When Merits lack merit.

[Brian]

The Exalted merits are at least reasonable.  But the WoD merits are all either useless, or waaaaay too powerful.

My favorite merit from Demon: The Fallen is "Good Right Hook".  Lowers the difficulty on your brawl attacks from 6 (standard) to 4.  It's a 1 pt merit, IIRC.

Natural Channel is fun, since if you have two people with it, you can be spirit inept, and still enter the umbra.  (If you're in the umbra without spirit, you die.  WHEEE!)

Spark of Life is great, since you heal faster, get lower difficulties/automatic successes to Life effects as a mage, though it does come bundled with the Potent Blood flaw, this means amazingly little to anyone who can use Life magic.

There's a merit that some of the changing breeds can get that makes them Veiled to other changing breeds, which means they incite delerium in, for example, Garou.  This is feasible, as a raging Mokolé SHOULD frighten a Garou with any knowledge of the War of Rage, but when combined with Intimidation and Mokolé Gifts such as Terrible Footsteps, and a few other Archid attributes, can mean a starting Mokolé is immune to silver damage, and has a difficulty of the targets willpower -5 to frighten ANY NUMBER of Garou away.  Mechanically, this makes the War of Rage infeasible, as a single Mokolé could frighten off all but about three members of a charging army of Crinos Garou.  Even with horde bonuses, you need willpower of 6 to have a CHANCE to resist, and with Dragon Masque, you need a willpower of 8.  (For those of you who don't speak WoD-ese, this basically means that the Mokolé who were supposedly nearly exterminated by werewolves in the war of rage are actually effectively invulnerable to them.)

The main problem with WW merits is that either they do nothing, but are amusing, or even at a low level cause such a fundemental change to the campaign that it changes direction.  Can you adjust for this problem?  Only by making the game ... not a WoD game.  Unfortunately, this is the fatal flaw of the WoD.  They say that their setting is an example, and everyone should make up their own WoD.  Then they sell novels based in their settings, add-ons for pre-made adventures in their own settings, and tons of key characters from their setting that are integral to specific mechanical aspects of the game (especially with regards to disciplines and gifts, though significantly less so for spheres).

I had the mokolé from the above example in the apoclypse campaign I'm running.  Let's just say the party spends a lot of time fighting fomori and umbrood, and rarely encounters werewolves.

But let's take this away from White Wolf specifically -- how often are advantages/merits/etc. offered that are too powerful?  They, too can have an unbalancing effect on the game.

The usual fix for this is to only allow merits/advantages that are offset by appropriate flaws/disadvantages.  What do you suggest?

[Ebiris]

Extra Attacks in BESM is hideously broken.

At four points per level, it's about the most expensive attribute you can buy, but even that doesn't do justice to its power.

Not only does it let you attack twice (or more!) in a round, it ensures that the second attack has a +2 penalty to dodge against, AND means that should you come under attack multiple times in a round, you can ignore the first multiple-defences penalty.

Words really can't do justice to how effective this is in a system where every defence attempt of a round past the first accrues a cumulative +2 penalty.

In order to fix it, the most reasonable solution is to break it down into two slightly less (but still) expensive attributes - one for extra attacks, and one for extra defences. This is the approach taken by Tristat DX, and seems fairly reasonable.

Another possible fix would be to allow anyone to make multiple dodges without penalty, provided all the attacks come from the same source. So someone beset on all sides is still screwed, but someone facing 'death of a thousand cuts' from a pimped up opponent at least has a chance.

[Edward]

Common Sense, whether in Gurps or Shadowrun, is a useless advantage as those who need it will never take it and those who take it will never need it.

[Brian]

Common Sense, whether in Gurps or Shadowrun, is a useless advantage as those who need it will never take it and those who take it will never need it.

I'm printing this out to hang on the wall in my room as we speak.

White Wolf has an identical merit.  It's only ever been assigned to players in my games, never chosen.

[Dracos]

The usual fix for this is to only allow merits/advantages that are offset by appropriate flaws/disadvantages.  What do you suggest?

Personally, I tend to like this type of setup the best, since it usually tends to result in a 'Talent + Weakness' effect.  Moreso though should be GM judgement on them.  Of course, that's sometimes hard to see ahead of time, like with that Mokole case you referenced.  It's one of those things I'd suspect you'd know next time to just say 'no' to, or modify (I'm surprised you didn't try and modify it sometime during the game, talking it over with the player and explaining it in that context or create some matching merit for werewolfs to allow the occassional werewolf fight).  Of course, this comes to the problem of what to do when a large number of the merits offered are unbalancing (doesn't matter their frequency in the whole set, just enough to seem 'large', 15-20 would usually do it).

And nice call on the common sense, Edward. =)

Dracos