The question came up recently of whether or not hunters, specifically capital-H-hunters-that-aren't-actually-capitalized, count as having a major template or not. Is being the star of a major game line enough to give you immunity to the Embrace? 

And the answer is "no." With some caveats, of course; you're probably going to be too altered to take on a major supernatural template if you've got some Cheiron Group implants making you rather less than human these days. There are probably no Lucifuge werewolves running around, with two different types of empowering bloodine. But essentially, the rule of not crossing the streams, of not hybridizing major elements of the World of Darkness — that's a rule, but it's not a law.

Similarly, you may have noted that the "5 x 5" concept really isn't a rule so much as it might have seemed. I've talked before, if perhaps not here, about how originally Werewolf: The Forsaken was designed with the idea that there'd be the usual five auspices and seven tribes. The tribe number was cut down to five not because five was the rule, but because two of them were a little redundant. Imagine splitting the Bone Shadows into two tribes (a death-tribe and a mystics-tribe) and doing the same with the Iron Masters (or was it the Hunters in Darkness?). We got stronger tribes by making them less one-note. But 5 x 5 turned out to be a good model, allowing us to hit enough options that you had a real choice but not so many that the choices started getting watered down. It was almost a rule.

So we started to break it, of course.

Now here's the thing. Back in the old days, we put the Golden Rule in every rulebook we put out, and we stressed the hell out of it. If you came on board post-Vampire: The Requiem and haven't seen it, the Golden Rule was essentially "Break and change any rule you want. Your judgment trumps all." We stopped doing that with the release of the Storytelling system because that had gotten to be a bit of a crutch. It wasn't an excuse for putting out shoddy rules that we liked and expecting people to come up with something better. We wanted to do rules that made sense the first time, and we didn't want the Golden Rule to be some kind of safety net. We wanted the rules to work the first time.

But the thing is that we still believed in the Golden Rule. We still wanted people to follow it, we just didn't want to emphasize it. Ultimately, gaming groups are such a deeply individualized mix of interpersonal chemistry and preferences that there's no way we can write from a perspective of knowing your group. Therefore, we have to write from the perspective of being the most useful to the greatest number of groups. That assumes a certain median. You don't add on multiple templates because it involves a lot of extra work that might not be worth it, for instance. Now, it might be worth it — but unless we're sure that everyone in the group is for the idea and willing to do the extra work that keeps the multi-template character from dominating play, it's better to err on the conservative side. That doesn't mean we can't break those rules from time to time, though.

One of the benefits of the limited-series model is that it's gotten us feeling rather more experimental. There are rules that Changeling broke that none of its predecessors did, and in turn Hunter went places Changeling didn't, and Geist is definitely going to mess with people's expectations even further. We also throw in experiments of character design in smaller books, too: consider Second Sight, Skinchangers, Changing Breeds, Innocents. (There's another one on the way, too.) What really has encouraged us, though, is when the experiments work. Changeling discarded the 5 x 5 model and went with 4 x 6, with the 6 having a separate subsection of choices to add on. That was received very well. Promethean really explored the idea of a finite chronicle. Hunter went new places with Tactics (building on an experiment from Werewolf) and Willpower.

It's to the point, basically, that nothing is sacred. Or rather, I should say that no rule is absolutely sacred. The genre is still sacred. You won't see X-Men-style mutants who are incredibly beautiful, powerful people with incredible powers and negligible drawbacks pontificating about how they have it so bad. You won't see eccentrically-dressed people popping out of phone-booth-sized time machines. You won't see rules for cartoon characters come to life, fun though Roger Rabbit and Loony Leo may be. The World of Darkness needs to fit within a certain paramater of genre faithfulness and plausibility, and we're pretty strong custodians of that (at least in print).

But if we can come up with a good enough reason to change a tradition of character creation or dice-rolling, we will. It has to be a good reason, mind; I don't think there are any good reasons to use dice other than d10s at this point, or to scrap the Physical/Social/Mental triptych. Some things are proven to really beat the alternative where the Storytelling System is concerned. But if we understand the rules, why they were created and what they're trying to achieve — and I like to think we do — we can take them apart and do something else with them.

You should, too. That's part of why we're trying to achieve more transparency in how the Storytelling system works here and in other places: because these are the kind of decisions everyone should be free to make, but they also work best if people are sufficiently informed about the principles in place that they can change things with a full understanding of what the results are likely to be.

So if you have any particular questions about rules you'd like to change, about the whys and the wherefores, why not post them? If you want to know why we picked 8 as the fixed difficulty, why there are the inborn and chosen axes of splats — let us know, and I'll take you behind the scenes as best I can. Messing with the rules is fun, and I'd be happy to help you with it.