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Kurieg posted:They did try to make them sympathetic, but by only by inference. "You were picked on in high school", "You always knew you were different", "Your true soul" all of those are pretty evocative of Trans imagery and otherkin stuff. And then they made the heroes use a lot of PUA terminology and act like dudebro jocks. The problem is that they never act sympathetic, they never actually do anything that might evoke sympathy. So it comes off as cheap pathos of "These guys act like guys you like, so they're good. Those guys act like guys you hate, so they're bad" But the end result comes off more as "No the bad guys have a point." and the next logical inference is "Why is your trans metaphor torturing dudes to death to feed?" and it's a fairly obvious one. The end result of this juxtaposition is basically "so what if all the propaganda that describes ethnic/social minorities as baby-eating inhuman monsters was actually true sometimes", which just as terrible as it sounds.
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Feb 10, 2016 04:55
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Effectronica posted:Why would you make a game about being an otherized outcast where the expectation is that you'll be solitary and without a broader social context, and then explicitly associate the PCs with oppressed classes? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Because you're an otherized outcast who exudes an aura that makes all the cool people* like you as if you were their best friend. *By cool people I mean the grimdark outcasts who are totally awesome and neat and powerful and not the assholes who made fun of you in gym class. Roadie posted:The end result of this juxtaposition is basically "so what if all the propaganda that describes ethnic/social minorities as baby-eating inhuman monsters was actually true sometimes", which just as terrible as it sounds. yeeeup. Kurieg fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Feb 10, 2016 |
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Feb 10, 2016 04:56
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I'm sitting on a dissection of Beast to post in here or FATAL+Friends once the complete text comes out, just in case I need to change anything. The short version is that, even if you put aside all the discussions of implications in the fluff or what take on the basic concept is better, examining the actual mechanical backbone of the game leads to some really silly extrapolations of world-building logic.
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Feb 10, 2016 05:54
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I was planning on doing a full F&F with the backer copy but I decided to wait until the full text is done since they might still at least fix the setting information even if the mechanics are a bit weird (eg: the whole "Only way to get rid of a hero tag is to kill someone" thing).
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Feb 10, 2016 06:03
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Kurieg posted:Beast still has hilariously tone-deaf stereotype quotes, and I love the ones for Prometheans and Demons. The Promethean ones are all basically "Come on, be a monster, it's fun!" and one of the Demon ones is "I wonder what will happen when I strip away your disguise" which would probably result in a dead beast and a very very angry Demon.
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Feb 10, 2016 06:23
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Calde posted:The problem is those two poles of otherness cannot coexist with each other without forming a bizarre message. The Beasts are rockstar princes/princesses of the supernatural world that everyone likes, without difficulty "passing" in the mortal world that Vampires or Werewolves or Prometheans have. They aren't discriminated against because of what they are but because of what they do: hurting people. And even then, it's only the odd "insane" MRA/fundamental Christian/frat boy/cheerleader who hates you, with the book's constant refrain that this means you can do even worse things to these Heroes because they deserve it. Beasts as "outcast" is incoherent with most of the text. So basically Beasts are that guy talking about how billionaires have it worse than Jews did under the Nazis.
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Feb 10, 2016 06:47
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Zereth posted:The Demon one could actually be pretty clever if it was in something more self-aware. Indicating that the Beasts very much do not understand Demons. I'm still confused by the way they went about executing the supposed feud between demons and Beasts. I get the base idea fine: it's interesting on both ends to have an exception case, and the kin-sensing power rubs the wrong way against Demon's spy genre, so there's a little conflict there already. The suggestion that it has to do with how the God-Machine is mechanical doesn't fly, but whatever. More importantly, you read the stereotypes and they're all "man, gently caress those guys, I hate 'em." I like my prey to be multiple choice, what would happen if I tore off all your masks, apparently didn't fall far enough, etc. You read the fluff text and it says "Beasts and demons don't understand each other and aren't comfortable with one another." You read the mechanics and there's a clumsy and roll-intensive (since it involves Family Resemblance and spoofing in addition to its own roll) clash that just automatically either intimidates the demon or... makes the Beast blackmailed by the demon somehow? This happens without any input or intent from the Beast or the demon, but one passage implies demons know why it happens and aren't telling, which is a weird thing to state about another gameline in your crossover game when players of that gameline don't have access to any answer. And Beasts can't use most of their team-up powers or sign pacts with a demon. The pact thing is presented as some big deal reason why demons wouldn't want to work with Beasts, when pacts are a relatively minor concern when dealing with a fellow supernatural being, being much easier with regular Joes. So the only thing really in there to inject more than a moderate amount of unease and inconvenience into their interactions is an arbitrary mechanic where either the demon gets scared or the Beast finds out the demon knows his email password, and neither party knows why this happens. Why are the stereotype quotes talking like oWoD splats having monster wars again? I mean, yes, this is a drop of water in Beast's ocean of problems. But it's just so strange in how clumsy it comes out.
