YMMV / Chronicles of Darkness

aka: New World Of Darkness

• Broken Base: Let's just say there is some strong split between fans who stick to Old World of Darkness, those who embrace this one, and those who just like both as separate games.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Hurt Locker lampshades this; the writers emphasize that while violence is a bad thing, there's nothing inherently wrong with sympathizing or playing as characters who have a violent streak or simply cannot avoid it. They just want you to remember the context.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • One of this game's most recognized qualities compared to the Old World of Darkness is that it has a more unified, modular system, making it easier not only to make crossover, but also to come up with homebrew fan-games. Just compare the list of fan-games for this setting to the one for the Old World of Darkness.
  • Many creatures, organizations or supernatural events in the setting (such as VII, the Aegis Kai Doru's true backstory, the Cheiron Group's director board, or some of the sample antagonists in supplement books) have their origins and motivations willingly left ambiguous so Storytellers can come up with their own explanations of what they are.
  • The Chronicle of Darkness final corebook goes as far as including rules allowing to build and customize your own unique monsters, playing up the fact not all monsters in the setting fit one game or another.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Changing Breeds is a very unpopular book for a variety of reasons- rules that are easily exploited, poorly thought out or straight-up Game Breakers, poor writing when compared to similar sourcebooks like War Against the Pure and a decidedly ham-fisted "nature versus civilisation" theme, with players practically encouraged to be murder-happy misanthropes.
• Fridge Logic: Spirits can subsist just by acting in accordance to whatever concept or thing they represent, but in order to grow stronger they must hunt, kill, and eat other spirits who represent similar or related concepts. If that's the case it's a wonder that things like love, compassion, cooperation, or procrastination manage to exist at all.
  • If you're paying attention, they can grow stronger by bathing in whatever their emotion is. That said, you ever notice none of the above-listed spirits have ever appeared in any of the books?
  • Or when they do, it's as horrifying amalgamations. "Glad to kill" was a murder spirit that gorged on tiny joy spirits. Fun times ensued.
• Game-Breaker: Fighting Styles can be more powerful than actual supernatural abilities. Less so after the God Machine update, when they got significantly nerfed (as an example, the Kung-Fu/Martial Art merit went from allowing to attack multiple times in the same turn to merely inflicting one additional damage per turn) while most supernatural abilities were made more powerful.
• Nightmare Fuel: Obviously has its own page.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The transition from Old World to New World was not well received by some fans. However, the new generation has gotten into the New World of Darkness, and the old guard has more or less gone from "Nerd Rage!!" to "Eh, whatever."
  • The God-Machine Chronicle rules revisions have been even less well received by an even smaller number of fans. One wonders if it's nerd rage concentration.
• Woobie Species: Very few supernatural species in this setting could really qualify as "lucky", but three species in particular seriously have it rough:
  • Changelings used to be humans until they were kidnapped by insane faeric beings from another plane, who then proceeded to reshape them into fae themselves and torture, abuse or otherwise use them as toys for their own amusement. They escaped only to find out they had been replaced by duplicates, and frequently are unable to return to their old life due to how much their experience has changed them, forcing them to build a society of their own, where they live in constant fear of being caught by their masters again, shaping their entire culture around rituals whose sole purpose is to make it harder for this to happen. They have grown so paranoid they can barely trust even each other (and rightfully so, because unfortunately, some of them are desperate enough to deliver their peers to the Fae), forcing them to rely on Magically Binding Contracts as insurances. Due to the fact they now live between reality and fantasy, they have to constantly struggle to distinct what's real from their dreams, with failure to do so potentially causing hallucinations, and eventually leaving them comatose. And as if that wasn't enough, a good chunk of the humans who actually know about them believe they are the evil fairies.
  • Mummies take Blessed with Suck to almost unbelievable levels. A typical mummy is a Nigh-Invulnerable Implacable Man with a vast array of Lovecraftian Superpowers- but are also enslaved to gods they barely remember, have outlasted everyone and everything they cared about, have their waking periods set on a timer, growing steadily weaker all the while, and their minds are a jumble of the most important memories of their thousands of years of life without any context.
  • Prometheans are Artificial Humans whose very nature cause both people and nature itself to hate them, meaning they can never integrate into society and are forced into a Walking the Earth lifestyle. Their mere presence in mortal society causes a Hate Plague directed toward them (and only one supernatural species besides their own is immune), landscapes gradually warp and decay around them, and animals instinctively fear and dislike them. The only way out is a long quest to turn themselves into humans, and in order to do that, they often have to create a new Promethean, thus ensuring more of them will carry their curse. Worst of all, monsters are out to devour their flesh, and the best way they can avoid said monsters is by hiding among these same humans who will instinctively hate them. They also have to interact with those selfsame humans if they actually want to learn about humanity and become human themselves. It's kind of remarkable that so few of them say "fuck it," give up on the Pilgrimage, and follow the Then Let Me Be Evil Refinement of Centimanus.

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