Alright, it's no secret that I have mixed feelings about the World of Darkness setting by White Wolf. The setting has a LOT of great concepts, but the settings and their great concepts are often ruined by their themes, particularly the ever-pretentious and ever-present theme of "personal horror", which will often turn many a game into a pretentious wangst-fest only enjoyable to the most insufferable of Goths and Punks (or Emo kids, if you're younger), to say nothing of some of the more rotten people on the White Wolf/Onyx Path payroll (most notably Martin Ericsson, Satyros Brucato, Justin Achilli, and the dickhead responsible for the abomination that is Beast: The Primordial). Not to mention the fact that WoD (both Classic and New) has one of the most toxic fanbases in all of tabletop gaming.

But underneath the terrible themes and the awful fanbase there is some good to be found. Vampire: The Masquerade First Edition was awesome (and still is), had minimal metaplot (if any at all), and was a very good game that didn't try to railroad you into personal horror (though it did present personal horror as an option). The same goes for the First and Second editions of Werewolf and Mage, and Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game is still one of my favorite RPG's of all time. It really wasn't until Revised Edition came out did the metaplot go into overdrive and White Wolf adopted its "One True Way" mentality and started to cram personal horror down our throats.

I wanted to go back to the pre-Revised Edition White Wolf, a time before the fanbase was so toxic and dominated by Goths (well, the Goths were always kind of there, but the inmates didn't start running the asylum until Revised). I know that with the current WoD fanbase and the fact that Martin Ericsson is in charge of White Wolf now, I know that we'll never officially go back to those good ol' days.

So instead, it is our duty as Storytellers to invoke Rule Zero and make the World of Darkness great again! As Storyteller, you can eat the chicken and throw away the bone when it comes to WoD. Keep the good stuff about the setting and throw away the metaplot and the personal horror (but if you like personal horror for some reason, you could just keep playing the way WW tells you to), and change the personal horror into a more enjoyable form of horror, Action Horror. It is time we kicked personal horror to the curb and gave the finger to the Goth subculture once and for all!

But enough about my setting hacks, what are YOUR homebrews and changes you make to World of Darkness (both Classic and New)?

Start with whatever rule set you prefer, up to and including nWoD/CoD.

Now get A World of Darkness, 1st edition and bask in its magnificent gonzo radiance.

Done and done.

Quote from: The Butcher;945575Start with whatever rule set you prefer, up to and including nWoD/CoD.

Now get A World of Darkness, 1st edition and bask in its magnificent gonzo radiance.

Done and done.

A World of Darkness 1st Edition is awesome, I must admit.

Sorry, what's "personal horror"? Dealing with mental illness, depression and other "demons"?

Quote from: rgrove0172;945584Sorry, what's "personal horror"? Dealing with mental illness, depression and other "demons"?

Mostly pretending to feel bad about whatever inhuman things your nonhuman character might do, from what I can tell. Theoretically just those things which were harmful, but practically it would often include any inhuman things.

In a game where you have theoretically chosen to play an nonhuman creature for fun.

I want to take "Dudes of Legend" and "Over the Edge" and create a WoD mashup, with bad ass Katana wielding dudes in Trenchcoats.  
Vampire the Masquerade run as blood powered superheroes defending the night against others of their kind.
Take nWoD, Book of Spirits, and Second Sight and run a mortals game where the PCs hunt down spirits and steal powers from the spirits by binding them to themselves. Why are they doing it?  depends on the person, some want revenge on supernatural critters, others want to BE a supernatural critter, and this is as close as they can get, maybe they want super powers, maybe they want to learn what no one else can teach them.
Take all those game ideas that die hard fans get horribly offended by, and run them to be as fun as possible.

on a side note, I will say that one of the most fun my friends and I have EVER had playing a World of Darkness game was when we ran a super hero campaign.
We built our characters using Freak Legion.  You know, that book from Black Dog Games that was all about how the 'people' created with that book were having their souls raped by multiple demons.
We had Man of Titanium/Titanium Man (the Superman of the comicverse his name and costume changed depending on which comic series was focusing on his adventures, except the comics were based off his adventures not the other way around) A man dedicated to destroying the evil werewolves. A man who could throw a city bus the length of a football field. A man who would regularly outsmarted by the pizza oven at work. (all mental stats were stuck at 1)
Phoenix with an F, the son of Titanium man, he could fly and had fire related powers, slightly smarter then his father, his mother was a werewolf, who apparently became that way after an accident caused by microwaving non-dairy creamer that merged her with the family dog.
Fantastico, the shapeshifter who could turn into anything so long as it was bird related. (Pigeon Power gave him flight, Corvus Claws gave him a claw attack, etc.)
and lastly, Anime-boy, the man ordered by Pentex to keep these 3 morons from killing themselves, and carrying around the recording equipment needed to chronicle their adventures so the writers could create the comics. (so named because he had bright blue hair, that made Cloud Strife's look normal, and was Japanese, the only non-canadian in the group)
Together they went on surreal adventures that made the events of the Tick cartoon, and Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol look sane.

