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Echo Cian
Jun 16, 2011

potatocubed posted:

I've been meaning to do this for ages, and now I've found the time.



This game makes me think of Exalted, but with clearer themes and better mechanical integration. Too bad the book is even more of a mess than the Ex3 backer copies; it's a great concept so far. Love the idea of Ownership.

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Echo Cian
Jun 16, 2011

Kavak posted:

I'm gonna say that's a pretty strong limb and sit on it with you.

Pretty sure this is actually a bench in a tree, which is pretty rad tbh.


A "leftist revenge fantasy" that involves rampant murder and rape, or a "feminist" revenge fantasy that involves treating all men as evil except for the dudes you gently caress (and that is their only stated redeeming quality) and rape/forcibly impregnate is very much missing the point.

This is the sort of thing you think of in disgust when you see victim blaming or harassment or whatever other poo poo, much like briefly fantasizing about if someone you hate got injured because that would show them. But most people know better than to entertain the idea for more than a minute.

Actually making a game about beating up strawmen, or putting it in a novel, is gross and short-sighted since it means those MRA types can point at it and yell, "See, this is what those feminazis REALLY think!" when... No, it really isn't. And this isn't helping. It's stooping to the level of writers who make women weaker than men statistically because :biotruths:, or reduce them to rapebait fucktoys with no agency to satisfy male fantasy. Doing the same thing in reverse is just as stupid.

Viewing it as a leftist or feminist revenge fantasy that would be "good to see" is lazy at best, suggests some unpleasant things at worst.

Bellum Maga is a steaming pile of poo poo with no redeeming qualities.

Echo Cian
Jun 16, 2011

Count Chocula posted:

Maybe, touched by this truth, the Beasts can use it to either bring meaning into people's lives, get them to enjoy life, remind them that all that jogging and healthy eating won't stave off death so maybe they could enjoy themselves.

I'm not sure what bizarro world you live in where jogging and healthy eating doesn't lead to a probably-longer life, and also somehow precludes living life, but here in the real world I find being unable to walk down a staircase without getting winded to be the opposite of "enjoying myself."


As for Beast, I'm not seeing any way it fits into the WoD lineup. It has too vague an identity, and any attempts to give it an identity just sound like another line that already exists. Its best bet, short of being deleted from existence, is to be a Hunter splat. Because WoD already has 'Heroes,' and they're done much better and have actual nuance! Wow!

Monsters that have to feed? Vampire. Shapeshifters fighting to protect humanity from dreamstuff? Werewolf. Feelings of unbelonging to the world? Changeling. Wrestling with powers that are dangerous to everyone around you? Mage. Another force in your head making you do its evil bidding that you either give in to or struggle against? Heroic Abyssal Exalted.

Even ignoring the fact that the metaphors drawn in the fluff are horrible, Beast has no reason to exist as its own line. It's reinventing the wheel, except the wheel is square. It's splat material at best. Or reflavoring Werewolf to shapeshift into mythical monsters if that's your jam.

Echo Cian
Jun 16, 2011

Spiderfist Island posted:

If I was the lead developer for Exalted, I would 1) separate PC and NPC character structure fully, 2) reduce the amount of charms and steps needed for character creation, 3) decrease most subsystem complexity and add realm management support, 4) include rules for PC Dragonblooded and Lunar Exalts in the core using the freed-up space, 5) introduce a generalized cross-splat charm tree system to replace the Martial Arts trees, and 6) get murdered by the fans and the other line designers.

The rest I either can't speak for or know isn't there (though it should be), but the 3E book has a specific system for creating Quick Characters that simplifies the process dramatically. It still mentions that major NPCs who will be showing up a lot should have full sheets, but most of them can be handled by the QC system. You pick from a range of dice pools for things they're likely to actually do, give them some Intimacies for the PCs to play with, and a handful of charms instead of 15+. It's only time-consuming if you want(/need) to write custom charms.

I'm using it for all my NPCs to see how far it stretches, or if I'll want a real sheet at all.

