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If we're going to use monstrosity as a proxy for queerness, why is it a petty and decaffeinated monstrosity whose victims all super duper had it coming? Why is PR so important?
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Jun 4, 2015 17:06
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I don't think Malcolm is going to come out against his colleague's work as angrily as people want him to, and I don't think trying to talk him into it will be productive.
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Jun 4, 2015 17:07
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Rand Brittain posted:I don't think Malcolm is going to come out against his colleague's work as angrily as people want him to, and I don't think trying to talk him into it will be productive. Pretty much. Companies don't let their employees criticize each other publicly like that.
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Jun 4, 2015 17:09
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I dunno, Malcolm's burns on whoever was handing in those Changeling drafts were pretty scorching.
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Jun 4, 2015 17:11
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Rand Brittain posted:I don't think Malcolm is going to come out against his colleague's work as angrily as people want him to, and I don't think trying to talk him into it will be productive. I'm not trying to talk him into it. If he's under pressure to not discuss it (except positively, I guess), then he shouldn't discuss it.
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Jun 4, 2015 17:11
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MalcolmSheppard posted:So you're just going to ignore the fact that the thing Beast is being accused of subtextual homophobia for is a thing employed by prominent queer genre writers for a specific reason because TOO MANY WERDS. Got it. Look, I am glad to hear that there might be a precedent to explain why is Beast the way it is, but could you explain it a bit more simply? I honestly didn't understand much.
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Jun 4, 2015 17:11
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There's nothing in my contract that regulates what I can say beyond NDA. Of course I'm going to exercise some polite discretion, but projects are sufficiently separate that Beast isn't my thing at all and probably won't be. My main stuff right now is Awakening, some WoD2 stuff and Scion (I designed "spine" Sardonyx mechanics, like the ones previewed). Normally I'd let this sort of thing slide but it really reminded me of a long term thing with the games that I think I expressed best responding to moths. With WoD games, folks tend to be a bit half-assed with the allegory. They'll assign it to people and objects, but then assume their interactions are a naturalistic sort of simulation. (This problem sometimes applies to the design side as well.) So you'll have folks happy to acknowledge that a dragon represents something (let's say a Scotsman) other that a dragon, but that when it burns a dude to a crisp it is the same as a real person in the real world burning a guy with a flamethrower. And the result is somebody going "I'm really disappointed the game suggests Scotsmen are murderous pyromaniacs." To be fair this is a difficult thing in games because even though the signifier should be the whole of the thing--the dragon and the fire--we don't definitively script the burninating, but only suggest it. Plus, WoD games do present the world as a thing in of itself in a way familiar to campaign-style gaming, with population figures and prosaic accounts of the world. Nevertheless I think a broader look can be worthwhile, though it will honestly find as many problems as answers. That's okay too. It's something to work with. MalcolmSheppard fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Jun 4, 2015 |
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Jun 4, 2015 17:26
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Ferrinus posted:I dunno, Malcolm's burns on whoever was handing in those Changeling drafts were pretty scorching. No idea what you're talking about.
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Jun 4, 2015 17:31
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Well, like, no one looks at hoarding Beasts and concludes that homosexuals must be kleptomaniacs. I'm not seeing where the excessive literalism you're talking about is. It's not relevant that a Beast literally kidnaps and terrorizes someone but it IS relevant that the Beast is totally dependent on the reactions they can provoke from a non-Beast, that immense effort is expended in identifying who is justified and who isn't and what are the specific personal failings of the latter group, etc.
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Jun 4, 2015 17:32
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I mean it works both ways. Better honed fan criticism would have more rapidly determined how terrible my work for Geist was.
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Jun 4, 2015 17:32
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My main issue with Beast remains with how many of the sample characters are just...not things that sound interesting to play. Like..."I am a petty bureaucrat who feeds on the suffering of others trapped in the red tape I generate is the least inspiring sample PC ever committed to paper. " "I am a cab driver who is deliberately bad at my job to troll my passengers and drive up my fares." Like ignoring whether they're a metaphor for anything, these are the sort of things whose crossover potential with other splats is "Oh, you got a dramatic failure on your roll? Congrats, your restaurant is being inspected by the worst dude in the Department of Health." (By the way he's secretly a tentacle monster.)
