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Dave Brookshaw posted: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. It's more about narratives. Promethean is about creatures who want to become humans and have to figure out what that means while avoiding persecution. Beast is about monsters that torment humans for minor infractions and the game goes out of its way to tell us this is cool and good, those
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Jul 20, 2020 17:59
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I'm glad we didn't get a dragon game because A) dragons are too powerful to be in player hands so it wouldn't be fair OR turn out watered down and lame and B) we all know that Mage is the dragon game anyway.
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Jul 20, 2020 18:04
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The Beast game we deserved.
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Jul 20, 2020 18:08
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Promethean's such an overt trans narrative (it's the densest use of neopronouns I've ever seen) that it kind of overwhelms other reads.
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Jul 20, 2020 18:18
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Kurieg posted: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 In Vampire are the street level villains "you, the vampires" and the bigger thing the Strix?
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Jul 20, 2020 18:28
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I'm glad that my only contact with Beast has been through this thread.
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Jul 20, 2020 18:31
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Zereth posted:In Vampire are the street level villains "you, the vampires" and the bigger thing the Strix? In Vampire, the street level manipulated villains are vampires and the bigger, truly monstrous villains are also vampires.
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Jul 20, 2020 18:53
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Zereth posted:In Vampire are the street level villains "you, the vampires" and the bigger thing the Strix? I Am Just a Box posted:In Vampire, the street level manipulated villains are vampires and the bigger, truly monstrous villains are also vampires. Beast has a backstory but it doesn't have a Plot. There's really no direction on where to go forward in the game. There's no bigger threat in the game beyond getting your next meal and knocking down cardboard cutouts of antagonists that in universe do not have any agency in the matter. If there was something bigger, if there was something to actually justify your monstrosity against then maybe it could have been something, have you be the lesser evil. But Beast is not a game about justifying your actions as lesser vs a greater evil. Beast is a game where your actions are justified because of who you are. A game where you are special and it's okay to be monstrous because the world is somehow improved by your mere existence(but we will not explain how in any detail) and the alternative is worse(again we won't explain just trust us). Knowing what we know now about Matt just gives everything a horribly slimy disgusting context.
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Jul 20, 2020 19:05
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Beast already tried to give the players some more powerful antagonists in form of the Insatiables. It didn't improve the game, because it's core narrative is still about being supernatural bullies, who give pathetic chuds wedgies while everyone stands up and applauds.
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Jul 20, 2020 19:31
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Insatiables aren't a 'bigger' predator though because Insatiables are all A) Utterly unique with no larger society B) lovely off brand versions of Beasts and C) Suffer from many of the same problems as heroes, mainly they can only be meaningful threats if they've merced some other Beasts off camera. You could just have Bigger, Stronger, Eviler Beasts be the enemy, but the Insatiables give you a fig leaf that lets you have something to kill that's similar to a Beast but ultimately not so you don't have to admit that your characters are maybe part of the problem. They're even axiomatically evil too with no nuance so it's okay.
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Jul 20, 2020 19:38
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Mors Rattus posted:It still is hard for me to think about playing Promethean or Demon, honestly. Can I ask you why?
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Jul 20, 2020 20:07
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paradoxGentleman posted:Can I ask you why? Because of Matt. Those games are the ones heavily sold as his babies, I can see his influence in them and in some cases directly identify his authorial voice, and they are harder for me to play and enjoy knowing that.
