Emulating Vampire: the Masquerade and its unbiased application of personal horror is a difficult thing in a free server chatroom. Therein, we almost literally provide the members of New York by Night with "Tabletop Chat". New York by Night is not necessarily Mind's Eye Theatre, though the aspects of roleplay incorporated therein are indulged at any possible point of progression. Vampire uses a simple, virtual form of dice. To be specific, Vampire use 10-sided dice (/roll 1:10, or 2:10, or 3:10, et cetera). You roll Dice whenever the outcome of the action is in doubt (always in combat) or another participating player decides that something seems "unrealistic", and she may ask for a "Roll". Your character's strengths and weaknesses affect the number of dice you roll, and thus directly affect your chances of success. To properly be a member of NYbN, we require that you know as much of Vampire: the Masquerade Playability presented on this website, The Dice Pool is the basis for almost every situation. Read on. Ratings - Your character is limited only by your imagination, but his abilities are defined by his Traits (perhaps you have already created your character) -- all of his innate and learned aptitudes and abilities. Each trait is described by a rating of 1 to 5; a 1 in a Trait is barely competent, while a 5 is the pinnacle of human achievment. Most people's traits range from 1 to 3; 4 in a Trait indicates an exceptional person, while a 5 is nearly incomparable -- among humans, at any rate. It's also possible to have a zero in a Trait -- representing an unlearned skill, but some exceptions occur "(Nosferatu and Appearance comes to mind). x Abysmal  Poor
Average
Good
Exceptional
Superb
Alright, whenever you have to roll dice, you roll (/roll syntax) 1 die for every dot in the 2 or so corresponding Traits. Occasionally your character may just be attempting an action that may include only one trait; lifting something heavy will just be a Strength Roll (if you have 2 dots in "Strength" on your character sheet, you have 2 10-sided dice or /roll 2:10), because no other skill applies. Although, if you are looking for a pattern in the Stock Market, you would use a Perception+Finance Roll, as they correspond with the "attempt"... if you have 3 dots in Perception, and 2 dots in Finance, you have a total of 5 10-sided dice, or /roll 5:10. The most common rolls in the game involve adding the dice gained from an Attribute to the dice gained from an Ability. When rolling virtual dice, our chat server allows a maximum of 6 dice to be rolled at one time. If, appropriately, your statistical Traits allow for more than 6 dice (and obviously you want to take advantage of every one) roll the first six (/roll 6:10), then following be sure to roll the rest of the corresponding dice. Some advantages or challenges allow even for more than 10 dice, just continue with the pattern of 6 until you've rolled every die. I am going to use an example from WhiteWolf "If Veronica was trying to find a specific file in a cluttered clerk's office, her player Lynn may roll Perception+Finance -- an Attribute plus an Ability. In this case, Lynn would take two dice for Veronica's Perception of 2, plus so mnay dice as she had in finance; Veronica has Finance 4, so Lynn gets four more dice from that. Veronica has a total of six dice to attempt her task. These dice are called the dice pool -- in other words, the total number of dice you roll in a single turn. Most often you'll calculate a dice pool for only one action at a time, although ou can modify it to be able to perform multiple tasks in a turn." There is absolutely no situation in which more than two Traits can add to a dice pool. What's more, if your dice pool involves a trait whose maximum rating is 10 (such as Humanity or Willpower), you can't add any other traits to your dice pool. It's effectively impossible for a normal human being to have more than 10 dice in a dice pool. Elder vampires on the other hand... Multiple Actions - Please read the following over carefully until you "get it," it is quite useful, but complicated. In parentheses, I will attempt to add additional information to the WW2300's explanatory document, because I recall the difficulty I had when attempting to learn. White Wolf WW2300: Occasionally, a player will want her character to perform more than one action in a turn -- for example, firing a gun at two different targets, or climbing a ledge while kicking at pursuers below. In such situations, the player can attempt actions normally, though all actions suffer a penalty. The player (in game, via roleplay) declares the total number of actions he wishes his character to attempt. He then subtracts a number of dice from his first dice pool (First Action) equal to the total number of actions (6 Dice, but 2 actions- subtract 2, 4 Dice for the First Action). Additional actions lose an extra die from their pools, cumulative (Your second action's Dice Pool loses 2 dice due to 2 actions, minus 1 because of being an additional action = minus 3 dice); if a dice pool is reduced to zero or below in this manner, the action may not be attempted. Example: Justin wishes his character, Hall the Nosferatu, to throw a punch while simultaneously dodging two incoming blows. Hall has Dexterity 3, Brawl 4 and Dodge 3. Justin calculates the dice pool for the punch (Dexterity 3 + Brawl 4 = 7 dice pool), then subtracts three dice from it (because of the three actions total), for a final dice pool of 4 (for first action). Now the first