It’s not often that I go to the RPG.Net forums for inspiration, but I had this idea for tweaking the Virtue and Vice system in World of Darkness, and, fortunately, had the forethought to Google it first. The almighty Goog linked me to this thread, featuring a post by Evil Hat’s own Rob Donoghue. And here I was, thinking I was being original. Well, no matter. I’m going to cop out and post this anyway.

What are Aspects?

First of all, when I talk about Aspects, I’m referring to the primary feature of awesomeness from Evil Hat’s FATE system, which powers their Spirit of the Century and Dresden Files RPGs. In short, Aspects are basically short phrases that describe something important about your character. In FATE, they’re generally used one of two ways; either you can invoke an Aspect to get a bonus on your die roll, or the GM can pay you, the player, a Fate Point (which are the FATE system’s form of player-input currency) in exchange for compelling you to act in a particular way based on one of your Aspects.

For example, let’s say you have an Aspect that says, “Sucker for a pretty face.” When you’re trying to convince an attractive young lady to give up some information on some Ancient Artifact you’re trying to keep out of Nazi hands, you shell out a Fate Point and tell the GM that you’re invoking your Aspect. You get a bonus on whatever die roll you use for sweet-talking info out of pretty young women. Later on, the same lass turns out to be secretly working for the Nazis, and slips the Ancient Artifact out of your pocket. The GM then gives you a Fate Point and compels you to let her go, citing the same Aspect.

Clear? Good. Indiana Jones reference too heavy handed? Eh. Sue me.

Aspects in the World of Darkness

Okay, so now that you are aware of what Aspects are and the basics of how they work, let’s look at a couple of ways that you could use them in a World of Darkness game. There are no guarantees that any of these suggestions will not break the game. However, they are also likely to lead to awesomeness that wasn’t there previously.

The WoD Problem

Okay, it’s not really a problem, in the strictest sense. I’ve just never cared for the Virtue/Vice setup.

First of all, in all of the ideas below, we’re going to use Willpower points as the player-input currency, and then tie WP spending and recovery to the Aspects.

Method #1: Virtue and Vice as Aspects

The simplest way of applying these mechanics is to straight-up use Virtue and Vice as Aspects. When you want to be able to spend a point of Willpower, you justify that through either your Virtue or Vice. You want three extra dice on that attack roll? “My Wrath overcomes me as I strike.” You want some WP back? The GM’s gonna make you go for that idea that’s full of Hope, but probably not very likely to happen.

The downside is that Virtue and Vice as written aren’t really meaningful. I think in practice, most people tend to take the seed of the Virtue or Vice and turn that into something a bit more specific, usually with one tied to the other. An ex-cop might have Justice as his Virtue and Wrath as a Vice, with the explanation that he’s got a tendency to let the ends justify the means while seeking justice. Fortunately, there are ways of tweaking this…

Method #2: The Two Aspect Character

In this method, we ignore the idea of Virtue and Vice per se, and instead give your character two aspects, one based on a Virtue, and the other on a Vice. This has the benefit of being, basically, what people do anyway, with the added bonus of actually having a concrete way of gaining back Willpower. Instead of having Justice and Wrath, you’d have a statement that’s a little more solid, like, “I am the law,” or, “I will make the wrongdoers pay!”

For a little exta fun, you could also make your character’s Concept or splat combination into Aspects as well.

Method #3: The Donoghue Method

In the post I linked to previously, Rob Donoghue made a brilliant suggestion of making each dot you have in Willpower an Aspect. Thus, a Willpower 4 character will have 4 aspects, chosen by the player. You’d create Aspects that apply to your character at character creation, and then, as you spend XP on raising your Willpower, you’d have to come up with Aspects that represent why you gained that dot. The nice part of this method is that you wind up with a character that has a ton of Aspects, and, once that happens, it’s really easy for the GM to get your character invested in the game. Also, in my experience, most WoD GM’s like to make players justify their XP expenditures. This makes you think long and hard about whether or not you have justification for spending those points on Willpower.

Next time, I’m going to address one of my pet-peeves in WoD – well, in a lot of RPG’s, really – the Extended Roll.

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I’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!

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This post made me start thinking, despite not having created a complete game, much less published one, about how the business of the RPG industry should be approached.

I haven’t really gotten to play Diaspora yet, but the decision by the creators to not publish a PDF until they can present the file as a product in itself, rather than just a dump of the book layout, seems like a pretty cool idea to me. It could just be that weird holdover from reading The Fountainhead, 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.

A lot of folks have said that they have problems reading electronic copies of books on a computer screen, and I wonder how much that can be mitigated by creating PDF’s that were designed for digital distribution from the ground up. Also, this could start the trend toward gaming material that could be more easily ported to an ebook reader. I know that White Wolf has also made some statements about moving in that direction, which is awesome.

Brad Murray, one of Diaspora’s creators, has a very astute blog entry about how information is presented and correlated between physical books and electronic documents. Reading it made me realize that these issues haven’t at all been addressed in most available PDF game documents. I very much think that they should, not just because it’s interesting, but because I think that electronic distribution with an option of a print-on-demand physical book is likely the future of the entire industry, especially as the cost of the reader technology drops.

This is one of those weird situations where the niche hobbyist is really going to do something innovative that will ultimately inform, at least in some small way, how some of the bigger players in the industry will offer their products in the future.

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