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Basic Dice Mechanics Introduction, or Do I hafta use dice for everything? The short answer is "no". You're not supposed to (nor are you expected to) roll for every single detail of your character's life. Not only does it distract from the flow of role playing, it's boring. Provided your character's more than 5 years old, you're assumed to be able to tie your shoes, cross a quiet street or buy a newspaper from a machine without having to resort to the dang dice. Generally speaking, you're only expected to roll for something when there's at least a moderate chance of failure. To use that crossing the street example again, you're not expected to roll if it's quiet - but if you're dashing into mid-afternoon traffic because you're trying to lose the guys chasing you, you are expected to roll dice - cause if you're not quick, you're going to end up the hood ornament on some unlucky car. the hows and whys of dice usage in WoD The dice systems of WoD are fairly straightforward. First of all, there's the dice you roll and the way you roll them. Some tabletop games like D&D use a whole whack of different dice - standard 6 sided dice, and everything from 4 sided dice which are shaped like pyramids (also known as "what the @#$$%?!?!" if you find yourself stepping on them in the middle of the night) all the way up to 20 sided dice (which closely resemble faceted balls, and roll a little too well...) Well, in World of Darkness games (indeed, most games put out by White Wolf games, period) all you use is one type of dice - ten sided dice - but you roll more than one die at a time, usually. (For those who are confused, "dice" is a plural - "die" is singular) This group of dice is called your dice pool. How do you determine what your dice pool is? Glad you asked! Determining dice pools For this part, you need a character sheet (don't have a sheet? Well then, go make one! ). Take your character sheet and look at the stats (rows of dots) on it. You'll notice it's divided into a few categories - but most of them are in "Attributes" (the basic 9 stats that everyone has, just as a human or near-human being - strength for lifting, perception for noticing what goes on around you, charisma for how likeable you are, etc.) or in "Abilities" (the things that pretty well anyone can learn, but which not everyone has - you can have someone who's got a high empathy, vs. someone who's got the sensitivity and compassion of a rabid wolverine, or someone who's a computer hacker, vs. someone who's never touched one in their life.) About 75% of the time that you have to roll dice, your pool is determined by adding an Attribute score and an Ability score together. So far as I know, you never add two attributes or two abilities to determine a dice pool. No, you don't just grab one attribute and ability at random - you choose the most appropriate scores for the situation, and the rule books that white wolf puts out cover this topic in great detail - they devote most of a whole chapter to this subject alone. If you don't have a rating in the Ability that is most suitable to the situation, then you can substitute another Ability, if it's just as applicable to the situation. Otherwise, just roll a number of dice equal to the applicable Attribute - it's Attribute + ability = (?), even if the ability is 0 - you just have to get by on raw Attributes - not anything learned. So in other words, if you're trying to make a good first impression at a party but don't have Etiquette, you can substitute the Subterfuge ability if you're actively trying to deceive them, but you can't substitute, say, Survival (or, god forbid, Firearms!) just "cause I took it at 5!" You just roll Appearance, and hope you roll well. Dice pool examples Social: You're trying to con someone out of money with a fast-talking scheme. Manipulation (an attribute that governs making people do what you want to do, whether they like you or not) + Subterfuge (an ability that governs lying and trickery) are your best bets. Mental: You're trying to hack into a computer database - you'd be rolling Intelligence (which governs memory, learning capacity and problem solving) + Computers to see if you're smarter than the programmers who's work you're fighting. Physical: Running through traffic after snatching someone's purse would be Dexterity (for how fast you move) + Athletics (how athletically inclined you are) to see if you're fast enough to avoid the oncoming cars while still getting across in time to escape. Now those examples are far from complete run downs of how to use each ability, but it's a good example of how the logic works. Once you've been playing it for a while they get easier. Difficulties, successes, and failures (also botches and contested rolls) Ok, you know how to roll dice online. You know how many to roll. You've rolled them. Ooooh, lookit all the pretty numbers - but what do they mean? This is where your "difficulty" comes in. Difficulty is the target number you're aiming for, and any die that comes up equal to or greater than the difficulty is considered a success. Only count those dice that come up at or above the target number to figure out your successes. (see also "the rule of ones," below) The more successes, the better you did.
