As I never bury the lead, the World of Darkness is and always has been laughably bad. I haven't played it in ~25 years. I skimmed Requiem a decade ago or so. I hear the new game continually apologizes for what shitty rules it continues to have, but not for the correct reasons.
World of Darkness was never good. It was always designed by idiots. The system was practically stolen from a game called Prince Valiant written by Greg Stafford. The difference is Greg was writing a game about shining knights intending children to play it prior to the grown up version, Pendragon, which he also penned. World of Darkness was written with goth normies in mind. Mature audiences. It was expected that the RPG nerds might join in, but wouldn't complain about the system because they'd be too busy trying to get laid.
The theory was to get girls in the game. The practice was, one to two girls would show up to any given game group, almost always significant others of other members of the group. Very often the GM. They called the GM the Storyteller, which was a it of a played hand as the same name was given to the GM of Prince Valiant. I won't get into the complete wrongness of this title. The fact was, you had hundreds and thousands of game groups across the country where GM's Girlfriend principle was in full effect. Or the GM wasn't connected to the attending girls and bent over backwards to try to alleviate that issue, in spite of significant others always being present regardless. And sometimes, they succeeded.
These were not high class big titty sexy goth girls. Those girls have something to do on a Friday and Saturday night other than hang with a bunch of dweebs in a living room pretending to be vampires. It sounds obvious when I explain it now, you wouldn't believe how many fell for this. Myself included. At best you were looking at snaring some nerd girl snatch. Snatch that likely every other member of the group had already snared.
I know I just spent two paragraphs talking about the environment around the game instead of the game itself, that's because the game itself is stupid beyond measure and was never a selling point. Roll a bunch of dice. Count the ones that land above a number, subtract the literal ones, you'll likely still have some "successes" and win. Or you're supremely unlucky and rolled more ones than the "ones above a number", in which case you botch. Every roll in the game had one of these two outcomes nearly every time. There was almost never a simple failure. The reason? Dice pools are mathless, and for retards. Hell the character sheet tried to not have any numbers on it at all, making you fill out dots like it was a SAT exam.
There was more dumb to it when you got to combat which was omnipresent and unavoidable, so when you rolled for combat you'd have to roll initiative, to hit, and damage. Your opponent would have to roll defense and soak. If you were attacked, you'd be rolling defense and soak. So combat was literally at least 5 rolls of handfuls of dice per round of combat for every single participant, meaning the GM either rolls 100 times or assigns another player to do NPC duty, which means that player is rolling even more fucking dice again. Worst part is, if the last roll (damage vs soak) ends up with no result, or negative result for damage, no damage is scored and combat drags on for in some cases a literal eternity. I've played in higher level 3E D&D combats that last less time than 3 months in Vampire combats. Or starting character Werewolf combats.
Idiots with the mental capacity of 4-year-olds like this system. Because they just like the sound and feel of rolling a shitload of dice. It only exists to obfuscate the odds and overly just grant a dopamine hit on it's use. But if you actually play the game for a few years and don't get fucking tired of dice pools, I think you might actually have something fucking wrong with your brain. Or you're a horny fat goth (or emo, or whatever kids do today) nerd girl and like getting a bunch of nerds fighting over you.
I'm kidding, this game is virtually dead and has been virtually dead for ~20 years. It is only sustained by people who used to play it in the 90s and still buy copies of it over the years to line their dust-covered bookshelves with product they never use or read. This review is not even necessary to warn people off the product, the only people buying it nowadays are morons who are still in love with the nostalgia of potential goth pussy of decades past and have money but no friends or game groups, likely because they have family and responsibility now. Maybe even with one of those fat goth girls turned soccer mom. And cheers for that, you apex WoD players. You deserve it for putting up with this system for so long.
Last thing, if you take any of these games seriously you're an idiot and have no business critiquing game design and even less business designing games. I have spoken.
