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Pope Guilty posted: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. Again, looking up thread, one of the 'antagonists' is a young woman who had the gall to defend herself and who is judged a monster because 'she isn't altruistic in her desire to fight these things and return home to a family that obviously loves and misses her.' Like, christ, how do you write that and still think you're writing about the 'good guys'? Reading about Hunter and Changeling, I wanted to pick them up. The only real way to register my disapproval of this kind of poo poo besides posting angry messages on the internet is to not buy any of OP's products, which I will be doing, instead. I've got plenty of other games to write, run, and play. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 09:17 on Jun 9, 2015 |
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Jun 9, 2015 09:11
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Adept Nightingale posted: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 is what I meant when I compared Beast to Changeling: the Dreaming, which also reads very much as though it were written in parts as a form of catharsis and it similarly did C:tD no favors whatsoever. I mean it's hard to tell with 100% certainty because the themes of Beast are muddy as hell...are Beasts supposed to be representative of persecuted and maligned minorities fighting back against those that would demonize and oppress them? Then why do Beasts all range from petty assholes at best to horrifically abusive monsters poisoning children? What's the takeaway supposed to be there? Why are Beasts every other supernatural splats' bestest buds? Is this supposed to be a "queer inclusivity" thing? Heroes are a similar mess, and I think it's pretty telling that everybody who's read the book as it stands has immediately sought to put a different spin on things in order to make it more playable and palatable, and also that nobody can seem to agree on what the hell Beast is about in the first place.
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Jun 9, 2015 09:13
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Night10194 posted: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. As a child, one of my parents learned not to listen to homeschool groups after their advice to "non-fatally" poison me took a moments-away-from-being-incredibly-fatal turn, so I feel that one. Kai Tave posted:This is what I meant when I compared Beast to Changeling: the Dreaming, which also reads very much as though it were written in parts as a form of catharsis and it similarly did C:tD no favors whatsoever. I mean it's hard to tell with 100% certainty because the themes of Beast are muddy as hell...are Beasts supposed to be representative of persecuted and maligned minorities fighting back against those that would demonize and oppress them? Then why do Beasts all range from petty assholes at best to horrifically abusive monsters poisoning children? What's the takeaway supposed to be there? Why are Beasts every other supernatural splats' bestest buds? Is this supposed to be a "queer inclusivity" thing? Heroes are a similar mess, and I think it's pretty telling that everybody who's read the book as it stands has immediately sought to put a different spin on things in order to make it more playable and palatable, and also that nobody can seem to agree on what the hell Beast is about in the first place. Most of the developers I have seen talking about heroes have tried to specify that what makes heroes bad is that they want to kill Beasts "whether the Beasts are evil or not." They try to compare them to a hate group in that someone that joins a hate group might feel legitimately wronged by one member of the group but where they go wrong is smearing the whole group. But... Beast doesn't do a lot to establish that there are Beasts that aren't abusive shitheads. It says there are, but it doesn't provide any groups, any philosophy-clubs-with-swords, etc to represent this. It doesn't spend time giving examples of what non-abusive feedings would look like. The example character feeds so uncomfortably that even the book calls it out as making other players uncomfortable. They are going "Well of course it makes sense, they want to kill even morally okay Beasts and that's why they are bad" while everyone else is going "wait, how can you even have a morally okay Beast? Is that a thing? Why isn't that in the book more, then?" You'd think that would be worth like, a couple of paragraphs, maybe a few pages. Mormon Star Wars fucked around with this message at 09:29 on Jun 9, 2015 |
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Jun 9, 2015 09:19
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Mendrian posted:Man I didn't think people would have such a visceral reaction to those meeting notes. Personally I was hoping for "We're hearing concerns, and we think we've written some things that imply things we don't and would never want to have implied that were inappropriate for the game. We'll be looking to revise areas to remove these unintentional themes", or something of that nature. Anything other than shrugging. 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 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. That basically. 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. Historically OPP products were insta-back for me; they've unquestionably lost that from Beast. 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. That's because, depressingly, that is what it is. I think ever since we began with the "Yes but that's exactly what you would say, MRA!" thing I've known nothing was going to change in response to criticism apart from obvious writing or mechanical errors (and in fact not even those, since the book's inconsistent as gently caress). Kai Tave posted: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. Monsterhearts is a Good Game and you could play it entirely as teenagers bein' teenagers rather than literal monsters because most of the moves work well as a douchey thing a teenager's doing or an actual magic power. This bit here is 100% correct; the end stage moves let you buy the ability to mechanically interact with people by acting like a loving adult and your character can "win" by growing up and graduating, leaving the game, if you wanted to play something else maybe.
