This review covers the rules section of the book which you can pick up on DriveThruRPG for free. The rest of the book it great and packed with awesome material for a game focused on the weird strange stuff related to the God-Machine. I highly encourage you to check it out.
Roleplaying Aids: Aspirations, Vice & Virtue, Integrity
First let us look at what changes have been made to facilitate roleplaying.Aspirations are what they sound like: goals for your character. These can be things you want your character to accomplish or even things you want to happen to your character like being attacked by a vampire. If a character accomplishes their Aspiration they gain a Beat. 5 Beats grants an Experience. So they work like a carrot, rewarding your character to involve them in the game.
From the Storyteller or gamemaster side, Aspirations are the my new favorite tool for characterizing nonplayer characters (NPCs). You give an NPC 2 or 3 tangible goals and you instantly have a picture of their motives and wants. I plan to use them in other game systems as well.
Vice and Virtue are two other ways that one can get in the head of a character and the designers of GMC have managed to expand them nicely. Now a Vice or Virtue can be any personality trait or drive, opening the doors to a much larger set of possibilities. Also they made Vice easier to access. Vice is now your comfort zone, like drowning your sorrows in alcohol (Addiction) or vegging out in front of the television (Sloth).
Then we have Integrity which replaces the much maligned Morality. Now rather than measuring some sort of level of empathy, the game just focuses on how well you are keeping it together, your mental integrity. High integrity means you are resilient to mental strains while as you fail rolls your mind grows more and more fragile.
In several ways the system resembles that of Unknown Armies, which I stole for my Hunter: the Vigil game. Like that system, Integrity uses variable criterion, called Break Points, to determine when the character has encountered something that could damage their sanity. Interestingly they leave the decision of what these points are to the players. So one character could be a shut in for whom any violence would shake them to their core while another could be a hardened soldier inured to gunfire and carnage.
The bit I really like about the system is how failing or succeeding on the Integrity check gives the character a Condition, which determines how a character reacts to the incident. I'll talk about Conditions later but essentially they provide a mechanical incentive for types of certain behavior through dice pool modifiers and the eventual reward of experience. What's nice about the Integrity system is that like in Unknown Armies the choice of Condition is up to you. Does your character feel Guilty or Shaken after killing someone? When their mind finally snaps do they gain Madness or do they go into a Fugue? As a player you get to keep agency while at the same time being gently pushed to embrace the behaviors associated with psychological horror.
Mechanics: Merits, Rolling, Combat Changes
There were also merely mechanical improvements as well.The Merit system was redone with re-balancing and new additions. All in all it seems good though I've had trouble making starting character with much in terms of fighting styles. As of yet I haven't used too much of those so I can't say how well they work.
I do like the changes to the basic roll mechanic. Like before you roll a number of ten sided dice equal to an Attribute + Skill + whatever the relevant penalties or bonuses are. But if you get an exceptional success (5 or more successes on a roll) you can impose a Condition on yourself or another person. You might feel more confident after a heroic leap or find a back door to a secure database after some computer hacking. This way you get a little mechanical bonus for later and some experience when you use it.
You can also get experience if you fail, if you chose to turn that failure into a Dramatic Failure. So in exchange for pushing the plot along in interesting ways you get to advance your character. I've found my players like this mechanic a lot, leading to people falling into traps when sneaking around or misinterpreting occult rituals to humorous effect.
The extended roll system was adjusted to make the long series of rolls that the World of Darkness designers seem to like more interesting. I've played with it but I'm still not convinced but I've discussed that before.
As for combat, defenses have gotten much higher. I was little worried about this since my players were not creating combative characters but it has actually worked out well. In general they can still hit, usually by spending willpower or doing an all out attack (and thus losing their defenses). This cuts both ways as some of their foes are forced to either expend their much more limited supply of willpower (as a Storyteller you are encouraged to give only named NPCs Willpower and usually only 1 point) or lose their defenses to inflict any harm.
The fact that weapons now deal automatic levels of lethal damage also makes combat beyond fists very deadly very quickly. But there are also rules to encourage people to surrender in fights that are not to the death. I've found that these work reasonably well.
I recently got to play with the grappling rules which are much improved and seem to make it move more fluidly.
All in all I find combat to be marginally improved.
Gluing it Together: Conditions, Social Maneuvering, Experience
After Aspirations, Conditions are my favorite part of the system. They combine the dice pool modifiers you might give for a situation (like blackmail or a broken leg) with a roleplaying incentive (in the form of experience). Plus you are encouraged to make up your own. For example with a failed Integrity roll you can take Guilt, Shaken, or Spooked.Guilt imposes a penalty to certain Social rolls are your guilty conscience weighs on you. But if you make an effort to confess your crimes and fix what you did, then the Condition is resolved and goes away. For that you earn a Beat. Shaken is even simpler. You can choose to fail a later combat roll as your frayed nerves betray you to resolve it. Then earn a Beat for your failure. Spooked gives you a Beat if you go investigate a potential supernatural event in a way that endangers you ("I'm going to check out the basement. I'll be right back.").
This helps push the characters to follow the tropes of the game in a way that keeps agency over their actions. They can choose not to use Shaken on the last desperate attack on the vampire saving it for a later battle with its vengeful ghoul. They can hold on to their guilt as long as they feel comfortable with or hurry off to speak with a priest. This sort of approach to controlling character action is one that I've really liked both as a player and a gamemaster.
A new subsystem for Social conflicts was also added. Rather a Social combat system, it is more of a maneuvering to convince someone to adopt a course of action. You make rolls over a long period of time using soft leverage like promises of aid or flattery until you succeed enough times to remove the target's resistance. Or you can try it all in one roll using hard leverage like a gun to their head. Overall I like it though the default times seem a little long for most situations.
Experience as I mentioned comes from many sources including the traditional ones of showing up and good roleplaying. Overall you can expect to earn roughly an Experience a session. While this sounds low, they have also adjusted the costs to be cheaper and more over flat. So the fourth dot of a merits costs the same as the first; 1 Experience. After 8 sessions, my players seem to be advancing at roughly the level I would expect under the old rules. That might change once we hit higher levels of power.
Bits and Pieces: Soul Loss & Spirits
That leaves a few odds and ends which I have yet to work with. Soul Loss is now codified in the main rules and is roughly similar to the situation laid out in Mage: the Awakening with the addition of making it a series of Conditions.The rules for ghosts and spirits (and Angels) have been unified. They look fairly complicated but I haven't had a chance to try them yet.
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