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Listen, it's my two+ year old sassy quote at the top of this thread, and I think that OPP as a whole shouldn't be as demonized as it has been. There's some stupid poo poo in the past, yeah, but Etherwind's rant about an internally controversial branding loses the self-righteous punch when he turns around and gets perma probated for wishing actual, literal death on a dude for having the gall to have different opinions. Make fun of specific aspects, maybe even specific writers if they have an extremely long and proven history like Rein*Hagen or Brucato, but maybe the third post should be cut or replaced by just the bestiality paragraph and Rape of Persephone if it's just going to cause arguments and slapfights. efb
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Apr 10, 2015 21:19
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Kavak posted:I just remembered this less than serious but still appropriate take on Awakening: I think you mean this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi_hcwB8i64
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Apr 11, 2015 07:49
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paradoxGentleman posted:Oh god, and the comment section of that piece of fiction is already full of praise. Oh for God's sake, it's some pretty bad prose but looking at it and declaring that the golden age of elfgames is dead is putting the cart about ten miles in front of the horse, especially after Demon and how hyped everybody in here was getting for Dark Ages. Now, when Beast comes out or has its Kickstarter and it all turns out to be wall-to-wall edgelord dreck, sure, we can start doomsaying.
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Apr 13, 2015 07:21
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Zarick posted:The real good way to do Beast I guess would be to make it the struggle between the Arisen and the Dragon from Dragon's Dogma.  I now mourn for something that will never be."Take up arms, newly Arisen, for my kind do not heed the toothless." And Grigori switching from taunting you and threatening you to welcoming death as you make it clear you're able to push forward the Eternal Wheel. Or making the Bargain, or denying the cycle, or the Dark Arisen... Daeren fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Apr 14, 2015 |
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Apr 14, 2015 02:49
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Mors Rattus posted:Also, seriously, please stop having Heroes use internet slang and comparing them to internet trolls. Daeren posted:However, the evasiveness of what, exactly, Heroes have to make them compelling foils and not thinly veiled analogues for Those Fuckers to string up as oWoD style punching bags, is not exactly something that brings a lot of confidence, especially when Heroes would apparently never exist if it weren't for Beasts doing Things(?), therefore putting the blame for any Going Too Far actions squarely on the Beasts that made them. 
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Apr 14, 2015 03:16
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Mors Rattus posted:Look at the fervor with which people will argue about whatever topic on the internet, from comic book movies, to gender, to space cowboys, to vaccines, to ethics in video game journalism, whatever. I want to know who wrote this so they can go sit in the shame corner and think about what they've done. There's touching the poop, and then there's rolling around in the poop while making GBS threads your pants and daring people to call you on it. And now I touch the poop myself and risk the inevitable derail because I spent ten minutes after reading that trying to parse its ramifications. Gamergate is, and was, a loving stupid and terrible thing. I think most of us in here can agree with that as a broad statement. Gamergater types did horrible poo poo to other people over incredibly petty reasons of identity politics, yes. Despite the people who came in suckered by the, well, "ethics in game journalism" argument, it was by and large a hate movement that did and said terrible things and used other people as a buffer against indictment, at least after a point. If you want to paint an entire group as a pack of childish, spiteful malcontents, you could do worse than invoking their name. AND YET. Mors Rattus posted:A Beast's particular hungers tend to be rather specific, so competition is rare - rather, they tend to be good at providing each other with meals. Like, a dude who eats the corruption of clergy teams up with a dude who eats the punishment of vow-breaking clergy. Yes, it's totally hypocritical - they're fine with it. [...] Crion posted:Beasts sound like a much better mid-tier Changeling antagonist than what we've heard of Huntsmen so far. They certainly don't sound much like PCs, outside of there for some reason being rules to play them. Mors Rattus posted:The book is quite clear - Beasts enjoy what they are. It feels good to sate your Hunger. And almost all of the listed Beast character snippets are of completely awful people who love every second of it. Dammit Who? posted:
