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If Beasts were the hegemons of the world they wouldn't be so overwhelmjngly concerned with how their audience receives them and they would survive by doing actual harm rather than by posturing. That post is stupid.
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Jun 4, 2015 23:42
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Ferrinus posted:If Beasts were the hegemons of the world they wouldn't be so overwhelmjngly concerned with how their audience receives them and they would survive by doing actual harm rather than by posturing. That post is stupid. It's about twitter.
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Jun 4, 2015 23:52
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All the talk of Beasts as a metaphor for illness makes me want to see David: The Cronenberging.
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Jun 4, 2015 23:53
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Mormon Star Wars posted:It's about twitter. It's pretty much all about Twitter.
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Jun 4, 2015 23:56
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Fsmhunk posted:All the talk of Beasts as a metaphor for illness makes me want to see David: The Cronenberging. You have absolutely no idea how badly I want this to be one of their future lines. There is so much potential in a full-blown body horror line.
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Jun 4, 2015 23:59
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Luminous Obscurity posted:I put it on the OP forums. Was it in the Beast: the Primordial thread? Because I can't find it, and I would really love to see the reactions to that. Could you maybe post a link? e: you're not atamajakki, are you? double e: oh no, you responded to that. Sorry. And their reaction is saying that this is just a game about being a monster. Wow. paradoxGentleman fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Jun 5, 2015 |
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Jun 5, 2015 00:01
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It's cool that a television show about mid-2000s Baltimore's decaying social institutions has now successfully influenced a tabletop roleplaying game about undead predators drinking people's blood and feuding among themselves, a tabletop roleplaying game about half-feral pack monsters policing the spirit world, a tabletop roleplaying game about magicians exploring the hidden truth above the material world while trying to alter reality itself, a tabletop roleplaying game about magically altered humans hiding from and resisting their lurking supernatural captors, a tabletop roleplaying game about monstrous creations trying to alchemize themselves souls so that they might be fully human, a tabletop roleplaying game about rogue machines hiding from and attacking the inscrutable mechanism that birthed them, and a tabletop roleplaying game about primordial monsters balancing satiating their desires with trying not to spawn the heroes who will kill them if they indulge those desires. For all the other lines, there's Homicide: Life On the Street
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Jun 5, 2015 00:04
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What about the tabletop roleplaying game about regular and not-so-regular humans trying to study and/or kill those monsters?
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Jun 5, 2015 00:07
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Kavak posted:What about the tabletop roleplaying game about regular and not-so-regular humans trying to study and/or kill those monsters? That's Treme
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Jun 5, 2015 00:07
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Ferrinus posted:If Beasts were the hegemons of the world they wouldn't be so overwhelmjngly concerned with how their audience receives them and they would survive by doing actual harm rather than by posturing. That post is stupid. Have you paid attention to the rich in recent years? They're the biggest pack of thin-skinned narcissists around. A couple of years back one of them tried to claim that billionaires have it worse than Jews under the Third Reich. The super-wealthy are obsessed with not only being powerful but with being loved and adored.
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Jun 5, 2015 00:14
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Daeren posted:You have absolutely no idea how badly I want this to be one of their future lines. There is so much potential in a full-blown body horror line. Freak Legion 20th Anniversary Edition had better be a thing.
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Jun 5, 2015 00:14
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This is only tangentially realted, but I just took a gander at the Scion section of the OPP forums and they are apparently planning on having ten pantheons in the first book. That... that's a lot of gods.
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Jun 5, 2015 00:22
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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. What are you trying to say here? The chance of rolling a majority 1's on a roll with no other successes decreases, I believe, as the number of dice goes up. It's not an orthogonal property.
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Jun 5, 2015 00:22
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Pope Guilty posted:Have you paid attention to the rich in recent years? They're the biggest pack of thin-skinned narcissists around. A couple of years back one of them tried to claim that billionaires have it worse than Jews under the Third Reich. The super-wealthy are obsessed with not only being powerful but with being loved and adored. The ones who make big spectacles of wanting publc approval certainly want public approval, yes. No doubt plenty more simply live quietly while property holdings and corporate machinery generate more and more wealth. The extent to which they are sympathetic characters is not the important thing about the upper echelons of our society. If you want the WoD's actual one percent, look to some combination of the Invictus, Seers, and God Machine. Beasts only work as proxies for people concerned with image, not with power.