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Jun 9, 2015 09:26
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Yeah. I'm one of those people who've gone from loyal, automatic backer and customer to 'eh... maybe' for future releases after this pile of bullshit.
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Jun 9, 2015 09:34
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Mormon Star Wars posted:As a child, one of my parents learned not to listen to homeschool groups after their advice to "non-fatally" poison me took a moments-away-from-being-incredibly-fatal turn, so I feel that one. I feel like this is going to be a sadly common refrain with regards to Beast. Nothing about what's being presented in the text so far on behalf of the protagonists is cool or interesting or evocative, it's sad and it's lovely and it's something a lot of people have had to put up with. I can't imagine myself ever wanting to play a game where I take on the role of an abuser abusing people while the game tells me that it's all okay, I'm in the right. This whole thing reads like a parody of WoD games that someone from the Gaming Den might make up. Mormon Star Wars posted:Most of the developers I have seen talking about heroes have tried to specify that what makes heroes bad is that they want to kill Beasts "whether the Beasts are evil or not." They try to compare them to a hate group in that someone that joins a hate group might feel legitimately wronged by one member of the group but where they go wrong is smearing the whole group. Like I said, I bet in a decade or two people are going to look back on Beast with its incredibly janky and totally inconsistent attempt to make a game where noble queer Beasts are persecuted by MRA gamergater bigots only the protagonists are massive dickbags and the antagonists are sympathetic and wonder what the gently caress was up with people in the year 2015.
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Jun 9, 2015 09:38
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Because Monsterhearts is cool and I was kind of unclear I'll give an example. MH is an apocalypse-world-style game, with the guiding principle that mechanical tricks represent actual things that happen (Monsterhearts breaks with this slightly with the move to describe your luxurious blonde hair from a third person way, but you still need to actually do it); you have a mechanic, called a Move, and a trigger for it in the fiction, and the two always happen together. When you Shut Someone Down, for example, in the fiction you're always snarking at them or chewing them out or whatever, and whenever you chew someone out or snark you're always Shutting Someone Down. Most moves have three outcomes, negative, mixed success, and success with bonus; because MH is about teenagers interacting dysfunctionally, it's more accurate to say "You take consequences", "You both take consequences", and "You force them to take all the consequences", and this is exactly how it is when you Shut Someone Down; you get a GM move made on you appropriate to the situation, you both come out looking bad, or they come out looking bad and you get to feel proud and good with yourself because hah stupid jock amirite? So, in a real situation, you've met someone being bullied. You like to think you're not an rear end in a top hat so when it comes up next, you're going to intervene! How're you going to do that? Well, uh, if you're going to tell them to stop being an rear end, that looks a lot like Shutting Someone Down. You could Lash Out, too, and probably have things go worse. Now, if you're experience, you might have a Growing Up Move, instead, such as Stick Up For Someone; this is a move that will likely have broadly positive outcomes*, although they can still be mixed and still end with people getting hurt, you're more likely to be breaking up fights and defending people rather than attacking someone you feel is a justified target as an outcome. But, this is a Growing Up Move, and as I said, your character needs to be pretty experienced and, notably, mature for it! *and as-such likely de-escalates the situation, which is good for the characters involved but probably makes your game rather boring. Hence why characters who've Grown Up enough are likely to leave the game soon! Monsterhearts is a really interesting game, and one I'm sad I don't get to GM as much as I'd like.
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Jun 9, 2015 09:48
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Kai Tave posted:This whole thing reads like a parody of WoD games that someone from the Gaming Den might make up. Weirdly enough, the two people I've told about Beast's numerous flaws have wondered if it was some elaborate self parody in poor taste by OP. One even wondered if it was a stealth marketing campaign for a new edition of Hunter until I pointed out there was a full multi-hundred page PDF involved...
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Jun 9, 2015 09:50
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It's been said here, there, and everywhere but the biggest gently caress up was probably in setting the power dynamic exactly backwards from what it should be. Heroes should create Beasts, not the other way around. You can't really have an oppressed minority stand in that that creates their own oppressors [Or at least empowers them to oppress even better], it's a terrible foundation to build a metaphor off of. There may be a lot wrong with the portrayal of Beasts, but that is like the foundational statement everything else has to build off of. "What is a Beast?". If by nature the act of being a Beast is empowerment, you've probably hosed up. Being a Beast should be bad, and rejecting the narrative should be what leads you to being empowered. If you are empowered from moment one what the hell is your game about?
