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Ironslave posted:I regularly spend more Internet Words than I should breaking down how Beast fails to accomplish what it sets out to do and the unpleasant and awful reads staring you in the face as a result, but the idea that anyone who finds some part of it that resonates with them must have problems or be monsters themselves is a hell of a disrespectful hot take. People are getting really really bad at literary/media criticism because it's turning into a game of telephone; they don't read the original sources for modern criticism and instead just know it second-hand from youtube videos or whatever. They draw a bunch of really bad conclusions because they don't know the underlying theory. We are creating a generation of uneducated people who think they are educated without having actual education (as opposed to the previously completely ignorant), so you end up with stuff like this. A similar issue that's cropped up in Trad Games recently is a bunch of people believing Lolita is completely without merit because they have no ability to read beyond a surface symbolic level.
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Jul 19, 2020 16:25
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Loomer posted:EDIT: Scratch that, like a True Smort Guy I found a back up copy under a completely arbitrary file name. I am have kept the Glass Walkers at bay this time (for those new to my nonsense, the project has been beleaguered by not one, but two, hard drive crashes with varying degrees of data loss. One wiped out two whole years of documentation for the Mage line so I've been blaming it on Virtual Adepts ever since.) Pattern Spiders hungry.
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Jul 19, 2020 16:58
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My Promethean game spent some time in the doldrums (the players seem to think it was fun but to me it felt like a bit of a slog for a few sessions), but now things are back on track and I think I can loop some somewhat neglected elements back into the plot. I'd like a little bit of advice/input - the players have decided that part of what is wrong with the town they're in is a historical but unresolved injustice that has lead to some haunting, specifically some unsolved kidnappings within living memory. I think this is cool so I'm rolling with it. From what I've read in the rulebooks, a lot of what goes into dealing with these kinds of issues is figuring out the history and specificity of "what happened" that lead to the spectral/spiritual contamination. How do you guys handle this? Do you create a solution and stick to it pretty rigidly? What does that look like - i.e. do you mostly reduce it to a matter of banes and bans or do you develop more bespoke means of dealing with the problem? Do you have any examples of a haunting that you're particularly proud of? I've got some ideas and I think I should be ready by the time of the session, but I like hearing about past successes (and failures, that's cool too if you've got one that blew up). Arivia posted:People are getting really really bad at literary/media criticism because it's turning into a game of telephone; they don't read the original sources for modern criticism and instead just know it second-hand from youtube videos or whatever. They draw a bunch of really bad conclusions because they don't know the underlying theory. We are creating a generation of uneducated people who think they are educated without having actual education (as opposed to the previously completely ignorant), so you end up with stuff like this. A similar issue that's cropped up in Trad Games recently is a bunch of people believing Lolita is completely without merit because they have no ability to read beyond a surface symbolic level. Listen, if reading dozens of reviews of TLOU2 with no intention of actually playing the game is wrong, I don't wanna be right.
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Jul 19, 2020 16:59
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Perhaps I was too hasty; I think that Beast is atrociously written and critically designed to synonymize victims of oppression and literal rapists at a fundamental level. For this reason, when we’ve seen examples of people identifying with Beast specifically and intensely, it is because they believe that existing in the world as themselves inescapably hurts other people; Beasts don’t just need a resource like blood, they purely need human suffering and to ignore others’ boundaries to inflict that suffering. So yes when I see someone posting that Beast is good because their existence causes people suffering and insisting this is an inherent quality of their nature and identity, it sucks but they just hurt people by being... I am going to take the position that people who deeply identify with Beast specifically are probably doing so because they think it is their nature to hurt others (not even exploit or leech off of or any of the vampire metaphors, but simply cause pain to) by existing. This is the core dynamic of Beast and one we’ve literally seen in this thread. Personally, I think it’s pretty fair to say one can read that as a cry of anguish. And then there’s the guy who oversaw Beast who turned out to be a monster. So yes, my hot take is that Beast, a game about abuse elementals, produces identification on the grounds of identifying with the position of ‘abuser’ and that’s either self-castigation or extremely worrying. To be clear, this is a problem with Beast, that it offers a promise of ‘family’ wrapped in ‘but only if you abuse and allow abuse to occur’ as a central metaphor. It’s trying very hard to convince people that a Beast truly represents the downtrodden or unhappy, and (contra something like Lolita) the deeper you get into it the more it’s clear that the conflation of abusers and the oppressed is the entire framework under which it operates. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Jul 19, 2020 |
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Jul 19, 2020 17:17
