__        ___     _ _        __        __    _  __ 
\ \      / / |__ (_) |_ ___  \ \      / /__ | |/ _|
 \ \ /\ / /| '_ \| | __/ _ \  \ \ /\ / / _ \| | |_ 
  \ V  V / | | | | | ||  __/   \ V  V / (_) | |  _|
   \_/\_/  |_| |_|_|\__\___|    \_/\_/ \___/|_|_|  
                                                   
 ____             _               ____    
|  _ \  _____   _| | ___   __ _  |___ \ _ 
| | | |/ _ \ \ / / |/ _ \ / _` |   __) (_)
| |_| |  __/\ V /| | (_) | (_| |  / __/ _ 
|____/ \___| \_/ |_|\___/ \__, | |_____(_)
                          |___/           
 ____                  _       _ _          _   _                 
/ ___| _ __   ___  ___(_) __ _| (_)______ _| |_(_) ___  _ __  ___ 
\___ \| '_ \ / _ \/ __| |/ _` | | |_  / _` | __| |/ _ \| '_ \/ __|
 ___) | |_) |  __/ (__| | (_| | | |/ / (_| | |_| | (_) | | | \__ \
|____/| .__/ \___|\___|_|\__,_|_|_/___\__,_|\__|_|\___/|_| |_|___/
      |_|                                                         
                 _   _____                      _   _          
  __ _ _ __   __| | | ____|_  ___ __   ___ _ __| |_(_)___  ___ 
 / _` | '_ \ / _` | |  _| \ \/ / '_ \ / _ \ '__| __| / __|/ _ \
| (_| | | | | (_| | | |___ >  <| |_) |  __/ |  | |_| \__ \  __/
 \__,_|_| |_|\__,_| |_____/_/\_\ .__/ \___|_|   \__|_|___/\___|
                               |_|                             

Specializations in White Wolf rules are a nuisance, in need of an overhaul.

How They Work

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.

Both rules are crap, for many reasons.

Mechanical Problems

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 work faster with just +1 die, but still doesn’t seem to make sense in all situations. 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 nothing.

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.

Real scientists have specializations like ‘how Northern hemisphere trout develop scales, from the perspective of molecular biology’ - a subject far too narrow to come up in any game organically.

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.

The Problem is Universal

Every Ability seems to have the same issue. Nobody practices how to ‘Brawl’, they do ‘Turkish oil-wrestling’, or ‘Brazilian Ju-Jitsu’, or whatever. And unless your chronicle is particularly homoerotic, you’ll never get a chance to engage in anything like the former. Meanwhile, the latter is so general that it’s barely a specialization; it applies to nearly everything - whether you want to harm or grapple, you can do it in the ‘Brazilian Ju-Jitsu’ way.

My solution is this: bin the rules on specialization. Instead, the Storyteller declares that you do not know your own character’s many fields of special-interest, but you will find out in-game, from the dice-roll.

I want to figure out how to attract rats to the restaurant with my science. I got 4 successes!

It turns out this character really knows their biology.

I want to lay a trap to capture as many rats as possible, so I can interrogate them…ah crap, only 1 success.

It looks like this ‘scientist’ wasn’t so great at engineering their solutions, or understanding the psychology of individual rat-decisions.

I want to check the DNA of the local pigeons, to see if they’re particularly foreign. That should tell us if someone’s been en-mass importing them…I got 3 successes.

This makes sense, the other rolls make sense, and any further rolls could also make sense. Even if the character knows about both rats and DNA, it doesn’t mean that they will, or will not, be able to study rat-DNA well. We can always think of a new reason that they’re good at this or that.

But shouldn’t my character know what they’re good at before they do it?

No! Lots of experts think their expertise is far more general than it actually is. You can roughly guess what you’ll be good at by looking at the Abilities, but real experts fail to predict how well they will perform all the time…especially with challenging tasks, which have a high difficulty.

And this applies equally well to all the Abilities. 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.

So bin the specializations and expertise rules! Fill in the details later, but interpreting the dice. And if you really want to say your character has some specialization, just make it ridiculously precise. You don’t need a background in ‘acrobatics’ - make it a background in ‘circus trapeze stunts involving a cannon, supported by intermittent wires’.