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Jun 5, 2015 00:26
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Ferrinus posted:The ones who make big spectacles of wanting publc approval certainly want public approval, yes. No doubt plenty more simply live quietly while property holdings and corporate machinery generate more and more wealth. The extent to which they are sympathetic characters is not the important thing about the upper echelons of our society. Beasts do definitely have power baked-in, and while they are very concerned with their optics they are not required to become as famous as someone that is considered public-image obsessed- such as celebrities. The 1% reading only requires you to believe that the 1% are like Beasts and care deeply about their image to the people that they interact with, which I don't have trouble believing as the luxury item market shows that ostentatious displays of wealth are a constant across all aristocracies. LatwPIAT posted:What are you trying to say here? The chance of rolling a majority 1's on a roll with no other successes decreases, I believe, as the number of dice goes up. It's not an orthogonal property. Allow me to expand: the chances of rolling more 1s than the success that actually matter increase as the total number of die in the pool increases. For a major portion of a nWoD game*, the difference between getting 1-4 or more than 5 successes is not as important to the outcome of a scene than the difference between the increased chances of getting more 1s than successes. In the nWoD a dramatic failure is (typically) written in the rules as a major event that creates major complications, and this also inspires the STs that read those rules to also treat non-explicitly written dramatic failure consequences the same way. You would have to meter the impact of successes, dicepool, and dramatic failures in a very shrewd manner, which belies the "simplicity" of just implementing the mechanic as stated to make Dramatic Failures happen more often. However, thankfully no one is advocating having 1s also reduce the number of successes! That is the same problem but just removing the word Dramatic from Dramatic Failure. *basically all of the rolls aside from the success threshold mechanics e.g. number of successes to cast a spell, number of successes to craft an item, number of successes to injure someone
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Jun 5, 2015 00:44
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paradoxGentleman posted:This is only tangentially realted, but I just took a gander at the Scion section of the OPP forums and they are apparently planning on having ten pantheons in the first book. Geez, I'm hard pressed to even come up with ten functional pantheons
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Jun 5, 2015 01:12
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Japanese, Mesoamerican, Norse, Greek, Egyptian, Hindu, Vodoun, Celtic, Sumerian, Chinese.
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Jun 5, 2015 01:21
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Why don't people ever pull in Abrahamic stuff when doing big 'THE PANTHEONS OF THE WORLD' stuff? I'm sick of Thor, that dude's everywhere.
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Jun 5, 2015 01:24
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Gerund posted:Beasts do definitely have power baked-in, and while they are very concerned with their optics they are not required to become as famous as someone that is considered public-image obsessed- such as celebrities. The 1% reading only requires you to believe that the 1% are like Beasts and care deeply about their image to the people that they interact with, which I don't have trouble believing as the luxury item market shows that ostentatious displays of wealth are a constant across all aristocracies. Every supernatural PC, certainly in 2nd edition, has loads and loads of power baked in. I'm sure a 2E werewolf or demon or promethean or changeling or whatever could take a beast, or rather I'm sure that whatever rocket-taggy clusterfuck ensued would come down to who chose fewer newbie traps or was lucky with their power wording. Vanity isn't what's relevant about our dark masters, power is. The 1% have something that you don't, and they're keeping it from you. They're harming you for their continued material gain. What do Beasts have, that's of value, that their enemies want to take from them? Well... plot primacy. Grandeur. Protagonism. Nothing real. Beast is about the narratives that take root after the actual fighting's done with.
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Jun 5, 2015 01:24
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Cabbit posted:Why don't people ever pull in Abrahamic stuff when doing big 'THE PANTHEONS OF THE WORLD' stuff? I'm sick of Thor, that dude's everywhere. The Angels even had sons and maybe daughters who fundamentally disordered the world and were crazy. Not to mention originally the pantheon was much larger and even after going mono/henotheistic there's still room for stuff like Sophia the Spirit of Wisdom.
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Jun 5, 2015 01:27
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Cabbit posted:Why don't people ever pull in Abrahamic stuff when doing big 'THE PANTHEONS OF THE WORLD' stuff? I'm sick of Thor, that dude's everywhere. You'd have to get pretty apocryphal to get more children of God.
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Jun 5, 2015 01:27
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Ferrinus posted:Every supernatural PC, certainly in 2nd edition, has loads and loads of power baked in. I'm sure a 2E werewolf or demon or promethean or changeling or whatever could take a beast, or rather I'm sure that whatever rocket-taggy clusterfuck ensued would come down to who chose fewer newbie traps or was lucky with their power wording. Yet I see a difference between the 1% I read as a comparison to Beast and the 1% you read as a comparison to Invictus/Seers/Promethean-antagonist-Alchemists. My own reading is not that the 1% desire power in a material sense (as in the number in their bank account going up) but by increasing the impact that their money and status gives them on the outside world: their Protagonism if we're gonna get capital-letters up in this. A Koch brother or T. Boone Pickens is not a great example of this (they're too publicly known), but their lesser-known analogs such as the shadow economy of College football boosters, the league of professional prestigious non-profit board members, political action committee commanders and the bottle service economy are good readings of Beasts as image-conscious without demanding the entirety of the culture's attention. Their self-worth is not defined by their own self, but by what greater mythic image they work in service to.
