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I'm confused why a Beast going low Satiety doesn't actually, you know, starve it to death.
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Jun 10, 2015 18:01
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SunAndSpring posted:I'm confused why a Beast going low Satiety doesn't actually, you know, starve it to death. You take 1 lethal per day you don't feed at 0 Satiety and you can't heal damage until you gain at least one point?
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Jun 10, 2015 18:03
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Kurieg posted:You take 1 lethal per day you don't feed at 0 Satiety and you can't heal damage until you gain at least one point? Oh really? Didn't find that in the section about Satiety, must've been somewhere else. My mistake.
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Jun 10, 2015 18:08
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SunAndSpring posted:Oh really? Didn't find that in the section about Satiety, must've been somewhere else. My mistake. It's a part of the Ravenous condition. quote:Ravenous (New Persistent Condition)
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Jun 10, 2015 18:12
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Crion posted:Hopefully if McFarland takes that criticism to heart what we get is something that actually embodies the values the poster in question highlighted, instead of some messed up way of hitting Heroes with Stockholm Syndrome. But the big problem here is that I'm not convinced the game is equipped, at its most basic level, to portray healthy relationships -- and no amount of "reframing" is going to change that. I'm hoping that's the case, but I'm concerned that, instead, Heroes are going just get a heaping coat of black paint and skulls to try and convince us no no really they're super evil, at best making the issue worse and at worst drowning the entire splat in so much pointless misery there's nobody you empathise with.
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Jun 10, 2015 18:15
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spectralent posted:I'm hoping that's the case, but I'm concerned that, instead, Heroes are going just get a heaping coat of black paint and skulls to try and convince us no no really they're super evil, at best making the issue worse and at worst drowning the entire splat in so much pointless misery there's nobody you empathise with. I may not be a fan of Beast (to put it mildly), but I have to believe McFarland and company have seen the concerns as something they need to address with more than even further tripling or quadrupling down on Heroes being bad people. I'm just worried the cosmology and core mechanics for interacting with the world that Beast provides preclude them from putting in any sort of meaningful quick fixes. It's really a project that needs to be razed to the ground and started over, and with a successful Kickstarter, they've got absolutely no business incentive to do that.
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Jun 10, 2015 18:30
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Crion posted:I may not be a fan of Beast (to put it mildly), but I have to believe McFarland and company have seen the concerns as something they need to address with more than even further tripling or quadrupling down on Heroes being bad people. I'm just worried the cosmology and core mechanics for interacting with the world that Beast provides preclude them from putting in any sort of meaningful quick fixes. It's really a project that needs to be razed to the ground and started over, and with a successful Kickstarter, they've got absolutely no business incentive to do that. Yeah, hence my concern. Slapping a patch on it, the "We were unclear how horrible Heroes are. True horribleness is substantial!" approach would be easy to slot in; cut Melanie, remove the line about Integrity and just say Heroes come solely from the ranks of internet trolls, whatever. But that doesn't really fix the more fundamental issues, which is a lot of effort.
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Jun 10, 2015 18:39
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The thing is, cutting Melanie means removing the coolest character in the entire book, rather than just making more cool characters on both sides.
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Jun 10, 2015 18:43
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Mors Rattus posted:The thing is, cutting Melanie means removing the coolest character in the entire book, rather than just making more cool characters on both sides. I want a game line about being in her situation. A game about PCs trapped in dreams and trying to find their way home while protecting sleeping souls and the waking world from the monsters that lurk in the collective unconscious would be great.
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Jun 10, 2015 18:46
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Mors Rattus posted:The thing is, cutting Melanie means removing the coolest character in the entire book, rather than just making more cool characters on both sides. Exactly. Getting up to date on the thread, I see we're desperately scouring for reasons she's a literal horror movie villain now, which is getting increasingly insane. The fact it's different people is worrying me. I like some suggestions raised, but I do think the flaws with the line still seem very fundamental. All the 1%/old money critiques are entirely correct, and people who want "The narrative" to be the villain are just asking it to muscle in on Changeling's territory, which is wrong and bad because Changeling is awesome and doesn't really need any more association with Beast than it's already gotten.