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Feb 10, 2016 07:56
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You already pretty much can't pact other supernaturals. You take a load of aggravated damage and you only get the human bits of their life, which if they're something like a Vampire means you get like two drinking buddies and some car insurance paperwork - a completely worthless, inconsistent Cover. My big problem with Beast is that if you do smack for four hours and sorta squint it looks like it could maybe be a good game executed badly if you view it from a long way away. Then the guy who wrote the game published an Actual Play of him running the game and it turns out it's exactly as much of a puerile, boring mess as the most hyperbolic of overreactions to Beast said it is. It's not even interesting! It's literally a game where you play the most powerful, fewest downsides splat since Geist and you spend all your time finding normal, defenseless humans to victimise and then being petty assholes to them for a couple of sessions before you murder them. Occasionally a Hero will show up for you to instantly toast with Dragonfire so you can pat yourself on the back. The strongest splat have - by far - the weakest enemy. Actual things that happen in this AP run by the actual guy who wrote the game. - Beast PC stalks a guy for a bit in order to spook him, fucks up the roll, the guy spots him and leads him into an alley and confronts him angrily. The PC toasts him to death in one round with Dragonfire for daring to stand up to him and walks off. - Beast PC seduces a guy at a bar so she can go home with him and murder him, fucks it up, follows him home anyway, breaks into his house later, finds out he's gone out so burns his house down to punish him for the affront of making it inconvenient to brutally murder him in his own home. Beasts aren't even interesting, guys! They're just poo poo! They're poo poo villains!
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Feb 10, 2016 09:34
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I'm curious if they changed the example of play, the one that generated this thread title. It's the only rulebook I can name to run in the complete opposite direction of "your friends are more important than this dumb game, if they're uncomfortable reel it in." Instead, it shows going too far as an example of correctly run Beast.
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Feb 10, 2016 12:47
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Doodmons posted:The strongest splat have - by far - the weakest enemy. I feel like it might have been more interesting if Heroes actually were Beowulf-tier superhumans who could wrestle packs of werewolves barehanded. Yeah, you're a Beast and it's great and you have all these powers, but none of that means a thing when a Hero shows up. Now you either have to run or hope to whatever god you have that you can do the impossible and actually beat one. I feel like it'd work better for the whole disenfranchised outgroup metaphor, too.
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Feb 10, 2016 13:15
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I thought from what brief text I read that Heroes were at least flat-out immune or ignore all beast powers, in order to enforce the anathema thing and give more justification for monster buddies, but then apparently not? I think they get a pass on mind affecting stuff but nothing to help with Dragonfire or hilarious physical stat boosting to just crush them flat.
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Feb 10, 2016 14:04
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Kurieg posted:To my understanding, Black Hatt Matt was arguing for the second interpretation more than the first, because as written all the 'bad guys' are the acceptable targets of people in power, frat boys, cops, popular girls, etc. It's your job to punish and/or kill them. I think one of the things nobody on the dev side ever realised is that even if a person is a bit of a jerk and even if they end up becoming a murderous rear end in a top hat, if this is accomplished by supernatural mind-gently caress magic, they are the victim of supernatural forces and are always going to be at least a little bit sympathetic. Beast wants to present them as rear end in a top hat drunk drivers who're so convinced they can handle it they're going to get someone killed but they're really more like someone who's a bit of a jerk at the office so you spiked their drink with medical alcohol so they're blitzed out of their mind so it's justified to call the cops on them.