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Jun 5, 2015 01:36
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What's the difference between a narcissistic poor person wanting attention and a narcissistic rich person wanting attention? Oh, right.
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Jun 5, 2015 01:38
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Cabbit posted:Why don't people ever pull in Abrahamic stuff when doing big 'THE PANTHEONS OF THE WORLD' stuff? I'm sick of Thor, that dude's everywhere. I always wanted to play a scion of YHVH who was super nervous and downplayed his supernatural role, because, hell, look what happened to that other guy a few thousand years ago.
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Jun 5, 2015 01:38
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Cabbit posted:Why don't people ever pull in Abrahamic stuff when doing big 'THE PANTHEONS OF THE WORLD' stuff? I'm sick of Thor, that dude's everywhere. ...At least in 1E Scion it's heavily implied that the Abrahamic god was actually a Titan who opposed both the gods and the other titans and who you'll have to eventually beat up. Like they never out and out said it was him but it was a Titan of Light with servants that looked like angels.
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Jun 5, 2015 01:39
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Kavak posted:You'd have to get pretty apocryphal to get more children of God. And exploring crazy apocrypha, related but distinct religions, and downright heretical syncretic teachings is awesome fun.
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Jun 5, 2015 01:40
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Gerund posted:Yet I see a difference between the 1% I read as a comparison to Beast and the 1% you read as a comparison to Invictus/Seers/Promethean-antagonist-Alchemists. My own reading is not that the 1% desire power in a material sense (as in the number in their bank account going up) but by increasing the impact that their money and status gives them on the outside world: their Protagonism if we're gonna get capital-letters up in this. It doesn't work when attention, respect, and the positive regard of an imaginary audience is actually the whole of what they're after rather than a perk that happens to attend an actual disparity in power. Applebees is not a Beast; Applebees's twitter account is a Beast. I don't get why anyone would go to bat for a comparison whose triumphant climax was the goddamn Wire. Come on!
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Jun 5, 2015 01:40
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My interpretation of Beast is that it's not a good game.
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Jun 5, 2015 01:43
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moths posted:Freak Legion 20th Anniversary Edition had better be a thing. No, because then we'd miss all the extra content that would be in "Possessed 20th Anniversary Edition."
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Jun 5, 2015 01:46
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My own personal reading (and its not very classically 1%) would be that the hyper-douches of the Pony Excess 30 for 30 doc are great Beasts. They, too, are after the reflected glow of positive opinion because they want SMU to succeed at a football game that they have never and will never play in themselves and never get true credit for. They are willing to do Bad things that involve the ineffable "suffering" of others to make this happen by paying players in secret. In this case, the Heroes are the NCAA investigators that gave SMU the 'death penalty' after a series of harassing and pathetic sanctions. The NCAA make great Heroes in this reading because they are pathetic dickless wonders who only hate SMU because they are noticeably successful without being acceptably old. However I admit that I don't like the Twitter comparison largely because I don't believe that anyone with any real power is in control of their twitter account, its easily-fireable interns all the way down! But I concede that the 1% reading did try to flog that tired touchstone The Wire and as such should be avoided for the near future. Gerund fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Jun 5, 2015 |
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Jun 5, 2015 01:47
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Gerund posted:But I concede that the 1% reading did try to flog that tired touchstone The Wire and as such should be avoided for the near future. Fair enough. 
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Jun 5, 2015 01:50
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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. Except not really. The failure chance decreases as dice are added to a pool even though each die only has a 30% of hitting a success. A critical failure in this way needs >50% of the failed roll to all be ones, which is extremely rare and becomes more rare as the pool increases. It just turns a critical failure chance from zero to approaching zero in all circumstances. Not that you care but the group is as much monkeycheese as it is brooding Camarillia LARPers.
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Jun 5, 2015 01:51
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I first thought the Pentex and Wurm stuff was basically going to be Videodrome style stuff when I first saw it, like people using body horror to serve their twisted corporate and philosophical ends, but it's way stupider than that. I actually wouldn't trust White Wolf to be able to do justice to the psycho-sexual themes of body horror stuff anyway to be honest.
