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Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
The whole "everyone in America carries guns and there are literal high noon duels in the streets" is in large part what I was thinking of when I said Brave New World was one of the dullest games I've ever read. Maybe dull isn't the right word...perfunctory? Stuff like this is just kind of slopped in there without any real thought or care. There's literally a dueling culture in 1999 America? Guns are all over the place and the average person goes around open carrying? So what's this mean for Joe and Jane Average in dystopian dictatorship America? What's this mean for you the GM and your games? The only real answer is just a big ol' shrug, like yeah, Matt Forbeck had all these disparate ideas but no real way to connect them into a cohesive or interesting whole...so he just sort of threw them in anyways.

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Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
I never owned this book so this is the first time I've ever heard that Matt Forbeck thought it was a great idea to make a Japanese-American journalist NPC and call him the Yellow Journalist. That's a special breed of classy right there. Oh and also the Unabomber's here too I guess, seriously what the gently caress.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Jesus, I'm not a Pathfinder fan in the slightest and even I don't have a hate-boner for it that huge.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Asimo posted:

I don't really hate the game, it's fine for what it does, but I do have a big issue with a certain part of the fandom for it who were all "it's the new D&D 4e!" before its release despite the fact the game has literally nothing in common mechanically with 4e beyond the usual fantasy elf stuff. 13A is a somewhat loose and narrative game, while 4e was a fairly tightly designed and tactically heavy combat game.

I don't hate 13th Age either, I'm just not sure why I'd want to play it over virtually any other game. If I want tactical crunch I'd rather play 4E or Strike-obligatory-exclamation-point. If I want something freewheeling I'd probably go with Fate. Something more abstract but still with a pleasing amount of crunch? Spellbound Kingdoms looks like it fits the bill.

13th Age is a d20 elf-and-dwarf game in a market absolutely saturated with them, and after playing it I can't identify anything it does notably better than any of those other options, and it also makes some of the same old mistakes that characterise d20 games. I mean, we're talking about a game that literally gave Fighters fewer skill points "for tradition's sake" in the earliest draft.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Count Chocula posted:

Overwatch has Soldier 76, who is a Call of Duty soldier in a game with a space monkey, a healer DJ, and a robot ninja. He's explicitly designed to teach new players the game, and I used him that way yesterday. Dark Souls has the pyromancer. Tons of games have starter characters or classes. Tons of games have starter warrior classes or whatever.

As someone who's been playing a shitload of Overwatch since it came out, categorizing Soldier 76 as "the dumb newbie class for newbies" is frankly pretty shortsighted. His origin may be kinda jokey "hey, what if we made a CoD/Halo shooter character?" but there's more actual tactical depth and learning how to play him well and maximize his abilities than there is to be found in any "obligatory basic Fighter for plebs" class, and also lol if you think new players don't overwhelmingly gravitate towards the hitscan sniper that's all about scoring sweet headshots, dual shotgun guy in a skull mask, the cowboy with the ability to melt any other hero in the game whose ultimate ability is "if I wait for about two seconds I can wrack up triple/quad kills and the play of the game," or Bastion, gimme a fuckin break.

Like, I'd actually planned to bring up this exact example when I got back from work only to say that Soldier 76 is a great example of a class that is, compared to everyone else in the game, "mundane" in theme but not really mundane in execution...he's basically a tough guy with an assault rifle in a game full of mecha pilots, moon apes, robots, ninjas, and all kinds of crazy exotic stuff, but his abilities and the things you can actually do with them mean that he isn't the same sort of "turn your brain off and spam basic attacks/negotiate with the GM in the Theater of the Mind" approach that most tabletop RPGs take with your common variety basic martial types. "Hold shift to sprint" seems like a pretty laughable ability to give a character in a wacky game like Overwatch until it turns out that he's the only person in the game that's figured out how to run faster which actually gives him the ability to flank from avenues you'd usually only expect dedicated skirmishers to come from, his ability to deploy healing fields that anyone on your team can make use of turns him into an effective off-support capable of reinforcing groups under attack and rallying them instead of everyone either dying or being pushed back to scramble for health packs, and despite literally being an aimbot his ultimate ability still requires actual skill to use effectively. Unlike your common variety fantasy heartbreaker fighter, Soldier 76 fulfills multiple roles and requires actual player skill to get good at instead of simply skill at charop to figure out how to maximize your Trip quotient before spamming it over and over.