1 success? You barely squeaked by.
Standard difficulty for most actions is 6 - so any die that rolls 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10 is a success - or in other words, each die has a 50% chance of being a success or failure on it's own. Things with lower difficulties are often not even rolled for, unless the number of successes becomes important. Higher difficulties are just that, things that are more difficult than the average roll. Juggling bean bags is one thing - juggling live chainsaws is a whole different kettle of fish altogether. It's very much a judgment call as to what's a higher difficulty than average, so either ask someone who's more experienced for their opinion, or pick up your own copy of one of the core books, where they cover this in a lot more detail. What if your roll comes up with no dice above or equal to the difficulty? Well, then, whatever it is, you failed. Were you trying to shoot someone? You missed. Were you trying to repair your computer? Maybe you should take it into the shop, instead... The rule of ones, and botching One thing you should pay attention to is if any of the dice come up a "1" - those are special cases, on two counts. One, any results of 1 on a roll are considered to actually take away successes from the roll. So, if you roll 6 dice with a difficulty of 6 and it comes up: 9, 3, 7, 4, 6, 1 you got three successes (the 9, the 7 and the 6) - but that "1" takes one of the successes away - leaving you with only 2.
Two, if you have no successes on a roll, and you roll a 1 as well
(example: 5, 2, 2, 1, 4, 3) you have what's called
a botch, which is a very bad thing. If a failure is just not
succeeding, then a botch is great misfortune as fate decides to spit in your
eye. It's not necessarily fatal (in fact, it's recommended that Storytellers not
impose fatal consequences on a botch unless there's no other alternative) but it
invariably lands you in more shit than you were to begin with, or worse yet,
with a result that you think is completely successful - regardless of
what anyone tells you. You're encouraged to be creative with a botch effect, as when you're in a freeform environment, you are considered to be your own storyteller - but that brings with it the obligation to be tough as a regular storyteller would be. If you're new, ask around when you botch, as to what would be a good result for a particular botch - most people are quite willing to help with that sort of thing if you ask nice. Willpower, auto successes, and willpower dice pools There are some stats on the character sheets that exceed 5, and go all the way up to 10 - notably (and universally present on all sheets) "Willpower." You probably noticed that there's two rows of spaces beneath the Willpower line on your character sheet. That's for keeping track of your "Permanent Willpower" and your "Temporary Willpower." Permanent willpower is just that - your permanent rating for willpower, determined during character creation, and which only changes under certain special circumstances. However - you've got a pool of disposable points as well, that are equal to the permanent pool, and they can be used for several things.
1) Some special powers require a willpower "activation cost" (if you have those
special powers, you know - or you need to read the book you made the character
with for a second time because you didn't pay attention.) Occasionally you might be called upon to roll willpower, sometimes to resist the powers that a supernatural creature might use on you. In that case, you simply roll dice equivalent to your permanent willpower rating - whether that's 3 dice, or 10, you roll permanent - even if you've spent all your temporary. When do you do such rolls? As I said - usually to resist others' powers being used against you, which can be done from time to time. Again, it's a power-by-power basis, and you should ask the opposing player if you can roll willpower to resist. Sometimes you get lucky, and can roll the dice. How do you get temporary willpower back? Depends - you can give yourself back a single point per day, or you can refill your pool at the end of every week (the closest you get to a 'story' in the freeform environments in yahoo) - those are the easiest, least aggravating ways of doing it. Further details are also offered (guess where?) in the books. If you are fortunate enough to have a Storyteller, let them tell you when you get willpower back. Either way you do it, you can't have more temporary dots of willpower than you have permanent. A note on Extended actions While it's possible to do what's called "extended actions" to accumulate successes, I won't cover them here - one, it's beyond the scope of mere basic dice mechanics for chat, two, it's rare that anyone uses the rules for extended actions, and three, if you're that interested in such details, perhaps you should lay your hands on one of the core books of one of the World of Darkness lines, to allow them to explain all this in proper detail to you (I've just covered over a chapter's worth of book topics in a single webpage, with notes for adaptation for yahoo's chat environment) |