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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. I'm fairly sure someone said something along the lines of "She was a burgeoning serial killer". I mean, let's be real here: My interpretation of that was that she got attacked and instead of taking it, fought back, pursuing the Beast when it tried to abort and managed to kill it in it's lair. It doesn't seem, to me, like that would require immense amounts of forethought or planning, and could easily come under the "impassioned" heading. But let's say she did pause, there was a day or two as she tracked it down, whatever. Melanie's still not a serial killer! We have a teenage girl, who was just attacked by an actual monster with actual supernatural powers that she now knows is real. I'm pretty sure she, like every other mortal in the WoD who gets to this point is going to go "I can't tell anyone about this. Everyone is going to think I'm crazy." Following from that obvious first thought, it probably doesn't cross their mind to check if there's a supernatural FBI agency for this kind of stuff (VASCU might not even exist in her ST's chronicle. Getting a bit meta there, but whatever). Taking from that, that there's a scary monster out there attacking people for unspecified reasons, and, again, as a teenage girl, having the ability to track them down to their magical lair and kill it is nothing short of incredible. Yeah, sure, maybe the Collector has a super-rich inner life and donates to the local Help for Heroes fund or whatever. How the hell is Melanie meant to know that, rather than knowing "Holy crap, monsters are real and also randomly attack teenage girls!"? Based on the information she knows, it's hard to argue that, if not the absolute best course of action, she certainly picked a very brave and risky one. This is the motivation of basically every Hunter ever and we generally ascribe to them, at worst, a conflicted antiheroic tenor, rather than going "Yeah serial killer, gently caress them". Kurieg posted:Ahahahahaha you poor bastard. Hilariously the book actually says the Beasts she's killed are, in fact, making her better, so even if your odds weren't good all of those Beasts were colossal nightmare monsters that are at best passively inflicting horrific nightmares on the world and at worst are the most depraved of terrible, ritualistic serial killers (isn't there wording that suggests feeding must "always inflict loss" or something?), this just puts her at exactly the same level as all the sample player characters who kill people for food. EDIT: And in fact, again, Melanie probably doesn't know anything about the Beasts now anyway, so she has as her sample solely terrifying abuse elementals that attack young girls, and is stuck in a nightmare world with no other obvious means of escape back to her family, so. spectralent fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Jun 9, 2015 |
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Jun 9, 2015 16:13
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Tezzor posted: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. Oh, you've started bringing other Arcana in because you couldn't get your point about Mind to stick. Cool. Emotional Urging doesn't make anyone do anything. It just causes an emotion to be felt. Nightmare either game-mechanically penalizes all actions in general or compels drastic changes in behavior. Not a thing available in Mind 3 actually lets you make someone do something they don't want to do, while one action with Nightmare 3 instantly incapacitates someone or forcibly ejects them from the scene. If a mage with Mind 3 and nothing else higher fougt a vampire with Nightmare 3 the mage would curl up into a ball on the floor and then die. That's because Disciplines are pound for pound stronger and more dependable than spells, at the cost of being much narrower in scope.
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Jun 9, 2015 16:15
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Flavivirus posted:From RichT on the Onyx Path forums: Unless Onyx Path Publications explains why they are asking for money to produce a product that celebrates and justifies child abuse with only the justification of "the abuse of the vulnerable is my soul's fetish", the answer is a base-assumption-level re-write and not pointing at the kickstarter total and saying "Scoreboard".
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Jun 9, 2015 16:18
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I want Melanie to cameo in either the Changeling or Hunter anthologies.
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Jun 9, 2015 16:18
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Even if VASCU does exist they might not be too immediately helpful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dNwFVk68PI
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Jun 9, 2015 16:18
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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. Another great post. Incidentally this is why I realized the Kinship and Family rules don't resonate for me the way they do for the defenders of Beast. They see LGBT support groups... I see 8chan's child pornography addicts standing beside their baphomet doxxers and white supremacists.
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Jun 9, 2015 16:21
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Oh wow I bailed out of the RPGnet thread when it became obvious that I was headbutting a brick wall with increasing force, but in response to "Melanie is only a teenage girl" someone posted:quote:Rachel Shoaf and Sheila Eddy were teenage girls surrounded by friends and families who lured 16 year old Skylar Neese out of her house, stabbed her to death, and hid her body in the woods in Pennsylvania. Jesus titty shitfucking christ what the actual making GBS threads fucknuggets.
