Tuesday, July 28, 2009

The Justification System is Broken

Most persistent world online World of Darkness chats have a system for spending experience. In fact, all of them use the same flawed system: the Justification System. In this system, when you want to spend XP you make a post to your character thread in the forum or email the proper ST(s), stating what you want to buy and why your character should have it.
On the surface, this is a reasonable system where players are forced to develop their characters in terms of fluff when they develop them in terms of crunch. The intent is to challenge players to think creatively and constantly push themselves to be a better roleplayer. As with so many things, however, this idea is merely de jure. De facto, this system has consistently devolved into repeated favoritism.
It isn't even intentional favoritism most of the time. Some people RP great whenever they log on, and are dedicated members of the setting, but simply don't have the time IRL to write several forum posts about how their character is practicing kung-fu. In addition, this system is often used in an attempt to "balance" a game, that is, keep people from achieving "dangerously" high stats too quickly. This is a false premise, caused by the inherent lack of trust between STs and players online. In reality, you can approve a character with Strength 5 and Weaponry 5 and he probably won't kill a single important NPC, let alone several or even many NPCs. In my nearly five years of consistently playing on these online chats, I've never seen any hint of a character going on some kind of random rampage thanks to the stats on his or her sheet. It just doesn't happen, and we need to stop acting like its a danger.
A second part of this issue is that the rate of XP accrual on chats does not match up with the rate at which you can spend XP. Many chats require you to spend a month or more learning the first dot of a single skill, while in that month you acquire enough XP to learn several low level skills or master one of your already possessed skills.
I think we should take a hint from our friends in the Exalted chats. Yes, Exalted and WoD are very different games, but that doesn't mean we can't take ideas from one to place into the other. I propose that instead of the faulty and easily abused justification system, we apply a training time system. This can even be hardcoded into any website with relative ease. When a character wants to spend XP, they state that they begin learning whatever it is they want their character to learn. After a certain amount of time has passed, they get it. No justification required.
Naturally, some particularly potent abilities could be flagged for requiring ST approval. Its only natural that a character should require some explanation for things like the Allies or Status merits, or for particularly powerful or unique abilities (like Devotions in Vampire).
This system can be easily customized from game to game, to account for their XP accrual rate and for how long term they desire their game to be. In a chat intending to run for a year, training times might be low, where chats with no definite end point could set training times months longer (although hopefully still matching up with XP accrual rates).

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Morality in the World Of Darkness

I think a common mistake people make when creating characters in the World of Darkness is playing them at the morality they want them to be at instead of the morality they are at. That is a big reason why so many themes of the game are lost. A starting character in the World of Darkness is supposed to be unlikely and unwilling to kill a man, or to steal from his peers.

Of course, sensible games allow a player to start at a lower Morality, sometimes in exchange for XP (something I've never understood). I think a character should be able to start at any Morality they like, usually somewhere between 4 and 8.

Games like Vampire and Mage are about, partially, a slow descent into madness. But if you start out mad, how can you possibly play that out?