Quote from: rgrove0172;945584Sorry, what's "personal horror"?

Teenage angst and self-hatred, including body horror and everything else that's a perfect analogy for puberty. Just as the Vampire clans were perfect stand-ins for 90s high school cliques, the focus on personal horror was a stroke of genius in audience targeting.

Quote from: remial;945588with bad ass Katana wielding dudes in Trenchcoats.  

Why has no one made a Highlander TV Series RPG?

Quote from: remial;945588I want to take "Dudes of Legend" and "Over the Edge" and create a WoD mashup, with bad ass Katana wielding dudes in Trenchcoats.  
Vampire the Masquerade run as blood powered superheroes defending the night against others of their kind.
Take nWoD, Book of Spirits, and Second Sight and run a mortals game where the PCs hunt down spirits and steal powers from the spirits by binding them to themselves. Why are they doing it?  depends on the person, some want revenge on supernatural critters, others want to BE a supernatural critter, and this is as close as they can get, maybe they want super powers, maybe they want to learn what no one else can teach them.
Take all those game ideas that die hard fans get horribly offended by, and run them to be as fun as possible.

I would so do this unironically

Quote from: Doc Sammy;945573But enough about my setting hacks, what are YOUR homebrews and changes you make to World of Darkness (both Classic and New)?

I like goth as a style, but I don't care for personal horror, and would rather use the Streetfigher manoeuvres, the vampire disciplines, the Changeling Arts and the Werewolf Gifts as magical spells and similar, along with simplified abilities that may allow things like bloodsucking or transformation, but they cost extra, and the chrinos is not towering, it's just an other hybrid form among several, sooo...
Want blood pool? Each point in excess of your own Health cost during Character creation.
Want Blood sucking? Also costs you.
Want to heal by using blood? Another cost.
Want a Werewolf Gift? Cost points.
Want Gnosis? Use  Blood or Ki instead, but may still cost extra.
Want to shapeshift? Each form is bought separately, if you want a Hispo Direwolf or a towering Chrinos, it'll cost more than a regular wolf- or hybrid-form.

In a way, the characters may be treated more like potential heroes, that are accepted or shunned depending on their looks and powers and the GM, being halfbreeds needing to handle rogue elements from other realms or even from the hidden parts of their own world, be it actual vampires and werewolves, vengeful fae, or creatures that looks like demons.

Oh, and no Mage-magic, as Disciplines, Arts and Gifts works far better as far as i'm concerned.

Also, I started to develop my own homebrew into my own game, but it's currently on ice. (See link below for unfinished pdf.)

That's what I'm talking about, so would I

Quote from: Tristram Evans;945590Why has no one made a Highlander TV Series RPG?

My guess would be that the owners of the license have an over-inflated sense of its worth. There is Katanas and Trenchcoats Episode 1: Welcome to Darkest Vancouver. It's a bit tongue in cheek, but also comes from a place of love.

To answer the thread: The only WoD games I have interest in running are Vampire and Mage.

1st Rule: No crossovers. Vampire is Vampire. Mage is Mage. Werewolf is Werewolf. Etc. That's not to say those types of creatures won't show up in a game; they just won't use their specific gameline fluff or powers. Example: In my last Ascension game, set in New Orleans, the players ran into a group of wererats and weregators loosely based off the Assassins and Thieves families in X-Men. They followed their own rules and had their own powers.

2nd Rule: Tracking morality is kind of dumb; players will do or not do horrible things of their own volition. I don't need a stat to track how horrible they are or to punish them. They'll fuck themselves up just fine by themselves.

3rd Rule: On my end, play it straight. The world of Vampire is a political one. The world of Mage is...well it's a lot, but generally not "Doctor Strange" heroics. If you want to do Superheroes with Fangs, feel free. It'll probably even work for a while as you get used up by someone smarter than you. Then you'll fuck up and the Justicars will stake you and leave you out to greet the Sun one last time.  Actions have consequences and I'm a referee, not a storyteller.

That's about it.

There was a pretty detailed fan hack out there called something like Immortal: The Gathering or Immortal: The Quickening.  I always thought the mythology fit pretty well, a secret race of beings who fight mostly amongst themselves and have in their legends a quickly approaching end of things scenario.  Almost tailor-made to plug into OWoD

I don't see the point using the system without the fugliness of "personal horror." Those pathos meters as an alternate lose condition to HP (or virtues for simply losing control), akin to CoC sanity, (e.g. humanity, banality, etc.) is the big reason I find to bother playing those games. The sliding-down-into-the-antlion's-jaws is the big selling point in casting Supers! widget powers in a new genre light.

Otherwise it's a pain in the ass rules light system with too many stats that loosely cross-combine -- until some janknard wants to fart out some bullshit exception-based squee power.

There's better rules light systems to run Supers! with way less overhead. And well, I also just don't get Supers!, too.

I wrote Dreadful & Obscure because I was tired of the World of Darkness being seen as the "definitive vision" of Urban Horror Fantasy.

D&O is a joke but I'd really like to see something new, something that isn't just (bad) Anne Rice fan fiction. That's always how the WoD looked to me.