YMMV / Changeling: The Dreaming

• Anvilicious: Growing Up Sucks and the real world that humans live in being an awful soul crushing place is, at times dropped onto you with all the subtlety of a rabid redcap dunking you in a bucket of Tabasco sauce. C20 ends up turning around and killing this theme dead because of just how bad it could get.
• Broken Base: And boy howdy it is! The gameline as a whole can be considered this among fans of The Old World of Darkness. While it has a rather rabid fanbase, its detractors often referred it to as being extremely childish to the point of being unplayable. Just don't say that to the fan's supporters, IT WILL NOT END WELL.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Meanwhile many fans felt C20's retcon of the Dauntain into just being born wrong only made them less interesting and robbed them of character potential compared to the earlier multitude of reasons a Changeling may go over to Banality, some of which could be potentially sympathetic or not intentionally malicious. This also removed the risk of becoming one as a hook for something a character could have to deal with or, if handled well, an alternative path to take them down, apart from the standard push and pull between Bedlam and becoming mundane from Banality.
• Fridge Horror: Yeah, it's a lighter game then Changeling: The Lost, isn't it? There, you play someone who escaped Mind Rape at the hands of alien gods, while here you're fighting to restore wonder and hope... and will explicitly lose due to metaplot saying so, and you won't live beyond your thirties unless you go Dauntain. Hence, why a lot of players think Lost is actually the more hopeful game.
  • C20 changed a lot of that, though things are still pretty bleak in the long run. While banality is no longer tied to your physical age, it's all but inevitable that you'll eventually succumb to banality or bedlam. The only consolation is that unless you were killed by Cold Iron or certain other means, the fae half of your soul will eventually reincarnate.
• Fridge Logic: Banality brings about a lot of this. Why, for instance, are scientists banal, when they are often noted as some of the most imaginative and creative people around in Real Life? Why does growing up rob you of glamour, when people not suffering clinical depression have been repeatedly noted to retain their dreams and hope throughout life, as noted in psychology?
  • A lot of this has to do with the game being set in the Old World of Darkness. While each game can be played as their own universe, a lot of the fluff and metaplot do involve the other races. The setting is often dark and depressed, and with the Weaver, Technocracy and various other forces suppressing humanity, dreaming is extremely hard.
  • As mentioned above, C20 changed a lot of this, with the Science Is Bad trope explicitly called out as a misconception.
• Misaimed Fandom: One of the oddest examples of this happening. There is an actual society called the "Otherkin" who believe that they were mythological creatures in previous lives. They thought that so much of the game was spot on that they concluded the makers of the game were in fact changelings themselves. One of the developers of the game went out of their way to deny this.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The first edition initially had cantrips be randomly created from a deck of 150 specialty cards, which were sold in randomized collectible boosters.
• Squick: The Sluagh kith literally thrives on this and players are often encouraged to be as creepy and disgusting as possible in order to gain Glamour. Redcaps have an earned reputation of being brutish cannibals and then you get into the idea that changeling lovers are often reincarnated and emerge from chrysalis in the bodies of children...
• That One Rule: More like a set of rules, the game's magic system is notorious even among its supporters for being shall we say... extremely expensive and rather underwhelming.
  • Specifically the fact that the character's magic is VERY difficult in universe and the character either has to spend all of their Glamour or spend several rounds casting even a single first level spell. Sometimes both. Couple this with the fact that Glamour is extremely hard to acquire unless you want to go full on evil or risk insanity. Harvesting it safely can take months.
    • Which would be fine if it weren't for the game being specifically about magical creatures doing magical things in the modern world. While this is hardly to the point of a full on Scrappy Mechanic or Grappling with Grappling Rules, it is enough that even enthusiastic players find it... frustrating. Even the game's developers said that they would address this in the 20th Anniversary Edition, and they did.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: In the original run of Autumn People, it was assumed that changelings would die or go Dauntain at around thirty. This... did not sit well with the fanbase, and C20 more or less excised that book from existence because it made Changeling: The Lost actually come off as the more idealistic game. (The age categories are now tied into personal character development, and one can remain any stage more or less indefinitely.) Really, C20 did a lot of this overall.