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The lead developer of the game about playing abuse elementals was revealed to be an abuser himself. Just... leave the game alone, man. Just walk away.
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Apr 22, 2018 18:07
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I know, but, I want there to be a way for young or budding abusers to recognize their own behaviors enough to change things, and I want that way to be a tabletop RPG I helped build with a bunch of strangers on the internet. yeah that doesn't sound very plausible now that i say it out loud
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Apr 22, 2018 18:09
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I started a while back to rewrite Heroes as guys trapped between the real world and astral dreamworlds, and need to complete their "quest" to escape the discordant jumping-between bodies as they slept in either world. Issues would've arisen from the dreamworlds being more dangerous but so much more interesting, working from the idea of it as a metaphor for seeking refuge in escapism.
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Apr 22, 2018 18:38
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Isn't Changeling already the Chronicles RPG that's a metaphor for surviving abuse? Isn't Changeling the splat that Beasts explicitly find entertaining to further predate on? Isn't it a better idea to just leave Beast in the outer dark and walk away? How 'bout some mage chat?
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Apr 22, 2018 18:48
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I just want a "classic monster of Greek or Arthurian myth" and/or "kaiju" splat that isn't trash. e: Well, and on the esoteric nerd stuff front, a splat that has significant hooks into the Astral but isn't Mage. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Apr 22, 2018 |
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Apr 22, 2018 18:53
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hey hows this for a cofd changeling game concept: all of the player characters are members in a band. players get 5 free dots in the performing skill of their choice, unless they're relatively untalented, in which case they get a meager 4 dots + 2 in a skill relevant to the practical side of running a band i feel if nothing else this gives players a hammer they want to swing at anything that looks like a nail, and fae magic rock offs could never be a poor decision
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Apr 22, 2018 19:20
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I just want a "classic monster of Greek or Arthurian myth" and/or "kaiju" splat that isn't trash. Step one would be to actually be a loving kraken, who is (possibly poorly) crammed into a human disguise because you like not getting blown up by the US navy. And at this point you are making something which is very much not Beast in any way.
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Apr 22, 2018 20:12
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I just want a "classic monster of Greek or Arthurian myth"
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Apr 22, 2018 20:48
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Puella Madoka: The Mahoening El Chupacabra: The Goat-Suckening
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Apr 22, 2018 21:05
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what kinda new splat would be involved w the astral conceptually
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Apr 22, 2018 21:09
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Tollymain posted:what kinda new splat would be involved w the astral conceptually "For long years we have retreated, as humanity conquers more and more of the dark places, the unknown places, until at last we make our lairs in the dreams of people and trees and, the strangest of us, in the wants of stars." Maybe in the reverse of mages journeying into the Astral, they start out uniquely empowered in the Axis Mundi, and have to fight their way into the Temenos and then Oneiroi and individual dreams. But don't make "we are dreams" their whole thing, because that sort of muddies the noble grandeur of being ancient monsters of legend if, ultimately, they can be argued to be humanity's self-inflicted figments of imagination. Like, maybe that could be a theory someone has, but unless you're specifically making Nightmare: The Elm Streetening, don't do that to a splat.
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Apr 22, 2018 21:16
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All they had to do was write Dragon: The Dogmaing. It was right there, a perfectly wrapped package that already encapsulated themes of lovely, pointless self perpetuating cycles that are terribly destructive. But no, we got abuse elemental otherkin and now that other game that might have been probably never will.
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Apr 22, 2018 21:20
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Ironslave posted:I started a while back to rewrite Heroes as guys trapped between the real world and astral dreamworlds, and need to complete their "quest" to escape the discordant jumping-between bodies as they slept in either world. Issues would've arisen from the dreamworlds being more dangerous but so much more interesting, working from the idea of it as a metaphor for seeking refuge in escapism. Sounds like A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Which is a way more interesting and awesome idea than whatever Beast tries to be.