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Jun 10, 2015 18:57
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Mors Rattus posted:The thing is, cutting Melanie means removing the coolest character in the entire book, rather than just making more cool characters on both sides. There are no cool Beast or Hero concepts that are true to the game's fundamental premises. Unless the writers substantially revise the game from the ground up, she should be cut and repurposed for some other product. Maybe Changeling's onieromancy section.
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Jun 10, 2015 19:00
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moths posted:I briefly thought borrowing Wraith's shadow guide mechanic might help save Beast. Let's just be honest, moths. People like you and me just keep suggesting this because it is a rad mechanic and we want to herald it's glorious return in any game we can squeeze it in. 
Mormon Star Wars fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Jun 10, 2015 |
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Jun 10, 2015 19:02
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Crion posted:There are no cool Beast or Hero concepts that are true to the game's fundamental premises. Unless the writers substantially revise the game from the ground up, she should be cut and repurposed for some other product. Maybe Changeling's onieromancy section. That'd be nice. More seriously, I fundamentally reject the idea of Always Chaotic Evil, and I don't want Heroes to have to suffer it.
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Jun 10, 2015 19:02
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Just thinking about it, Melanie is basically a pc type for Orpheus - sleepers are people in medically induced comas whose spirits are projected out into the spectral plane to treat with ghosts and fight spectres. (Orpheus is possibly the best game line white wolf's ever done and the only truly excellent meta plot I've ever encountered. It's a crime it's as obscure as it is.)
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Jun 10, 2015 19:07
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Mors Rattus posted:That'd be nice. This is also an important point. No sentient creature should be without moral agency as a class of beings unless it is incredibly, monstrously alien, at which point it might have moral agency it just doesn't make any goddamn sense from a human perspective.
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Jun 10, 2015 19:09
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Crion posted:I may not be a fan of Beast (to put it mildly), but I have to believe McFarland and company have seen the concerns as something they need to address with more than even further tripling or quadrupling down on Heroes being bad people. I'm just worried the cosmology and core mechanics for interacting with the world that Beast provides preclude them from putting in any sort of meaningful quick fixes. It's really a project that needs to be razed to the ground and started over, and with a successful Kickstarter, they've got absolutely no business incentive to do that. They may not have a business incentive to do that (although I think they do), but they do have a stronger incentive, which is that the message that the game is sending to the majority of people is super offensive to them and that they don't want to be the people that released a game that most people take as sending that message.
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Jun 10, 2015 19:09
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I won't argue with that, but it doesn't make either of us wrong.
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Jun 10, 2015 19:14
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Judging by their kicktraq. It does seem like they're starting to lose people, less people than are coming in, but the money is plateauing faster than most of their other kickstarters have.