We come to this. The rest of the book (apparently), the preview stuff mentioned, the tone in general, all suggests beasts are equally wretched motherfuckers. I mean, when you have a Hunger for torturing people to death or forcing them into captivity until you get your sanity back, you've lost any moral high horse. You're a monster by necessity of existing. You've basically lost any reason to look at the basic hero motive of "go kill the monster" and not go "Yeah, that's an eminently reasonable reaction," which leaves the text in the awkward position of needing to constantly undermine heroic motivations and morality. You know what did shades of gray and black really well? Vampire. Hunter. Nobody's gonna say a vampire's a saint, but you can reasonably say that one vampire is a whole lot less of an rear end than another, and Hunter fills like a third of its pagecount subtly/blatantly alluding to He Who Fights Monsters and setting up interesting hypotheticals. Yet, heroes start as a pack of dispossessed, sociopathic milennials obsessed with ruining lives, and beasts are effectively torturing themselves if they aren't a Morality 0 puppy-devouring child-drowning self-obsessed monster, in a far more real way than Vampire's slow degradation of morals from the weight of time and a monstrous society. At this point, we reach the deadliest words a writer can hear: "Why should I care about these people?" gently caress them. gently caress both sides, let them die, burn it down, hail Satan. They're both morally bankrupt, there's little to no room for nuance on either side. Beasts are, from all accounts, being set up to be woe-is-me hypocrites who justify doing terrible things because gently caress you, I'm the only thing that matters, how dare you tell me what I can't do. Heroes have to have the writing conspire against them to make them anything but the more sympathetic party and that isn't going to sit well with a lot of people. And then you remember they're invoking Gamergate as the boogeyman, as Heroes. The thing that any right-thinking, morally upright protagonist should naturally be repulsed by. By the transitive property of heroes and beasts as a dynamic, they're immediately implying that feminists, women, social progressives, and everybody else on the other side of the fence are all hypocrites, soul-shattering, nightmare-eating, sociopathic, gleeful, hedonistic monsters who happily enjoy being evil as hell. And that Gamergate wouldn't have existed without feminists egging them on by...doing progressive things? NOT doing progressive things!? Existing!? loving...come on. NOBODY WINS BY SETTING UP THIS DICHOTOMY. Did whoever wrote the heroes section just...forget to think about the ramifications of using analogy? Is this secretly a design document taken out of a time capsule circa 1993?
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Apr 14, 2015 04:41
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Mors Rattus posted:E: I should also note that not all methods of fulfilling a Hunger have to be the most horrible poo poo ever. One of my favorite character snippets was a Tyrant, the guys who hunger for domination and control. He's a criminal lawyer, and he tends to pick cases that are against awful people. And he wins them - he just purposefully focuses not on the truth, but on using his superior skill as a lawyer to crush the opposition and force them realize that they are not and never will be as good he is. What a Tyrant hungers for, after all, is that moment when the opposition realizes that they are inferior.  (okay yeah that's pretty good)
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Apr 14, 2015 04:52
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Denim Avenger posted:If I had to guess, Demons are probably singled out to protect the paranoia that's core to Demon. Demons are fairly undetectable, it can be hard to tell if you're even talking to the same Demon at times as long as they're in Cover, so having Beast be Demon detectors would kinda ruin that I imagine. Yeah, I can buy that. Overwhelming paranoia is part of Demon's jam, trust nobody, etc., so having Weird Cousin Vinny the Skeleton come over and start talking shop would be... actually, wait, why is this something we want to stop?
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Apr 14, 2015 05:01
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Mors Rattus posted:I do want to emphasize again that not all of Beast is bad. I dislike a lot of the fluff, but I really like the Lair stuff and almost all of the Nightmares are really cool powers. I especially like how Nightmares can halfway function as blessing powers if you're willing to be really backhanded about it. I think there is potential here, and I would love to see it realized. Let's hear some of the standout good stuff then, cause I don't want this to be a total burn-this-fucker-down party if there's stuff to celebrate.
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Apr 14, 2015 05:11
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GimpInBlack posted:You're welcome. Realtalk there better be a Geist Nightmare called There Is A Skeleton Inside Of You. Or You Are Already Dead.
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Apr 14, 2015 19:31
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:Well, I'd say I want to play Demon now. This is the correct opinion to have.
