World of Darkness Book

This is another somewhat dishonest review, since I don't know that I actually read this whole book. Well, I think I did, but I did so in two parts. I read the setting stuff ("fluff") a while back, and thought it was well-written, but basically just standard White Wolf World of Darkness stuff. Not BAD, mind, just standard. Didn't make me say "damn, I want to run this game".

This time, however, I was looking at the systems, because I was considering using this game to run some sort of Dark Ages fantasy game of unknown content or setting, and wanted to see if this seemed workable. Also, I was just impelled by curiosity, because White Wolf tends to put out stuff that I really like conceptually, but then falls apart when I start rolling dice.

To my pleasant surprise, the new "Storytelling" system seems pretty robust on the surface. Granted, this book deals primarily with playing normal people, but for that function, it seems like the system works pretty well. It's straightforward, seems reasonable easy to remember, combat looks like it should be really fast, and there aren't too many weird exceptions. I'm sure once you start piling powers and shit onto that, it gets much more complicated and confusing real fast, but fortunately, if I'm running a low fantasy game, that shouldn't be a huge issue. And I'm not quite up for trying to run a modern nWOD game yet, though I suppose the upcoming Hunter: The Vigil could change that. I think I'm going to look over a couple more options, and then start to try and make some kind of decision.

In any case, it seems like a neat system, and could be fun to run/play at some point. I'm sure there's broken stuff in it that I've missed, but no system seems completely free of that sort of shit…