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Rand Brittain posted:I continue to be extremely vexed that there isn't more Beckett talk, because that book is so goddamned full of content. It's the same size as Exalted Third Edition and it's all setting stuff, and all good. Kickstarter people haven't gotten their hardcopies yet, which is what seems to bring a big influx of content. I suppose the people who would have talked about it already did during the drafts released to backers. Other people are understandably on the fence. If the book is going to be outdated the moment v5 comes out (and there's clearly people who put a lot of emphasis on metaplot and things becoming outdated, even if they're supposed to be a small faction of the fanbase) people might not want to spend much time on it. Even if it is supposed to be the baseline for v5, they'd have to wait for v5 to be sure.
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Apr 25, 2018 00:04
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:No, Modiphius is fine but White Wolf used to be a major RPG company and to relegate publishing to another company seems like a step down in a big way. It makes sense, printing is expensive and Modiphius is a big company who publishes RPG's, but most of the companies they publish are small, like the Fragged Empire guy. This is very much Swedracula's pet project while Paradox sits on the rights. I think after a Bloodlines successor deal with Obsidian fell through the budget must've dried up to sub-typical RPG company levels. Paradox must've paid pennies on the dollar for the rights and is just letting WW do its own thing. I think that will change as soon as they start getting named/blamed for anything particularly heinous and prominent on Swedracula's part.
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Apr 25, 2018 00:32
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Counterargument: One of the evil gods in Exalted 3rd ed was a child raped by demons for all eternity. Can White Wolf even CATCH controversy at this point, or do they just call it "buzz"?
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Apr 25, 2018 01:29
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Counterargument: One of the evil gods in Exalted 3rd ed was a child raped by demons for all eternity. I refer you to the FAQ in the 5e playtest blogpost.
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Apr 25, 2018 02:28
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Counterargument: One of the evil gods in Exalted 3rd ed was a child raped by demons for all eternity. You mean 2nd, right? Because I'm pretty sure you mean 2e Infernals.
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Apr 25, 2018 03:01
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Joe Slowboat posted:You mean 2nd, right? Because I'm pretty sure you mean 2e Infernals. Yeah, the little girl who got raped a bunch was 2e, 3rd edition had "Well we say ravish but in a romance novel way not a rape way."
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Apr 25, 2018 03:31
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None of those have hit the mainstream Discourse, though. When/if the Werewolf video game comes and it gets any traction, that might cause something.
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Apr 25, 2018 03:38
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Kurieg posted:Yeah, the little girl who got raped a bunch was 2e, 3rd edition had "Well we say ravish but in a romance novel way not a rape way." Fortunately, those dudes got hella fired.
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Apr 25, 2018 03:58
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I Am Just a Box posted:Hired harrassment specialist Zak S. for their first in-house production and stood by him in the face of backlash. Lead Storyteller Martin Dracula contributed a story using the phrase "full rear end-rape stiffness" to a reprint of an anthology edited by a child abuser. 5e playtest materials include mechanics for Brujah being hyperbolically offended or as the text calls it "triggered" and present an active pedophile as one of the playtest scenario player characters. Interviews consistently lean towards wanting to be edgy and transgressive in the pursuit of relevance, including wanting to directly involve 9/11 and Middle Eastern strife in the metaplot, wanting to revisit the Shoah and World of Darkness: Gypsies, and folding "the lure of heroic fascism" into their themes for Werewolf. LARP event incidents involving indifference and lack of sympathy to consent issues and anti-harrassment precautions that I'm not entirely read up on myself. She's Olivia Hill now.
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Apr 25, 2018 05:25
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Huh, didn't know that. Good for her.
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Apr 25, 2018 05:50
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i heard other than having the demon rape thing, the Infernal Exalted was really, really bad for other reasons, like "the first and last half of the book are written by different people and it shows." But what specifically was the disconnect? Also more on topic, what are even the "politics" of White Wolf? I hear this edgelord stuff, but then I hear how they're loving up because they're trying too hard to virtue signal and are doing a bad job of it? From which side are they being terrible people from?