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Jun 9, 2015 10:30
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So which beast family represents the primordial fear of a bad game line?
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Jun 9, 2015 11:07
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Cable posted:So which beast family represents the primordial fear of a bad game line? Considering that every single writer from OP has distanced themselves from Beast, I'm gonna go with "the McFarlands".
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Jun 9, 2015 11:53
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In the grim future of tabletop roleplaying, receiving a copy of Beast: The Primordial from your ST will be akin to receiving the Black Spot from your pirate captain and indicates you are about to expelled from your gaming group.
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Jun 9, 2015 12:07
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Gerund posted:Considering that every single writer from OP has distanced themselves from Beast Really? loving time zones! No one tells me anything.
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Jun 9, 2015 12:10
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Do they police up the comments? Because there's at least two "Gee how are people upset about this great game!" posts mixed in with "I'm glad to hear you're taking concerns seriously!" Like, if I hadn't read the PDF or this thread I'd assume it was just pearl-clutching nonsense instead of Abuser: The Pedocideing.
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Jun 9, 2015 12:43
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moths posted:Do they police up the comments? Because there's at least two "Gee how are people upset about this great game!" posts mixed in with "I'm glad to hear you're taking concerns seriously!" They banned someone from harmlessly saying it reminded them of what a wife beaters own self rationalization would be.
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Jun 9, 2015 12:50
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Really? loving time zones! No one tells me anything.
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Jun 9, 2015 13:24
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Adept Nightingale posted: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. [...] Yes, I agree. From what other people who've known him longer say it seems very unlikely that McFarland would intend for his work to come across this way. quote:(Heroes, in particular, feel like they were written as a form of catharsis for the creators). This, though, bothers me. A game-as-polemic where you're here to imagine beating up all the fuckers that the creator of the game personally hates is not really a good look even if I, too, hate the fuckers. Mage, for instance, has a standin for the ruling classes in the Seers of the Throne. Those are some real fuckers, in-game and in real life! But the game isn't about killing Seers, and moreover the game understands why someone would want to be a Seer - wealth and power can salve the conscience pretty well. The honesty about how the ruling classes perpetuate themselves and how the things they actually do are at a remove from their real-life counterparts (you're arranging proposed roadways into Evil Runes, not lobbying for juveniles to be tried at adults) means that people want to run Seer campaigns; these properties also make those campaigns something the game can support without falling apart. All Beast does is throw glaringly unsupported assertions one after another in a desperate attempt to keep people from playing "the wrong kind of Beast game". Like, okay. Let's take Beast exactly as it seems to have been intended - Beasts are the marginalized, Heroes are extremist zealots who are not mentally ill. Beast has at its core a fundamental ignorance or dishonesty about where extremists come from. As we've all noticed, Heroes are all atomized weirdos radicalized by a single encounter with the supernatural, which they may have never encountered or put any credence in before. If another Hero exists and has a similar obsession, it's basically a coincidence. This is not how extremism works. Guys like Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh are referred to as "loners", but the truth is they both had an active ideological support network. McVeigh spent years on the gun show network, spreading his ideas and soaking up new ones. He gave out literature to like-minded friends. He regularly referenced The Turner Diaries. He was tutored in bomb-making by Terry Nichols. Harvard was awash in Ted Kaczynski's brand of anti-technological despair when he attended and taught there. When he encountered the work of French philosopher Jacques Ellul, he was delighted to find someone writing what he already suspected. When he finally published his manifesto, the press and public were shocked by how unremarkable the ideas in it were - not mainstream, but reasonable and a reflection of more common attitudes. As science author Robert Wright put it in TIME magazine, "There's a little bit of the unabomber in most of us." Extremists don't emerge from a single traumatic incident and don't produce their obsessions ex nihilo, they're grown over a lifetime of soaking in attitudes already present in society. TERFs and MRAs and white nationalists aren't boxes of coincidentally-obsessed loners, they're support structures and lobbying networks who police themselves ideologically. A Slasher can be a lone nut, but a Hero never is. Beast's misunderstanding of how extremists (and hence, Heroes) work means that it has a hard time portraying them in ways that make sense. Take Melanie, for instance. She's loving awesome. Like the star of some unmade Nightmare on Elm Street spinoff, or a changeling culture hero battling against all odds in Arcadia, she's an inspirational