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I expect that it coasted on the success of Demon. Demon interestingly plays off the other aspect of McFarland's nature, in that concealing your true nature is a core task. Faking a cover, avoiding scrutiny and judgment, etc is all familiar and relatable territory in fiction. Spies and secret agents, prison-breakers, heists, undercover detectives - there's an inherent tension there that permeates the media. But it also applies to creeps like McFarland. He wrote an exceptional game about impersonation because he's been living as an impostor. And I suspect that's what emboldened him to incriminate himself with Beast. He dug into his experience to gamify hiding, but his second effort tried to gamify what specifically he was hiding. Demon was good because it was a true game about masks. Beast was about the truth under McFarland's mask.
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Nov 2, 2020 16:30
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moths posted:Demon was good because it was a true game about masks. Beast was about the truth under McFarland's mask. I really hate this because that's the aspect of Demon that speaks to me for various reasons (disability being a big one) and it ends up being a Rosemary's Baby kind of situation where it's like "yeah the reason this person understands this dynamic so well is because they are the monster."
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Nov 2, 2020 16:38
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Dawgstar posted:It is so weird the same guy did Demon and Beast. One is amazing. One is Beast. I should point out that Rose Bailey came up with the idea for Demon, its basic bible, what demons were and acted like, hired the team, and Matt then turned it into a game because we wrote Demon and what turned into Requiem second edition simultaneously and she quite rightly wanted to do Vampire. Promethean is the gameline that's the most Matt-ish, and the one he used to cite as feeling the most personal to him, but while he wrote on its original corebook he didn't invent it - he took the line over from Bill Bridges with its 1e supplements. EDIT: Also, we were all absolutely obsessed with Burn Notice and Person of Interest around the time God-Machine Chronicle was being written. Behold the references to "the little bones in the hand" in the 2e combat Merits. Demon hit our zeitgeist hard. Beast has... Fewer directly-applicable source media. Not "none" - the "family" thing started out as a Nightbreed riff - but probably the least of any CofD game. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Nov 2, 2020 |
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Nov 2, 2020 17:03
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I mean, I backed Beast instantly and didn't really bother to look much at stuff about it until the final pdf came out. I bet a fair number of other people did too. Beast sounds so good on the surface, but the fact that it isn't actively about playing capital M monsters and the Heroes are also bad was such an unexpected gently caress up. I thought the whole point was telling the story of your inevitable and justified destruction at the hands of your victims. gently caress Beast, drat.
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Nov 2, 2020 17:27
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Dave Brookshaw posted:EDIT: Also, we were all absolutely obsessed with Burn Notice and Person of Interest around the time God-Machine Chronicle was being written. Analogue Interface: the Panopticon! 
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Nov 2, 2020 17:54
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Rand Brittain posted:According to people who know, McFarland was a very lazy developer and nearly all the work on his games was done by the writers except when he jumped in to insist on a really stupid idea like "enchanting mortals must be prohibitively expensive." So, two very dissimilar lines. This is pretty accurate from my experiences writing mechanics under his lead. Matt sort of infamously didn't believe in game balance but did have some pretty particular ideas about what mechanics NPC could or should be interacting with in the game which was sort of like a game of minesweeper. At one point I almost yelled at him in a skype call that we should just replace nightmares with a clash of wills because it would save a lot of room if we just acknowledged they were all save or eat poo poo.
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Nov 2, 2020 18:25
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I still really don't *get* nightmares. Most of them just seem like being a petty vindictive jerk to random NPCs for no reason. And I really don't see how they're useful in feeding because they're most effective when you really should not be feeding under any circumstance.
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Nov 2, 2020 18:28
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 I really can't provide more insight into design "vision" then that. Somebody wanted spooky gently caress you powers that alternated between petty vindictive jerk or alternatively just absolutely obliterating something.
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Nov 2, 2020 18:41
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I mean, thank God "You are meat" got made a storyteller only power, but the new one is just pure "Beasts are better than everyone else" fellation.
