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Kurieg, do you mind if I post my own dissection of Beast's mechanics alongside yours? I have little interest in taking a hatchet to most of the fluff, because
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Apr 10, 2016 23:09
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Kurieg posted:Go ahead, though I was planning on addressing the points where the mechanics start describing or even undermining the story. I would only ask you wait until I get to a mechanic so we don't get ahead of eachother. I take it you're already quite aware of Family Dinner then (though that's more the straw that breaks the camel's back). I was planning on letting you get to poo poo first already, so don't worry about that.
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Apr 10, 2016 23:47
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PurpleXVI posted:I'm imagining a Beast and a Hero about to get down to a final battle after a harrowing chase/adventure when the door gets kicked down by a lawyer and the cops, who drags them both off to court for destruction of property, endangering bystanders, etc. Turns out giant squid and magic swords can't stand up to the legal system and a dozen tazings. Maybe that'd be a more fun game. Lawyer: The Legaling. Bringing mundane law to supernatural dorks before they tear up half the town. Add in some psychic powers and you're basically just describing VASCU, The Best Hunters.
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Apr 10, 2016 23:54
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Night10194 posted:There are no good ideas behind the current incarnation of Beast. There are some, but mostly it's in the mechanics, and most of those have more than a few stumbling blocks in their way.
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Apr 11, 2016 03:08
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Alien Rope Burn posted:There will be a constant push for people to try and "fix" Beast because it's an official World of Darkness release and therefore it is part of the canon and all the Legos have to fit together! They wouldn't release a kit where the Legos don't fit! We have to make it fit! Night10194 posted:Beast should have been Onyx Path Presents Dragon's Dogma, The Cycle of Eternal Return. One reason I have a dissection of the mechanics waiting in the wings is that I tried to do exactly this until I realized I would be better suited by torching nearly all of it, and tweaking most of what was left behind to fix systemic problems. It was actually pretty cathartic, after years of being That Nerd, to come out the other end saying "Actually, no, I'm fine with just leaving this behind." RocknRollaAyatollah posted:It's also pretty unnecessary. Chronicles of Darkness is almost getting worse than peak Classic, One or whatever, World of Darkness. Beast, at its heart, is a """greatest hits""" of themes already covered at length in every single other line, and it basically admits as much with its fluff about Kinship. There's more room for WoD's conceptual legs to stretch, but Beast was the exact opposite of that. I mean, poo poo, at minimum it's Changeling: the Requiem, guest starring Not-Slashers. You could make strong arguments for themes from Werewolf, Promethean, and parts of Mage being core to it too.
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Apr 11, 2016 04:31
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The Lord of Hats posted:At a very basic level, I kind of like the idea of getting to be one of the big horrible monster dudes. Something about playing a character who is, at least in some small way, a kraken, sounds neat. But slotting that into "weird loner at school who gets picked on" is just... ugh. It gets so many things rolled together at cross purposes with each other that you get a horrible message and unsympathetic characters. Terminal illness. I've had a loooot of thoughts about a body-horror oriented fan splat because I'm still That Nerd deep down in my shrivelly black heart, and you're basically describing the same thoughts I had after reading Beast the first time, which reawoke those tinkerings.
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Apr 11, 2016 04:36
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Night10194 posted:I mean it wouldn't be a World of Darkness game because a game about a union of supervillains/monsters/demons/mad scientists who exist to prepare heroes for the Actual Threats and teach valuable life lessons about confidence, teamwork, and happiness wouldn't fit the milieu, but there'd be room for it in gaming. Better Angels already does a lot of this, and was another reason I decided redoing Beast to fit this exact line of thought wasn't worth the effort. (Better Angels owns, by the way.)
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Apr 11, 2016 22:02
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Night10194 posted:What is Better Angels? You are a comic book supervillain doing comic book supervillain things, like making giant death rays powered by diamonds and puppy tears, in order to threaten to BLOW UP THE OCEAN unless the UN gives you one billion dollars in bitcoins. The reason you're doing this is that your superpowers actually come from a no-poo poo from-Hell demon bound to you. If you don't keep it appeased by doing bad things, it starts to get very cranky and mess with your life by doing things like activating your "light self on fire" power while you're getting ready for bed with your wife and kids. If you do too many evil things, it gets to drag your soul to Hell. So, by doing cartoonish, EEEEEEVIL things, you keep the demon sated, because demons are cool with playing the long con and like dinner and a show, while not actually being that harmful in comparison to systemic, callous, real-world evil. There's an entire sidebar about it. So, yeah, you can totally play a game as Dr. Explosions cackling evilly over his diabolical schemes while inwardly making sure to never quite aim the gatling grenades directly at Lantern Jaw Man, because you'd never forgive yourself if he actually died.