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Apr 25, 2018 06:01
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Pope Guilty posted:She's Olivia Hill now. Apologies! I had no idea and will edit appropriately. Liquid Dinosaur posted:i heard other than having the demon rape thing, the Infernal Exalted was really, really bad for other reasons, like "the first and last half of the book are written by different people and it shows." But what specifically was the disconnect? If you're asking "what is the character of the divide?" The second half is written with bizarre transhuman villains and antiheroes in mind, with powers and panoplies of beautiful but dangerous unnatural distortions, likely to wreck the world for everyone in the long run, including their bosses, because they were given power without a scrap of oversight or discipline. The first half is, well, the kind of content where a helpless child being raped endlessly is a major setpiece, written under the assumption that the Infernals are unthinkingly loyal, intrinsically brainwashed, personally policed, and likely to wreck the world because their malevolent child-raping bosses want them to wreck it. If you're asking "why did this divide take place?" The better question is "how did the authors of the second half of the book get their poo poo straight in the first place?" Exalted Second Edition had an extremely laissez-faire developer who basically gave each assignment's writers free range, and each book had multiple writers. The second half authors talked shop with each other through email and messaging. The first half I don't know, but they were old World of Darkness hands, so I assume they just glanced over the outline and did the White Wolf thing they were used to doing. Liquid Dinosaur posted:Also more on topic, what are even the "politics" of White Wolf? I hear this edgelord stuff, but then I hear how they're loving up because they're trying too hard to virtue signal and are doing a bad job of it? Who are you hearing the complaints from? I think that's more likely to answer your question than what White Wolf actually does. "Virtue signalling" is a bit of an ideological shibboleth, like "cultural Marxism." There's not a binary answer to the question anyway. We're talking about a) multiple actors (White Wolf Entertainment and Onyx Path Publishing are two separate groups of people with like two or three people's worth of overlap, even after including their respective freelancers), each composed of b) multiple individuals (one writer won't have the same politics as another within the same company) who are capable of c) a broad range of behavior (people can demonstrate both good and bad approaches to political dilemmas even without undergoing major changes of their outlook). I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 07:54 on Apr 25, 2018 |
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Apr 25, 2018 06:19
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Liquid Dinosaur posted:i heard other than having the demon rape thing, the Infernal Exalted was really, really bad for other reasons, like "the first and last half of the book are written by different people and it shows." But what specifically was the disconnect? Ok, as to the first thing... as someone who got into Exalted in Second Edition, Infernals was both the worst book and the best book at its point in the game. It had two distinct sections: the mechanics, and the fluff. Each of these can be broken down into two parts, one of which was absolutely goddamn atrocious, in the fluff's case both morally and aesthetically, and one of which was actually really good. Exalted 2e had some deep, deep mechanical issues; it tried to do some ambitious things early on in its run in terms of giving players tons of power in a simulation-y, game-y system and setting, and that really broke a lot over its knee. The Infernals characters' basic powers were created considerably after the developers had realized these flaws, and they leaned in - if you wanted to play pre-errata Second Edition, Infernals mechanics were the least janky, most fun, and most flavorful. Further, they basically let you play as pseudopods of giant hell-gods from a hell designed by Jenna Moran, the author of Nobilis and Chuubo's and also a fantastic hell writer. The actual setting of Hell, by default, was a great pulp fantasy zone where Infernals could run around being rock stars, scheming like supervillains, and having a fantastic time. Then there were the artifact mechanics from Infernals - all of them were cool and interesting variations on Exalted's aesthetic themes, and also they were hellishly broken, bad for game balance, and occasionally just sort of nonsensical. Then there was, well, the entire setting chapter at the start of the book. This wasn't the main setting book for Hell - that had already come out, with the Malfeas book, which has very little gross content that I can remember, and a lot of good plot hooks and interesting places. The Infernals setting chapter... well, it had Lillun, whom I will not describe but is what's being referenced when people talk about how loving awful and edgelordy 2e got. Super gross, super bad, not coming back in 3e by explicit, developer level statements. Then there's the fact that a few casual lines make it clear that when your Infernal character becomes an Infernal, there's a big party where all of the demons in the soul hierarchy of their patron come by and whichever ones feel like it rape your character. That's just backstory for Infernals. That's the other 'so bad it makes the eyes bleed' bit in their book. The multiple authors doesn't actually account for all the bad mechanics - the infernal artifacts with the cool fluff are from the back half, which is the not-grotesque half. But the first two chapters were widely reviled, and didn't really influence the fluff of the rest of the book, which is where the usable mechanics were. So, as you can imagine, most players skipped over the first few chapters once word got around. But some players definitely enjoyed that whole grotesque mess, and it took a while for them to peel away as the creative direction swung away from that poo poo in late second edition with Masters of Jade and Shards of the Exalted Dream. (It helps that the errata finally happened, such that Infernals went from markedly superior to play to 'interesting but not that much better' in the same period- though they still got way too much focus and interest). Exalted 2e had some real edgelord poo poo in it in published materials; 3e hasn't so far and hopefully won't. I've really liked 3e, especially the refocus away from the kind of cosmic squabbling that Infernals were expected to do in 2e towards more Conan-style 'it was an age undreamed-of.' EDIT: Well I got scooped. But it's worth noting that chapter two was also bad, because it provided rules for any Exalt selling themselves to the demon lords of hell, resulting in their free will being totally scooped out and them becoming substantially more powerful, plus they become immortal. If you really wanted to spot a terrible player on the old forums, just look for someone talking about how cool their 'akuma' of whatever demon was, and how much they were going to serve the lords of hell totally loyally. And then the good rules for playing weird hell-scions were in 3, I think, and artifacts in 4? It's been forever since I've opened the PDF, and frankly, that's a good thing. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Apr 25, 2018 |
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Apr 25, 2018 06:51
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Thanks. Most informative. And by “virtue signaling” I meant how there’s the attempt to portray the abuse monsters im Victim: The Blamening as minority standins in ways which are gross for a variety of reasons. Promethean seems cool though, though I see why not many people play it. Liquid Dinosaur fucked around with this message at 13:47 on Apr 25, 2018 |
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Apr 25, 2018 13:45
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Beast is a large can of worms that has very little to do with the rest of nWoD at this point.