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Nov 2, 2020 19:00
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Kai Tave posted:The thing that still blows my mind no matter how many times someone tries to explain it to me is that someone with any sort of power within Onyx Path, because I'm fairly sure McFarland wasn't the top guy in charge, didn't look at Beast and immediately go "absolutely not, under no circumstances." Just a complete abdication of any sort of editorial oversight. See Exalted, where the authors just kind of hosed around for ages and then the book was left 'in layout' for something like a full year.
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Nov 2, 2020 19:19
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Kurieg posted:It did have editorial oversight. Somehow I missed this. That adds a whole new level of gross to the whole thing. So, what was different with the post-Beast accusation? Why did that one finally stick, if he and his wife had been successfully silencing women prior? Was it just timed right with the Me Too movement?
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Nov 2, 2020 19:20
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As I recall there was a discussion of rpg.net on harassment in the game industry that Matt was moderating and someone posted the accusation against him directly in the thread.
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Nov 2, 2020 19:30
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Falstaff posted:Somehow I missed this. That adds a whole new level of gross to the whole thing. Beast was written in Autumn 2014. It was kickstartered in 2015. Matt was accused of rape in October 2017 and fired from rpg.net and Onyx Path. He continued running his own company Growling Door and lurked around the edges of the industry. The accused crime was from years ago - when he was a college student IIRC, and his then-girlfriend was underage. (EDIT to make clear - yes, she was underage so it'd have been statutory rape anyway, but as she made clear in her post she said no and he ignored it, so no, he's a rapist no matter what. But that's why you hear "a minor" used when describing it.) In Feb 2019 he was then accused of different misconduct by various freelancers he'd "mentored" in a Weinstein-like fashion while active in the gaming industry. Like, after Beast had been written current. Growling Door shut down after this one. Michelle was given a lot of benefit of the doubt by rpg.net. She married him within my span of knowing them both, and I believe rpg.net thought that they couldn't punish her for something she'd just found out her husband had done. Turns out she was helping him hide his current predation, so when the second accusations came out she got ejected from rpg.net as well. FINAL EDIT I SWEAR: Some of the freelancers that accused him and Michelle was helping to silence aren't women, by the way. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Nov 2, 2020 |
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Nov 2, 2020 19:35
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Roadie posted:See Exalted, where the authors just kind of hosed around for ages and then the book was left 'in layout' for something like a full year. I mean... Based on what we know now, Exalted came out in a normal time frame for Onyx Path and was even ahead of schedule. It's just that OPP made their promises for that early KS based on what White Wolf could accomplish with real employees and not based on what freelancers can do for beer money. A corebook taking four years or more to complete is completely normal these days. How long did Hunter 2e spend in the oven?
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Nov 2, 2020 19:44
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I went hunting through my post history and found this. https://twitter.com/CheyenneRGrimes/status/1094847702838456320 This was when it became apparent that Michelle both knew and was using her position as president of the IGDN to shield him. Also, the Beast Players Guide has a story where a Heroic (in both senses of the word) Speech Therapist protects two preteen Beast students under his care from another Beast that's heavily coded as a child molester. Why yes, at one point in his life Matt was a Speech Therapist.
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Nov 2, 2020 19:56
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Rand Brittain posted:I mean... Well, also the delivery date was based on an outright, deliberate lie on the part of at least the developers (and, by our silent complicity, the others in those dev Skypes). It wasn't just some mistake. Edit: holy poo poo lol I forgot the delivery estimate was just six months out from Kickstarter close. What a massive lie. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Nov 2, 2020 |
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Nov 2, 2020 20:06
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That Old Tree posted:Well, also the delivery date was based on an outright, deliberate lie on the part of at least the developers (and, by our silent complicity, the others in those dev Skypes). It wasn't just some mistake. Yeah; I remember getting the impression from the KS that the book was done and just needed art and layout and stuff. Then parts of it started getting written...