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Apr 22, 2018 21:41
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Slimnoid posted:Sounds like A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. It cribbed more from KA Applegate's Everworld series if anything. The idea being there was "real" you and "dream" you and whenever one went to sleep they'd merge. Dropped it when I had to focus on moving, but the main sanity stat was something along the lines of discordance as you tried to reconcile the safety and mundanity of the world with the danger and wondrous nature of your quest and dreamscape whenever you experienced a merger. On one hand it was an escape from the difficulties of your normal life, on the other it was an experience which could hurt you and your ability to function as a stable human being. Had a rough idea where something Beast-adjacent could pursue them in both worlds, but never developed it further.
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Apr 22, 2018 21:50
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Obligatum VII posted:All they had to do was write Dragon: The Dogmaing. It was right there, a perfectly wrapped package that already encapsulated themes of lovely, pointless self perpetuating cycles that are terribly destructive. Dragon's Dogma is the best creative first-time GM's excitable and awkward D&D campaign I've ever played.
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Apr 22, 2018 22:13
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So, have any White Wolf/OPP games included mechanisms for therapy and overcoming trauma? Any Chronicles book cover how mortals recover from hospital stays and PTSD? Posting this to remind myself, but I want to check out how Wraith resolved fetters and passions, as I bet that'd be a good first place to start, but I'm curious if it's already cropped up in any other games, new or old world. The system I'm homebrewing in my head involves the oogity-boogity powering up it's Monster Soul by inflicting Torments on other mortals, making one of the big focuses for the PC how to redress existing torments and prevent new ones from making the antagonist more powerful.
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Apr 22, 2018 23:40
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Right now Mage gets the most access to the Astral Realms with some of the others getting peripheral access to it, but Psychonaut: the Delving or something like that could absolutely be its own complete game. Play people who are actually all about going into the astral and fighting both personal fears as well as collective nightmare-memes.
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Apr 23, 2018 01:42
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So ten minutes into westworld2.1 this speech Delores gives is promethean af
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Apr 23, 2018 05:21
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Tricky Dick Nixon posted:Yeah that's a big inspiration for me. Just curious about how to best make the procedural part of it feel right, like investigative techniques and ways to reveal clues. I didn't enjoy the first episode of Mindhunter but going to give it another try for sure. In addition to GURPS: Mysteries and anything Gumshoe, check out Aletheia for more ways of making investigations work in RPGs. It was one of my main inspirations. TV stuff, original Law & Order, Columbo, and Waking the Dead.
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Apr 23, 2018 10:22
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Soonmot posted:So ten minutes into westworld2.1 this speech Delores gives is promethean af Funny, I've been thinking since episode 1 of the first season that WW was Changeling as fuuuck. The entire Park is a Durance, and Ford is its True Fae.
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Apr 23, 2018 11:03
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Zereth posted:Just take the elevator pitch of "You're ancient monsters hiding in plain sight" and make something that actually matches that elevator pitch with it. The big problem you have in cooking up new CoD games is that more or less all the really iconic monsters with wide enough cultural cachet to hang a game line on are taken, either by actual WoD/CoD games or knockoffs. Dragons are a major gap, but then Fireborn exists and the comparisons to that may be undesirable. Likewise, UFO aliens are a gap, but don't really fit the more supernatural than science fiction underpinnings of the setting. Deviant might be the closest that you get to that, though Deviant has its own issues in that it's a slightly different take on the Frankenstein thing than Promethean. (The only difference between a Deviant and the original Frankenstein's monster, so far as I can make out, is that whoever's brain it is in the Deviant remembers their old life whereas Frankie woke up a blank slate - though that's probably a big enough difference to hang a splat on.) Beast seemed to want to be an "miscellaneous/all of the above" splat, but was anyone really, genuinely, honestly crying out for the chance to play, oh, I don't loving know, a hydra or a centaur or a minotaur or whatever in a CoD/WoD-like game? Even if someone was, were there enough people crying out for the same thing that it made any goddamn commercial sense to actually make a game for them? And doesn't having a splat which can glom onto other splats and joyride on their schtick just undermine all the other splats' USPs? It feels like Beasts either end up being lovely versions of concepts better dealt with by other splats, or failing that end up being weird take on monsters which, on balance, don't really belong in your modern day urban occult horror game because there isn't a good hook for doing a modern-day update of them. Beast being a trainwreck due to its handling of abuse themes was deplorable, but there's a reason all Beast discussions turn into discussions of the abuse stuff - if you take it away there's nothing conceptually vivid there beyond vague huffing and puffing about a dark mother and creepy otherworld lairs. Compare that to the striking conceptual clarity of, well, pretty much any other splat. There isn't enough "there" there to make a game out of, or at least not one which sits nicely in the same ecosystem as the other CoD splats. Some of those "ancient monster" concepts would work way, way better in Scion than elsewhere (all the Greek myth ones, for instance, make far more sense in a cosmology where the Greek pantheon exists and has an active role in the world), others could make decent splats in their own right except their lunch already got eaten by a sufficiently conceptually-close splat that making a CoD game out of them would struggle to find its own identity. Warthur fucked around with this message at 12:01 on Apr 23, 2018 |
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Apr 23, 2018 11:57
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bewilderment posted:Play people who are actually all about going into the astral and fighting both personal fears as well as collective nightmare-memes. 