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Jun 9, 2015 16:31
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Vampire also benefits from being clearly fantasy. The vampires do fantastic things that cannot be done in real life, it serves as a reminder that it's a game. People don't get attacked by vampires in real life. But compare that to the imitable violence in Beast. Beasts vandalize property to intimidate. They run over your family's dog. They threaten children. It's like someone saw a neo-Nazi spraying a swastika in a synagogue, and said yes - let's tell a story where that guy's the hero. Beast's ugliness exists in our world.
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Jun 9, 2015 16:31
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spectralent posted:Oh wow I bailed out of the RPGnet thread when it became obvious that I was headbutting a brick wall with increasing force, but in response to "Melanie is only a teenage girl" someone posted: Worst part is? In Beast, you'd play the murderers. But yeah, trying to equate Melanie with those two is not just reaching, you're trying to pull something you've seen through the Hubble Telescope. Good God, I think bringing them is as an example is showing disrespect to everyone involved.
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Jun 9, 2015 16:50
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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. On a general scale, you could make something out of how the common narrative of a hero who slays a beast is that the hero is heroic for having slain the beast. That just because Melanie has slain a Beast, she's not necessarily heroic, because the Beast wasn't necessarily a bad person. Twisting the narrative on its head, like Foucault and Chomsky playing D&D and concluding that the humans are monsters in the eyes of the goblins, and the human tendency to go kill them is just a form of imperialism. But the game has spent a long of text telling us all the myriad ways in which Beasts victimize humans, abusing, hurting, and murdering them. It's natural to assume that when a Beast breaks into a teenage girl's house, it was in fact not up to anything good. Even if all it wanted was to steal one of her dolls to feed off her loss, it would still be intentionally hurting a teenage girl to satisfy its lusts, which is not a position that elicits sympathy for the Beast. Perhaps following it and killing it wasn't a measured response - but Melanie is a teenage girl and cannot be expected to know what the measured response to being terrorized by a monster is. When she then ends up comatose, trapped in the strange and presumably scary/dangerous Primordial Dream, it's difficult not to feel sorry for her; for how long has this teenage girl been alone and missing the safety of her parents? It seems like they wanted to do a twist on the story of the hero who enters the magical realm, like Narnia or something - but how do you make someone trapped in a confusing and scary world the villain-of-another-story? Even children's cartoons ultimately portray the monster that is just lost and accidentally rampages around as a victim of circumstance; not one to be punched, but one to be returned home. The most horrible reading I can come up with for what kind of metaphor this is is that Melanie is a child molestation victim who has latched onto some trivial feature of her molestor and how hates everyone with that feature; maybe she was molested by a black man and is now a White Supremacist... but that's still an incredibly tragic narrative, and Melanie is ultimately the victim or the tragic villain. She's latched onto the "Beast" part of "abusive Beast", rather than the "abusive" part, but this fails for two reasons; the first is that someone so obviously traumatized (a teenage girl with Integrity 4) is not someone you can hate, and the second is that "abusive" and "Beast" seem far too much like synonyms for latching onto "Beast" as the important part to be a sign of psychological hatred. The funny thing is, I could see playing a game that makes you, metaphorically, play someone with a socially transgressive urge; a game of playing pedophiles and serial killers, or at best exhibitionistic fetishists. It would be an incredibly dark game, but a workable one nonetheless - because you'd be playing someone desperately trying to balance the fact that they have a psychological urge that cannot be satisfied without harming others - but it would be a game about avoiding harming others, and finding escape through questionable means. It would be a game about confronting the shame of what you are, the fact that you are incompatible with society, and the issues a liberal culture faces when it comes to how to include members who through no fault of their own cannot play well with others. Beast: the Primordial has a lot of the elements of this, but the message it seems to communicate is that you should be socially transgressive, even when it hurts others. spectralent posted:Oh wow I bailed out of the RPGnet thread when it became obvious that I was headbutting a brick wall with increasing force, but in response to "Melanie is only a teenage girl" someone posted: The wikipedia article for that case doesn't go into depth on the perpetrator's family backgrounds, so instead I'll look at a similar case. If you have the stomach for it, look at the kind of families the murders had; in the end, they're also the victims; every single one of them so broken by abuse that they are capable of planned torture and murder. I can't hate someone who is so obviously suffering. LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Jun 9, 2015 |
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Jun 9, 2015 16:53
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Ferrinus posted:Oh, you've started bringing other Arcana in because you couldn't get your point about Mind to stick. Cool. According to Ferrinus 3E Fighters are balanced with Wizards because fighters are better at doing one thing, assuming no preparation or synergy
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Jun 9, 2015 16:55
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Tezzor posted:According to Ferrinus 3E Fighters are balanced with Wizards because fighters are better at doing one thing, assuming no preparation or synergy This analogy would be accurate if in comparing "Dominate Creature" the Bard got a superior version compared to a Wizard. Please try to argue in good faith.