edit; like the idea that new players are going to pick up a game and go "woah, I don't want to be overwhelmed, I'd better pick the most pedestrian, boring-looking option available to get some practice in first" is predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature or naive optimism, I can't tell which. Like no they loving don't, new players gravitate towards the coolest looking poo poo first. That's like saying that every person who picked up Mass Effect et al for the first time went for the basic Soldier class right away, no they didn't, they went Vanguard so they could shoulder-tackle people into next week because that's so loving awesome.

Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Jun 5, 2016

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Also Overwatch has come into existence in a day and age where unless you've literally never ever played so much as a single hour of a contemporary FPS, perhaps one of the most successful and popular video game genres for many years running now, chances are you don't need a basic dumbed down character to walk you through the concepts of aiming your gun and shooting people. Of course Blizzard isn't going to deliberately snub those brand new gamers for whom Overwatch is their first foray into FPS/competitive shooters, but if we're assuming that prominent characters have an influence on who new people are likely to default to then Soldier 76 is at a minimum in terms of being a touted part of the Overwatch Brand Experience, it's Tracer and maybe Winston who get the most facetime (Tracer is even on the box art) and if someone does a casual search on what this Overwatch thing is about they're going to run into people talking more about McCree the cowboy and Bastion the robot that transforms into a turret than they are the guy with an assault rifle.

In my admittedly not world-spanning experience with TRPGs, what I've seen happen is new players come to the table, seem overwhelmed by options initially, and then someone else will suggest to them that they should play a simple character and the new person, wanting to get along, agrees to doing so, but I've never once encountered someone who was like "hey I'm new so please give me the most simplistic, non-interactive option you have until I can wrap my brain around the complex notion of pretending to be a wizard."

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
I think it's pretty fuckin lovely that the last three or four pages of this thread have been more about people complaining about how people post than people posting reviews of games and I would rather see More Rattus transcribe whatever he wants in whatever detail he feels sufficient than someone getting increasingly bent out of shape because somebody was insufficiently critical of Pathfinder for the tastes of the self-appointed F&F police. Seriously, I don't even like Pathfinder myself but gently caress off.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Also the issues with Beast and Bellum Maga aren't even necessarily ones that involve the punching up, down, or sideways thereof. A large part of it is that they co-opt legitimate issues then turn around and make the ostensible "heroes" (not capital-H Heroes) repugnantly monstrous and vile, so much so that they warp back around into effectively portraying the minorities and their struggles the way someone on a smear campaign caricaturing such people and beliefs would. Beasts are supposed to be stand-ins for persecuted minorities, and Beasts are also abusers draped in abuse apologia all of which is presented as objectively right and good by the author. Do you really think that GLBT people searching for a game that speaks to their inner selves want something that enables them to pretend to be stalkers and abusers, or at best petty health inspectors and sadistic assistant principals? These games aren't affirming and empowering, they're pathetic and petty and frequently run contrary to the ideals they cheaply drape themselves in, oh and they're pretty gross in places too.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Also talking about how "RPGs are great and imaginative and isn't it good fun to pretend that the depression you feel is like part of some dark magical metaphysical reality," isn't Changeling: the Dreaming at the top of White Wolf's "psychiatrists are evil and want to lobotomize brainrape you into being a drooling conformist drone" charts? Because maybe when you're a teenager in high school and feeling generally lovely the way most teenagers in high school do that resonates on some level, but personally I find the pervasive vilification of therapy and psychiatric care as being some gruesome fate worse than death to be pretty loving stupid, short-sighted, and quite possibly harmful since I've known plenty of people who suffered from things like depression and PTSD who adamantly refused to go and get any sort of treatment because "those pills just turn you into a zombie." Meanwhile these days in the actual real world we have regular outbreaks of diseases that were formerly on the decline but are now experiencing resurgence because a bunch of B-list celebrities and self-appointed experts have convinced a whole lot of people that doctors are evil and want to infect their kids with the autism.

edit; before someone says anything no I'm not blaming the rise of antivaxxers on C:tD, simply using it as an example of why the whole "the real world is out to get youuuuuu" message doesn't exactly appeal when I can see exactly what that sort of thinking results in, and apparently it's kids with measles. No thanks.

Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 10:07 on Jun 7, 2016

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Bedlamdan posted:

The fact that so many people are willing to buy into Beast as written does show that what is supposedly a demented parody still has some traction with people.

How many people actually buy into Beast though? Like, the DTRPG reviews as was pointed out are basically the equivalent of those Amazon reviews that read "A+ product for the service, very good of quality and would buy again" that you see spammed everywhere. Are there any Beast actual plays going on right now? Someone running a sweet Beast podcast so we can see what a game is actually like out in the wild? Obviously there are people who'll go to bat for anything and go digging through a comatose teenage girl's stat block to find evidence that she deserved to be "taught a lesson" if you know what I mean, but there's a difference between the sort of person who likes to argue that Star Wars' Empire is actually a noble force for stability and order and an actual fandom.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

theironjef posted:

With the world descriptions in the core book the retcons all appear to be in the same flavor of writing out egalitarian multi-racial societies in favor of various factions of white humans with fun to draw robots.

I don't think that's a racism thing mind you, I just think the art team was pretty limited early on. Ramon Perez was such a great addition to this staff.

And yet the skull-loving faction with policies of xenophobia, conquest, and extermination of the "impure" gradually morph over time from clear-cut antagonists to hard men making hard decisions that would bring a tear to John Ringo's eye so I dunno.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

potatocubed posted:

Next Time: Pre-Statted Antagonists. In which we put a police officer and a peregrine falcon in a cage and see which one comes out alive.

Go on...

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Halloween Jack posted:

Greg Stolze's Progenitor has a great alternate history, but I think Greg Stolze's Godlike is even better.

Having read both I'm kind of curious why you feel that way, because one of the themes behind Godlike was that the war was a bigger thing than even people with weird superpowers and things wound up playing out more or less as they did in the real world with only minor differences. I mean, I can't say that an alt-history is to be judged purely on how crazy and far out there it gets, but a lot of Godlike's timeline isn't really even alternate history so much as just history.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Count Chocula posted:

I'm not being a Devil's Advocate, and I tried to avoid saying STEMlord (too much). I just like what I like. oMage and oChangeling -at least how I saw them - are about weirdo artsy kids and hippies and outcasts of all stripes banding together, and getting power from what makes them different. The M20 review, and the general Technocracy wank in this thread, seemed really hostile to that. I know that, in real life, the scientists world view is more correct than the hippie/magickal world view 99% of the time. I've lost friends defending science! In the real world, being great at words and art and symbolism makes you less than useless compared to knowing how math and physics and all that boring stuff work.

But RPGs are FANTASY. They're explicitly happy pretend funtime. Some of the games I defend (parts of) like Beast and Bellum Magica have harmful subtext - but at least they're punching UP. But some just say 'hey, those guys that rule the real world? That rigid paradigm of solid objects and linear time? You can imagine a world that isn't that. You can pretend that the depression you feel in shopping malls has metaphysical reality. You can play somebody who can change the world by being stylish and knowing the right words and the right place to say them.'
It's as valid as imagining that the FBI had fancier guns and legitimate targets to use them on.

Count Chocula posted:

Look, I'm gonna dispense with the philosophy and politics (tho I can imagine Demons calling anyone who sides with the God Machine as 'Statists'). The God Machine is the coolest thing in the nWoD by a wide margin, and gamers have always sided with that, even if it's Rifts Coalition Nazis or the Drow.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

"These lovely games that pretend to be about fighting the man are actually awesome, something something STEMlord Technocracy wank."

"gently caress off, the cosmic embodiment of uncaring oppression is the coolest thing ever!"

