YMMV / Old World of Darkness

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah is a tabletop game supplement (for Wraith) about the Holocaust. Unlike the far more ill-conceived World of Darkness: Gypsies, Charnel Houses of Europe is by all accounts a well-written, well-researched book that treats its subject-matter with the seriousness and respect it deserves... but since that subject matter is the Holocaust, it is nonetheless not a book very many people use in play, even if they own it.
• Broken Base:
  • The Meta Plot. Even now almost ten years after the fact the fanbase is STILL split as to whether or not it made the setting as a whole more interesting, or unnecessarily shoehorned players and storytellers to utilize rules updates that reflect the changes to the setting just to buy more books or worse, out right destroyed many interesting player options and NPCs just to create drama and angst. This has led to full on edition wars because of it.
  • Revised Era is generally agreed to be the worst offender, as while many enjoyed the mechanical changes, others thought they were needless complications (especially to the already bulky combat rules) such as the division of Bashing/Lethal/Aggravated damage rules and the dice splitting systems.
  • Crossovers between the games are this as well. White Wolf was notorious for providing ways that games could crossover while being extremely unhelpful when it came to to actually place their rules or cosmologies together in a single cross over game. This has led to a sizeable number of fans who outright refuse to use the splats as written in one game interact with another as written in its own corebook. Such as The Garou from Werewolf: The Apocalypse interacting with Awakened Magi from Mage: The Ascension. While others very much enjoy being able to play a Dreamspeaker mage fighting alongside (or against) a Silver Fang.
• Continuity Lock-Out: As time went on, the backstory became increasingly thick and convoluted. The Metaplot did not help matters. The New World of Darkness was created because this issue began negatively affecting sales.
• Continuity Snarl: There were quite a few retcons and quite a few mistakes. It's difficult to tell which is which.
• Fan Wank: Several actually got noticed by the authors and mentioned derisively in the canon, among them a male offshoot of a female only Vampire bloodline, and a "pact" or "understanding" between Gangrel and werewolves, undermining the usual state of affairs.
• First Installment Wins: The first three gamelines, Vampire, Werewolf and Mage, definitely got more attention than the later ones. Notably when the gamelines were ended each of those three games got their own end-of-the-world books (Gehenna, Apocalypse and Ascension) whereas the the other gamelines got a single book, Time of Judgement, that wrapped up them all in a book about the same length.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Specific examples in the Old WOD: the Baali and the Sabbat in Vampire, the Black Spiral Dancers and the Wyrm in Werewolf, the Nephandi and Marauders in Mage, the Spectres and Oblivion in Wraith, the Shadow Court in Changeling, the Akuma and Yama Kings in Kindred Of The East... It's pretty much easier mentioning which factions are NOT Nightmare Fuel.
    • More specific examples from oWoD: the Nosferatu, the Nicktuku (Nightmare Fuel even to the Nosferatu), Followers of Set, the Giovanni, the Tzimisce and (to some extent) the Malkavians in Vampire, the Banes, Fomori and Blackspiral Dancers in Werewolf and the Earthbound (and pretty much any high-Torment fallen) in Demon.
• Old Shame: The world's characterization of various ethnic groups. Examples include:
  • The Romani in both their portrayal as a people and the heavily sterotyped Ravnos clan. see below for details and Author's Saving Throw for details.
  • One of the developers of Mage: The Ascension said in this interview that they regret the early heavily stereotyped portrayals of The Akashic Brotherhood and Dreamspeakers.
• Values Dissonance: Early depictions of Romani as thieves and vagabonds.
  • Most notably seen with World of Darkness: Gypsies. The goal of the book was to give the players the feel of the mythical Gypsies from the old Hammer/Universal Studios horror movies set in the modern day. The kind that travel around in caravans, wear scarfs and bright colors, provide "exotic" romances, trick people and steal their stuff, and deliver terrible curses on those who wrong them... Never mind the fact that Romani are actual real life people and the supplement as a whole kind of read more like a primer on how to roleplay offensive stereotypes - something White Wolf somehow apparently never realized up until it was actually in print. It's been described as like releasing a supplement in which African-Americans get magic powers from eating fried chicken and listening exclusively to gangster rap.
  • Vampire: The Eternal Struggle gets in on it by having an ally card called Gypsies that receives +1 Stealth on all of its actions, going along with the "sneaky criminals" characterization.