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Apr 15, 2015 02:24
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I've been seeing a lot of people (or maybe just the same few people in a lot of places) bringing up the idea of making the narrative cycle that ensnares beasts and heroes the villain rather than either of them. Combine that with the Dragon's Dogma suggestion earlier, and Night's ideas, and you get beasts as either people shackled to an alien cycle, or self-aware monsters comfortable with their place in things. Both exist to create heroes, to test them, to force humanity to adapt, improve, or die. The only way out of the cycle is for the beast to succeed, to create a truly worthy opponent, and die at their hands. I had an idea related to that: make beasts immortal in most circumstances. The Story refuses to let you go unless you die the Right Way. Being killed by nearly anything just forces you and your Soul into your Lair to recuperate for a long time, because what kind of proper legendary monster gets chumped by being hit by a random car? Being killed by heroes that aren't really invested in you forces your Soul into a new host that experiences the Homecoming, but you, the human part, are dead, and possibly forced to live on as an agonized memory in the Soul. Being killed by the hero you've chosen, though? Built up to be your nemesis, tested, drawn into your Lair for the final confrontation? That kills you permanently, sending the Soul back to its Primordial Dream, letting you and everyone else the Soul has ever touched finally rest - if and only if the hero is found "worthy." If they've got any weakness left within them the Soul can latch onto, if the Story doesn't deem the narrative complete, or whatever other mysterious criteria the cycle runs on aren't met, the Soul infests the hero and turns them into the next incarnation of the beast. You want to die? To end the cycle? Then for your own sake, you better not die until you're absolutely sure the person killing you is as perfect a hero as you can force someone to be. And you better hope what you consider a perfect hero counts. Even if you want to live, you could mechanically incentivize the process of choosing and building up a hero by giving temporary bonus stats that become permanent if you kill them once you're at risk of permanent death. This is all just brainstorming at the moment but I think there's potential for a reskin in this angle.
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Apr 16, 2015 20:30
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Luminous Obscurity posted:On another note, Matt McFarland brought up the leak in the RPGnet thread, for those curious. Yeah, alright, that's a pretty good reply, especially given the context. If there's enough smoothing out of the stuff we've been hearing based on the leak and incomplete information, I'm willing to give it another crack, though I think the foundation might just not be what I want out of the game. Props as hell to actually listening to the often-acerbic critiques too, if that gets incorporated into the core and further books. Seriously though. Someone broke an NDA they signed, with all their personal information, to leak information that can get them in legal trouble, to...make a freelancer who didn't even have anything to do with Beast look bad. That may be the most petty, self-destructive, brainless thing I've heard in a long time.
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Apr 16, 2015 23:24
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Ferrinus posted:Bizarre. Either way, kudos again to the WoD folks for handling it well. I gripe a lot about the actual revealed content, but I always appreciate the opportunity to gripe afforded to me by the team's overall transparency. :Exalted 3e's cover slowly slides upscreen into view: (Agreed though, nicely done/thanks for the information)
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Apr 17, 2015 01:20
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Omnicrom posted:Who? A man with a staggeringly comprehensive record of ruining everything he manages that somehow continues to sucker people into giving him lots of money to do things for them. To give you an idea, he was the guy who came up with the 3.0 OGL, and is now working on the Pathfinder MMO. MonsieurChoc posted:I dunno, the Secret World is pretty WoD-ish, and it's the best single player MMORPG out there. Mors Rattus posted:Well, second=best. FFXIV's got a good thing going. Agreed on both counts.
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Apr 17, 2015 06:01
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GimpInBlack posted:That's the real strength of the digital/POD model Onyx Path follows, yeah: lines can get as many books as they need/as many as developers have cool ideas for, and since they're not competing for shelf space in stores and the whole collection is always available from DTRPG and the like you get less of that "well, Werewolf hasn't had a book out in six months, it's obviously dead and never coming back!" sentiment that you saw back in the supplement treadmill days. It also means nobody's going "uhhh, poo poo, we need a new Vampire book for October... umm... gently caress, I dunno, let's do a book about vampire gerbils." That explains the two Night Horrors books, three Bloodline books, and two Ancients books 
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Apr 18, 2015 23:29
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Mors Rattus posted:The Ancient pair was a great set of books, at least, and Night Horrors was generally middling to good. Bloodlines...gave us the Players? Yeah, Ancients was good, Night Horrors had some neat ideas, and Bloodlines...well, as said, there were the Players and the Oberlochs and the Melissidae, and some more standouts (the Prince in the long Vampire game I ran was a Taifa with a Sotoha bodyguard), but a lot of them I just sorta forget until I go looking again.