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Apr 23, 2018 14:00
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Warthur posted:Beast seemed to want to be an "miscellaneous/all of the above" splat, but was anyone really, genuinely, honestly crying out for the chance to play, oh, I don't loving know, a hydra or a centaur or a minotaur or whatever in a CoD/WoD-like game? Even if someone was, were there enough people crying out for the same thing that it made any goddamn commercial sense to actually make a game for them? And doesn't having a splat which can glom onto other splats and joyride on their schtick just undermine all the other splats' USPs? It feels like Beasts either end up being lovely versions of concepts better dealt with by other splats, or failing that end up being weird take on monsters which, on balance, don't really belong in your modern day urban occult horror game because there isn't a good hook for doing a modern-day update of them. I think the problem with Beast is that it was already trying to be two different things(A play on the nature of story on the medium of "horror" and "Monsters", and all the "also Rans" that hadn't gotten full press time in other books) before Matt turned it into a confession/cry for help and warped the beasts into minority stand-ins for some easy ally credits. Beasts as completely inhuman and unapologetic, thinking that they're actually doing good in the world when they turn people into Heroes because at least now they're interesting as opposed to their old hum-drum lives, is interesting. Even though it sort of treads on the toes of the True Fae beasts at least have a fundamentally human lens on the game that players can utilize. The rules for Horrorspawn, cults, Dark Mother Rituals, delving through the deeper layers of the primordial dream, etc. that are in the Beast Players Guide are really neat and should have been in the core book, also they shouldn't be behind two chapters of Matt dropping the pretense entirely and creating a splat of cursed, put-upon, good-guy rapists.
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Apr 23, 2018 15:05
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I've been thinking about a V20 campaign recently (THANKS BLOODLINES REPLAY) and it seems to me that unless people are all of the same clan, that you would want to run a series of one-on-one sessions for each person to set up everyone's story, before going to have a session with everyone. How do people run their games? It's not really like a D&D session where you can be 'well everyone meets each other at an inn due to the sheriff wanting you to clear the kobold cave', though it can be like that at times.
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Apr 23, 2018 15:41
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Huh. 5th ed VtM preorders were announced, so I guess the trash playtest was a secret flaming success and it'll be available at gencon.
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Apr 23, 2018 15:52
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moths posted:Huh. 5th ed VtM preorders were announced, so I guess the trash playtest was a secret flaming success and it'll be available at gencon. Glad we live in a world where I am taking a pass on a Ken Hite horror rpg. I hope it has some good mechanics or something, because I dislike everything about New White Wolf that I plan to give their whole product line exactly $0 of my money.
