Basics

The Golden Rule

It’s been twenty years, and some things never change.  The Golden Rule remains the most important rule in the game: The rules are what you make of them. Whether you’re running a long-running chronicle of tense negotiations and furious action in the Amazon, or a near-diceless political negotiation between the Changing Breeds of Africa with each player as a representative from an affected Breed, if the rules get in the way of your game, change the rules.
Nothing in this book is more important than the story that’s happening around your table. The Storyteller and players should determine between them what works best for the game they’re playing, and you’re free to use, alter, abuse, or ignore these rules at your leisure to achieve that
goal. If you know something doesn’t work for you but you don’t know where to start changing it, a number of fan communities are just an internet search away, where you’ll find people who delight in tinkering with the rules to get the outcomes they want.

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Rolling the Dice

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Role Play is the focus of Sanguine Sands as opposed to Roll Play. Players are encouraged to use dice rolls as a last resort during day to day role play, and instead act your way through things. Convince that mechanic that he should lower the price of the labor, go play darts with a friend, try and convince the Prince that he should give up his favorite chair and let you sit in it! Ok, that's probably a bad idea, Travis will eat you...but you get the picture!!! RP first, Dice second.​

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That being said... IF it comes down to a toss up, Sanguine Sands puts the success and failure of most actions in the hands of chance and fate. Specifically, the agents of chance are a number of 10-sided dice. You can find these in most game stores, buy them from online retailers, or simulate the experience with software dice rollers (including a number of excellent mobile apps). The Storyteller will need some dice, as will the players — while the players can share, the Storyteller needs some dice to make rolls with in secret. Both the players and the Storyteller should have at least 10 dice each to start with.

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You roll dice whenever the Storyteller thinks that there’s a chance your character will fail, or that the outcome of an action is in doubt. The number of dice you roll is directly related to your character’s strengths and weaknesses, so his Traits directly affect his chances of success. The dice give a sense of chance or destiny to any situation that calls for a roll, but they do so objectively for everyone. A character’s Traits affect his chances of success, but every player has a fair chance of either succeeding at her character’s actions or failing interestingly.

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Difficulties

There’s no point in rolling dice unless you know what results you’re looking for. Whenever you try to perform an action, the Storyteller will decide on an appropriate difficulty number and tell you her decision. A difficulty is always a number between 2 and 10 (but generally between 3 and 9). Each time you score that number or higher on one of your dice, you’re considered to have gained a success. For example, if an action’s difficulty is a 6 and you roll a 3, 3, 8, 7 and 10, then you’ve scored three successes. The more you get, the better you do. You need only one success to perform most actions successfully, but that’s considered a marginal success. If you score three or more, you succeed completely. Also, a result of a 10 is always a success, no matter the difficulty number. 

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Difficulties

Three      Trivial (scanning a small crowd for a familiar face)

Four        Easy (following a trail of blood)

Five          Straightforward (seducing some one who’s already “in the mood”)

Six            Standard (firing a gun)

Seven      Challenging (locating where those agonized whispers are coming from)

Eight      Difficult (convincing a cop that this isn’t your cocaine)

Nine        Extremely difficult (walking a tightrope)

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Obviously, the lower the difficulty is, the easier the task is to accomplish, and vice versa. The default difficulty is 6, and it indicates that an action is neither impossible 
nor simple. If the Storyteller or a rule book does not give you the difficulty for a roll, assume that the difficulty is 6. 

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The Storyteller is the final authority on how difficult attempted actions are — if the task seems impossible, he’ll make the difficulty appropriately high, while if the task seems routinely easy, the difficulty will be low (if the Storyteller decides you even have to roll at all). A difficulty 3 task is so easy that it probably doesn’t merit a die roll, but a fluke failure or extraordinary success might sometimes make it worth the chance. 

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Degrees of Success

One Success          Marginal (getting a broken refrigerator to keep running until                                         the repairman arrives)

Two Successes     Moderate (making a handicraft that’s ugly but useful)

Three Successes Complete (fixing something so that it’s good as new)

Four Successes   Exceptional (increasing your car’s efficiency in the process of                                          repairing it)

Five or More        Phenomenal (creating a masterwork)

Failure

If you score no successes on a roll, your character fails his attempted action: He misses his punch. The file is encrypted too well. The Prince doesn’t believe her alibi. Failure, while usually disappointing, is not so catastrophic as a botch.

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Botches

Occasionally, truly bad fortune strikes. If none of your dice comes up a success, and one or more dice are dice showing 1, the roll is a botch. If you score at least one success, even if that success is canceled out and additional 1s remain, it’s just a simple failure. 

