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I tend to think most "heavy metal album cover" stuff (which is exactly how I've always thought of it too) is kinda goofy or tacky, but it's definitely not the same order or magnitude of problem as rape ghosts. We're not participating with a culture that normalizes cannibalism. I'd much rather have a game or a game line that contained cannibal skin thieves and corpse catapults or whatever the hell Exalted has than the other thing; I could sit at a table with someone who thought the former was cool (and I do, I've got a friend or two who eats that poo poo up). A game where the latter was okay being popular forces me to take a long hard look at my engagement with the entire hobby.
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Feb 3, 2014 16:29
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For what it's worth, I think Lilun is in the running for "Worst thing White Wolf ever published." As for goofy and tacky, we are literally (which is to say, figurative) publishing a game where you can play a team-up of Cloud Strife and Vampire Hunter D.
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Feb 3, 2014 16:30
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Stephenls posted:For what it's worth, I think Lilun is in the running for "Worst thing White Wolf ever published." As for goofy and tacky, we are literally publishing a game where you can play a team-up of Cloud Strife and Vampire Hunter D. Yeah there's just too much shonen in Exalted's veins for me not to roll my eyes at it a little bit. I've made my peace with that. Or rather I expect I will as soon as there's a god drat book
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Feb 3, 2014 16:32
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Working on it! I spent 3-4 hours every day all of last week editing a bunch of poo poo that all came in at once.
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Feb 3, 2014 16:34
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PrinnySquadron posted:Wait, is that true for Mnemon? I don't recall anything that portrayed her that way. The artists (thankfully!) forgot that Princess Mnemon is an eternally 16 red-headed beauty. She actually gets older and older in the art as the game moves on, actually. Oddly it wasn't retconned out of the fluff; I just looked and it's still in the text about the fall of the Versino in the Black & White Treatise. Rereading Aspect Book: Earth hunting that down led me to stumble on the line about the Shogunate being a time of incredible peace, which is precisely opposite to how our campaigns depict it because it is right there in the name, Shogunate.
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Feb 3, 2014 16:38
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Calde posted:The artists (thankfully!) forgot that Princess Mnemon is an eternally 16 red-headed beauty. She actually gets older and older in the art as the game moves on, actually. Oddly it wasn't retconned out of the fluff; I just looked and it's still in the text about the fall of the Versino in the Black & White Treatise. It is really quite difficult to get artists to follow changes to a character's look in the text when they have pictures to go on.
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Feb 3, 2014 16:40
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I was less trying to equate cannibalism with, say, Cthulhutech's literal Nazi rape machine and more point out that "titilation" isn't the only reason people shoehorn "mature content" into their games and that everyone who does so thinks they're doing it for totally logical and evocative reasons. I don't think that cannibalism is some sort of instant no-sell or something, but it also seems like Exalted's writers get really, really hung up on stuff like that only to turn around and bemoan it later when future writers/creepy fans wind up running it into the ground or taking entirely the wrong impressions from things.
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Feb 3, 2014 16:41
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Stephenls posted:Raksi is pretty much She-who-must-be-obeyed as well as being The Rakshasa; I think my position w/regards to that in a recent authorial email exchange is "We're never going to get away from that, so we might as well embrace it while figuring out how to make it not horrible." I don't have a problem with cannibalism in and of itself. One of the issues with Raksi was more a sort of circular logic - "How do you know she's savage? She eats babies. Why does she eat babies? Well, because she's savage." Granted, there's a sort of backstory where she's generically mad, too, which doesn't really help. "Because it was in the Mahabharata" has similar issues, but I trust you've thought about this already and can come up with something more interesting.
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Feb 3, 2014 16:52
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Kai Tave posted:I was less trying to equate cannibalism with, say, Cthulhutech's literal Nazi rape machine and more point out that "titilation" isn't the only reason people shoehorn "mature content" into their games and that everyone who does so thinks they're doing it for totally logical and evocative reasons. What counts as mature content in media changes with the times. I was born in 1983, which means I grew up on the tail end of 80s cartoons. Werewolf: The Apocalypse, for all its splatterpunk and unintentional racism in the tribal stereotypes, was mature when you parked it next to after-school specials about the evils of marijuana or the D&D cartoon's network-mandated "The complainer is always wrong" moral. I don't think early White Wolf was being disingenuous or intentionally misleading when it billed itself as "Games for Mature Minds." We look back and it looks tacky, but there was a period of time when almost any attempt to push the existence of sexual crime into the media spotlight in a way that would draw attention, no matter how much it stumbled or used titillation to draw interest, was laudable because before that, it was a topic not raised at all.