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Jun 10, 2015 19:16
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Crion posted:There are no cool Beast or Hero concepts that are true to the game's fundamental premises. Unless the writers substantially revise the game from the ground up, she should be cut and repurposed for some other product. Maybe Changeling's onieromancy section. This is another issue with Melanie. I and a bunch of other people here have spilled a lot of ink about how it's hosed up that Melanie is being portrayed as the bad guy when she's a traumatized girl turned spirit world dream warrior monster hunter...that's not a villain, that's a tragic antihero at best, an outright hero at worst who we're expected to boo. Okay, but another big issue with Melanie is that Beast, both the game and the titular PCs, are badly equipped to deal with her as a challenge or obstacle in any interesting ways. It's been brought up multiple times that Melanie would fit great in Hunter or Changeling, and besides being generally better and better-written games do you know one reason why that is? Because those games give you much more ground to approach things in varied and interestingly conflicting ways. Take Hunter for a basic example. If Melanie showed up in Hunter then you'd have all sorts of varied reactions to someone like her among the various splats and organizations ranging from "awesome, this girl is rad as hell, let's go hunt monsters together" to "what the gently caress is wrong with you, this is a scared lost girl, she needs to be returned to her parents" and neither approach needs shoehorning or twisting of the game's conceits to make work. It's like that for several of the other nWoD lines, Changeling or Mage or even Werewolf, all of these are equipped on some level with the ability to approach a tragic figure like Melanie in more ways other than "well she's an antagonistic NPC, obviously she's an rear end in a top hat bitch and needs to step off"...but a fundamental problem that Melanie highlights about Beasts, which has been identified by other people like Mormon Star Wars, is that Beasts are one note. There are no altruistic Beasts. We're told that there are "good Beasts" but not shown many at all, and even if we were to believe that all the tools in a Beast's toolbox are geared around torture and terrorizing, there's very little in there for a noble-minded Beast to go "hey what happened to this girl is a lovely deal, we should get her out of the nightmare realm and back to her parents and try to patch things up." I mean it's possible to do so in the same way it's possible to do anything in any RPG, but the game itself doesn't really seem to give you much support for being someone who tries to fix the problems that other members of your supernatural subtype cause without resorting to being a destructive, abusive monster. I think this is why Melanie is causing some people to strip a gear...she's a character with nuance in a game that has none. (Which isn't to say you can't spin a game out of the PCs being selfish, destructive jerks. Vampire exists and that's fine. But if Melanie were a Vampire NPC, some sort of deathly wraith created by some rear end in a top hat vampire who did weird blood magic gone awry and now she hunts vampires in their lairs, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be seeing people scouring the text looking for ways to portray her as an evil serial killer, because gently caress vampires.)
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Jun 10, 2015 19:35
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The biggest problem for me with beast is that there's absolutely no conflict drawn from having to do monstrous things to survive. The example old lady child abuser has been just a person for what, 65 years maybe, but then she has her Homecoming and now she's just flat out malicious and has utterly abandoned all of her previous morality. The game should at least pay lip service to the idea that maybe having a normal civilized human upbringing might make someone balk at murdering people to survive.
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Jun 10, 2015 19:45
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Gilok posted:The biggest problem for me with beast is that there's absolutely no conflict drawn from having to do monstrous things to survive. The example old lady child abuser has been just a person for what, 65 years maybe, but then she has her Homecoming and now she's just flat out malicious and has utterly abandoned all of her previous morality. The game should at least pay lip service to the idea that maybe having a normal civilized human upbringing might make someone balk at murdering people to survive. I mean, apparently the book mentions someone committing suicide because they didn't want to fulfill their hunger, but without a beast society putting that in a wider context of "Here are different groups of Beasts and how they approach Hunger ideologically" it makes it seem less like it's saying "There are a variety of ways for Beasts to approach their Hunger" and more like like it's saying "Some people just can't handle it."
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Jun 10, 2015 19:56
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Kai Tave posted:(Which isn't to say you can't spin a game out of the PCs being selfish, destructive jerks. Vampire exists and that's fine. But if Melanie were a Vampire NPC, some sort of deathly wraith created by some rear end in a top hat vampire who did weird blood magic gone awry and now she hunts vampires in their lairs, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be seeing people scouring the text looking for ways to portray her as an evil serial killer, because gently caress vampires.) We also accept that most vampires are assholes - not because they start that way, but because hurting people wears them down. The game makes a pretty big deal out of this, out of how it's so easy to lose touch with humanity and accept being the monster you don't want to be. Beast doesn't do that. Beasts don't have an Integrity/Humanity/whatever stat that tells them that hurting people is wearing, that horrible things are bad for the soul, or that mental health can be worn away by witnessing horrific acts. Instead, they have a pool of power points.
