opening match 1: World of Darkness vs Wrath & Glory
these two systems are the most recent I’ve played in, so they get to be the first reviewed. they feel like bookends, in a way: Wrath & Glory is most new to us, while World of Darkness was husband Jeremiah’s introduction to roleplaying and its books some of the oldest in his collection. my experience is far less extensive than his, but nevertheless our World of Darkness game-stories have been some of my very most favorite.
a note or two of framing: with these matched-up game reviews, I am purposefully embracing (mimicking?) the very squishy, laid-back approach modeled in the wonderful Tournament of Books. and while I'm also writing more or less to the same 'general public' audience the rest of this blog is ostensibly written for, we should probably recognize, in deepest honesty, that I mostly write stuff here for me. and for the sake of it.
dear whoever else is reading this, welcome to my thoughts.
that said, what purpose do I imagine these reviews will serve? primarily one of entertainment, for myself and for whatever audiences may wander in. my goal shall be to write well and evocatively about this unique set of semi-fictional books so that readers may find themselves intrigued, or not, as their tastes and interpretations may dictate. I'll not expect everyone to know everything about roleplaying as a hobby, but I will assume you can infer enough to go chase down your own internet search results for anything I'm not explaining at total-beginner-level detail.
in my introduction outline post about the tournament, I did lay out a loose approach to guide my considerations and provide a little consistency across the series. I may not conduct every element of that process in the same order every time, but I'll touch on them all and make that the basis of my written review. what follows here is a little table of metadata, summaries of characters I've made in each system, and then my thoughts on their aesthetics, approachability, and mechanics.
| SYSTEM | World of Darkness |
Wrath & Glory |
| back cover tagline = | "Your greatest fears aren't make believe; they're real." |
"A grimdark future of glorious adventure." |
| publisher = |
White Wolf | Cubicle 7 Games / Games Workshop |
| pub. date = |
2004 | 2020 |
| original cost = |
$24.99 | $59.99 |
| length = |
8 chapters / 223 pages |
14 chapters / 383 pages |
| my exp. level = | medium-high | barely any, almost none |
previous characters:
our current World of Darkness chronicle, "North of Eden," has been running since March of this year. in mid-May, friend David ran a single session of Wrath & Glory for us.
my prior and first ever Wrath & Glory character (Sileema Ramzee, inquisitorial acolyte) was therefore pretty recent, but for the purposes of this little tournament she still counts as part of the past. tracking my prior World of Darkness characters isn’t so simple— most were technically made for various World of Darkness companion systems: Mage, Changeling, and Vampire. only a few truly started out in the core World of Darkness system:
- Peggy Pyke, whom I imagined as a 1910s version of Jessica Jones— much more prim and proper, but smart and strong and investigation-y— never came to life in any roleplayed story, but she might yet get her chance. we shall see.
- Hannah McLaughlin, a daydreaming foster kid trying to impress her
teachers by day and her variously delinquent foster brothers' friends by
night, was eventually Awakened as a mage for two or three short
roleplaying sessions.
- Miranda Garcia (Andi for short) is my nerdy/outdoorsy engineer/kayaking-enthusiast, and she’s currently surviving a zombie apocalypse with three other player characters, making the best of things as winter descends on an island in the middle of Lake Michigan.
I’ll write more fully about my other World of
Darkness–adjacent characters in future match-ups; for the moment, here
is a list of all their names as a preview: Sierra Adler, Victoria
Abigail Evanston Bell, Margo Wallace (all three vampires), Synthia Starling, Liv (changelings), and Poppy (another mage).
new characters:
my brand new, tournament-specific characters are simple. I created both following the books’ basic instructions, keeping them both at starting level. for World of Darkness, this means choosing basic stats and no additional XP for upgrades in attributes and skills. for Wrath & Glory, it means a Teir 1 archetype.
making characters in a relative vacuum is a little odd. more commonly, there’s the whole context of grounded gameplay and some direction provided by a lead storyteller, game master, whoever. usually you at least have a sense of the kind of adventure this imaginary identity will fit into, so not having that is strangely freeing but almost too much so. limitations are possibilities, after all.
left purely to my own devices, I chose attributes and skills and other character details based on what seemed novel and amusing. bits of advice from dearest husband led me to look toward elements that I normally might be turned off by—those that might let me explore the aspects or angles of the game I hadn’t or likely wouldn't actually want to play in real life. so after a few evenings' work with rulebooks, pencil, and paper, we have...