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Apr 25, 2018 13:56
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Liquid Dinosaur posted:Promethean seems cool though, though I see why not many people play it. Yeah, even for folks who would probably dig it there's something hardwired into a lot of gamers' brain about an end state being 'I lose my cool powers.'
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Apr 25, 2018 15:06
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Beast was really a perfect storm of one developer trading in all of his trust and associated goodwill on a passion project and people interpreting his reluctance to change as an unwillingness to kill his darlings rather than a concerted effort to lionize himself. And it will probably never happen again, RichT is definitely going to be paying a lot more attention to other lines as they come out, and they're almost assuredly never going to let a developer's sole editorial oversight be their spouse.
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Apr 25, 2018 15:08
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Kurieg posted:Beast was really a perfect storm of one developer trading in all of his trust and associated goodwill on a passion project and people interpreting his reluctance to change as an unwillingness to kill his darlings rather than a concerted effort to lionize himself. It is shocking how you can go from Demon to Beast. That's like making, I dunno, Goodfellas and your next movie being Freddy Got Fingered.
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Apr 25, 2018 15:33
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Everybody I talked to who knows anything about how Beast got developed seems pretty confident that Matt had surprisingly little to do with it. It was a lot less "Matt developed abuse elementals to express the contents of his tortured psyche" and more "Matt took a nap while a whole bunch of writers who had never worked before created some nasty new monsters, and snored through the bit where the developer was supposed to make this into a playable game." Apparently the only part of the line that really has his stamp on it is Heroes.
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Apr 25, 2018 15:50
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Which does seem hard to believe, given what's come out since.
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Apr 25, 2018 15:52
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And then, presumably, slept through the literal months of criticism that followed leaks, previews and a Kickstarter, while publically owning it as his game. And then, later, got revealed to have been a rapist.
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Apr 25, 2018 15:55
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I have to admit I don't find "guy refuses to admit that a horrifying crock of bullshit was produced on his watch" to be intrinsically unbelievable. In part this is because the more I read C20, the more flaws I find that crept in because the person on top wasn't doing the necessary work to keep things consistent or spot obvious minor problems. (C20 is so irritating because they had a huge hurdle to get over, and they cleared it with style, but then they went and added a whole bunch of extra, new hurdles for themselves to fall over!)
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Apr 25, 2018 16:00
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Rand Brittain posted:Everybody I talked to who knows anything about how Beast got developed seems pretty confident that Matt had surprisingly little to do with it. It was a lot less "Matt developed abuse elementals to express the contents of his tortured psyche" and more "Matt took a nap while a whole bunch of writers who had never worked before created some nasty new monsters, and snored through the bit where the developer was supposed to make this into a playable game." That is, apparently, how the Conquering Heroes book was made(Very little oversight, but also very little direction, which is why it's so disjointed). But the Fluff in the Beast Core and first two chapters of the Players Guide are 100% Matt. e: Like i can 100% buy that the reason why beast is so mechanically disjointed and lacks any sort of focus in how you're actually meant to play the game is because of a lack of Matt's attention. But the themes and tone of the game were set by Matt before we even saw the kickstarter. People raised the issues to him and they were barely wallpapered over so that people who did a quick reading of the first two chapters would think that everything was changed for the better. Kurieg fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Apr 25, 2018 |
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Apr 25, 2018 16:02
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Rand Brittain posted:(C20 is so irritating because they had a huge hurdle to get over, and they cleared it with style, but then they went and added a whole bunch of extra, new hurdles for themselves to fall over!) Has there been an F&F of C20 yet?
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Apr 25, 2018 17:03
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Rand Brittain posted:Everybody I talked to who knows anything about how Beast got developed seems pretty confident that Matt had surprisingly little to do with it. It was a lot less "Matt developed abuse elementals to express the contents of his tortured psyche" and more "Matt took a nap while a whole bunch of writers who had never worked before created some nasty new monsters, and snored through the bit where the developer was supposed to make this into a playable game." It's the OPP/White Wolf superstar game designer thing yet again, where developers are rock stars when it serves the publicity for that to be the case and irrelevancies when it's awkward.