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Feb 3, 2014 16:54
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Stephenls posted:
I don't think anyone here has been insinuating that, though you may be talking about something offsite of which I am not aware. I am certainly in the camp that trivializing sexual abuse for cheap characterization or shock value or titilation is pretty vile in a way that lung-machines and portrayals of cannibalism are not. While I do think gratuitous gore is usually unwarranted and juvenile, that is completely different from playing into the worst trends of the culture we both occupy, and I think there is occasionally a place for it. poo poo, it has been my experience that the people implying they're the same sort of wrong are the people who are really just derailing and want everything included because they're not bothered by sexist garbage. I have no problem with one of the four unknown Deathlords knowing a strange capstone of Quicksilver Hand of Dreams that causes him to Freddy Krueger people for a reason no one can remember while they're sleeping, or a charm that copies Don't Look Now and ruin someone's life by giving them premonitions of their own death that cause them to behave erratically, but give you an overwhelming compulsion to kill them when their predicted time comes. I don't oppose an infiltration plot where a Dragonblooded boarding school is to be taken over by the ghosts of the Dynasts who died during intrigues there, and have a debate about whether they need to be stopped from murdering the descendants of their political enemies. I wouldn't mind a Deathlord who has an obsession with collecting ideal specimens of body parts to necrograft into horrors. Tricking someone into being so paranoid they kill their friends for you and end up dying is horrible behavior, and yet I can see it as entirely appropriate in the Abyssal charmset. I just don't want any Exalt type to be one-dimensional, and I'm not really a fan of many charms one couldn't justify by saying the end justifies the means. As for things like pillars of skulls and thrones made out of bones and whips made of your enemy's spinal cord, I think :metal: should be one aesthetic that's present in the Underworld, but I begin to find the Underworld boring if that's universally dominant.
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Feb 3, 2014 16:59
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Stephenls posted:What counts as mature content in media changes with the times. I was born in 1983, which means I grew up on the tail end of 80s cartoons. Werewolf: The Apocalypse, for all its splatterpunk and unintentional racism in the tribal stereotypes, was mature when you parked it next to after-school specials about the evils of marijuana or the D&D cartoon's network-mandated "The complainer is always wrong" moral. I don't think early White Wolf was being disingenuous or intentionally misleading when it billed itself as "Games for Mature Minds." We look back and it looks tacky, but there was a period of time when almost any attempt to push the existence of sexual crime into the media spotlight in a way that would draw attention, no matter how much it stumbled or used titillation to draw interest, was laudable because before that, it was a topic not raised at all. That's true and all and provides context for a discussion of WW products from the 90s, but it's also true that the current discussion started with a preview sent out last year in an attempt to advertise the new edition. It's two decades on, and I'm not sure PC powers themed on sexual assault would be a cool thing to do even in the 90s.
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Feb 3, 2014 17:02
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I don't have a problem with cannibalism in and of itself. One of the issues with Raksi was more a sort of circular logic - "How do you know she's savage? She eats babies. Why does she eat babies? Well, because she's savage." Granted, there's a sort of backstory where she's generically mad, too, which doesn't really help. "Because it was in the Mahabharata" has similar issues, but I trust you've thought about this already and can come up with something more interesting. My ideal version of Raksi is sort of multi-layered. She's savage, but most people living in urbanized societies look at her and go "She's savage because she lives in the jungle like a savage and does all those horrible things that savages who live in the jungle do, like eat babies and gently caress animals." Actually this is not the case. 1) She is not savage because she fucks animals (she doesn't gently caress animals -- she fucks people, as an animal; the consent issues are entirely different, though no less problematic). 2) She eats babies because she's playing to an image. 3) Basically none of this has a causal relationship to living in the jungle, and Creation is full of people who live in jungles and don't get up to any of that bullshit, just Creation has many people in urbanized societies don't live in jungles but do get up to that sort of bullshit. But she is savage. This is a problem, She's a terrible influence on the people living in her sphere of power.