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Jun 10, 2015 19:58
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Mors Rattus posted:Instead, they have a pool of power points. They have a pool of power points that rewards them with experience points for spending and refilling them constantly. I think sated specifically calls out spending satiety wastefully as a beat point.
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Jun 10, 2015 20:05
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Flavivirus posted:Just thinking about it, Melanie is basically a pc type for Orpheus - sleepers are people in medically induced comas whose spirits are projected out into the spectral plane to treat with ghosts and fight spectres. It's my favorite oWoD game by far, just because of how focused and good it is at what it's trying to do.
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Jun 10, 2015 20:06
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Swagger Dagger posted:It's my favorite oWoD game by far, just because of how Amazingly, contrasting wraiths and Orpheus ghosts actually made me appreciate Orpheus more! It was cool how Orpheus ghosts were their own thing.
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Jun 10, 2015 20:09
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Vampire is also a pretty nuanced game. It floats around a single obvious transgression every vampire will, eventually, engage in -- assault, and potentially murder. Almost every vampire tries to develop a way to mitigate psychological and collateral damage on their victims, not because they care, but because it's easier to feed when you're not churning out traumatized people and/or corpses. Not every vampire feels this way and each covenant has a different opinion on the role mortals play in their crimes. The entire game is set up to deal with the damage vampires cause and ask questions about it. Even Disciplines are means to that end. I feel like when the trauma becomes that point that's where the dangerous parts seep in.
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Jun 10, 2015 20:09
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Oh good, I just found a passage talking about how it feels really good to build a new Lair room out of an area where someone else has had a mental breakdown in front of you.quote:If, on the other hand, a character loses a dot of Integrity, the Beast is building her Lair not on her own magical prowess, but on another character's spiritual weakness. The character commits an act or witnesses an occurrence that shakes her self-image and damages her soul, and the Beast's monstrous Soul builds a nest with the fragments. A Chamber created after such an occurrence is likely to be very comfortable for the Beast, a kind of second Heart.
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Jun 10, 2015 20:16
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Mormon Star Wars posted:Let's just be honest, moths. People like you and me just keep suggesting this because it is a rad mechanic and we want to herald it's glorious return in any game we can squeeze it in. I've considered using it for a Fate/Stay Night-esque game about wizards summoning mystical warriors for fighting; everyone plays a wizard... and the Servant of another player. Mors Rattus posted:We also accept that most vampires are assholes - not because they start that way, but because hurting people wears them down. The game makes a pretty big deal out of this, out of how it's so easy to lose touch with humanity and accept being the monster you don't want to be. I'm under the impression that OPP doesn't really want to use the Humanity/Morality mechanic as a downwards spiral of losing yourself to being a horrible person except for in Vampire, so they've been getting creative with what to use instead. It's not so much that Beasts have a Morality-stat that they also use as power points - it's that Beasts don't have a Morality-stat. Which is a shame - I rather liked what Morality/Humanity/Wisdom did to the game; it doesn't matter that you're a powerful mage; being a dick to people still reflects on you.
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Jun 10, 2015 20:17
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And Integrity, apparently. They made a big deal with Integrity that no matter how used to it you get, killing normal people is still gonna be a breaking point every time.
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Jun 10, 2015 20:20
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2e Harmony is fantastic, particularly compared to 1e(and changing breeds *shudder*) Harmony. Rather than being a measure of how wolfy you are and how important being a wolf is to you. It's now actually a measure of how in harmony you are with both flesh and spirit. And going too far in either direction is bad for different reasons. Being too far gone to flesh makes it harder to shapeshift intentionally. Where as being too far gone to spirit makes you shapeshift all the time, whether you want it or not. And the further you are from the center the more general your personal frenzy triggers become. Avoiding swallowing human blood is easy, avoiding tasting human blood is more difficult. Avoiding seeing human blood? Please make your wasu-im rolls now.