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Apr 11, 2016 22:18
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:And the other reason is because either implicitly or explicitly, the demons need to be tethered to Somebody who said yes to the possession offer, and if it's not you in a garish spandex costume doing themed crimes, it might be an actual psychopath who responds to the demon's constant pleas to roast and eat a school bus full of orphans with "why not think bigger?" and then scorches the planet. It should also be noted that it does Wraith's Shadowguiding correctly. Another player plays your demon, and you play someone else's. There is a looot of wordspace and mechanics devoted to minimizing the risk of it turning into the Shadowguiding problem - that is to say, the game either goes nowhere because there's no conflict because nobody wants to be mean, or it immediately devolves into a daisy chain of spite-fueled backstabs that completely derail the game.
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Apr 11, 2016 22:27
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Night10194 posted:That sounds a bit darker than what I was thinking, though still interesting. Yeah, the default is much more dark than just flat out Hero Rancher 2016, but there's room in presented tone to make it anywhere from a tale of a bunch of people doomed to an agonizing fate, to a Saturday morning cartoon that's pushing the boundaries as hard as it possibly can.
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Apr 11, 2016 22:29
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Zereth posted:I'd bet on "unintentionally comic failure to understand the Hunter's point of view". That's basically exactly how the later stuff about hunters goes. Alien Rope Burn posted:This has a probably been said a hundred times already, but the whole "teach people lessons by doing terrible things to them" is essentially apologism for abuse. It's the kind of nonsense I hear unironically coming out out of people's mouths that the reason kids today are so out of control is that they don't get smacked around enough. Now, if the game at least took that and said "this is the bullshit reason Beasts use for hurting people", that'd be another story, but as it is, it wants to eat the whole cake and still have it afterwards. Yeah. I expect Kurieg to have words about this when it starts coming up more in earnest, but I have some of my own when I go into the mechanics. Anyway, I also have a bad, bad idea. Apparently, the fansplat Leviathan: the Tempest has been getting a 2e do-over on Onyx Path's forums, and I'm considering picking at it - especially in context of Beast, since while the original Leviathan had a shitload of problems, its fluff served as a pretty hilarious mirror to hold up to Beast. I might even compare the two drafts to each other.
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Apr 24, 2016 21:33
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Hostile V posted:I keep forgetting that I never got around to the powers for Leviathan because I got buried under it being a giant pile of words on a wiki. I still find it hilarious that Leviathans are the better Beast because Beast is like "well uh what do you do with the world and other supernatural species" and Leviathan is like "you don't know how to interact the world and other supernatural species and there's the main thrust of your conflict". I'm doing a very quick skim right now. It's still kind of ill-thought-out in a lot of the crunch, but it's still got compelling hooks and ideas under it, and I haven't trivially found a way to roll 98 dice to throw a house on somebody right out of chargen like 1e Leviathan's powers let me. And yeah, honestly? Leviathan does a significant chunk of Beast's more salvageable concepts much better. For instance, Ahabs are basically Heroes that aren't completely awful in every way, and Atolls can be used for all sorts of entertaining/horrifying things. What's an Atoll? Imagine being the incarnate bloodline of the Old Gods, your psychic pressure intense enough to force your worst enemies to bow before you in fear and reverence. You probably haven't interacted with someone who wasn't bending over backward for you in decades. Then, all of a sudden, you meet someone who makes your constant inner anxiety chill the gently caress out, and you must get to know them...but your mojo doesn't work on them. At all. And now you're a centuries old squid god babbling like a goon trying to impress this random checkout clerk who's getting more and more weirded out, and oh god your fish eyes are starting to pop out :spaghetti: Ahabs, meanwhile, are basically people who respond to your psychic browbeating with murderous rage and become, well, Captain Ahab. They will not rest until you're dead, and the sheer level of their obsession with killing you empowers them to do so. Again, you're probably so used to scaring trained soldiers into submission with a mean look that some accountant with a baseball bat who will not lay down and die is going to be a big, big problem for you if you've gotten out of shape.