But no really guys, I'm not just a devil's advocate because

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

How to tell that the guy who writes your captions is phoning it in.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
There's a difference between a crunchy system and a lovely system is the thing, they aren't mutually inclusive. Not everything has to be done in Fate, but having actually played Rifts before I can assure you that anyone singing the praises of that system is doing so through rose-tinted glasses as thick as Coke bottles because it's unmitigated dogshit even for someone who wants to sit down and masturbate to character generation for six hours.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Even by the standards of nerd tat, that shirt is incredibly pathetic.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Count Chocula posted:

As a Northerner born and bred, I'd uncritically believe any of those stories about the Deep South.

As someone who grew up in the south and went on to spend more than half my life in the Pacific Northwest I can assure you that despite Hollywood's predilection towards giving every corrupt small-town sheriff a southern accent regardless of where they're stationed that the south doesn't have a monopoly on racist, reactionary, or downright crazy people.

My mother grew up in rural Alabama in the 60s-70s and actually did (and still does) collect books on things like herbalism and witchcraft as a hobby and as far as I know she was never accused of being a witch either in earnest or by someone wanting to tarnish her character.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
There was an X-Files CCG back in the day because of course there was, there was a CCG of anything companies could get a license for.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Count Chocula posted:

Ironically, I feel like it's the one supernatural show that Unknown Armies wouldn't work for.
The setting, I mean. The system with its Obsessions and Triggers would work perfectly.

That's easy to explain, it's because Unknown Armies posits an entirely humanocentric cosmology. There aren't any sinister aliens behind the scenes, no reptile-men pulling the strings, no immortal vampire lords, every bit of weirdness that happens, every magical conspiracy, every pivotal decision, is down to people. Even demons in Unknown Armies aren't like demon demons from hell, they're basically the unruly and occasionally unhinged ghosts of people. There's a reason that the tagline for UA is "You Did It."

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Halloween Jack posted:

Wasn't one of the principal NPCs a very, very well done Mechanomancy project?

Yeah, one of the sample NPCs in some book was basically a clockwork human-looking robot that a Mechanomancer poured every last one of his memories into and turned her sentient in the process. There are other examples of Mechanomancers creating human-seeming automata including the old guy's wife in the Prison Break one-shot adventure but I'd note that this sort of thing is again due entirely to people doing it rather than cosmic intelligences or grey aliens from space.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Am I misremembering or doesn't Aces & Eights have detailed subsystems for things like standing trial, I seem to recall a writeup where there was an example of someone's character being put on trial for some crimes and there was like an actual Old Timey Western Courtroom minigame.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Yep, turns out I was right.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Fossilized Rappy posted:

A bit late responding to this, but David Pulver totally loves anime and you're right that it's not surprising at all to see him involved with it. The settings he may be most famous for (Reign of Steel, Technomancer, and Transhuman Space) may not be anime on the surface, but he tends to have little things sneak in anyway, even if it's just in the inspiration biographies. He was also one of the writers of BESM, like you said, and he wrote the very anime-inspired GURPS 3E book GURPS Mecha.

For example, David Pulver is the guy who never passes up an opportunity to put catgirls in whatever he writes.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

wiegieman posted:

One reason not to put the Nazis in anything is that there's really no way to have them in without either directly confronting or deliberately avoiding the very large number of people the murdered in cold blood.

Honestly this holds for both theaters, the Japanese were pretty awful too.

Turns out war kind of sucks.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
A world where all terrain is mentally shaped by people is Feng Shui's Netherworld.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Fossilized Rappy posted:

Adventure 3: Sahudese Fire Drill
Tagline: "Tired of the same old adventures? Here's a change of pace. Babysit a hundred screaming Sahudese while their clan leader visits Megalos. All you have to do is keep them safe and happy – while they tear the city apart . . ."