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Feb 3, 2014 17:02
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Flavivirus posted:That's true and all and provides context for a discussion of WW products from the 90s, but it's also true that the current discussion started with a preview sent out last year in an attempt to advertise the new edition. It's two decades on, and I'm not sure PC powers themed on sexual assault would be a cool thing to do even in the 90s. Again, all I can say is we're committed to not using sexual exploitation for titilation -- but even people who seem to take me at my word on that one still go back to the "Haha White Wolf, calling splatterpunk and prurience mature" witticism well, and I don't think that's fair. When Werewolf was new, it was mature in the laudable sense. But White Wolf and now Onyx Path have meant a lot of different things by "Mature." They dropped "Games for Mature Minds" ages ago and now generally just go with "For Mature Audiences." That's (and I think this is obvious in context) a warning label. We all know what mature on a warning label means; it means swearing and heavy metal album cover art. It means "Parents, think twice before buying this for your kids." That's not a misleading use of the term. It's probably not as necessary now as it was back when you could buy White Wolf books in retail stores, but practices change slowly, and even as recently as when Vampire: The Requiem was new, WW was still in Borders and FLGSs, and that warning wasn't inappropriate. I also think we can be "mature" in both the laudable and the warning sticker senses, and I don't think there's a contradiction there. Personally when I work toward making Exalted mature in the sense of actual maturity, I'm talking about portrayal of the effects of economic exploitations on conquered peoples, because that's a topic a lot of escapist fantasy mishandles.
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Feb 3, 2014 17:30
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Stephenls posted:Again, all I can say is we're committed to not using sexual exploitation for titilation -- but even people who seem to take me at my word on that one still go back to the "Haha White Wolf, calling splatterpunk and prurience mature" witticism well, and I don't think that's fair. When Werewolf was new, it was mature in the laudable sense. You might want to add a qualifier to that, really. I mean, I know you mentioned the 'unintentional racism in the tribal stereotypes', but I feel that's a bigger deal than you're making it sound. And given that people like the writers of Werewolf: The Apocalypse have been pillaging the ruins of my people's culture and history for years, it's not as unintentional as you state, nor is that potential lack of intention as comforting as it might sound. When Werewolf was new, my skin was still brown and I still descended from the Noble Savages that Werewolf: The Apocalypse both mourned the loss of and reveled in the slaughter of (for it makes us more noble, you see - we're not figures worthy of veneration unless we've suffered). It was mature in a sense, but only in a sense, and only for a specific audience. I imagine that mature people of the time who might want to tell stories about Injuns would be reading the works of Janet Campbell Hale or Leslie Marmon Silko, or even Louise Erdrich. I believe that Sherman Alexie started publishing at about the same time as Werewolf: The Apocalypse, for that matter. They could even look at actual, non-fiction accounts of Indian life in contemporary times, there were plenty of those in the early nineties. Hell, at the same time as Werewolf: The Apocalypse, you had Jim Jarmusch playing with, skewering, and eviscerating the idea of the stereotypical native (along with many other Wild West stereotypes) in his movie Dead Man. But it doesn't look like White Wolf deigned to do any of that. If they did, it's not evident. I mean, come the gently caress on. They had a white man be the most important member of their Violent Warrior Injun tribe. The other Injun tribe, for those keeping score, was the Mystical Wise Injun tribe. That's embarrassing, even in the nineties. You have to go back a few decades more for it to be even remotely excusable. How do we solve this rift between Red and White? By forgiving a white man and letting him into our tribe, of course. How could the Wendigo be so foolish as to not think of that sooner? It depends on what you mean by mature, really. I see all of that as pretty childish, and not in any meaningful sense more mature in a laudable way than the D&D cartoon. Say what you will about Dungeons & Dragons, but I can't remember it being so consistently imbecilic about an ethnic group that actually existed and still exists. At least orcs are green. Werewolf: The Apocalypse was the first game I played. I was a little kid, who was desperate for any sense of my people being represented in media as anything other than a stereotype. While I'm not of any North American tribe, seeing my northern cousins depicted like the stereotypes I had to see everywhere else was pretty goddamn humiliating anyway. There's nothing mature about that loving game. I don't mean to drag the room down, I really don't. It's just a subject that bothers the poo poo out of me.
