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Kurieg posted:Ahh, the Games Workshop approach. Ctrl+R "vampire" to "blooddrainer", done.
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Nov 11, 2015 00:25
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Here's my own rewrite. I don't know if mine's the one that was looked for, but I did put it up on pastebin. I've been pondering writing up a section on oubilette adventures; journeys to ancient cities full of strange cthonian figures and non-euclidian geometry that drive mortals mad, perhaps with one of the Oldest asleep or dead (as if there's a difference) at their heart.
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Nov 11, 2015 06:37
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Yeah, that is the one I was thinking about. Ther was a lot of general spitballing on how to fix it; I think that, if the game managed to admit that the Beasts are horrible creatures and addressed them as such, the way Vampire does, I would not have nearly as many problems with it.
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Nov 11, 2015 11:16
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paradoxGentleman posted:Yeah, that is the one I was thinking about. Ther was a lot of general spitballing on how to fix it; I think that, if the game managed to admit that the Beasts are horrible creatures and addressed them as such, the way Vampire does, I would not have nearly as many problems with it. That, or made it clear (and supported by mechanics) that Beasts are just weird people with a human's range of ethics and that the Heroes really are unjustly pursuing them, that might have been OK too. You might even have some of that moral ambiguity the game so desperately wants to have. Give Beasts mechanical incentives to do terrible things, but don't make it mandatory. Doing horrible things makes Heroes. Heroes are driven to hunt Beasts, but don't have a clear idea about which Beast is which and may focus in on the wrong guy. Now you have conflict, temptation, and a spectrum of morality for all characters involved. Cool Dad fucked around with this message at 14:08 on Nov 11, 2015 |
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Nov 11, 2015 14:04
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Gilok posted:Now you have conflict, temptation, and a spectrum of morality for all characters involved. A dark irony, indeed...
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Nov 11, 2015 19:21
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Gilok posted:That, or made it clear (and supported by mechanics) that Beasts are just weird people with a human's range of ethics and that the Heroes really are unjustly pursuing them, that might have been OK too. You might even have some of that moral ambiguity the game so desperately wants to have. I think the disconnect arises because Beasts (seem to) justify themselves as being staightforward in-the-right. Vampire ethics are transparent. There are all different kinds of vampires from guys and gals who try to be normal and get really depressed when they hurt people all the way to Belial's Brood who embrace sociopathy as the road to mental health. I think vampires skew 'evil' as a result (they hurt people to survive) but the game continually acknowledges that you don't get to claim moral immunity just because you're forced to be abusive to the kine. You see the diversity right there in the sample characters, the covenants, and even scrawled into the Humanity rules. Beasts are also abusers but it's weird because they seem to justify it by targeting people who 'deserve' it. See, even when vampires skew evil they typically see themselves as apex predators; detached predators. Oh I'm sure I can find an example of a vampire vigilante somewhere but if you look at the Invictus or the Sanctum they have opinions about human masses and not individual people. We still can acknowledge that as an evil perspective but it's sensible. I think it's the fact that Beasts tend to judge their prey on a very personal, often petty scale that would make even a vampire raise an eyebrow. You can decide for yourself whether that's good or bad for the line but I think that's what makes it feel weird.
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Nov 12, 2015 01:55
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Mendrian posted:
Here are excerpts from a game run by the head writer of Beast, written by the head writer of Beast. quote:[Player's] character is Maia Wallis (Makara Ravager). Maia prefers to feed by getting into relationships with men and then slowing wrecking their lives. They're free to walk at any point, of course (she doesn't stalk them if they break up with her). She teaches the lesson that some relationships are toxic and it's better to end them. I'm not reading into anything. That's the language of abuse. This is the way the game is supposed to be played. I have zero interest in its themes. I would probably start to rethink my relationship with a player if they did.
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Nov 12, 2015 03:19
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] Satiety that brings. Maia is contemplating inviting Mike home with her, but he gets a call from someone and rushes back to the house, just in time to see the windows explode outwards. The fire department is on the scene, and Maia thanks him and leaves in John's car (with John still in the back).
