While on the road to Gen Con '90, Mark Rein-Hagen came upon the idea of a new game design that would become Vampire: The Masquerade.
Tom Dowd, co-designer for Shadowrun, worked with Rein-Hagen to adapt the core mechanics from his previous game success to use d10 instead of d6 for calculating probability.
Two dots represents an average capacity in that attribute, while five displays the peak of human ability.
Characters have a wide array of Skills to choose from that represent specialized areas of knowledge.
Unlike attributes, however, abilities can have no dots filled in to represent a complete lack of training and experience.
Advantages in the game are such things as the character's Defense score, Health, Initiative, Morality, Size, Speed, and Willpower.
A Vice is a basic weakness in the character's personality, and a flaw or guilty pleasure they may indulge even while knowing that there may be consequences to suffer.
Depending on what the situation calls for, a character has a number of Dots in Attributes and Skills associated with the task.
For example, if a character is scaling a wall, they add the number of Dots in their Strength Attribute and their Athletics Skill together.
Anytime a character has absolutely no dice remaining in their pool as a result of negative Modifiers, the task would seem impossible to perform.
For every Success a character has on their Attack roll against an opponent, they inflict one Health Point of Damage upon the target.
After a game, a Storyteller can award experience points to players to improve their character's Attributes, Talents and Skills.
Experience distribution is typically based upon roleplaying performance (especially if flaws are present), as well as accomplishing short- and long-term goals.
Certain traits that would later be codified as Merits still existed, but were instead referred to as Backgrounds; advantages such as Contacts, Resources and Status were universal across gamelines.
The Mind's Eye Theatre system, is designed for LARP rather than tabletop roleplaying, and drastically overhauls the core mechanics to adjust for the different playstyle demands, resolving conflicts either through drawing from a deck of cards or by rounds of rock paper scissors.
The Experience Point system also changed greatly: throughout a session, players now accumulate "beats" through coping with or resolving Conditions, dealing with hardships, or accomplishing goals.
While Vampire: The Requiem had released its The Strix Chronicle less than a year previous, Onyx Path conceded that the second edition of Requiem would be identical enough to Strix that they would supply a free PDF of the second edition to anyone who had already purchased a PDF copy of that book.
While the core mechanics remain the same as the Storytelling system, the Storypath system focuses significantly more on ludonarrative consistency: a major resource is Momentum, which does not represent any tangible or recognizable asset but instead the characters' narrative inclination to succeed in the story as a whole.
Another addition is Scale: a mechanic employed when one character has a significant advantage over another that may not be ideally rendered by a dice pool.
While successes are added to Dramatic targets, they are multiplied against narrative ones, allowing for impressive effects that do not automatically overwhelm central characters.