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Crasical posted:I'm not going to put forth the theory that you can't write a good game about being villain protagonists, and there's actually probably a good argument to be made that base-state, a lot of the splats are exactly that. I'm going to belatedly put forward that villain-specific gamelines tend to be bad by virtue of most players being patently incapable of handling them with any grace or nuance. There's something about pointing out that 'this is the villain splat' that breaks peoples' brains, and this applies to people that I considered to be relatively good/responsible players prior to making the jump in the first place. Like, to this day, I have never seen people play villain splats in a way that's anything other than an excuse to out-edgelord one another. That isn't to say it can't be written well, or in a way that doesn't automatically feel like some rando on the bus touching your hair and breathing down your neck ala Beast. I just don't have a ton of faith re: what's done with the material once it's published. edit: I'm willing to concede that maybe I just know a slew of poo poo players, though. edit 2: oh god dammit, the worst snype
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Feb 14, 2019 18:12
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citybeatnik posted:That's one of my mild concerns with Deviant, since I'm not sure that there's much room in there for a full splat. You've got a solid grasp on the pop culture side of Evil Science, then add in the historical examples. There's a lot there. Personally, I want to play someone with such potent Orgone powers that they correct the fung shui layout of a room just by lingering in it long enough. "lol whoops sorry that vase went flying into that other corner, the energy waves from my boner power are irrepressible."
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Feb 14, 2019 18:34
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Ferrinus posted:You weren’t playing as a kraken - you were playing as a kraken’s official twitter account. Before everything else, this is what unsold me on Beast. I asked "Huh... could you play... Godzilla?" And a lot of folks were all "yeah sure!" So I read it! You could not play Godzilla. You couldn't even Minilla. Also, hey, it was super gross and weird and I found Kurieg's F&F which was a giant help because it made sure I wasn't going crazy reading the implications.
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Feb 14, 2019 18:40
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Joe Slowboat posted:My version of Melanie (Sleeping Beauty) was in the Astral because a Tremere botched ripping out her soul due to untapped Astral Adept capabilities. That's awesome. I was thinking of using her in my Changeling game if it ever happens. And to elaborate briefly on my "Make Beasts the bad guys" idea, after reading through the excellent F&F review, it's clear to me that Beasts are trash monsters that deserve death, not just because of literally everything surrounding the game, but from their own book it's all about how they can influence an area. That's bound to piss off the local Vampires/Werewolves/etc because they all have their own status qoue to maintain and here comes this rear end in a top hat with delusions of mythic grandeur loving everything up for everyone. I'm not implying this justifies the game existing, just something I thought about.
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Feb 14, 2019 18:59
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There is nothing there to salvage. Don't bother.
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Feb 14, 2019 19:29
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joylessdivision posted:That's awesome. I was thinking of using her in my Changeling game if it ever happens. Canonically they have the stupid poochie aura that makes everyone (except Demons) think they're cool. No, this doesn't make sense with Werewolf/Changeling in particular at all. Beasts are deeply annoying as NPCs in other lines. I was in a Hunter game which turned into Werewolf and among other terrible ideas my storyteller had (like trying to fit every single Compact/Conspiracy/Tribe/etc and nearly every splat into one city) he leaned on Beasts when he couldn't think of good enemies. Even with Heroes in play it was wildly difficult to get anything done against them and it was never fun or interesting.
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Feb 14, 2019 19:55
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Dawgstar posted:Before everything else, this is what unsold me on Beast. I asked "Huh... could you play... Godzilla?" And a lot of folks were all "yeah sure!" So I read it! You could not play Godzilla. You couldn't even Minilla. Also, hey, it was super gross and weird and I found Kurieg's F&F which was a giant help because it made sure I wasn't going crazy reading the implications. Are Mokole still a thing? If not, are Were-Elephants?