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Also, as monsters, Beasts just ain't cool. They're essentially just superheroes with vaguely animal-themed powers. They don't actually drink blood or shapeshift or anything.
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Nov 12, 2015 03:26
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tatankatonk posted:Here are excerpts from a game run by the head writer of Beast, written by the head writer of Beast. That's loving gross.
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Nov 12, 2015 03:30
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tatankatonk posted:Here are excerpts from a game run by the head writer of Beast, written by the head writer of Beast. Y'know maybe I'll just tinker with the mechanics to myself to practice design but give up on the rework part because even if I somehow turned this into God's gift to mankind I'm still in effect validating this sort of bullshit by doing so. Like, for real, I've been in a abusive relationship, and if someone came to my table trying to play that Makara as justified I'd have to resist bodily throwing them out of my house.
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Nov 12, 2015 03:49
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Mendrian posted:I think the disconnect arises because Beasts (seem to) justify themselves as being staightforward in-the-right. Vampire ethics are transparent. There are all different kinds of vampires from guys and gals who try to be normal and get really depressed when they hurt people all the way to Belial's Brood who embrace sociopathy as the road to mental health. I think vampires skew 'evil' as a result (they hurt people to survive) but the game continually acknowledges that you don't get to claim moral immunity just because you're forced to be abusive to the kine. You see the diversity right there in the sample characters, the covenants, and even scrawled into the Humanity rules. I don't even know if it has to do with ethics much, exactly. As the wise thaumaturge said, "good and evil are subjective, but being a dick cannot be allowed." I don't find Beasts intolerable because they're evil (although they pretty much all are); I find them intolerable even as fictional protagonists because they're dicks, and they're smug about it. (Also because everything in the book and the author commentary on the book seems to indicate that the author backs them up in the view that they're justified.)
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Nov 12, 2015 04:40
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The way they currently work the only media that I can think of that really works for a beast is J. Walter Weatherman from Arrested Development, who's at least managed to monetize teaching lessons by terrorizing people. The nightmarish horror suddenly sits up and growls, "AND THAT'S WHY YOU ALWAYS LEAVE A NOTE."
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Nov 12, 2015 04:57
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Couple all the above poo poo with that Hero example that was, literally, a teenage girl who's great sin was having killed a beast that came to do her harm (in language that is pretty loving rapey, too, so let's go ahead and say it. She killed a monster rapist.) and then trying to claw her way back to being in her own body after the injuries inflicted in the fighting left her comatose and stuck in the astral plain. That's their idea of the bad guy in this scenario. Not the child-molesting monster rapist. The girl who fought him off and just wants to go home. That's the bad guy. I'm usually pretty okay with 'edgy' poo poo but that one was way too hosed up for me to be okay with. I actually wound up writing RichT about it, which is the first time in my life I've ever been so genuinely offended by something WW or OPP have done that I've complained about it to them. To his credit, Rich was very good about it, promised to take a good hard look (the part where he was getting dozens of emails about it probably helped), and made sure I felt heard and they did excise that whole section for being too hosed up IIRC.
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Nov 12, 2015 06:25
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Loomer posted:Couple all the above poo poo with that Hero example that was, literally, a teenage girl who's great sin was having killed a beast that came to do her harm (in language that is pretty loving rapey, too, so let's go ahead and say it. She killed a monster rapist.) and then trying to claw her way back to being in her own body after the injuries inflicted in the fighting left her comatose and stuck in the astral plain. That's their idea of the bad guy in this scenario. That Beast just wanted to teach her a valuable lesson about how you should never feel safe even in your own home, and does he get any gratitude? No, he gets murdered. Makes you wonder who the real monster is...
