Everything Old is New Again:
a look at the New World of Darkness

by Nancy Schultz



In 1991 White Wolf introduced the Storyteller system. Intended to be a "new direction" in role-playing games, it was among the first to really emphasize the story over the mechanics, to the point where at times the mechanics themselves supported the story first. At the same time, they introduced the World of Darkness, and in so doing intrigued and brought to gaming a whole sub-culture that itself was still somewhat young... the Goths. Both of these events were accomplished by the introduction of a single game: Vampire: the Masquerade. It would be instrumental in bringing White Wolf out of the shadows of TSR and FASA and into its own right as one of the top gaming companies in the US, and arguably in the Industry as a whole.

Vampire was just the start of the World of Darkness, however. White Wolf followed up with Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Mage: the Ascension, Wraith: the Oblivion and Changeling: the Dreaming over the next four years. And it continued to grow through second editions and revised editions, through the addition of historical games such as Dark Ages, sub-lines such as Mummy and Kindred of the East, and the metaplot-driving modern lines of Hunter: the Reckoning and Demon: The Fallen .

In 2004, White Wolf did what many thought was the unthinkable. They ended it. All of it, except Dark Ages[1]. The announcement came at Gen-Con 2003, and was greeted with mixed reactions. Their reasoning was both that they had been promising an apocalypse since Vampire was introduced in 1991, and that 12 years of experience had taught them that among other things, another revision of the rules wouldn’t do anyone any good. There was too much baggage from the previous three editions. What the World of Darkness needed as a Clean Start.

At GenCon 2004, we got a look at that Clean Start.


This is not a review in the typical sense. By the time of publication, five reviews have appeared on RPG.net alone, and several others are scattered throughout Cyberspace. Rather, I intend to look at how the new World of Darkness compares to the old, both in terms of comparing the Storyteller system to the Storytelling system, and in terms of the New World of Darkness setting that is, at least in theory, devoid of the baggage of the old.


The Books

Obviously, the best place to begin to compare the two world is the books in which they are presented. The old World of Darkness (oWOD) was introduced in Vampire: the Masquerade, a green marble soft cover. Several of the pages of story information were all but completely unreadable due to a poor choice of grayscale-textured backgrounds and difficult to read fonts. The new World of Darkness (nWOD) comes in two books, both hardcover. The World of Darkness Corebook is a black cover with slight blue undertones, and Vampire the Requiem is a lovely red somewhere between ruby and blood. Both books are significantly better in terms of backgrounds, with no grayscale textures, though some of the story text on the chapter splash pages is still in difficult fonts. The contrast, however, is much clearer, so the font choice is less annoying, at least most of the time.

In my opinion, the new books are better looking, better organized (they even have indexes!), and as I’ll get into later, better written. Certainly the Production Team has learned over the past thirteen years.


The System

The old World of Darkness used the Storyteller system, an elegant, if not simple, system where you added one of nine attributes to one of (initially) thirty skills to form a dice pool of anywhere from 1 to 10, before allowing for supernatural enhancements. Occasionally, your dice pool was a single trait, usually one that was measured from 1 to 10. These dice were then rolled, and the number of dice that met or exceeded a target number of anything from 3 to 10, usually 6, was counted as a success. Any 1’s rolled were subtracted from the number of successes. The more successes you got, the greater your success was, and occasionally tasks required more than one success to achieve them. Any and all modifiers are applied to the target number or the number of successes needed. As the game lines and supplements piled up, this system became increasingly tweaked, added to, and manipulated. Each addition tried to correct the mistakes of the previous, but frequently didn’t account for the supplemental information published in non-core books, making translations occasionally difficult.

Then there is also the compatibility of the many different lines. In a word, they weren’t. Yes, they were all set in the same World of Darkness, but their systems were uniquely designed to support the particular brand of horror that the game line represented. Some of the skills translated across easily, mostly the combat ones. Others were shifted from one category to the next, or else removed, redefined, or renamed. Only the attributes and the common trait of Willpower remained constant. Each line also introduced a plethora of new skills across the many supplements, resulting in a list of over 175 skills, many of which were redundant. Crossover guidelines were printed in many of the GM screen supplements, but usually far, far too sketchy and constantly in need of revision as the various lines developed.

The new World of Darkness uses the Storytelling system, an elegant, if not simple, system where you add one of nine attributes to one of twenty four skills to form a dice pool of anywhere from 1 to 10, before allowing for supernatural enhancements. Occasionally, your dice pool is a single trait, usually one that is measured from 1 to 10. These dice are then rolled, and the number of dice that exceed 8 are considered successes. Tasks sometimes require more than one success. If you score five more successes than you need, that is considered an exceptional success. Any and all modifiers are applied to the dice pool.