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I would wager to say, if some aspect of Beast resonates with you but comparable aspects from other game lines do not, that's where you get into the "wait what now?" zone, because there's really no given piece of Beast that isn't already covered by another game line and better: - "But what if I feel like I'm conflicted between an identity that the world at large does not approve of, or I feel that it doesn't, but expressing it makes me feel like me" Okay well that is Werewolf and Changeling pretty overtly and a case could be made for virtually any other line - "I just want to be a monster and get revenge" Sick, Deviant exists now for explicitly this, Werewolf's got you covered, also Demon, very Changeling, maybe even Promethean, Vampire sure whatever - "I want to make a found community of similarly-Other individuals" Hey that's all of them but most mechanically supported by Promethean, Changeling, Werewolf, Geist in no particular order - "No you don't get it, I really, really want to get revenge with hideous dread powers" Man whatever floats your boat, Hunter's right there - "Let me be clear: I want to cloak myself in the language of liberation to justify being an unrepentant and abusive shithead" Well that's not great but isn't there a whole major faction for Vampires to do this, and a chunk of Werewolves, as well as certain Promethean paths and a whole bunch of Mages? Beast came out when other games could already handle everything you could get from it, and even the least charitable reading of someone's motivations for playing it is redundant to better games, crucially games without the baggage of its developer. On a separate note: Tulip posted:I'd like a little bit of advice/input - the players have decided that part of what is wrong with the town they're in is a historical but unresolved injustice that has lead to some haunting, specifically some unsolved kidnappings within living memory. I think this is cool so I'm rolling with it. From what I've read in the rulebooks, a lot of what goes into dealing with these kinds of issues is figuring out the history and specificity of "what happened" that lead to the spectral/spiritual contamination. How do you guys handle this? Do you create a solution and stick to it pretty rigidly? What does that look like - i.e. do you mostly reduce it to a matter of banes and bans or do you develop more bespoke means of dealing with the problem? Do you have any examples of a haunting that you're particularly proud of? Probably my best haunting session in a game was one where the only dice roll I made was to see if my character remembered enough relevant scripture to deliver proper burial rites to a very confused little girl ghost who was ambushing and scaring people because she was waiting for her family to come back for her. The rest was a pretty harrowing but very emotionally fulfilling hour of talking a ghost through, well this is the hand you got dealt, it sucks, but here's some stuff that maybe you'll get to see in the afterlife because you didn't get it in your life + here's some crappy stuff you got to skip past so don't feel bad about missing that.
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Jul 19, 2020 18:08
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:
My group is very much from the AW school of thought so usually when I get stuck I just turn to a player who's either not in scene or less in focus and go "what do you think." That said I am kind of going for a mystery vibe that's mostly worked and part of that is having at least a few concrete things made in advance. I think I made my life somewhat easier by accident - I set up a very offscreen centimanni earlier in the campaign who was active at around the same time, so keeping that as the 'principle secret' and then letting the players maneuver around it and following their lead sounds good. "What's the worst that could happen" is also a very good idea, I'm used to the AW school of "don't make people roll if you don't know what happens when they fail," but I haven't been applying it at the more macro level. That haunting session sounds amazing. I might end up using a significant chunk of that, I love it. One thing that's been coming into more focus is Judaism - one of the players is a pretty devout reform Jew and he's decided that he wants a character that explores that, so I think this could be another opportunity for him to delve into that. (my best session so far was a solo session for a character who died and met the soul of the corpse she was built from, so I'm feeling pretty good about my players being good for a very conversational session)
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Jul 19, 2020 19:48
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There was someone who thought Beast resonated with them because "Me, too, hurt people just by existing" and it really bummed me out at the time and made me wish they got some help. 
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Jul 19, 2020 21:16
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Beast leans hard enough on DARVO's abuser-as-victim that I'm skeptical of anyone who'd tell me they were into Beast. Heroes being "bad" because they're prejudiced against Beasts fits in the context of normalizing abuse. It's appropriating the persecution of things like homosexuality or kink. The abuser rationalizes that their behaviour is no different, it just isn't acceptable yet because of small minded bad people. I think Beast unfortunately resonated with some marginalized people in demonized communities. It appropriated some queer trappings, which I guess is how you create "abuse-positve" media. Importantly though, no relationship in Beast is consensual. Beast is a celebration of abusers, specifically their percieved right to abuse and entitlement to our acceptance.
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Jul 19, 2020 22:00
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I think one of the other big appeals for Beast (at least around here) is the "wow, I feel like I could FIX this. It's ALMOST cool." Like people don't talk about rebalancing the Disciplines in Vampire nearly as much as they talked about trying to fix Beast. It would be interesting to see figures or estimates on how many of these gamelines translate to actual chronicles, even short ones...
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Jul 19, 2020 22:38
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Beast is that friend everyone had who taught us that we can't fix people, but a game.