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A botch is much worse than a failure — it’s a dramatically appropriate misfortune, the worst-case outcome from any action that calls for a dice roll. Botching a Stealth roll when breaking in to an office block means tripping the alarms and making so much noise that security is waiting for you. Botch a Firearms roll when you’ve got a bead on the Wyrm-tainted councilor, and your gun jams. If Storm had botched rather than failing, she’d have walked straight into one of the hunters’ traps and made enough noise that the whole group descended with guns at the ready. The Storyteller decides exactly what goes wrong; a botch may produce a minor inconvenience or might result in wholesale catastrophe. 

Ratings

Although your character’s personality is limited only by your imagination, his capabilities are defined by his Traits — all of his innate and learned aptitudes and abilities. Each Trait is described by a “dot” rating of 1 to 5 (usually); a 1 in a Trait is barely competent, while a 5 is the pinnacle of human achievement. Most people’s Traits range from 1 to 3; a 4 in a Trait indicates an exceptional person, while a 5 is nearly incomparable — among humans, at any rate. Think of this as similar to the “star” rating system of movie reviews and restaurants — a 1 is barely passable while a 5 is superb. It’s also possible to have a zero in a Trait, which usually represents a skill that the character never learned, but some exceptions (such as the hideous Nosferatu’s lack of an Appearance Trait) do occur.

 

x       Abysmal

•        Poor

••      Average

•••     Good

••••   Exceptional

•••••  Superb 

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Dice Pools

When you roll dice, you roll one die for each dot a character has in a Trait. For example, if your character is trying to remember a license plate number, and he has three dots in Intelligence, you would roll three dice.  However, it is very rare to roll an Attribute Trait all by itself. Raw potential is modified by skill, and most rolls add together the dots in an Attribute and an appropriate Ability for the action. 

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For instance, if your character were trying to trick the Nosferatu elder’s ghoul into revealing her master’s location, the Storyteller might have you roll Manipulation + Subterfuge:  an Attribute plus an Ability. In this case, you might take three dice for your Manipulation of 3, plus as many dice as your character has in Subterfuge — say, two — so you get two more dice from that. Thus, you roll a total of five dice to determine your character’s success or failure at confounding the ghoul. These dice are called the dice pool: the total number of dice you roll for a single action. Most often, you’ll calculate a dice pool for only one action at a time, though you can modify it to be able to perform multiple tasks in a turn.

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Not every roll requires an Ability to be added to an Attribute. For example, lifting an object is a pure application of Strength alone, while a Humanity roll to test for moral degradation obviously draws its dice pool solely from the Humanity Trait. 

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A dice pool can’t draw from more than two Traits. In addition, if your dice pool involves a Trait with a maximum rating of 10 (such as Rage or Willpower), you can’t add any other Traits to your dice pool. It is effectively impossible for a normal human to have more than 10 dice in a dice pool. On the other hand, totem benefits and the Attribute modifications of a werewolf’s forms can sometimes help Garou overcome the limitations of a mere mortal. 

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Automatic Success

You know how to do it so well that you could do it in your sleep. Your Garou has more training in the field than you do. So why should you have to roll? Well, you shouldn’t. Anything that streamlines play and reduces distraction is a good thing. To that end, Werewolf has a simple system for automatic successes, allowing you to skip rolls for tasks that your character would find mundane. 

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Simply put, if the number of dice in your dice pool is equal to or greater than the task’s difficulty, your character automatically succeeds. No dice roll is necessary. Mind you, this does not work for all tasks, and never works in combat or other stressful situations. Furthermore, an automatic success is considered marginal, just as if you’d gotten only one success on the roll. If quality is an issue — the dramatic necessity mentioned earlier — you might want to roll the dice pool anyway to try for more successes (although you still risk potential failure). But for simple and often-repeated actions, this system works just fine. 

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There’s another way to get an automatic success on a roll: Simply spend a Willpower point. You can do this only once per turn, and since you have a limited supply of Willpower you can’t do this too often, but it can certainly help when you’re under pressure to succeed. 

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Trying It Again

Failure often produces stress, which often leads to further failure. If a character fails an action, he may usually try it again (after all, failing to pick a lock does not mean the character may never try to pick the lock again). In such cases, though, the Storyteller should increase the difficulty number of the second attempt by one. (Note that the Storyteller may choose not to increase this difficulty, at her discretion.) If the attempt is failed yet again, the difficulty of a third attempt should increase by two, and so on. Eventually, the difficulty will be so high that the character has no chance of succeeding: The lock is simply beyond her ability to pick and she’s frustrated with the whole affair. 

