House Rules: General

These are general clarifications, interpretations, and changes we've made to cWoD 20th Anniversary Edition. Most of these rules deal with corner cases. The more important or broad something is, the higher on the list it will appear.

Clarifications

This section is for rules that are worded in ways which specific interpretations are policy here on FtA.

Specializations

We will be using the 20th Anniversary Edition mechanic for Specialties. Namely, rather than causing the player to roll an additional die, each 10 on a roll where a Specialty applies adds 2 successes instead of one.

House Rules

This section is for rules that do not meet our theme, are mechanically ineffectual, or generally just need to not be as they are written.

Difficulties Above 9

Because of the way probabilities work, difficulty 10 means that any given die is 80% likely to do nothing, 10% likely to botch and 10% likely to help. In other words, an additional die on the roll is equally likely to hurt as it is to help, it's essentially a coin flip. Generally speaking additional dice are meant to represent additional skill or ability. At difficulty ten, then, more skill doesn't actually make you more successful, it just makes your results swing more violently. This is contrary to our desired behavior so we are abolishing difficulty 10.

Instead we will use the Threshold System. When you encounter difficulties higher than 9 the difficulty is reduced to 9. For every step higher than 9 that the difficulty would have been, the roll now requires an additional success. These additional successes are known as the threshold. For example:

A difficulty 10 roll now becomes

Difficulty 9, Threshold 1.

A difficulty 11 roll now becomes

Difficulty 9, Threshold 2.

A difficulty 14 roll now becomes

Difficulty 9, Threshold 5.

A difficulty 9 roll facing +2 diff becomes

Difficulty 9, Threshold 2 (As it would've been Difficulty 11).

Failing to meet the threshold does not result in a botch.