Wow. Of all the things I would have never expected to find in a GURPS sourcebook, an entire chapter of someone's Joe Jitsu fanfiction is certainly somewhere at the top of the list.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
I'm going to disagree with Bieeardo's post somewhat and say that yeah, I am actually surprised by Sahudese Fire Drill in the sense that when I think egregious and gobsmacking levels of racism that sound like they came from a Dice Clay sketch I don't generally think Steve Jackson Games. Maybe I'm just ignorant of the other completely out-of-left-field ironically racist adventures that SJG has published over the years that I've simply never heard of, but my experiences with GURPS have led me to believe that it's mostly known for its encyclopedic and somewhat dry and mathy sourcebooks on a variety of subjects, not oh golly me so solly.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Davin Valkri posted:

I'm guessing that's because military themed video games have been on the ups for the past two decades. Or maybe "military" themed, depending on how charitable you feel.

Even then, video games haven't really flirted with serious crunchy strategic/tactical milsim stuff for a good long while, most of the military-themed games you get these days are bombastic first-person shooters about Tier Beyond One Operators operating operations on terrorists and/or Russian ultranationalists (or in one case the People's Republic of North Korea).

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Cold City is actually a really neat little game. For one thing you don't really get too many "directly post WWII" RPGs, and for another thing while you might be inclined to think that oh, it's another alt-history game where the Nazis had super-science ho-hum, the game makes it abundantly clear at multiple points that not one bit of this super-science actually helped them in the slightest, and furthermore it's probably not going to be very helpful to any of the other world powers currently politicking and cloak-and-daggering each other over it. It's also a game where the more trust someone has in you, the harder you can betray them if (or when) you finally decide to, which is a neat little mechanical gimmick but at the same time makes for a bit of a balancing act as far as "how do I run this" goes because it's not quite to the levels of Paranoia where you're overtly trying to gently caress everyone else over, ostensibly you're all working together, but at the same time various pressures from home are strongly encouraging you to put your country and their cause above that of the RPA. With the right group this can be great, with the wrong group I can see it getting kind of messy in that way interparty conflict often gets.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Doresh posted:

I also applaud them for not going all "OMGWTF Nazi super weapons are AWESOME!". You'd think they would've actually won the war with all their UFOs powered by occult technobabble.

(Man, I'll never get over that stupid Nazi UFO documentary I saw once...)

Well the various global powers certainly seem to think that the Nazi's many weird science experiments have the potential to be awesome, but the book goes to great pains to illustrate that no, it would be for the best if everybody just left that poo poo alone but the Cold War is in the process of ramping up so rational policy-making is going to go out the window because you can't let there be a shoggoth gap.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Comrade Gorbash posted:

I'm assuming this game namechecks Stross' A Colder War? I mention it because it literally has a line about a shoggoth gap ;)

I can't remember if it explicitly mentions that story or not but it's definitely in the same ballpark, though Cold City takes place in an earlier era than Stross' story does.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Ego Trip posted:

Stross also has The Laundry Files, which also touches on Weird Nazi Science.

The Nazis were about to finish a project that would have won the war, technically. They weren't actually all that skilled, they just burned a lot of resources. Also the Ice Giant they wanted to summon would have eaten the universe over the next 70 years or so. The main character visits a universe where they succeeded, and he spends a few moments watching the stars go out.

The Day After Ragnarok also posits what turns out to be a pretty amusing take on the whole Nazi Occult Doomsday project when the Nazis manage to instigate Ragnarok...that is the literal actual Ragnarok, not just a fancy codename...and when Jörmungandr the Midgard Serpent emerges from the oceans to herald the beginning of the end the Allies drop the atomic bomb straight into its eye and kill it. This winds up having a few knock-on effects like massive tidal shifts and rising sea levels, degenerate serpent-spawn born from Jörmungandr's blood, that sort of thing, but it's one of the only examples I've seen of a post-abortive-apocalypse game.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Nessus posted:

This looks sweet even if it's a bit too Brit-sniffy for my own personal tastes (though I see explicitly why they did that). Hope their stuff talks about the USSR, and I've always thought you could get a similar effect to such a game by staging something just after the demise of Stalin, since the ol' :ussr: Oppressometer dialed back considerably (if not... to the point of becoming nice) after old Joe died.