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Jun 4, 2015 17:37
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MalcolmSheppard posted:No idea what you're talking about. I just thought it was funny that, as people were scratching their heads over the atrocious (non)editing of those Changeling documents, you were like "Oh heh yeah those are actually not looked over in the least bit before upload, just like mine weren't *buffs fingernails*"
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Jun 4, 2015 17:37
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Ferrinus posted:I just thought it was funny that, as people were scratching their heads over the atrocious (non)editing of those Changeling documents, you were like "Oh heh yeah those are actually not looked over in the least bit before upload, just like mine weren't *buffs fingernails*" Nah, I was just describing a process. Different teams use the open development process in their own ways. Mage and Changeling both went for a "warts and all" where as soon as the developer thought something neat arose, it went up. I completed my dev edits of the Paths recently and they are considerably refined from the first hack at it. Plus, different writers submit at different stages in their processes. Newer writers use a much more back and forth process where pre-1st drafts go to the developer in a really embryonic stage, get kicked back, and go forth again, and might get shared for open dev at any point. I came up during a period where I had to delete a ton of email just to have room for a single small Word doc to go back and forth, so I tend to grind and grind and then throw the final result at Dave or whoever, so you'll tend to see my work at a later stage.
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Jun 4, 2015 17:46
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Thanks for elaborating on that, by the way. I guess a lot of the problem in trying to read Beast's themes is that they're inconsistent and contradictory: On one hand, Beasts are described as just doing their thing and then oh no here comes persecution. But then on the other hand, "their thing" amounts to killing, bullying, and harassing regular people. Out of the whole Beast / Hero dynamic, the only relatable people aren't even characters: they're one-dimensional victims. The abused girls chained up in the Beast's Lair, the guy just trying to get home in the wrong cab, or the popular kid about to get killed over an imagined slight. Trying to read in themes of homosexuality (or any oppressed outgroups) has to be out of generosity or optimism. This is magical child molester, school shooter, and rapist territory - and I don't think anybody expected that poo poo from OP. Beasts take what they want from innocent people to gratify themselves. They rationalize those who object as sub-human oppressors, as bad or worse than themselves. Regular people exist only to indulge their inner monster. It's all pretty hosed up. And the game backs up this worldview. I don't like it.
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Jun 4, 2015 18:00
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paradoxGentleman posted:Look, I am glad to hear that there might be a precedent to explain why is Beast the way it is, but could you explain it a bit more simply? I honestly didn't understand much. 1) There's a non-homophobic tradition of using monsters, the supernatural and transgressive figures as representations of queer identity, by LGBTQ writers, so that representation isn't inherently a problem. 2) For 1) to work, though, you need to get that the figures *and* their actions/situations represent something else. Now to get to Ferrinus' comment a bit about confrontation and reaction, over in another place a friend of mine talked about these elements in the context of the politics of respectability, where liberal tolerance reaches its limits and demands a certain degree of conformity in your Will and Grace depictions. Or getting beyond that identity axis, in patriarchy you'll have liberal manifestations that will only accept some women's experiences as valid, and demands women reproduce patriarchal ideals to advance. On my perusal of Beast certain things might be read that way, but here I have to concede A) It's not my project, and B) my personal identity bits are pretty dominant-group-y in all the ways I'm willing to disclose, and you'll really have to talk to somebody else for responses that really come from the guts.
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Jun 4, 2015 18:03
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I don't think reading Beast as a queer text (or not) really gets to the roots of the problem people are having with the text, so I don't know that it's helpful to bring it up in this context. The root of the issue is that, from a neutral standpoint, Beasts and Heroes are both pretty bad, and Beasts are almost invariably worse, both because they prey on everybody (not just Beasts) and because they unquestionably start the aggressions between themselves and their Heroes. However, the authorial voice pretty obviously regards the Beasts as sympathetic, and it will either play them up as cool predators or ignore the horror of what they're doing more or less interchangeably. At the same time, the authorial voice pretty obviously loathes the Heroes, to the point where I can almost see the drops of spittle on the pages of the book that talk about them. The author is so clearly in the tank for the nightmare-beasts and against the people who rise up to fight them, so determined to make Heroes unworthy of even a scrap of empathy, that we keep seeing readers rejecting the text and regarding Heroes as the sympathetic party. Requiem and Awakening, for example, are both very self-aware about what their protagonists are. Vampires are alluring predators who are ultimately slaves to their hunger. Mages are occult seekers who should know better, but mostly don't. I don't get that feel from Primordial. I don't get the feeling that the authors thought that Beasts should try to be "better," or that they should be anything but even more beastly than they already are. It feels like the text is working out some old grudge that I don't share, and reading it makes me very uncomfortable.
