Post History

From interviews of the era, as well as his [AMA](https://www.reddit.com/comments/2boyia/i_am_mark_reinhagen_world_creator_and_game/), 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:

1. A combined lack of grounding in (and desire to learn) the mathematics of probability to make a system that wasn't broken.
2. 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.