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Apr 24, 2016 21:59
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ProfessorCirno posted:Yeah, I think if you play CoD as completely bleak and hopeless, you're doing a disservice. The world is lovely. Thing is, you don't have to be. There is no greater godlike power of justice or hope, so you have to become that. I don't think that's bleak at all - I think it's empowering. The catch is, you need a GM who goes along with this. The quickest way to describe it is that you should play CofD as written by Camus, not Nietzsche. And yeah, this is a setting with a terrifyingly enormous robot god-entity...but it's one that can have its ground game irrevocably hosed up for centuries by meth-addled, shotgun-toting good ol' boys going out to hunt themselves a robo-gator.
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Apr 25, 2016 00:17
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SirPhoebos posted:Well, this was an excellent point to catch up with this thread https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9270u0MkI2w It only gets worse, I'm afraid.
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Apr 27, 2016 01:20
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Kai Tave posted:I vaguely remember someone somewhere working on a WoD fansplat that was basically Prototype: the RPG. I have no idea if it went anywhere or was any good (probably not to both). That may have been me, because I got inspired from an old, barely-finished fansplat (Pathogen), then the wind got knocked out of my sails by Deviant being announced. I still tinker with it quietly, and it has more or less nothing left to do with Pathogen. Yes, it me, im fansplatter (at least I havent published it anywhere [yet]) Kurieg posted:Beast had the same problem, The Hungers are all kind of ancellary to the game, and there are clearly correct choices, (E.G. Be a Tyrant, literally everything the other hungers do can be warped through the lens of a Tyrant. Being a Nemesis is probably the worst thing you can do because of how narrow you have to define your focus). But the X splat suffers too, Ugallu weren't concieved of until late in the playtesting cycle, and couldn't fly until one of the Playtesters pointed it out to them. To reiterate: The beast who's entire shtick is "Attacks you from above" couldn't fly until someone pointed it out. The playtest stories that came out of Beast are interesting to say the least.
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Apr 27, 2016 21:45
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Kurieg posted:Because I hate myself, and love this thread, I picked up the Beast Fiction Anthology. He failed around the time he talked about the playtest game where one of the players was an emotionally abusive Makara who lured people into relationships and abused them until they absorbed the lesson that some relationships are toxic and should be excised from your life. But it was okay, she wasn't a stalker or anything, and didn't stop anyone who tried to leave her, so really, it was on them. I'm not exaggerating a loving word of that. As a man who has been in an emotionally abusive relationship before that was so bad I wasn't able to register it as abusive until she dumped me and I had a panic attack when she texted me a few weeks later asking to hang out as friends, that was the precise moment I went from "maybe he's just really screwing up his intended message" to "Even if you give him the benefit of the doubt, whatever his intended message was doesn't matter."
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Apr 28, 2016 03:09
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Kurieg posted:If there's something good to come out of the Beast Anthology it made me look back at one of the rules that all the storys were seemingly ignoring and I can now state that Heroes Are actual threats to a Beast.. But then again so's a properly motivated Cop. A Beast that dies outside of his lair doesn't just teleport back to their lair anymore, they die for real. And Beasts are loving squishy, and very few of their powers are multi-target. I'm going to argue this when we get to the mechanics.
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Apr 28, 2016 04:15
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Kurieg posted:Spoilers for a future chapter of Beast even though that's dumb as hell And, unless they changed it from the December draft, the actual mechanics Heroes use to find Beasts means that Heroes will never, ever actually catch them unless they literally find one red-handed.
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Apr 28, 2016 22:31
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RentACop posted:I mean poo poo, 'Beasts hassle people with difficult but surmountable challenges that help them surpass their limitations and hang-ups, until they are strong enough to become Heroes and strike down the Beast so the cycle can begin again elsewhere' seems like it writes itself. It probably already exists somewhere You're about the seventh or eighth person I've seen (semi-)independently come up with that exact concept.
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Apr 29, 2016 01:25
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Mors Rattus posted:Ir's important to remember that the part of Onyx Path that makes WoD and the part that makes Exalted have little to no crossover. It should also be noted for the umpteenth time that the Exalted developers are proud of paying literally no attention to anything else the company does, and have zero interest in almost anything but Exalted and some oWoD stuff. I can only assume the feeling is mutual from the other wing of the company.
