Import Wraith’s Passions into Your Storytelling Game

My favorite of the old World of Darkness games was, hands-down, Wraith: The Oblivion. A lot of people found it too depressing, but I like ghosts, and I liked that it was driven by each characters’ unresolved issues. Wraith was an intimate and deeply personal game, and I found this refreshing compared to the more externally focused games. It was the first game I played where the internal aspects of a character–their hopes, dreams, fears, and anxieties–was given a mechanical focus rather than relegated to hoping the GM uses the hooks littered throughout a character’s background.

If there is one mechanic that I missed from the old World of Darkness, if there’s one thing I wish had been applied more broadly through World of Darkness games, it’s Passions.

Here’s my way to bring that back. This can replace the current morality system for the core World of Darkness game.

Here’s how it works.

Each Passion has a purpose and a motivation. The purpose describes what the character is trying to do. The motivation is the emotion that drives it. Two Passions that seem to share a purpose can have strikingly different motivations. For example, “Protect my spouse (Love)” is a whole different animal from, “Protect my spouse (Greed).”

Just as in Wraith, Passions are rated from 1 to 5 dots. The higher a Passion, the more it defines a character’s sense of self.  As a result, Passions with higher ratings tend to be larger in scope than ones with lower ratings. The more a character is willing to risk and sacrifice to fulfill a passion, the higher the rating.

For example, take a Passion for making money. Let’s look at three different scenarios:

• An MBA student whose Passion is, “Make a six-figure income by age 30 (Pride) 3.”
• A CEO whose Passion is, “Become a billionaire before I retire (Greed) 4.”
• A drug dealer whose Passion is, “Get rich or die tryin’ (Greed) 5.”

The drug dealer may not, in the end, make as much money as the MBA student or the CEO, but he’s willing to do a whole lot more to fulfill his Passion–even risking or sacrificing his own life in the process. The CEO may be willing to screw people over or destroy a marriage or friendship if it means becoming a member of the billionaires’ clu. The MBA student might forego hobbies and a social life to achieve her goal.

Each character gets 10 points to distribute to Passions (or more or less, depending on what the Storyteller finds appropriate for the game). In the interest of elegance and simplicity, if you want one Passion to have several motivations, you must create them as separate Passions. So, if you have, “Get rich or die tryin’” as one of your character’s Passions, and you want both Pride and Greed to motivate it, you create them like this:  “Get rich or die tryin’ (Greed)” and “Get rich or die tryin’ (Pride).”

Your Passions determine how your character gains Willpower. Each time your character does something that fulfills one of their Passions, they get one or more Willpower Points based on the consequences of what they do (maximum equal to the Passion’s rating).

• 1 point: no significant consequences
• 2 points: do something that has short-term or minor consequences
• 3 points: do something that has major or long-term consequences
• 4 points: do something that has major and long-term consequences
• 5 points: do something that has major, long-term, and far-reaching consequences

For instance, say that your character has the Passion, “Finish my novel (Joy) 3.” This means that, while pursuing that Passion, your character can regain up to 3 Willpower points each time they do something to fulfill that Passion. So, even if your character kills their beloved toy poodle, they get a maximum of 3 Willpower points. Let’s say that, to finish this manuscript, your character put up a good chunk of their savings to go to a retreat so that they can have time and solitude. It’s going to take them a while to earn that back, but it’s possible. That’s a long-term consequence, so that gives your character 3 Willpower points.

The motivations for Passions are important, for they determine other situations when your character can gain Willpower, such as when they do things motivated by one of the emotions for their Passion. When your character does something that inspires or makes them feel the emotion connected to a Passion, they earn a Willpower point.

Let’s revisit, “Finish my novel (Joy) 3.” Every time you have your character do something out of joy, they earn a Willpower point. Likewise for, “Get rich or die tryin’ (Greed) 3.” If your character does something out of greed, they get 1 Willpower point.

To purchase Passion dots, it costs a number of experience points equal to three times the new rating.

Feel free to try this in your Storytelling games. Let me know how this works out.