![]() Additionally, being able to succeed at a cost can be important, when the cost isn’t too high – not that it’s sustainable to spend a Willpower to re-roll and then take a Willpower damage to eek out one more success, but it helps that the option is there. The relatively bad odds can be significantly mitigated by the three-die re-roll for spending a Willpower. Use Your Willpower and Hope Your Storyteller Allows Success at a Cost: I know this isn’t really about character creation, but given the above, keep in mind that Willpower is meant to be used. I also suggest hoping that your Storyteller realizes that a ‘hard’ difficulty of 5 borders on impossible (barring a critical) for characters who aren’t highly specialized in that task. You need a lot of dice to consistently succeed at ‘standard’ difficulty tasks. In V5 the question is whether you can succeed at all. In V20 you would succeed, and the question would be by how much. ![]() For a challenging task, you now need to be rolling eight dice to have a 50/50 shot at succeeding (barring a critical). In V5, these difficulties are now 2 (straightforward), 3 (normal), and 4 (challenging) – except now you need that many successes, with a 50/50 chance per die, and there’s no concept of a “marginal” (although you might get success at a cost). Challenging tasks (e.g., locating the source of a whisper) were a difficulty 7 (~78%). A “straightforward” task (e.g., “seducing someone who’s already in the mood”) was a difficulty of five (~93% chance of success with three dice). If you had an average attribute (2) and some training (1 in the skill), you would get at least a marginal success approximately 88% of the time (a “complete” success only ~13% of the time). If you were rolling one die, you would succeed at a task half the time. Remember that you are no longer effectively required to take dots in things like Haven, Drive, and Technology just to have somewhere to live, be able to drive a car, or be able to operate a computer.ĭifficulties Are High, Use Your Willpower, and Small Dice Pools Are Weakĭifficulty Numbers Are High In V5: In V20, the standard difficulty was a 6.You can’t go wrong with dots in Awareness.When in doubt, spend a lot of coterie background points on Chasse.Take Status 1 unless your concept is to play a social pariah. Resources are still very, very powerful (but be prepared for your Storyteller to limit your ability to use Resources to simply duplicate other backgrounds). Think carefully before taking Allies – V5 significantly overcharges for them.If you don’t know which attribute to put stick at 1 dot, go with Stamina or Dexterity.Make sure your Predator Pool has a lot of dice in it.In particular, carefully consider whether you want to be bad at Strength + Brawl. If you want to be any good at combat, make sure to invest in the applicable skill/attribute combination. Combat is very all-or-nothing, and all the Disciplines in the world won’t help if you can’t win the combat roll.If you want to have any sort of real skill at a particular task, you probably want to have at least 6 dice. It is difficult to succeed with small dice pools without spending Willpower, and even that option is off the table if you’re hungry. V5 requires a relative lot of successes. ![]() The article below is pretty long, so here are some high points to keep in mind: We also have a video version, if that’s more your style. And it’s a letdown to realize that the array of dots on your sheet won’t let you do that.īelow you’ll find an examination of some basic mechanical concepts of V5, and how they might affect a character, then a brief rundown of the various attributes, skills, disciplines, and backgrounds, with a focus on what is likely to come up in a chronicle and what else you need on your character sheet to make it work. In general, this sort of guidance is agnostic to character concept – there is no inherent conflict between character competence and character concept.Īnd, all other things being equal, I think most players want to be able to pull off awesome things at some point, even in a chronicle that is mostly drenched in angst. It’s another thing to create a character who isn’t combat-capable even though you wanted them to be. It’s one thing to create a character who isn’t combat-capable because that’s your concept. I think that it’s relevant to be able to make sure that your character concept is embodied in the dots you actually put on the sheet. But I still think that this sort of examination can be helpful. And they will be absolutely correct in the general notion that story and concept come first. Let me preface this article by acknowledging that there are going to be some number of readers who find the entire concept of focusing on mechanics when creating a character to be offensive in some way.
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