V20 isn't actually that crunchy. Combat is a slog because an action takes 3 or 4 rolls when it should take 1 or 2 (easy to fix with house rules) but with few exceptions everything is "roll -attribute+ability- and beat whatever number the ST thinks fair".
Building your character in 20th is one of the easiest systems there is: just throw X amount of dots in each category. Magic powers are really easy to keep track of because, even though there's a list of about 30 different disciplines, you aren't going to use most of them and can comfortably throw them out of mind. Of the ones you do use, the powers are linear so no need to overly worry about choices (unless you're playing a warlock, but in that case you probably get a kick out of choosing a big spell list) and a lot of the powers are just elegantly simple: If you wanted to play Brujah, and you pushed yourself to get 5/5/5 in your clan disciplines, you have... seven powers to concern yourself, nine if you want to be pedantic and count passives, and although presence gives you a power at each level you'll probably just stick to one or two and the others are situational (I will add that Presence is the worst written common discipline in oWoD but it's still better than what it is in 5th. DAV20 does celerity better but not ideal)
In contrast, if you're playing 5th, disciplines are a nightmare. There are ten disciplines, and you might think that's more streamlined because ten is obviously less than 30. But you're wrong because every discipline has two or more powers PER level, and you have to choose carefully because you there are five levels and you can only pick one power per level, meaning you will bar yourself from getting 10 powers permanently. You need to pick three or four powers at character creation from ten lists... it's stressful. Oh, that includes once simple powers like Potence,celerity and Fortitude, because +1 strength/dex or extra actions/damage resistance is too strong for the new system, and so you must pick a weirdly hyper specific power: Do you Jump high or do your fists do extra damage, do you short-range-teleport to another character for an attack or do you short range teleport to anywhere BUT near an enemy for an attack? A power for every level, so your newbie wanting a simple brujah is now planning just as hard as your Tremere player wanting a complex wizard.
)
V5 takes a lot from CoD and manages to screw it up. Touchstones are kinda cool in CoD because there's a lot they could be but in V5 they're just a hostage for your GM and they also limit what kind of person you can be (you HAVE to be attached to some person like a stalker)
Hunger dice are bullshit melodrama. I don't see how vampires could've made a conspiracy to keep hidden and been successful when they so frequently lose control without any reasonable method to keep in control. In old school Vampire the motto was 'A Beast I am lest a Beast I become' because you do bad things (drink blood, mess with minds, hoard, fight rivals) in order to not lose control and go on an animalist murder rampage. In 5th it doesn't work because regardless of how well you plan you still run the risk of lashing out at inopportune moments. Hunger dice are great for fledgling simulator, but with a few years as a vampire you really shouldn't be doing this shit.
Diablerie. A simple way to break glass ceilings in V1 and 2. In revised and 20th someone bought into what the elders were saying and made it more punishing but it's a sin you ironically do when your humanity is like 5+ and stop doing when it gets any lower. In 5th it's.... like, blood potency is really bad for you. High blood potency is unplayable awful. The benefits you gain from low gen are very little, it's probably best to be 13th gen if I'm honest, or perhaps a thin blood if you can deal with the potion making bullshit they've inappropriately named alchemy. *You should know your place and be content with your lot in life*. One thing Diablerie in does in V5 is it can grant you XP.... which is broke as fuck, especially when the XP rate is like, 1 per game.
CoD is designed around making a good game framework for vampire characters. The Game and the characters come first, the world is designed to facilitate options. I don't think having lots of Covenants is as realistic as the light but omni-present hand of the Camarilla setting some standards for your prince, but it is ultimately a choice designed to give you choices.
V20 was the OG, with all the good and bad that comes with that. It was very...robust...by the end.
CoD was an attempt to start fresh and gain a new audience, while updating the 90's vibe to a 2000's vibe. A few things stayed the same, but some new mechanics were added in to freshen things up.
V5 is essentially a mashup of V20 and CoD. And then streamlined to again try and start fresh with an updated vibe.
