Changeling: The Dreaming

Since this is the game Gtroc and I argue over the most on our podcast I figured I would start off this argument on our forums.
Basically it goes like this, I like this game, A LOT. I know it has some major flaws in it, namely the characters complete inability to come in contact with any of the other major races in the oWoD. Stupid? Hell yes! Fixable by ignoring the meta-plot? Certainly!
Not that Banality doesn't have it's place in a Changeling game, it's just WAY too big of a factor to avoid since according to the meta-plot the entire world does not believe in faeries unless they are crazy or children.
There are some wonderful aspects of the game though, people call it a much "happier" form of the World of Darkness but there was one part of the story that really appealed to me.
The leaders.
Now in Vampire, Cain is this head figure who vampires of all (well most) creeds believe they descended from. He is usually revered in their lore and elders who are closer to him by bloodline generation are revered and feared, if not out of actual respect then out of the fact that they actually are way more powerful than they are.
Werewolf has the same sort of figure admiration towards Gaia and the other major characters in her plot (the weaver, the wyld, and the wyrm) and with the exception of the wyrm those head characters are also adored.
Then comes along the Changelings with the Sidhe.
Now setting aside my personal dislike of the sidhe, (which I CAN do) we have something new. Leaders who failed as leaders by leaving their people behind when the going got tough, who return to the world expecting that their job is still waiting for them. While some of the fae seem to welcome their return, a significant amount of the races regarded the Sidhe's audacity with a sort of "who the hell do YOU think YOU are?" behavior.
I love the commoners, and I honestly think that they wouldn't be half as interesting without the Sidhe to hate on.
This is all the book stuff though.
When people PLAY Changeling there is a good chance I'll hate the characters.
This is because of White Wolf's race descriptions.
Never before have I seen a list of stereotypes used over and over again.
This is usually:
Crazy
Sex-crazed
Hideous/Grotesque
Rebel without a cause
Natural Leader (Or ELSE)
Honor bound
and of course the Tale teller

These stereotypes drive me mad! Not because of the people actually playing the races right but people who play a lack-luster cookie cutter variant. Back-speaking pooka or redcaps who lounge about and "randomly" take a bite out of a barstool.
I like what the race system offers but on the same note I loathe it with the heat of a thousand suns because for every Bango the monkey pooka/leader of the wildlife pooka army there are twelve Bob the Backspeaking Bunny Pooka.

it because changeling was never taken seriously by the gaming community, they heard fairies and thought oh "joy and light and fluff" they never really stopped to take a look and realize that when stripped down the game is about identity.

i also see a lot of people bitch about how the game only supports youth and children being the paragon of purity and innocence, to this i say, well yeah. I look at my life now and i'm am HELL of a lot more cynical and jaded and angry and "banal" than i was at sixteen, or six, and 'im only 26, i get that aspect of the game very much.

Lets not delude ourselves, when were younger we DO believe anything is possible, then the world slaps us in the face.

as for the Sidhe and people hating them, the dreaming reflects their right to rule even sidhe without title are affected for Fae 2, that speaks volumes to me right there. Nor do i dislike commoners but so many people treat them as paragons of virtue who do NO wrong. Yes the sidhe did orchestrate the night of iron knives but the resulting ( and i think seven? documented) retaliations of commoners against sidhe ( yes involving cold iron and in one case boggans killing Sidhe children) doesn't exactly make them better to rule than the Sidhe either.


as for stereotypes, i have to admit ive participated in some of them what gets me though are the people that straight up think a changeling can harvest glamour from a vampire... it drive me up the wall

heres to an interesting discussion!

I took my time in response to this as I wanted to make sure I put my thoughts in order. Changeling: the Dreaming is a game I have many issues with, both mechanical and setting-wise.

First I will speak to the mechanical reasons I don't like the game. It is an Old World of Darkness game. What this means is that the mechanics are all over the place. They make less sense, and have more power creep, than Palladium. And if any one has ever heard me rant on Palladium, that is not saying much.

