Musing about World of Darkness Games and LARPs

Someone built this to stop you

The Usual Assumption is Wrong

In many World of Darkness games, antagonists generally – and mortals especially – are treated more like scenery than as true threats. They become dangerous only when they are individually and personally powerful, named, or politically important – and probably sporting some incredible supernatural power. The nameless guard is a speed bump. The receptionist is a Charisma+Persuasion roll. The security system is one Security check from being offline. The cop has more value for his badge than for the system that backs him. These things act more like isolated obstacles waiting for a player to show which person in the coterie has the right trick to get through the challenge. And that assumes they don’t just bypass the threat entirely.

I want to challenge this assumption.

The World of Darkness should not be a field full of passive targets waiting for one of the many monsters to jump out of the closet, make a Security test, and waltz their way into the penthouse. It should be full of people and organizations that have survived this long because they have a deep understanding of how their world works and how dangerous things can be. A security team hired to protect something valuable is not made of random incompetents. A hunter cell that has not been eaten yet has probably learned not to give vampires a fair fight. An Anarch crew holding territory against the Camarilla knows who belongs in their turf and who doesn't. A corporation with secrets worth stealing has an army of lawyers, logs, cameras, policies, protocols, and incident response systems. Even ordinary mortals, when encountered in the context of their expertise, are often not average at all. They are trained, practiced, and backed by systems far larger than themselves.

The mistake is treating opposition as thought it begins existing when the PCs enter the scene. Someone built the lock. Someone placed the camera. Someone wrote the access policies. Someone spends hours training employees on policy. Someone conducts drills and trial runs and red team engagements to check if people follow the policy. And someone has been around long enough that they remember what happened the last time a receptionist let through a stranger and then Jim upstairs was never seen again.

The system was built to stop you.

The Mortals Know What They’re Doing

In the community of D\&D Games, Keith Ammann writes his series titled The Monsters Know What They’re Doing. D\&D Tables often struggle with giving a challenge to players because not all DMs are amazing tacticians. The series gives tactics and strategies that monsters and enemies would realistically take to ensure their success.

In World of Darkness games we suffer from the same challenge, with some unique additional elements that compound on top of the raw tactical issues. In D\&D, most of the friction – the forces that work against the players – are seen in combat. In the World of Darkness, our frictions do end up there many times; but we also run into a lot of friction of bureaucracy, social order, and technology. The frictions we need to make our games feel difficult take a much more subtle approach than just fighting with pack tactics and using terrain to your advantage.

In WoD, we need to expand this concept of fighting tactically outside of combat.

Hunters should know how to scout a target, remain undetected, and watch their habits.

Anarchs know how to survive without permission to be in the territory they are in.

Sabbat knows how to vanish after they sow terror before they get rooted out.

Corporations know how to protect assets (both their people and information as well as physical items).

Police know how to build a case and put clues together.

Occultists know how to conceal rituals.

Ghouls know how to serve their masters without getting noticed.

So let’s dive into how to take your game from a world of speed bumps for player interests, into something dangerous. Most of my play is in Live Action games, so that is my primary perspective here, but the concepts apply across formats.

People are not average at their own specialties

Not everyone is going to be a multidisciplinary genius. Non-Player Characters should however be good at something. You’ll have to pick that on a case by case basis. At a bare minimum though, anyone the players encounter who is acting in their professional role – the thing they do almost every day – should be assumed to be highly competent at that task. The doorman is not going to let a sweet-talker into the penthouse - even if he thinks that person is his own best friend. If you don’t look like the owner of that apartment, he’s going to turn you down. And even if you look like the owner’s son, he’s going to call the boss before he lets your 5 friends in with you.

In addition to personal competence, these people are also backed by support systems to prevent them from accidental failures of their jobs. The security guard you are getting past also has a camera watching him – and that guard has an outside line. Bypassing a single obstacle should rarely be enough to make your way through a well prepared target.

Of course part of all this is to say don't make people average on their stats. Yes definitely you should treat more security guards like they have 4s or 5s in some of their attributes and skills related to their jobs (unless they are intentionally new). But that is not the whole lesson to take from this. “Just raise the difficulty” is not the goal. The goal is to make your NPCs act more like they understand the world they live in.

They may not know about vampires, but they know the crime rate in their city is high. They know about social engineering. They know that disappearances happen all the time. The mortals in the world should act like they know they are surrounded by threats. They are not blind to the evidence of it - someone got mauled by some wild animal in the next neighborhood over just last month after all.