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Apr 29, 2016 21:27
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Rand Brittain posted:Given that Beast was almost certainly made with the intention of being socially conscious and responsible, I'm not really sure if I could point to a "this is where it all went wrong" moment for future developers to avoid. The literal instant they decided to make a significant part of the game a naked allegory for Gamergate. That's going past kicking a hornet's nest into taking a big ol' bite out of it.
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Apr 29, 2016 23:36
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Luminous Obscurity posted:My other favorite thing about beast was some of its most ardent defenders were exactly the people it was trying to condemn And/or self-admittedly abused, self-loathing, and seriously messed up people self-identifying with the beasts, which was upsetting on basically every level possible.
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Apr 29, 2016 23:55
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Kurieg posted:That's part of the reason that I really hate Beast, and am doing this review. Not to put too fine a point on it but the 4th-9th grade years of school were a very unpleasant time for me. So having a game tell me that I deserved it, or that my feeble attempts to lash out(Which actually ended up getting me the help I needed) made me literally Hitler is infuriating. Yeah, I'm just going to reiterate that seeing a very familiar profile of my former abuser as an example protagonist in a playtest, in which nobody and nothing called them out as anything but a reasonable archetype, made me want to throw everyone involved out of a very high window.
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Apr 30, 2016 00:05
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When I heard that the day it was pre-released, I had to go look for myself. The fact that two of the demo characters are black - one of them a Muslim Somalian, the other being Obrimos (which Mors will get into) - was enough to set at least one guy on 4chan into an apoplectic fit of rage about SJW tokenist cultural marxists etc etc. Now, to be fair, even a significant chunk of 4chan was pointing and laughing at him, but still. You must always remember our hobby is full of lovely people.
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May 4, 2016 03:39
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Mors Rattus posted:Mage: the Awakening, 2nd Edition Oh boy oh boy oh boy now I can post my STUPID WIZARD TRICKS (WARNING: There are a lot of mechanics and math in this post. I probably hosed some/all of it up. Please yell at me with corrections if so.) Mage 2e's casting system has a daunting amount of crunch if you're using all the bells and whistles all the time. Lord knows it took me more than a couple reads to get a total understanding of it. However, it trades off the crunch investment with a nigh-infinite number of ways to screw with people like a proper wizard. With Paradox retooled so heavily (and so well) into the new Reach mechanics, the game encourages you to do stupid wizard poo poo far more than the first edition. For instance, in 1e, it was totally possible to use Transform Energy for all sorts of things, but considering that - like most of the rest of Forces - it was Vulgar, you'd only use it when you absolutely had to. Now? Now you can pretty fearlessly cast it and disinfect lab equipment with your headlights, Heaven, or shred out a Slayer solo that turns into a god-damned death ray. Sure, it's still not a particularly good idea to do it in front of a big crowd - 8-again, rote action Paradox pools get real scary real fast, even with just one die - but compared to before, it's a godsend for actually using your drat magic powers. There are a shitload of interesting combinations of the Practices and Arcana, but one of my favorite only requires Forces 4 to pull off. Time, Fate, and/or Space 2+ is gravy, as is having Forces 5, but the trick itself doesn't require them. For the purposes of demonstrating how silly this can get, though, I'll be bringing back an old friend.  Say hello to the Mage Your Mage Could Cast Like. It's been a while. (Two disclaimers: yes, I know, physics and magic don't play together the way that post assumes, I've heard a million times. Second, the following example is the result of me going out of my way to find entertaining ways to break the game in spectacular ways, and a character like this is never going to show up in any real game run by human beings unless they're doing the same thing or have run the game for literal years, at which point balance always goes out the window.) The Mage Your Mage Could Cast Like (or just the Mage for short) has Gnosis 5, Forces 5, Time 2+, Fate 2+, and a poo poo-ton of rotes. The Mage is also, like all sufficiently powerful wizards, a huge douchebag. Sure, he COULD use Forces 5 to break all the atomic bonds in your body at once, turning you into a rapidly expanding ball of superheated plasma, but that's not nearly as entertaining as setting up a good old fashioned Rube Goldberg death machine. Let us posit that a hungry Beast unwittingly beats up the Mage's assistant in order to teach some sort of half-assed lesson about cutting people off in traffic. Upon hearing this, the Mage puts on his robe and wizard hat, and sets off to work. Note: I'll be addressing some stuff Mors hasn't covered yet, but it's mostly self-explanatory. Finding the Beast's abode is trivial enough for someone with the Mage's stats to not even be worth addressing, as is accessing the Beast's garage while they're asleep or out eating puppies. The Mage begins his ritual casting by casting two different iterations of Hung Spell, a Time 2 spell that can hold spells in place, waiting to fire once Hung Spell