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Feb 3, 2014 18:20
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Stephenls posted:...and I just don't see it. poo poo that makes you uncomfortable because it's straight out of a horror movie is not on the same level as poo poo that makes you uncomfortable because it's straight out of the Men's Rights Activism playbook. We're not sticking the latter in, but we're not giving up the former.
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Feb 3, 2014 18:22
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I think there's a few different levels to the argument here which makes sense because people have different things that they feel uncomfortable with. Personally I don't care about Raksi, and I don't have a problem with cannibalism existing in Exalted. I'd really hate to lose that "R" rating. But the thing is, I don't want My Character to have to eat people to perform a basic function of her Exaltation. Especially when other splats can perform that exact same function without eating people. That's one of the major issues with 2E Lunars. Necrotech can be really cool and corpse armies of zombie death things are fun and they should be disturbing but there is definitely a line and "Pregnant Monster That Throws Baby Grenades" crossed the line. e: Honestly I think "Violence against children/Babies" might be the line that people mostly dislike. That doesn't mean bad things can't happen to kids, but things that specifically target children and especially babies should be examined carefully so they don't come off as gratuitous. mistaya fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Feb 3, 2014 |
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Feb 3, 2014 18:26
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MadScientistWorking posted:You do realize that horror often gets criticized because its written in a manner that basically comes straight out of a MRA playbook. The fact that you don't know said criticism even exists is kind of worrying as the only way not to fall into that rut is to be aware of it existing. Hey, my favorite horror movie remains Gore Verbinski's The Ring, and I prefer it to Hideo Nakata's because Rachel carries the whole plot of her movie on her back while Reiko spends hers standing on chairs and screeching like a 50s housewife pointing at a mouse while Psychic Exposition Love Interest does the work. There are huge problems with the way horror handles women and I won't deny them, but that doesn't decrease my enjoyment of horror movie monster aesthetics. As mistaya says, corpse armies of zombie death things are fun and they should be disturbing. Likewise, we talk about heavy metal album covers but some of those can be pretty degrading to women; those are not the album covers I want to steal from. (My objection to Pregnant Monster That Throws Baby Grenades actually looks like this: It's dead flesh, how is it generating new babies? That doesn't play to the themes of the material at all! But I don't think it would be possible to write a pregnant monster that throws baby grenades that plays to any theme worth conveying. Unless... maybe if you were writing a parody of the way the pro-life movement tends to be backed by the same people who vote for cuts to social services for poor families [we've all seen newspaper cartoons about Republicans caring about embryos but not babies], and tying it together with observations about how people of low economic classes are often convinced to vote against their own interests. Not appropriate for Exalted, anyway. Could work in HoL.) BryanChavez posted:You might want to add a qualifier to that, really. I mean, I know you mentioned the 'unintentional racism in the tribal stereotypes', but I feel that's a bigger deal than you're making it sound. And given that people like the writers of Werewolf: The Apocalypse have been pillaging the ruins of my people's culture and history for years, it's not as unintentional as you state, nor is that potential lack of intention as comforting as it might sound. That's all fair, and my only defense of Werewolf: The Apocalypse in this context is basically "The Black Furies, Fianna, and Get of Fenris are terrible, too." And that's a terrible defense and they're not awful nearly to the same degree. Early White Wolf certainly banked on that era's interest in shallow, pop-culture versions of Native American mysticism, and whether Onyx Path should be called on doing it again with the 20th Anniversary Edition is another topic that I'm just going to mosey away from. Stephenls fucked around with this message at 19:01 on Feb 3, 2014 |
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Feb 3, 2014 18:53
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Oh man, the Fianna make me laugh, though. It doesn't take much to start the process of becoming Other. You can be the right skin color, the right religion, from the right continent, but have a silly accent and a history of getting subjugated, and all of a sudden you're an entire tribe of Drunky O'Leprechaun. The Get of Fenris, Teutonic Muscle-Gods (who are maybe racist misogynists, it was never very clear)! The Black Furies, THEY HATE YOUR PENIS. I honestly love Werewolf: The Apocalypse, but I can't run it as anything other than parody. Which is a shame, because a futile war against an impossible-to-defeat enemy is right up my alley. I've always been right on board the very original 'you can't win, only delay the inevitable' thematic content of Exalted. That's really the important thing, though. People are so good at brutally stereotyping even people a little different than themselves. Which is why the obviously Mexica-inspired culture that you guys previewed a bit ago is either going to be so cool, or hilariously shameful, just absolutely the worst. It's going to be interesting, either way.