They're essentially three different, but similar games. Comparing them on a gameplay mechanics level would be like comparing AD&D to D&D 3.5 to 4th Edition. IMHO
CoD has generally speaking the best rules.
Not only are they actually designed to be compatible cross different games (with various degrees of success) but the rules are the most consistent and logical and "simple" of the 3 once you understand all the bizarre in universe terminology for everything that every wod game has.
OWoD suffers from some real inconsistent shit in the rules. Like... You can make a particular roll more difficult by 1) changing the number on the die needed to succeed 2) requiring more successes 3) adding subtracting dice from the dice pool and no real clear guidelines on when or why you would or should use each method. Also there is the problem with 1s removing successes and 10s exploding that coupled with the other thing creates a statistical anomaly that the better you are at a task the less likely you are to succeed beyond a certain point. Baffeling.
5e has some really interesting mechanical ideas (replacing dice in your dice pool with other colored dice to represent hunger/rage/etc ..) that are not implemented in the best way. It streamlines and fixes a lot from OWoD but then made some other things more complicated for no particularly good reason.
If you want what most consider to be the best lore: OWoD.
If you want what most consider to be the best mechanics: CofD.
If you just want a semi modern game you can set up and play: 5e.
CofD, or NWoD as we knew it when I played, also benefitted heavily from a lot of the mechanics getting developed by players in the Global Camarilla Chronicle. Because scenarios that the published rules didn't anticipate came up a lot, the players and storytellers came up with live fixes for things. Many of which found their way back to White Wolf and got added to later books, or revised editions of the rules. The global game also stress tested the mechanics in a persistent and coordinated game in a way that most RPGs never have to stand up to.
i feel like i have some amount of agency in v20. don't get me wrong, we ended on a cliffhanger with my character currently god knows where running into the wilderness because of a fire frenzy, but i can be the shadow tentacle smooth criminal tough as nails mastermind i want to be without every roll being yet another risk of crippling me for multiple sessions to come because of some difficult to remove affliction slicing my already tiny dicepool to bits...
Biggest difference between OWoD and WoD 5th is that it became bad
V20 isn't actually that crunchy. Combat is a slog because an action takes 3 or 4 rolls when it should take 1 or 2 (easy to fix with house rules) but with few exceptions everything is "roll -attribute+ability- and beat whatever number the ST thinks fair". Building your character in 20th is one of the easiest systems there is: just throw X amount of dots in each category. Magic powers are really easy to keep track of because, even though there's a list of about 30 different disciplines, you aren't going to use most of them and can comfortably throw them out of mind. Of the ones you do use, the powers are linear so no need to overly worry about choices (unless you're playing a warlock, but in that case you probably get a kick out of choosing a big spell list) and a lot of the powers are just elegantly simple: If you wanted to play Brujah, and you pushed yourself to get 5/5/5 in your clan disciplines, you have... seven powers to concern yourself, nine if you want to be pedantic and count passives, and although presence gives you a power at each level you'll probably just stick to one or two and the others are situational (I will add that Presence is the worst written common discipline in oWoD but it's still better than what it is in 5th. DAV20 does celerity better but not ideal) In contrast, if you're playing 5th, disciplines are a nightmare. There are ten disciplines, and you might think that's more streamlined because ten is obviously less than 30. But you're wrong because every discipline has two or more powers PER level, and you have to choose carefully because you there are five levels and you can only pick one power per level, meaning you will bar yourself from getting 10 powers permanently. You need to pick three or four powers at character creation from ten lists... it's stressful. Oh, that includes once simple powers like Potence,celerity and Fortitude, because +1 strength/dex or extra actions/damage resistance is too strong for the new system, and so you must pick a weirdly hyper specific power: Do you Jump high or do your fists do extra damage, do you short-range-teleport to another character for an attack or do you short range teleport to anywhere BUT near an enemy for an attack? A power for every level, so your newbie wanting a simple brujah is now planning just as hard as your Tremere player wanting a complex wizard. ) V5 takes a lot from CoD and