Pith and Vinegar

WARNING: EXCESSIVE NERDOSITY. AVOID CONTACT WITH EYES. SEEK MEDICAL ASSISTANCE IF CONTAMINATION IS SUSPECTED.

I recently helped overhaul Requiem of Dreams, an old World of Darkness RPG chat site. Most of it was a code copy/paste job from its WOD sister-site, Dark Providence. The big task was the creation of an oWOD dice roller.

Now, people have been making oWOD dice rollers of various flavours since White Wolf fans first got online in the mid-’90s. But I think mine may be the most comprehensive one ever devised. Let me walk you through it. While the modern WOD has one book for all the rules and everything else refers to them (with the occasional tweak), the oWOD books didn’t have a central oWOD rulebook. Every game published its own set of rules. For the most part, those rules were identical, but everything worked just differently enough to give me a headache.

In general: You roll your dice pool (e.g. 5 10-sided dice). Any result above the set difficulty of the action (e.g. 6) is considered a success. Difficulties go from 2 to 10. Any 1s which turn up will subtract a success from the total. If you’ve purchased a Specialty in a certain area (e.g. a hacking specialty on your Computer skill) then on Specialty-related rolls you get to reroll 10s recursively.

Vampire: As normal.
Werewolf: On specialties, 10s do not reroll recursively.
Mage: Difficulties can raise above 10. Difficulties are treated as 9, with the difference being subtracted from the number of successes.
Wraith: 2nd Edition Rules. 10s rolled on specialties are not recursive.
Changeling: 2nd Edition Rules.
Hunter: On specialties, 1s are not subtracted from successes.
Demon: As normal.
Orpheus: If a double-specialty applies (one on Attribute, one on Ability), 9s may be rerolled as well.

In Revised rules (everything but Wraith and Changeling), if you roll 1s but no successes, you botch (dramatic failure). Even a single success alongside a dozen 1s will just net you a failure. In second edition, anytime 1s outnumber successes is a botch. So it’s way easier to botch in 2nd ed. Initiative is also rolled quite differently.

Of course, it was only after I’d written the 2nd edition code that I found out it wasn’t being used; RoD had standardized to use Revised rolls for Initiative and botching. Yay.

Orpheus’ 9-again rule also wasn’t implemented because the venue is ostensibly never going to be used. And there are a couple of fiddly bits I need to account for, like Changeling has some innate kith abilities that let them ignore botches in some cases.

But by and large? Done. When you pick your character, it automatically figures out what game you’re playing, and thus figures out what rule variants to apply. Took me foreeever, but it seems to be working. I’m happy with how it worked out.

And yes, it figures out your Initiative automatically for Init rolls.