dodge has a base dice pool of 6 (Dexterity 3 + Dodge 3), minus four (three for the number of actions, plus one for being the second multiple action), for a final dice pool of 2. The final dodge has a dice pool of 1 (6, minus three for the number of actions, minus an additional two for being the third action attempted). Hall had better be pretty lucky. Vampires with the Discipline of Celerity may take multiple actions without subtracting dice from their pools. These extra actions, though, cannot be divided to multiple actions. Difficulties - Obviously there is no point in rolling dice unless you know what results you are looking for. Every time you attempt an action, there is an appropriate difficulty to accomplish (many things requiring rolls have default difficulties; see Challenges, Combat, and Playing for them). A difficulty is always a number between 2 and 10, each time you score that number or higher on one of your dice, you're considered to have gained a success. For example, if an action's difficulty is 6 and you roll (/roll 5:10) 3,3,8,7, and 10, then you've scroed three successes. The more you get, the better you do. Often, you need only one success to perform actions, but that's considered marginal. If you score three or more, you completely succeed. Vampire: the Masquerade and NYbN make use of dice due to the realism involved. Naturally, the lower the difficulty, the easier it is to score successes, and vice versa. Six is the default difficulty, indicating actions neither exceptionally tricky nor exceptionally easy to accomplish. If nothing on this website or a rulebook provides a set difficulty number, assume that it is six. On challenges somewhat effecting the actual Place, like busting through a wall, the current storyteller is final authority on how difficult attempted actions are -- if the task seems impossible, he'll make the difficulty appropriately high, while if the task seems routinely easy, the difficulty will be low. The following charts should give you a good idea of how to combine difficulties and degrees of success. Italics indicate the average. Difficulties Three Easy (installing software on a Macintosh) Four Routine (changing a tire) Five Straight forward ( seducing someone who's already "in the mood") Six Standard (Firing a gun) Seven Challenging (replacing a car's sound system) Eight Difficult (rebuilding a wrecked engine block) Nine Exteremely Difficult (repairing a wrecked engine block without parts) Degrees of Success One Success Marginal (getting a broken refrigerator to keep running until the repairman arrives) Two Successes Moderate (making a handicraft that's ugly but useful Three Successes Complete ( fixing something so that it's good as new) Four Successes Exceptional (increasing yuour car's efficiency in the process of repairing it) Five or more successes Phenomenal (creating a masterwork) Failure - From WW2300 by Whitewolf: If you score no successes on a die roll, your character fails his attempted actions. He misses his punch. His pitch is a ball instead of a strike. His attempt to persuade the prince falls flat. Failure, while usually disappointing, is not so catastrophic as a botch (below). Example: Feodor, a Nosferatu, is attempting to spy on some suspicious- looking activities in one of th egalleries of the sewers , and in perching precariously o nan overhead pipe to do so. Justin the Storyteller tells Feodor's player, John, to roll his dexterity + stealth (difficulty 7). John rolls an gets 2,5,66,4,3 -- no successes. Justin rules that as Feodor attempts to shift position on the pipe, his foot slides on something slimy, and he loses his balance. The thugs below don't see Feodor, but he is definitely in trouble... Botches - From WW2300 by Whitewolf: Bad luck can ruin anything. One more basic rule about rolling dice is the "rule of one," or (spoken in a despairing tone) "otching." Whenever one of the dice comes up as "1," it cancels out a success. Completely. Take the die showing "1" and one of the dice showing a successful number and set them aside. in this manner, an otherwise successful action may be reduced to failure. Occasionally, truly bad fortune strikes. If a die roll garners no successes whatsoever, and one or more "1s" show up, a botch occurs. In other word, if none of your dice comes up a success, and there are dice showing "1s" (no matter how many), the roll is a botch. If you score at least one success, even if that success is canceled out and additional "1s" remain, it's just a simple failure. A botch is much worse than a normal failure -- it's outright misfortune. For instance, rolling a botch when trying to gun down a hunter might result in your gun jamming. Botching a computer roll when hacking into a system will probably alert the authorities, while botching a Stealth roll is a proverbial "stepping on a dry twig." The storyteller decides exaclty what goes wrong; a botch might produce a minor inconvenience or a truly unfortunate mishap. Of course, some storytellers may find that botches are cropping up a little too frequently in their scenes (the laws of probability often warp around dice, as any veteran roleplayer can attest). In that case, it's the Storyteller's privilege to give everyone, player and Storyteller NPC a like, one botch "free" -- in other words, the first botched roll of the session doesn't count. This rule tends to make unlife a little easier on the players -- but then again -- there's less chance of their enemies suffering a run of bad luck either... Example: Alexandra, a