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Jun 4, 2015 18:19
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Is there anyone who has worked on Beast who also happens to be a goon? Maybe we'll understand it better if we hear the point of view of someone who contributed to making that game.
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Jun 4, 2015 18:23
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MalcolmSheppard posted:On my perusal of Beast certain things might be read that way, but here I have to concede A) It's not my project, and B) my personal identity bits are pretty dominant-group-y in all the ways I'm willing to disclose, and you'll really have to talk to somebody else for responses that really come from the guts. I feel that Beast's main problem is a communication of tone. There's not really a unified voice, with different writers taking significantly different perspectives on the game. Those perspectives aren't all bad (and I think part of what I find frustrating about Beast is that I feel it came very close to, and yet fell very far from, being a strong and good game), but the way they clash with one another exacerbates a failure to clearly communicate the metaphor. Or in other words, I think the intended message is sound, but I don't think the book succeeds well in communicating that intended message to me. Of course, I'm also pretty dominant-group-y, and the plural of anecdotes isn't data and all. From what I've seen among readers who don't conform as much to the dominant identity, there have been mixed reactions; I've seen at least one person who felt Beast resonated and was honest and familiar, and at least one person who felt deeply alienated by its message as received. Either way, though, I enjoyed hearing your thoughts on this, it's something to chew on.
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Jun 4, 2015 18:26
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Nah, I was just describing a process. Different teams use the open development process in their own ways. Mage and Changeling both went for a "warts and all" where as soon as the developer thought something neat arose, it went up. I completed my dev edits of the Paths recently and they are considerably refined from the first hack at it. Plus, different writers submit at different stages in their processes. Newer writers use a much more back and forth process where pre-1st drafts go to the developer in a really embryonic stage, get kicked back, and go forth again, and might get shared for open dev at any point. I came up during a period where I had to delete a ton of email just to have room for a single small Word doc to go back and forth, so I tend to grind and grind and then throw the final result at Dave or whoever, so you'll tend to see my work at a later stage. I doubt, though, that even your embryonic drafts look like what we saw in those Changeling previews. Even if they do, the upshot here is that Mage is getting much higher-quality drafts than Changeling is, which is just and proper because Awakening rules and Lost drools. Eat chain, -gelings. ... In general, while I'm certainly willing to believe that Beast's writers were trying to get Beasts to represent queer or otherwise transgressive people, I don't think they succeeded, and instead ended up with a text that belittles rather than celebrates monstrosity either as an element of myth and culture or as a metaphor for people who live outside social norms. Too many things just fail to line up, or make things seem petty that should be poignant, or justified that should be villainous, or whatever. Like, I think you were completely on point about Heroes - properly speaking, Heroes who represent an obsessive and out-of-proportion reaction to transgressive behavior should probably be people who are suppressing those already-existing urges within themselves, not who are effectively transformed and deranged by the "monsters" they're hunting. This is a game about building your personal brand, not a game about building your identity.