for World of Darkness, Briella Jameson, an athletic activist who just wants to rock climb as often as possible and find all the ways to help the unhoused folks in her city...
and in the 41st millennium, Kukka the orkboy, a combat-crazed minion with aspirations of someday leading the whole Snakebite clan into glorious, bloody battle.
would these two be friends? I think likely not, if I had to imagine it. in any case, these are just test characters— concepts created for the purpose of comparing the process for each system. they don't and can't quite even exist without stories to live in and contexts to shape their motivations. for both, the whole world is in stasis, waiting for a storyteller to start manipulating the strings of conflict and consequence around them.
speaking of context... aesthetics:
we could accurately describe these two gameworlds as dark, gritty places infused with no end of supernatural weirdness. they have that in common at the surface, yes. but the settings for each of these games have pretty different vibes. even the books themselves— the art and style their pages paint for us— strike quite different tones. the World of Darkness core book is slim and fairly monochromatic, greys and blues and a gauzy shadow around every corner, black and white text with a little grunge in the typography. it has an oldschool feel, tapping into a Lovecraftian, almost-but-not-really-steampunk something. on the other hand, Wrath & Glory is ten times more colorful, its pages ornate with grand, militant imagery. there is an ecclesiastical, orderly, but also bloody and mangled sense to the whole thing.
World of Darkness strikes me as very film noir—artsy in its portrayals of depravity and corruption. Wrath & Glory, based in the less-familiar-to-me universe of Warhammer 40,000, eschews artsy in exchange for excess. if nothing else, the world of Warhammer is extremely a lot. the word everyone uses here is grimdark: dystopian horror turned up to eleventy hundred million. it almost doesn’t make sense to build a roleplaying game in this world, one might think. when your average military grunt is lucky to last 15 whole hours in combat, how on earth do any plucky adventurers manage to trust anyone else long enough to form an adventuring party? and that disconnect is one of my critiques. the conventions of a collaborative adventuring RPG system feel somewhat shoehorned into a precariously agonistic and brutal context.
on
the other hand, why should these systems of make-believe need to make that
much sense? as long as we're having fun, we may as well roll with it and see what
happens. what I gather second-hand from dearest husband's dabbling in
Warhammer proper is a picture of flashy, hectic, intergalactic warrior
factions slapping at each other as desperately as possible, collateral
damage be praised. is that fun? it must be for some people. Henry Cavill is a big fan, apparently.
of course my perspective is only one, and quite a limited one at that. thankfully friend David's one-shot of Wrath & Glory did not revel so much in the tortuously, excessively endless hierarchies of otherworldly war and pestilence and exploitation. in that playthrough, Warhammer felt almost like a more somber, haunted version of Star Wars. we did have fun. and this is the great thing about RPGs at their core— they are flexible, malleable things. every story can bend itself into something a little bit different to suit the people playing it.
similarly, my "film noir" label for World of Darkness may not match what everyone else sees when they look into it. my own bookish, academic background may indeed color my view of that world's shadowy archives and its alternatingly grunge/emo/punk aesthetic. and my experiences roleplaying in various instances of this world have added their own lenses. I'm drawn to what seems mysterious and romantic about it; there is tragedy, and darkness, and even horror in this world too, but those negatives edge the world so vividly as to make it all seem beautiful.
approachability
both core books are relatively approachable and well organized. World of Darkness
focuses from its first lines on the deeply human and transcendently
mystical properties of stories and storytelling. it is a game that
invites you to collaboratively shape a beautiful plot arc across the
haunting not-quite-emptiness of every deep, dark, shadowy unknown. the core book is the simplest of them, and once you learn that framework you can play with it in myriad ways.
Wrath & Glory
leans more into the uniqueness of its setting (see above about its blatant a-lot-ness) and the endless
possibilities for customizing one’s experience within such a mad,
hopeless, violent future. its process and set-up seem a little more
hand-holding, more limited at first. the book provides a selection of
archetypes that can be carved or smoothed out into unique personas for
each player to pilot through the warped and violent chaos of it all.
story seems less important than identity and mood, somehow.
in
both books, interspersed with the rules and procedures for playing in
both of these core books, there are vignettes or excerpts or letters or
quotes from in-world sources. various genres show up: academic papers,
diary entries, epigraphs, first-person present-tense interior
monologues. I'm not sure if all RPG books do this sort of thing, but I’m
going to watch out for how other systems may or may not use similar
meta-textual content to evoke a certain verisimilitude.
the
other convention of RPG books I want to watch out for is the two-column
layout. I'm tempted to say most if not all RPG books use this design
choice to save space and make their mountains of content more readable
(or both). we'll see if it's true for my tournament contenders, anyway.
if you have a counter example for me, please do point us to it.