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Feb 10, 2016 14:08
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Doodmons posted:You already pretty much can't pact other supernaturals. You take a load of aggravated damage and you only get the human bits of their life, which if they're something like a Vampire means you get like two drinking buddies and some car insurance paperwork - a completely worthless, inconsistent Cover. As an aside from the Beast stuff, is that how this works? My understanding was that you got the whole deal from a soul pact, but now your cover is effectively completely human but has to carry on with his unlife without anyone noticing, which I think is way more interesting and fun and has all kinds of great story hooks for both Demon and Vampire/etc ("Rumor has it that Bob the Nosferatu has regained his humanity somehow!") I'm about to start running Demon for the first time so I'm interested in how this stuff works. I wouldn't mind other tips for running Demon either!
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Feb 10, 2016 15:14
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Gilok posted:As an aside from the Beast stuff, is that how this works? My understanding was that you got the whole deal from a soul pact, but now your cover is effectively completely human but has to carry on with his unlife without anyone noticing, which I think is way more interesting and fun and has all kinds of great story hooks for both Demon and Vampire/etc ("Rumor has it that Bob the Nosferatu has regained his humanity somehow!") I might as well quote the rulebook here: Demon The Descent: Page 194 posted:Supernatural beings can sign away their souls to demons, but it doesn’t benefit the demon much. When the demon claims the being’s soul, the demon suffers aggravated damage equal to the supernatural being’s Supernatural Tolerance (Blood Potency, Gnosis, etc.) as the being’s power is converted to Aether and burns off. Even then, the demon only assumes the being’s identity…but as a human being. If she claims a vampire’s soul, she takes that vampire’s name and face, but is not undead, does not drink blood, and does not necessarily know the intricacies of vampire society. It looks like it leaves you enough wiggle room to attempt to pass yourself off as a vampire and certainly there are Embeds and Exploits that do that. All the pactee's vampire friends and associates don't forget him or anything, either. I certainly don't get the impression that it's going to be easy to pass yourself off as one even if you do have all the requisite powers - knowledge of how vampire society works just doesn't transfer over in the pact.
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Feb 10, 2016 16:00
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Doodmons posted:I might as well quote the rulebook here: "holy poo poo bob's immune to sunlight? Quick capture him my mages must dissect his corpse to discover his secrets!"
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Feb 10, 2016 16:38
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spectralent posted:I think one of the things nobody on the dev side ever realised is that even if a person is a bit of a jerk and even if they end up becoming a murderous rear end in a top hat, if this is accomplished by supernatural mind-gently caress magic, they are the victim of supernatural forces and are always going to be at least a little bit sympathetic. Beast wants to present them as rear end in a top hat drunk drivers who're so convinced they can handle it they're going to get someone killed but they're really more like someone who's a bit of a jerk at the office so you spiked their drink with medical alcohol so they're blitzed out of their mind so it's justified to call the cops on them. Well, there's that, but there's also that you are always a monster that feeds on pain and misery. That was actually something that struck me during the reading of the preview; that there are possibilities to feed the Hungers in not-evil ways, but they're actually not rewarded. The Nemesis Hunger, for example, explicitly rewards you more for elaborate serial murder than it does, say, just marking someone or beating them up a little. Something I've been tossing about in my head is what it'd feel like if you actively decoupled the brutality from the Hungers. It works alright enough for most - Power turns you into a cult leader, but there's nothing that says you need to be an evil cult; Hoard never really required you to harm anyone to begin with; Ruin can be directed at deserving and, most importantly, non-human targets, letting you be a sasquatch who sabotages logging trucks, etc. - but then I realized that any Beast that focuses on the Nemesis Hunger might basically become Batman and I'm left wondering if this would be terrible or not.