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Jun 4, 2015 18:28
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MalcolmSheppard posted:There's nothing in my contract that regulates what I can say beyond NDA. Of course I'm going to exercise some polite discretion, but projects are sufficiently separate that Beast isn't my thing at all and probably won't be. My main stuff right now is Awakening, some WoD2 stuff and Scion (I designed "spine" Sardonyx mechanics, like the ones previewed). Speaking for myself, I don't have any moral outrage about Beast. It's Lord Raziere that has a problem with playing characters that do bad things, and like you said, doing bad things in fiction is what makes outgroups in fiction cool and likeable. Eating a man in fiction is cool! There have been a ton of WoD gamelines about outgroups that separate themselves from mainstream society through violence. Beast does a ton of stuff that Promethean does, including Hero generation through nightmares. In Promethean 1e, those mobs could be presented as justified, since the Promethean really is making things worse in that town if he stays there. What separates Beast, though, is its presentation. Promethean never felt the need to make sure we knew that the mobs were actually super terrible and bad and full of mediocre jerks. There's material in Beast that matches Promethean's treatment, but then there's the stuff that everyone's been complaining about. Promethean stands on the quality of its writing. It's confident enough in its own metaphors and allegories that it doesn't need to oversell its premise. The Beast writers, on the other hand, are terrified that we might not like Beasts, so they feel the need to grind it in. All I ask is a little bit of confidence in their own premise, as well as consistency. The rules are fairly coherent, but it comes with a bunch of fluff that disagrees with what the rules say and with the basic themes of the game. The general consensus among Beast detractors seems to be that there is potential for the game, along the lines of what you see in it. Beasts have cool enough powers and hungers that they can be attractive protagonists, and the idea of Heroes drawn out to kill their special souls is not irredeemable. It's the presentation of the fluff that is objectionable. I don't think an allegorical reading saves Heroes. The reading of them as reactionary homophobes is pretty obvious, but what makes homophobia threatening in the real world is its institutional support. As I said before, the book is super divided on the issue. Heroes receive superpowers to kill Beasts from the ether, and among those powers is charisma that attracts followers, which is somewhat effective. However, the fluff consistently portrays the Heroes as loners whose toxic personalities drive people away from them. They have trouble holding down jobs and waste their money on their quests. They don't have the institutional support necessary to truly equate them to homophobia. I haven't read Cabal/Nightbreed, but it sounds like the cops are better homophobic antagonists because they're cops, attached to an institution that can legally bring lethal force to the equation, as well as having access to vast resources. This doesn't even get into the fact that the abuse reading is just as valid. The post I linked to earlier does a good job explaining the parallels, but in short, Heroes are portrayed as receiving abuse from Beasts, whether it's physical violence, theft, or just being bullied and demeaned. The Hero comes by some ability to stand up for himself. The Hero then either triumphs over the Beast or is defeated by the Beast, demeaned for valuing his own needs over the Beast's. There are explicit parallels drawn between the behaviors of Heroes and Beasts. Collector Beasts and their Heroes steal, Tyrant Beasts and their heroes bully, etc. Flinching at the immorality of the Hero using violence against his abuser would be exactly the same as flinching at the immorality of the Beast scaring or eating people. It's just as irrelevant to the allegory. It would be just like getting mad at Danny and Wendy Torrance for killing Jack in The Shining. The abuse reading does focus more on the fluff than the rules, but the fact that the rules produce one reading, while the fluff produces something radically opposed to that reading, is an indication that there's a deep divide between them, and that is a serious problem for the book.
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Jun 4, 2015 18:30
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Rand Brittain posted:It feels like the text is working out some old grudge that I don't share, and reading it makes me very uncomfortable.
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Jun 4, 2015 18:34
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pospysyl posted:Speaking for myself, I don't have any moral outrage about Beast. It's Lord Raziere that has a problem with playing characters that do bad things, and like you said, doing bad things in fiction is what makes outgroups in fiction cool and likeable. Eating a man in fiction is cool! There have been a ton of WoD gamelines about outgroups that separate themselves from mainstream society through violence. Beast does a ton of stuff that Promethean does, including Hero generation through nightmares. In Promethean 1e, those mobs could be presented as justified, since the Promethean really is making things worse in that town if he stays there. Yeah, this is about where I stand. If I wanted to be flip, I'd summarize the issue by saying that Beast wants us to be very clear about how anybody who dislikes a Beast must have a tiny penis.