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Apr 19, 2015 01:20
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Crion posted:The amount of off-brand repeat-of-corebook-concept conspiracies/compacts hanging around (Ashwood Abbey's Bear Lodge/Hunt Club is easily most the most blatant, but the X-Files Family could do with cleaning up too) is actually kind of startling when you look at it While this is true in large strokes I will shank you if you try to get rid of the Barrett Commission or VASCU because both of them own bones. As has been said, one of the greatest things I love about nHunter is that there's so much room for scope and tone shifts. Cell/Compact/Conspiracy allows you to tweak the level of empowerment you've got as a baseline, and the sorts of themes you want to deal with, while tonally there's honestly room for anything between the most bone-chillingly bleak meditations on the inevitability of death and monstrosity to taking a break from fighting supernatural PMCs to play some sick guitar riffs as a squadron of F-16s shoot down the private jet of a scheming vampire mastermind as a superimposed American flag waves. Night10194 posted:What's a slasher? Are there yet more magic serial killers in WoD? Yes, though they're some of the most literal encapsulations of the idea. Slashers are effectively serial killers who get so good at killing that it's a form of supernatural prowess, through unknown means (and every Compact/Conspiracy has their own explanation). They effectively embody the archetypes of serial killers in cultural myth and popular media - the avenging victim, the mindless, mute killing machine, the sociopathic charmer, the amoral genius, and the like. They start as Rippers, where their prowess is basically just being really, really good at killing people, and if they are active long enough, had some sort of experience with supernatural stuff before (cough cough HUNTERS cough), or through other unknown factors, become Scourges, where no reasonable explanation can explain the poo poo they can pull off. For instance, the Jason-style killers, Brutes/Masks, eventually become so unstoppably tough that they can only take a single point of damage from any attack, no matter how many successes it got. It is outright stated that most Hunters are doomed to become Slashers if they operate long enough because of the poo poo that the Vigil does to their minds (and souls, in some cases). A Hunter who's changed their moral views with the Code enough are more or less indistinguishable from a lot of Slashers anyway.
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Apr 21, 2015 22:54
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Boogaleeboo posted:But conversely, the VASCU is the FBI. Like ok, you'll have to deal with some crazy magic poo poo, but you'll be trying to put it into jail. You are a real agent, you have a real badge. And again, it's magic jail, but jail. And sometimes it's some crazy rear end mutant that is eating people and making clothes out of their skin and you have to put it down, but it's never really the objective. You'll do paperwork about it, and you'll have to deal with assholes at TFV taking over cases, and you are in all ways just a 'regular' agent. And a lot of the time you'll just get roped into regular everyday cases. And it's somewhat of an open secret what you do at the FBI, and wider agencies and local law enforcement know if you have an....interesting case this is who you call. In so many ways their job is really only as disturbing as people that have to deal with regular serial killers and kidnapping cases, which isn't exactly a picnic. Paging Ronwayne to the thread to talk about his former Hunter PC that is exactly this, to the letter and it was the greatest thing, especially because he was stuck with a pack of sketchy vigilante murderhobos (and literal hobos)
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Apr 21, 2015 23:05
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GimpInBlack posted:In fairness, Division 6 predates that particular twist on TFV by two years. The "it's vampires" sidebar appeared in Compacts & Conspiracies, a long time after Witchfinders. And to give my two cents I hate the "it's vampires" sidebar. If it's going to be some mysterious supernatural force with its fingers in the pie to explain contradictory orders, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't funding, and generally inexplicable shenanigans, make it ALL of them. Make TF:V the worst kept secret in the United States Government. Every manipulative Dracula and Merlin and Robot Satan and Zombie Ghost is going to go looking for the men in black and try to screw with them, given the inclination, only to discover that it's standing room only and every attempt to push a lobbyist to divert funding might be met with six more lobbyists coming to break their knees. Simultaneously the most infiltrated, corrupt, and compromised black ops bureau in the government, and bizarrely one of the most effective and reliable because a supernatural infiltrator trying to push an agenda past every other knucklehead with the same bright idea is like all of Mr. Burns' diseases cancelling each other out. It's a colossal honey trap that has the beneficial side effect of actually going out and killing some Draculas too. Meanwhile, I also hate the Cheiron sidebar where it's like "oh no, this conspiracy whose entire thing is that humans turn themselves into monsters to hunt monsters in a literal as well as metaphorical sense are actually controlled by SPACE ALIEN GHOST HUNTERS, not something that actually fits pre-established themes like a board of directors that keep themselves quasi-immortal with the best monster parts and are ripped apart and devoured to salvage the pieces when they're fired/someone else gets promoted."
