WoD Mod #1: Morality for Power
Posted in Gaming, RPG Design, Role-Playing Games on February 3rd, 2010 by ShaunI’ve been thinking of ways to revitalize my blogging. Usually, I find myself unable to keep myself interested in whatever it is that I happen to be doing, hence the lack of updates. Fortunately, I had some ideas that might just make me keep this thing up to date. At least for a while.
One of these ideas is the WoD Mod series; a bunch of random, unplaytested hacks for White Wolf’s World of Darkness line of games. Very few of these are written with the intension of saying, “This was bad game design. Here’s how to fix it.” There might be a couple of posts like that, but for the most part, these are about trying to get the game to give you a different feel. Also, as I said above, nothing in here is playtested, and it’s entirely possible that I won’t get a chance to test them ever, so, I’m relying on you kind WoD players to try these out in your own games, then come back and let me know how they work, or if the idea was completely retarded. Which is possible because, hey, I don’t write games for a living.
Let’s talk about the Morality track in WoD, shall we?
Basically, as written, the Morality attribute is intended to measure how in touch your character is with whatever his nature happens to be. For mortal characters, this is basically a question of adhering to general Western moral ideals. For all the supernatural critters, it’s a measure of consonance or dissonance with one’s nature. How close are you to the monster inside you? Or, something like that, anyway. In practice, all it really does is disincentivise people from playing either retardedly moral or retardedly amoral characters. It’s really really hard to get to Morality 10, and pretty much impossible to stay there. You also have to be really really bad to drill down to Morality 1. Generally, you have to engage in every activity that makes GMs, and probably every other player at the table, roll their eyes as you describe how you mutilate kittens in gory detail. In practice, there’s generally this sweet-spot between Morality 5 and 7 where most characters reach a kind of stasis, and manage to stick around that range. If you play any World of Darkness game, you probably know all this already.
One of the things that I always want World of Darkness games to be about is being forced to make the hard choices – do you give in to the nature of what you are, in order to accomplish what you need to do. To that end, here’s the hack I propose for making the WoD just a little more Faustian.
Instead of using the normal power currency for the activation of Disciplines, Gifts or Spells, turn Morality (whatever it happens to be in the game line you’re using) into a spendable pool of points, like how Willpower works, and spend those points to fuel your abilities. Keep the original power currency, but use it to fuel the “mundane” stuff – healing, buffing your stats, or whatever. The real point is to make it so that using your awesomeness costs you something real. So, when a vamp decides he wants to be superhumanly strong, instead of using Vitae to do it, you tap into the Beast – you give it control for just a little bit. Of course, if you give an inch, it takes a mile.
If you ever drop to 0 points, the Beast or the Rage or the Geist takes over and does things with your body while your conscious mind goes and hides for a while. Your Morality score automatically drops by one, you get to check for derangement, and the GM gets to put you in a shitty situation. Shitty situations are awesome, by the way.
Also, the original Morality degeneration rules still apply. Yup, you now have two ways to turn into a monster. If you do bad things, you degenerate, Gollum-like, into a subhuman – and possibly insane – creature. If you give in to the darker urges inside of you too often, same thing.
So, why do this? Really, it’s a way of making the rules affect the fiction in a cool manner. It’s also a good way of addressing one of the main themes of the game in a mechanical way. As it stands, you make Morality degeneration rolls when the GM decides that you’ve done something that warrants it, which isn’t a problem in and of itself, but, in my experience, WoD GM’s rarely actually call for degeneration rolls unless you do something blatantly evil, like murdering a busfull of schoolchildren with some vulgar magic, or wolfing out on your wife during an argument over taking out the trash.
In any case, that’s pretty much it. Give it a shot, let me know how it goes, or doesn’t!
Next week: Virtue and Vice as Aspects!
, but there’s a large part of me that thinks that is of the opinion that a person’s product is his or her own to do with as they please. I also think that, while it may not be a profit-driven decision now, it could be a really good way of looking at PDF releases in the future.