Competent opposition does not just have bigger numbers, they also have better habits.

Give Your Antagonists Procedures

A trained antagonist should not need to improvise everything.

Hunters have rules of engagement, ghouls have reporting chains, packs have assault plans, corporations have escalation policies, police have documentation and chain of command, occultists have taboos and secret handshakes.

Give your antagonists a routine that they follow – that they almost always follow – when dealing with various situations. If things start to get out of the ordinary, they should default into a routine that is optimized, trained for, and standardized.

Some examples include:

A hunter does not chase anyone alone.

A ghoul is compelled to never open the door unless the passphrase is given.

A Sabbat scout never stays to fight, he only marks the target and gets out.

Procedure is how everyone stays alive when so many things are stronger and more dangerous than they are.

Build Layers, not Walls

Prepared opposition should create multiple doors, not a single hard stop. Build up many layers of defenses around a target that will require coming at the challenge from multiple angles and with many different specialties.

Bad:

“The hunters are too prepared, you won’t be able to catch them.”

Good:

“The hunters are well prepared. You’ve found out they have a safehouse somewhere, a surveillance van, at least three informants, and that one of their members is getting very paranoid. What are you going after first?”

If the team wants to take out a hunter cell, the process is going to look less like “follow them to their hideout and fight them”. Break it down into concrete challenges to be overcome.

Identify the cell

Learn their doctrine

Find their surveillance points

Compromise their communications

Separate the members so they can’t defend each other

Hit the safehouse

Prevent evidence from reaching other cells

And there is a temptation to look at that and see “5 rolls i need to make before hitting the safehouse”, but each of those challenges can be an entire scene and effort unto itself.

Failures Escalate

“If nothing goes wrong.” We all know intuitively that this phrase is almost an assurance that something will go wrong. Yet in our games failure is usually quickly and quietly cleaned up and ignored after the immediacy of the event. When it makes sense to do so, failures should create new challenges or increase the difficulty of later actions when dealing with an ongoing engagement with an organization or person. Prepared antagonists notice when something is wrong, and they alert, record, adapt, and respond to those changes.

A failed hack alerts IT

A sloppy feed creates a new hunter lead

A bad intimidation check means the guard calls his allies over to help

What I recommend is to use an Alert Ladder, a system of escalation that keeps track of how heavy the friction will be for the players.

Green - NPCs are totally clueless to player presence.

Yellow - Something feels ‘off’, and they will be wary of red flags.

Orange - An investigation into the situation has begun.

Red - There is an active and immediate response attempting to defuse the situation.

Black - Lockdown protocols. Ambushes, hostile retaliation, masquerade exposure, or flight all become immediate threats.

When players fail, step up the ladder. And remember coverups only de-escalate so far. Dominating the receptionist might make her less suspicious of you, but her coworker who walks by 5 minutes later may still notice something is wrong.

Special note - many characters in the world of darkness have difficulties interacting with humans because of their monstrous nature. Those low humanity symptoms, werewolf penalties, etc – those characters should be treated as already at “Yellow” in every situation dealing with a mundane human. And in the systems where Unseen Sense exists, those mortals who have it should start at “Yellow” or even “Orange” for every in their sense.

Powers work, but antagonists understand the risk

Do not negate disciplines and gifts and sorceries just because the antagonist is competent. The power still works, let the safeguards that are in place check it though.

You can still:

Dominate the guard

Obfuscate past the lookout

Presence your way into the meeting

Potence through the locked door

Use Auspex to find the hidden watcher

But sometimes:

The guard had a check-in schedule

The lookout has a partner watching from somewhere else

The meeting is recorded by someone not in the room

The broken door triggers a response plan

The watcher was bait

Supernatural powers should solve problems. They should not automatically erase the systems around those problems.

Antagonists learn

This aspect of making enemies competent is less forgotten, but worth mentioning. After every encounter with the players or their minions, you should ask yourself “what did the enemy learn from this encounter?”

Did they learn someone is asking around about John Quincy? Did they learn the faces of some of the coterie? Did they learn that they are dealing with someone with Dominate? Did they learn that the coterie has the physical strength to tear open a vault door? DId they learn that they need to rotate guards more often or put up new cameras?