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Feb 3, 2014 19:04
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I think that preview is pretty much all the coverage Ixcoatli is going to get in the core, but I would not be surprised to see IF YOU gently caress THIS UP SO HELP ME I WILL MURDER YOU in the outline for whichever book inevitably fleshes them out.
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Feb 3, 2014 19:08
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Stephenls posted:I would not be surprised to see IF YOU gently caress THIS UP SO HELP ME I WILL MURDER YOU in the outline for whichever book inevitably fleshes them out. Also since you've got horror fan chops, can the premise of Pontypool be an Abyssal Linguistics (or Performance, or Presence, or Lore) charm? Please and thank you in advance.
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Feb 3, 2014 19:14
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:It's a shame you can't put this in every single outline without blunting some of its impact. It's usually not necessary. Our writers know what they're doing. I think the plans for Ixcoatli are basically "Sort of rear end in a top hat imperialistic expansionists, but no more rear end in a top hat than any of the other rear end in a top hat imperialistic expansionists." Their purpose in the setting is to show off that Creation's beastfolk are people, with all the hopes and fears and triumphs and tragedies and admirable traits and stupid bullshit that comes with being people, so if we make them racist caricatures, then, uh, wow. That will be such a fuckup on so many different levels. Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Also since you've got horror fan chops, can the premise of Pontypool be an Abyssal Linguistics (or Performance, or Presence, or Lore) charm? Please and thank you in advance. You know I have not actually seen Pontypool. I fell out of the habit of watching horror when Saw and Hostel and gore porn hit, and I haven't gotten back in.
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Feb 3, 2014 19:21
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Stephenls posted:You know I have not actually seen Pontypool. I fell out of the habit of watching horror when Saw and Hostel and gore porn hit, and I haven't gotten back in. It's a language virus spread by talking that makes words lose all associated meaning, breaking down communication and driving you crazy as you try to rip out the voices in other people's throats and you become a shambling, non-communicative semi-zombie. It absolutely screams Abyssal Linguistics in a way far beyond "Cast Silence as a Cleric of your Essence level."
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Feb 3, 2014 19:28
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mistaya posted:But the thing is, I don't want My Character to have to eat people to perform a basic function of her Exaltation. Especially when other splats can perform that exact same function without eating people. That's one of the major issues with 2E Lunars. 'Be this specific human being' isn't really a core Lunar function. Lunars having the choice between just being really good at disguise or being able to actually be that person at the cost of doing a horrible thing actually sounds like a place where interesting story could come from. Lunars need disguise charms that will allow them to be very good at pretending to be someone else without eating them, though, and the 'face stealing' needs to be more powerful (perhaps including some element of taking the victim's fate as well as their form, for example.) Setting the baseline to "not eating people" rather than "you must eat people to have an effective disguise" solves the largest part of the problem.