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Jun 9, 2015 17:01
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LatwPIAT posted:It's natural to assume that when a Beast breaks into a 12-year-old girl's house Wait wait wait she's twelve? People are trying to hold a twelve year old for moral accountability for murder of, not only a home-invading grown-rear end human, but one with supernatural powers who was there to, in disturbingly unspecific detail, prey on her?  I am rapidly coming aboard flagship "Burn this splat to the ground" but probably one of the most even-handed assessments and best critiques for reform has been from Rand, which I'm partially quoting here and providing a link to. It lays out basically all the issues I can think of (the other one is "That is an ugly shade of pink to put a monochrome artset through") in good detail and suggests fixes. quote:The first two problems are ultimately intertwined. The first problem is that Beasts are incredibly unsympathetic. This exacerbates the second problem, which is that the text and subtext of the game are decoupled...
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Jun 9, 2015 17:03
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The original text mentions she's still a teenager after 2 years in a coma, so she could have been up to 16 years old when she went all  However, since 16 is the legal age of consent in some states, that means she was a legal adult who must have willfully gone after a poor creature that was only fulfilling its narrative and biological imperatives. Thank God she's in a coma, otherwise she'd be looting and murdering and raping everything with a pulse! Goddamn Beast. EDIT: Here's the original text. quote:Sleeping Beauty
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Jun 9, 2015 17:06
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Tezzor posted:According to Ferrinus 3E Fighters are balanced with Wizards because fighters are better at doing one thing, assuming no preparation or synergy According to me you are not competent to prosecute this argument. I cite as evidence your backing off immediately from every specific example you brought up. I don't think you could actually explain what the fighter/wizard problem was or how it applies to this if you tried. It's not the same as the sorcerer/wizard problem.
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Jun 9, 2015 17:12
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Actually, you know what, the Melanie thing is pushing me over an edge. I'm actually going to write to Onyx Path and request it be removed or expressly presented as a case where a person is justified in killing a Beast, because it is way too loving close to some real-life poo poo I've seen and that's making it very personal.
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Jun 9, 2015 17:25
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A mage with Mind 3 and nothing else faces a vampire with Nightmare 3 and nothing else. (The 0xp vampire has 3 dots total and the 0xp mage actually has some other Arcana at 2 and a third at 1, but hey.) Let's assume both have equal resistance stats, dicepools, no preparation, etc, are naked and weaponless, and both parties are acting optimally. Already at this point it's just a question of initiative rolls and luck on dice. If the vampire goes first he attempts to freeze the mage in fear. If the mage goes first he turns on Not-Obfuscate. The next turn the vampire would attempt to get the mage in a grapple and start sucking before the spell is broken, then it's a resisted grapple situation between two characters with equal and crappy physical stats (although the vampire can spend blood to buff stats so has some advantage). Or, if he went first the Mage would kick the vampire into Frenzy, then use telepathy to make him really mad at whatever furniture is nearby, then start blasting away with psychic bashing until he's torpored. Or, with a few hours notice, the mage could come in pre-Obfuscated, with his Composure bumped to 7 with the resulting benefit to mind-control resistance and Initiative, and an additional +3 resistance to mind control for good measure. Maybe +3 armor too if his Spell Tolerance is high enough.
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Jun 9, 2015 17:34
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CommissarMega posted:The original text mentions she's still a teenager after 2 years in a coma, so she could have been up to 16 years old when she went all Of that text there are exactly one and a half lines that could be read to imply she's anything close to a bad person, and the entire rest of it is sympathetic. I repeat,
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Jun 9, 2015 17:37
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Not-Obfuscate is.... not Obfuscate. It does not force people to instantly ignore you who were focusing on you. You don't seem to understand that the subtle, surface-level effects generated by third level Mind magic don't have the explosive force or declarative power that third level Disciplines do. You also keep trying to sneak hours of cumulative pre-buffing back into the discussion as though it hadn't already been addressed.