Tremere played by Merida, is desparately firing a gun through the windows the chantry, which are being shot out by a marauding Sabbat pack. Merida rolls Alex's Dexterity + Firearms (difficulty 8), and gets 9, 1, 1, 8, 1. The "1s" more than cancel out the success, but because she rolled to begin with, the action simply fails. She's not so lucky next turn. The dice come up, 1, 3, 4, 3, 7. This time, not only did a "1" occur, but no successes were scored at all, so the action is a botch. The ST rules that Alexandra's gun jams, and as she tries to force it, something crucial breaks, rendering the gun worthless. Alexandra starts to craw for the back door, hoping that the pack hasn't found it yet... Automatic Successes - Alright, we all know that rolling dice all the time is going to get absolutely tiresome and repetitive, especially if you continue to fail though are determined to try, and try, and try. Rolling also sometimes may be more prominent than the actual Roleplay, and the Roleplay always comes first. Thereof, we are going to be issuing "automatic successes" outside of the absolutely obvious ones (Crossing the street, dancing, opening a door, normal Roleplay). We are employing White Wolf's System for Automatic successes: If the amount in your dice pool are equal to our succeed the task's difficulty, then you succeed without rolling. Of course, this success is seen as a marginal one, so if you are going for quality, roll anyways to get more successes. Trying it Again- From WW2300 by White Wolf: Failure often produces stress, which often leads to further failure. If a character fails an action, he may usually try it again (after all, failing to pick a lock does not mean the character may never try to pick the lock again). In such cases, though, the ST has the option to increase the difficulty number of the second attempt by one. If the attempt is failed yet again, the difficulty of a third attempt goes up by two, and so on. Eventually, the difficulty will be so high that the character has no chance of succeeding (the lock is simply beyond her ability to pick). Examples of when to use this rule are: climbing a wall, hacking into a computer system, or interrogating a prisoner. After all, if you couldn't find a handhold, defeat the security program, or get the prisoner to talk the first time, there's a reasonable chance you might not be able to do it at all. Sometimes you shouldn't even bother invoking this rule. Failing to shoot somebody with a gun, detect an ambush, or keep on another driver's tail are to be expected in stressful situations. Such failure does not automatically lead to frustration and failed future attempts. COMPLICATION Resisted Actions- A simple difficulty number may not be enough to represent a struggle between characters. A character may attempt to batter a door down while a character on the other side attempts to hold it shut. In such a case, there is something known as a resisted roll -- each player roll the appropriate amount of dice against one another, and the person who scores the most successes dominates. A score is only as many successes as the amount which you exceed your opponent's successes; in other words, the opponent's successes eliminate your own, just as "1s" do. If you score four successes and your opponent scores three, you have only 1; a marginal success. It is often difficult to achieve an outstanding success on a resisted action. Even if your opponent can't beat you, he can still diminish the effect of your efforts. Example of Resisted Action Veronica, prowling for trouble at the latest Camarilla soiree has determined by night's end to spite her rival, a ventrue by the name of Giselle. Giselle arrived at the fete with her latest childe in tow; Tony, a talented and delicious young man with a medical license and a much vaunted pedigree. Veronica decides that therew ould be nothing more amusing than stealing Giselle's childe away from her for the evening -- of course, that'll take some doing, as Giselle will be watching him like a awk Lynn (Vernoica's player) and the ST roleplay out much of the initial three-way conversation between Veronica, Giselle, and Tony. Finally, the ST has lynn roll Veronica's Manipulation (3) + Subterfuge (3) resisted by Giselle's Manipulation (3) + Subterfuge (4). Lynn rolls six dice versus a difficulty of 7 (Giselle's manipulation + subterfuge); the ST rolls Giselle's seven dice versus difficulty of 6 (Veronica's manipulation + subterfuge). Lynn manages to score four successes, while Giselle remarkably manages only three. Giselle's successes subtract from Lynn's leaving Lynn with one success. Tony opts to make the rouns with Veronica, although her marginal success means he casts a few longing glances back Giselle's way... Teamwork- You don't awlays have to go it alone. if the situation warrants, characters can work together to succeed. If teamwork is possible (not in combat or disciplines, rituals though.) for the task in question, two or more characters can make rolls separately and add their successes together. They may never combine their Traits into one dice pool, however. Teamwork can be effective in many situations -- dogpiling on the prince's pet enforcer, shadowing a hunt or doing research in the library, for instance. however, it canactually prove to be a hindrance in certain situations (including social interaction such as fast-talking or seducing a subject), and one person's botch can bollix the whole attempt. |
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