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Feb 14, 2019 20:11
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Mors Rattus posted:There is nothing there to salvage. Don't bother. Beast is a grubby little craggy celestial body orbiting a dying star. It has no atmosphere, it has no life, it is openly and viciously radioactive. It is an inhospitable piece of work that stands as a naked testament to its creators sins. Know it exists and then go nowhere near it.
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Feb 14, 2019 20:12
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Beast is not a place of honor.
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Feb 14, 2019 20:21
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Are Mokole still a thing? If not, are Were-Elephants? There is a new world of darkness book that has were-crocodiles and were-elephants. It was written by Satyros Brucato. Do not read it.
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Feb 14, 2019 20:33
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I think Beast's biggest problem is that it has no theme I can see, or if it has one it does not exhibit it well in it's mechanics or goals. And what it does exhibit is a bunch of abuse justification, apologia, and uncomfortable validation of the othering of people which to this day I'm not sure was intentional or accidental.
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Feb 14, 2019 20:40
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Mors Rattus posted:There is nothing there to salvage. Don't bother. Yeah I agree, and wasn't advocating for it, just letting some idle thoughts out that I'd had.
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Feb 14, 2019 20:59
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I think it shows how beloved the WoD is that when a bad game got released fans try to save it somehow.
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Feb 14, 2019 21:04
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Kurieg posted:There is a new world of darkness book that has were-crocodiles and were-elephants. War Against the Pure and Skinchangers both had much better support for making weirdass were-animals of all types, use those instead.
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Feb 14, 2019 21:09
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The core (actually good) bits of Beast that should at least be considered to be salvageable are the ability to integrate with any splat and its heavier dealing with the Astral Plane and that side of the WoD cosmology. Everything else is pretty much tossable in a bin if only because the parts it came from were originally something poisonous and abhorrent and not just odd and slightly deranged like Changeling going from The Dreaming to The Lost. Of course, Hunter is pretty well and good in being the former though there's not mechanical linkages for it. MonsieurChoc posted:I think it shows how beloved the WoD is that when a bad game got released fans try to save it somehow. There is this though.
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Feb 14, 2019 22:39
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If you have the impulse to salvage Beast, go track down the fangame Leviathan: The Tempest, which I think is the closest thematically and actually doesn't start from a place of complete dysfunction. It has the same core conceit, "I'm a bad monster and I'm OK with it" from Vampire but goes in different directions.
kaynorr fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Feb 14, 2019 |
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Feb 14, 2019 23:16
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It's also probably the most functional of the fangames, though that's not really a high bar.
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Feb 14, 2019 23:18
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The thing I hate most about Beast is the fact that I really wanted an Astral splat to match up with the Spirit world and Underworld, but Beast had to come out and ruin the whole thing for everyone.
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Feb 14, 2019 23:27
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Lair mechanics are also kind of cool. The one thing that Beast actually gave me an itch for was an in-universe Killer Game Master who's Lair was a tomb-of-horrors esque classic DnD Deathtrap Fiesta. Then I just made them a Changeling who abused the heck out of that 'You can open a hedgegate directly into your hollow from anywhere' merit. It scratched my itch for that particular concept and I had no need to interface with Beast Further.
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Feb 14, 2019 23:51
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For obvious reasons, I think the WoD needs a book for running games where a group of antisocial weirdos overcome their social shortcomings to lead full, happy, offbeat lives.
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Feb 14, 2019 23:59
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:For obvious reasons, I think the WoD needs a book for running games where a group of antisocial weirdos overcome their social shortcomings to lead full, happy, offbeat lives. You really need to read Changeling and Promethean.
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Feb 15, 2019 00:05
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I had one of those unbidden fonts of realization that the Mandragora Garden merit from Secrets of the Covenant is basically a Secret Vampire Grow Lab. Just gently misting cannabis plants with vampire blood down in a sealed basement so that some undead stoner can light up.
