When I first got my hands on a friend's copy of Vampire: the Masquerade some decade ago I was amazed by how one aspect of the game stood out: the mechanics were horrible. Since then, I have played Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Changeling and several cross-over games, but through all the work they have done, they have not changed my opinion in this matter. In fact, I considered posting a rant, going into great detail about why exactly I find them so abhorrent, but have decided that it would be counter-productive.

Thus, I have concocted a system for converting from the Storyteller system to FUDGE. This is my attempt to provide a means by which people can continue to play their games (and support White Wolf, since I'm not going to provide their source material), while working with better mechanics. While I am generally pleased with how it seems to work, I have not yet gotten to playtest it extensively. If anyone out there does, I would very much enjoy your feedback.

Oh, one other thing. I am assuming that you are familiar with the FUDGE rules. If you are not, you can download them for free from here. So, without any further delay. . . .

Attributes

Keep the same nine attributes. There's no reason to change that, after all.

Abilities

Abilities in Storyteller include Talents, Knowledges and Skills. For FUDGE purposes, these are all Skills (as opposed to Attributes or Gifts) because they are all based on levels.

There are two ways you can try to translate the Abilities of Storyteller into the level system of FUDGE. The first is to read the description of the Ability in the Storyteller book and estimate from that. This is at best an imprecise science (it will probably help to use Table 1) and does not reflect how the Abilities work in the game itself.

To reflect how the Abilities work in the game, you need to consider not only how many "dots" of Ability the character has, but the total dice pool available to the character for applicable rolls. In Storyteller, all Ability checks are made by rolling from a dice pool equal to the sum of the dots of Ability plus the sum of the dots of the applicable Attribute. This roughly converts to the following table:

Willpower

Translate it for rolling purposes using Table 2. Keep track of the original number, though, because you can spend a temporary Willpower point from this pool to add +1 to any roll (except Willpower). Translate arete (for Mages) and gnosis (for Werewolves) using the same table. Keep track of the original gnosis value for purposes of a gnosis pool.

Glamour/Quintessence/Virtues/Blood Pool/Rage/Banality/Humanity/Paradox/etc.

These numbers are mainly important for the uses of their pools. Thus, track the numbers.

Gifts/Cantrips/Magick/Disciplines

Keep the same basic structure for this, only the die-rolling really changes. The only exception that occurs to me off the top of my head is the casting of cantrips in Changeling. The die-roll for that is based on the relevant Attribute plus the appropriate Realm. Translating the die pool straight doesn't resolve this one well, because there are so many Realms that several translations would be required. While it might be less accurate, and I'm not sure that it is, a simpler way is proposed here:

1. Note which is the larger value, the Attribute or the Realm.
   
   
2. Use the level of the larger, as modified by the smaller as follows:
   
   

   Table 3: Cantrip Modifiers
   Lower factor is:		Modify roll by:
   -2 or more		+0	(not enough to be a factor)
   -1		+1
   even		+2

Rolling the Dice

The mechanic for rolling dice in Storyteller comes down to two basic concepts: difficulty numbers and successes. For each die rolled that meets or exceeds the difficulty number (and isn't removed by a 1) a success is scored. In general, more successes yield better results. The guideline (theoretically, at least. Even in the rulebooks it doesn't always hold up) is that one success is marginal, three is complete and five is extraordinary.

Distilling this down, we see that Storyteller wishes to take into account the quality of any given success, not simply whether or not a given action succeeded. The first part of this, the difficulty numbers, is easy enough to translate (see Table 3, below). It was the second part, the quality of success, that I had to stop and think about. I decided that this was merely an extension of the RPG standard concept of separate attack and damage rolls — a great attack roll does not guarantee great results (in this case, damage).

Mind you, this second roll should only be considered necessary when it is appropriate to the action. A songwriter may successfully write a song only to decide that it is awful and throw it away, but a thief sneaking past a guard only needs to know that he succeeded. In any event, if the second roll is called for by the GM, it should be an unmodified (or at most modified by no more than +/- 1) roll. Thus, someone with Great Subterfuge will, rarely, do a Poor but passable job, but will most often do just Great.

A quality of success roll can come into play in combined actions and extended actions. There are two ways that occur to me offhand as to how this could be done. The first is to assign a point value for each level of success (such as 1 for Terrible, 2 for Poor and so on up to 11 for Superb+4) and decide how many such "points" must be accumulated to succeed. The other is that the GM can simply decide that a given action requires a given number of Good or better results to succeed.

Genre-specific Mechanics

Still to come!

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