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Jul 19, 2020 23:53
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:I would wager to say, if some aspect of Beast resonates with you but comparable aspects from other game lines do not, that's where you get into the "wait what now?" zone, because there's really no given piece of Beast that isn't already covered by another game line and better: Yeah, Beast seems to be addressed towards people who want to be unrepentant and abusive shitheads, but without the discomfort other game lines would bring. They want to feel that the people whom their abuse elementals torment totally deserve to be traumatized and even benefit from it. They need the game to pat them in the back and tell them how great their characters are. And they don't want any challenge while doing it, as Heroes can be relatively easily curb stomped and other supernatural templates love beasts. The game is pretty much an engine to bring elaborate revenge fantasies to life. That's why I would be pretty leery of people that claim to like Beast. Role playing games give you the opportunity to weave pretty much any story possible; someone decided that the story they really, really want to explore is where they torture people they don't like and who totally brought it on themselves. It's hard not to ask "Why?" in a worried tone.
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Jul 20, 2020 00:22
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Now I want to bring in a Beast to my mage game to see how fast they figure out what's going on and how many pieces they explode it into
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Jul 20, 2020 01:20
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Soonmot posted:Now I want to bring in a Beast to my mage game to see how fast they figure out what's going on and how many pieces they explode it into I still think the funniest thing about Beast (as opposed to all the terrible and bad things) was the notion that all the other splats see them as kin when if you look at Beast even vaguely closely you'd see their SOP would disrupt the activities of the other gribblies at best (from the vampire who finds a Beast messing with a human they'd marked as useful for reasons) to the werewolves (where it's "Oh MY GOD stop leaving hideous stains on the Shadow you ABSOLUTE WEIRDOS").
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Jul 20, 2020 02:39
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Soonmot posted:Now I want to bring in a Beast to my mage game to see how fast they figure out what's going on and how many pieces they explode it into The answer is all of the pieces. But really, that’s more screen time than they’re even worth. Much better than they just don’t exist at all in any form, even all of the pieces.
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Jul 20, 2020 03:54
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An Abyssal Intrusion but it's just Beasts becoming canonical until your players solve the problem. "Told you the Abyss was bad bro."
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Jul 20, 2020 04:11
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Dawgstar posted:I still think the funniest thing about Beast (as opposed to all the terrible and bad things) was the notion that all the other splats see them as kin when if you look at Beast even vaguely closely you'd see their SOP would disrupt the activities of the other gribblies at best (from the vampire who finds a Beast messing with a human they'd marked as useful for reasons) to the werewolves (where it's "Oh MY GOD stop leaving hideous stains on the Shadow you ABSOLUTE WEIRDOS"). Huh, I was wondering why Beasts were "completely unaffected by Disquiet." Not even Mummies are unaffected by Disquiet!
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Jul 20, 2020 04:15
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Relevant Tangent posted:An Abyssal Intrusion but it's just Beasts becoming canonical until your players solve the problem. "Told you the Abyss was bad bro."
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Jul 20, 2020 04:18
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Beast laid some framework for a more vigorous resistance to Swedracula, at least - it was a good chunk of the community's first real 'wait, what the gently caress? This isn't the 90s anymore, assholes!' moment and that helped when we had the rear end in a top hat who wanted to make it the 90s again. On the project front, I finally got around to transcribing the final novel entry, wrapping that side of the project after all these years (and prompting my 'oh gently caress where's the garou merged file?' moment). All told, the novels and various short stories added another 6,626 entries to the files, many of them duplicates, bringing it to a total of 68,845 raw entries without the card game entries. I've gone into that before a few years ago but that basically entails a weird mix of duplicates and unexpanded population entries (e.g. just a note for '100 setites in Maralago', and that's not counting the ones for Wraith that add on literally millions of additional wraiths) making it a very foggy number to say the least and hard to figure out a dupe:new ratio, but that aside, the delay to incorporate the novels properly upped the total number of data points by nearly 10%. If we assume a conservative (and almost definitely wrong) 50:50 dupe:new then we still wind up with another 5% new entries - a pretty big chunk! What this means in practical terms is that, while I'm busy with work commitments over the next three months, we're still easily on track for a non-deluxe timeline release before 2021. All