD.
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Post by violence in the media »

How is that much different from oWoD where people carried flare guns for the ability to do aggravated damage?
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Post by RandomCasualty2 »

sake wrote:Don't forget one of the more bat shit crazy examples of why nWoD combat is screwed over: Finger of Death in Can.

No, really for just a dot in resources you can buy Bear Mace which will not only completly disable a Werewolf, but outright kills mortals in a single shot. Hell, even regular mace is deadly as all hell by nWoD rules, since it will put anything short of a werewolf or vamp down long enough to do anything you want to them.
Seriously? What does mace do in nWoD?
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Post by Username17 »

RandomCasualty2 wrote:
sake wrote:Don't forget one of the more bat shit crazy examples of why nWoD combat is screwed over: Finger of Death in Can.

No, really for just a dot in resources you can buy Bear Mace which will not only completly disable a Werewolf, but outright kills mortals in a single shot. Hell, even regular mace is deadly as all hell by nWoD rules, since it will put anything short of a werewolf or vamp down long enough to do anything you want to them.
Seriously? What does mace do in nWoD?
Uh...
World of Darkness wrote:Mace or Pepper Spray
Durability 1, Size 0, Structure 1, Cost n/a
Function: Contained in spray bottles that fit in the palm of the hand, these devices debilitate targets who are sprayed in the face. A Dexterity + Athletics roll is made at a -1 penalty to hit a target. Range is one yard maximum, and the target’s Defense applies. If it is successful, all of the target’s actions suffer a -5 penalty for the remainder of the scene as his senses are overwhelmed and breathing is made extremely difficult. A chance roll is not made to use a spray on a target over one yard away; the effort fails automatically. Beings that are no longer alive but that walk and talk are not affected by such devices. A single spray canister can be used three times before it’s empty.
No Resource dots are required to be able to afford a spray.
There are severe nerfs to pepper spray in Armory where they confidently inform you that pepper spray and cs gas have no effect on dogs or other animals (seriously, wtf?). But these nerfs are hidden away in a book that is largely full of stupid player options that your storyteller may not own and probably hasn't read.

But if you are using the Armory rules, you can lay down CS gas that reduces peoples' dicepools and resistance traits by 5 each. Since each Resistance Trait is generally measured on a 1-5 scale, this amounts to a death sentence. Of course, then you have to put up with the crazy rant about how it doesn't work on werewolves because dogs are immune to CS gas.

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Post by Username17 »

Anyway. Credit where credit is due: nWoD came out with a model of vampire organizations that could have been very good. Or at least, a lot more accessible. See, in oWoD there were all these organizations like the Church of Set and the Sabbat and shit that were "doing stuff" but that didn't really matter because you couldn't interact with any of them without getting stabbed in the face. nWoD offered a new take, where membership of one of the fie organizations seriously didn't mean that you were "at war" with any of the others.

Now the problems set in immediately. First, only two of the five organizations actually bothered to have any meaningful political stance. The other three were just sorcery study groups, and two of those were steeped in painfully heavy Christian imagery (the other is a broad wiccan parody, which means that you can't really escape the lame religious discussions of Atlanta middleschoolers if you want to pursue any of the sorcerous paths). But remember kids, vampires don't secretly control the world in nWoD, so the political posturing in the two groups that you can do that in at all is pretty much like running for Homecoming King in Junior High. Seriously, advancing to the top of the local Invictus chapter just gives you the keys to the company car, you could get farther ahead by spending an equal amount of time working law in night courts and using your vampire powers to win cases and get financial bonuses. Then you know, buy a car.

But of course, this doesn't even pretend to matter, because your social standing in any of these organizations means fuck all because Predator's Taint will come and ass rape you if you ever tried to get more than four vampires into the same house, let alone the same room.

But man, it was nearly a step in the right direction.

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Post by CatharzGodfoot »

FrankTrollman wrote:
World of Darkness wrote:Beings that are no longer alive but that walk and talk are not affected by such devices.
So apparently zombies and legless vampires are still affected... Is this for real? I mean, it's Rules Lawyer vs. The Oberoni Fallacy, but still...
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Post by Anguirus »

FrankTrollman wrote: But of course, this doesn't even pretend to matter, because your social standing in any of these organizations means fuck all because Predator's Taint will come and ass rape you if you ever tried to get more than four vampires into the same house, let alone the same room.

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Predator's taint only comes up the first time that vampires meet and it can generally be assumed that in the highly political, low population world that vampires live in pretty much everyone has already met everyone else. This isn't really a valid criticism.

Also, where does it say that Mekhet get dark vision?
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Post by Psychic Robot »

Frank: To remedy the combat system, would you recommend allowing a soak roll, then?
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Post by Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp »

Just for reference, whether going by the rules or not or houseruling or playing in a LARP that has global rules that have changed the game, most people don't play with the rules for frenzying when meeting a new vampire.
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Post by Psychic Robot »

Because otherwise the plot will spontaneously combust?
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Post by Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp »

Because even the people who play the game think that that rule is retarded. It would be interesting to ask how many LARP players know that that rule exists.
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Post by RandomCasualty2 »

Psychic Robot wrote:Frank: To remedy the combat system, would you recommend allowing a soak roll, then?
Honestly the combat system is pretty unsalvageable IMO, I'd think the best thing you could do is just switch it to the shadowrun combat system.
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Post by Psychic Robot »

Care to describe that in brief? I've always been curious, but I've never had a chance to look at the Shadowrun books.
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Post by RandomCasualty2 »

Psychic Robot wrote:Care to describe that in brief? I've always been curious, but I've never had a chance to look at the Shadowrun books.
Well nWoD basically works the same as shadowrun in terms of dice pools. Things are attribute + skill to form a dice pool. It also has damage tracks (though not a physical and stun, but i thas damage types anyway).

