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There needs to be some explanation by the company that there is a reason for Onyx Path to ask money for a game gleefully celebrating the act of child abuse other than "it is our fetish".
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Jun 9, 2015 05:47
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Gerund posted:There needs to be some explanation by the company that there is a reason for Onyx Path to ask money for a game gleefully celebrating the act of child abuse other than "it is our fetish". No, there doesn't, because count these fat stacks
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Jun 9, 2015 05:51
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Unless they change something drastically in the hero/beast narrative. It's a game that glorifies abusers and bullies and tells their victims that it's their fault. In both directions. Beasts beat up on people, they torture them, they tell them that it's all their fault. And then tell the victims that they're wrong to try and get retribution. While simultaneously stating that getting that kind of revenge and punishment on abusers is the right thing to do. It's amazingly hosed up, it's telling victims that it's totally okay to go Jigsaw on someone but only if you have a Dark Mother membership card, like there is somehow a victimization privilege. Otherwise you're just supposed to curl up in the dirt and slowly lose your soul like all the rest of the sheep.
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Jun 9, 2015 05:53
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I'm trying to force my way though disappointment into a detached interest/dread of what horrible thing will be released next, any tips?
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Jun 9, 2015 05:56
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Kavak posted:I'm trying to force my way though disappointment into a detached interest/dread of what horrible thing will be released next, any tips? Stop loving the brand That goes for all of you. Stop loving the drat brand. Beast, and everything OPP releases, is a product. It's not a community project. It's not something that needs to be fixed. It's not something that deserves to be fixed. Don't buy it, don't play it, don't houserule it, don't rehabilitate it, and drat sure don't Kickstart it or anything having to do with it
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Jun 9, 2015 05:58
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Kavak posted:I'm trying to force my way though disappointment into a detached interest/dread of what horrible thing will be released next, any tips? Dehumanize yourself and face to bloodshed
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Jun 9, 2015 05:58
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Hell, you've got to pay obeisance to the drat iron seals.
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Jun 9, 2015 06:03
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Kurieg posted:Possessed is really good. I was hoping that Geist would be a possessed successor, but it turned out p. lame, which is disappointing because we probably won't ever get another "this is a thing possessing you" game for nWoD. I'd like to see a "The Claimed" book or something. Or a Possessed 20th Anniversary Edition 
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Jun 9, 2015 06:05
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Mormon Star Wars posted:I was hoping that Geist would be a possessed successor, but it turned out p. lame, which is disappointing because we probably won't ever get another "this is a thing possessing you" game for nWoD. I'd like to see a "The Claimed" book or something. Predators is super good.
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Jun 9, 2015 06:06
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So, I get it, Beast is terrible. Haven't read it, might mine it for ideas like the comatose power ranger, but otherwise don't use it. Why are so many people advocating bailing ship from Onyx Path as a whole though? Demon was a masterstroke, and it shouldn't suddenly retroactively be deemed untouchable because OPP screwed the pooch, should it? I don't see why the hate for Beast is strong enough to try to sink the usually good ship. Am I hopeful for the future products? Significantly less so, but hey, if they're gonna release diamonds in the rough, and give everyone the text to look through prior to release, hell yes I'll take the good games when I see them.
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Jun 9, 2015 06:08
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Loomer posted:I regularly play in a game where the entire idea is to be cartoonishly evil supervillains. Beast is still way too loving far even by my tremendously warped standards. You're not a cartoonishly evil supervillian, you're the petty dick at the DMV who gets off on denying Mexican-Americans driver's licenses
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Jun 9, 2015 06:09
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Jade Mage posted:So, I get it, Beast is terrible. Haven't read it, might mine it for ideas like the comatose power ranger, but otherwise don't use it. Why are so many people advocating bailing ship from Onyx Path as a whole though? Demon was a masterstroke, and it shouldn't suddenly retroactively be deemed untouchable because OPP screwed the pooch, should it? I don't see why the hate for Beast is strong enough to try to sink the usually good ship. Am I hopeful for the future products? Significantly less so, but hey, if they're gonna release diamonds in the rough, and give everyone the text to look through prior to release, hell yes I'll take the good games when I see them. Where are these people Where are these illusory motherfuckers that are advocating never buying another OPP publication, ever, regardless of content, instead of consuming a product like a consumer of a product instead of a cheerleader Crion fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Jun 9, 2015 |
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Jun 9, 2015 06:12
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At the bare minimum could you people not roll in here and with your first words post a bunch of hyperbole not present in the thread, and then decry the hyperbole you've posted in the thread
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Jun 9, 2015 06:13
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Sorry, I seem to have misinterpreted, carry on. I am wrong.