The game has two sets of difficulties. first it has what it calls difficulty, which is a target number on a D10. What this means is that the GM(or storyteller as White Wolf pretentiously calls it, but more on that later) sets a number that needs to be met or beaten on a roll of a D10. This leads to a fairly predictable curve in statistics, when dealing with the dice pool concept.

Then we come to successes, or as I like to call them, difficulty squared. This is the ruling that the GM can further alter the requisite difficulty of a task by requiring more than one die show a number that meets or beats the requisite "difficulty". Still with me? Well that's good because I am way lost...well not really, but as you can see this dramatically alters the probability scale, and also makes it very difficult for the GM to know how hard the task is.

GM: hmm...do I go with a higher target numer, or more successes? shall I do both? what does that do to the probability if success?
Player: whatever man I just want to roll the damn dice.

You can see the issue(I hope). Now lets get onto my persnal favorite, dificulty modifiers. That's right, it gets more complicated. There are three types of modifiers. The first, and most common by far, is requiring more successes. This is different than what I talked about before though. This takes the number of successes you, as the GM, decided to use and modifies it. Basically if the GM thinks that three successes are needed to complete the task and the player does a manuever that modifies the successes required, it modifies the three successes as a base.

The second modifier is the removal of dice. what this means is that if a the PC were in a situation that makes the roll harder, the rules state that a certain number of dice are removed from your pool. Confused yet? Well good because we have one more type of modifier, and this one is a doozie.

Should you roll a one on a D10 in your pool, then that one cancels out a success you recieved. I am having a hard time not swearing at my screen right now just thinking about this rule(calm Jake...deep breaths). There, I am better. so basically the more dice you have the odder the probability curve becomes. As it is no longer just set probabilities in a single direction, you now have to take into account the possibilty that you success might turn into failure due to a fluke of probability.
This led to wierd rules, like in Mage, where you were allowed to use less dice than you had, in order to avoid rolling a one, or god forbid, more than one one(one one, hehe, I am easily amused, so what?).

Also the game suffered form scaling difficulties. as all stats are rated one to five, this led to some odd jumps in ability levels. This was easy enough to ignore when dealing with mundane abilities, but when dealing with supernatural abilities, it rapidlly got out of hand. Level four powers were orders of magnitude greater than level three, and level five were often so over powered that GMs would sometimes restrict them to NPCs only.

Then of course there is the most useful stat in the game, there are two stats that required the most points spent on them right off the bat. The first is Dexterity, which is attached to almost every physical skill. Strength(in some games) ets two skills attached to it, Stamina gets one( occassionally two, but they are essentially the same skill), and Dexterity getsthe rest. Guns, Martial arts, driving, piloting, dancing, initiative(not a skill I know but still attached), melee combat, climbing, swimming, seriously every damn thing.

The other stat is the gnosis or generation, or glamour, or arete. However I must say that Changeling did not focus so much on that in it. instead there were a seriously complex number of side stats that let you effect things, people, places, and such like. It was overly complicated, but at least there was more things to spend points on.

Those are my basic issues with the crunch of the game, I will continue later with my problems with the fluff.

--Jake signing off for now

::edit:: Sorry for all the grammar and spelling errors in the original post. That's what I get for writing posts while at work. ::end edit::

After reading all the posts I thought I would share some of
my own thoughts as a Changeling Storyteller.

Mechanics:
Yup. They are not the best. In some cases they are downright
horrid. The best thing that they did was put in the core rule book,
several times if memory serves, the Golden Rule. If you don't like a
rule, change it. People who rules lawyer the game obviously don't get the
whole point of the game.

With that in mind, are their some serious system flaws. But I have yet to
see any game system that doesn't. The question is whether or not the
story is engaging enough for you to overlook those flaw. If you don't
like the story of Changeling then it doesn't matter what re-writes or rules
changes are made. You won't like the game. If you do like the world
of Changeling then the broken rules are an annoying means to a great end.
I call BS on anyone who says that they like the world and the story but just
can't get past the rules.

