World of Karmic Darkness

Parent Page: Houserules and Hacks

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### **The Goal of this Hack**

Replacing the World of Darkness games' heavily Fortune-based rule system with a Karma-based one, or for a milder change, merely enrich it with the latter while keeping the former around to also use alternatively / fall back on once the Karma is exhausted.

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### **Where the Inspiration Came From**

When playing Gumshoe, a game heavily focussed on investigation, research and mystery, Alegz discovered the potential joys of a Karma-driven skill system - and while that game perhaps takes it a bit far for our tastes, he nevertheless resolved to try and implement some of its goodness into our regular, go-to rule system, the WoD.

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### **The Basic Idea This Builds On**

In Gumshoe, your Investigative Abilities are expressed in points, similar to the WoD. But you don't roll for these abilities, instead you spend their points. When you 'make a spend' in this game, the ability always works, i.e. Spending a point of "Forensic Analysis" *will* give you a clue as a result.

This reliability is very Karmic, and is desirable for certain situations in an RPG, especially for investigative scenarios where the players *need* to find the clues, or else risk getting stuck in a bottleneck...

So the basic idea for this hack was - what if the dots on a WoD sheet could be used in the exact same way as the skill ratings on a Gumshoe sheet?

It is really a pretty simple concept, and easy to implement in the WoD system, for one thing because the changes are so across-the-board that not a lot of detailed rewriting has to be done, and for another thing because there is already a mechanic in WoD that does something just like that (Willpower Spending), and which can simply be 'generalized' to be used/allowed for any skill in the game, not just WP.

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### **What We Plan On Using It For**

Alegz is considering to use this Hack for a possible continuation of his recently-started KULT campaign, the PbtA-based rules of which proved not as much to our group's liking as he had perhaps hoped they might...

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#### **Okay, So How Do I Hack my WoD to Become a WoKD?**

Alright, so look at the way Willpower can be spent in WoD. You have a set number of WP points (the scale is 1-10, but you'll mostly have 4-9 or so). You can spend them on a one-for-one basis. Each one you spend right before you roll any given dicepool in the game, gives you 1 automatic success for this upcoming roll.

#### Step 1

Now, we use this rule, but free it up to work not only for WP, but for any attribute, skill, background, and other trait in the game. The range for most traits apart from WP is 1-5 (exceptions exist, but need not concern us here, for now), and you'll mostly have ratings somewhere between 1 and 3, perhaps two or three 4s, and rarely a 5, in any given skill or background.

#### Step 2

Decide how Karma-heavy you want to go with this. For a slight dose of Karma, keep the Spending rule as it is, and tell players:

"Each time you are asked to make a roll in the game, calculate your dicepool for that roll, and decide whether or not you want to spend a point from one of the stats involved with this dicepool, in order to get 1 additional success on the roll automatically. Then make the appropriate roll (with the spent point not yet subtracted), and count out the results as usual, adding your 1 success from the spend. Afterwards, cross out that dot on your sheet, as you have just spent it."

This leads to dicepools diminishing over time, because points spent can no longer be added into dicepools for rolls to make. For example, after rolling your Intelligence+Investigation 7 a couple of times, and sometimes spending Intelligence and/or Investigation points as described above to increase your results, your dicepool for Int+Investigation rolls may have shrunk to just 4 dice. At some point, this attribute+skill combo will be so diminished as to become almost useless, and you will begin to run out of of points to spend anymore. Your character becomes exhausted from doing this too much.

This serves considerations of Spotlight distribution as well, preventing high-dicepool skills from being used over and over again by the same player, and never 'running dry'. In this variant, even Dr. Holmes, genius investigator that he is, will eventually deplete his repertoire of clever insights and perceptive analyses, and need help from Mr. Watson, ever standing ready to support the great master when the latter's verve starts to trickle out.

(This hack needs some mechanic to govern the replenishing of spent points. We will discuss this later on, but that mechanic will probably be something close to Lady Blackbird's refreshment scenes, or WoD's original WP regain mechanic.)

If you are satisfied with such a slight ingestion of Karma into your WoD, you can stop here. Just look up the refreshment options given below, settle on one or more of them, and you're good to go playtesting this hack.

If not, and you want more of that Karmic goodness, proceed to Step 3.

#### Step 3

If you want to go medium-Karma, tell the players the following:

"In this game, you always get the choice to either make a roll for any given use of a skill, or not to roll but to spend points instead. When you choose to roll, do so as normal. When you choose to spend, however, select one of the dots from either one of the relevant traits that would be used for the roll.

For example, if you have Intimidate 3, you could select the first, second or third dot of this ability to spend it. The spent dot will grant you as many successes as its 'worth'. So, spending the 2nd dot of Intimidate will grant you 2 successes, while spending the 3rd dot will grant you 3 successes. Of course, you can spend each dot just once.

Consider allowing the players to spend more than one dot per task they do. When spending 2 (or even more) points on a task, the points may all come from either one of the traits used to build the dicepool, or be divided amongst them. (E.g. when doing a Intelligence+Investigation task, you might use your 2nd Intelligence dot and your third Investigation dot, for a total of 5 (2+3) successes on the task, or you might spend your 1st and 2nd dot of Intelligence, for a total of 3 (1+2) successes.)

At any point during the game, you may also resort to 'just rolling for it' instead. In this case, use your default dicepool, as usual, without any Karma attached. To balance out this option of still rolling 'as normal', while also able to profit from Karmic spends as well, the base difficulty of rolls in this variant should be 8, instead of the normal 6. Relying on your luck should intentionally be more risky under this rules variant.

So the choice you are really making as a player when faced by any given in-game task, is to either pay for a reliable and gradable amount of success with a limited mechanical resource (point spend), or to take the risk of a slightly-harder-than-average dice roll (and its ever-present chance of botches!), which however costs you nothing to attempt.

If you are happy with this more or less equal mixture of Karma and Fortune, you can stop here, and go play already.

If not, you may need to go full Karma on this, and proceed to Step 4.

#### Step 4

In this, the full-blown Karmic variant, handle point spends as described above, under Step 3, but don't have the players make any rolls.

Refreshment needs to happen earlier and more often than under the first two variants, since spending is now the only option players have to determine the success of their skills when they use them.

Under this variant, definitely allow players to spend more than 1 point on any given task, if they so wish, as described above, under Step 3.

#### Step 5

It doesn't get any more Karmic than this, so you have now made your available choices, and are ready to go play.

The only thing left to do (but you can even delay on deciding this until you see how these rules handle in actual play) is to choose refreshment options from below, so as to keep the Karma economy of the game ebbing and flowing - you'll want to neither over-supply, nor starve the players of spendable points - and you're all set.

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### **Refreshment Options**

X amount of points refresh -

* at the beginning of every session
* at the resolution of an chapter / arc / season
* when achieving an important story goal, personal victory, or moment of catharsis
* after a good night's sleep
* after a week / month of rest
* ...

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