tale for people who've been shat on by the World of Darkness. Nothing she's described as doing sounds anything less than laudable. But she's a Hero, and the text says Heroes are narcissistic and incapable of self-reflection, so she must be bad somehow! This leads to reactions I've already seen over at rpg.net, where people start combing through the rest of her character sheet looking for something they can interpret as evil in order to resolve the text's contradictions. Ah, she has a Specialty of Finding Weaknesses, eh? How unlikely, for a long-term monster hunter! She must have been a real bully before being attacked. What a piece of poo poo 'mean girl', throw her in the garbage with all the rest of the Heroes. At best, it makes the reader do all the heavy lifting and go through some serious contortions in order for things to make sense. At worst, it's one of the unfortunate tendencies of the more immature wings of the social justice community, where someone is declared Bad by a local authority and there's a brief scramble through their previous output (Tumblr posts, instagrams, whatever) to find things that can be interpreted or misinterpreted as justifying the declaration. If Heroes are bad, I should be able to come to that conclusion without the text constantly and explicitly reminding me so. If I can't, it means something's gone badly wrong. Dammit Who? fucked around with this message at 13:59 on Jun 9, 2015 |
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Jun 9, 2015 13:56
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NutritiousSnack posted:They banned someone from harmlessly saying it reminded them of what a wife beaters own self rationalization would be. Just to reiterate: this was an RPG.net mod, not to my knowledge any writer or staff member of OPP.
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Jun 9, 2015 13:57
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Wow, they're really making GBS threads up Dark Eras with Beast? Instead of literally anything the backers of that book actually wanted. E: I misread, it's going into the Dark Eras Companion instead of anything the backers wanted and voted on. moths fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Jun 9, 2015 |
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Jun 9, 2015 14:04
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Dammit Who? posted:Just to reiterate: this was an RPG.net mod, not to my knowledge any writer or staff member of OPP. Yes, RPG.net moderation is just terrible. That Matt McFarland is a mod there himself probably further adds to the confusion people have over this.
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Jun 9, 2015 14:19
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Gerund posted:Considering that every single writer from OP has distanced themselves from Beast, I'm gonna go with "the McFarlands". I didn't work on it, but I'm not taking a position on the game based on Internet Consensus either. I posted in regard to some generic poo poo talk and to note that the basic structure of the game does follow a tradition in horror fiction. How well did it do? My only close reading of the text has been a couple of things I needed to know for Mage. But I'm in no way "distancing" myself from Beast. It's just not on my roster, which is currently NWoDcore, Sardonyx, Scion, Mummy, Mage, a little bit of Vampire: The Masquerade and some other things.
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Jun 9, 2015 14:26
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Dammit Who? posted:Yes, I agree. From what other people who've known him longer say it seems very unlikely that McFarland would intend for his work to come across this way. This is a real good post. Even abscent the themes of glorified abuse, the text does not justify a Beast's existence other than the random luck of their soul-twinning and a survival instinct. Ubless there is something people have missed, there isn't a society of Beasts that fosters or teaches a young Beast the way of their society and a valid philosophy to live by. Its also a pretty ugly allegory that the trans-ish splat is inherently abusive to society to the point where their own suicide is a valid reaction.
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Jun 9, 2015 14:35
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Dammit Who? posted:A good post. All excellent points. Having read a lot of those RPGnet threads and been involved in one of those I was profoundly disturbed, to the point of not really wanting to engage with those people, when the witch hunt for reasons Melanie secretly was a psychopathic murderess began. I mean, does it matter? I've mentioned before how I hate how people keep bringing up real world subtext and making out like Beast is a direct 1-1 analogue that produces meaningful insight on one's views on real world topics, so I'm kind of going to be a bit hypocritical, but... I've been bullied. If you'd asked me, when I was like, 10 or 12, what should be done about bullies, I might have said "Locked in an unending nightmare with horrific monsters" (I was a very verbose kid; probably one of the reasons I got bullied). But I wasn't even a teenager. That people, from an OOC perspective, who appear to be adults, are still holding onto this view, that it's fine that a school bully got attacked by a terrifyingly powerful monster and ended up in a coma, is kind of disturbing, even if you think bullying is a real issue (which I also think is the socially acceptable stance for an adult to take, obviously). So many of the things heroes get accused of are like that; being an obsessive rear end in a top hat, or narcissistic and self-absorbed, or wearing fedoras and saying "M'lady" might mean I don't want to hang out with you, but they probably don't deserve summary execution. (Even if you dress up the stay of execution a bit by magically making them behave worse beforehand.)