Asimo posted:

I tried to like it for years as both player and GM, I really did, but the issues with it are just way too deep and impossible to resolve. I hope Exalted 3 fixes some of it, but in the end I suspect it's just shuffling the deck chairs around on the titanic. :smith:

They did fix a lot of it. It's pretty decent! Still has issues but it's playable, even for someone like me who hates numbers.

...Which is to say, I'm already trying (lazily) to make an Atomic Robo hack for the setting because fuuuuuck tracking dice pools and mote pools and hit pools and damage pools and

(It's fine if you have even half a mind for crunch. I just don't.)

Echo Cian
Jun 16, 2011

The Heroes are right.

How is any of this remotely appealing or even playable in concept? They're all variants of sociopaths with no redeeming qualities.

You could make something compelling from the idea of people with hard-to-control powers maybe wishing they could just lose control, because who hasn't had that sort of day? But this isn't that in the slightest, you can't make an entire line out of the concept, and it's probably already covered (and done better) by something else in WoD.

...Actually, you can make a game out of it. It's called Monster Hearts.

Echo Cian
Jun 16, 2011

kaynorr posted:

Given the large dice pools for investigators, even difficulty 5 actions aren't going to be a huge obstacle past Essence 3 or so. The choices are to effectively increase the difficulty past five (probably by ruling that the evidence was hidden with magical levels of Larceny) and/or extending the trail of clues before hitting the payoff (factoring in the once-a-story automatic advance of Mind Manse Technique).

This is from a previous update, but I wanted to mention that in my experience so far, Difficulty 5 is a complete joke at Essence 1 if the characters are even moderately decent at what they do, and anyone running the game should be fully expecting to either complicate matters past it or plan extra bonuses for rolling 9 sux vs Diff 5.

But maybe I'm just seeing some unusually good rolls.

Echo Cian
Jun 16, 2011

BinaryDoubts posted:

I personally like longer write-ups when they're digging into the themes and history of the game - more analysis/criticism than just rewriting spell lists. Much respect to Mors for the amount of time he's dedicated to the thread, but I've started scrolling past his write-ups since I'm just not that interested in the really specific bits and bobs of these games.

I can't read them either even though I've tried. A combination of too much detail to the point that it's basically just transcribing the book (if I wanted to read this much information instead of just getting an overview, I'd get the book) without much actual commentary to make it interesting, massive paragraphs that aren't broken up, and images that are just more words. My eyes slide off the screen every time.

Echo Cian
Jun 16, 2011

Poltergrift posted:

I know it's been done many times, and everyone has pretty much come to the conclusion that it's pointless, but just to get it off my chest, here's another instance of "how I would fix Beast."

I don't know how well it could be run at a glance but this is a cool idea for something.

Echo Cian
Jun 16, 2011

Oh boy. Ohhhh boy. Narrative structure! I can talk about that!

There's something required to most every story, whether you're writing a Hero's Journey or a Monomyth or whatever else: The protagonist has to do things. They want something, something (whether a person or their own insecurity) is in the way, they must overcome that to get it. It can be mostly navel-gazing. But they nearly always have to be proactive.

What that text tells me is that Beasts aren't supposed to be proactive. They just sit around while the Hero acts, eventually bumbling into them one day for no real reason on the Beast's part, and then the Hero fails (because that's what the game makes them do) and nothing is learned because that explicitly goes against the game's " "themes" ". (How? "Because.")

The story they're writing isn't a subversion. It's a non-story. Beasts are non-protagonists. No wonder there's no clear way to make a hook for a Beast game - the Heroes are the only ones doing anything.

With this, I have a better idea of where this game came from. They wanted to turn the narrative on its head, but they didn't understand or bother to figure out why the narrative (any narrative) is structured the way it is. Thus, they couldn't replace the roles in any way that made sense, or went any deeper than the most basic "the good guys are bad and the bad guys are...also bad, but the good guys are worse for Reasons! Aren't we clever?"

This sentence was particularly telling:

"Part of the compelling aspect of Heroes is that the Beast doesn’t usually have a direct tie to her assailant."

...So what's the compelling aspect of Beasts?


The second quote from that doesn't even make sense with what they put together and shows further complete misunderstanding of the narrative they're trying to twist.