I
imagine my commentary on the book design and formatting of these
publications could easily take up dozens more paragraphs, but that’s not
what this tournament is about, so I'm gonna stop before I get too
carried away.
mechanics
they may proscribe different dice, but the gameplay mechanics of these two games are actually fairly similar—a fact that friend David remarked upon when he first suggested the system to us. World of Darkness uses d10s exclusively and Wrath & Glory d6s exclusively. for each test or challenge, you’ll roll multiple dice based on a combination of attribute, skill, any bonuses, etc. and then any success (an 8 or higher for most rolls in World of Darkness; 4 or higher for most in Wrath & Glory) counts as success. multiple successes may mean your character succeeds to a greater degree.
World of Darkness characters all have a basic set of 9 attributes in Physical, Mental, and Social categories, with 8 skills in each category as well. the numbers you choose for those traits form the core of your character, and from there you'll calculate health points, willpower points, and morality. (now that I think about it, these three kind of sort of map out a character's wellspring of physical, mental, and social energy... like, if you run out of health, you're incapacitated physically. if you run out of willpower, you lose your ability to resist manipulation. and if your morality drops too low, your ability to socialize normally is damaged because most folk will see you as a despicable villain. hmm.)
on top of basic stats and skills, each character also gets a handful of merits or advantages— extra abilities or resources to round out who they are and what they can do. there's also space for equipment, gear, weapons, etc. if your game requires those to be spelled out.
last but not least, World of Darkness also uses a Virtue and Vice mechanic based on the traditional cardinal virtues and seven deadly sins. it's not my favorite part of the system, to be honest, mostly because I always struggle to apply it in my actual roleplaying. and that bias tempts me to label it as gimmicky and unnecessary... but on the other hand those rules do serve a purpose in supporting meaningful roleplay and rewarding it with mechanical benefits. when a character enacts their virtue or vice, they can regain willpower points, and those points can be extremely handy for adding dice— 3 whole d10s— to any challenge roll. for example, my character Miranda has used 6 of her 7 willpower points and only normally regains them at a rate of one per in-game day. I can regain them for her faster, and thus benefit from the 3 extra dice more often, if I roleplay Miranda's faith (her determination to find meaning in even the darkest of circumstances) or her pride (her knee-jerk insistence that her plans are always the best ones). but it's not always easy (for me) to steer a collaborative story toward those self-centered moments. but perhaps I'll continue getting better at it.
Wrath & Glory gives characters 7 attributes (strength, toughness, agility, initiative, willpower, intellect, and fellowship)— which seems like so many even though 7 is obviously fewer than 9— and 17 skills, each connected to a key attribute more in the manner of the D&D system. those base stats feed in to calculations for maximum wounds and shock, defense abilities, resolve, and conviction.
having only played the one
short session (so far) in this system, I'm less familiar with its nuances. but another cool mechanics thing to mention is the Wrath and
Glory points system. Wrath points accumulate for individual characters
and allow players to re-roll dice, heal their character, or take narrative
control of the scene in some small way. Glory points accumulate for the
whole group of players in a shared pool, and anyone can use those points
to add dice to their rolls or to deal more damage in combat. the shared
resource of Glory points is pretty interesting. will players consider their party members' needs when drawing from the pool, or will everyone feel entitled to take from it what they want in a more competitive way? lots of options.
preliminary verdicts
as we all know, three weeks and two character sheets up against years' worth of play = potential for a highly unbalanced evaluation. but of course judging these two systems against each other like this isn't fair at all. what could be fair? there's no such thing. and my goal with this project isn't fairness— it's exploration and consideration and writing it all down along the way. that's enough.
I'm not going to give ratings here or anything. at most I can sum up that I find one system more comfortable and beautiful and full of potential, while the other is mildly intriguing despite its puzzling loudness, so far. I have had more chance to find my own style within the former, and barely any with the latter. so even though I won't even officially choose a winner yet, we all strongly suspect it would be World of Darkness, do we not?
but I will only announce the first 8 winners and losers at the very end of all 8 opening round matches. it will be more dramatic and suspenseful that way. and it gives me more time to marinate in the decision itself, which perhaps will make up for the highly unbalanced nature of this whole thing.
next new one-shot (tonight!): Werewolf: the Forsaken
next match-up review (soon!): Dungeons & Dragons 5e vs Werewolf: the Forsaken
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