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Jun 9, 2015 14:36
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MalcolmSheppard posted:I didn't work on it, but I'm not taking a position on the game based on Internet Consensus either. I posted in regard to some generic poo poo talk and to note that the basic structure of the game does follow a tradition in horror fiction. How well did it do? My only close reading of the text has been a couple of things I needed to know for Mage. But I'm in no way "distancing" myself from Beast. It's just not on my roster, which is currently NWoDcore, Sardonyx, Scion, Mummy, Mage, a little bit of Vampire: The Masquerade and some other things. I think what Dave (and other people who worked on Beast) is doing isn't distancing himself from Beast, but simply stating his intent regarding the parts he worked on was not what people are picking up. I know someone on here wrote the Nightmares, and those are all pretty great too. The problems are in the fluff pieces, and the hero section, and arguably the basic premise of the game. Also this just occurred to me: Beast is Doctor Horrible's Sing Along Blog rebooted as a gritty slasher piece.
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Jun 9, 2015 14:40
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Roland Jones posted:Yes, RPG.net moderation is just terrible. That Matt McFarland is a mod there himself probably further adds to the confusion people have over this. Seriously? Talk about your conflict of interest. What really gets me is how none of them seem to have realized that in endorsing Beast's worldview, they are actually endorsing the people who've bullied them. I dislike Nezumi-chan on that board not because she's trans and/or autistic, I dislike her because she's endorsing the worldview shared by people who bully (to say the least) trans and autistic people. Hell, by taking on that worldview, in game terms wouldn't that make her a Hero™?
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Jun 9, 2015 14:40
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CommissarMega posted:Seriously? Talk about your conflict of interest. That line about the fundamental attribution error upthread was dead on.
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Jun 9, 2015 14:51
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CommissarMega posted:Seriously? Talk about your conflict of interest. It's usually unavoidable that a moderator will have some personal involvement in a thread on a forum they moderate. If they don't participate in the forum, they're distanced from it, which leads to passionless moderation and a lack of connection with the community. To avoid the conflicts of interests, a large moderation staff can share work between them such that nobody moderates a thread where there's a conflict of interest. Matthew McFarland being a moderator on a forum where games being made by the company he works for are discussed means there's a conflict of interest between McFarland and those discussions, not the moderation staff as a whole.
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Jun 9, 2015 15:02
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You know, the game could be much better, both in quality and potential sales potential if they made the narrative itself the villain. Beasts and Heroes create each other, and it's useless to say which came first (think 'chicken or the egg'). Under normal circumstances, a Beast comes along, does nasty poo poo, and is slain by a Hero. Okay, cool- but it's a lovely deal for Beasts, since they were regular, normal working Joes and Janes who've suddenly been conscripted into some kind of crazy metaplot for unknown reasons (maybe the God-Machine likes lovely fantasy, who knew), and at the end, they have to die. Thing is, Heroes would have a lovely time of it too. Look at King Arthur, slain by his son, while his wife cheats on him with his best friend. Luke Skywalker lost his dad to the dark side, and his adoptive parents to friggin' stormtroopers. Peter Parker also lost his uncle. A Hero's emergence is heralded by chaos, death and destruction, often to his closest relatives and loved ones because that provides both a heroic catalyst and ratings gold-drama. Maybe some sociopaths are cool with this, but people like Melanie? No loving way she's going to take this lying down (metaphorically, I mean). So start off your sourcebook with Beasts, because maybe they were the first to look at the narrative and say 'gently caress this poo poo', but later on you can expand the line to include Heroes, because while Ye Olde Age™ Heroes might have been okay with loved ones dying left and right, what with the Crusades and plagues and all, and having an easily-blameable Beast right there, as time went by they too began to look at the Narrative and decide it's poo poo. BAM! Second sourcebook, holla holla mo' nerd dolla, hire me now OPP. LatwPIAT posted:Matthew McFarland being a moderator on a forum where games being made by the company he works for are discussed means there's a conflict of interest between McFarland and those discussions, not the moderation staff as a whole. Yeah, that was what I was referring to, sorry if I was unclear.
