a good explaination of power stats at the start adn then it all goes to shit

Changing Breeds Review Part IV: A Miserable Little Pile Of Mechanics

Welcome back. This is the point where the mechanics give up all pretense of being any good and collapse into a singularity of stealing from better things and ruining them.

For those with no knowledge of the WoD system, here's a quick crash course for stuff you'll need to know here. Every supernatural system has a "Power Stat" ranging from one to ten that measures how strong your character's supernatural power is in general. Mage has Gnosis, Vampire has Blood Potency, Changeling has Wyrd, etc. etc.. It's used as dice in some power rolls, to resist other supernatural powers, determines how much mojo you have to throw around, and - this is the important part for right now - increases the maximum dot cap on your statistics from five to [Power Stat] once it hits six or above. Hitting this level is nowhere near easy, requiring something in the neighborhood of 160 experience points when the system says you should only get three or four per session. This is to represent that, if you're that old/powerful, you're nobody to be fucked with, and can reach literally inhuman levels of power. A skill or attribute of six or above is the stuff of legends and fearful, whispered stories. The only ways of getting a cap above five before the Power Stat bumps it up that I can think of involve Prometheans each having a specific attribute that can hit six dots, or a Changeling with an extremely expensive merit that can only be bought at character creation and only allows one specific attribute to be able to hit six dots.

Feral Heart, the Changing Breeds power stat, allows for characters to have a stat cap of six at character creation by simply sacrificing their merit dots to get Feral Heart 3. At Feral Heart 5, this reaches 7. From Power Stats 3 to 8, Changing Breeds are strictly better than every other line in the World of Darkness when it comes to basic statistics.

If there was any doubt that this wasn't a system designed to make Mary Sue characters for the authors, it just got shot in the head.

Also, the only 'downside' to having a high Primal Urge Feral Heart is that you get a slowly increasing Social roll penalty that's stiffened if you're a predatory shifter. However, a shifter can add their Feral Heart to social rolls for [Feral Heart] turns, for no cost, any time they want. So, there is literally no point where you ever have to suffer social penalties, and it quickly turns into a free boost. Even better, if you read into the shitty explanation well enough, it may actually erase the Feral Heart penalty before applying the bonus. You can also do this song and dance with Perception rolls, which, again, are some of the most useful rolls in the entire system.

Oh yeah, you also bleed off Essence at the higher end, but at that point you're going to be swimming in it.

Now onto the mana-equivalent, Essence, stolen from Werewolf, neutered now that characters don't necessarily ever have to deal with spirits or The Shadow. Most characters will only use it to shapeshift instantly, use random shit, or (the clear winner) heal Lethal damage instantly.

Now to Harmony, which is stolen from Werewolf wholesale and given some shoehorned additions. Harmony is the Morality stat of the system, basically how sane/moral you are (and yes, tying relative sanity to relative morality is indeed a giant shitstorm waiting to happen, we all know). Weirdly, the system actually improves on Morality in a couple minor ways before taking a giant steaming dump all over the rest. The biggest and my personal favorite way is that it goes through each individual breaking point and clarifies it, and also goes through each level on the track and describes what a person is like at that level. It's a really great touch that was in Vampire and Werewolf that sort of disappeared in the later lines and I have no idea why, especially when you get to the that is Geist's Synergy. Another minor cool touch is that once you get to a low end of Harmony, the 'real' you can leak out depending on which way you're sliding (which I'll explain in a minute.) For instance, a tiger might cast the shadow of a woman, or a dude might have a bear for a reflection. Lastly, it actually gives a more mechanical reason to avoid slipping low by tagging the low levels with a blanket penalty to rolls involving Composure, which makes sense for the track's fluff (keeping balance within and not losing your shit). The rest of the penalties in other systems involve having the dice pools involving your Morality-analogue be lowered, which ranges from laughably pointless to crippling, and a host of other things that also range from slaps on the wrist to utterly devastating.

However, that's about as far as my praise will go for this incarnation of Harmony. As if the Morality systems weren't crippled with their own issues that have been discussed at length by the WoD threads and generally anybody who looks at the Morality system long enough to go "hey wait a minute," Changing Breeds essentially tries to squeeze two tracks into the one, the fluff demanding that the character lean more towards Humanity or Beasthood through the derangements they're probably going to rack up as they fall down through Harmony...and yet, Harmony is stuffed with sins from either side with no real caveats, especially at the higher levels. So, all your sins could be acting like a complete jackass to nature, wearing only the finest clothing made out of 100% clubbed baby seal, and you could either have no derangements at all (and therefore little to no external impetus to act out low Harmony characteristics) or have all the derangements that make you more animalistic.

By the way, eating the flesh of your animal type, killing anything 'important' as a hunter (whether for food or sport), killing anything 'important' for giggles, killing your animal type/humans, murdering humans/your animals, 'Betraying Man to Beast or Beast to Man', sadistic murder of animals/humans, and cannibalism of humans/shifters all count as different infractions! Can you tell they had no fucking clue what they were doing? Cause I sure can.

Also, at Harmony 2, 1, and 0, shapeshifting progressively becomes more and more difficult until you're either stuck as that one guy from Jumanji, or as Cujo.

And now...we get to the derangements.

Oh my fucking Lord.

Derangements are going to be their own update because God DAMN.

Skipping them, we reach the rules for shape shifting. They're the Werewolf rules (SHOCK AND SURPRISE), with holes punched in for the modular stat changes of the different breeds. Also, apparently, no animal form, no matter how human or dextrous, can use anything as complicated, or more complicated than, scissors. The example they give is an elephant using a computer, and I counter with a gorilla driving a car. Every single car chase is improved if the drivers are gorillas. Prove me wrong

Anyway, rules for the Warform are brought up, with all animals getting a violent bent according to their animal's personality, even peaceful herbivores becoming "sadistic trap-and-torture killers." Otherwise, the rules follow Werewolf.

Animal form spends most of its time talking about how being treated as an animal by people is alien and weird, then adds a new mechanic that staying in animal form for a long time (like, several weeks) may cause your character to forget they were ever a shapeshifter and remain an animal.

Near-Man (Throwback) and Near-Beast (Dire) forms are addressed with shoehorned one-size-fits-all modifications applicable to existing breed stats if you bought the merit that lets you use them, but their applications as compared to Werewolf are slim at best.

Lunacy (now Delusion) is changed from depending on set reactions based on maximum Willpower to an actual roll, bogging down things unnecessarily while adding a degree of randomness to the proceedings. And yet, when you do the numbers, the results are pretty much the same when it comes to statistics...until you factor in Feral Heart acting as a penalty, pretty much ensuring a powerful shifter will never get busted. Sigh.

Regeneration is literally Werewolf's regeneration with the healing made twice as slow, unless you buy a merit to make it Werewolf's system. Siiigh.

Silver dealing aggravated damage is in for no justified reason. Siiiiigh.

Death Rage/Frenzy/Etc is copy/pasted with name edits, only with a new version that's basically summed up as Captain Planet With A Chainsaw. And I would watch the hell out that show, even if the mechanic is stupid. Like, "flicking away a half burnt cigarette means the guy comes home to a giant pile of elephant shit on his doorstep" and "starting a small fire means chasing them down with beast form or destroying their property with bodily waste (this is seriously an example, swear to God)" stupid.

And that finishes the chapter! After this is the chapter with all the breeds, which is a bountiful cornucopia of horrible art, terrible writing, and jaw-dropping mechanical asshattery.

But that will have to wait.

Next time: Derangements. God help us.