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Apr 22, 2015 00:13
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paradoxGentleman posted:The line is pretty out there, no doubt, but the write-up doesn't seem bad to me. It continues the trend of trying to convince you that the seeming/clan/whatever they are talking about is great and wonderful and make you want to play it, but that seems to make sense to me, especially if they are trying to portray Changelings less like victims and more like survivors. Or, bluntly, that the people writing them have a childish view of sexuality themselves. I am totally okay with sex as a thing in games. Hell, Changeling 1e had art with very clearly defined nipples and piercings through sweaters and gently caress it, that was okay because it was in a section actively talking about romance and sex in dreams, which is something that's basically impossible to avoid talking about when dreams are your jam. Monsterhearts is an entire game system around sex - awkward, teenaged, doomed sex - as a vehicle for a plot. Sex is at the root level of all sorts of motivations, and it's frankly puritan and silly to pretend it doesn't exist and get the vapors every time dicks and vaginas are implied. I say this to establish my views when I say that tryhard "no, really, this is rad and transgressive" sex references like the one in the Changeling writeup and ~the communion of the oval office and cock~ are not good incorporation of sex into games. As Swagger says, it's aimed at mid-teenagers who think the word penis is the most offensive thing in the universe. It's a perpetually stunted, adolescent view of things. And targeting that as your demographic is fine, except that OPP writers/fans often seem to try to have their cake and eat it too by attempting serious commentary or meditations on Real poo poo, then calling people who find their discussion of sex childish prudes and puritans. How often they've succeeded in their serious attempts is a matter of debate tatankatonk posted:Sex in games is fine, but only if it's in the proper and sacred context of marriage  Rand Brittain posted:It also helps if finding the sex sexy doesn't depend on the reader sharing some very specific fetishes. Ah yes, the good old Magical Realm. How disappointed and utterly unsurprised I am to have my major hobby demand that term's existence. (And yes, if I can close my eyes and see the writer's hands down their pants while writing, that torpedoes most of my interest)
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Apr 23, 2015 21:53
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Literally The Worst posted:Remember when he ran Mage 
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Apr 25, 2015 04:36
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Don't forget illusion magic Nightmare! Realtalk my brain actually blocked out Nightmare's rework because I had no idea what you were talking about until I went to go look at Blood and Smoke again.
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Apr 26, 2015 03:55
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I may be misremembering but most of the ways demons can get agg involve serious risk. Changelings shouldn't be the sorts who can just snap their hands and get agg on a whim, though, and Beast has bigger fish to fry (though instant agg is a fish worth frying.) Mages, well, I'm just gonna assume  is still in play until the book's in my hands.
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Apr 29, 2015 20:09
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Pope Guilty posted:Why is it Mage specifically that always inspires the fifty-page rules arguments? Are the mechanics that vague? It's precise enough that when you start to sit down and think about the logical end result of mechanical interactions things can get extremely silly, while vague and often poorly laid-out enough that you can argue for fifty pages (five hundred pages if you're Ferrinus) over what the logical end result actually is.
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May 2, 2015 20:54
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Pope Guilty posted:Dan Ackroyd:Ghostbusters::Phil Brucato:OWoD  why is this so accurate
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May 21, 2015 01:52
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MonsieurChoc posted:In the right hands, They are people who are tortured into making a mistake that damns their soul to eternal recurrence and torment in service to destroying all of reality, often driven by the original thought made in the absolute depth of despair and having their soul tortured that universal nonexistence is preferable to any existence that could ever allow things like them. MonsieurChoc posted:In the wrong hands, They made up approximately half of the Third Reich, and a significant chunk of nephandi are super-Nazis from the Hollow Earth bent on
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May 21, 2015 04:56
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Boogaleeboo posted:It's the natural consequence of the total irrelevancy of the Technocracy/Tradition conflict. Neither side truly matters [They've never been more than a reed in the water, slightly changing the flow of history. Humanity itself rejected magic all on it's own], and there are forces outside the human paradigm that would absolutely unmake everything if given a chance....and all the bullshit infighting among humanity gives them that chance. This is basically why at the end of the day I really can't take most of oMage too seriously. As presented, it's a giant, world-shaking, cosmological conflict over what pattern the wallpaper should have while the entire house is on fire and falling off a cliff, and the writers themselves rarely seem to understand that. The implications of Consensus are loving horrifying and that doesn't get nearly enough attention (unless that changed in M20, or I've forgotten stuff in the years since I've read most of it). Like, one of the old punchlines I remember about oWoD is that Consensus, if you bend it a bit, is an unwitting in-universe explanation for all the ridiculous racist stereotypes - enough people were racist enough to make Consensus enforce race sciences and stereotyping. Truly, it is the Darkest of Worlds
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May 21, 2015 23:02
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Yes, we should! Becoming a Banisher is a natural and morally required reaction to discovering the plague on reality that is Wizards Being Wizards, discuss
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May 22, 2015 01:00
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Pope Guilty posted:Gnosticism
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May 22, 2015 01:11
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I really, really like the tone of what they're going for, even if its ultimate execution is a bit odd like Gerund notes. The idea of someone being Labyrinth'd into seeking out a lost loved one is appropriate as hell, but yeah, I assumed that most of them would either find their lost one or end up dead.
