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White Wolf Devlog 2: Specializations and Expertise

Specializations in White Wolf allow someone with a rating of 4 or more in a Trait to re-roll any ‘10’s for a chance at an extra success.

Expertise (not used in all books, but present in the Dark Ages), allows a character +1 success.

Mechanical Problems

The specialization rule clearly has to go. White Wolf’s basic rules have a wonderful purity - you grab the dice, cast them like so many runes across the table, and then read the result. This ruins the experience, forcing other players to wait as someone nit-picks through the right dice, and roll again.

Expertise Limitations

The rule for Expertise works better with its simple +1 dice, but still doesn’t seem to make sense in all areas. If you ask someone with a Masters in Physicist about the mating habits of bees, he won’t have degree-level knowledge about the subject (as if one would pick that up, studying stars) - he’ll know as much as anyone else.

It’s not clear how to react here. If we divide the subjects right down into what people actually know, we threaten to make hundreds of knowledges for each character, most of them useless.

Needless Restrictions

Having this available only to those with 4 or more in some Trait means we cannot have someone learning Chemistry. ‘Science 1 (Chemistry)’ might make perfect sense to anyone, but apparently apprentice scientists need to learn all the sciences, or none. This makes no sense, as anyone learning about a full subject will work better in some areas than others.

But then if we award 1 specialization, we trap people where they are at level 1: perhaps that person with basic Chemistry later wants to know about Physics. And if we provide 1 specialization per level, every character sheet becomes littered with more specializations than it can sustain without a steady-hand and a magnifying-glass.

Potential Solution: Interpretation

I don’t see any great solutions to this very general problem for RPGs, but I think I have a good-enough solution. We simply interpret rolls as statements about a specialization. Consider the following rolls, spaced across a chronicle:

Someone who knows ‘Science’ gets 4 successes when attracting rats to a restaurant. Apparently they know their Biology well. Even if the backstory is about physicist, we can understand they studied a little biology, possibly kept rats when they were small, and understand how to apply theory well.
Later, when attempting to understand a paper on modified rat-DNA, they get 1 success.
When asked to predict the motions of stars, they botch the roll, and that makes sense as well - they’ve not done these calculations in years, and really cared about how stars form more than anything else.

People into their Crafts, Academics, and such, will often learn a variety of rather random and niche subjects. Rather than clumsily conforming the system’s results to our pre-conceived narrative, we can simply build a coherent narrative from the system’s results.

Bin the specializations and expertise rules! If someone makes a fantastic Academics roll to understand everything about a Sumerian statue, it doesn’t mean they will perform well with other statues, or with other Sumerian artefacts.