Were V:tM rules intentionally badly designed?
Rumours tell that Vampire: The Masquerade was designed with purpose to be a trainwreck when it comes to the mechanics, so that people would not use them.
Was this really the case? And what evidence is there for or against it, aside from the nature of the rules themselves and similar sentiments in the traditional RPG culture of the time?
2 answers
From interviews of the era, as well as his AMA, I'm pretty sure that Mark Rein·Hagen didn't deliberately make the rules broken because he didn't want people to use them, but rather did so out of a combination of factors:
- A combined lack of grounding in (and desire to learn) the mathematics of probability to make a system that wasn't broken.
- A belief that the dice should be ignored if they contradicted the desired direction of storytelling: that the GM should be overriding the dummy dice anyway, so there's no need for a rigorously correct die rolling system.
There is no viable argument to refute the first point, but whether he was right on that second one is, naturally, a matter of taste. He was not, however, trying to attract the D&D crowd to his game. He was trying to bring in the non-gamer crowd of the time—and in that can hardly be viewed as a failure given that people who wouldn't have spent even a moment looking at "nerds" vicariously crawling through dungeons were brought into the gaming fold.
The World of Darkness game family (and their assorted other die pool workalikes) is not one I like. When they're not flatly mechanically broken (like the original WoD games), they're counter-intuitive and whimsical. It's not to my taste, but it's not "broken" in terms of successful game design either if people are enjoying the family.
Not sure how to answer this beyond saying I ran a V:tM campaign for six years after it came out, and the rules worked out fine for me. I wasn't super strict, perhaps, but the basic dice mechanic worked. I actually like it better than the ubiquitous single-roll style of D&D.
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