runs out of duration. He attaches the Fate 2 Attainment Conditional Duration to them as well, increasing how long they last by giving it a condition where they wears off instantly. He chooses "when this vehicle reaches 90 miles an hour" - he knows the Beast is a habitual speeder. Next, Forces 4 spell Rend Friction and the Forces 3 spell Velocity Control. Rend Friction was covered above, but Velocity Control doubles the target's Speed for each point of Potency, doubling each increase with successive points of Potency. You can probably see where this is going already. Mechanics-wise, both Hung Spells are trivial to cast - by spending the free Reach on the spell to turn its duration Advanced, the bonus from Duration being the primary spell factor, the bonus from Conditional Duration, and a rote (+5 dice from, let's say, Subterfuge), we only need one success on fifteen dice to make it last a month. Yeah, its Potency is so low that any mage could sneeze at it and dispel it, but we're not dealing with mages, are we? Rend Friction sadly does not scale its damage with Potency, so we'll just leave it as a bog-standard casting, and staple it to the first iteration of Hung Spell. The free Reach covers the cost to affect a target as big as a car, and the penalty doesn't really matter when it's the only one. Of more interest is Rend Friction, because we're going to be abusing the everloving poo poo out of spell factors. The base pool for the spell is 10 dice - Gnosis 5 + Arcana 5. We automatically add four free Potency due to Potency being the primary spell factor, for a total of Potency 5. This is enough to make our vehicle go from 90 miles an hour to 2880 miles an hour - approximately Mach 4.36. This is faster than the SR-71 Blackbird by an entire Mach number. This is nowhere near fast enough. Let's stack our bonuses. Yantra bonuses cannot exceed +5 after penalties. At Gnosis 5, we can incorporate four different yantras into our spells. We use High Speech (+2), a rote we designed ourselves using an Order skill (+6 dice and the rote quality), our Dedicated Path Tool (our wizard hat [yes you can do this], -2 to Paradox pool and +1 to spellcasting), and some Supernal runes scrawled under the hood (+2 dice, spell instantly fails if they're destroyed). Additionally, we can extend our ritual casting time from half an hour to three hours to get five more dice. This gives us 21 rote dice, 6 of which must be used to offset penalties. We also have three free Reach to mess with. One of these points of Reach immediately goes into the Scale factor, allowing us to sink two dice into letting us cast this on a sedan. This leaves us with 19 dice. 18 dice immediately go into adding nine Potency. This may sound like a preposterous amount, but by spending Willpower, we can still roll a four-dice pool with the rote quality, which is a 94% to succeed. If that makes you too jittery, six dice rote is nearly 98%. We spend our two remaining free Reach on making it harder to counterspell, because making someone try to counter a Potency 14 spell isn't a big enough "gently caress you," and making it Advanced duration, because we want the shrapnel to keep going for an hour. The keen-eyed among you may note that we never got any extra Reach, and didn't cast this spell in front of mortals. These spells will not cause Paradox, unless it is checked for when Hung Spell expires, in which case it's still going to be a chance die thanks to our Dedicated Tool. His task complete, the Mage heads back home and watches via scrying window as the Beast gets into his car in the morning, gets on the highway, and immediately starts speeding up to 90 miles an hour. The second the engine rolls over to 90, the spells fire. First, his car accelerates from 90 miles an hour to 1,474,560 miles an hour - approximately 1912 times the speed of sound, enough to circle the world a little less than once a minute, and fifty-two times faster than the highest re-entry speed ever recorded for something that survived re-entry. Then Rend Friction kicks in. Something traveling 1,474,560 miles an hour is going about 410 miles a second. 410 miles a second is 721,600 yards a second. A turn in Mage is about three seconds long. Our Beast's car suffers one point of damage for every three yards it travels, thanks to Rend Friction. In the span of three seconds, the Beast suffers the g-forces of accelerating to Mach 1912. The car, meanwhile, suffers 721,600 points of damage - enough to instantly destroy forty thousand cars of Structure. Any microscopic pieces of shrapnel that miraculously survive fly far enough to go from Dunnet Head, Scotland to Zurich, Switzerland. If any of the Beast is left, it is catapulted out of the explosion at Mach 1912 to bounce on the pavement (and more than likely the ocean, soon enough.) Even assuming the car does not explode into a boiling cloud of plasma, an shrapnel doesn't obliterate all the cars nearby, this is going to be more than a minor interruption of the morning commute of most of the county. But hey, the Mage certainly taught that Beast a thing or two.  And then every mage in the tri-state with Time retroactively blows you off the face of the Earth as you start the ritual to set this up Daeren fucked around with this message at 00:53 on May 10, 2016 |
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May 10, 2016 00:50
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I've seen several people really mad that PCs can get access to time travel before archmastery but I think that's actually cool as hell. I love the explanation for the mechanics of time travel the arcana gives - they're easy enough to grasp as opposed to, oh, say, Continuum, Gnosis 5 is not trivial to get, and even then, you can actually stop time travel shenanigans by noticing the massive anomalies in Mage Sight and following them to wherever you can dispel/gently caress with the effect.
