That's like asking Bethesda to give the Fallout IP to pre-2012 Obsidian, or Blizzard to stop sucking up to China. Honestly, I'm satisfied with sticking to W20/1st Edition Forsaken and going no later than either.
Yeah, it wasn’t hard to snag the few good ideas out of V5 and reverse engineer them onto V20.
The only good bits from my perspective being;
- a more consistent attribute spread (just as the CoD power, precision and resistance were superior).
- making Generation a trade off instead of something you spend background points on (as written, 5 points for 8th Gen is a power gamer’s wet dream and literally the best investment you’ll ever make in your PC)
- Banes (with severity based on generation) vs. the V20 clan weaknesses.
A few of the individual discipline powers were also better implementations of prior ones, but as a whole, V5 was hot garbage with a “One True Wayist” design instead of the toolkit of prior editions.
Honestly, it wouldn’t even be hard to snag the few good bits off of CoD, V5 and the chassis of V20, slap a new mythology (with different bloodlines in place of clans) on top and have a functional system free and clear of the woke corporate drama.
That said, as I shared with BoxCrayonTales in his hacking the Storyteller system thread over in design and development, I don’t think playing the monster (particularly the emo VtM variety) is particularly in line with the zeitgeist (nor is Hollywood which is why their woke garbage keeps failing). When times get tough, people don’t feel sympathy for the predators (which worked during the halcyon days of the 90s when our teens had to invent traumas because their lives were so good compared to the past)... they want heroes who stop the predators.
So the real game to make in the present age would be a “Hunters of the Damned” type setting where playing someone suffering under the curse of vampirism or lycanthropy are optional types of hunters, but the gist would be taking the fight to the monsters (who stand as proxies for the crony multinationals who rape the middle and lower classes with the blessings of a bought off government, the eco-terrorists preaching genocide and dragging the survivors back to the stone age to ‘save the planet’ and the Satanic anti-Western racists who think tearing down civilization will somehow create a utopia... or basically a game where the White Wolf versions of vampires, werewolves and witches/mages are again the bad guys).
What underlying system would you use? Take in mind I never played anything from the Vampire line, so if it's their system you'd need to specify the mechanics.
I'm asking because I have in the backburner such a game, with OSR chasis.
And indeed you could play a "good" monster, but only in sofar the PC works to protect humans and against it's own kind.
I haven't figured a way to have a good vampire tho, best thing I have managed is a Damphir, postulating they can drink blood other than human while full vampires can't.
Weres are much easier, you manage to retain your human mind, thus only those who were already monsters or on the road to becoming one (prior to being bitten), or those who loose their human mind to the wolf become predators, granted, the percentage of those who manage not to become monsters is tiny (in my setting) IIRC about 5%.
Witches are born, the female is 99% of the time the one with powers, males with powers are 85% of the time dead before puberty, those who survive are 95% of the time way weaker than the females. They are divided between white and black witches, strong witchcraft requires sacrifice and or pain, this means blood, torture, killing. White witches are usually weaker than black ones because of the nature of witchcraft and are often used as sacrifice by the black witches to harvest their power. A white witch doesn't need to be defensless tho, it all depends on the creativity of the player to justify the increase in power of a spell without torturing/killing someone.
Not sure about including Wizards as a different beast because I haven't figured out how to do so yet.
Then there's the Fey, those are like the brothers grimm portrayed, they eat children, pets, etc.
Other monsters include the Wendigo, and other cryptids appropriate for the setting, or changed to fit it.