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Nov 12, 2015 06:54
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spend a blood point to get a boner
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Nov 12, 2015 08:10
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Loomer posted:Couple all the above poo poo with that Hero example that was, literally, a teenage girl who's great sin was having killed a beast that came to do her harm (in language that is pretty loving rapey, too, so let's go ahead and say it. She killed a monster rapist.) and then trying to claw her way back to being in her own body after the injuries inflicted in the fighting left her comatose and stuck in the astral plain. That's their idea of the bad guy in this scenario. TBH, I would be more interested in playing the Hero who got hosed up by the Beast than the horrifyingly abusive Beast. Although, at that point you're pretty much just playing Changeling so... Is there anything about Beast that's even close to redeemable?
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Nov 12, 2015 08:15
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I was hoping that one of Paradox Interactive's first moves as the new rights holders would be to cancel the gently caress out of Beast, but sadly all the Kickstarters are still going forward.
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Nov 12, 2015 08:22
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Sampatrick posted:TBH, I would be more interested in playing the Hero who got hosed up by the Beast than the horrifyingly abusive Beast. Although, at that point you're pretty much just playing Changeling so... It might be "redeemable" with more work and effort than virtually anyone who dislikes the game as it stands is going to want to spend putting into it, but the problem is that even if you somehow managed to salvage Beast from its extremely lovely state of being that you then have to confront the fact that Beast does nothing that any of the other nWoD gamelines don't already cover in a vastly more interesting fashion. Redeeming Beast at that point means that you're basically going to be reinventing Vampire or Changeling or maybe Slasher.
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Nov 12, 2015 08:31
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Sampatrick posted:TBH, I would be more interested in playing the Hero who got hosed up by the Beast than the horrifyingly abusive Beast. Although, at that point you're pretty much just playing Changeling so... Some of the mechanics like Lair are really interesting, and I can't completely disregard the potential in rewriting the fluff to be less about an abuse justification metaphor and more like Better Angels, make it so you're trying to do the least lovely things possible and cultivate the development of legitimately good people by acting as their dialectical opposition. Heroes would be more like sleepwalkers or wolf-blooded, where they just sorta happen, and are very low key unless a beast chooses them to make them a proper hero with the aid of The Narrative, or they zero in on a beast being a giant dickweed. I've got a lot of half-finished notes about making the hero-beast dynamic much more nuanced and personal, allowing for lots of different viewpoints on the matter. Making a "proper" story with a "proper" hero ends with you dying, but it eliminates the Horror permanently, and gives the World of Darkness an actually (more or less) good person with supernatural power in return. You can also do the whole "flip the narrative" thing if you're not interested in altruistic suicide, and become an immortal nightmare monster, but you're barely human by the time you do so and probably a huge jackass. In short, my rework idea reframes the game's central question to be "What would you choose if you had to choose between yourself and the world?" Of course, this makes it in effect Changeling: the Requiem, but I'd take retreaded ground over the uncharted waters it attempted to sail. E: welp, Kai beat me to that last point Daeren fucked around with this message at 08:36 on Nov 12, 2015 |
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Nov 12, 2015 08:32
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Personally what I would have liked was if beasts and hero's were literally the same thing. So hero's are beasts who got all this cool narrative power and decides to help people. And beasts are also hero's who became the bad guy. That would give some interesting themes and people could still be horrible poo poo bags if they wanted to be.
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Nov 12, 2015 15:29
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That Beast game report reads like something from the imagination of 80's Satanic Panicked moms. I wrote up a pitch where Beast was the in-game power fantasies of the WoD's lowest tier scrubs. Like inconveniencing people but not enough to become a Slasher? Embrace your otherkin primal beast: attach cosmic significance to passive-aggressively undercooking table 6's Eggs Over My Hammy.