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Jun 9, 2015 15:07
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Ferrinus posted: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. It is both more powerful and more flexible. A mage can heal faster than normal humans by spending Mana, although it's poor compared to any other splat. They also have no weaknesses. It's silly that you would even attempt to claim that mages are balanced against the other splats.
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Jun 9, 2015 15:08
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spectralent posted:All excellent points. Having read a lot of those RPGnet threads and been involved in one of those I was profoundly disturbed, to the point of not really wanting to engage with those people, when the witch hunt for reasons Melanie secretly was a psychopathic murderess began. I mean, does it matter? I've mentioned before how I hate how people keep bringing up real world subtext and making out like Beast is a direct 1-1 analogue that produces meaningful insight on one's views on real world topics, so I'm kind of going to be a bit hypocritical, but... I've been bullied. If you'd asked me, when I was like, 10 or 12, what should be done about bullies, I might have said "Locked in an unending nightmare with horrific monsters" (I was a very verbose kid; probably one of the reasons I got bullied). But I wasn't even a teenager. That people, from an OOC perspective, who appear to be adults, are still holding onto this view, that it's fine that a school bully got attacked by a terrifyingly powerful monster and ended up in a coma, is kind of disturbing, even if you think bullying is a real issue (which I also think is the socially acceptable stance for an adult to take, obviously). So many of the things heroes get accused of are like that; being an obsessive rear end in a top hat, or narcissistic and self-absorbed, or wearing fedoras and saying "M'lady" might mean I don't want to hang out with you, but they probably don't deserve summary execution. (Even if you dress up the stay of execution a bit by magically making them behave worse beforehand.) I'm an abuse survivor, and I was bullied extensively in school. I've had my shoulder dislocated because I wouldn't give up my lunch money. I had my foot twisted in front of a teacher on his smoke break who just kind of glared at me for having the imposition for thinking he'd help. Making me limp to the nurses office on my severely injured ankle. After four years of this poo poo I finally had enough and fought back, and because of the absolutely ludicrous policy our school had, I got detention. It was easier to punish the loud kid who complained than the six kids who beat him up on a regular basis. By the standards of this game, I would be a Hero. Which means by the standards of this game, not only did I deserve it, but my abusers were somehow heroic and justified in their actions. That is the narrative the game creates. It encourages real life abuse victims to sublimate these feelings not into righteous anger, not into striking back at their abusers and taking back their agency and dignity, but into perpetuating the cycle of violence because they've got some kind of free pass on moral rectitude that makes it okay for them to be the abusers and everyone else just has to suck it. "Inverting the Narrative" doesn't change the narrative meaning of the actions, it just removes the justification of them.
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Jun 9, 2015 15:19
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Tezzor posted:It is both more powerful and more flexible. A mage can heal faster than normal humans by spending Mana, although it's poor compared to any other splat. They also have no weaknesses. It's silly that you would even attempt to claim that mages are balanced against the other splats. Mages can heal one level of damage per day, climbing to an eventual four. I notice you can't gainsay anything I actually said about the very powers you brought up in your last post. Maybe you've realized how stupid it is to compare "Emotional Urging" to "Eye of the Beast"?
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Jun 9, 2015 15:40
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From RichT on the Onyx Path forums: ----- quote:But I think we can say that of the people who are/were interested in Beast but are now very much put off, the overwhelming majority aren't in the "Beasts are too evil to be fun" camp. The fact that this is the main criticism that seems to have been taken away is deeply concerning. ---- So it looks like a response to the abuse themes is still incoming. I'm not hopeful, but it's something.
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Jun 9, 2015 15:41
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Vampire is one of Onyx Path's most popular properties and in that game you also play an abusive stalker. In fact the mechanics have moved more in that direction in every release and the audience has eaten it up. But neither the game nor the mechanics tells you that you're right to be one. (There are some factions that do, but they all are portrayed as corrupt and monstrous because corrupt monsters created them.) In fact the significant central choice of the game is you trying to not be as bad as you know you can be.
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Jun 9, 2015 15:46
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Part of the fun of being a monster in Vampire, a killer in Werewolf or a hubristic rear end in a top hat in Mage is knowing you're doing something bad for your own gain or desire or needs. It is the active choice of doing monstrous things and not spending time justifying it to the world. Maybe to yourself - 'I have to do this now or something worse will happen later' - but you know that's rationalization, and you know that you're doing something bad. You may fight the guys who get mad at you for it, but you don't blame them, out of character. This is an important and key difference. The omniscient narrator isn't telling you that the guy you drank the blood of must have deserved it. It isn't telling you that the grieving mother who sets your house on fire is a total bitch for blaming you for the death of her child. It isn't telling you that you are right to terrorize and kill and anyone who wants to stop you is an rear end in a top hat who deserved it anyway. You can justify and rationalize all you want but the game isn't going to endorse you for it. Except in Beast.
