Anybody like/play The World of Darkness?

[Desh-Rae-Halra]

I liked oWoD best, but I think it depends on how your group wants to play.
If you go Hardcore in Vampire, your players need to wrestle with their beasts and struggle to cling to their humanity (at least the Camarilla settings).

What I see happen more often is people play it like a Supers game except you have to occasionally drink blood and hide in the daylight, essentially minimizing the Vampiric element. I have played with very few people who took the setting seriously.

I didnt like the nWoD as much as they got stuck on the 5 and 5 (clans & covenants), but I want ot say Changeling broke the mold on that,which was great.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Compared to things like GURPS or my personal #1 RPG system, HERO, they definitely are. At worst, I'd say there were at the heavy side of the bell curve for rules-light games.

HERO/Champions on the other hand may just be the single rules-heaviest game that significant numbers of people actually played. And GURPS was the system that gave us formulae involving squares and cube roots (and the rest of the 3E Vehicle Design Rules). I'd therefore say your two examples are at the extreme end of the bell curve.

Also in practice most games in the 21st Century are lighter than games of the 90s; those drawn to hardcore simulation rules are mostly drawn to the way computers can work that out for you.

WoD in practice I'd put in the same rules-weight category as both AD&D and 3.X: Rules loaded (which is adjacent to Rules Heavy). This is a consequence of splat bloat where the splats take the complexity of the game, whatever the underlying system, to about the heaviest most veterans can manage.

For genuinely rules light -medium I'd start off by looking at Fate (Fate Core/Fate Accelerated) or some of the Apocalypse World family. With games like Fiasco or Dread fitting the genuinely rules light category.

That said, the WoD dominated the 90s (with 2e only outselling it by producing masses of books) even if the nWoD didn't catch on that thoroughly.