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Jul 20, 2020 20:22
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Kurieg posted:
Even when they did this it didnt work, It doesnt really matter how much how many homophobic slurs you tweet out or how much you like Trump you're always going to be way more sympathetic than someone who eats children or at best gasslights people and expects a round of applause as part of some malformed understanding of mythology. I've been playing with the idea of retro-engineering the game to play as heroes, pretty much everything Beast offers has been done by every other wod game somewhere, wereas the chance to play Hercules, Arthur ,the forty seven ronin, Arjuna or even modern heroes like Batman in a wod context would be something more novel I had this idea of having the Beast be nemisis' spawned due to hubris moral compromise or disconectment with humanity at the upper levels of gently caress up the Beast would usurp the heroes role like Gaston becoming the villain vs the now redemed beast or creating dark tyrants like Darth Vader or Loki. Dave Brookshaw posted:
Olivia Hill, everything she writes read like an angry 14 year who just found out republican leadership is bad and thinks shitflinging online is the way to go. I'm genuinly curious how much of the really self indulgant aspects come from her vs the sex predator rationalizations. Although I'll admit Ihunt is an interesting concept if a little contrived and underdeveloped. Zombiejack fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Jul 20, 2020 |
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Jul 20, 2020 20:23
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Zombiejack posted:I've been playing with the idea of retro-engineering the game to play as heroes, pretty much everything Beast offers has been done by every other wod game somewhere, wereas the chance to play Hercules, Arthur ,the forty seven ronin, Arjuna or even modern heroes like Batman in a wod context would be something more novel didn't old hunter try to do this as an abandoned attempt to tie exalted in with wod
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Jul 20, 2020 20:33
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Mister Olympus posted:didn't old hunter try to do this as an abandoned attempt to tie exalted in with wod Sort off, it was trying to do too many things at once. I'd considering using Hunter-the reckoning style archeotypes as a frame of referance except based on rough hero types EG-leader, strongman, trickers, etc.
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Jul 20, 2020 20:39
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If Olivia Hill's politics threaten or embarrass you, the problem probably isn't her writing.
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Jul 20, 2020 21:22
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Olivia Hill’s politics and writing seem generally good, though I’ve also seen the claim she was behind a lot of the Chronicles Tokyo/Japan writeups? Which really haven’t worked for me, especially the Werewolf one. If that wasn’t her I’d be glad to hear it.
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Jul 20, 2020 21:50
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GimpInBlack posted: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. I was always perplexed why this wasn't the premise; it seemed the obvious direction for it to go in the ChroD and I even tried to do an adaptation along those lines (because it is every person's mistake to try and fix it at least once). I'm glad to know at one point it was supposed to be. Dave Brookshaw posted: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. Oh no, I never realized that. Promethean's always been one of my favorite lines and now I see it.
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Jul 20, 2020 22:06
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I have a complicated relationship with Olivia Hill's work because a lot of what she added to nWoD 2E is stuff that that my RPG id really wants but that my RPG superego sternly disapproves of and forbids.
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Jul 20, 2020 22:06
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Ferrinus posted:I have a complicated relationship with Olivia Hill's work because a lot of what she added to nWoD 2E is stuff that that my RPG id really wants but that my RPG superego sternly disapproves of and forbids. Expand on this? I just don’t know a lot of who did what on various lines besides the negatives like ‘Matt did this, that is a problem.’
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Jul 20, 2020 22:08
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Zombiejack posted:Even when they did this it didnt work, It doesnt really matter how much how many homophobic slurs you tweet out or how much you like Trump you're always going to be way more sympathetic than someone who eats children or at best gasslights people and expects a round of applause as part of some malformed understanding of mythology. gently caress it, I'm down for aberrant in wod, but I think this is a niche deviant is going to fill.
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Jul 20, 2020 22:09
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Dave Brookshaw posted: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. Yeah. Yeeeeah. Every time I look back at some of the stuff I wrote for Promethean I need a shower. The bits I'm thinking of, stuff about Roles and the Great Work particularly, I pretty much based on my experiences rebuilding my entire personality after a breakdown & suicide attempt, using archetypes to learn how to be a functioning human again. But looking at it now, I hate it, because it's so easy to read as a loving guide to how a predator like Matt can present as a "normal" human. At the time, I loved it. It was a blend of alchemy and occultism — things I love — with this deeply personal experience and Matt, loving Matt, made me hate it by being who he is. Apologies. I've had about a third of a bottle of Courvoisier and needed to vent. Joe Slowboat posted:Olivia Hill’s politics and writing seem generally good, though I’ve also seen the claim she was behind a lot of the Chronicles Tokyo/Japan writeups? Which really haven’t worked for me, especially the Werewolf one. If that wasn’t her I’d be glad to hear it. All the Japan writeups were Olivia, at least until things went south between her and OPP. The Werewolf one specifically was her suggestion and execution. Ninja edit: Ferrinus posted:I'm glad we didn't get a dragon game because A) dragons are too powerful to be in player hands so it wouldn't be fair OR turn out watered down and lame and B) we all know that DigitalRaven fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Jul 20, 2020 |
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Jul 20, 2020 22:12
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I’m really sorry to hear that about your work for Promethean, which is a game a number of friends of mine going through depression and various personal issues have found really meaningful — so for what it’s worth, what you made is valuable to a lot of people who aren’t abuse elemental prime. (Also, I guess I do have a minor but persistent creative disagreement with Olivia Hill, because all the Japan write-ups put me off and making all Japanese werewolves Ainu is a very bad idea that would be a better fit for Apocalypse.)