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Feb 10, 2016 19:00
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Axelgear posted:Well, there's that, but there's also that you are always a monster that feeds on pain and misery. Sorry, that was a statement of assent that it's a bit silly people were being shouted down for finding heroes sympathetic since the condition is inherently at least a bit pitiable, not a statement of support from Beasts. Beasts are
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Feb 10, 2016 21:09
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Gilok posted:I'm about to start running Demon for the first time so I'm interested in how this stuff works. I wouldn't mind other tips for running Demon either! As a general tip for the more complex splats, I would suggest making index cards for players with a quick reference of the things Demons can do inherently and the systems for it. Especially Legend, Spoofing, Aetheric Resonance, Partial/Full transformation, and Pactmaking.
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Feb 10, 2016 21:20
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spectralent posted:Sorry, that was a statement of assent that it's a bit silly people were being shouted down for finding heroes sympathetic since the condition is inherently at least a bit pitiable, not a statement of support from Beasts. Beasts are My bad, sorry. I must work on my reading comprehension.
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Feb 10, 2016 22:28
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actually summarising further: Beasts have some agency, even if they were presented as disliking their condition and the reader wasn't presented as being a big judgemental MRA for thinking they sound insane and evil. Heroes don't and didn't lose their agency in a way that's particularly easy to blame them for; they're brain-whammied into going along with the beast's chuunibiyo and are almost certainly going to get killed because of it. That's not the hero being full of himself and not understanding the beast is a person to; that's beasts inherently stripping people's personhoods from them and then killing them for it.
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Feb 10, 2016 22:37
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Axelgear posted:Something I've been tossing about in my head is what it'd feel like if you actively decoupled the brutality from the Hungers. It works alright enough for most - Power turns you into a cult leader, but there's nothing that says you need to be an evil cult; Hoard never really required you to harm anyone to begin with; Ruin can be directed at deserving and, most importantly, non-human targets, letting you be a sasquatch who sabotages logging trucks, etc. - but then I realized that any Beast that focuses on the Nemesis Hunger might basically become Batman and I'm left wondering if this would be terrible or not. Any attempt to fix Hungers and Satiety is completely pointless so long as Family Dinner exists. It's the fault line the rest of the mechanics and fluff break upon. To give a very quick paraphrase/summary of my dissection, Satiety is a mechanical system that simultaneously values three points as the effort required to humiliate and kill a werewolf pack leader in honorable single combat, and the effort required to watch a vampire friend of yours gnaw on a drunk co-ed. Or, to put it another way, when you can get your fix by watching a changeling feed on the emotions of young lovers on a date, you have absolutely no reason to torture petty thieves to death for the same reward unless you are deeply, profoundly hosed up to the point where every other World of Darkness game would say "yeah no your character's not playable anymore, hand the sheet over to the ST." spectralent posted:actually summarising further: That was the first-draft version. They stripped almost all of that out of the version that's near final release, but while what's left is certainly more palatable, it's at the price of deeply confusing the core message it wanted to say. The message was a terrible one, yes, but now it's just sorta wandering around unsure of what to do with itself in half the page count.
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Feb 11, 2016 00:12
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Daeren posted:That was the first-draft version. They stripped almost all of that out of the version that's near final release, but while what's left is certainly more palatable, it's at the price of deeply confusing the core message it wanted to say. The message was a terrible one, yes, but now it's just sorta wandering around unsure of what to do with itself in half the page count. Oh, huh, what's the new version meant to be? I admit my memory of the new version was that it was the same but told more vaguely. But that was some time ago.
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Feb 11, 2016 00:22
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It's so unbelievably cool that the game where you're supposedly playing primordial conceptions of monstrosity actually involves you piggybacking on genuine monsters and attempting to align your brand image to theirs.
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Feb 11, 2016 00:29
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Effectronica posted:It's so unbelievably cool that the game where you're supposedly playing primordial conceptions of monstrosity actually involves you piggybacking on genuine monsters and attempting to align your brand image to theirs. Corporations are the true monsters.
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Feb 11, 2016 00:31
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MonsieurChoc posted:Corporations are the true monsters.  A Network Zero hunter goes for a more subtle approach to informing people about Beasts.