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Apr 23, 2018 15:56
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En Fuego posted:How do people run their games? It's not really like a D&D session where you can be 'well everyone meets each other at an inn due to the sheriff wanting you to clear the kobold cave', though it can be like that at times. I tend to default to, as generally everybody is a neonate, they're thrown together before the Prince because getting their sires getting to sire them means the sires owe the Prince a boon and since in Kindred land as anywhere else poop rolls downhill (moreso, in some cases) the job of working it off falls to the PCs. And hopefully they will bond and become a productive coterie forming perhaps the city's one true alliance etc.
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Apr 23, 2018 15:56
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Warthur posted:The big problem you have in cooking up new CoD games is that more or less all the really iconic monsters with wide enough cultural cachet to hang a game line on are taken, either by actual WoD/CoD games or knockoffs. This is a really solid point. It's also one of the reasons I dig the new Demon/GMC flavor is it feels like a step away from Dante's vision of hell and demons, which has become fairly stale. The move towards more abstract and gnostic themes do open up potential for basing games on more philosophical, deconstructed ideas of monsters. In the system I'm thinking of, the specific historical monsters are just faces for the horrors of violence and extremism. Instead of being born with a different soul, any character exposed to sufficient trauma would have a chance of gaining beastly aspects, almost as a defense. Justify it by saying that trauma inflicts wounds in a soul that the Void/Abyss/Entropy can corrupt. Have the beastly aspects tied to the nature of the character's trauma as one face of primeval violence, rather than a distinct and unique entity. The Gorgon represents suspicion and hostility, the Hydra represents deception, the Kraken is avarice, like that. There would be no distinction between heroes and beasts, except what the character chooses to do with their powers. To gain in strength, characters have to inflict additional torment upon the world, so a major character struggle would be to find "acceptable targets." Think about the whole Real Life Super Hero thing, people going out of their way looking to justify a fight. Animal rights extremists torching labs and accidentally unleashing swarms of invasive rabies-having rectum-dwelling fang-ferrets. Open Carry dudes hoping someone at a bar says something, tell me those aren't modern day monsters. Or think of the alt-right and Antifa. They both aren't afraid to use violence, because violence is using them. Where this gets complicated is that there's always the chance that someone preyed on will end up manifesting their own powers, with a well-justified grudge. I'm envisioning a group of Hero Jocks beating up a Beastly Nerd, only to discover that by traumatizing him further he has grown in power and viciousness. In my head-campaign, the players would be a group of friends tormented by a bully, who is himself tormented by an abusive family. They can't beat up the beast, because he's vastly more traumatized and therefore more powerful, and direct confrontations just inflict additional traumas, which fuel more powers. To win, the players would find which other kids in the school the bully is tormenting, and help them resolve their traumas so their fear no longer fuel the bully's supernatural powers, then confront the bully at home, to resolve the abusive relationship which spawned the beast in the first place. Here, this almost acts as an inverse of the Imbuing, instead of being chosen as a Hunter the character becomes a puppet of monstrosity. It's also easy to see how any mortal NPC in a different game could become a Beast if pushed enough, someone who survives a werewolf attack, a member of a vampire's herd, or a mage's neglected cultist. Batman is a Beast because he gets into fistfights instead of using his enormous wealth to eliminate poverty and crime forever. Traumatizing every cutpurse and pickpocket in Gotham does them no good, but keeps Batman swimming in eternal youth and preternatural vigor. There would be a mechanism similar to Wraith's Eidolon rating, where PCs can do good work and public service in order to gain power, but with greater difficulty than just beating up and abusing people. Give the players a civic center they need to maintain and protect from greater evil, something that rewards them from just jumping gaze-first into the Abyss. Anyway if that sounds cool I can throw something together and share it around. I need to talk to therapists in order to make sure I understand the main theory behind EMDR because I think roleplaying therapy should be what replaces cinematic combat as the main dramatic device in-game.
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Apr 23, 2018 16:00
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Batman is a Beast because he gets into fistfights instead of using his enormous wealth to eliminate poverty and crime forever. Traumatizing every cutpurse and pickpocket in Gotham does them no good, but keeps Batman swimming in eternal youth and preternatural vigor. He does both, actually, got an entire Foundation for it. And Wayne Enterprises is well known in Gotham for giving second chance jobs to felons attempting to go straight. 