The same tricks don’t work forever, the same entrances don't remain unguarded. Discipline use creates rumors, fears, reactionary responses. Even your successes can change the world and how the NPCs respond to you in an intelligent and intentional way.

Use the System for Antagonists, Too

We should bake an assumption into our games that the antagonists know how to use the same world, tools, and rules that the player characters do. NPCs can make use of the rules of the game in more ways than just stat blocks and powers. The realm of stacking together powerful combinations of skills, backgrounds, merits, downtimes, preparation, teamwork, and more doesn’t belong only to the PCs.

This matters most when the enemy has time to prepare. The megacorp security system should not be modeled as one technician making a roll the moment the PCs arrive. It should be understood as the product of a team: intelligent, trained professionals with strong relevant pools, specialties, equipment, procedures, peer review, and weeks or years of work. In a system with extended actions, they will have already made those rolls. You may be looking at overcoming a security system with an accumulated 50 or 60 total successes. You aren't just trying to overcome a single camera. You are trying to avoid getting caught by an elaborate system of detections prepared by professionals specifically to catch you.

The same logic applies away from hacking.

A hunter safehouse is not just a room of enemies. It also includes escape routes, surveillance angles, alarms, dead drops, fallback comms, and ways to stop pursuers if they need to evacuate.

Respect that your antagonists might have had time, resources, motive, and opportunity to prepare for this exact situation. Respect that they also know about the cheesy combos of skills and powers and merits to achieve incredible advantages (and test pools) for themselves.

Complex Actions, and Laws of the Night 2

Some of the WoD systems, mainly LARP systems and specifically LotN 2, do not have a system for taking complex actions over an extended period of time or good ways to accumulate successes over time. While this makes for very quick resolution of issues, it also creates a default fallback to “hack the system with a single test”.

In these cases, I recommend STs to consider extended engagements as an Operation.

An Operation is a single objective that is too large and complex to be resolved with a single challenge. A single challenge can bypass one layer of the problem, but cannot resolve the entire goal. Describe an amount of successes that needs to be made, alerting the opposition (# of failures), difficulty, and the amount of time each action takes. A significant failure, reckless approach, or repeated brute force attempts might create additional failures.

Everything below is just a mechanical shorthand for what would otherwise just be normal Storyteller judgement. This just gives a simple framework for storytellers to conceptualize running these scenarios. These are not ‘new rules’, just structure for you to use as you please.

– Building an Operation –

An Operation has 4 main values:

Progress Requirement: how much work must be completed. Failure/Alertness Threshold: how many failures the PCs can suffer before the opposition notices, adapts, or responds. Difficulty: how hard each individual test is. Time per test: how long each attempt takes in the story.

Progress Requirements

Progress measures the size and complexity of the objective. A single success usually creates 1 Progress. An exceptional success creates 2 progress.

A high progress requirement should usually mean that the objective has many layers of defenses or that the target has many different overlapping systems to prevent failure. And not all rolls may necessarily need the same skill. Your hacking attempt could start with a social engineering attack and then pivot into raw security rolls for the last half.

Failure/Alertness Threshold

The Failure Threshold measures how many failed tests the characters can suffer before the opposition notices, adapts, or responds. This should usually be set as a ratio of the Operation’s Progress Requirement, not as a fixed number.

Lower thresholds mean the opposition is more vigilant. High thresholds mean the opposition is slower to notice, or less actively watching for this type of threat.

Because many LARP rules use rock-paper-scissors, the ratio matters. If a character’s pool is higher than the Difficulty, they usually gain progress on a win or tie. So even highly competent characters will fail 1/3rd of their challenges. At exactly that ratio, a highly skilled character will have an approximately 50/50 chance of success on the Operation as a whole - assuming no exceptional circumstances or powers are used to push the odds in their favor.

When Failure Happens The opposition is alerted and becomes aware of the Operation - though not necessarily the actors attempting it. How they respond will vary; maybe they change their entire security system. Maybe they burn the safehouse and move to a new one. Maybe they fire their mortal staff and get a new team. Maybe they show up to the situation with guns drawn. This will ultimately be a case by case decision by the Storyteller; but the bottom line is that the PC’s actions have been noticed by those they were targeting.

Difficulty

Difficulty measures how hard each individual test is. In LotN2 terms, this should usually follow the normal static challenge scale.

Time per Test

Time per test determines the pace of the Operation

Use short times when the scene is tense and immediate. Use downtime actions when the Operation represents patient work over days or weeks.