that's left is to merge the new entries in (an annoying process since my notations aren't exactly the same a lot of the time since it used whatever a character was referred to in the text, and in the initial format, encoded all of it in a bracketed comment on the initial line. If I'd set it up with a bracket seperation when I first moved from word docs to excel* but didn't know how significant that would be later, and while I still could at this stage, there's still plenty of dupes with minor orthographic differences or a name added/ommitted depending on source text that'd require me to manually hunt anyway.), then a final clean-up step to clean up the name entries and remove the bracketed comments (and some private comments in the notes) for both the merged and unmerged datasets. That step is pretty quick since it can be automated really easily for the first part and the second part is just a handful of comments on things that were clarified later/injokes/etc. The third, and actually interesting step, is one I've noodled with before to get some practice in, which is actually poking and exploring the data to see what it says, with the exception that this time I'll be compiling it all into a single almanac, breaking down splats by representation (versus what we're told it should look like and what it might look like if we extrapolated what we see outwards to account for the amerocentric bias in the data), then total populations by splat, region, etc, and a neat list to finally answer the burning question: Just what is the ratio in different cities? Attached to that will be the essay on vampire feeding habits that explains why the Vampire ratio actually needs to be anywhere from three to ten times higher than surface appearance suggests (basically, a DA:V style ratio of 1:10,000 is actually fine for managing the masquerade - except you can't actually feed on most of those people because you can't get them during the day and the bulk of people aren't accessible in prime feeding locations at prime feeding times - you're not likely to find the over-65 or under-10 contingent hanging out in conveniently shady alleyways at 2AM, and so on. The end result is that your actual available feeding population will be much lower, especially in the suburbs and regional/rural areas, and as such you can't feed as freely as the 1:100,000 because the population that is available will start to show the impacts of predation much faster and expose you to vastly greater risk. This is where having the closest thing to 'concrete' population ratios for vampires becomes useful - we can take particularly exhaustively represented areas and spin them out as models for broader application) and possibly a quick one on Garou ancestry tracing through the documented lines that intersect with real people (you can actually span that out to include several hundred thousand people, last I checked, so it'll have to be truncated) and the 'basic' version of the timeline that just presents events by year and month. The 'deluxe' timeline will come out later since writing a cohesive(ish) narrative out of it all is pretty big work (especially with the plan to include maps of changing influence and war campaigns) and I'm planning to charge for it, while all of the above will be available either as PWYW or in a split freebie and 5$ donation option with the same content. * yeah, I've learned quite a bit of basic best practices for data management doing this... For a start: don't loving do it in Word, don't set it so different datasets you intend to combine in some form have different column structures, and don't do it all in one entry unless it's csv. Even worse than doing it in Word? The initial sketchy version I did for a game was just in png files for lineages that expanded out to cover more and more territory, rather than using graphing or even family tree software. At that point at least I had an excuse where it was just for a particular game. Loomer fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Jul 20, 2020 |
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Jul 20, 2020 04:20
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Loomer, you remain a saint among geeks.
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Jul 20, 2020 04:30
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Beast continues to be one of the few game lines out there in any system that makes me basically see red and have the siren from Kill Bill go off in my head. Particularly when you have folks talking about the whole "family  " aspects of it. Each time I've joined a discord group where it's offered I always end up on some weird dwarf fortress tantrum spiral until i leave the loving group.Also, Loomer - i would love to read that essay you're working on.
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Jul 20, 2020 04:35
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Loomer, if ever a poster on the internet deserved someone setting up baby's first SQL server for them and uploading all the data for them to query and collate, it is you, you crazy diamond.
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Jul 20, 2020 04:36
