Three turns and out is still optional. Oddly I think the Vampire section about it makes that more clear than the Werewolf one, which seems to really, really want to be the default setting. I don’t care for it and I don’t use it in any of my games. I don’t think it’s terrible advice to keep combats short, though. That said it’s not even really a 5th original idea, it is related to Chronicles 2e’s Down and Dirty concept of finishing combat in a single roll.

I don’t really get your complaint about character creation. It’s an entirely new edition of the game, character creation changes between editions pretty regularly. It’s allegedly more “balanced” in terms of XP costs for future advancement but it’s not a difficult experience to select X 2s, Y 3s, and Z 4s and slot them in. I’m not really sure why they didn’t go with the single banner of Merits like 1e/2e Chronicles did for those abilities, I’m not sure what keeping it split into Backgrounds and Merits does for any game. I’m glad they kept Flaws around.

Death to Freebies - having two different costs for extra points spent after the standard character building is done was always silly. Does the character have a few more bits and bobs than a standard new lick/cub/whatever? That’s XP.

I get you to some extent on the no roll vs lots of rolls vs limited rolls philosophy. With the various 5th games less rolls are better because there are consequences attached to them. You can bend the rules a bit when you want to have people roll for something for fun by dropping the consequences in terms of Hunger etc. I do that from time to time. They do also offer take half for players as well, ways to have the consequences there but not for skillful characters. If Kevin’s character has 8 dice for picking a lock, he doesn’t need to roll to pop open a standard lock. But Sara’s character is a rage monster combat wombat that is only passingly familiar with picking locks, it’s more reasonable for her to have to worry about flipping her lid and kicking the door in. I think it provides a nice balance to the old and hilarious botch induced comedy that could happen without also creating a classic AD&D fighter that gets five attacks and has a 5% chance on each attack to stab himself in the face with his great axe, thus making him statistically more likely to hurt himself every turn than a level 1 wizard.

It was a disappointment to me in a number of ways as well.

Regarding the removal of the old stuff, I can sort of get it, but they screwed it up. No more metis as, effectively, a slur? Makes sense. Seriously offensive to those people. No more intra-werewolf racism? No historical bad blood? I get that it’s offensive to some people, but that’s the point of not only werewolf, but the entire World of Darkness. It’s a WORLD of DARKNESS. A (fleshed out system of lore) of (the things that make you uncomfortable or scared). Despite DnD dorks trying to make it superheroes with fangs, Vampire is a personal horror game in which you make reasonable decisions that slowly turn you into a monster. Werewolf was about confronting the grim truth that often the ‘heroes’ battling against ‘evil’ are often just as fucked up as the ones they are fighting against. Changeling is a game about PTSD. Wraith is a game about the death beyond death, being forgotten. The whole set is about stepping into the shoes of those we call ‘monsters’ and seeing things from their perspective. Some people call things edgy but this is, by and large, just a way to dismiss things that make them uncomfortable. It provides an ironic distance that lets them feel superior when someone asks them philosophical questions. So, when they stripped all that out in an effort to appease the idiots who can’t bear the existence of fictional hypocrisy as a teaching metaphor, they strip out the Darkness from their World of Darkness. And then, even more foolishly, by not replacing them with something else, they end up with no World to their World of Darkness. It’s just an of. Who wants to play some ‘of’ guys? Anyone?

Without the lore, then to be good, it has to have good mechanisms at least, but they used the same formula as with Vampire, which somehow made it past playtesting, though I will never guess how. The flaws, merits, and backgrounds stuff was absurd, and to keep it from clashing with Vampire, they didn’t fix it for WW. The XP system also clashes with itself, never committing to an idea fully. The rage/critical dice system is cool, though just a touch complex for something like WW, where feels like it should be dumber but punchier. I could see trading some punchy speed for depth, or vice versa, but WW kind of fails at both.

Now, I will say, the thematic warform change was great. I love the interplay that exists in the space of ‘I have power, but I have to be afraid to use it because I can’t fully control it.’ It recreates some of that tension that the lore scrapping removed. The darkness is no longer in the culture of the werewolves, it’s in you. That’s excellent fodder for stories.

And the Harano/Hauglosk system is also great. Faced with the end of the world, do you fall to despair, unable to fight a battle you know you can’t truly win, or do you let the war consume you, letting you and everything you hold dear be destroyed, as long as the enemy dies first. This is also excellent fodder for stories.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. I’ll be signing copies of my books in the lobby for the next hour.

imo, if you want a better version of WtA 2e, just play Werewolf the Forsaken 2e and import whatever story points you need from WtA.