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Apr 23, 2018 16:21
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If you want Batman as Beast you only have to look at the "Dark batmen" from the most recent comic arc that is bad and terrible in several ways.
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Apr 23, 2018 16:43
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batman's a rich psychopath bane and his army of common men are the real heroes of gotham
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Apr 23, 2018 16:44
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That's what I like about the system I'm thinking about, both bane and batman are mechanically both the same type of monster, just executed differently. batman beats dudes up while bane has an army he orders around and, presumably, keeps in a state of stress. Elon Musk makes people work stupid hours because their misery physically strengthens them. Basically, it's Captialism: The Leechening. nofather posted:He does both, actually, got an entire Foundation for it. And Wayne Enterprises is well known in Gotham for giving second chance jobs to felons attempting to go straight. wow, every big hollywood blockbuster gets its own comic adaptation these days! sheesh, whats next, funko pops?
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Apr 23, 2018 16:58
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nofather posted:He does both, actually, got an entire Foundation for it. And Wayne Enterprises is well known in Gotham for giving second chance jobs to felons attempting to go straight. They also run orphanages that don't suck. Catwoman grew up in one and talks about how it was the happiest part of her life. PHIZ KALIFA posted:That's what I like about the system I'm thinking about, both bane and batman are mechanically both the same type of monster, just executed differently. batman beats dudes up while bane has an army he orders around and, presumably, keeps in a state of stress. Elon Musk makes people work stupid hours because their misery physically strengthens them. Bane lives in the worst prison in the world, which he purposely keeps terrible, and keeps his army in line under threat of death depending on the writer. In the most recent Batman run, Bane sits naked on top of a pile of skulls at the bottom of his prison in his off time. He takes natural selection to an extreme level. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Apr 23, 2018 |
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Apr 23, 2018 17:03
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So what you're saying is Batman is "capitalism with a human face."
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Apr 23, 2018 17:43
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So I know the V5e announce was met with a fairly tepid response here ... and I did check out the alpha playtest (oi). So I present this to you: Should I wait until V5 and see what they do, orrrr should I pick up V20 on DriveThru RPG while they have the massive PDF bundle for under $50? Note, I am doing one of these so I would love some insights.
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Apr 23, 2018 17:53
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En Fuego posted:So I know the V5e announce was met with a fairly tepid response here ... and I did check out the alpha playtest (oi). So I present this to you: Although I admit bias, because the most fun oWoD game I've ever played or run was a fully gonzo elder game in V20.
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Apr 23, 2018 17:58
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While there's always a sort of limited "cultural bandwidth" for franchises and parts of franchises, I think it's a mistake to just sort of shrug your shoulders and assume that the various WoD's are done because, like, Frankensteins and Vampires and Wizards and Werewolfs and, hell, I guess that's it. Demon sure got some of the same "Meh, but what's the incredibly simplistic hook of a broad cultural touchstone?", even after it demonstrated you could totally open up new spaces in the of Darknesses. The big stumbling block isn't that "the good ones are taken", it's that creating a new, engaging IP is just plain hard.Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:V20's at least a Lot of game to play around in already, and the things that are bad about it are known bads like "Celerity still busts the action economy wide drat open"-level stuff, but it's not a pile of badly executed trash from an ill-spirited dumpster like V5. If anyone's going to buy it (don't), buy V5 much later down the line to gently caress with their rollout sales numbers.