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citybeatnik posted:Beast continues to be one of the few game lines out there in any system that makes me basically see red and have the siren from Kill Bill go off in my head. Particularly when you have folks talking about the whole "family It'll be out by the end of the year at this rate. It's pretty fun stuff to work on - lot of good, basic statistics stuff as a core with a face layer of White Wolf in-universe nonsense. Sneering Tremere counterpart to Netchurch, to be exact (with the end chapter on game implications without that, for obvious reasons) whose spineless cowardice bleeds through whenever there's discussion of how exactly war packs and coteries use blood. The data itself is a pretty straightforward matter - all you need is the number of vampires (and, crucially, their ghouls - ordinary estimates exclude ghouls but every ghoul maintained must be fed 12 vitae a year at a minimum, which means every ghoul is a 3% bare minimum survival loading on a given vampire) in the city (which is easily abstracted and averaged out), their blood spending behaviour (are they just scraping by at 1:1 rise:feed to survive, or are they actually doing stuff? I've got 4 basic patterns of expenditure. That's not much, but it adds up when you're looking at large cities with several hundred ghouls), preferred feeding style (e.g. animal herding, human herding, bloodbanking, ambush predation) and a few arbitrary decisions on human blood capacity (8 pints but 10 BP, with the ability to heal the damage from a 1BP feeding in a night, is the white wolf baseline - it's more interesting to assume long term degradation when you feed every night on the same people, though) and activity (e.g. 'no one under the age of 10 is out at 2AM, except homeless children') based on the demographics of the area you're looking at and any available commerce stats on nightlife, number of all-hours/late night businesses, etc. In theory I could actually plug all of this into a few formulas for people to easily adapt to their own needs with a set of abstracted vampire and human populations - e.g. formula 1 for bare minimum carrying capacity in a city with an active nightlife and high homelessness, formula 2 for high-expenditure carrying capacity in a city with same, and so on. The fun part is the exploration of the different feeding patterns and how they impact on this, which I went into in a bit of detail a while ago. Cliff notes version: I've got ~20 feeding types divided into 8 general categories (herding, active predation, passive predation ('order a pizza'/grindr hookup/ghouls bringing you tasty treats), animal feeding types, bloodbanking, herd raiding/migratory feeding, bulk feeding (essentially a subset of 1, 2, 4, and 6 that has different ramifications on overall kine mortality), and eating other vampires or their ghouls) and consider their implications for overall carrying capacity, and a special section on Ventrue feeding and its unique challenges and opportunities. There's also a chapter on kine demographics to look at the kind of social conditions that are most helpful to vampires and the 'best' victim (cliff notes: it's never a blood doll. Blood dolls are, per the source materials, usually from the age of 14-25 from middle to upper class families, largely white - a demographic you may recognize as very likely to have a fuss made if they disappear. The homeless aren't great either - poor health and a high prevalence of certain bloodborne diseases relative to the ordinary population means that the blood you get is likely to be thinner and might be contaminated, and of course, there's a very good chance that either they're in someone's rack or someone's reserve herd and feeding on them will make you an enemy. The very best targets outside of herds are actually sleeping upper lower to lower middle-class people - still a higher prevalence of health conditions than the wealthy but much more accessible if you can break into their houses, and less likely to die on you than either an overexcited club kiddie who's already been drained once that night and whose heart is already struggling with the sheer amount of cocaine they've done or an already crook homeless fella with respiratory issues) and implications of long term chronic blood loss for herds (spoiler: it ain't pretty since it can lead to total bone marrow collapse!) The last chapter is the most important, which is how to actually use this stuff in a game - boils down to 'ignore it if you like' (which, to have a lively vampire world, you more or less have to to a certain degree and absolutely should) and a few suggestions for ways to make it stretch if you want to still have domain management be an important element but not be stuck with 3 vampires in town, either by playing with certain assumptions (vampires run the CDC so no one will notice the bizarre number of anaemia patients; feeding causes no long term damage and masks its presence with a flush of health, allowing you to feed more frequently on the same people, rather than slowly wearing people down; vampires only need to feed every few nights; or even using the V5 hunger mechanic) or by cultivating the right conditions for a larger population than the ratio would ordinarily suggest is feasible. Loomer fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Jul 20, 2020 |
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Jul 20, 2020 05:04
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Yeah, the 'one blood point per night' thing is really what makes the Masquerade problematic. Do you have any proposed alternate rules for that? My thought while moving around the dishes: Everything else is as usual, but if you have no other demands on your vitae, you lose one blood point every (Blood Pool, +1 per large increment of age) nights purely to operational expenses. This is probably not worth tracking on a session by session basis. Vampires who have gotten to the 'must have vampire blood' level of the hunger lose one blood point per month "operational costs," or their derived figure from the above, whichever is lower. This will greatly reduce the 'background radiation' while still allowing for situations where vampires have to go on the hunt because they were doing cool poo poo.