So basically you can go and take the shadowrun attack and damage rules and easily substitute them for the white wolf rules, since both are dice pool systems that generate a dice pool almost exactly the same way. There are a few small differences like WW caps an ability/skill at 5 and SR tends to do so at 6 or higher, but I dont' think it's going to matter much.
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Post by cthulhu »

Shadowrun combat is two stage:

To hit: Attribute + Skill + Mods vs Attribute + skill + mods (though if they are not taking defensive actions they don't get skill, typically)

Damage is: Weapon damage + excess successes from to hit + mods vs Attribute + armour + mods

Works well and is easily translatable to nWoD. I have no idea why they didn't just do that.
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Post by Username17 »

Psychic Robot wrote:Because otherwise the plot will spontaneously combust?
That would be why, yeah. That rule makes it so that games have a substantial chance of ending in player death if you run the scenario "The player characters meet up in a bar." and for LARPs, if a character comes in and introduces himself from out of town, chances are very good that someone would die. The predator's taint thing is just unplayable.
Bill wrote: It would be interesting to ask how many LARP players know that that rule exists.
Almost none. Because almost every LARP is played with the oWoD setting. Those games shrugged on for years getting incredibly elaborate plots and soap opera-like interpersonal connections, and when White Wolf did a world reset most of the LARPs either told them to fuck off right away or did an experimental switch-over and then went back.

I'm not even kidding. Just google up the currently running games, the first hits are all based on oWoD material.

I don't know if there are any LARPs based on Requiem. I'm sure there must be, it's just that no one knows or cares about them. For example, look what happens when someone tries to find one based on nWoD in Phoenix. Answer: we have several different oWoD LARPs you may be interested in...

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Post by Koumei »

FrankTrollman wrote: I don't know if there are any LARPs based on Requiem.
There are, but they have a different name: gangster drug trades. A bunch of guys meet up in a room, then at that point usually everyone waves guns about warily. Then either someone fires and everything goes to hell and you have an episode of CSI, or they pass their check and the trade happens.

The old one was more of a goth orgy at a nightclub. Even disliking clubbing, typical goths and WoD players, I can tell you I like that more.
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Post by sake »

At this point I'm almost surprised WW hasn't started up a 'World of Darkness: Classic' line, that tries to create some sort of unholy mix of WoD's fluff and nWod's crunch.
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Post by RandomCasualty2 »

sake wrote:At this point I'm almost surprised WW hasn't started up a 'World of Darkness: Classic' line, that tries to create some sort of unholy mix of WoD's fluff and nWod's crunch.
The problem is that nWoD's crunch isn't any good either.

It wasn't like they produced a good rules set with a shitty world. They produced a shitty rules set in a shittier world. oWoD at least had a decent world with it so that you had a reason to slog through the shitty rules set. nWoD just can't say that, so I literally don't know anyone who plays that system.

It was the White Wolf attempt to codify their rules like 3E, only none of those guys were ever good at thinking up rules, so the product is a pile of steaming shit. nWoD really is just a failed design all over. The flavor sucked, the crunch sucked. Everything was just shit. There's really no reason at all to play that game.
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Post by Psychic Robot »

I don't think this can be said enough times: there is no fucking damage roll. No damage, no soak. Your to-hit roll is also your damage roll. And it's a dicepool system. If I roll 2 dice I am handing out exactly and linearly half as much damage as a guy rolling 4 dice. If there are two of me, we are handing out the same damage (actually more, because there are multiple attacker bonuses, but you get the idea).
Question about this. In WoD, a weapon's effectiveness in combat is given by the amount of bonus dice it has. (This, of course, is severely abstracted.) From what I've read of the SR system, your damage is equal to DV + net successes.

A scenario in WoD might involve three thugs rolling 6 dice each. They'll do the equivalent of 18 dice of damage total, no soak.

Now, in SR, it seems that you could have three thugs (with guns) rolling six dice each. They'll do a total of 3(4 + net successes) damage, but the game allows a soak roll.

My question is: aside from the soak roll, how is the SR combat system superior to the WoD system? Is it the fact that three guys with guns are going to be handing out more pain (because of the flat DV) than three guys in WoD?

I'm just trying to understand where you're coming from on this, since the simplicity of the WoD system is attractive.

EDIT: Also, is having soak be a flat amount better than having soak be rolled? My friend argues vehemently against any rolling because he's played oWoD and says that it's a mess, but I think that rolling doesn't sound too horrendously awful.
Last edited by Psychic Robot on Thu Apr 16, 2009 9:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Chamomile wrote:Ant, what do we do about Psychic Robot?
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Post by Roy »

Because the WoD system makes a literal Short Bus the best tactic. After all, retarded six year olds still get one die each. Without any sort of 'DR' the class therefore does around 30 dice of damage.
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Post by Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp »

FrankTrollman wrote: I don't know if there are any LARPs based on Requiem. I'm sure there must be, it's just that no one knows or cares about them. For example, look what happens when someone tries to find one based on nWoD in Phoenix. Answer: we have several different oWoD LARPs you may be interested in...

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Frank,

There's a huge LARP from White Wolf themself that you have to be a member of the Camarilla club to play in (after 3 trial games).

Take a look at this Fan Wiki that lists several people with detailed descriptions and pictures of their characters.

Warning: Some parts of this link may be scary http://cam-wiki.org/index.php/Main_Page
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Post by Mr. Bane »

Thinking about re-writing this to be a little more clear and include the discussions after the OP and then sharing. Nifty piece.
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