RPG system: White Wolf
The rules
I still play White Wolf’s second edition World of Darkness (WoD) games, which celebrated their twentieth anniversary some time ago. So why do I keep playing a decades-old game?
Well, it was one of the first real game systems I played, and you tend to stick with what you know. I transitioned from formless and diceless improvisational roleplaying almost directly into second edition Dungeons and Dragons (AD&D), Palladium Books’ endless Rifts system, and White Wolf. I upgraded AD&D to third edition because it was less clunky, and I went on to 3.5 and even fourth edition D&D. Maybe next time our group does Dungeons and Dragons, we’ll try out fifth edition.
Palladium is one of the clunkiest, messiest systems I’ve ever used, but I was reluctant to discard it because Rifts is a fun and fascinating setting. Eventually, we just kept the setting and chucked the system. Now we use BESM for our Rifts games, because it’s flexible and we house-ruled the shit out of it.
But I still play White Wolf second edition. We’ve made a couple of changes and house rules, but keep playing the system and world more or less out of the books. I did read the White Wolf revised second edition and used some of the changes, but didn’t really like third edition. It made some rules updates that I was neutral on… But the largest changes were to the world and setting. The alterations were fine for a lot of people, but it wasn’t what I wanted to Storytell or to play.
Besides, why spend hundreds of bucks on books all over again?
So, here I am, still playing second edition — a game that’s 30 years old. Some of the content didn’t age well, but it requires staggeringly less cherry-picking than Rifts. So hey, that’s a win.
And there is still so much I love about the World of Darkness. White Wolf has traits called Nature and Demeanor that are much more flexible and open than D&D alignments. It uses an Attribute and Ability setup that allows for a lot of different non-combat skill checks. I’m not saying that all other game systems are limited to hack-and-slash dungeon crawling — only that White Wolf was my first taste of something that wasn’t.
And they really went crazy with the skills. A character can get secondary skills in White Wolf, which are cheaper but more focused than general skills — and some of them can be kind of ridiculous. In the Storytelling Guides, I joke about basket-weaving skills. I don’t think White Wolf actually has basket-weaving as a skill… But I bet there’s a weaving secondary skill, and nothing to stop you from specializing in baskets.
Needless to say, a lot of the secondary skills don’t get much play. But if you want your character to be incredibly good at something incredibly obscure, White Wolf is the system for you.
No matter what character concept you want to play, you can find the skills for it in White Wolf. And the skills aren’t tied to any stats — like I see in most games — so you end up mixing and matching for your rolls in surprising ways.
While I roll Dexterity + Firearms to shoot my gun, maybe my Storyteller will also let me roll Perception + Firearms to be able to tell what kind of gun the other guy is holding. Or even Manipulation + Firearms to wave my gun around and intimidate or impress someone. There’s an intimidation skill, too, of course, but the point is that I can give my players the chance to use their skills in surprising ways, as long as we’re creative. And I’m all about encouraging everyone to get creative.
The White Wolf skill list — the primary one, not the volumes of secondary skills — often influences the skill list we use in other games, too, because no matter what system we’re playing, we can create scenes in which research or social interaction are every bit as important as survival rolls or making a bloody hash of monsters. White Wolf is one of the best-suited systems for non-combat rolls that I’ve ever encountered.
Most RPGs have some kind of knowledge skill. In White Wolf, Knowledges is a whole category that covers everything from computers and investigation to politics and bureaucracy. Yeah, bureaucracy is a skill in White Wolf because a game session might be about a vampire manipulating the local bank manager to hide the loan for their new nightclub so their rival can’t undercut it and get the bank to take the property back.
And then the next session might be the club’s grand opening, with lots of rolls to choose the right decorations (Intelligence + Style), recruit a popular band to play (Charisma + Subterfuge), and then walk around in your trendiest clothes, making the other vampires feel out of fashion (Appearance + Carousing).
I’m not saying that Dungeons and Dragons can’t ever involve role-playing or adventures outside of a dungeon, just that White Wolf’s system provides a lot more to support that kind of role-playing. If you like social RPGs, you should give White Wolf a whirl.
I mentioned above that we did make some house rules for White Wolf. For instance, we eliminated the wound penalties. Out of the book, when you get injured, you get a die penalty, which means you get injured more easily and earn an even bigger penalty. We didn’t enjoy the downward spiral at all. Sure, it might be realistic. In real life, I shoot you in the leg and you fall on the ground. Unless you’re totally high on adrenalin, you lay there and can’t do much else.