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Jun 4, 2015 18:36
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Nah, I was just describing a process. Different teams use the open development process in their own ways. Mage and Changeling both went for a "warts and all" where as soon as the developer thought something neat arose, it went up. I completed my dev edits of the Paths recently and they are considerably refined from the first hack at it. Plus, different writers submit at different stages in their processes. Newer writers use a much more back and forth process where pre-1st drafts go to the developer in a really embryonic stage, get kicked back, and go forth again, and might get shared for open dev at any point. I came up during a period where I had to delete a ton of email just to have room for a single small Word doc to go back and forth, so I tend to grind and grind and then throw the final result at Dave or whoever, so you'll tend to see my work at a later stage. Also "this hasn't been seen by an editor" when David says it is the whole truth - he just puts drafts up. When I say it, it's technically true (the editor won't get Mage until I'm done with it over the next few months) but not the whole truth. The Path spoilers haven't been seen by an editor, but I *did* go through them and clean up some things precisely so that fans would actually read them rather than obsessing about dropped words or misplaced emdashes. So, if they read "cleaner" than Changeling's spoilers, that would be why. It's certainly not because Filamena (the author of the Changeling Seemings) is a newer freelancer. She's just as much a veteran as Malcolm. EDIT: And when I put excerpts of her work on Awakening up, not a peep of complaint. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Jun 4, 2015 |
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Jun 4, 2015 18:37
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paradoxGentleman posted:Is there anyone who has worked on Beast who also happens to be a goon? Maybe we'll understand it better if we hear the point of view of someone who contributed to making that game. Yesterday morning: Gilok posted:Actually considering how previous OPP kickstarters have done, this is pretty slow.
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Jun 4, 2015 19:21
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I sincerely don't have an issue with World of Darkness protagonists being, well, monsters. I don't even really care about the text suggesting they're not-- I feel like that suggests a dissonance in Beasts (whether author intended or not) that I could work with to establish a mood as an st. The hero stuff is sincerely pretty weak, though-- I expect more nuanced and interesting villains from WoD, and I think just using straight up hunters would have made more sense. Would also have turned the question of right to exist back onto the Beasts themselves-- they do awful things to get by, but would they be willing to die to make it stop?
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Jun 4, 2015 19:44
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Kavak posted:Yesterday morning: While Gilok's testimonial does give us some information on the way the product was handled (Matt going incommunicado is a pretty bad sign) I was talking about writers or developpers; is it possible that no one noticed the message the game seemed to be sending? Or the tone it was taking? But you reminded me of something that I was meaning to ask: Gilok, what exactly happened in the playtest? One of the criticism we are raising against Beast is that Beast have little to do beyond smacking Heroes around, and you say that your group had fun, so you must have found something to do. What was it?
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Jun 4, 2015 19:45
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Adept Nightingale posted:The hero stuff is sincerely pretty weak, though-- I expect more nuanced and interesting villains from WoD, and I think just using straight up hunters would have made more sense. Would also have turned the question of right to exist back onto the Beasts themselves-- they do awful things to get by, but would they be willing to die to make it stop?
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Jun 4, 2015 20:14
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I did some more readings into the mechanics. What I'm seeing is that the reason why beasts feed is because being at low satiety for too long means that your soul is going to go out and gently caress with people. But that's not really "a monster I am lest a monster I become" that's "I better gently caress with people on my own or else my soul is gonna be a dick." You aren't fulfilling some supernatural imperative by making people feel fear. There isn't some greater doom you're preventing by ensuring that mortals poo poo themselves in terror or are forced to fill out convoluted tax forms. You are a nexus of sheer assholery and that will happen with or without your conscious involvement. I have no idea how any beast can see themselves as the put upon party. That said, I think beast does look like an interesting game if you read it as unrepentant, inhuman monsters on a quest to achieve Apex and Myth. Since that gives you a goal to strive for, and should really be more up front in the text and not hidden in the storyteller chapter. As an Aside. Family dinner basically oblivates any beast of needing to use the feeding mechanics, it almost seems too powerful. If you go out clubbing with one of your vampire friends that you have a kinship with. You get 3 satiety, and you don't need to take all of it if you don't want to, meaning there's no risk of going up to 10. And the reading of it also seems to bypass the Ravenous condition.
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Jun 4, 2015 20:18
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For me the main issue with Beast is that the central conflict is apparently supposed to be Beasts and their Heroes and it's not, well, a conflict. Like at all. Beasts are not threatened by Heroes. Beasts are basically the strongest supernatural type that's ever been put into a WoD book and their big antagonist is.... normal human beings who can sometimes do aggravated damage and have a couple of kooky powers. Humans who explicitly don't really have a lot of friends or backup and basically the worst they can do is come at you in a group. Your Lair is an impregnable fortress and the idea that it's your secret weakness is laughable. Your Nightmares are stronk as gently caress and nearly unresistable. Your physical prowess can be switched on reflexively and makes you an invulnerable flame-spitting juggernaut. All supernatural creatures automatically like you, so you've probably got a posse of werewolves or something backing you up. You're basically a human and don't really have any weaknesses at all, so there's nothing stopping you having money and friends and help from the police. The end-game of Incarnation requires you to be Lair 8 and to kill a Hero without him doing you any lethal damage. Lair 8 is 25 xp away for a starting character and by the time you get there, the odds of a Hero being able to do lethal damage to you is, frankly, hilarious. Beasts are meant to be crossover-friendly. They're not. They're Smaug. They're unstoppable. They have no weaknesses.