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Feb 3, 2014 19:36
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Kenlon posted:'Be this specific human being' isn't really a core Lunar function. Lunars having the choice between just being really good at disguise or being able to actually be that person at the cost of doing a horrible thing actually sounds like a place where interesting story could come from. Agreed here. Lunars should be absolute monsters at faking taking the appearance of others, even without the cannibalism. EDIT: Oh dear god this thread has turned into a discussion of what Lunar themes and capabilities should be. Is nowhere safe from Meerkat Steals the Spotlight Prana? Stephenls fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Feb 3, 2014 |
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Feb 3, 2014 19:39
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Well we can go back to talking about Solars if you can sneak us any tidbits!  And if the baseline for "Impersonate a human" isn't EAT THEM AND WEAR THEIR SKIN, then that'd be OK with me. mistaya fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Feb 3, 2014 |
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Feb 3, 2014 20:16
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The baseline for disguise remains "Make a mundane disguise and use a dice-adder."
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Feb 3, 2014 20:24
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Lunars should have to eat people to disguise themselves as those people, and also to regain motes of essence.
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Feb 3, 2014 21:49
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Which wouldn't be terrible, but Lunars have 5 whole dice to add. Shapeshifters want to shapeshift, yo. Not put on makeup.  Go ahead and keep eating people if you want to, but make that like, absorbing their memories and intimacies and Fate and stealing everything about that person. Put that deeper in the knack-list and make it give tempting bonuses to lead heroes astray. Right now, Prey's Skin Disguise is the low-essence entry knack to human shape-stealing and it's full on cannibalism. You have to buy 'Cannibal' to get to 'Not-cannibal'. That's a little bit backwards, yo! Shouldn't cannibalism be an extension, a 'power corrupts' temptation? There's a lot of interesting ground within the Sacred Hunt. What happens to animals or people who are hunted? Maybe their spirits are actually taken into the Lunar herself, and the Lunar can learn to consult them, or gain knowledge/training from them? What if Hunting a master of Snake Style let you then learn Snake Style as if you had a tutor because you can draw on the memories of the dead master? What if it was a way to hold a loved one's spirit with you forever, since Lunars are capable of living thousands of years? Could the spirits within the Lunar talk amongst themselves, or see out of her eyes? The Solar Bond doesn't just apply to Solars anymore, so I really hope we see some new synergies between Lunars and their Abyssal and Infernal mates as well.
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Feb 3, 2014 21:52
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wasn't the original idea that Infernals didn't even get Solar Bond? Not that I want that, I like the idea of Bonds.
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Feb 3, 2014 21:58
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I guess I can talk about the conceptual genesis of Ixcoatli a bit. There's not a complex story but I think it's interesting. For a long time Exalted's position on beasmen (or, I guess, we're moving toward calling them beastfolk now) has been "They're people, and in fact fully human, not subhuman savages or an alternate race; anyone in the setting who claims otherwise is just a bigot." I've always thought that was neat. Djala and folks with green hair are the same -- Creation just generally has a wider range of phenotypic variance in humans than Earth does. But this sort of suffers from not having many good examples -- beastfolk tend to show up as raiders and things. Ma-Ha-Suchi's goatmen. You know. So for 3e, right to start out, we wanted to have an interesting, complex new culture that just happened to be made up of beastfolk. But we didn't know what it was going to be. For it to stick it would have to be an interesting enough culture that it could be spun as not beastfolk and people would still like it. And one day Holden said "Hey, what about a culture of great architects and scholars who are a literal Empire of the Feathered Serpent -- an alliance of snakefolk and birdfolk?" And then later we remember that raitons are fuckawesome, and so it became snakefolk and archeopteryxfolk. It's actually kind of cheating -- Exalted already has imperial reptilians who lord(ed) over vast landholdings from step pyramids and who are not nearly as cartoonishly evil as that image implies, in the form of the Dragon Kings. They were even culturally prominent in the area Ixcoatli occupies! But Holden liked the idea and decided to run with it; we'll probably deal with aesthetic redundancy somehow. That's how Ixcoatli ended up on the map in 3e. We're fairly committed to not loving them up, since their whole reason to be there is to be an interesting, complex culture with a memorable visual aesthetic that can grow the setting and serve as a source of both protagonists and antagonists and who just happen to be animal-people. It'd be a terrible failure on our part if we made them a racist caricature of pre-Cortez Mexica -- I imagine whoever ends up writing more about them will at the very least get a copy of 1491 flung at his head. Or her head. (I read that, by the way. Then I bought a copy for my mom. Fascinating book.)