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Jul 20, 2020 06:35
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Nessus posted:Yeah, the 'one blood point per night' thing is really what makes the Masquerade problematic. Do you have any proposed alternate rules for that? It really depends on what mode of play you're after. For a taut descent into horror and madness 1BP a night burning off is a good thing, but for anything else it gets in the way, but in different ways depending on focus. My general proposal is to tie it to humanity for standard vampires (vampires on other Roads and Paths may need a different focus, but it's not inappropriate for some of them to burn blood like crazy just by existing. Others can have it mapped basically 1:1 or with different thresholds where appropriate - e.g. Honourable Accord - depending on the extent to which controlling the Beast is central to the Path/Road), where at 9-10 humanity you only burn one vitae every 3 nights, at 6-8 every 2, and at 5 and below one a night (you could pair it with a blood potency or generation mechanic as well, to really drive home the idea that with age comes a certain level of innate monstrousness regardless of how attentive you are to keeping the beast in chains). The more you degenerate into a beast, the more you need to feed, which ends up with a high risk of a feedback loop, but not one that can't be intercepted since it starts fairly early. That way feeding remains a not insignificant factor of the game but for your average city most vampires are at 1/2 of their vanilla hunger, which both makes small herds more helpful* and significantly reduces the overall blood use of the community without also totally erasing it, either enabling larger populations or rendering the masquerade less fragile in a default setting by giving each individual kine (outside of herds) a significantly lower chance of being fed on in a given week. It also has precedent in Golconda's scanty rules reducing your blood expenditure to 1 point a week to wake. This approach can be scaled up or down based on your game's needs - if you want a big rear end vampire population in a small city just double the figures, if you want a small one tighten it the other way and double blood expenditure below 7 humanity and so on. The other simple approach is to tie it to a roll with path rating against a number of successes/TN derived from the path you're on (e.g. Humanity will suffice with 2 successes, Path of Blood will need 5, and so on.) The latter option further increases the carrying capacity of any given territory since there's a good chance most young vampires can go for quite a while without needing to feed if they aren't actively using their disciplines (a hard cap of a week might be appropriate, or even just 'up to <humanity score/path rating> days', so that an extremely lucky hypothetical roller doesn't get to go decades without feeding because he sits in his basement all night watching infomercials and doing literally nothing else.) *: Small herds are basically useless in vanilla for playing anything but the taut descent into horror, whereas here a 3-person 1-dot herd will give each vessel a little break for default blood expenditure and in turn gives them more of a buffer for if you need to do more, enabling them for the other styles of play. The critique that this diminishes the value of big herds misses a central element of big herd value: currency. A herd isn't just for you: a herd is something you can trade produce from, whether for favours or assets. If you know the local Brujah and Gangrel are about to get into a shitfight because one of the Brujah frenzied and murdered a Gangrel in his domain and all the local Gangrel are his childer, then it's a good time to reach out to either the Brujah or the Gangrel and say 'hey, so, I'll cut you a deal: access to my herd in exchange for territorial concessions when you win.' Access to a safe, reliable blood supply during a fight is a big strategic advantage, especially if its one that won't get the Prince pissed at you - and that's just the tip of the ice berg. Plenty of vampires are going to struggle with the practicalities or morality of predation tactics while lacking the capacity to build much of a herd themselves, and they're a good market. Blood, especially safe blood without risk, is a valuable commodity of exchange, and one that plays nicely with the metaphor of vampire-as-capitalist - when he's not sucking your vitality for his own use, he's literally trading your life force to his friends for advantage. A blood-as-commodity angle for larger herds also helps boost the potential power of Ventrue, Brujah, Tremere, and Toreador, as they're the best placed to accumulate large herds that either won't care if you have a drink (blood fetishists, occultists, worshipful cults) or can be dominated into forgetting far in excess of their own needs in order to exploit the blood market. In turn, this helps stoke the tensions between fledgling and elder and reinvigorate the fledgling/novice anarch vs camarilla elder angle since blood-debt slavery is suddenly A Thing and elders and ancillae have had a much better opportunity to assemble a herd and, crucially, establish control over the avenues for assembling one. At that point the elder owns both the commodity and (parasitically) the means of production through recruitment, whether it's a cult, a hospital, a drug and alcohol support group, whatever. At that point your new fledgling, if they lack a sire willing to split their own herds with them (usually with strings attached), is left with the choice of either risking their unlife actively hunting (in poor grounds, since all the good ones are taken, which means both a higher police presence and a higher likelihood of defensive or even retaliatory violence from the prey - or worse, poaching on good grounds at the risk of another vampire being very unhappy), eating rats, or entering into blood-debt to their elders, which is a sufficient grounds in and of itself to stoke continual resentment among the newly embraced. (Now you all see why you don't want legal theorists writing clear and concise rules, right?)
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Jul 20, 2020 07:18
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Tulip posted:Huh, I was wondering why Beasts were "completely unaffected by Disquiet." Not even Mummies are unaffected by Disquiet!
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Jul 20, 2020 08:08
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I want to say that's the case but that also feels like something I'd decide "yep that's how we're gonna do it now."
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Jul 20, 2020 08:15
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Zereth posted:I think Disquet hits a Demon's cover but not them. The actual passage is weird: "Demons and mummies respond strangely to Disquiet; demons are affected by it, but as they maintain ironclad control over their responses, they can choose whether or not to act on it and in what capacity. Mummies seem to respond to Disquiet if their cults have been afflicted, but data is scarce given the rarity of both the Arisen and the Created." So it doesn't affect their covers but does affect their core, while Mummies it seems to be the opposite.
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Jul 20, 2020 08:20
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That would certainly be why I opted to make it cause problems with their covers if they don't play along with the Disquiet.
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Jul 20, 2020 08:23
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Tulip posted:Huh, I was wondering why Beasts were "completely unaffected by Disquiet." Not even Mummies are unaffected by Disquiet! Which makes a complete lack of sense. Prometheans aren't even a race, they're a constructed beings roughly divided in groups. There's no link to the OOO DARK MOTHER. Second place is their oddly trollish attitude to Demons with "Ha I'll rip that mask off you and we'll see what happens then, huh?" when the answer is 'that the creature who looks like a mecha angel built mostly out of bladed whips will kill the stupid Beast because you just forced it to Go Loud and it's really mad at you.'