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Jun 9, 2015 17:37
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Calde posted:Another great post. Incidentally this is why I realized the Kinship and Family rules don't resonate for me the way they do for the defenders of Beast. They see LGBT support groups... I see 8chan's child pornography addicts standing beside their baphomet doxxers and white supremacists. When I started thinking of "What would a Beast 'group' look like?", along the lines of Mage Orders or Vampire Covenants, the first thing that came to mind was the Collectors Convention in Sandman. On reflection, I sincerely cannot think of anything more fitting. e: 
Axelgear fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Jun 9, 2015 |
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Jun 9, 2015 17:46
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Axelgear posted:When I started thinking of "What would a Beast 'group' look like?", along the lines of Mage Orders or Vampire Covenants, the first thing that came to mind was the Collectors Convention in Sandman. Which is funny, because the solution to Beasts is pretty similar. "Man, you fuckers don't actually matter and aren't really that important in the long run, so run along."
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Jun 9, 2015 17:49
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Axelgear posted:When I started thinking of "What would a Beast 'group' look like?", along the lines of Mage Orders or Vampire Covenants, the first thing that came to mind was the Collectors Convention in Sandman. If there are beasts that can feed without actually loving people up, they need to be the majority of examples, not just the one pawn shop guy or whatever. Here's a helpful example. Someone on RPGnet went through the book and listed all the example characters and how they feed: quote:Originally Posted by Logos Invictus View Post
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Jun 9, 2015 17:51
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quote:[Again, everyone needs to stop comparing Beasts or Heroes to specific real-life minorities or abusers of those specific minorities. This is the second time I've said this, and Future Villain Band has also said this elsewhere. If it keeps happening, we're going to look at infractions. Redtext, too.
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Jun 9, 2015 17:58
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The thing that gets me is that a lot of examples of "Good Beasts" are basically quasi-villainous comedic stock characters. A hanging judge who enacts harsh penalties. A petty bureaucrat who feeds on the despair of people caught in his technically correct net of red tape. _A really bad cab driver_. These are the guys where the audience cheers when they get their comeuppance, usually by falling face-first into a pile of manure or getting a pie to the face.
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Jun 9, 2015 18:00
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Ferrinus posted:Not-Obfuscate is.... not Obfuscate. It does not force people to instantly ignore you who were focusing on you. You don't seem to understand that the subtle, surface-level effects generated by third level Mind magic don't have the explosive force or declarative power that third level Disciplines do. You also keep trying to sneak hours of cumulative pre-buffing back into the discussion as though it hadn't already been addressed. Incognito Presence makes it more difficult to notice or remember the caster. If you want to rule that someone actively viewing the caster isn't affected, then drop that step and just dump the vampire into fear frenzy. I keep bringing up pre-buffing because it's a very common and non-esoteric factor and you're attempting to claim splat balance by declaring the strongest aspect of one splat out of the discussion. Why not argue that humans are stronger than vampires as long as it isn't night?
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Jun 9, 2015 18:00
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Traveller posted:Redtext, too. Thing is that you can't use Beasts as stand-ins for minorities under that either! But, nominally, that's the point of the line.
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Jun 9, 2015 18:02
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Tezzor, go back to Hellthread. They miss you. Also, this thread needs people debating Ferrinus like Beast needs more defenders.
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Jun 9, 2015 18:36
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Traveller posted:Redtext, too. RPG.net management posted:STOP THINKING SO HARD AND JUST GO ALONG WITH THIS DISTASTEFUL THING
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Jun 9, 2015 18:44
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Tezzor posted:Incognito Presence makes it more difficult to notice or remember the caster. If you want to rule that someone actively viewing the caster isn't affected, then drop that step and just dump the vampire into fear frenzy. I keep bringing up pre-buffing because it's a very common and non-esoteric factor and you're attempting to claim splat balance by declaring the strongest aspect of one splat out of the discussion. Why not argue that humans are stronger than vampires as long as it isn't night? Oh? Oh, yeah? Drop the vampire into fear frenzy, i.e. replicate the effects of Nightmare 3 exactly? Which spell are you doing that with? I don't remember one in the corebook, or any other 3-or-lower spell in the corebook which sets the precedent. While we're at it, how about you figure out why I'm discounting buff-stacking in the course of claiming that vampire powers are dot-for-dot stronger and more convenient to use than mage powers.