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Jul 20, 2020 22:26
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Fireborn was an interesting "I Can't Believe It's Not WoD!" game. It had at least one interesting design choice of the 'play in the past as a dragon and in the present as a reincarnation' but a dice system I can only describe as baroque and couldn't tell you much about save you moved dice around related to the elements? I think?
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Jul 20, 2020 22:36
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I always took the Mokole splat as the "be a dragon" game since their build-a-war-form approach makes making a Western or Eastern style dragon pretty easy, and they get Gifts related to fire due to their relationship with the Sun.
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Jul 20, 2020 22:49
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Joe Slowboat posted:Expand on this? I just don’t know a lot of who did what on various lines besides the negatives like ‘Matt did this, that is a problem.’ Oh it's mostly to do with the pricing/titrating-out of certain traits like combat merits and Ordo Dracul Coils that would be naturally attractive to your typical powergamer, and resultant effects on nWoD 2E combat balance and the allowances the new line makes for you to really specialize in being a combatant such that you're untouchable by/instantly lethal to hypothetical 2-dots-everywhere chump newbs. It's not totally or probably even largely Hill's doing but she seemed to most actively be working on it/defending it back on the OPP forums years ago. Like I said, I disagreed but also strongly sympathized at the time.
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Jul 20, 2020 22:54
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Yeah, I’ve had that exact conversation about fighting merits and more particularly fighting style merits back when Chronicles were just a rules update. I don’t remember if she said she’d written them or just worked to get them all in the same form, but I didn’t care for them then. I took issue with them being excess to requirements and better suited to a D&D 4e style character system, but that was the extent of it. One of those agree to disagree moments in life and that’s okay. That also boils down to me thinking that anything that it shifts the focus of the system heavily into the physical combat part of things. I’d have fewer issues if there were more extra toys built into the social and mental tracks, but that didn’t happen until there were social doors. Except that’s just a system, but the social merits don’t give nearly as much as a similar combat merit gives. It’s just not as game breaking as some of the 1e combat merits were and we’ve had great results in my game just ignoring that combat fighting styles exist.
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Jul 20, 2020 23:20
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Dawgstar posted:Fireborn was an interesting "I Can't Believe It's Not WoD!" game. It had at least one interesting design choice of the 'play in the past as a dragon and in the present as a reincarnation' but a dice system I can only describe as baroque and couldn't tell you much about save you moved dice around related to the elements? I think? One of the few things that would lure me back to working on big-company-owned RPGs: I want to work on a do-over of Fireborn that uses a system that isn't over-engineered and mathematically incoherent. DigitalRaven fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Jul 20, 2020 |
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Jul 20, 2020 23:21
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:If Olivia Hill's politics threaten or embarrass you, the problem probably isn't her writing. Yeah, brushing Hill off as a 'rage-addled idiot' honestly just makes you sound like one of the far-right chuds she's been dealing with throughout her dev career. I don't necessarily agree with all of her design decisions, but she's got serious dev chops and she definitely does it better than I could.
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Jul 20, 2020 23:47
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Soonmot posted:gently caress it, I'm down for aberrant in wod, but I think this is a niche deviant is going to fill. Yeah that could work as a stop gap but I was thinking more the idea of the hero as the mythic figure rather than a hero as simply someone with magic powers whose good, I think they really missed the shot when they made their approach at the mythic cycle about the primal monster rather than the Hero. If I were to a 'primogenator' monster I would have made them antagonists ala The Insatiable but far less human (no null spyder evil troll) and may never have been human from day one, something which representing a primal true 'demon' linked the dark mother in opposition to the God machine but ultimatly still a force for evil. With that in mind heroes would be partially focused on fighting these things with the beast being more an 'missing link' between the heroes, the insatiable and some of the supernatural creatures of CoD. Tuxedo Catfish posted:If Olivia Hill's politics threaten or embarrass you, the problem probably isn't her writing. They do neither, her politics are relatively close to my own. Zombiejack fucked around with this message at 10:08 on Jul 21, 2020 |
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Jul 21, 2020 00:36
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DigitalRaven posted:One of the few things that would lure me back to working on big-company-owned RPGs: I want to work on a do-over of Fireborn that uses a system that isn't over-engineered and mathematically incoherent. It's kind of up there with In Nomine in RPGs I'm a little surprised haven't yet been brought back, but there's probably rights issues I'm unaware of. (IN being originally a French game for example, or maybe SJG is squatting on the rights.)