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Jul 20, 2020 12:32
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Dawgstar posted:Which makes a complete lack of sense. Prometheans aren't even a race, they're a constructed beings roughly divided in groups. There's no link to the OOO DARK MOTHER. Second place is their oddly trollish attitude to Demons with "Ha I'll rip that mask off you and we'll see what happens then, huh?" when the answer is 'that the creature who looks like a mecha angel built mostly out of bladed whips will kill the stupid Beast because you just forced it to Go Loud and it's really mad at you.' My favourite was the one for Hunters: "What gives you the right to kill me?" as if that was a profound question, and not Baby First Moral Dilemma in Hunter.
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Jul 20, 2020 13:28
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LatwPIAT posted:My favourite was the one for Hunters: "What gives you the right to kill me?" as if that was a profound question, and not Baby First Moral Dilemma in Hunter. Yeah, that was an artifact of me writing off the setting bible which went big on "Beasts are part of a Narrative about monsters and monster-slayers, they know this, and they act accordingly, either trying to break out of that narrative cycle or playing it to the hilt, depending on their inclination." That... pretty much got ignored by the entire rest of the game, so what was supposed to come across as indignant shock and smug superiority at the upending of the way things are "supposed" to go ended up coming across as incredibly stupid moralizing. Though honestly that still ends up fitting Beast pretty well.
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Jul 20, 2020 13:47
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LatwPIAT posted:My favourite was the one for Hunters: "What gives you the right to kill me?" as if that was a profound question, and not Baby First Moral Dilemma in Hunter. if their's anything you can justify slotting without considering it in Cod its the Beasts, gently caress em. on hindisight having a sexual predator write the book with an rage addled idiot as co-author wasnt the way to go. Then again they don't really bring anything to the table as pc's anyway, they should have just made Heroes-the whatever and kept the beasts as an edgelord option.
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Jul 20, 2020 13:49
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Beast is an insidious game because on the surface it uses coded language to tell people that "it's okay to hate being ostracised for who you are and other things outside you control." But then follows that up with "But only if you perpetuate that cycle of abuse on the fuckers who really deserve it (Note: the fuckers who really deserve it are the people you don't like)" And people are all too willing to ignore the second part of that statement because the game said the first bit loudly enough. It's an insidious slow burn of pushing the envelope of what is acceptable and what is good. Like, "It's not okay to hate someone for being deformed." "it's not okay to hate someone for being less attractive." "it's not okay to hate someone for their sexual orientation." And then after that slow burn and hoping to god you ignore all the really profoundly gross subtext in everything but a surface level reading of the book he drops the molten hot take of "IT'S NOT OKAY TO HATE SOMEONE FOR BEING A RAPIST!" before being dragged offscreen and quietly memory holed. As an abuse victim myself it was simultaneously validating to see that all my weird feelings about this game were 100% justified, while also very disgusting to find out I defended a rapist. But that's the way the book is written, it uses the language of abusers to get into the heads of victims and convince them that it's okay to feel this way. So gently caress McFarland forever for creating Beast. Zombiejack posted:if their's anything you can justify slotting without considering it in Cod its the Beasts, gently caress em. on hindisight having a sexual predator write the book with an rage addled idiot as co-author wasnt the way to go. It's even better when you know that people finding Heroes sympathetic was seen as a bug and not a feature of a well written game, because all the other CofD lines had huge otherworldly inhuman horrors as their primary antagonists so Heroes being knowable and human was bad. Nope, remove their agency and turn them into stereotypes, phew, problem solved. Except in a competently written game heroes would be the street level, knowable antagonist and there'd be something bigger and like, actually villainous behind it. You know, like the Dark Mother is the bigger, villainous face behind the street level Beasts oh wait 
Kurieg fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Jul 20, 2020 |
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Jul 20, 2020 15:12
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Dawgstar posted:Which makes a complete lack of sense. Prometheans aren't even a race, they're a constructed beings roughly divided in groups. There's no link to the OOO DARK MOTHER. Second place is their oddly trollish attitude to Demons with "Ha I'll rip that mask off you and we'll see what happens then, huh?" when the answer is 'that the creature who looks like a mecha angel built mostly out of bladed whips will kill the stupid Beast because you just forced it to Go Loud and it's really mad at you.' The Dark Mother is an astral entity. Beats themselves are the Goetic equivalents of Bound with delusions of grandeur. It doesn't *matter* that there's no actual casual lineage between Beasts and Prometheans. Beasts are powered by humanity's reaction to monsters. All monsters. On the Promethean front, I find it harder to read than Beast itself nowadays - Matt had as much or more influence over it for much, much longer and used to say it was the game that felt closest to him, personally, the