the roasts arent wrong but they're also not all that meta. they're largely specific flaws, not cultural.
the Atlantis thing was so weird & so much anti the point of mage to me. humans just being awesome (if they dared to, could awake themelves) was way way better.
The primary fan base for World of Darkness was aging goths. nWoD was doomed from the get go because the existing, shrinking, fan base was going to be pissed at any changes at all, but the material was still too "90s" to draw in new fans.
Then White Wolf tried to just re-release old Vampire stuff, but who cares at that point, since the majority of those fans, while very vocal, had aged out of playing a game that requires obscene amounts of preparation.
And then let's not even mention the obscene WTF investment it takes to get started playing. You get to read a base book, and you have to read it as a novel because White Wolf was incapable of arranging a book for use as reference, and then you get to read at least 1 book for the actual system you want to use.
And then you have to find players willing to do the same.
Each book is full of dense prose in a hard to read font. When I started playing nWoD I was in my 20s. Soon as I hit 30 those fonts became WTF hard to read.
While amazing to sit down and read through as just a book, the (very well made) books are useless when it comes to actually running a game. I had to write up my own condensed guide to the rules.
White Wolf was trying to do a thousand things with a tiny team. They kept publishing new splats (Mummy!) while their existing splats had giant holes in them.
And finally, EVERYTHING WAS A SHADE OF GREY. There wasn't ever a big bad, or as a ST the big bad was so amorphous I had shit to work with and I was expected to work my arse off fleshing out the thin plot threads the source books gave me.
At least old WOD had fucking bad guys. "The technocracy goons are going to kill you!" vs nWoDs "Strange secret organization may or may not be doing bad things, or maybe they are the good guys, who knows, fuck it, you figure it out yourself".
Like, sometimes I don't want to construct complicated worlds of political intrigue. Sometimes I just want the players to have something they can go blow up and feel good about it. I mean sure because it is WoD I'm going to make them feel a little bit bad about it, but holy shit grimdark shades of grey gets old after while.
the Atlantis thing was so weird & so much anti the point of mage to me. humans just being awesome (if they dared to, could awake themelves) was way way better.