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May 28, 2015 02:21
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ZiegeDame posted:I'm running a Demon campaign soon, and there's something that's been bugging me. How do demons recognize each other? It's not like vampires where you instantly know when you're in the presence of another demon, unless I'm forgetting something from the book. Short of one demon walking around blasting out aether and another trying to sniff it out, how do two demons ever meet one another? How do demons meet? Easy answer. Extremely carefully. If you're playing paranoia themes to the absolute hilt, barring seeing someone transform into their demonic form right in front of you, which is a rarity for reasons which should be pretty obvious, you should never truly know who you're talking to really is. Yeah, he knows all the codephrases, he remembers all the right stuff, and he's acting the same as he always has. But maybe he was a deep cover mole all along, and he's swapped the cover over to an assassin Integrator ready to sell you all out. Or this new cover he swears is really him is actually an angel that spied on you long enough to learn just enough to get in your good graces and feed you both disinformation, carefully manipulating every interaction so the two of you never realize what's happening. Or that seemingly totally mundane contact of yours has been Spoofing the poo poo out of you and is actually a demon so deep in her cover that if she even thinks you're trying to suss out a confession she'll kill you and bury the body so deep even the God-Machine won't find it. Or maybe he's exactly who you think he is - except he's not really, because demons lie, and there's a whole lot more to his motives and abilities than you've been led to believe. Remember, even demons can't prove another demon's lying. And demons lie about everything, from the biggest things to the tiniest things. The second you tell the truth is the second you show your throat to someone who might have a dagger behind their back. The closest demons can get to positively identifying each other as demonic without extremely careful conversation or potentially blowing their own covers is by using Aetheric Resonance, which lets you know the rough location of nearby angels and demons out of their Cover, and when a demon spends Aether nearby - or when an angel spends Essence. There's no way to differentiate the two. You have to spend Aether to activate this too, which means you show up on the radar of any demon who thought of doing it first, and they're immediately made aware you're one of two things - the enemy, or an unknown agent. Twitchy demons tend to treat the two equally until given an extremely good reason to do otherwise. Paranoia is written into every atom of Demon's structure. It's suffocating in the best way possible, but for the sake of playability, I suggest letting the players just trust each other as much as demons can trust anybody, to avoid weeks/months of dancing around co-operating as little as possible. If you want to play the game so that the paranoia extends to the ring itself, that's extremely viable, but that takes a very particular set of players. NPCs, though, should always be treated as potentially traitorous. Even if none of them ever turn out to be, it is always, ALWAYS possible that the smallest thing you say to the most inconsequential person will be the thing that gets you dragged back to the reclamation forges, and it is that fact that informs nearly everything else about Demon. E: As GimpInBlack says, a major thing that lessens the chokehold is that Fallen demons set off basically every  poo poo IS GOING DOWN sensor in the general vicinity, so the demons that survive long enough to evade the detachment of hunter-killers sent after their last known location are generally aware of the local players that are willing to stick their necks out a bit. Of course, it's entirely possible they're scooped up by traitors first and crafted into unwitting trojan horses.
