WoD Competence Dice?

[De Villefort]

One thing I never liked about WoD was how every fight turned into a comedy of failure or one side was so overpowered that it wasn't even funny.

I can't do anything about the latter, but the former I have an idea that might make things slightly better. For this solution, let us look behind the scenes at the mechanics we don't use for our characters in day-to-day play.

Let's say your character is opening a door. They don't have a door opening skill but they can still do it. Behind the scenes it is assumed that somewhere along the lines they picked up some secondary skill for opening doors. It's just not on your sheet.

Since most people don't frequently mess up opening a normal door we can assume that you have at least 2 points in your "Open doors" skill + your dexterity (or intelligence).

This results in most people having at least 4 dice to roll vs a low difficulty for a standard door. This explains why you can go most of your life opening doors every day and rarely mess it up.

In the real world sometimes you do mess up even opening a simple door. You push when you should have pulled, or you hit your own foot. Those are the 4 dice rolling 1s.

Now why, I ask, are these two invisible competency dice for every day tasks not added to skill checks involving things in combat?

Should not anyone, even a toddler, be able to throw a punch and hit a larger target? Currently, if they have no skill in it the chance of them doing it with their 1 Dex or 1 Int die is next to impossible.

However, if you assume everyone has 2 points of competency dice for skill related checks, then the toddler has 3 dice to successfully hit their baby sitter.

Now this is an extreme example but it gets the point across that what we have been using as our first point in our combat skill should be seen as your first point of expertise, not competency.

I propose that (for Skill/Knowledge/Talent checks only) everyone has two free dice to represent the basic human ability to do things.

Beyond that, you buy expertise dice with your chargen or XP points to make you better than an average human. These are the points on your sheet.

Just throwing the idea out to see what everyone thinks.

[Misadventure]

@De-Villefort Typically your base pool from the attribute accounts for this basic capacity.

Likewise, it isn't that you have a list of hundreds of mundane everyday skills, is that the system doesnt think they merit requiring even 1 success. They fall under things we just arent going to roll for, typically because neither success nor failure is interesting in an of itself. And the differences in characters wouldnt be interesting either.

Most systems have a guideline of don't roll unless it is important.

So zero success results can be interpreted as successful efforts that were actively countered by whatever the challenge element is - eg you throw a punch but they were already moving in a way that you didn't connect, you connected but with a glancing blow, you drew a little blood but it's not enough to take a health level, etc. Similar ideas are applied to everything, you didn't do enough to affect the situation. You tried hacking a system, and that vulnerability wasnt present, try again.

Ultimately this is an issue with the chunkiness of successes rolling 8+ of a d10. You'll get 0 successes from low pools even before you consider needing multiple successes.

As the 8+ method average comes out to .33 successes per die, you can always just add the dice together and divide by 8 (about 3.5 avg with 10-again, chance of no successes on 2 dice drops from .49 to .21 and to .035 at 3 dice) and you'll see more successes, but the various versions of the game aren't balanced to deal with that unless its always a die pool vs die pool check.

Most people just dont care, for most the rules aren't there to be explored, they are a clunky mechanism to measure incremental but assured gains, resolve player conflicts.

[De Villefort]

@Misadventure
All of your points are completely valid and I agree 100% with them.
However, wouldn't it feel better if you got to roll more dice for your S/K/T checks?

Even if, in the long term if makes only a fractional difference, succeeding even moderately more often at tasks would make you feel more like a heroic character without needing to lower the difficulty on everything.

More dice is just more fun.

[Ghost]

@De-Villefort WoD solved this in v5 by making successes happen on 6+ and the existence of both critical successes, bestial criticals, and bestial failures.

Having said that, the game as a while suggests that there shouldn't be a dice roll required for anything 'rote', such as opening doors, making coffee, figuring out how to use a vending machine, and even safely driving a car from one point to the next.

I don't recommend the use of "competence dice", though, and here is why...

1. If you don't have any dots in the skill you need, then you're just supposed to roll the attribute (ex: Int + Occult with 0 occult dice should be an automatic fail OR you can attempt on Int dice alone and get lucky).

2. The harsh reality of WoD in both table top and the way MUs handle it is that players will assume specific skills like social skills or academics to be "dump stats" that they can argue with the ST for presumed pass/fail hand-waving. On the WoD character sheets, you HAVE to choose where your character is most likely to fail based on your choices (dot placement) on where you want them to succeed. You're supposed to roleplay those deficiencies, however weak GMs will let a mix-maxxed physical badass with next to nil in social or mental abilities get away with negotiating a truce between the crips and bloods because they're either afraid of what the player will do when forced to "act with their dice pool" or aren't allowed to succeed.

3. 8+ on a pool of d10s is fucking brutal and was one place where nWoD didn't make the games better. You could throw 10d10 at something and it doesn't truly make it any more likely that you will succeed because each die still has only a 20% chance of success.

tl;dr? Drop the success margin to 7 or 6 on the die, force players to roll anything that isn't "rote", and don't accept "player can Google it so the character shouldn't have to roll"...ever.

[Misadventure]

@De-Villefort If you just want to add 2 dice to every roll, go ahead.

Or drop the success threshold to 7, 6, 4 whatever.

Or add the dice and divide by some number like 8, 7, 6, 4 whatever.

Make every even die a guaranteed success.

You could also go off range and make the scale 1-7, so the avg person has say 3 dice in an attribute, and even a smidge of experience is worth 1 in a skill.

Or reduce the lower pool to 1 die, and subtract the same dice from the higher pool. Now roll to compare successes. Or assume all dots get 1 success except the last 1 and it gets to roll.

As for the heroic feel, the 1-5 scale is the mortal range. Depending on which version you are playing, you can stack in gear, circumstances.

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Ultimately either you will push the range ov everyone up to always having successes, or you'll be comparing bigger success totals in contests.

Me, personally? Yes, I far prefer the "feel" that my pro got 3-5 successes that were countered by anothers 3-5 successes over I just didnt get any successes.

[Ganymede]

@Ghost said in WoD Competence Dice?:

Having said that, the game as a while suggests that there shouldn't be a dice roll required for anything 'rote', such as opening doors, making coffee, figuring out how to use a vending machine, and even safely driving a car from one point to the next.

This.

A GM shouldn't require a roll of someone unless a task is complex, the knowledge is not commonly available, or the character is under stress.