Realistic, sure, but I don’t want my characters lying on the ground doing nothing. I want them on their feet, doing something.
We also started splitting up everyone’s combat turns into a minor action, move action, and a standard action. Lots of other systems do that under various names — like incidental actions, maneuvers or whatever. Why did we do that? Well, when a White Wolf character had to take their entire action to use one of their little magic powers and I just had an NPC blast them in the face with a shotgun — because they were standing there using a little magic power — it wasn’t much fun.
White Wolf lets you split your dice pool between actions, but your character has to be really good for that to be effective. Otherwise, shotgun to the face. So nobody got to use their cool little magic things. They just skipped straight to blasting everyone else in the face, or else single-mindedly pursuing any power that gave them multiple actions — Celerity, Quicksilver, Multi-tasking… There are a couple of ways to do it depending upon which particular WoD setting you’re running, but it meant that those extra-action traits suddenly became really common.
Now with a minor action, I let players use their little magic abilities: grow claws with Protean, put up Oakenshield for some help taking that shotgun blast, etc. (And if you play White Wolf — hell no, True Magick is not a minor action.)
With a move action, the PC can either move — closing distance — or dodge/parry attacks. They’re moving out of the way, after all. Out of the book, dodging is a normal dice pool, so it’s either the only thing your PC is doing, or you have to split with your attack pool. It puts players on the defensive, and it can be hard to ever transition back to offense. The enemy just attacks you again, which you have to dodge again — and that goes on until you biff a roll and get beat down. That sucks. Now players are back to hungering for multiple actions. Or pumping up the game’s best defensive stat (Stamina) so that they can actually survive long enough to shoot back.
It also means that unless your opponent is actively dodging — which, if they want to hit back, they don’t — you only need one success to hit. This leads to either wasting high levels of skill, or splitting that one attack as many times as possible, and chopping down my bad guys way too fast. So letting everyone have a move action that’s used to dodge gets them a chance to defend without using their whole dice pool. But not every time, since the PC has to decide between moving and dodging with those dice.
Standard actions are everything else — attacking back, True Magick, etc. And according to our house rule, only the standard/main action can be split into multiple dice pools.
This is a pretty new house rule that we’re trying out in Erica’s new Wraith game, and we’ll see how it goes. But so far, no one has been min-maxing Stamina or extra attacks, and everyone has been able to get to use their magic powers to help out in a fight.
The settings
But when I’m talking about White Wolf, that’s just the game system — the dots and dice, the rules and rolls. But that’s less than half the story. The world that I play in and run is the World of Darkness, one of several White Wolf settings and the most popular that I’m aware of.
WoD is urban fantasy, although that term didn’t really exist when I began playing. There are some archaic sub-sets — playing wraiths during World War 1, vampire in the Dark Ages, and Renaissance-era mages — but most WoD games are contemporary.
We’re taking advantage of those modern world elements to introduce some new role-players to the game. There’s plenty to learn with the rules and pretending to be weird people without also having them learn a whole fantasy realm with its own physical and social rules. They already know how to use a cell phone or buy gas to burn down a villain’s lair. Once I’ve gotten them comfortable with some more of the gaming elements, I can throw them into Rifts or Dungeons and Dragons.
Within the World of Darkness are five main individual games. They interact with each other in interesting ways — detailed in each system — and are both highly social and very mysterious, with a lot of plot hooks baked in.
Vampire: The Masquerade
If you’re already familiar with White Wolf and the World of Darkness, then you probably came to it through Vampire. I did, and so did Erica. Vampire is the sexy, trendy WoD game… in a very counter-culture, don’t-call-me-trendy sort of way.
Vampire is probably the most social WoD game, because vampires are all about blood and politics. Other people’s blood, not their own… So though there are plenty of awesome, epic fights in a vampire game, these immortal creatures are generally reluctant to risk their own eternal necks. There’s a lot of talking, lying and exchanging favors to get things done. Vampire is a ton of fun.
Werewolf: The Apocalypse
In Werewolf, you play… stay with me here… werewolves! They’re giant, furry murder machines, and if you want to explore dungeons and slaughter countless foul creatures, this is the World of Darkness game you were looking for.
But there’s also a spirit-world aspect to Werewolf, and themes of environmentalism and spirituality that makes the game more complex and moving. There are tribes and packs within Werewolf, too, that make for great social dynamics that can be as backstabbing as any Vampire game, if that’s the way you want to go. Although with werewolves, it’s more back-shredding than back-stabbing.