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Feb 15, 2019 01:48
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Ironslave posted:I think Beast's biggest problem is that it has no theme I can see, or if it has one it does not exhibit it well in it's mechanics or goals. And what it does exhibit is a bunch of abuse justification, apologia, and uncomfortable validation of the othering of people which to this day I'm not sure was intentional or accidental. The author was recently revealed to be a rapist, so yeah, it was intentional.
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Feb 15, 2019 03:18
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Zereth posted:The author was recently revealed to be a rapist, so yeah, it was intentional. So here's a thing I want to throw out there. Matt's an utter piece of rapist trash. But he also didn't really write most of the Beast book. A lot of people did. It was a really bad development cycle. Super rushed. A lot of people who had never worked with the WoD stuff before. And ultimately Matt did development fairly hands-off with an email list. Which meant that a whole hell of a lot of people were talking over each other and elevating the first idea they found cool. It's pretty much the worst example of "design by committee" I can think of. During that process, a handful of people said, "Um, this is kinda gross?" But that never really gained traction among the cacophony of people saying, "Oh hey this thing would be cool and also this thing would be." It happened very fast. Like, across a month. And every day, we'd all wake up to a chain of 20 or more emails and it was just a gigantic pain in the rear end. Without a coherent direction, Matt just sort of assigned little bits to a lot of people. Each writing in their own little island. TBH I don't think Matt actually wrote any of the first draft of the book everyone saw, except for like the introduction "how you use this book" bit. There were a ton of people with little experience, and a few with experience throwing together words based on cobbled together ideas about a massive email chain with 500+ replies, and of course everyone had their own sort of idea of what the game should look like based on which emails they focused on. Everyone wrote on an island. The book is a mess because there's no coherent theme, and it's like 20 different books. I personally wrote a very small chunk (I think actually my smallest contract ever for WW/CCP/OPP). I told Matt it was altogether too much to deal with, reading hundreds upon hundreds of emails just to do underpaid work on an elfgame. So I told him I'd do Merits, since I can do those in my sleep and did them for almost every other Chronicles book. A lot of my material was trimmed to nothingness. That happens. Ultimately the best I could do as a creator was develop the Hunter book for Beast, which was basically my sort of answer/criticism to Beast. I know some of the people who wrote the things that people point to and say, "this is clear evidence the game was written by a rapist." A few of those people were also rape survivors, who were utterly devastated to hear their work was being attributed to a rapist. A few walked away from writing RPGs in the future. When they were writing what they were writing, they didn't see it in the greater context of what the game was, and some were just overcome with the nervousness of doing their first White Wolf core rulebook. They did a thing they thought was clever or edgy or whatever. That doesn't mean they're rapists. Matt was irresponsible and negligent in not listening to the numerous people who told him he should fix it from moment one. Matt had a responsibility to the authors to look at what was there, and not allow it to be released in its state, after all the warnings. Matt had a responsibility to control the development process and present a coherent vision that didn't allow the writers to make something that was ultimately so harmful. He was rushed to compile a draft, because other books were late and they NEEDED that Kickstarter preview immediately. But I think it's important to note that pointing to a piece of text and saying, "clearly this was written by a rapist" can have unintended targets.
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Feb 15, 2019 03:52
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Nessus posted:I think "selling" here is being parsed as "additional opportunities to purchase," as opposed to "delivering goods contracted and paid for." In other words, the interpretation is that these PDFs will go on DTRPG or something, as opposed to being sent to various backers Modiphius' email stated that the PDFs will still be sold, assumably through their site.
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Feb 15, 2019 03:57
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MachineIV posted:So here's a thing I want to throw out there. Thank you for posting that. I've always been a little uncomfortable with how specifically attributable some of the bile for Beast gets sometimes, not that I've bothered to make a deal about it.
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Feb 15, 2019 04:00
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If a rapist is at the helm, isnt that gonna shine through regardless of who is writing specific material, especially if hes keeping people on islands and no voice is developed except his own?