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Nov 12, 2015 16:30
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Daeren posted:Y'know maybe I'll just tinker with the mechanics to myself to practice design but give up on the rework part because even if I somehow turned this into God's gift to mankind I'm still in effect validating this sort of bullshit by doing so. I was bulled a bunch as a kid, to the point that I had money stolen, bones broken, and seriously contemplated suicide on more than one occasion. The petty bullshit seen in some of the preview characters, and the fact that a lot of the nightmare powers don't seem to be directed and have much futher reaching implications bother me, particularly when the game then goes on to say "Beasts are justified and pure and are doing a good thing". It also plays into the all to real cycle of abuse, where abused become abusers, and doesn't even try to break it. Beasts are maligned by society, so they predate upon society and create heroes, who they then also kill because gently caress them. I really like Beast mechanically, the way the Atavisms and Nightmares feed into the Satiety system works pretty well, but the game would be served much better by biting the bullet and admitting that you are playing inhuman monsters and probably don't even care. The point of the game should be power, you only care about the little guy as much as avoiding their ire keeps Heroes away, you want to survive long enough to ascend into Myth, after all.
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Nov 12, 2015 16:45
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I feel like when your game's premise is that you're playing the inhuman monsters of fairytale and myth, it would be better served by the writers bucking the cliche and having them not just look and act like normal humans 90% of the time. The monsters that Beast is ostensibly inspired by are defined by their existence in a space outside society: they're society's inverse, living in forests and dungeons and undersea caves. Having them be social chameleons makes the game feel even more like a weak stab at trying to be Vampire.
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Nov 12, 2015 17:19
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Kai Tave posted:It might be "redeemable" with more work and effort than virtually anyone who dislikes the game as it stands is going to want to spend putting into it, but the problem is that even if you somehow managed to salvage Beast from its extremely lovely state of being that you then have to confront the fact that Beast does nothing that any of the other nWoD gamelines don't already cover in a vastly more interesting fashion. Redeeming Beast at that point means that you're basically going to be reinventing Vampire or Changeling or maybe Slasher. There is some room in the design space for something novel in Beast, but you have to look for it and probably outright invent it yourself because the book as written sure isn't going to make it easy for you. A core part of the problem is that the creatures of myth and legend it wants to emulate are purely reactive things, which exist in the story for the sole purpose of being killed by the hero, either to exemplify the hero's greatness or to teach some moral lesson. No-one pitied the Minotaur, the offspring of a divine curse and bestiality, or asked for its perspective, and it never demonstrates any motive beyond "Well, guess I'm gonna sit in this maze." My best attempt was to use the family element, but not in a cross-splat manner; to rewrite Beasts so that they're fundamentally not human, and have that mean something. Humanity hates and fears Beasts, and rightly so, but Beasts were born the way they were and don't really have a choice in the matter. They're not there to teach moral lessons, they simply have different modes of existence that, in many ways, are anathema to humanity (but don't actually have to be; those ways are just much easier). Each group has just as much reason to hate and kill the other, but that isn't really the necessary option; peace and mutual benefit are possible too, just difficult. Tribalism and paranoia rule the roost, as each side has instincts telling them to destroy the threat. I've never been that good with mechanics, though, sadly, so I never really got to hammering down half the things that'd be necessary to complete a rewrite and playtest it.
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Nov 12, 2015 17:56
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Just retheme Leviathan to Beast
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Nov 12, 2015 18:04
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We were promised Godzillas and given petty assholes who consider Godzilla their spirit animal.
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Nov 12, 2015 18:15
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I will admit the fact that Otherkin latched onto it as validation is also a black mark against it in my book.
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Nov 12, 2015 18:20
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Kurieg posted:I will admit the fact that Otherkin latched onto it as validation is also a black mark against it in my book. They did? Where/when exactly did this happen?
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Nov 12, 2015 18:25
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Kurieg posted:I will admit the fact that Otherkin latched onto it as validation is also a black mark against it in my book. See also Dreaming.
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Nov 12, 2015 18:33
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NewMars posted:They did? Where/when exactly did this happen? Shortly after they announced that they were changing it from "You are born with a beast soul and you undergo a homecoming to discover your lair" to "You are just a psychically aware human who was willingly devoured by a beast to become one" there were some people bitching about it on RPG.net because now they weren't born special and different.
