A) Already did a top to bottom rewrite of the mechanics for what often call "White Book Mage" (due to my giving copies to my players using white binders) available here; https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8uzbbLvQJOLRWtSaVU4M3A5M0E/view?usp=sharing
Interesting though I have to admit - I dislike sphere redesign
I think
Mage: The Awakening's arcana are an improvement. Though I still find both very lacking. I prefer something like the
Dark Ages: Mage magic system where every magical tradition has its own set of magic skills.
If I was designing a game, then I'd let all splats have access to the magic system and then make some additional special rules just for the snowflake wizards to justify them being a distinct splat.
It also provides a fresh start to (re)develop ideas with the benefit of hindsight, the easy research provided by the internet, etc.
I find a lot of WoDisms to be pretty arbitrary.
For example, before Changeling: The Dreaming was released, somebody invented their own "Faerie: The Game Eternal." While it draws on the same folkloric roots, the execution was completely different. Rather than being killed by the stability of human society, these faeries rely on it to avoid deteriorating into beings of pure chaos.
I'm generally quite willing to go with The Lost angle, not The Dreaming. Ancient mysterious terrors from Dream/Nightmare Dimension that ocassionaly kidnaps people.
Dreaming angle ultimately leaves me quite cold.
I like Lost over Dreaming, too. Nonetheless, I recognize that some people don't like the whole "you were abused by fairies" angle. So I'd offer an olive branch by allowing "exile fey" as a PC option: they're fairies who decided to live in the human world and adopt human ways.
In terms of oWoD - nWoD - I rather prefer my Vampire and Mage more on o-side, and Changeling and Ghost on n-side.
Werewolves sort of leaves me cold on both sides, but if I had to choose I'll go with nWoD because zoophilia is just icky.
This is why I prefer to invent my own setting rather than try and parse which iteration of the IP I find less offensive.
The whole zoophilia thing is just unnecessary and could have been replaced by humans having sex with wolf
gods rather than literal wolves. Woman has sex with wolf god, she becomes pregnant with wolfblood. Man has sex with wolf goddess, she becomes pregnant with wereblood wolf.
And others wrote "Angel: The Rapture" and "Daemon" years before Demon: The Fallen. Or literal Anne Rice vampires: while similar to WoD vamps, there are key differences.
There's also plenty of heartbreakers like The Everlasting and WitchCraft.
There's tons of conceptual space to explore without wholesale copying WoD. Take inspiration, sure, but don't feel constrained by the choices of White Wolf in the 90s and 00s.
From 3pp hacks of WoD my favourite is definitely Genius: The Transgression.
I saw the author advertising it all over tvtropes years ago, but I never saw the appeal. You can hack
Mage to do the same thing, as WW eventually did in
Mage Chronicler's Guide.
Another example: why should vampire PCs all drink blood? Why can't we play energy vampires like in What We Do in the Shadows tv show? Or a succubus like in Lost Girl?
I'm all for energy vampires but as different being that is not really vampire in common sense. Sort of like Vampire Courts in Butcher books which are loose coalition of separate species of supernaturals - with psychic vampires being human+, and classic vampires being almost Lovecraftian spiritual energy mimicking psyche of freshly dead and converted corpses.
But that's sort of another problem - I like to have extra species, but also to have multi-clanned classic vamps with singular historical source of their existence.
I don't see the problem here. You can have a bazillion strains and sub-strains of vampires. What's stopping you?
The Everlasting offers an interesting variation. Progenitor vampires (the ones that found bloodlines) come into existence when a person commits really big atrocities, rather than all tracing back to a single progenitor in the middle east 10,000 years ago or whatever. Although they don't seem to share the same source (or maybe they do? it's unclear), they do follow the same rough Ricean-inspired template except that their strengths and weaknesses are slightly more diverse than WoD (though not as diverse as they could be). For example, they all drink human blood (youth-stealers and flesh-eaters are different splats for some reason) but some bloodlines lack fangs. Perhaps the most extreme divergence is that some bloodlines aren't harmed by sunlight.
If you care enough to reinvent the wheel for a kitchen sink urban fantasy and convince people to play it... more power to you. As it stands, being able to put up "Looking for players for V20 or M20 campaign" on our local gaming meetup groups and not have to spend hours just explaining the setting and can just get right to char gen and playing is well worth any trivial issues I have with the setting.
Yep. Besides why assume we don't know various tropes and just prefer overall outline of WoD?
My issues with the setting and the rules are non-trivial. I'm not going to play a game I don't like because someone is trying to sell me something. WoD is a dying brand anyway, so there's never been a better time to invent your own setting.
It's not like anybody else has tried... outside of the urban fantasy
fiction market, which is vastly larger than the tabletop market.
In case you missed the memo... vampires are the villains and should be played the same way you would an evil-alignment D&D game. There's a reason I only play mortal hunters or dhampirs in VtM.
Should they? I mean vampirism is definitely icky and unholy in origin, but still you can carefuly keep your Humanity high and fight a good fight, I mean considering how many evil kindred are around, those vampires who does not want to surrender to vampirism are probably one of best weapon against them.
It's not like Buffy where it's corpse with caulliflower demon inside
I never understood how you can maintain high humanity at the same time you accumulate a laundry list of superpowers. Wouldn't using the powers offered by vampirism make you
more susceptible to its darkside? Why not play a superhero game and make a PC with vampire powers?
The Technocracy are still the bad guys because they think socialism/fascism is the best path forward for the world so any free thinkers pretty much have to end up at least tangentially associated with the Traditions
I have a hard time as European Catholic to align with free-thinker occultists over fascists
But then I play Technocracy as divided and not even close to omnipotent, because honestly this 90-ties vibe about how big bad powers will make world boring is really stupid.
Any wannabe big power knows rules of panem et circes.
I never got the appeal of the Technocracy. I vastly preferred
Nephilim's secret societies in concept: normal human beings who know the supernatural exists and hunt down wizards to drain magic for their own gain. Not all secret societies were like that, but those were the ones most relevant as antagonists. (It was basically "
Illuminati: The Conspiracy" if you're familiar with that old homebrew.)
You don't strike me as someone who would do that, but if you don't think creativity is your thing, it wasn't really mine either until, as BoxCrayonTales pointed out, I tried my hand at fanfiction. Moved away from it pretty quickly because the IP is heavily copyrighted but I found a new niche afterwards that I liked and stuck with it.
So far I have no ambition of being RPG designer
You don't need to be. There's plenty of existing rules systems that you can make homebrew for, or even go for a systemless setting. You might be fine using a modified WoD/CoD setting/rules
now, but that might change in the future. Particularly if you keep making changes and can't silence your niggling doubts about the game's fit for you.
If a mod thinks this is too tangential for the original purpose of the thread, then let us know.