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Feb 15, 2019 04:46
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Since I'm feeling called out, I guess I'll respond. I know Matt didn't write everything in the book, but as the lead designer and presumably the first person to get a crack at editing he's definitely responsible for telling people what to write, deciding what goes in the book, and how it's presented. And I know how he responded to criticism before and during the kickstarter. Belittling his detractors and promising changes that resulted in very little actual change(that was then undone in the storyteller chapter). I did spend the better part of a year trying to defend OPP and the writers of the book even while I critiqued the book itself for being pretty goddamned vile in composition. I was a little raw by the time I got to the players guide (for obvious goddamned reasons) which is also one of the reasons why I haven't finished reviewing it and really can't bring myself to do so. Even if the back half of the book is good I feel personally injured by the content of the first half and the knowledge of what Matt has done. Because I was molested as a kid, and finding out that I had been defending a rapist's honor was perhaps the lowest point of my life second only to that. One I know I have (perhaps erroneously) attributed to Matt directly is the Talassi(The beasts who are cursed to be rapists and are heroic when they decide not to rape). If he didn't write that or at least heavily dictate the tone then that's one hell of a serendipitous coincidence.
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Feb 15, 2019 04:51
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Unoriginal Name posted:If a rapist is at the helm, isnt that gonna shine through regardless of who is writing specific material, especially if hes keeping people on islands and no voice is developed except his own? To an extent. But his development edits were very quick and hands off. A lot of it was just voice and typo stuff. The kind of draft where you can hit “accept all changes” and it’s basically done. The edits you can really point to as his specifically are the first to second public draft versions. Those were 100% him.
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Feb 15, 2019 04:53
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Kurieg posted:I know Matt didn't write everything in the book, but as the lead designer and presumably the first person to get a crack at editing he's definitely responsible for telling people what to write, deciding what goes in the book, and how it's presented. And I know how he responded to criticism before and during the kickstarter. Belittling his detractors and promising changes that resulted in very little actual change(that was then undone in the storyteller chapter). Oh I agree. You can absolutely attribute it to his development and his negligence and his hostility toward detractors. I just think it’s important to note the potential problems with pathtologizing work by individual unknown contributors. He is absolutely responsible for how bad the game turned out. And he had a responsibility to the contributors that he betrayed.
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Feb 15, 2019 05:07
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MachineIV posted:Oh I agree. You can absolutely attribute it to his development and his negligence and his hostility toward detractors. I just think it’s important to note the potential problems with pathtologizing work by individual unknown contributors. He is absolutely responsible for how bad the game turned out. And he had a responsibility to the contributors that he betrayed. I feel like all of this wouldn't be a bad idea to issue as a public statement now that it's entered back into peoples' minds. It may not bring some of the nervous/bailing writers back, but it might do good by them to be more open about the development cycle. IDK how eager OPP is to do that, but given the hostility that surrounded Beast from McFuckBag's end of things, it seems like it injured their work in the eyes of a number of people. Maybe I'm wrong an definitive statements would just make things worse, or maybe it's already been done, but idk. Feels like openly acknowledging this and even some people being honest about whether or not they knew these allegations before wouldn't hurt things, especially in this era. Might hurt in terms of getting back some slings and arrows, but, I mean. The damage, technically, is already done. Old Boot fucked around with this message at 06:37 on Feb 15, 2019 |
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Feb 15, 2019 06:34
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Old Boot posted:I feel like all of this wouldn't be a bad idea to issue as a public statement now that it's entered back into peoples' minds. It may not bring some of the nervous/bailing writers back, but it might do good by them to be more open about the development cycle. IDK how eager OPP is to do that, but given the hostility that surrounded Beast from McFuckBag's end of things, it seems like it injured their work in the eyes of a number of people. Maybe I'm wrong an definitive statements would just make things worse, or maybe it's already been done, but idk. Feels like openly acknowledging this and even some people being honest about whether or not they knew these allegations before wouldn't hurt things, especially in this era. At this point the general assumption among my gaming group is that any incarnation of White Wolf or White Wolf-derived company, while they may have something interesting at the moment, either is or will soon become a garbage fire and should be avoided. That includes Onyx Path after Beast, let alone after M20, Exalted 3e kickstarter, Olivia Hill's firing... They've got a lot of perhaps survivable individually PR disasters piling up, and a lot of them aren't being managed well or are actively awful.