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Nov 12, 2015 18:38
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Kurieg posted:Shortly after they announced that they were changing it from "You are born with a beast soul and you undergo a homecoming to discover your lair" to "You are just a psychically aware human who was willingly devoured by a beast to become one" there were some people bitching about it on RPG.net because now they weren't born special and different. I always liked Vampire and Wraith better than Mage, Changeling, and Werewolf, and part of that was because a vampire or a ghost is something you become, whereas the others are special things you get just for the random chance of being you. That's also part of why I like Awakening better than Ascension- anybody could Awaken under the right circumstances, rather than having to have been born with a special soul.
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Nov 12, 2015 18:47
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That's not how Lost Changeling work, though; they're folks who were kidnapped and altered, not 'special souls'.
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Nov 12, 2015 19:07
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He's talking about oWoD. 2E Werewolf's decided to move away from that as well.
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Nov 12, 2015 19:17
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Axelgear posted:My best attempt was to use the family element, but not in a cross-splat manner; to rewrite Beasts so that they're fundamentally not human, and have that mean something. Humanity hates and fears Beasts, and rightly so, but Beasts were born the way they were and don't really have a choice in the matter. They're not there to teach moral lessons, they simply have different modes of existence that, in many ways, are anathema to humanity (but don't actually have to be; those ways are just much easier). Each group has just as much reason to hate and kill the other, but that isn't really the necessary option; peace and mutual benefit are possible too, just difficult. Tribalism and paranoia rule the roost, as each side has instincts telling them to destroy the threat. Except Demon: the Descent covers the whole "truly alien non-human outsiders crashing into the World of Darkness' urban horror setting" way, way better. I keep having to remind myself that the same person who wrote Demon also wrote Beast because man, they could not be more different on every conceivable level.
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Nov 12, 2015 19:38
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Pope Guilty posted:I always liked Vampire and Wraith better than Mage, Changeling, and Werewolf, and part of that was because a vampire or a ghost is something you become, whereas the others are special things you get just for the random chance of being you. That's also part of why I like Awakening better than Ascension- anybody could Awaken under the right circumstances, rather than having to have been born with a special soul. Too be fair to Ascension, everyone has an avatar, just most are "asleep". Anyone in Ascension could theoretically awaken as well.
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Nov 12, 2015 19:49
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hangedman1984 posted:Too be fair to Ascension, everyone has an avatar, just most are "asleep". Anyone in Ascension could theoretically awaken as well. Really? I thought you had to be a reincarnated person with a special Avatar in order to awaken.
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Nov 12, 2015 20:02
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Pope Guilty posted:Really? I thought you had to be a reincarnated person with a special Avatar in order to awaken. No, it jsut made it easier because your avatar had woken up once already. TO be fair, it's not quite clear in the text because the in-universe groups don't all realize this and so have different opinions on what makes someone awaken and, this being old white wolf, a lot of the books are written from an in-character perspective.
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Nov 12, 2015 20:17
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Ferrinus posted:Also, as monsters, Beasts just ain't cool. They're essentially just superheroes with vaguely animal-themed powers. They don't actually drink blood or shapeshift or anything. What? What the hell is the point of playing a dragon if you don't play a dragon at some point?
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Nov 12, 2015 20:37
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Kai Tave posted:Except Demon: the Descent covers the whole "truly alien non-human outsiders crashing into the World of Darkness' urban horror setting" way, way better. I keep having to remind myself that the same person who wrote Demon also wrote Beast because man, they could not be more different on every conceivable level. He was a Co-Developer. Rose Bailey's presence did a lot to help the end product. Also, if memory serves, the initial concept of Demon was from her.
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Nov 12, 2015 21:08
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zeal posted:What? What the hell is the point of playing a dragon if you don't play a dragon at some point? The only way you get to transform into a dragon is in one of the apothesis failure states.
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Nov 12, 2015 21:14
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