Some specifics. Are Strength and Dex important? Sure.
Especially for combat. But not everything is combat, and as Combat is one
of the clunkier systems most good GM's avoid drawn out battles when
possible. If you are running a Courtly game Manipulation and Charisma may
get significantly more play time. If you are running a Mystery then
Perception, Wits, and Intelligence will get the lions share. Also there
is no rule that says Dexterity HAS to be the trait used to hit in combat.
Epic fights that last for days on end do happen in the Dreaming. In those
cases it is often much more about Stamina and that could legitimately be your
attack trait because otherwise you are just too exhausted. Maybe you are
trying to make a called shot and hit a specific location. Perception
might be the right ticket for that. The options are endless. It all
depends on what style/flare your Changeling game has and how creative/vindictive
your Storyteller is.

Difficulty ratings:
Sure it's a little confusing. Let’s start with the basics. You have
a difficulty. You roll. You count your successes. You also
count the number of 1's or botches. Each botch cancels out a
success. After everything is canceled to you still have at least one
success? Yes? Good. You succeed. No? You
don't. You have more Botches that success's? Sadness. Epic
Fail. Everyone points and laughs as the storyteller describes how you
manage to trip and stab yourself in the leg.

In my opinion Storytellers should only require multiple successes for truly
historic and heroic/nigh to impossible feats. Just because this is a tool
in the Storyteller's tool box does not mean it is one that needs to or should be
used. In my current game I can only come up with one unlikely situation
where multiple successes might be needed.

Now as to the game it's self:

Are their Stereotypes? Yup. Are they any worse than Mage or
Werewolf or Vampire really? Nope. I mean, Cult of Ecstasy? No stereotypes
there. Silent Striders? Get? Black Furies? Celestial Chorus? Ravnos?
It's all stereotypes. The thing to remember is that these are guides.
They are point of fact: stereotypes. It is up to both the
Storyteller and the players to make the characters more than the 2 dimensional
examples on the page. What about the Satyr who is a Roman Catholic
Priest? Yes he is constantly horny but it doesn't mean he acts on
it. It's great inner conflict! Or if you want a Troll that is not
'honorable' then just make sure that this is a character that NEVER actually
swears an Oath. An Unseelie type character? Obviously. But
fun none the less! How about an Eshu that was crippled and is now stuck
in a Wheel Chair? They can still tell a tale with the best of them but
the ability to follow the wanderlust has been forcefully taken from them.
That might just cause them to slip into Banality!

Remember, Seelie are not always good guys. Unseelie are not always bad
guys. And characters are just like people. Deep, complex and
changeable. They should be played like they are.

Finally, my own personal thoughts. Obviously I am a huge fan of this
game. I don't play the light hearted silly Changeling. My world is
one of nightmares and terror. Are there silly moments? Sure.
One of my Chimera is the rapping Polar Bear "Whitey D. Bearz".
One of my players has as his Bunk for a cantrip singing "Go Greased Lighting".
But those moments are used to give the players a much needed break from the
horror and suck that is the rest of the world. People, and characters,
can only take so much darkness and suck in their life. They need breaks.
If you give them just enough to catch their breath then you can crush them and
take them even further into the darkness. Changeling is uniquely set up
to be able to give PC's those short breaks and glimmers of silly and of hope
then take those loving fragile dreams and mash them to the ground.
The politics of the game world is so inclusive and immersive that you
can have a wonderful story arch based only on political maneuvering and have no
combat at all if you want. In fact as a storyteller I generally just
avoid dice rolls altogether when possible.

I have to say this has been, and I hope it continues to be, a very wonderful
and fascinating discussion! Thanks for getting it started.

I have a fairly long and involved response in mind, however I do not have the time at the moment, I will respond later.

Simply stating that you have a response is not a valid argument against the game Jake.

I am aware, I just have not had enough time to frame a proper response yet. I fully plan to espouse my response within a day or two.