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Jun 9, 2015 18:53
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Hey, Ferrinus. When Mage 2E comes out are you going to run a game here?
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Jun 9, 2015 18:54
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I'm running a game of Mage using an incredibly intricate constellation of houserules for some friends of mine already, but I'll definitely consider at most switching to a fiddled-with 2E or at least mining 2E for all its setting changes and spell ideas once it comes out. I've already been drawing on a lot of setting stuff from WoD 2E in general and some of the description and aesthetic of Mage 2E.
Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Jun 9, 2015 |
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Jun 9, 2015 18:56
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Brutal Casting
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Jun 9, 2015 19:04
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spectralent posted:Thing is that you can't use Beasts as stand-ins for minorities under that either! But, nominally, that's the point of the line. I think the issue is that some trolls were back tracing the comment. Saying that if beasts were stand-ins for minorities then minorities were actually monsters and racists were justified. Except the game does paint them that way, and it's something that needs to be addressed.
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Jun 9, 2015 19:13
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Brutal Casting "We're here to make everything metal. Blacker than the blackest black... times infinity." 'You don't have enough Matter dots for that.'
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Jun 9, 2015 19:54
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Cabbit posted:"We're here to make everything metal. Blacker than the blackest black... times infinity." 'You don't have enough Matter dots for that.' This reminds me of that grimoire that's a limited run vinyl of a death metal album that actually plays "Satanic" High Speech when run backwards, and has a rote to turn a corpse's skeleton into metal and rip itself free from the body. God drat, that was great.
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Jun 9, 2015 20:04
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Daeren posted:This reminds me of that grimoire that's a limited run vinyl of a death metal album that actually plays "Satanic" High Speech when run backwards, and has a rote to turn a corpse's skeleton into metal and rip itself free from the body. Dark Revolution was its name and I agree it was the best one of the whole grimoire spalt.
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Jun 9, 2015 20:08
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Ferrinus posted:Oh? Oh, yeah? Drop the vampire into fear frenzy, i.e. replicate the effects of Nightmare 3 exactly? Which spell are you doing that with? I don't remember one in the corebook, or any other 3-or-lower spell in the corebook which sets the precedent. While we're at it, how about you figure out why I'm discounting buff-stacking in the course of claiming that vampire powers are dot-for-dot stronger and more convenient to use than mage powers. http://nwod.org/wiki/index.php/Provoke_Wrath Can trigger rage frenzy in a vampire, so fear frenzy for the same level seems reasonable. And yes, if we're going by this, Mind 3 can exactly replicate the effects of Nightmare 3. Unlike Nightmare 3, it can also do dozens of other things. As far as vampire powers "being dot-for-dot stronger and more convenient to use" than Mage powers, to keep it just within Nightmare, Nightmare 5 can for 1 Willpower cause lethal psychically. Mind 5 can cause lethal psychically for free, or agg for 1 Mana. In addition to that, it can also possess people, read and utterly dominate minds, read and rewrite personalities and memories, imprison someone in the Astral plane, create a mind, enter the Shadow, network minds together, get up to +5 in up to 6 attributes and/or 3-5 ranks in any skill or skills, paralyze, drain willpower, create hallucinations, decrease a target's mental or social attribute, turn off a target's senses, enter dreams, or make someone fall in love. And about a third of that is covert.
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Jun 9, 2015 20:40
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So Beast's pretty poo poo. The thing I find most worrying is how strongly a lot of people seem to have identified with the Ghost of Christmas Child Abuse.
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Jun 9, 2015 20:43
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Brutal Casting So one of the amusing things about this meme, is that Brutal Casting doesn't actually exist. I didn't like it in the first draft of Mage's Merits, so I deleted it in the redlines. And not a single one of you knows what it was supposed to do. Only David Hill and I do.
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Jun 9, 2015 21:01
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Dave Brookshaw posted:So one of the amusing things about this meme, is that Brutal Casting doesn't actually exist. I didn't like it in the first draft of Mage's Merits, so I deleted it in the redlines. I think it only got mentioned the one time in here - I'd forgotten its existence completely until that post. I'm not surprised if people latched onto it though.
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Jun 9, 2015 21:05
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