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Apr 25, 2018 19:01
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Warthur posted:This seems to have been a line that people said a lot after Matt's dodgy past came back to haunt him on RPG.net. Up to that point he was pretty much treated as the Beast auteur and final port of call for definitive answers on the subject. It's kind of awkward either way, really. Anyway, I can point to Exalted 2e as a pretty clear example of "developer essentially does nothing" being a thing.
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Apr 25, 2018 19:10
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Rand Brittain posted:It's kind of awkward either way, really. And? The fact that it happened to Exalted doesn't mean it happened here. And I'm frankly confused as to why people want it to be the case here.Unless they're still laboring under the idea that Beast is a good game and trying to separate it from it's chief actor. I mean frankly the idea that there's an entire cadre of authors out there who put together a giant glowing treatise on abuse apologia that somehow slipped past the attention of a rapist and his editor wife reflects even worse on OPP than "Matt is human scum but he's gone now."
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Apr 25, 2018 19:41
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Kurieg posted:And? I guess I just find the notion that terrible books sometimes happen via a horrifying confluence of well-intentioned events a more interesting explanation, especially when it matches up with the information I've been given. Beast is a bad game and Matt is a bad person, one of the few people I actively dislike, given our history, but the idea that Matt just kind of leaked evil onto the manuscript and wound up with something awful is both reductive and boring. (Particularly because the result is completely opposite from both Matt's stated views and the views of everybody else who worked on the project. How did that happen? It's a fascinating question if you're interested in how the sausage gets made, and just boiling it down to "bad people write bad books" is totally unsatisfying.) Rand Brittain fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Apr 25, 2018 |
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Apr 25, 2018 19:52
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How is it reductive and/or boring to assume that a game's lead developer can or even would have any control over the course of a game's development? You are aware that real life doesn't often do things just because they're "more interesting that way" right? The opening fiction for the Beast Player's guide was explicitly written by Matt McFarland and it has a creepy pedophile front and center, introduced on the first page. And the Talassi being described as "Cursed to be rapists" and that they should be praised for resisting their urge to rape and not blamed for indulging sure as poo poo came from somewhere. Whether Matt wrote the brief for someone else to expand on, Matt wrote it himself, or Someone else came up with it and Matt approved it. No matter how the sausage got made it still had to pass by the desk of a man who put his sausage in an underage girl.
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Apr 25, 2018 20:11
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I’m sorry real life doesn’t fit your required level of dramatic tension.
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Apr 25, 2018 20:14
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Mr. Maltose posted:I’m sorry real life doesn’t fit your required level of dramatic tension. I've filed a bug report, but my form came back covered in literary criticism.
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Apr 25, 2018 20:26
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Nobody who gets mired in Beast arguments is allowed to get mad about Mage chat ever again.
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Apr 25, 2018 20:38
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Most of the time when you bring it up it really comes off as stanning/defending Matt, even though that's not how you intend it.
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Apr 25, 2018 20:38
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Mors Rattus posted:Most of the time when you bring it up it really comes off as stanning/defending Matt, even though that's not how you intend it. I suppose. The guy really is a loathsome backstabber, though. EDIT: I think the thing is that unlike most of Something Awful posters my instinct is to be nicer to someone the more I dislike them, so it might help if you imagined my overly-reasonable posting as my own way of saying "bless your heart." Rand Brittain fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Apr 25, 2018 |
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Apr 25, 2018 20:40
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Rand Brittain posted:overly-reasonable posting No. It's not reasonable, and presenting "let's give a child rapist the benefit of the doubt, I hate him but this might not have been his fault" as "reasonable" suggests some really hosed up things if you follow the logic through.
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Apr 25, 2018 20:52
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He's a rapist. This is not even a they go low we go high thing, and the idea that you're positioning yourself higher than I guess this forum morally because you want to say bless your heart to the rapist for making a game about how abuse is super cool and queer actually is very bad.
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Apr 25, 2018 20:54
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Rand Brittain posted:I suppose. Sorry, I have a glandular disorder that prevents me from looking at irritating mealy-mouthed posts and interpreting them positively.
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Apr 25, 2018 21:02
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Attorney at Funk posted:Nobody who gets mired in Beast arguments is allowed to get mad about Mage chat ever again. Really feels like every week someone wanders into the thread and wants to know about Beast and Matt McFarland and everyone just falls over themselves to explain it and rehash all their issues with them again and again. Putting it into the OP wouldn't even work because there's already an F&F we can link to and it's never enough.
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Apr 25, 2018 21:21
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petition to change the op to "BEAST = BAD"
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Apr 25, 2018 21:23
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That but the thread title.
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Apr 25, 2018 21:32
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