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May 14, 2016 22:16
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Mors Rattus posted:My personal favorite thing is the explanation of how time travel works in the present. Guy A casts a spell that launches him into the past, with a duration of one hour. Here in the present poo poo changes, but for one hour any Time mage can see it happening and protect things they don't want changing or try to dispel and make it so the guy changes nothing. Yeah, one of the arguments I saw was that someone could kill you without you being able to do anything by murdering your ancestors, but I'm fairly sure that'd make a screamingly obvious Time anomaly around you and literally everything you own, so the plot hook of "someone is trying to murder your grandpa, you have [x] time to stop it" is actually one I am glad can exist. And like, yeah, you can do that to Sleepers or other supernatural entities, but I'm fairly sure murdering someone's ancestor is going to have Unforeseen Consequences for you if the ST has half a brain.
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May 14, 2016 22:32
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Count Chocula posted:What's stopping nMage from turning into Doctor Who, with a bunch of Time/Space Archmages zipping through the past on the non-TARDISes that they can explicitly create? Or is there an NPC faction that does that? By and large, not much. The big counterbalance is other archmages punching them in the throat if they screw around too much. Archmages follow the Pax Arcana, which is basically a gentleman's agreement to not gently caress around with the fabric of reality (or mundane affairs) too hard too often, because all the other archmages (and the Exarchs, in some situations) will come down on the offender like a ton of bricks when there's a breach of decorum. Besides, even mages around Gnosis 4 or 5 tend to be...detached from the frame of reference most humans have. Archmages are at the point where they don't really even think about screwing around like Doctor Who unless it's directly serving one of their often incomprehensible Obsessions or motivations that don't have to do with seeking transcendence from the Fallen World.
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May 16, 2016 03:12
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unseenlibrarian posted:The NWOD Changeling game I've always wanted to play in/run has basically been along the lines of that 'famous missing people' entry for Banestorm. A bunch of Lost who were famous for vanishing mysteriously. D.B. Cooper, Amelia Earhart, Ambrose Bierce, Glen Miller, etc, etc. who've now made it back to earth and have to adapt to life in some rural freehold to avoid everyone noticing them. All, weirdly enough, have the exact same Keeper, who had a bit of a fixation, let's say.
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May 20, 2016 21:15
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Tasoth posted:I've been drawing monsters for the past five months as a personal project. I could not pass up drawing a hordeling. That Trogdor arm with a bowie knife is good poo poo.
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May 21, 2016 05:06
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Mors Rattus posted:It'd be great if that were mechanically relevant in any way to Geist. Yeah, the problem with Geist is that for all its fluff, the mechanics have absolutely nothing to hard-compel people. Vampires need blood, for instance. The other lines have a bunch of soft leverage as well - hell, that's basically what all the fluff serves to do, give ideas and impetus to player action. Geist has...basically none of that. It has some suggestions, sure, but when you reach for the actual mechanical tie-ins for that it talks about, you either grab a handful of nothing, or a handful of half-baked, fiddly, incredibly easy to abuse mechanics. It really suffered from White Wolf getting bought out right in the middle of it being written, as far as I remember. There's an excellent game in there, but if they do a Geist 2e, it'll be more a rewrite than an update.