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Jun 9, 2015 06:15
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Crion posted:Where are these people You? Literally on this same page even? Crion posted:Stop loving the brand Crion posted:Beast is that particular sort of horrible and horrific product that not only makes me reconsider spending money on things that OPP puts out in the future, but makes me think about cutting back on the amount I use OPP products in the present. It never really bothered me to be known as a tabletop gamer who plays White Wolf/OPP products before now, but now it's something I have to sit down and think about. I might not duck out of any current games, but I'm reconsidering whether I want to start or join any new ones in the future, even using old editions. You just said that the game is so bad that it retroactively makes other games worse.
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Jun 9, 2015 06:15
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Jade Mage posted:So, I get it, Beast is terrible. Haven't read it, might mine it for ideas like the comatose power ranger, but otherwise don't use it. Why are so many people advocating bailing ship from Onyx Path as a whole though? Demon was a masterstroke, and it shouldn't suddenly retroactively be deemed untouchable because OPP screwed the pooch, should it? I don't see why the hate for Beast is strong enough to try to sink the usually good ship. Am I hopeful for the future products? Significantly less so, but hey, if they're gonna release diamonds in the rough, and give everyone the text to look through prior to release, hell yes I'll take the good games when I see them. The bad parts of Beast hit really close to home to people because the type of things Beasts do aren't weird, but everyday actual bad things that happen to people and make them feel bad. So when the text is perceived as justifying those things it's a lot more personally worrying than when the text is perceived as justifying eating a person with your distended snakeman jaw or whatever.
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Jun 9, 2015 06:16
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Ferrinus posted:Hell, you've got to pay obeisance to the drat iron seals. I can't wait to see the badass rocket tag powers Seers get from Exarch patronage in Mage 2e that pentacle mages have no analogue to.
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Jun 9, 2015 06:20
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Kurieg posted:You? Literally on this same page even? "It" refers to Beast. Nothing I've said about Beast there is wrong or even mildly incorrect. And me ruminating on my personal use of OPP's products is not a mandate or even a call to action about how anyone else is supposed to use those products moving forward. It's not even a clear statement about what I, personally, am going to do with these products moving forward. I like to think I know how to use words to communicate ideas, Kurieg, and if I meant "I'm no longer playing WoD games because of this book" instead of "this mess is making me rethink the time I spend with this product line," I would have somehow, someway, figured out how to say the former, instead of the latter. And if you're just going to extend "I'm rethinking how I spend my spare time with this product line in light of this" into "no one should buy this company's products, ever," I think perhaps the problem doesn't lie in my words, but you reading them. Crion fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Jun 9, 2015 |
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Jun 9, 2015 06:21
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spectralent posted:the grand dragon of the KKK Beast character concept spotted
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Jun 9, 2015 06:23
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Jade Mage posted:So, I get it, Beast is terrible. Haven't read it, might mine it for ideas like the comatose power ranger, but otherwise don't use it. Why are so many people advocating bailing ship from Onyx Path as a whole though? Demon was a masterstroke, and it shouldn't suddenly retroactively be deemed untouchable because OPP screwed the pooch, should it? I don't see why the hate for Beast is strong enough to try to sink the usually good ship. Am I hopeful for the future products? Significantly less so, but hey, if they're gonna release diamonds in the rough, and give everyone the text to look through prior to release, hell yes I'll take the good games when I see them. They wrote a game about justifying real sorts of abuse that real people, myself included, have experienced, and where the victims deserve the things that happen to them, they've been generally lovely about the whole thing, and now they've released a "sorry you were offended" apology. I do not want to give these people my money, for any reason. This doesn't make Demon worse, it makes Demon a thing I would have to pay terrible people money for. I can go without.
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Jun 9, 2015 06:24
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Roland Jones posted:As people have said, it's basically "we're sorry you were offended". They have no intention of admitting actual fault or even pretending to consider that they may have done something wrong. McFarland posted:So people know: I'm planning on starting a new thread sometime this week and addressing some of the common points of criticism that have been brought up (the ones that are being made in good faith, obviously; not everything is). I want to do it in a new thread because this one is long and pretty hostile in places, and hostility makes me stressed and grouchy and that isn't fun. I haven't read every single critique of Beast on RPG.net, but given his overall attitude to people who don't like Beast, it's hard to read this as something other than giving himself a carte blanche to dismiss out of hand any criticism he doesn't like.