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Feb 11, 2016 00:38
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spectralent posted:Oh, huh, what's the new version meant to be? I admit my memory of the new version was that it was the same but told more vaguely. But that was some time ago. There can be good heroes now, because the game tells you there are. But mind-loving someone down to 3 integrity still has a decent chance of turning them into a hero.
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Feb 11, 2016 00:43
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Gilok posted:As an aside from the Beast stuff, is that how this works? My understanding was that you got the whole deal from a soul pact, but now your cover is effectively completely human but has to carry on with his unlife without anyone noticing, which I think is way more interesting and fun and has all kinds of great story hooks for both Demon and Vampire/etc ("Rumor has it that Bob the Nosferatu has regained his humanity somehow!") My next character is a demon in a group of non-demons and, knowing the other players in my group, I know that Pacts will be Forged as soon as my cover gets blown. The book doesn't seem to cover making pacts with other players (if it's in there, I completely missed it) so we'll be figuring that out. I agree with Kellsterik that you should definitely have some sort of reference material on hand for quick access to specific mechanics. My current problem with Demon isn't that it's complicated, but that I have to learn like a dozen new systems and mechanics and then figure out how they work together.
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Feb 11, 2016 00:44
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spectralent posted:Oh, huh, what's the new version meant to be? I admit my memory of the new version was that it was the same but told more vaguely. But that was some time ago. Heroes are people who can feel the Primordial Dream in a broad sense. Where Beasts dream deep, Heroes dream wide. They can feel disturbances in the area, and for a while basically served as soothsayers, therapists to humanity's collective unconscious. Now, though, modern humanity's version of the Primordial Dream is a constant mosh pit of anxieties, xenophobia, and terror, and Heroes tend to get a little cracked in the head because of it. Instead of doing the whole interpreter-of-lessons-from-pain gig, they prefer to go out and murder anything that's causing waves in the Dream. The book still crowbars in that Heroes are bad because they don't actually want to kill you because you're messing up the dream, it's because they want to be idolized and adored and be the big fixture in the dream instead of you, and good heroes are the ones who realize that and dial it back a notch. It proceeds to completely ignore them for almost the entire Heroes chapter and talk about the Heroes who - by its own admission - are the small minority that just go out and stab anyone they think looks funny. Effectronica posted:It's so unbelievably cool that the game where you're supposedly playing primordial conceptions of monstrosity actually involves you piggybacking on genuine monsters and attempting to align your brand image to theirs. 
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Feb 11, 2016 00:45
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It's a pretty half-assed hack to try and save them. Then again the same could be said about so many things in the book.
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Feb 11, 2016 01:30
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Doodmons posted:I might as well quote the rulebook here:
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Feb 11, 2016 04:52
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Effectronica posted:It's so unbelievably cool that the game where you're supposedly playing primordial conceptions of monstrosity actually involves you piggybacking on genuine monsters and attempting to align your brand image to theirs. I'll probably end up using PBTA crunch instead of WoD, if only because I'm a lot more comfortable toying with that system without worrying if I'm either reinventing the wheel or making something terrible and/or broken.
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Feb 11, 2016 08:34
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Poison Mushroom posted:That actually has some pretty neat implications in the context of the "you need humans to believe in you but not TOO hard" hack that's bouncing around in my brain. (Working title is "Bogeyman".) If you piggyback on the reputation of vampires, sure you get a shortcut to bring recognized, but you're also a huge risk to the Masquerade even without taking it too far. WoD takes a he'll of a lot of writing to make a splat. Which is both a good and bad thing. PBTA requires a lot less mechanical complexity. Though if it works well with PBTA nothing stopping it getting expanded to WoD.
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Feb 11, 2016 12:58
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Arashiofordo3 posted:WoD takes a he'll of a lot of writing to make a splat. Which is both a good and bad thing. PBTA requires a lot less mechanical complexity. Though if it works well with PBTA nothing stopping it getting expanded to WoD. As someone who does more than a little homebrew/dev for both systems, I would say it's far far easier to write a PBTA game than a Chronicles line, but far far harder to make it actually good. There are some bad fansplats out there. They pale in comparison to how bad some of the fan hacks of Apocalypse World are. Hell, even some of the actual published hacks are just not good at all.