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Jun 10, 2015 20:29
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Mors Rattus posted:Oh good, I just found a passage talking about how it feels really good to build a new Lair room out of an area where someone else has had a mental breakdown in front of you. This more excerpts I see, the more the game looks like they tried to extrapolate something from the Night Horrors line of books into a playable splat. I don't really want to play as any of those things.
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Jun 10, 2015 20:50
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CommissarMega posted: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. I was thinking about other ways Beast could have gone and basically this. Monsters and their slayers are like an opera, endlessly repeating with different actors as the primordial whatevers go through their epic grubby fight over and over. A Beast is someone that woke up sharing their soul with a monster, knowing with absolute certainty that someone was going to hunt them down and try to kill them. And that eventually the Beast will always lose because that's how the story always ends. The Beast craves power and violence, it needs to inflict pain to survive. And if the human part of them manages to resist the urges and starve the Beast, the human soul dies too, because they are irrevocably one being now. To live the Beast has to choose to hurt others. PCs would likely try and target people that deserve it. NPCs would look for chances to dominate or humiliate people and get away with violence, maybe in law enforcement, criminal groups, biker gangs, PMCs, one of the alphabet agencies if they really had their poo poo together. One respectable estate agent, every few months, drives to a different city to murder someone nobody would miss; they mark it on their calender as 'paying the rent'. A dental nurse knows just the right cocktail of anaesthetics to cause agony the patient will remember only in confused, unreliable flashes. The Beast is simple, and physical pain and death feed it best. As the Beast survives the monstrous and human parts of its soul become more entwined, not just revealing new powers but also memories/plot hooks from past incarnations. It's tastes become more refined, ritualistic and specific. If it demands tributes then constantly raising rents on a buy-to-let property portfolio might work, but sitting in a restaurant as local business owners hand you envelopes of cash with shaking hands just feels more right somehow. For the crossover focus it's simply that Beasts can sense souls, and they know that when the Hero comes it will be piggybacking on one. Friends and family are dangerous; lots of myths have the monster slain by someone close to them, right? If you have to rely on someone it had better not be them, or anyone human, but there are others out there. Changelings: The fairy people, their souls have already been claimed. Or at least... moulded? Either way they're safe. Vampires: The good news is they're soulless monsters. The bad news is they're soulless monsters, but needs must. Prometheans: The patchwork men are empty inside. Lonely, too. Desperate. Useful. Werewolves: We'd probably get on quite well, if they weren't always trying to rip me to shreds. Hunters: Stay the hell away from them, and any other human that stares at you too long. Or kill them quickly. Demons: Always shifting, changing, like staring at a flashing light that blinds you. They aren't like us. People can't change what they are, and they'll never understand that. Like Beasts Heroes are possessed, but they come later, almost as a reaction or a crescendo. A Beast that makes the news will be hunted sooner than one who hides and constantly moves, but eventually a Hero always comes. It's always a person suited to the task, with the skills and resources to kill the Beast, and sometimes other bizarre criteria (They always have bright blue eyes. Why is that all I can remember? Those loving eyes.) and they are utterly single-minded, obsessive, about their task. If the Beast survives, or even kills the Hero, then in not too long another will come, and another, until the story is finished. Anyway that was just something I thought might be a less schizophrenic game. I don't feel like Beasts should be social metaphors, the point of them is to be a Bad and minority representation that isn't positive/edifying is pointless. The characters are brutal and cruel, and they chose to be even if it was just to survive, and the best ending they can really hope for is to have against all odds channelled that violence and made the world a better place. To look whatever's possessing the Hero in the eye, spit blood at them and grin "I did more good than you did,".