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Jun 9, 2015 06:25
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LatwPIAT posted:I haven't read every single critique of Beast on RPG.net, but given his overall attitude to people who don't like Beast, it's hard to read this as something other than giving himself a carte blanche to dismiss out of hand any criticism he doesn't like. tbh I think the RPGNet discussion would have probably been less intense if the only person defending the game hadn't been defending it from the vantage point of "But all abuse isn't really evil and people can deserve it (who cares if it happens to bad people)"  It's no wonder people flamed out in a variety of directions, it was treading way to close to "but this is the way real morality works and Beast is just reflecting it."
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Jun 9, 2015 06:34
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DJ Dizzy posted:5 matter, 5 mind. Its a fairly highpowered game. No nwod vampire with BP 8 or less can stand up against a decent 5 mind 5 matter mage so don't bother
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Jun 9, 2015 06:35
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Mendrian posted:I mean yeah there's PR in there, but what were people looking for? A complete rewrite? "It died on its way back to its home planet?" Why the gently caress shouldn't this be a realistic expectation? I mean I know the answer is "because the writer doesn't think the book is dogshit and also look at all these dollar signs" but I think it would be a refreshing change of pace for someone in the process of writing what's shaping up to be a frankly embarrassingly bad book in several respects to look at the criticisms being leveled at it without dismissing them out of hand as "bad faith" or "just trolls" and go "oh hey wow, this is actually pretty bad, maybe I should go back to square one." It's not like you can't cancel then retry a Kickstarter. Or hell, just let the Kickstarter finish and then go back to square one anyway, that's what the Exalted 3rd Edition team did. It occurred to me the other night what Beast reminds me of, which is Changeling: the Dreaming. It reminds me of that game in the sense that looking back on it with the benefit of a decade-plus worth of hindsight it's very easy to see that the game was intended by its authors to convey a message with all the subtlety and nuance of a sledgehammer, an editorial in RPG form where the writers could triumphantly knock down all the strawmen they'd set up for themselves, but to everyone on the outside looking in the game and its ostensible protagonists are incredibly insufferable and unlikable even though the author takes great pains to inform you that no, really, they're the heroes and you should be rooting for them. I feel like in 10-15 years people are going to be looking back on Beast the same way they look back on C:tD now, as a baffling time capsule of straw-feminists and evil monster hunters in fedoras and trenchcoats with a horribly mixed set of messages baked in.
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Jun 9, 2015 06:45
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A Beast rewrite would require its primary dev being someone other than the person than he's shown himself to be throughout this entire process, so I'm not sure why people would entertain the notion that was on the table. It's far more likely the book just doubles down.
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Jun 9, 2015 06:48
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Crion posted:A Beast rewrite would require its primary dev being someone other than the person than he's shown himself to be throughout this entire process, so I'm not sure why people would entertain the notion that was on the table. It's far more likely the book just doubles down. Oh I know. I mean I don't know Matt from Adam, but everything I've seen suggests that the fine White Wolf/Onyx Path tradition of ignoring all criticism and sticking to your guns even harder in the face of people pointing out how whack your stuff is will be in fine showing (see Exalted 3E). I figure that in that 10-15 years if Onyx Path is still around that their version of Rose Bailey will be apologizing for releasing a game about heroic child abusers when it's time for the Beast 2E Revised Kickstarter.
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Jun 9, 2015 06:52
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Kai Tave posted:Oh I know. I mean I don't know Matt from Adam, but everything I've seen suggests that the fine White Wolf/Onyx Path tradition of ignoring all criticism and sticking to your guns even harder in the face of people pointing out how whack your stuff is will be in fine showing (see Exalted 3E). I figure that in that 10-15 years if Onyx Path is still around that their version of Rose Bailey will be apologizing for releasing a game about heroic child abusers when it's time for the Beast 2E Revised Kickstarter. Onyx Path is usually pretty good about listening to their fans and being open about their development and generally not being a bunch of wankers. Beast and Exalted are the exceptions.
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Jun 9, 2015 06:58
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Ferrinus posted:Can you explain what made 1E mages overpowered? I bet you can't. I bet you're just repeating yet another pernicious meme. This is pretty disingenuous. Sure, on an instant spell, a mage's mind control or life buff doesn't roll more dice, but as you acknowledge, the r ritual system breaks this in half. A starting mage can get +3 to all physical attributes for a month by spending a work day at it, while a werewolf gets +3/+1/+2 for five rounds, can't increase the numbers our the time and can't walk around in public with it. Even without the ritual system, with equal dot investment a vampire gets Dominate 3 and a mage gets Dominate 3, Majesty 3, Nightmare 5, Obfuscate 5, Auspex 4, Animalism 4, plus all kinds of stuff not even included in those disciplines like the ability to get +3 to all your social and mental stats, +3 armor, +3 to any skill, dream travel, +3 to mental resistance, etc, etc
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Jun 9, 2015 07:05
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Thank god you're here Soonmot, people almost went a page on-topic about Mage without someone's pissy whinging I was actually enjoying this because it's dispelling a lot of what I *thought* I disliked about mage!
