I’ve written my first module for World of Darkness: Innocents! I haven’t run it just yet, I’ll be doing that at RetCon on Saturday night, but if how much I’ve enjoyed writing it is any indication everyone will be pleased.

One of the things that struck me as slightly odd about Innocents is that it doesn’t use the Virtue/Vice system. Honestly, I can’t imagine why since the entire rest of the World of Darkness line does. The idea of Innocents is that the main protagonists are children (boogie man in the closet kind of stories) but it’s hardly as though children don’t have Virtues and Vices. Children can be every bit as Wrathful, Envious, Proud, Hopeful, Prudent, and Charitable as adults can. So why not Virtues and Vices? Why does Innocents switch to “Assets and Faults”?

I have no answer for that question, and here is another question I have no answer for: why wasn’t “Assets and Faults” made the universal personality trait for all of the World of Darkness instead? Now that I’ve seen the system in Innocents I can’t understand why it wasn’t used across the gamut.

I’d guess that most people are familiar with the seven deadly sins that Vices are based on, and of course the Virtues are all familiar enough as well. The thing is, while Envy is simple enough as a concept, to covet that which someone else has, it’s a little less easy to role play effectively. Envy is a subtle inner conflict that doesn’t always play well at the game table.

In contrast, the Assets and Faults of the Innocents system are all concrete and easy to communicate at the table. They are also well balanced, so that for the various positive qualities a character might have, there are opposing negative qualities: Bravery and Cowardice,  Kindness and Cruelty, Generosity and Greed. As for the replenishment of Willpower Points, they work exactly the same way as their counterparts in the other systems: the indulgence of a Fault replenishes one point of Willpower, and the portrayal of an Asset replenishes Willpower to the character’s maximum.

In the Virtues and Vices system I tend to stick to a core few that I use to make pre-generated characters for convention modules because I want to be sure that players with no experience won’t have a hard time portraying the various characters as written on the sheets. I didn’t have that problem at all writing characters in Innocents. I didn’t see any particular quality that wouldn’t be fun to portray at the table. They all feel like they will work well in a group dynamic.

Of course, I’ll know more after Saturday night’s session!