I played the oWoD for several years pretty much weekly, sometimes less sometimes more. My RP'ing group pretty much shrunk down to 3 a few months before the new books came out and so I never purchased them. I did however read through tons of them and it just felt odd to me. It seemed to me like the new people at White Wolf just didn't get the old school WoD.
Granted, there were about 1000 ( serious not a mde up number ) contradicting facts, statements and descriptions in the old World of Darkness and thus killing it off and creating a new line was a good idea. They just didn't carry it out to well.
The new setting is geared much more for huge RP'ing groups ( 8+ ) or for LARP troupes IMHO.
As to the fact that it was hard to run crossover chronicles with Vampire, Mage, Changelling and Werewolf, yeah it was hard, but not impossible.
The key was having mature ( mental not physical ) gamers who could all get together and discuss certain aspects of the different races and how they would be delt with before starting a chronicle. For instance Mages are often seen as way overpowered. However everyone seems to forget that if a mage is seen doing magic, he could literally BLOW UP. Werewolves are so powerful right? Well yeah, but compaired to a Vampire who Can soak aggravated damage ( Fortitude ) and who can boost his or her physical traits to extreme levels in order to rip the head off of a Garou, there is a slight balance.
The problems came when you had Rank 2+ Werewolves and Neonate vampires with 3 dots in disciplines. A rank 2 garou will DESTROY a neonate vamp 99% of the time. What our group did was we would discuss hundreds of aspects and then when we agreed on things we made sure to follow things by the book very strictly to ensure that there were not any min maxers who were making cheesy death machine characters. Many folks don't realise that the WoD is NOT a combat game. Yes there are rules for combat ( way too damn many ) but overall the game is supposed to be a tale of Gothic horror. In otherowrds your supposed to deal with survival in a world full of monsters more powerful then you who exist solely for the purpose of aquiring power in order to control and manipulate those weaker then themselves.
Changeling ( which is great by the way ) was a fantastic pain in the @ss to intigrate into a crossover chonicle and as a result we seldom allowed it, but from time to time we bent the rules and to be honest, the Changeling characters were some of the best we ever had, mainly because their players were not trying to create characters that would destroy the city or cause strife for everyone.
Sadly this thread has made me miss the WoD and now I am depressed =P
haha J/K
P.S. all mispellings are on purpose because i am a Malkavian =P