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Jun 9, 2015 15:51
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Dammit Who? posted:Beast's misunderstanding of how extremists (and hence, Heroes) work means that it has a hard time portraying them in ways that make sense. Take Melanie, for instance. She's loving awesome. Like the star of some unmade Nightmare on Elm Street spinoff, or a changeling culture hero battling against all odds in Arcadia, she's an inspirational tale for people who've been shat on by the World of Darkness. Nothing she's described as doing sounds anything less than laudable. But she's a Hero, and the text says Heroes are narcissistic and incapable of self-reflection, so she must be bad somehow! This leads to reactions I've already seen over at rpg.net, where people start combing through the rest of her character sheet looking for something they can interpret as evil in order to resolve the text's contradictions. Ah, she has a Specialty of Finding Weaknesses, eh? How unlikely, for a long-term monster hunter! She must have been a real bully before being attacked. What a piece of poo poo 'mean girl', throw her in the garbage with all the rest of the Heroes. If I ever get a chance to run Changeling, Melanie is either going to be the Queen of Summer or a Prometheus-level Summer culture hero. If she has to have her origins in Beast, the least I can do is port her over to a good OPP game. (I mean, seriously, they even called her "Sleeping Beauty.")
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Jun 9, 2015 15:51
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Ferrinus posted:Mages can heal one level of damage per day, climbing to an eventual four. I notice you can't gainsay anything I actually said about the very powers you brought up in your last post. Maybe you've realized how stupid it is to compare "Emotional Urging" to "Eye of the Beast"? Mages can heal one level of damage per day, unless they have Life 2, in which event they can heal (Successes) damage per 1 Magic Juice spent, instead of 1 for 1 as with other groups, and heal others in this way and Agg on themselves with Life 3. Emotional Urging by itself, let alone Mind 2 as a whole, is a far more flexible power than Eye of the Beast, and easily has the potential to have a stronger and/or longer-lasting effect if cast as a ritual, either on somebody tied up, or sympathetically with Space, or powered up and or then hung with Fate, either way for a minimal dot investment that gives tons of additional effects of its own. Tezzor fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Jun 9, 2015 |
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Jun 9, 2015 16:02
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Melanie is awesome, and the attempts on RPG.net to justify her situation and status as a Hero with "She followed the thing that was trying to harm her to its lair and slew it, how reckless!" is loving dumb.
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Jun 9, 2015 16:04
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Really the bit that gets me is the people scouring over her sheet looking for proof she's evil. Hmm that is an awfully suspicious specialization to have, maybe it is she who is the real monster.
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Jun 9, 2015 16:07
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If you wrote up my real-life sheet I'd definitely have a "Child Abuse" specialization; c'mon, don't look at me like that! It's my job field!
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Jun 9, 2015 16:12
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| # ? May 8, 2024 09:19 |
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Jonas Albrecht posted:Melanie is awesome, and the attempts on RPG.net to justify her situation and status as a Hero with "She followed the thing that was trying to harm her to its lair and slew it, how reckless!" is loving dumb. Ahahahahaha you poor bastard. They're *way* past that now. quote:Actually, someone else pointed out some really, really interesting things from Melanie's stat block. First off, she has Integrity 3. That doesn't mean anything itself, but then look at her Social skills, and we get "Empathy (Finding Insecurities) 3." Her character write-up doesn't say, but from that, it sounds a hell of a lot like she was already exactly the sort of bully you'd expect to become a Hero. That doesn't mean she deserves what happened to her, but it strongly suggests that, yes, there is a certain sort that becomes Heroes beyond just "low Integrity" and Melanie was one of them, rather than having it forced on her by that nasty Beast when she'd never done anything wrong. quote:Though while the topic is still in the air, she also has the Subterfuge specialty "Putting on a Brave Face", which also shades the possibilities of her unrevealed history. Including the 'finding insecurities' specialty and especially Integrity 3. quote:No it certainly doesn't - but equally, all but one of the Beasts she's killed have nothing to do with what happened to her.
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Jun 9, 2015 16:13
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