same way that I'm mostly known for Mage but find more of me, author-wise, reflected in Deviant. So yeah. Game about broken disgusting monsters who make everyone around them supernaturally revolted when their true faces are revealed, and who are trying to figure out what being a person means and building their way toward normalcy. If you're looking for a game that looks terrifying once you know about its Dev's past, Promethean is right there. It doesn't get brought up, though, because it's a good game. Zombiejack posted:if their's anything you can justify slotting without considering it in Cod its the Beasts, gently caress em. on hindisight having a sexual predator write the book with an rage addled idiot as co-author wasnt the way to go. Who's the Rage-addled idiot? quote:Then again they don't really bring anything to the table as pc's anyway, they should have just made Heroes-the whatever and kept the beasts as an edgelord option. Never an option. Beast was pitched as a Dragon game, where the splats were the different sorts of "horde", and expanded in weird ways between that and writing. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Jul 20, 2020 |
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Jul 20, 2020 15:30
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Dave Brookshaw posted:
Should have just made mokole 2.0
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Jul 20, 2020 15:40
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Dave Brookshaw posted:The Dark Mother is an astral entity. Beats themselves are the Goetic equivalents of Bound with delusions of grandeur. quote:Never an option. Beast was pitched as a Dragon game, where the splats were the different sorts of "horde", and expanded in weird ways between that and writing. Really wish it was that instead of what we got.
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Jul 20, 2020 15:43
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Dave Brookshaw posted:It doesn't *matter* that there's no actual casual lineage between Beasts and Prometheans. Beasts are powered by humanity's reaction to monsters. All monsters. Yeah, this is one of the few things that never bothered me as much as it did others. The way it's presented in the book is pretty dumb, with the narrative text being much too gullible in taking the beasts' self-aggrandizing beliefs at face value, and a sidebar using "Descended from the Dark Mother" as an out-of-character mechanical definition rather than something more neutral like "Kin" or "Monstrous," but it did feel apparent to me, once you read into the astral connection, that beasts are "kin" to monsters and form supernatural connections with them not because they share a literal heritage, but because the nature of a beast's power is monstrocity and the more monstrous you are the more they connect with you. That's why there's the weird middle-ground category of "only kinda-sorta kin" for mages and hunters with Endowments. Now, the way kinship relates to demons as an exception case? Complete nonsense. The only decision there that makes sense is "the automatic monster sonar probably shouldn't work on the spy splat that's all about not being made," but the explanation and the extended mechanics are ridiculous. Also nonsense: putting all these "crossover-focused" kinship powers on what was also trying to be the meanest, cruelest, darkest splat since Vampire, even before you got into how that manifested in the text as outright abuse elementals. Here's a monster specifically designed to team up with you and be your friend! He disgusts you on a profound moral level, and you drink the blood of the living.
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Jul 20, 2020 15:50
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It still is hard for me to think about playing Promethean or Demon, honestly.
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Jul 20, 2020 16:02
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Never an option. Beast was pitched as a Dragon game, where the splats were the different sorts of "horde", and expanded in weird ways between that and writing. Echoing everyone else in saying that I really wish this was what we actually got.
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Jul 20, 2020 16:40
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| # ? May 31, 2024 12:37 |
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Kurieg posted:Beast is an insidious game because on the surface it uses coded language to tell people that "it's okay to hate being ostracised for who you are and other things outside you control." But then follows that up with "But only if you perpetuate that cycle of abuse on the fuckers who really deserve it (Note: the fuckers who really deserve it are the people you don't like)" And people are all too willing to ignore the second part of that statement because the game said the first bit loudly enough. It's an insidious slow burn of pushing the envelope of what is acceptable and what is good. Like, "It's not okay to hate someone for being deformed." "it's not okay to hate someone for being less attractive." "it's not okay to hate someone for their sexual orientation." And then after that slow burn and hoping to god you ignore all the really profoundly gross subtext in everything but a surface level reading of the book he drops the molten hot take of "IT'S NOT OKAY TO HATE SOMEONE FOR BEING A RAPIST!" before being dragged offscreen and quietly memory holed. It does start very small, too. In the very first piece of Beast fiction I read, it's about a girl in a school lunch room who is... accidentally jostled by a rando which does make a mess, but it was again an accident. So naturally she grabs the guy and has a murder fantasy about him being eaten by an octopus. Our first POV with this splat comes off like an unhinged Peter Benchley enthusiast.
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Jul 20, 2020 17:35
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