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Jun 4, 2015 20:18
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 okay, I was a little too flip about that statement last night, but at least it sparked an interesting debate. I do agree that it's a little reductive, but the abuse reading to me is the one that really sticks out as the unintended, incredibly ugly accident of design, the result of a completely inconsistent attempt to portray tones and metaphors across different chapters. Like others have said, I really don't mind if a book encourages being a monster in-game - hell, I loving love Vampire, and Demon is in many ways about a level of sociopathic detachment. The way it's presented this time, how it creeps into text that should otherwise be neutral, is just kinda gross, in a way that speaks to authorial intent rather than game design. I'd be more charitable if McFarland hadn't very regularly come out and said "no, heroes should NEVER have sympathy, they're all dumb and terrible," or Dammit Who? mentioning the guy banned for bringing up the domestic abuse metaphor, adding reinforcement to the idea that it's not MEANT to be a creepy presentation. It's a Gordian knot of interpretations, intended or otherwise.Adept Nightingale posted:I sincerely don't have an issue with World of Darkness protagonists being, well, monsters. I don't even really care about the text suggesting they're not-- I feel like that suggests a dissonance in Beasts (whether author intended or not) that I could work with to establish a mood as an st. Rand Brittain posted:Yeah, this is about where I stand. If I wanted to be flip, I'd summarize the issue by saying that Beast wants us to be very clear about how anybody who dislikes a Beast must have a tiny penis. This, basically.
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Jun 4, 2015 20:38
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i told matt mcfarland rpg dot net is a white power site and his administration of it is a professional conflict of interests and then he made this game its all my fault
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Jun 4, 2015 21:51
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Mexcillent posted:i told matt mcfarland rpg dot net is a white power site and his administration of it is a professional conflict of interests and then he made this game you fucker
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Jun 4, 2015 22:05
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paradoxGentleman posted:While Gilok's testimonial does give us some information on the way the product was handled (Matt going incommunicado is a pretty bad sign) I was talking about writers or developpers; is it possible that no one noticed the message the game seemed to be sending? Or the tone it was taking? Our game was adapted from, I think, a Vampire SAS. The PCs were a stripper with a Siren themed Makuru, a brawly Bouncer Kraken-themed Makuru at the strip club (otherwise unrelated I guess?), a police officer who was a...Namtaru? I think. Spider-themed. And my hilariously out of place character, a Namtaru gollum-esque district attorney. Pretty much everyone had Power as their hunger except for my character, whose hunger was Prey(murderers). There were uh, communication issues with character creation. The main story we dealt with was that one of the other strippers at the strip club was a vampire, and was being...I'm not sure, harassed? They had some kind of problem with a powerful Daeva. We confronted him in his club, the siren cowed some of his ghouls, and we told him to stay away from whats-her-name. Then we went to his house, killed all of his security and his ghouls, fought our way to his inner sanctum, and left him a nasty note. Thereby demonstrating our power over him. And since I pursued, harried, and "brought down" the vampire as prey, I was able to feed on him too. The focus the ST was going for was on kinship powers and forming a Brood(Which it turned out there weren't actually rules for, you just decide to be a family now. There are, however, rules specifying that broodmates are immune to various powers you use, etc). I didn't get a lot out of the game, as my character was completely out of place in this party and I wish someone had mentioned that the game would be strip-club-centric ahead of time. Everyone enjoyed their character's powers and the imperative to be terrible to people, which was cathartic at least. Again, I completely hosed up making someone conflicted about his role as a monster since nobody else was having that problem. I think our group had a lot of communication issues and interpreted a lot of things differently from each other, which is endemic of Beast as a whole. I made a character who was reluctant to kill and who fed on villains, and everyone else made blood-spattered psycho monsters. Everyone else made grungy low-brow thugs, I made a state employee. Granted this isn't Beast's fault so much as it is my group not talking to me about what we were doing, but the fact that the game never really tells you what it's about besides "be mean to people and fight heroes" is reflected in our lack of communication.