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Jul 21, 2020 00:46
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Zombiejack posted:Yeah that could work as a stop gap but I was thinking more the idea of the hero as the mythic figure rather than a hero as simply someone with magic powers whose good, I think they really missed the shot when they made their approach at the mythic cycle about the primal monster rather than the Hero. Hunter: the Vigil First Edition has its own perspective, presented as one of multiple optional interpretations of an artifact letter on King Nimrod: quote:Nimrod, Samson, Achilles, and Other Psychopaths
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Jul 21, 2020 05:31
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:If Olivia Hill's politics threaten or embarrass you, the problem probably isn't her writing. They write words encouraging people to read more Benjanun Sriduangkaew. I do not like those words. 
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Jul 21, 2020 11:28
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LatwPIAT posted:They write words encouraging people to read more Benjanun Sriduangkaew. I do not like those words.
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Jul 21, 2020 11:53
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NGDBSS posted:What is Benjanun even doing these days? The only time I heard about her was as part of some takedown essay that won a Hugo for research (?). Trying to take advantage of the sexual harassment and representation controversies in speculative fiction to present herself as a safe authority on the genre. You know, typical narcissistic abuser poo poo.
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Jul 21, 2020 11:58
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LatwPIAT posted:They write words encouraging people to read more Benjanun Sriduangkaew. I do not like those words. That's the Requires Only Hate person, right? Yeah, no thank you.
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Jul 21, 2020 12:05
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NGDBSS posted:What is Benjanun even doing these days? The only time I heard about her was as part of some takedown essay that won a Hugo for research (?). Writing sci-fi. Since her professional debut in 2012 she's written 37 short stories, four novellas, and a novel. I don't know if they're all about how (thinly veiled analogies for) Europeans are decrepit, inbred, and inherently evil, living in swarming, overpopulated anthills who need to be liberated from the suffering of their disease-riddled bodies and pollution with a genetically engineered plague, starting with Scandinavia - but I didn't feel inclined to check any more after the first one. I don't really feel the need to read the books of someone who writes about how great it would be if my lungs filled up with blood so I choked to death.
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Jul 21, 2020 14:33
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LatwPIAT posted:They write words encouraging people to read more Benjanun Sriduangkaew. I do not like those words. Olivia goes by she, not they. making GBS threads on a former WW author because of her choice in queer fic seems like a crappy direction for this thread. Anyone read the new Geist supplement? Memento Mori, I think?
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Jul 21, 2020 15:55
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Octavo posted:Olivia goes by she, not they. making GBS threads on a former WW author because of her choice in queer fic seems like a crappy direction for this thread. Anyone read the new Geist supplement? Memento Mori, I think? I'm okay with saying that it's weird for Olivia to have pushed back against Zak so forcefully (and for good reasons) but to also disregard and belittle people pushing back against Sriduangkaew (for good reasons) when it's the same kind of conduct just in a different field.
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Jul 21, 2020 16:04
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Arivia posted:I'm okay with saying that it's weird for Olivia to have pushed back against Zak so forcefully (and for good reasons) but to also disregard and belittle people pushing back against Sriduangkaew (for good reasons) when it's the same kind of conduct just in a different field. Judging from her twitter feed, she decided that Sriduangkaew grew up and quit being an rear end in a top hat. There's got to be something better to talk about than Olivia's friend list, even if there are a few people on said friend list that I can't stand. How about a little Magechat? I was thinking about running a high level Mage game that takes place during the final stages of the revolt against the Exarchs, culminating in the game changing to Unknown Armies with the player characters either joining the statosphere as NPCs or becoming PC Avatars and Adepts with little memory of the past cosmological configuration due to aponia.
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Jul 21, 2020 16:45
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