There is also the issue of compatibility between the lines. This isn’t as easy to judge, as only the World of Darkness Corebook and Vampire: the Requiem are available. However, from the very construction, the lines should be more compatible than the oWOD. Characters are built first as mortals, and then a template for the appropriate supernatural "race" is applied on top of that. Also within Vampire: the Requiem they deal with the issue of using vampiric abilities on mages and werewolves. Not in depth, certainly, but with sufficient clarity to make crossover much less headache inducing. Requiem also begins with guidelines for creating new disciplines (vampiric powers), something that I don’t recall at all in Masquerade until the Outcasts book was printed.

In my opinion, the Storytelling system is cleaner and simpler than the Storyteller system. At least for now. As the supplements roll in, that will doubtless change, but hopefully not to the extent of the Storyteller system. I’m definitely impressed with the new system, and with the split of Mortals as the Corebook and the various "races" as templates that are applied. My only real concern is that in terms of relative power level, a starting human in the Storyteller system is notably more capable than a starting human in the Storytelling system, and this difference in starting power is only exaggerated once the supernatural template is applied. However, they wisely allowed for this, providing example levels of XP to award at character creation in order to facilitate making more competent characters. An option I would seriously recommend, unless your starting characters are no older than their late teens early twenties (and even then, it’s a bit slim). There are a few other issues I have with the system, but most of them are fairly minor and, in my opinion, easy to fix.


The World

On the surface, the part that mere mortals see every day, there is no real difference between the old World of Darkness and the new. It’s still our world, but nastier and, well, darker. Criminals get away more, the system is more corrupt, there is even less of the wilderness left.

As we scratch down beneath this dark exterior, the two views of the world are still similar in that there are still wraiths to haunt people, vampires to prey on them, werewolves to guard those rare natural places, and, presumably, mages to tinker and twist our perceptions. There will still be strange creatures that defy easy categorization. But as of yet, we don’t know if the fae still haunt hidden glens and yet plague humans with devil’s deals. And we don’t know yet if the demons themselves are free to manifest upon the earth, cast out from Heaven. Nor do we know yet if there will be humans with more than human powers, yet not the versatility of the magus.

Now, in the old World of Darkness, this darkness had more of a purpose. It was the herald of the end of the world, and though it took twelve years for that end to come, it did come. This also means that there was a lot of story and background, and it was usually moved a little bit forward with each book. Some people liked the Metaplot, some did not. Every critter had at least a U.S. spanning organization (or two) and this model repeated over all countries... even when it wasn’t really logical.

So far, we’ve only gotten a peek into the new vampires of the World of Darkness , but that’s enough to notice some significant changes. The clan structure has changed. From the thirteen clans, plus smaller clans and bloodlines, now there are only five, plus bloodlines. Three former clans are now bloodlines, which may not sit well with those who liked them in their old incarnation. There is no Camarilla any more, except as an early sect of vampires. Now there are five different sects, and it’s not uncommon to be unaligned. In the oWOD, you almost had to pick a side on something. Not so much any more. With the lack of Camarilla, there is no world-spanning organization of vampires that all vampires must either belong to or rebel from (or choose a neutral path at great peril).

I’m happier with the new clan setup, and there’s a scholarly clan that wasn’t there in the first edition of Vampire, and when one was introduced, they weren’t really playable in most games because they belonged to the Sabbat. I also like the new way the covenants are set up, in a much more fluid setup. If Requiem had been the Vampire game I’d been introduced to before I developed a large amount of baggage from watching the LARPers bring a new definition of angst to gaming, I might still be playing it rather than relegating Vampire to my antagonists’ shelf.

All in all, I’m quite impressed with the new World of Darkness and the Storyteller System. It’s clear to me at least that they have learned from the past 12 years, at least to some extent, and they’ve put that knowledge to good use, clearing out the dead weight and trimming down the system to a much more streamlined format that succeeds at least slightly better than the old at encouraging role-playing over rules. I’m looking forward to Werewolf: the Forsaken (poor choice of initials not withstanding) in February of 2005, and Mage: the Awakening in August, 2005, as well as many of the supplements, and I recommend the new World of Darkness to anyone who liked the concepts of the old, but wasn’t quite happy with the way it played out. And anyone who liked the old World of Darkness as it was should give this a look. You may not like all the changes, but there may be something in here to surprise you.


[1] Although the Dark Ages line was not canceled with the rest of the oWOD in spring of 2004, by the end of September, the developer realized that the Dark Ages line would only suffer from the nWOD, as would the nWOD, so the Dark Ages line was also canceled.


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