Backgrounds and Qualities

So... Backgrounds and Qualities. These have always been a major portion of the WoD and they've always been over-the-top broken as fuck. Perhaps the biggest offender is that traditionally a five point merit (or background) has been worth very much more than a 2 point and a 3 point one together. While possibly inevitable for any system of social resources that hopes to model characters who know "some sketchy characters from down by the docks" or possibly "Bill F. Gates" (the F. stands for fucking), it's not much of a bold claim that WoD has always gone way too far in that direction. Most damningly, there is so much overlap with these things that there is frankly little reason to split one's background dots between anything. Why buy a few points of Resources when for a few more points of Fame or Status you can just get paychecks that are six figures or more?

Many of the backgrounds are just broken on the face of it. Age (the background that gives you more points that in turn can be used to purchase other backgrounds), Retainer (for a few points you can have an assistant whose is worth more points than you are in classic Jeeves and Kato fashion), and the various "I have a higher power stat" ones (such as Avatar and Generation) are the most egregious. But really all of the Backgrounds tend to fall into the categories of "fucking useless" (like Haven) or "way too powerful" (like Status). Worse, the vast majority of Backgrounds seem to hop directly from the garbage pile to the gamebreaking pile after a certain amount is purchased. Resources, for example, go up exponentially and it is literally one dot standing between an amount of money so small that it has no real effect on the story and a warchest of such power that it wraps the game around its mass.

Further, there are way too fucking many of these things. Chantry? Legacy? Artifact? What the fuck!? Even if it weren't for the fact that splitting your backgrounds traditionally makes you suck ass, the fact is that there are so many around that you really can't even have them all. It's just not practical to have friends and a paycheck and a flat. And while maybe that's supposed to be some sort of deep insight into the frailty and unrealistic expectations of the supposedly normal life expected by modernity - frankly I think it's actually just the kind of bad design you get when you have stream of consciousness design by multiple authors who aren't talking to each other.

So step one is to divide things that are about you from things that are about resources you currently have. If you happen to be from a prestigious line of vampires or have a set of memories gong back centuries or something, that's really unlikely to go away. If you go into torpor and wake up in a hundred years you'll still have all that. On the other hand, if you have some friends, a house, and a bank account, that could all go away if you fucked a corpse when the cameras were rolling. Things like Lineage make more sense as a merit or "positive quality" to use SR lingo. On the other hand, financial resources are only ever "yours" in the sense that they are real objects that you happen to have proximity to. Which brings me to the idea that everything like that should be called a "resource." And once play begins, resources of any kind are not bought with experience they are picked up and lost in play.

So here's an initial thought, Resources are things you have "access" to that can help you out in one or more areas of your investigations. They are divided based on how they help you:

• Financial Resources: Stock, property, piles of gems, kilograms of coke, or just plain piles of cash - Financial Resources are portable and usually fairly anonymous. Easily transferable, and good for bribery, they usually don't do anything much if you elect to not trade them to others.
  
  
• Social Resources: Contacts, friends, favors from powerful people, and even personal fame - Social Resources aren't anything tangible at all. They are the expectation that others will use their abilities and knowledge to help you.
  
  
• Magical Resources: Magical artifacts, special places, strange curses and the like - Magical Resources are things you can use to solve magical problems.

Does it need subdivisions?

When looked at from the standpoint of Resources vs. Debts the social connections that might fight on your behalf really do look differently from the social connections that provide other kinds of services. So the ones like Retainer or Backup probably do want to go into a different category from the ones like Contacts or Influence. Because the negative version is totally different. The negative version of the former is Enemies (guys who come after you) and the negative version of the latter is Obligations (guys who you have to do shit for).

So that seems like 4 kinds of Resources and 4 kinds of Debts.

• Financial: You either have things that you can spend like a suitcase full of ecstasy or you have something that requires you to go acquire wealth (like a mortgage or a sister who needs an organ transplant).
  
  
• Social: You either have contacts and influence or you owe favors to someone else.
  
  
• Capital: You either have factories or weaponry or you have some sort of job that eats up your time.
  
  
• Physical: You can call upon real people for direct assistance or you have real enemies who want to fuck with you.