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Jun 9, 2015 07:07
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Beast as it is sounds bad and not fun, but I don't really have a problem with OPP's (non?)apology if they actually change the offending content / presentation of that content I wonder if the initial pitch sounded risky to OPP or if it just somehow got out of hand piece by piece? Either way I hope they can now make it fun and not-bad
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Jun 9, 2015 07:14
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Tezzor posted:Even without the ritual system, with equal dot investment a vampire gets Dominate 3 and a mage gets Dominate 3, Majesty 3, Nightmare 5, Obfuscate 5, Auspex 4, Animalism 4, plus all kinds of stuff not even included in those disciplines like the ability to get +3 to all your social and mental stats, +3 armor, +3 to any skill, dream travel, +3 to mental resistance, etc, etc No, it doesn't. Mind 3 is more flexible but not more powerful than Dominate 3. It just doesn't create effects as pernicious or total, and it's highly limited in terms of how many of those effects it can sustain at once and how long those effects last. The incidental personal safety stuff like mage armor just makes up for the fact that mages take full damage from normal weapons and heal no faster than humans do.
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Jun 9, 2015 07:17
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It's actually kind of amazing that designing a corebook by committee - a common practice throughout RPGs, not just Onyx Path - doesn't go frightfully wrong more often.
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Jun 9, 2015 07:22
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LatwPIAT posted:I haven't read every single critique of Beast on RPG.net, but given his overall attitude to people who don't like Beast, it's hard to read this as something other than giving himself a carte blanche to dismiss out of hand any criticism he doesn't like. What I hope to get out of McFarland's eventual thread is an acknowledgment of the concerns raised here and elsewhere, and a statement that makes it clear he does not consider those concerns minor, is taking them seriously, and is dedicated to making the work non-harmful generally. I believe this can be done without necessarily compromising the themes he was going for. I do not consider publishing a substantively similar work with trigger warnings added, as others have suggested on rpg.net, to be appropriate. They can be appropriate, but in this context I feel they would be a "get out of jail free" card. I am not the custodian of Matt McFarland's soul- I have no idea what he personally thinks of all this, so I am choosing to live in hope.
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Jun 9, 2015 07:31
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Dammit Who? posted:What I hope to get out of McFarland's eventual thread is an acknowledgment of the concerns raised here and elsewhere, and a statement that makes it clear he does not consider those concerns minor, is taking them seriously, and is dedicated to making the work non-harmful generally. I believe this can be done without necessarily compromising the themes he was going for. I'm still confused about what Beast's themes are supposed to be exactly. Like, pretty much every other nWoD game has, in my experience, very clear thematic space staked out for it except perhaps for Geist (which is very muddled in many respects) and Mummy (which I'm completely unfamiliar with). Part of what makes games like Changeling so good is their clarity of theme which gives the game purpose as well as a solid grounding for players to engage with...you are survivors of terrible abuse putting your lives back together, using what you've gained by surviving your ordeal to help make you stronger and prevent other people from having to go through what you did. And also there's magic and fae and other WoD monsters too. Reading what I have of Beast, I'm still at a loss to summarize it in a way that jives with the text of the book itself in a non-contradictory fashion and also doesn't seem like I'm bagging on it even unintentionally. It isn't very clear to me what a Beast game would look like, what sorts of arcs I would expect to see a Beast character play out or undergo, or how I could sell someone on Beast in a way that wasn't a long and rambling mix of tortured explanations and preemptive apologies.
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Jun 9, 2015 07:54
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It's Monsterhearts: the WODing. It's Monsterhearts but not explicitly focused on teens and a bit darker and (this is probably the biggest presentation blunder imo) much less explicit about the ways in which characters can/maybe should overcome their negative behaviors and cycles of violence. Alternately/the same thing said super pretentiously: it is a seriously metal take on the fundamental attribution error.