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Jun 4, 2015 22:07
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Guys, Mixing nWoD Hunter with Shadowrun is fun. You should try it. Decking but no Matrix (int+computer+hardware vs. Security level) Spirits and non-mage magic and only a bit of spirit plane walking. Running, thieving and burning as a normal job but you never know if the security team has a vampire or your assassination target is a werewolf. My players have to be keen, patient and deliberate and it's a blast. The theme is more Deus Ex than Seattle 2077 laser teeth so physical augs are almost always big and obvious. The group's current antagonist is a small but tenacious group of human supremacist Templars. It's nice to be able to drop them in as an opposing faction because, right now none of the players are supernatural so they are not a Templar target but they are competing for jobs and targets. It's so nice to have a group that sees a ridiculous world and embraces it. Feels like going from GTA to Saints Row. Edit: we added a house rule that any failed roll that has a majority of ones will be a dramatic failure. Only having DF on a chance die seemed too safe and this has led to some rare but exciting turn of events. Inzombiac fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Jun 4, 2015 |
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Jun 4, 2015 22:51
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Holy crap I think Beast just clicked for me. Beasts aren't being mapped to "The Other." Think about it. They're predatory, have incredible power that is inherited from ancient times, have connections to nearly every group of shadowy monsters in the WOD, and their actions generate monsters personified by the worst of humanity. They're the 1%. The deck is stacked in their favor from the start and they still don't feel like its enough. Any actions against them are treated as irrational and villainous no matter how justified they may be. Heroes aren't meant to be seen as oppressors, they're the products of a corrupt system. They're the PIC/Tea Party/etc. While they have the power to harm Beasts, they're largely too unstable and disorganized to do so. Meanwhile the masses are either blind to the true nature of their predators or too scared/overwhelmed to make any serious moves against them. I mean I still don't really want to play them because that's super depressing, but they make way more sense when you view them through that lens. Mage just lost its title as "The Wire" of the World of Darkness. Luminous Obscurity fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Jun 4, 2015 |
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Jun 4, 2015 23:14
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Inzombiac posted:Guys, You should create a better system to make dramatic failures happen more often than tying their rate of occurrence to the number of dice you are rolling, because your current method makes the fear of a increasing the chances of a dramatic failure completely orthogonal to the inherent appeal of more dice being equivalent to a larger success. The answer, if you're being suitably monkeycheese and are okay with the implementation being clunky, is to roll a secondary pool of d10s that isn't tied to the number of die you are rolling and have that result trigger the Dramatic Failure.
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Jun 4, 2015 23:19
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Gerund posted:You should create a better system to make dramatic failures happen more often than tying their rate of occurrence to the number of dice you are rolling, because your current method makes the fear of a increasing the chances of a dramatic failure completely orthogonal to the inherent appeal of more dice being equivalent to a larger success. Or use the nWoD 2e rule and let players choose to turn one failure per scene into a dramatic failure for sweet, sweet XP.
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Jun 4, 2015 23:24
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Luminous Obscurity posted:Holy crap I think Beast just clicked for me. Beasts aren't being mapped to "The Other." Think about it. They're predatory, have incredible power that is inherited from ancient times, have connections to nearly every group of shadowy monsters in the WOD, and their actions generate monsters personified by the worst of humanity. This is the best reading I've seen.
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Jun 4, 2015 23:31
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Luminous Obscurity posted:Holy crap I think Beast just clicked for me. Beasts aren't being mapped to "The Other." Think about it. They're predatory, have incredible power that is inherited from ancient times, have connections to nearly every group of shadowy monsters in the WOD, and their actions generate monsters personified by the worst of humanity. Please post this somewhere Matt McFarland will see it.
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Jun 4, 2015 23:33
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| # ? May 8, 2024 09:33 |
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Gilok posted:Please post this somewhere Matt McFarland will see it. I put it on the OP forums.  Edit: Holy poo poo no wonder Beasts and Demons don't like each other! Demons are revolutionaries! 
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Jun 4, 2015 23:35
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