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Feb 3, 2014 22:28
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Stephenls posted:Agreed here. Lunars should be absolute monsters at faking taking the appearance of others, even without the cannibalism. I was always annoyed that you need like 50 knacks to become Alex Mercer as a Lunar. Being able to eat someone should be an early level Lunar thing, but it should be "eat someone and become a security nightmare." So you have this guy who you need to interrogate or his cult will activate a devastating first age superweapon to cleanse the Realm from the lands (as well as thousands of other innocent people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time). Do you use normal interrogation methods and possibly fail? He's a fanatic, after all. Or do you eat him and become him? Do you want to become a monster? And worse yet, do you want to understand his viewpoint? Maybe you'll eat him and you'll decide he was justified after all. And now what? You've killed someone for literally no reason. Lunars are ha-ha-ha laughing tricksters because otherwise, too many of them would cry.
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Feb 3, 2014 22:32
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Stephenls posted:That said, we're committed to treating sexual content more responsibly, but I find it difficult to participate in these discussions because recently we had a whole blowout where it was established that most people consider the inclusion of certain forms of content a moral lapse (and I agree), but now it's sort of being insinuated that things like corpse-engines and cannibalism are the same sort of lapse, like they're comparable to a game about invading a sorceress's tower to rape her, or, ugh, CthulhuTech... Given that I drew a line between the examples I made and Lillun and I never mentioned rape ghosts, I'm not sure where you're getting that impression. The only things I'm equating are the amputee ghost monk orgy in the Lover Clad's writeup along with undead-baby necrotech artillery and cannibalism / zoophilia / baby-eating as a prominent part of Lunars—you know, things that are traditional to the line or that you've never denounced. It would be charitable to call these as stuff out of a horror movie: it just feels squicky and unnecessary. Like, a short piece of fiction about the Lover Clad using someone and destroying them via seduction would be a much more effective way to convey what she's about than going on about amputee group sex. The undead baby necrotech would be camp horror at best. Gating significant power for an entire splat behind cannibalism and zoophilia feels arbitrary and weird, and the baby-eating shtick is taboo enough that it eclipses everything else about Raksi. I don't see any of these elements as being effective in showing the audience something cool and worth talking about. It's possible that I'm part of a queasy/sensitive minority that you're not interested in courting—and I guess that's fair, if unfortunate for me. I just wish that you went for psychological horror rather than shock value. Lymond fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Feb 3, 2014 |
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Feb 3, 2014 22:40
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Well, there'll be plenty of... ...I'm not sure what to call it? Tamer? More vanilla? Less prurient? Less XTREEM?... (Cue link to that Buzz Bunny flash cartoon from ages ago, and its followup.) ...material if you want to stick to that -- the corebook is, I believe, largely free of it. Abyssals will dip into the gothic horror and heavy metal album cover wells, though, and Lunars will retain the potential to become shapeshifting monsters from the depths of oh-my-god -- and you can't just give them that but make it an aesthetic choice and allow anything they could access through it to be accessed in nicer ways. I agree the pregnant zombie shooting baby-bombs is over the top.
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Feb 3, 2014 23:08
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Always w/the Savage talk too, tho. e: for me, I think it's just a question of being tasteful. Horrible things can happen within the boundaries of good taste, but having a white overlord witch ruling over debased dark skinned monkey people/pregnant dead baby zombie shooters/raperaperaperape/etc. is really just kind of tasteless and gross. Mexcillent fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Feb 3, 2014 |
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Feb 3, 2014 23:09
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The most disappointing thing about all of these setting reveals is that the design team is kind of aware how dumb and juvenile most RPGs become when they try to present themselves as dark or mature, while they include a lot of dumb and juvenile ideas because they're trying to be dark and mature. Eating babies, really? Infant cannibalism. You're okay with that, in the game you're making. Okay. Pregnant Zombies that shoot babies, apparently? If you're striving for horror, I feel like it would be a lot more productive to write about some sort of cosmic and existential horror instead of stuff that sounds like it came from those guys from that one youtube about IGN's most embarrassing amateur game designers.