Mage: The Ascension
Mage takes a big leap into the abstract. The fundamental premise of Mage is that reality is fluid. The combined thoughts of humanity decide the shape of our cosmos. In the paradigm of Mage, when people used to think the Earth was flat, it was actually flat. And when enough people came to believe that it was round, it changed shape.
Player characters in Mage are people of great intelligence and power, who have the will and the mental strength to actually change reality with a thought. Not the whole world, but make a door in a wall where there wasn’t one before — or a smoking stump at the top of your neck where a head used to be.
Mage is a game about the power of ideas, a sort of role-playing brain-teaser. The magic system is free-form, which is super cool and challenging — and hard as hell to run. In Mage, your players are limited by a few dots on their character sheets and their imagination — and those imaginations will both astound and screw you every time. Storytelling Mage requires you to not only think on your feet, but think standing on your head. My relationship with Mage is a kind of love/hate one.
Changeling: The Dreaming
This one also required a little mind-bending to get my head around, mostly imagining how the faerie world and the mundane world were supposed to overlap. When Changeling first came out, it was also kind of a rude shock to the WoD players, who were all used to playing immortal vampires, furry engines of death, and sorcerers who could think someone’s head off. Compared to them, the fae of Changeling are quite fragile and not nearly as edgy. Don’t get me wrong — changelings are neat and the setting is a beautiful one, but I wouldn’t put any money on most of them in a fight against a werewolf.
But I don’t run a lot of crossover games, and within the setting of Changeling, they work out just fine and we’ve had some really fun games playing faeries. My main player group is mostly made up of 80s kids, and we’re all big fans of Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, The Princess Bride and that kind of stuff.
Changeling is a game where a pinky-swear is a binding magical thing, two players jinxed each other and it was as powerful as an oath of silence, and homework is a dangerous threat. Taking something that silly and treating it with gravitas is a lot of fun.
Wraith: The Oblivion
The last major release of second edition World of Darkness was Wraith. Vampires, werewolves, mages, faeries, and ghosts make for a pretty well-rounded world with a dark and secret magical side.
But honestly, by the time they got to Changeling, I think White Wolf was running out of ideas. They had used up most of the cool names for stuff and were scraping the bottom of the barrel a bit, and they were already moving on to the revised second edition. Even back in Changeling, half of the books were released in second edition, the other half in revised.
The same thing happened to Wraith. I feel like it just didn’t get much love from the creators, and neither the system or setting were really developed. I won’t detail here how much world-building Erica and I had to do before Wraith felt playable for her campaign, but she wrote a post about it.
And Wraith characters are complicated. They have not only a Nature and Demeanor — traits that are supposed to guide your role-playing the way alignments do in other games — but they have ten points of Passions to assign that make your Restless Dead restless. And then ten points of Fetters, the shit and people that ghosts couldn’t leave behind.
As if that’s not enough personality and motivation to put down on a character sheet, wraiths also have their Shadow — the shitty part of their personality that gets its own voice after death. The Shadow is your dark side, animated by Oblivion, the part of you that wants you to stop haunting things, to let go and die the rest of the way. And the Shadow has a Nature, and it has Dark Passions. Then someone — either the Storyteller or another player — has to play that Shadow!
It’s a lot to juggle. Now, Erica wouldn’t be running Wraith if it was all pain and no gain. White Wolf’s vision of the afterlife is damned dark and cool, but it’s a daunting task. Kudos to Erica for taking the plunge, and to Amber and Jack — who have never even played the relatively simple Vampire: The Masquerade — and are cutting their first WoD teeth in the Underworld. That’s a hell of a jump into the deep end.
This is our first stab at Wraith, but in the last 30 years, we’ve run a couple of Changeling campaigns, a few Mage, and a gothy butt-load of Werewolf and Vampire. We’ve used the White Wolf system to run our own house games for many, many years.
We first dabbled in one-night Cthulhu mythos games using White Wolf’s dot system because the mechanics for research and horror were such a good fit. We didn’t want our horror games to be dungeon crawls or murder-fests — for that we use Freak Legion, under White Wolf’s 18+ imprint, Black Dog — and White Wolf had the tools for it. We just added a sanity mechanic, which fell naturally into place — they already have tons of rules for derangements — and then we had a vehicle for one-night horror games when we needed a break between major campaigns.
Erica and I have a lot of history with the World of Darkness, and we’ve built up our house-rules so the system is just the way we like it, so we’ll probably still be playing it 30 years from now. Thanks for decades of fun, White Wolf!