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Jun 10, 2015 21:01
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LatwPIAT posted:I'm under the impression that OPP doesn't really want to use the Humanity/Morality mechanic as a downwards spiral of losing yourself to being a horrible person except for in Vampire, so they've been getting creative with what to use instead. It's not so much that Beasts have a Morality-stat that they also use as power points - it's that Beasts don't have a Morality-stat. Which is a shame - I rather liked what Morality/Humanity/Wisdom did to the game; it doesn't matter that you're a powerful mage; being a dick to people still reflects on you. Nah, Wisdom is still a downward spiral of increasing hubris as your Obsessions drive you mad.
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Jun 10, 2015 22:54
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I wish werewolves just had a 0-5 "Flesh" trait and a 0-5 "Spirit" trait, and you added either to your Primal Urge to determine annoying werewolf side effects like increasingly disquieting humans and being poisoned by chocolate.
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Jun 10, 2015 23:09
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Ferrinus posted:I wish werewolves just had a 0-5 "Flesh" trait and a 0-5 "Spirit" trait, and you added either to your Primal Urge to determine annoying werewolf side effects like increasingly disquieting humans and being poisoned by chocolate. Oh, I like that.
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Jun 10, 2015 23:11
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Luminous Obscurity posted:So David Hill made a post about pitch season and gave an example of a pitch that didn't get accepted, Fury: The Scourge. This is really interesting. It's kind of like a cosmic vigilante shtick. Wish we were getting this instead of Beast.
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Jun 10, 2015 23:17
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Others have said it, but as I've bugged on eight episodes so far, Sense 8 is WoD as gently caress!
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Jun 10, 2015 23:22
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I had an idea this morning as I was waiting for the bus. A Conspiracy of sailors and captains, dating back to the early days of the Age of Exploration. It stands to reason that there's a lot of terrifying things at sea, and a group of hunters could have formed between those who had seen or experienced the unnatural. I thought of calling the Thesean Guild. Their Endowment would be Unnatural Cartography. Got a few ideas as to what that would entail, but nothing really done yet.
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Jun 11, 2015 02:55
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moths posted:I briefly thought borrowing Wraith's shadow guide mechanic might help save Beast. Treating the Soul as a separate entity would go a long way towards giving you relatable PCs, and even remove the need for fiat-bad Heroes. (Villainous heroes could still exist, like Thunderbolt Ross or Gaston, but ALSO good heroes who couldn't differentiate between you and your Soul.) Not gonna lie, this could be an amazing game. I'd be down to play a beast simultaneously struggling to still be a good person or even a morally good archetype of his monstrosity (not every dragon or giant or troll in myth is necessarily a colossal rear end in a top hat afterall, so there's ample precedent) while also trying to survive hero attacks, not kill the heroes who do more good than bad in the world, and try and steer them towards the beasts who give in fully to loving horrorshow monstrosity. It'd also make a loving neat twist on the monomyth, which is supposedly part of beast's whole schtick. By directly acting to try and keep the good hero alive but 'in the dark' even when he's busy barging into your shadowy lair, you take on the role Campbell sets out for the supernatural or quasi-supernatural source of aid. The hero doesn't know it, but you're the reason he ends up with the necessary amulet to go kill that dragon - because you made sure it was in the 'treasure' in the false lair of yours he raided, or you arranged for an old homeless man to give it to him, etc. You're the force that pushes him into the return stage of the monomyth cycle once he's done, to make sure he doesn't turn into one of the villainous 'heroes' who wind up causing great amounts of harm. And all the while you're having to fight against the monstrous instincts and manage to keep him from accidentally killing you rather than the real bastards.
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Jun 11, 2015 04:40
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MonsieurChoc posted:I had an idea this morning as I was waiting for the bus. A Conspiracy of sailors and captains, dating back to the early days of the Age of Exploration. It stands to reason that there's a lot of terrifying things at sea, and a group of hunters could have formed between those who had seen or experienced the unnatural. I imagine it wouldn't see much use outside of games specifically tailored for it (I mean, it probably wouldn't pop up in a game set in the Midwest...) but a nautical Hunter conspiracy could be pretty cool.
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Jun 11, 2015 04:58
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