I would also argue that trying to play a game in a conflict-free story method is just asking for failure from the start. That doesn't work for an RP. I also don't think that trying to force a specific pacing (especially by interrupting to play a different game completely, what?) will work for RP. I can see a lot of opportunity for players to get sick of delays and quit out of boredom, if any ST actually lacked enough sense to try and stick with this.

This loving game. :cripes:

Echo Cian
Jun 16, 2011

Midjack posted:

No law says anyone has to provide a paragraph by paragraph breakdown of the books reviewed here. That's kind of become the norm in the last year, but I've found the shorter "here's a game, here's the weird/bad stuff and here's my opinion" reviews that fit in a post or three to be as much fun as the ones that go on for twenty max character posts.

More fun, if anything. If the writer gets bored, the review gets boring, because it means there isn't anything to hold interest for the reviewer or the reader. Personally, my eyes glaze over if something goes on too long.

If it's interesting, say why it's interesting. If it's stupid, go to town. If it isn't either, then mention it exists but otherwise don't bother with it.

Echo Cian
Jun 16, 2011

Hostile V posted:

So in a sense of Good Free Stuff, Dissidents get the best of it. We'll go further into the Traits in a bit, but the +1 to Willpower is very good and they have access to 4 Traits that have no downsides and have a full range of abilities. They make good social characters, which They don't get Hacking for free, but they do get it for cheap. I can't really list the others in any sort of ranking because they all have...issues.

Seems you skipped out on your sentence. :v:

Between these tables and your warning in the first post, this is going to go places.

Echo Cian
Jun 16, 2011

Hostile V posted:

Yeah to be honest I've largely given up trying to adhere to any semblance of the timeline and am just making the characters I want to make for this whole thing.

I would actually like to see a similar setting, in a better system, with G-Unit as premade characters and/or important NPCs. Your little touches, like the relationships between the team and NPCs they've rescued, make them far more compelling than this game deserves.

Some aspects of the setting are interesting; they just happen to be the parts that were stolen from better sources (such as Event Horizon) and managed to not get entirely buried under a mountain of poo poo writing. It wouldn't be hard to do it better. The bar can't get lower--FATAL's in the way.

Echo Cian
Jun 16, 2011

I like the idea of a game where the goal is to find a solution to a plague while things have gone to poo poo and anarchy rules, and the means to do so is kind of awful (even (especially) if it's something other than eating eyes).

...But without kids, or this focus on slavery, or improbable grimdark*, or anything else about this game.


*KidWorld wants to convince me that society as a whole will take less than four years to degenerate almost entirely into a man-eat-kid-eyes world, where the concept of mutually beneficial cooperation barely exists and both kids and adults collectively leap to slavery as a solution, and I'm not buying it.

Echo Cian
Jun 16, 2011

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Presented without comment.



I dare them to point to what was inspired by the Broken Earth series.

(...because a game that actually used those themes would be loving awesome.)

I wonder if any of them even read it.

Echo Cian
Jun 16, 2011

Dallbun posted:

It says there can be three immature owlbears in the lair also, if you wish. In stark defiance of everything I know about baby bears and baby owls, the owlbear cubs “are not very cute,” and they will also attack.

That depends on if they're barn owlbears, because very young barn owl chicks are the likely origins of some Halloween decorations.

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Echo Cian
Jun 16, 2011

Mors Rattus posted:

So far as I know, it's still going.

This doc only has until 2016 but there are more recent entries.

This was a while back, but I double-checked, and the last actual update was the last entry on this list. He's spent two years reposting them. The official LB index ends after the movie and doesn't even include Nicolae: Rise of the Antichrist, so this is the most complete list. (And I just added the posts he's put under that tag since then.)

Last October he was still trying to convince himself to continue. I hope he can, eventually, but I can't say I blame him for having a hard time finding the motivation after 2016...


On-topic, all I've liked from The End is the entry on Gabriel. I might save that. The game is dumb but I always enjoy when those of you who've studied religion have an excuse to speak up. I grew up religious, so naturally I don't know any of this poo poo.

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