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Feb 3, 2014 23:34
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tatankatonk posted:The most disappointing thing about all of these setting reveals is that the design team is kind of aware how dumb and juvenile most RPGs become when they try to present themselves as dark or mature, while they include a lot of dumb and juvenile ideas because they're trying to be dark and mature. Eating babies, really? Infant cannibalism. You're okay with that, in the game you're making. Okay. Pregnant Zombies that shoot babies, apparently? If you're striving for horror, I feel like it would be a lot more productive to write about some sort of cosmic and existential horror instead of stuff that sounds like it came from those guys from that one youtube about IGN's most embarrassing amateur game designers. Jesus. They aren't setting reveals, they're older stuff in 2nd Edition that the current team wants to avoid. All this stuff was written in the mid 00's before the current writers joined.
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Feb 3, 2014 23:41
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tatankatonk posted:The most disappointing thing about all of these setting reveals is that the design team is kind of aware how dumb and juvenile most RPGs become when they try to present themselves as dark or mature, while they include a lot of dumb and juvenile ideas because they're trying to be dark and mature. Eating babies, really? Infant cannibalism. You're okay with that, in the game you're making. Okay. Pregnant Zombies that shoot babies, apparently? If you're striving for horror, I feel like it would be a lot more productive to write about some sort of cosmic and existential horror instead of stuff that sounds like it came from those guys from that one youtube about IGN's most embarrassing amateur game designers. ...no? I think I just explained that: 1) the "Mature" stuff we're including because we want to be mature, that I think counts as actually mature, is the economic and sociopolitical depth. 2) The heavy metal album cover content, we are including because we like it and think it's fun, but we're not pretending it's particularly mature except in the probably-needs-a-warning-label sense. 3) Pregnant zombies that shoot zombie baby bombs is a thing from previous editions that I think is over the top, not something we're looking forward to perpetuating. The thing we're looking forward to perpetuating is the doom engine that sings death songs and is stitched together from the necromantically animated lungs of the unhallowed dead. Which is totally metal, but not really mature, except, again, in the language of parental warning stickers. 4) The cannibal infanticide is one NPC, and it's been her shtick since her introduction. Removing it would be more conspicuous than including it at this point. I'm trying not to sound like I'm excessively splitting hairs here.
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Feb 3, 2014 23:51
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Stephenls posted:The baseline for disguise remains "Make a mundane disguise and use a dice-adder." That leaves the Exalt who should be best at disguise as the worst at it, though. And having a baseline of "You suck compared to everyone else," doesn't work. Players want to be good at things. Especially things that are strongly within a character's schtick. So instead of being a real choice, having a Lunar who eats people becomes the norm, and that's wrong. Let the moral choice have a solid weight to it, rather than being a checkbox that players ignore to get to mechanical parity. MJ12 posted:So you have this guy who you need to interrogate or his cult will activate a devastating first age superweapon to cleanse the Realm from the lands (as well as thousands of other innocent people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time). Do you use normal interrogation methods and possibly fail? He's a fanatic, after all. This.
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Feb 4, 2014 00:04
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mistaya posted:Right now, Prey's Skin Disguise is the low-essence entry knack to human shape-stealing and it's full on cannibalism. You have to buy 'Cannibal' to get to 'Not-cannibal'. That's a little bit backwards, yo! Shouldn't cannibalism be an extension, a 'power corrupts' temptation? I disagree with this bit. The threat of Chimeraism is that eating your way up the foodchain requires less metaphysical effort than refining yourself into something less dangerous. Alternatives to eating people should be right at the bottom of the charm chain and availble right out of chargen, but the absolute no-effort baseline should still be violence.
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Feb 4, 2014 00:12
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Eating people being lazy is lame and toothless compared to eating people being a path to otherwise unavailable power. Raksi eating, specifically, babies is really goofy. Haha, I've tricked you into thinking I'm a crazy woman who eats babies, by eating babies! Trolled! It's not that it's necessarily unrealistic or something - if you're an ancient super powerful witch-queen no one really has the power to make you stop eating babies, after all - but it's something that contributes to Raksi seeming deranged, not Raksi seeming cunning. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Feb 4, 2014 |
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Feb 4, 2014 00:33
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