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Examples of when to use this rule include picking a lock, hacking into a computer system, or interrogating a prisoner. If you cannot turn the tumblers, circumvent the security, or get the canary you are interrogating to sing the first time out, there’s a good chance you might not be able to succeed at all. 

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Sometimes the Storyteller shouldn’t invoke this rule. For example, failing to shoot somebody with a gun, detect an ambush, or keep on another driver’s tail are to be expected in stressful situations. Such failure does not automatically lead to frustration and failed future attempts. The intent with the Trying It Again rules is to increase the likelihood of either success or interesting failure.
 

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Storyteller Dice Pool System

One of the greatest strengths of the Storyteller system is its flexibility. Storytellers should keep the versatile nature of the core dice pool rule system in mind when establishing challenges and resolving conflict. A given situation might have multiple possible resolutions under the dice pool system. For example, a car chase might be resolved using the contested action system, or it might be resolved with extended actions, with each participant in the chase “racing” to accumulate a number of successes before the other. 

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The Storyteller should use what best suits the pacing of the moment and the needs of the story. If that car chase isn’t one of the main sources of drama, there’s no point in decompressing it into a big extended and resisted action that takes several minutes of real-time to play through. Leave it as a single resisted action instead, and use the result of that action to guide the story from then on. On the other hand, if the players are getting antsy it’s a good idea to add some dramatic action that calls for a number of potential rolls. Nothing soothes a player’s frayed nerves like rolling some dice, and it shows that as a Storyteller you’re willing to bring in moments of drama to keep everyone hooked. 

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With a few examples aside (remember, rules exist to let every player know that the playing field is equal), there’s no “right” way to resolve a dramatic situation. Go with what feels right, what emphasizes your troupe’s tastes for narrative or gameplay, and what gets the best response from everyone at the table. The system isn’t a blunt instrument to be wielded by the Storyteller against the players at the table; it’s the tool that you mutually employ to tell a thrilling story.

 

Actions

Over the course of the game, your character will do many things. Most of the time, those things are fairly simple, and thus don’t require a roll, like walking across the street, or reading the news on a smartphone. Actions, by contrast, are anything that might produce an interesting outcome to the direction the story takes. Using a Gift, “accidentally” stabbing a  challenger in the gut with your klaive, hiding while watching two of your packmates breaking the Litany, chasing a rival pack across the rooftops — these are actions, and their success or failure will alter the outcome of the story. An action typically takes one turn to complete.

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In most cases, speaking and conversations aren’t considered actions. Although interesting developments may certainly arise from things the Kindred say to one another or to the other residents of the World of Darkness, talking is typically free in terms of game mechanics. The Storyteller may rule otherwise, such as whether a vampire manages to scream out the location where the Methuselah has the ghouls trapped before the sunlight burns him to ash, but for the most part, the game places as few limitations as possible on communication among players and characters. 

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Simply put, an action is whatever you choose to have your character do. She soothes a barking dog? An action. Calls her boss? An action. Takes out a knife and cuts runes into her skin to summon a murder of crows? An action. Most actions take a turn or two, though some especially complex ones – like, say, car repair or a long ritual – can last quite a while. 

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Reflexive Actions

Sometimes, it doesn’t take an appreciable length of time to take a significant action. Instinctual reactions happen as your character is acting. Such actions are called reflexive actions, and performing one may break the normal sequence of action resolution. A player doesn’t have to “take an action” as described above to use a reflexive action. Your character can perform one whenever the opportunity arises, and may also take his normal action, without any penalty. 

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Essentially, a reflexive action takes no measurable gametime – it’s more or less automatic, or requires little conscious effort. In game terms, you probably don’t have to roll dice at all unless the reflex itself (like soaking damage with your Stamina) involves rolling dice on the player’s part. 

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Multiple Actions

Sometimes, a player wants his character to perform more than one action in a single turn, such as climbing a tree while remaining quiet, or sidestepping an incoming attack and clawing at his opponent’s belly. In these situations, the player can roll for all the actions, but each one suffers a penalty. 

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The player declares the total number of actions he wishes his character to attempt and determines which of those dice pools is the smallest. He may then allocate that number dice among the actions as he sees fit. 

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Extended Actions

Sometimes completing a task takes longer than the increment of time in which the Storyteller chooses to conduct the scene. When you need only a single success to complete an action, it is called a simple action. When you need multiple successes to accomplish even a marginal success at the task in question, that action is an extended action. Simple actions — the actions described in the preceding part of this chapter — are the most common, but many opportunities arise to perform extended actions as the game progresses.