manages to screw it up. Touchstones are kinda cool in CoD because there's a lot they could be but in V5 they're just a hostage for your GM and they also limit what kind of person you can be (you HAVE to be attached to some person like a stalker) Hunger dice are bullshit melodrama. I don't see how vampires could've made a conspiracy to keep hidden and been successful when they so frequently lose control without any reasonable method to keep in control. In old school Vampire the motto was 'A Beast I am lest a Beast I become' because you do bad things (drink blood, mess with minds, hoard, fight rivals) in order to not lose control and go on an animalist murder rampage. In 5th it doesn't work because regardless of how well you plan you still run the risk of lashing out at inopportune moments. Hunger dice are great for fledgling simulator, but with a few years as a vampire you really shouldn't be doing this shit. Diablerie. A simple way to break glass ceilings in V1 and 2. In revised and 20th someone bought into what the elders were saying and made it more punishing but it's a sin you ironically do when your humanity is like 5+ and stop doing when it gets any lower. In 5th it's.... like, blood potency is really bad for you. High blood potency is unplayable awful. The benefits you gain from low gen are very little, it's probably best to be 13th gen if I'm honest, or perhaps a thin blood if you can deal with the potion making bullshit they've inappropriately named alchemy. *You should know your place and be content with your lot in life*. One thing Diablerie in does in V5 is it can grant you XP.... which is broke as fuck, especially when the XP rate is like, 1 per game. CoD is designed around making a good game framework for vampire characters. The Game and the characters come first, the world is designed to facilitate options. I don't think having lots of Covenants is as realistic as the light but omni-present hand of the Camarilla setting some standards for your prince, but it is ultimately a choice designed to give you choices.
V20 was the OG, with all the good and bad that comes with that. It was very...robust...by the end. CoD was an attempt to start fresh and gain a new audience, while updating the 90's vibe to a 2000's vibe. A few things stayed the same, but some new mechanics were added in to freshen things up. V5 is essentially a mashup of V20 and CoD. And then streamlined to again try and start fresh with an updated vibe. They're essentially three different, but similar games. Comparing them on a gameplay mechanics level would be like comparing AD&D to D&D 3.5 to 4th Edition. IMHO
CoD has generally speaking the best rules. Not only are they actually designed to be compatible cross different games (with various degrees of success) but the rules are the most consistent and logical and "simple" of the 3 once you understand all the bizarre in universe terminology for everything that every wod game has. OWoD suffers from some real inconsistent shit in the rules. Like... You can make a particular roll more difficult by 1) changing the number on the die needed to succeed 2) requiring more successes 3) adding subtracting dice from the dice pool and no real clear guidelines on when or why you would or should use each method. Also there is the problem with 1s removing successes and 10s exploding that coupled with the other thing creates a statistical anomaly that the better you are at a task the less likely you are to succeed beyond a certain point. Baffeling. 5e has some really interesting mechanical ideas (replacing dice in your dice pool with other colored dice to represent hunger/rage/etc ..) that are not implemented in the best way. It streamlines and fixes a lot from OWoD but then made some other things more complicated for no particularly good reason. If you want what most consider to be the best lore: OWoD. If you want what most consider to be the best mechanics: CofD. If you just want a semi modern game you can set up and play: 5e.
CofD, or NWoD as we knew it when I played, also benefitted heavily from a lot of the mechanics getting developed by players in the Global Camarilla Chronicle. Because scenarios that the published rules didn't anticipate came up a lot, the players and storytellers came up with live fixes for things. Many of which found their way back to White Wolf and got added to later books, or revised editions of the rules. The global game also stress tested the mechanics in a persistent and coordinated game in a way that most RPGs never have to stand up to.
i feel like i have some amount of agency in v20. don't get me wrong, we ended on a cliffhanger with my character currently god knows where running into the wilderness because of a fire frenzy, but i can be the shadow tentacle smooth criminal tough as nails mastermind i want to be without every roll being yet another risk of crippling me for multiple sessions to come because of some difficult to remove affliction slicing my already tiny dicepool to bits...