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Apr 23, 2018 18:10
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DigitalRaven posted:In addition to GURPS: Mysteries and anything Gumshoe, check out Aletheia for more ways of making investigations work in RPGs. It was one of my main inspirations. TV stuff, original Law & Order, Columbo, and Waking the Dead. Definitely appreciate this, especially Waking the Dead which I hadn't thought of. Just finished Mindhunter (have mixed feelings but good source material) and working on some other material. Right now I'm decided on definitely focusing it on the slasher phenomenon as a continuing theme, and have some ideas for where to go but I'm trying to get a handle on a solid introductory plot. I want to make sure that the target of the investigation is one that is ambiguously supernatural, while still requiring the intervention of VASCU. A slightly straightforward case with a few twists and turns while still making it clear what kind of role they can play. Would be down to hear any story hooks or ideas from folks in the thread, or even other sorts of killers. I do have some story seeds already (a blood bather fraternity, a body thief that must commit suicide to change bodies, a family feud in the Ozarks boiling over due to generational influence of spirits) but they don't yet feel the kind of plot that feels best to introduce the slasher phenomenon and how it relates to what VASCU does.
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Apr 23, 2018 18:12
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Warthur posted:The big problem you have in cooking up new CoD games is that more or less all the really iconic monsters with wide enough cultural cachet to hang a game line on are taken, either by actual WoD/CoD games or knockoffs. Dragons are a major gap, but then Fireborn exists and the comparisons to that may be undesirable. Likewise, UFO aliens are a gap, but don't really fit the more supernatural than science fiction underpinnings of the setting. Deviant might be the closest that you get to that, though Deviant has its own issues in that it's a slightly different take on the Frankenstein thing than Promethean. (The only difference between a Deviant and the original Frankenstein's monster, so far as I can make out, is that whoever's brain it is in the Deviant remembers their old life whereas Frankie woke up a blank slate - though that's probably a big enough difference to hang a splat on.) There's a Shadow Over Innsmouth-style fan splat about playing Lovecraftian sea gribblies, but it didn't look great at a quick glance, and I don't think there are really any major commercial knock-offs that have you playing the monsters in that scenario. And yeah, I've never heard anyone say a kind word about Fireborn. Also, the main thing I like about the Chronicles of Darkness games is that, for all that they're not always well-organized and are sometimes "bigger" games than they strictly need to be, they do occupy a comfortable and semi-unique niche in terms of being high-crunch games with strong connections between theme and mechanics. I like the Chronicles of Darkness lore and setting and that helps, but what I'm really here for is e.g. the way the game rules cleverly prod Werewolves towards violence, Demons towards paranoia, Vampires towards selfishness, etc. combined with a system deep enough that the decisions you face are more than just narrative.
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Apr 23, 2018 18:22
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:This is a really solid point. It's also one of the reasons I dig the new Demon/GMC flavor is it feels like a step away from Dante's vision of hell and demons, which has become fairly stale. The move towards more abstract and gnostic themes do open up potential for basing games on more philosophical, deconstructed ideas of monsters. I'm not sure how often you can do the "we're going to take the central idea and do a radical reimagination of it" thing though. If someone buys Splat: the Splattening, odds are it's because they want to play something which closely resembles a Splat, and if what's presented doesn't feel like a "real" Splat to them then that's a burden. Your new thing sounds interesting. Do you intend to present it as a standalone game? Because as with Beast (and to a certain extent Demon, come to think of it) I'm not sure what having the other CofD splats present in that setting really adds. That Old Tree posted:While there's always a sort of limited "cultural bandwidth" for franchises and parts of franchises, I think it's a mistake to just sort of shrug your shoulders and assume that the various WoD's are done because, like, Frankensteins and Vampires and Wizards and Werewolfs and, hell, I guess that's it. Demon sure got some of the same "Meh, but what's the incredibly simplistic hook of a broad cultural touchstone?", even after it demonstrated you could totally open up new spaces in the of Darknesses. The big stumbling block isn't that "the good ones are taken", it's that creating a new, engaging IP is just plain hard. The fact that it's very hard doesn't mean it isn't worth doing - but equally, the fact that it's very hard intrinsically means that the odds of success are slim. Coming up with a new splat that benefits from being part of the CofD rather than just its own thing in its own standalone game is difficult enough that, whilst I don't think Onyx Path's designers should stop brainstorming, I'm not anticipating that many new games in the CofD happening. And if they do come, they'll come at an extremely slow pace, unless older lines get outright shuttered for the sake of making way for concepts that do what they did better.
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Apr 23, 2018 19:31
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