You know I really am curious if V6 is going to keep the whole "danger dice" mechanic that 5th edition has been famous for. Vampire has Hunger Dice, with the idea that your Beast is trying to help you and the hungrier you get the more active it gets. This makes sense because the Beast is not inherently evil, it's animalistic and savage, it wants you to be strong, safe, and well fed. It's also kind of a replacement for Frenzy rolls in earlier editions, because Frenzy in 1-4th edition required the GM to remember to call for them and many of them, including me, forgot often. I don't care for hunger dice because I think it's dumb they force you to pretty much always have at least 1 of them, and I think vampire being at risk of Frenzying every time something goes wrong for them kind of disrupts the image of what a vampire is. Like how the fuck have these hair trigger psychopaths kept the Masquerade for so long if they're constantly flying off the handle?
I think Rage dice for Werewolf, which are basically the same thing, make more sense. Rage is a Gift from Luna, but also a curse, because spirit gifts always have two sides. It's a great weapon that makes you strong but also makes you risk losing control. It's too bad the rest of W5 is shit because Rage dice are kind of cool in concept.
I have no idea if Hunter 5 has danger dice because I didn't play Hunter 5 and neither did you and I think it's lost media now so I guess it will forever be a mystery.
I think part of the reason they're moving on to V6 without every making a Mage 5, Changeling 5 and so on is because that danger dice mechanic really doesn't work outside of Werewolf and Vampire. It works great in Werewolf, it's works... okay at best in Vampire, but Mage, Changeling, and Wraith it just wouldn't really make sense.
See the Beast and the Rage are meant to be a blessing and a curse, but the other game lines don't have that. When Jeremy Crawford was hinting at making Mage 5, people were speculating if there'd be Paradox dice, but that wouldn't really work. Because Paradox in Mage is a wholly negative force, it exists to make your magic harder, to fuck you over when you try to overwrite reality, and the idea it'd ever give you extra dice doesn't make sense. It sort of would make sense for the Dark Ages and Sorcerer's Crusade timeline of Mage when Backlash and later Scourge were a thing, and could sometimes reward you for your audacity, while also risking your spells getting out of control, but White Wolf couldn't even get M5 modern out so zero chance they'd get a historical setting.
Changeling couldn't work with this either. Banality is another wholly negative force, so Banality Dice couldn't be a thing. *Maybe* with some rework you could make Nightmare or Bedlam dice a thing, but that would require dramatic, W5 style re-writes of the entire game and, in my opinion, if you need to do W5 level re-writes of a game to make it work in your current edition, just make a new game.
You could *sort of* make this concept work for Wraith. Have like, Shadow Dice, representing your Shadow trying to take over and making you do self destructive things the more you lost control, but it'd require a lot of mechanical changes and I doubt it'd happen because Wraith, while good, has never been a very profitable game for White Wolf.
The funny thing about this is that if they really wanted another game where this Danger Dice thing would work, Demon the Fallen would be perfect for it. Torment Dice would slot perfectly into the game, would match the pathos of the game, would neatly interlock with the existing system of High Torment and Low Torment powers that exist and the risk of Fallen accidentally using the more destructive High Torment version. It'd actually be kind of great. But White Wolf is scared of writing Demon the Fallen now, and honestly I don't know if the modern writers are skilled enough to pull off a good Demon edition even though it's basically a gimme.
yousharknotpass
2087
gracieabrams
origamiaround
