I have been running and playing Werewolf the Apocalypse since 1995. It is my favorite RPG.
I was very excited when Renegade Games obtained the license and started publishing WtA. I have been running a 5e (Werewolf’s 5th edition, nothing to do with D&D 5e) for around 10 4+ hour sessions. And the game is just bad.
Firstly Renegade addressed some of the problematic content that existed in an edgy book published in the early 90s. This I have no issue with and in fact that was why I chose to run 5e over 2nd. It advances the story into 2023 and beyond. Werewolves are no longer fighting the coming Apocalypse, they are fully within it. Some of the tribes have changed, some are silently absent. As is the 3rd breed form, which was named after a First Nations tribe, they did not like the use of their name in this fashion, so I am okay with the form changing names, but they removed it entirely. With the removal of the “mule” breed the Garou language was removed, werewolf society was removed, and you have to be killing to remain in Crinos, or the war form.
Anyone familiar with Werewolf (or White Wolf’s other titles), knows it is White Wolf’s combat rpg, White Wolf even released a combat guide. So to see Renegade say that all combat should be concluded in no more than 3 turns should have been the biggest red flag, but I pressed on with the game.
Character creation was changed some too, you still assign dots as you wish, but the method to do so was tweaked, and in my opinion, made more confusing.
Freebie points, which were used to round out a character are gone, merits and flaws were made confusing to buy and use.
I spent more time trying to figure out how to run the game than I did running the game. And yes I know I can alleviate dice rolls by role playing, but somethings being left up to chance adds to the roleplay. I have never enjoyed a fully diceless game system, or rather a system that uses no rng or chance mechanic.
During this week’s session I was trying to figure out how to use one of the player’s background abilities and the group said can we play 2nd edition instead?
So next session everyone is going to remake their character in 2nd.
Tl;dr Werewolf 5e is a game that feels like it was made by someone who overheard someone explaining Werewolf the Apocalypse.
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.
As long as they are 2nd edition I will take a copy.
I have no issue with the overall setting that Renegade made, it is the lack of systems that is my huge issue.
That’s the hollowing out. They gutted things and didn’t put anything in the hole, like a bad taxidermist.