No need to donate plasma, that might set off Frenzy…
Werewolf the Apocalypse was a bizarre fever dream of 90s influences. You had the whole enviro/new agey/appropriation of Native American stuff, which didn’t exactly fit in well with the cyberpunk stuff of the Glass Walkers and Bone Gnawers, the Shadow Lords and Silver Fangs being rather difficult to distinguish from Vampire clans, the shall we call them broad ethnic stereotypes of the Fianna or the Get of Fenris or the Silent Striders, etc.
Mostly, I would call Werewolf a bit too over-designed. Shape-shifting really should have been the central thing (although I think three forms rather than five would work better), but they added on Gnosis and the Umbra and spirits and spells and magic items on top of that. The three Breeds work (although the Metis stuff had problematic implications), but then they added on five Auspices and thirteen Tribes, and your character’s identity gets very complicated and blurry indeed.
This was a problem with all three of their flagship gamelines, really. They threw everything and the kitchen sink into them, which was great in a lot of ways but became absolutely ridiculous if you thought about it for even a second.
The Mages had the same issue, where your play troupe could easily end up being a 1940s style mad scientist, a traditional robes-and-hat wizard with a spellbook, a death cultist, a nerd with a “trinary” computer, and an actual-factual druid. And you fought the Men in Black, evil cyborgs, Doctor Mengele, and magic-using corporate executives.
Now, that was super fucking awesome, but god, did it have a tendency to collapse under its own weight at times.
Vampire at least had the advantage that all of the vampire tropes meshed okay together, but even there if you started going too far afield of the Camarilla you slammed into dudes like the Followers of Set and the weirder shit they threw in to round out the Sabbat clans, to say nothing of the Kindred of the East.
Their minor gamelines, Hunter, Wraith, Changeling, etc. tended to be a lot more cohesive and thematically unified. Of course, this was back in the day when White Wolf had more money than god and even a tiny gameline like Hunter got a full-up fatsplat and tons of splatbooks. (It says something about how poorly Wraith did, despite being one of their best-designed games, that it managed to get cancelled at a time when White Wolf was publishing entire splatbooks about were-rats and were-alligators.)
Yeah, Mage was really OTT, especially given the extreme tension between a magic system that encouraged really far-out spells and the harsh penalties of Paradox.
But even Changeling, while more cohesive, was something of an overgrown hothouse of ideas. For example, its system of completely random requirements to cast spells (which didn’t really work well with a lot of character concepts) linked into a goddamn collectible card system. I bought some of those cards, impressionable teen that I was, and while the artwork was gorgeous, the damn things were completely useless.
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