It also gave a few miscellaneous bonuses like erasing security footage and covering up tracks, just to rub salt in the wound. If you were playing a detective and trying to track someone who had Arcane, you’d be at a huge disadvantage with no way to make up the difference. There was no corresponding bonus for detection skills. If you made a character with both Arcane and Stealth, you would have a master ninja to whom sneaking up and tying the President’s shoe laces in knots would be a breeze. If you wanted to make a sneaky character, Arcane was more efficient than the skill meant for that exact purpose. Adding insult to injury, it was cheaper to raise with starting points than the actual Stealth skill. In some cases, Arcane would count twice on a single roll. Not only did you add Arcane to all Stealth skill rolls, but you subtracted it from opposing Perception or Investigation skill rolls. One rank would make the character easy to overlook, while five ranks made them practically non-existent. It didn’t actually make them invisible, but people found it hard to concentrate on them. This background represented the mage’s ability to slip around unnoticed. Old World of Darkness character sheets had a spot on them for something called “ backgrounds.” Most of these were benefits like Allies or Resources, things your character had that existed outside their actual stats.
It also had one of the most broken abilities to ever grace the genre. It introduce a revolutionary free-form magic system and a setting so rich that many groups are still using it today.
That book was Mage: The Ascension, and it would forever change the way people thought about roleplaying games. Macedonia was admitted into the UN, the European Union was created, and White Wolf Publishing put out a book about pretending to be a wizard. Arcane, Mage: The Ascensionįor our first entry, we have to take a trip in the Wayback Machine to 1993. Unfortunately, the World of Darkness has some of the most overpowered abilities available in gaming. Even in a narrative heavy game like White Wolf’s The World of Darkness (WoD), keeping abilities on the same level is important. Those who don’t take them end up feeling discouraged because their characters are so much less capable. If one power is much stronger than others of the same cost, you feel pressured to take it because you want your character to be effective. Overpowered abilities are bad for roleplaying games because they unbalance play.
How you decide that can be tricky, but it usually boils down to an ability being stronger than other powers of the same cost or level. Three ranks in Forces Magic granting you the ability to call down lightning bolts would be over powered if three ranks in Matter Magic only let you turn water into salty water. In gaming, an ability is defined as overpowered if it is more powerful than it should be.
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