ST advice: Do you houserule to disregard / implement features you think should be there? (V20 AND V5)How do you do it?

Good night.

My question would be simple. I see a lot of posts about "V5 sucks" and "Lol, this is a problem", by otherwise intelligent people (*glaring in the direction of mage players*).

I have allways operated under the idea that your world of darkness is full of houserules. you simply ignore the parts of the settings that you do not like, hoppefully WITH an idea what aftereffects such and such has, dress it up nicely, and there you go.

You have a problem with self insert gary sue "Rudi"? Well, you have a mechanism in game to send him out of your game permanently. the beckoning it can hit anybody. no roll needed, you are out permanently. Rudi was there when ur schluugi fired off the breaking of the clan curse, and got diablerised mid air by a frenzied banu haquim? Why not?

I grew up under the assumption that every piece of lore is optional, and not required to be in your game, from small things, like the color of becketts hair, to big things, like rudi no longer existing, and mithras only having an episode a la "I am not mithras, mithras has followed his calling to mekka, I am bithras, I have a mustache, therefore you are talking to a new person, who is this mithras, I have never met him, I am very keen to learn all you have to tell me about this mithras, and what you think of him", while wearing groucho marx glasses and a different hat. I allways try to keep my lore from being close to the officcial lore (I do not straight up claim rudi never existed), but I provide context for it (he frenzied once, diablerised a feminist, got a bear pelt for the next 50 years ourt of the guilt of having established his toxic masculinity, could not be see around his activists anymore or else he would frenmzy again, heard that the black stone of mekka could cure all things, decided to go on hadjj, JUST as the curse of the assamites was broken, got ripped apart mid air by an assamite on board, his crew back home makes up ridicullous talers of what rudi has done, or what rudi would have said, thus keeping rudis rebellion alive for anybody willing to join, but they have a problem as rudi is dead now....and would you look at thatm, there is a "gangrel" in london who would just be fit for this pursuit.... he is young, he is black, he wears dreads, and he can talk the chrome of a trailer hitch, ladies and gentlemen, there is bithras the mustachiod, which is nopw taking over Ruidis rebellion. )

Lets give you an example from my tables.

The coterie ran into "torpor and you" and had to make the decision that some of them were looking at half a century of torpor. So, they began looking for an out.

The stakes and the onset were clear:

+ get rid of long term torpor via special concoction. - the concoction is difficult to make.

So, looking at this, the backing came to me at once. thinblood alchemy.

More speciffically, that the older the blood, the rarer the rituals required. a gen 16 , aside from being woken up with the thaumaturgical equivalent of a gas station sub, a coke and 5 minutes of cussing, does not require a lot of work, while waking up a humanity 2 8 gen can require a hollywood level production with hundreds of statists, hundreds of liters of blood, a team of alchemists, an entire set of rare ingredients, and so on and so forth.

Thus, it could be implemented ingame as thinblood alchemy (easily), as thaumaturgy of any clan (Gangrel thaumaturgy.... because of course you need rare animal blood), it can be as hard or as easy as it needs to be (You can easily see why a gen 16 gangrel needs ANY animal blood in his potion, while a gen 8 gangrel will need the blood of a pregnant panda that was born in the wild, but got pregnant in the zoo, and of course the local pandas are interested in litterally anything more then in getting pregnant), and so on.

The balancing is clear. I am not taking away the balancing factor of low humanity, I am just making sure it does not require a new character. The closer it is to actually taking a short break from the game (lets say, 2 weeks), the easier, but if it would require a year longt absence from the game, guess what, the revivier sure is complicated, but doable...

So, I would tell my group that yes, there ARE some stories of things like that happening, one of the most common being the name kostya saushkin being rolled around, a tzimiscie revenant that got his embrace to full vampiredom (gen 8) thanks to his research on revivers, but was later killed in an accident in baikanur kosmodrome........ a lot of his works were kopied under the hand, and most of the ex soviet nosferatu still know of the sauschkin cocktail, but can't make it work....

Could that be a hint that the research was incomplete? That Sauschkin had access to an other component that he did not write down? Was it coincidence that he spent his university years in prague? What role does his (revenant) father play, that is falling down drunk? Is it a secret that copies of surviving handwritten reccipies for the sauschkin cocktail are traded incredibly high, but only amongst thinbloods / caitiffs?

Could it be that sauschkin wrote other reccipies down, things like "how to tame the beast (temporarily)", "how to increase / decrease blood potency" "how to digest food again" or a very simple "how to age by 10 years"? Could it be that he had help in develloping those?

Could it be that there are faked copies of his works? could there be copies of his works that have the opposite / dangerous effects? Could there be some mixtures of his that make you smell delicious to diablerists?

all this runs under houserule in my games. the players are aware that this is hopuserule territory, the balancing is off, sometimes it can work, sometimes it can't, better not rely too much on it....

So... any examples from your side? how do you houserule?

because, sometimes, all that is needed is a single houserule to implement a single feature, and it is good. and 90 % of V5 hate can just be eliminated if you see it like optional progress descriptions. You know, just a fisting of the toilet, where the writer grabbed a hunk of shit and slapped it on the page, going "well, it's not impossible..."

And disregarding that if the situation was "what would you do with 1 million dollars", their probability would be the "donate it to charity, my life is good as it is right now" slice. just isolate the bad writing, and houserule over those parts that you don't like.