Okay, so I've decided to use Opening the Dark as a basis for my own modern "
new age mythic" game in the vein of Nightlife, World of Darkness, and The Everlasting. I'm going to reorganize the skills to be more elegant (because currently they are awful, what was Malcolm thinking?), gut the emotional traits, add more derived statistics, and streamline combat to use only one roll, plus optional rules sprinkled throughout the book for gamemasters to tweak things (like making combat have two rolls for people who want that). Basically everything to make it better emulate nWoD. However, its' not going to be a true retroclone, since I'll be making several different design choices to address
common criticisms of the Storytelling System.
A less common criticism of the new World of Darkness is that there is a great deal of power bloat (of course few people mention this). The basic rulebook for Vampire includes disciplines and devotions, but then sourcebooks add things like bloodline disciplines, alternate discipline levels, single discipline devotions, merits that give new powers, and lots of other things. Blood & Smoke doesn't solve this problem at all. So I'm going to gut the power paths completely. Instead of powers being organized into linear paths, players can simply buy whatever powers they want their characters to have without having to worry about prerequisites or anything else, as easily as adding new spells to a D&D game. This will apply to all supernatural powers regardless of character type. All magic (which is separate from standard powers) will work the same and everyone who spends the experience will be able to use it: none of this "blood sorcery" versus "shamanism" versus "true majik" nonsense. Yes, I suppose some would complain that this "destroys character diversity," but does anyone really want to have five different rules for changing into a wolf when using just one rule is easier to remember?
I'll be slaughtering most of the sacred cows that these sorts of games usually have. You can cut down the vampire bloodlines to "the beautiful people", "the ferals," and "the occultists" and still have plenty of diversity by giving them each a greater pick of supernatural powers. Werewolves? Rest assured, they aren't going to be new age racist stereotypes who talk about "cold ones" and "mother gaia." The spirit world? Yeah that's going out the window, since, oddly enough, most primitive cultures don't actually believe in a separate spirit world: the spirits exist in the real world, undimensioned and to us unseen.