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In an extended action, you roll your dice pool again and again over subsequent turns, trying to collect enough successes to succeed. For example, your character has been chasing a fomor through the city streets on foot. The Wyrmspawn had ducked into a warehouse and slammed the door closed just as your character got there. The Storyteller rules that it will take 15 successes to get through the door, but your prey gets farther away each turn and has a better chance to set up an ambush. You will succeed eventually, but will you find the fomor? The Storyteller is the final authority on which situations are extended actions.

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You can usually take as many turns as you want to finish an extended action (but situations being what they are in Vampire, you won’t always have that luxury). If you botch a roll, however, you probably have to start over again from scratch, and likely have some other resultant catastrophe to worry about. Depending on what you’re trying to do, the Storyteller may even rule that you can’t start over again at all; you’ve failed and that’s that. 

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Resisted Actions

A simple difficulty number might not be enough to represent a struggle between characters. For instance, you may try to batter down a door while a character on the other side tries to hold it closed. In such a case, you’d make a resisted roll — each of you rolls dice against a difficulty (often determined by one of your opponent’s Traits), and the person who scores the most successes wins. 

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In a resisted roll, you score only as many successes as it takes to exceed your opponent’s successes. In other words, the opponent’s successes eliminate your own, just as 1s do. If you score four successes and your opponent scores three, you are left with only one success: a marginal success. It’s difficult to get an outstanding success on a resisted action because someone else is actively trying to stop you. Even if your opponent does not beat you, he can still diminish the effect of your efforts.

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Extended and Resisted Actions

When two characters struggle for victory, you might employ an extended and resisted action. In this case, the initiating player has to score a certain number of successes while the resisting player tries to keep him from succeeding. As with an extended roll, you need to gather a certain amount of successes within a certain number of rolls… and, as with a resisted roll, the other player tries to take those successes away from you. 

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Subtracting Successes in a Resisted Roll

It’s worth noting that your opponent’s successes take away successes from your own roll. If you roll five successes and your opponent rolls three, then you score only two successes. 

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Teamwork

The pack is the purest sign that for the Garou, there is strength in numbers. In some situations, characters can work together to increase their odds of success. This only applies in some situations, like trying to flip over a car or searching through large amounts of paperwork. If the Storyteller agrees that teamwork would be appropriate for the situation at hand, each player makes a separate roll, and then adds their successes together. They do not combine Traits into a single large dice pool. 

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Teamwork can be effective in many situations — restraining the frenzied Gangrel, gathering some physical resource, or doing research in the library, for instance. However, it can actually prove to be a hindrance in certain situations (including most social interaction such as fast-talking or seducing a subject, where too many people can overwhelm a single subject). As well, one person’s botch can bollix the whole attempt. 

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Time

Time passes in the World of Darkness just like it does in the real world: Sunday morning follows Saturday night, days run on as do weeks, months, and years. A lot of what happens in those moments isn’t important to the game, while sometimes mere minutes take far longer to work out in the game. Ten years can fly past in a single sentence, and it’s a rare player who wants to pause the game for eight hours while his character sleeps. 

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• Turn — The amount of time it takes to perform one fairly simple action. A turn can range anywhere from three seconds (the norm in combat) to three minutes, depending on the pace of the current scene.

• Scene — Like the division used in plays and movies, a scene is a compact period of action that takes place in one location in a contiguous chunk of time. This could be a ritual that honors the characters pack totem, the pack searching a corporate executive’s office, or a klaive duel. A scene consists of precisely as many turns as it requires — no hard-and-fast limits apply. In combat, the turns are three seconds long, while a showdown with a rival pack might use longer turns to ratchet up the tension. A scene consisting of dialogue and character interaction might not divide into turns at all.

• Chapter — A chapter is an independent part of the larger story, made up of scenes interconnected by downtime. A chapter is almost always played out in a single game session, and is comparable to a chapter in a book or an act in a play or movie. • Story — A full story, with an introduction, rising action, setbacks, and a climax. Some stories are told over many chapters, while others only take one chapter to complete. Some short stories are effectively long scenes.

• Chronicle — A series of stories, connected by the characters and related structures (such as the pack), which features an ongoing narrative, possibly with a common theme or overarching plot.

• Downtime — Time that happens in the world without being roleplayed out on a scene-by-scene basis. If the Storyteller informs you that it takes three hours to drive to the lab, that’s invoking downtime to speed the story along. Downtime allows the story to miss out on periods that don’t contain any events worth playing out.    Players    can    have    their    characters    conduct    simple actions during downtime: “You stop at the apartment your wife’s moved in to, and leave your wedding ring on her bedside table before making your way to the Hive.” Sometimes, a situation that begins as downtime can turn into a scene or even a story if the players decide to do something dramatic during what would normally be an “off-camera” moment.