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May 24, 2016 22:52
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MonsieurChoc posted:There's a group of vampires who worship the God-Machine in one of the Requiem books. They get answers to questions they haven't asked yet. Which is cool and all, but if they don't ask the question in time really bad stuff starts to happen. They're the Holy Engineers and they are the best loving covenant.
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May 24, 2016 23:24
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Zereth posted:I like how the God-Machine is also completely orthogonal to the Mage cosmology. Can Mage Sight even find hidden Infrastructure, or would a Mage need the relevant merit from Demon to find that poo poo? Mage 2e has a single reference to Demon while discussing rules about interacting with other templates, and the word might be referring to one of the other types of demon. Otherwise it very, very pointedly fails to mention the God-Machine in any way, shape, or form, and I am almost certain this is intentional. RAW, you could probably infer the presence of Infrastructure with Space, Time, and maybe Forces Sight, but that'd likely just give you an incomprehensible "poo poo's hosed, captain" error message when you look at a bunch of folded space-time where Burger King should be. I'd wager that if the average Mage learned about the God-Machine they'd poo poo a brick, then instantly get an Obsession relating to it and get their fool rear end killed by poking their nose in the wrong piece of Command and Control Infrastructure.
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May 24, 2016 23:52
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Kurieg posted:Family Dinner This is what I was talking about when I said I had my own thoughts. Family Dinner near-singlehandedly destroys the game's attempts to do an actually interesting experiment with mechanics via Satiety, and once Kurieg goes over Satiety's rules, I'll start posting about why.
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May 25, 2016 18:01
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Count Chocula posted:I need to run that. You are the first person I have seen in fifteen years to try to use fjord-ing as a joke with a straight face. And isn't it fnord anyway?
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May 26, 2016 01:59
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Tasoth posted:So this is my first contact with Werewolf: The Forsaken and I want to work out some logic about it and beast. You'd think so, wouldn't you!
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May 28, 2016 02:15
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Kavak posted:And it works, though it's best if you have guys in Dalu (Lon Chaney) shooting it at the same time. In the first edition, it was actually a sucker's game to ever go full wolfman, because going Dalu and using a giant gun/weapon was far more effective and came without the downside of uncontrollable berserker rage. In 2e...well, Gauru is a hell of a lot more effective now.
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May 29, 2016 04:32
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Kellsterik posted:The day-to-day Werewolf duties as described are sounding pretty...reactive? It's usually ultimately about "fixing" a place and returning it to the correct normal condition. I keep seeing this stock example of "physically and spiritually cleaning up the slums of drugs and violence and corruption" when I hear Werewolf being described. I can totally see that as being an argument, but there's also a lot of proactive hooks in the system/fluff. By default, though, packs are often seen as reactive entities - they maintain or attempt to create the status quo in their territory, however they define the status quo. The other end of the spectrum is when a pack decides to go on a road trip to hunt something down, or pre-emptively pursue the Sacred Hunt for their own reasons. E: Also the Pure are 100% revanchist reactionaries in terms of wanting to go back to the Good Old Days, when they could just eat people and sort them into nice little breeding farms to make more proper werewolves.
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May 29, 2016 23:50
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Just Dan Again posted:The longer the Forsaken 2e review goes, the more I want to revisit it. My friends and I played just enough Apocalypse to be thoroughly confused at what we were supposed to be doing in Forsaken. It sounds like the new edition is more clear about what the general idea is going to be: grow your territory, fix its problems, and walk the hundred tightropes that define life as a werewolf. The big problem I still see was pointed out by somebody else a little while ago- it all seems very reactionary. I'm looking forward to seeing if there's any GM advice on how to run a chronicle with a clearly defined purpose rather than a sandbox. While I can't remember off the top of my head if the storyteller section talks about it directly, I can think of a hundred and one ways to give a pack a solid purpose. Once Mors reaches the Idigam, for instance, you'll have a small mountain of inspiration. E: and yeah, Forsaken 2e is a vast improvement to 1e in terms of focus, among other things.
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May 31, 2016 03:56
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Count Chocula posted:I've heard a bit of Planescape slang in Australia, but I think they both come from cockney and pirate slang. Nah, Planescape was so popular in Australia that it crept into pop culture, funny enough. Ettin can back me up on this.
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Jun 1, 2016 02:20
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