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Jun 9, 2015 08:02
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NiciasTSOF posted:It's Monsterhearts: the WODing. It's Monsterhearts but not explicitly focused on teens and a bit darker and (this is probably the biggest presentation blunder imo) much less explicit about the ways in which characters can/maybe should overcome their negative behaviors and cycles of violence. I can't profess to any great experience with Monsterhearts myself, it's a game whose themes are completely outside my realm of "things I strongly dig and/or are my jam" so I haven't sought out any games of it and am unlikely to do so, but with that overwrought disclaimer out of the way I'm not seeing the Monsterhearts in Beast. I guess on a superficial reading they're similar because both are games in which you play as monsters and are lovely to other people, but the key difference is that in Monsterhearts you're lovely to other people because you're a teenager in high school and teenagers are, by and large, lovely to people, to each other and their significant others and their parents etc, and the monsterness is sort of incidental to that...you could probably get some decent mileage out of Monsterhearts sans the supernatural elements by playing it as a straight up game of high school petty politics, romance, and poor decisions and it would function more or less the same minus a few spooky powers or with an afternoon's reskinning. Whereas in Beast the titular Beasts are monsters through and through and if they don't act like assholes then their soul will go out and be an rear end in a top hat for them. Also Monsterhearts PCs aren't extolled as the True Heroes of the world by the author and don't spawn strawmen villains for them to triumph over smugly, what I've read of Monsterhearts makes it apparent that the "end game victory condition" in Monsterhearts is growing up, gaining maturity, and not being such an rear end in a top hat all the time.
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Jun 9, 2015 08:26
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I hope to have a piece up about this by the 12th on my site talking with Matt directly about the game and some of these concerns directly, and I'm hoping for some good answers there, but my basic feeling here is that this book was reaching really hard to evoke themes like that in Nightbreed (and other Clive Barker works, but Nightbreed's probably the most relevant/most often cited take on horror working through queer themes), but ultimately failed to earn the audience's sympathy. Beasts do bad things and lash out at the world around them, and feel like others just don't understaaaaand them. This is, in itself, not inherently terrible. The issue is, to my mind, that the lashing out ultimately isn't earned. Beasts aren't actually part of some marginalized group, striking back at a world that hates them unreasonably. If anything, they're inherently privileged: blessed with remarkable power with very little drawback save "if you don't use it to hurt people enough, it will use itself to hurt people." This inverts the entire message. I don't at all think this is what McFarland or the other writers set out to do, and that's where the static's coming in. It's easier to assume people just aren't getting what they're going for, especially when the subject material feels this personal (Heroes, in particular, feel like they were written as a form of catharsis for the creators). This doesn't excuse any of the concerns-- I just think the sin here's in mistranslation, not evil intent.
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Jun 9, 2015 08:53
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It's also the specific sort of lashing out. The examples and things feel like the creatures primarily target people who have no hope of fighting back against the creatures, don't know the creatures exist, and aren't hostile to them to begin with. And they do it in styles that are much less allegorical than most monsters. A vampire carries similar themes of parasitic abuse and misuse of others, but while in the real world an abusive parent, teacher, guardian, or other person in power might actually 'non-fatally' poison a child to 'learn them' and then choke them half to death to frighten them further, no-one drinks people dry in a club. The things the Beasts do to people are allegorical for monstrous predation, but take the form of very real abuse and manipulation, which hurts any attempt at a metaphor because holy poo poo these are things actual people do to other actual people and they give the same excuses ('She had it coming.' 'You made me hit you.') the loving Beasts do. There is seriously nothing funny about child abuse and a sample player being described as 'delighted' to make a safe space (a kid's home) into a place she can torture him until he goes mad is some seriously hosed up poo poo that needs to change.
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Jun 9, 2015 09:02
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Yeah, that's what I mean when I say it isn't earned. Beasts primarily look to prey on literal innocent bystanders, which makes the entire queer reading fall apart immediately. They should have played up the Hero-Beast relationship a lot more (and made the Hero the instigator in the relationship), in my opinion.
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Jun 9, 2015 09:05
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Night10194 posted:The things the Beasts do to people are allegorical for monstrous predation, but take the form of very real abuse and manipulation, which hurts any attempt at a metaphor because holy poo poo these are things actual people do to other actual people and they give the same excuses ('She had it coming.' 'You made me hit you.') the loving Beasts do. There is seriously nothing funny about child abuse and a sample player being described as 'delighted' to make a safe space (a kid's home) into a place she can torture him until he goes mad is some seriously hosed up poo poo that needs to change. I think this is the really important part- Beasts do terrible things to people without justification (other than that it feels good and satisfies an internal need to abuse and dominate others) and paint themselves as the victims. They are textbook abusers and narcissists who use the same self-justifications real-world abusers and narcissists do while, just like human abusers and narcissists paint themselves as victims who are being persecuted by people who won't take their poo poo. This is profoundly gross.
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Jun 9, 2015 09:08
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