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Feb 11, 2016 14:21
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It might actually work best as a Monsterhearts hack. Which, admittedly, is a little like saying "These chainsaws would probably juggle better if they were on fire."
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Feb 11, 2016 14:45
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Zereth posted:Doesn't taking over somebody's life not actually get you their specific knowledge? Like you'll know how to operate the fry cooker at their burger flipping job but you won't actually know their in-jokes with their co-workers or anything. Soul-pacting doesn't get you anything except their identity as a Cover. Demons need to do a lot of research if they want to keep their new pacts from eroding. Fortunately, menial, sub-Skill-dot level stuff like how to operate the fry cooker, daily schedule, names of friends and family, etc. is pretty easy with a couple days' observation thanks to demons' Eidetic Memory, and Legend can cover the bigger stuff for a while, but if you soul-pact a brilliant neurosurgeon and you have no Medicine dots, you might want to engineer an excuse for retirement ASAP.
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Feb 11, 2016 16:34
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Ah, so that's why he's running for president.
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Feb 11, 2016 16:50
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Poison Mushroom posted:It might actually work best as a Monsterhearts hack. Monsterhearts is a PBTA game, but personally I'd say that it might not be the best basis. It's always seemed to me to be aggressively player vs player, and doesn't encourage working together so much. That said I've never played it because of that reading of it. So maybe there's more to the game than that.
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Feb 11, 2016 17:05
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nrook posted:Ah, so that's why he's running for president. Next campaign hook found. Gilok posted:I'm about to start running Demon for the first time so I'm interested in how this stuff works. I wouldn't mind other tips for running Demon either! A big one I see people get hung up on is the "acting grossly out-of-character" compromise risk. The intent was that anything that would be a breaking point for the Cover identity's Integrity is usually a compromise, but that got a little muddled when we had to move the Integrity rules out of the core for space reasons. It doesn't mean "well, Gary the Soccer Dad doesn't engage in covert espionage against an uncaring machine demiurge, so engaging in the game's basic premise costs you Cover;" nor does it mean "your cover is a slacker pothead college kid so you can never act like anything other than a slacker pothead college kid." It just means that actions strongly counter to the perceived self-image of the Cover identity are likewise damaging to the structure of the Cover. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't used "suddenly displaying doctorate-level knowledge of physics" as an example of that kind of compromise; it muddies the waters further, and that sort of "wait, where didyou learn i]that[/i]?" compromise should really fall under humans getting suspicious of you and investigating your Cover. Hindsight is 20/20.
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Feb 11, 2016 17:16
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Arashiofordo3 posted:Monsterhearts is a PBTA game, but personally I'd say that it might not be the best basis. Pretty much all games based off Apocalypse World encourage at least fractious relationships between players, and usually outright conflict. It's part of the core conceit of the style of the thing - this is a pressure cooker, and you're not a "player party", you're a group of people who know each other. Sometimes that means you band together, but sometimes that means you are opposed, because in a pressure cooker situation there's only so much give. IMO, and I think it's reasonably consistently held across PBTA fans, the best hacks are the ones that get this and incorporate it. The reason Monsterhearts is so strong is that it really embraces that and gives you good, interesting ways to make that interesting. The same goes for Urban Shadows, but can't be said for Dungeon World... which is why the latter often causes problems many players don't realise for a long time. I've heard DW being described as "slogging through quicksand" - in a game where supposedly you're all together for a common cause, actually using the PBTA framework just makes stuff hard to do. Whereas, in something like AW, or MH, that framework ensures escalation, resulting an an explosive (often literally) climax. That's the goal of the system, whether someone writing a hack wants it to be or not. PBTA is fractious, antagonistic and explosive. It's baked into the core concepts.
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Feb 11, 2016 17:16
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nrook posted:Ah, so that's why he's running for president. 
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