Daeren fucked around with this message at 04:22 on May 29, 2015 |
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May 29, 2015 04:17
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tatankatonk posted:If you ran a Demon game this way without handwaving everyone knowing each other after two sessions the game would explode And that's why I said to do exactly that for the PCs (and I suppose a few key NPCs) that unless your players are very particular sorts of people
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May 29, 2015 04:31
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Night10194 posted:Beast just sounds like sort of a boring waste of its concept, which is sad. Not even vile or offensive or anything, just sorta completely inconsequential and pointless. The Heroes stuff gets pretty close to being offensively underthought. I still have to give it a full read myself if the "beasts are women on the internet (and also gleeful monstrous sadists)" accidental reading still exists. Gerund posted:....so why ask for money to deliver the corebook in its current state, rather than release these supplements with a barebones starter system attached? sadly. I see glimmers of good ideas in Beast, but enough warning signs to make me pause and reconsider if they'd ever be expounded upon in later splats, or put aside for more strawman punching. I'm not sure I can back it in good faith - the only way I could is if there was really solid evidence that they want to improve it in later books (and again, why the hell not make the core book better instead?), and the stretch goals give no indication of that. They're curiously anemic, even.
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Jun 2, 2015 22:12
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Xelkelvos posted:So is this shaping up to be better or worse than Geist in terms of wasted potential? Geist will probably be getting a second edition to address its wasted potential soon. Beast needs to pray for a hail-mary supplement.
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Jun 2, 2015 23:14
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Kurieg posted:What is the "Failure State" of beast, what are you trying to prevent. Hit satiety 0 and, yeah, that's basically what happens. Hit satiety 10 and you're defenseless against heroes. There's also a few "endgames" but they're kinda shakily written in most spots.
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Jun 3, 2015 00:28
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Free Cog posted:Isn't that the hook to Better Angels, the Wild Talents setting? I mean, that does sound pretty cool and all, but I swear I've heard it before. Better Angels owns bones. It's like Wraith except you're playing a deliberately incompetent Venture Brothers supervillain, and you don't want to shoot yourself/your Shadowguide at the end of a session.
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Jun 3, 2015 02:16
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pospysyl posted:Part of the problem is that this book is so obviously written by different authors with different ideas, in obvious ways. As mentioned, the Heroes section talks about their willpower and experience mechanics, which doesn't make any sense. The Storytelling advice section then gives instruction on how to portray Heroes and gives the Integrity advice again, stating that they didn't do it before because, as NPCs, it doesn't actually matter. The overall aims of each section also don't match up. The Heroes section begins with a rundown of mythical heroes and focuses on the horror of having your psyche bound into these archetypes. It does not work at all with the ST advice to portray them as fedora wearing MRAs. That's what digs into me. After reading his posts on the matter, McFarland freely admits he has a biased reading/intent for the line and the conflict, but the book itself doesn't knuckle down and commit to that bias. Turning it purely into a bizarre quasi-fascist abuse apologist tract is deeply unpleasant, but at least it would be consistently unpleasant, serving some arguable purpose to set a tone and the mindset of some really loving terrible people. It magnifies how ugly some of the writing gets when it's sandwiched between chapters that completely contradict it.
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Jun 3, 2015 05:42
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Night10194 posted:I'm guessing the whole thing is meant as an allegory for out-groups, but the thing is, when you set up your metaphor for out-groups as a bunch of people with lethal superpowers who eat people, you suddenly make it look totally reasonable to want to fight them and stop them doing 'what's natural' to them. It's a hilariously mixed up and wrong-headed metaphor. Like I said, they aimed for a metaphor about family dynamics and out-groups and misfits creating their own working families, and hosed it up so badly they more or less wrote fascist propaganda that can actually operate on two readings at once. Either it's a game about playing the unfettered exploitative supermen dealing with the Enemy who are incompetent, stupid, easily tricked, and yet a pervasive and immanent threat to all good folk, or it's a game about playing the diabolical manipulative Other who eat babies and seed nightmares, evading legitimate attempts to punish them, and painting the people trying to enact some form of justice against them as horrible monsters persecuting down-on-their-luck misbegotten schlubs to anyone who is foolish enough to listen. And just writing that made me feel a little dirty. I really want to believe that they had some sort of good idea, but their attempts to handle ideological metaphor just completely and utterly backfired in the worst possible way, because otherwise, someone (or more than one someone) on the writing team is more than a little bit  , whether they realize it or not.
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Jun 3, 2015 06:14
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Pope Guilty posted:And like I said with True Blood, it's entirely inappropriate because BDSM practitioners don't devour people. Yknow I was gonna make a joke here about that German cannibal guy but I know a ton of people into kink scenes and I can't in good taste (  ) compare them to that. Or this.
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Jun 3, 2015 06:44
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