Wellllllll I have good news and bad(?) news because Day After Ragnarok does indeed spend some pagespace on the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the interrupted Ragnarok but Uncle Joe is still alive and kicking at the time the game takes place. The book certainly doesn't really try to downplay Stalin's penchant for atrocity (quoth the book, "Between famines, purges, and the War, the Soviet population, even including the new annexed territories, is only 170 million") and the USSR has only weathered the Serpentfall in large part due to the aid of the Narts, primordial giants of Ossetian myth whose ancient lore has helped protect the land from the worst of the environmental aftereffects. Stalin "commands" them, being part Ossetian himself, but the book implies that they're keeping their own council and that their paths may not be intrinsically linked to that of the Soviet Union.

I guess it's up to you whether this falls into the same sort of bin as Nazi Wunderwaffe Wank in elfgamifying real historical perpetrators of unfathomable atrocities, but less ink is spent talking about Stalin learning sorcery and more about the USSR's geopolitical situation in the aftermath of a world-shaking near-apocalypse, and while not everything is covered in the same amount of detail comparing and contrasting The Day After Ragnarok with something like the Brave New World WWII sourcebook, Ragnarok does a much better job of giving you a top-down overview of a post WWII alternahistory world that involves more than like America, Germany, Japan, and maybe Britain. It helps that Ken Hite is the lead author.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Nessus posted:

That does sound pretty sweet indeed. Hell, I'd like to know what the Japanese are up to, though I suspect it involves ninjas and some degree of orientalism.

What the Japanese are up to is not getting nuked since the Allies used the bombs to kill the Midgard Serpent. This resulted in what Ken Hite referred to as "a wonder" as the Imperial Council and Japanese Army High Command both agreed to count their blessings and take the opportunity afforded by America's withdrawal from the Pacific Theater to rebuild their infrastructure while retaining much of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and are now spending most of their time finding new and inventive ways to loot Southeast Asia more effectively and stepping up their attempts to conquer China.

Like for being a Weird War II kind of alternate history setting, one of the biggest strengths of Day After Ragnarok in my opinion is that it doesn't fall back on the same tired old pastiche and trope stuff you so often see in the genre. In most games of this type you'd expect to see mention of the Emperor of Japan gaining super magical powers and being openly worshipped as a god or something. In Day After Ragnarok? They don't even mention the Emperor at all, he's a non-factor for the most part, what's more important is the armistice between Great Britain and Japan starting to break down as overconfident and increasingly aggressive Japanese commanders turn a blind eye to attacks against Allied shipping and the ongoing conflict in China.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
The book seems to imply that in this case the role of Thor slaying the Midgard Serpent could be said to have been performed by Joseph Westover and the crew of the B-29 bomber Strange Cargo when they rammed the Trinity Device into its skull, in which case the apocalypse hasn't been aborted per se. Fenrir is mentioned in passing in a sidebar on various means and methods which might reduce the levels of Serpent-blight from the poisonous fallout that Jörmungandr left in its wake, namely that perhaps for things to get better the cycle of Ragnarok needs to be completed. Odin gets no mention, though Loki does as one of the names that Nasren, greatest of the Narts, might have been known by had Hitler found him first.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
It's hard to call any one thing Beast does badly its biggest sin since there's so much competition, but certainly one of them is that even if you ignore all the poo poo that's been hashed out across this thread and the WoD thread re: abuse, mangled minority metaphors, and so forth, once you lay the core concept of the game bare it's completely loving dull. None of this stuff about the collective unconscious, teaching lessons, or your ambulatory soul is in any way interesting or engaging, not even in a power fantasy sense because everything's all symbolic and metaphorical instead of literally getting to be a cool mythological monster like almost every other World of Darkness game.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Count Chocula posted:

OTOH if you want to be uncharitable you can play it like that Supernatural episode where the 'dragon' was a guy with glowing eyes who lived in a sewer.

It's this.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
On the other hand, Hunter: the Vigil has detailed rules for creating safehouses and also isn't a dumpster fire of a game.

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Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Count Chocula posted:

Or just write a game where you play videogame bosses, but I think that's already a board game.

Appropriate enough to the discussion, it's also a bad one.

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