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Jun 5, 2015 01:54
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Ferrinus posted: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? Because of the kind of queerness we're talking about if we assume this reading, I guess. In Cabal/Nightbreed, Boone was explicitly innocent; the Breed, while they wanted to get their murder on, lived abjectly and were persecuted by a serial killer with institutional support. That's your Platonic Beast-Hero dynamic. But in actual Beast, that's not what you get. Beasts have every advantage. The Nightbreed lived in a small close-knit community contrasted in the story with the vast unfriendly outside. Beasts exist in the World of Darkness, a game world about monsters where monsters are the most important thing. The outside world is narratively "smaller" than the inside, and Beasts are beloved by everyone who counts! They are the toasts of the town, princes of darkness. They're free to live happily wherever they choose, taking jobs as prosecutors(?!?), joining homeowners' associations, having cocktails with senators... Their monstrosity doesn't come in any material sense from who they are, so they have to put on an act (I'm queering court spaces by getting tough on offenders! We dropped off this poor guy in a rich neighborhood, and you won't BELIEVE what happens next!) in order to retain their "monster cred" - as you say, it's about building your brand. They don't even need to do that, really. A few hours hanging around at the cool vampire bar will give them enough cred for a while, even if they're just leeching off monsters who don't have a choice in how they present themselves. A Beast's perspective is the worst strawman of Gay, Inc., where a small class of wealthy politically active gays largely ignore the material suffering of their less well-off peers in favor of hijacking grassroots struggle to enrich themselves personally. They have no structural opposition. Anyone who hates them has to be an atomized weirdo, a Westboro Baptist with no capacity for self-reflection. Why, if Heroes could just sit down and really think about it, maybe watch a few HuffPo videos, they'd be fine upstanding Hunters. Beast, in this reading, asks us to accept this depiction of HRC gays, and not just to applaud it but participate in it ourselves. It even provides a standin for trans people in Demons, who cross an intolerable line in choosing to define themselves rather than be defined, and are explicitly said to not be kin. It's like asking a leftist to write a mean caricature of liberal politics and then accept it at face value, or those video games where you shoot a million guys and then the game stops and tells you what a bad person you are for shooting all those people. What response is there, other than to ignore what the game is telling you or to decline to play it?
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Jun 5, 2015 02:32
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Down With People posted:My interpretation of Beast is that it's not a good game. I say if the supernatural powers system is good, then just staple that onto Geist's setting and maybe transplant from the Inner Beast conflicts into the conflicts a Sin-Eater has with their Geist. Cabbit posted:Why don't people ever pull in Abrahamic stuff when doing big 'THE PANTHEONS OF THE WORLD' stuff? I'm sick of Thor, that dude's everywhere. I think some of the Sumerian mythologies trickles into it. Still, gnostic mysticism from the Abrahamic religions would be neat in Scion. Who needs the blood of Hel or Osiris when you could be the physical will of the archangel Azrael or Melek Taus made manifest.
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Jun 5, 2015 02:47
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Down With People posted:My interpretation of Beast is that it's not a good game. This is true but making fun of broken, terrible metaphors is funny
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Jun 5, 2015 03:14
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Dammit Who? posted:What response is there, other than to ignore what the game is telling you or to decline to play it? Good reading. Reckon I'll pick the latter option.
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Jun 5, 2015 08:01
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Take the God of Job. Have him just be a divine monarch who fabricated claims and alienated his peers. Do serious research into yhvh's former pantheon. Put them in as aggrieved parties plotting in secret with the Adversary, whom they don't trust and plan to betray as soon as possible. Leave it up to sts if Shaitan is undercover, plotting to regain favor, or genuinely interested in the overthrow of God and the well-being of his peers. Then make his true feelings irrelevant because he's a loving narc who ran "God"'s gestapo. Meanwhile, everyone else stays away from the shitstorm and tells their kids to do the same. Big Hubris fucked around with this message at 09:25 on Jun 5, 2015 |
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Jun 5, 2015 09:21
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ErichZahn posted:Do serious research into yhvh's former pantheon. Considering Scion 1e, I don't think this is going to happen, sadly. I agree that El-Shaddai/YHVH/El could be a really cool twist for the crazy godchild setting and I can see a ton of ways to do it, but they couldn't be bothered to do very much research as it was.
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Jun 5, 2015 16:21
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I'm glad they finally, Finally made a splatbook about playing MC P Pants. I've been waiting for this for years now. Bless you Onyx Path.
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