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Feb 15, 2019 07:05
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Unoriginal Name posted:If a rapist is at the helm, isnt that gonna shine through regardless of who is writing specific material, especially if hes keeping people on islands and no voice is developed except his own? Yeah, I'm reminded of the parable of the factory workers who think they are making baby cots but when they try to make a cot of their own by taking a component from each assembly line and putting them together they end up with a machine gun.
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Feb 15, 2019 09:55
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Warthur posted:Yeah, I'm reminded of the parable of the factory workers who think they are making baby cots but when they try to make a cot of their own by taking a component from each assembly line and putting them together they end up with a machine gun. Does it shine through with Demon and Promethean?
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Feb 15, 2019 09:56
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Inspiration help - what powers or numina might a "spirit of angles" familiar have? I was thinking perhaps being able to fold and conceal itself in corners, and maybe take people with it. Also open to any cool stories of unusual spirits that would still make sense within the game world without being magath.
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Feb 15, 2019 10:11
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kaynorr posted:If you have the impulse to salvage Beast, go track down the fangame Leviathan: The Tempest, which I think is the closest thematically and actually doesn't start from a place of complete dysfunction. It has the same core conceit, "I'm a bad monster and I'm OK with it" from Vampire but goes in different directions. I still haven't forgiven Leviathan for going with "Bahamutans" instead of "Behemoths" for a splat.
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Feb 15, 2019 10:36
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Does it shine through with Demon and Promethean? (Pssst, Dave: people are giving you a lifeline to say that the overall problems with Beast were not the collective responsibility of all the writers on the project, but primarily the responsibility of Matt as its overseer. If you want us to believe that it's not wholly Matt's fault how Beast turned out, that's not helping OPP or its freelancers. Not even slightly.)
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Feb 15, 2019 13:08
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Warthur posted:(Pssst, Dave: people are giving you a lifeline to say that the overall problems with Beast were not the collective responsibility of all the writers on the project, but primarily the responsibility of Matt as its overseer. If you want us to believe that it's not wholly Matt's fault how Beast turned out, that's not helping OPP or its freelancers. Not even slightly.) Is it at all useful or healthy to pretend it's all his fault when it wasn't? The fact that maybe a lot of the unfortunate implications were thoughtless mistakes instead of some singular villain's plan doesn't make Matt any less a rapist. But pretending otherwise probably makes it harder for those who are just misguided to improve. He's responsible enough for the overall project as its developer without trying to erase everyone else to make him solely responsible. The truth of this kind of thing can't be useless.
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Feb 15, 2019 13:28
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Dammit Who? posted:I still haven't forgiven Leviathan for going with "Bahamutans" instead of "Behemoths" for a splat. Thus actually makes sense to me, in that Bahamut is a fish, and Behemoth is a land animal whose name got swapped for Leviathan somehow by the medieval Muslims that came up with Bahamut and Kuyutha (the cow that probably got its name taken from Leviathan).
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Feb 15, 2019 13:31
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That Old Tree posted:Is it at all useful or healthy to pretend it's all his fault when it wasn't? The fact that maybe a lot of the unfortunate implications were thoughtless mistakes instead of some singular villain's plan doesn't make Matt any less a rapist. But pretending otherwise probably makes it harder for those who are just misguided to improve. He's responsible enough for the overall project as its developer without trying to erase everyone else to make him solely responsible. The truth of this kind of thing can't be useless.
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Feb 15, 2019 13:52
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