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Nov 2, 2020 20:41
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Kurieg posted:I went hunting through my post history and found this. So wait, Heroes can be anti-pedophilia and work with Beasts? I thought they were all MRA incel neckbeards that were always portrayed in a negative light? I presume that Matt imagined himself as Beasts rather than Heroes given the whole...well, everything. Or am I looking too hard for logic in this brainworms of a book?
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Nov 2, 2020 22:08
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KingKalamari posted:The only instance of a rivalry between storygamers and OSR people I've ever seen is creeps associated with the OSR spinning conspiracy theories; was there ever any actual truth to the idea that the OSR and storygamers were like the online Crips and Bloods? I do think that there's a cultural problem in the OSR, and much of it is down to a scene made up disproportionately of old white males--we don't like being told that what was okay in 1990 is not okay in 2020. The rest is because the barrier to publishing OSR stuff is nonexistent. It's the inheritor of the D20 boom and bust and all of the slapdash, occasionally revolting content of that era. Like, all of James Desborough's stuff is OSR now. FMguru posted:To the extent that OSR was in opposition to anything, it was opposed to everything since 1982 or so. Not just Storygames, but White Wolf style detailed metaplot games, D&D 3.X, games-as-physics-simulators (like GURPS and Rolemaster and Shadowrun), AD&D2E-style setting bloat - pretty much anything more than a step or two removed from that little box of OD&D books.
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Nov 2, 2020 22:15
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Libertad! posted:So wait, Heroes can be anti-pedophilia and work with Beasts? I thought they were all MRA incel neckbeards that were always portrayed in a negative light? I presume that Matt imagined himself as Beasts rather than Heroes given the whole...well, everything. The story was written very early in Beast's development, like "A portion of the story was included in the announcement that Beast was even going to be a thing, prior to the kickstarter existing even." early. That's why it has very young Beasts, because it was written back when beasts were Born as beasts. I have no idea why the saintly Hero that's an obvious stand in for Matt himself gets to exist considering it was obvious early in the Kickstarter that Heroes being seen as relatable as a bug and not a feature. But yeah.
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Nov 2, 2020 22:18
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Rand Brittain posted:According to people who know, McFarland was a very lazy developer and nearly all the work on his games was done by the writers except when he jumped in to insist on a really stupid idea like "enchanting mortals must be prohibitively expensive." So, two very dissimilar lines. TwoWordName posted:This is pretty accurate from my experiences writing mechanics under his lead. Matt sort of infamously didn't believe in game balance but did have some pretty particular ideas about what mechanics NPC could or should be interacting with in the game which was sort of like a game of minesweeper. Dave Brookshaw posted:In Feb 2019 he was then accused of different misconduct by various freelancers he'd "mentored" in a Weinstein-like fashion while active in the gaming industry. Like, after Beast had been written current. Growling Door shut down after this one.
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Nov 2, 2020 22:43
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Lord_Hambrose posted:I mean, I backed Beast instantly and didn't really bother to look much at stuff about it until the final pdf came out. I bet a fair number of other people did too. I have no doubt a lot of people did this, but I still don't really get it. I get backing prematurely because you liked the past output of the company. I put in a pledge initially too, before I had time to sit down and read the manuscript and see what people were saying and taking away from it and withdrew my pledge. But they were posting excerpts as updates during the Kickstarter campaign, and made the text of the book available to read. I don't expect folks to read the entire manuscript before the campaign is over, but even a cursory skim, I think, would have laid bare that Beast was about harming people, enjoying it, and dunking on anyone who dared question your right to do so.
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Nov 2, 2020 23:00
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I Am Just a Box posted:I have no doubt a lot of people did this, but I still don't really get it. I get backing prematurely because you liked the past output of the company. I put in a pledge initially too, before I had time to sit down and read the manuscript and see what people were saying and taking away from it and withdrew my pledge. But they were posting excerpts as updates during the Kickstarter campaign, and made the text of the book available to read. I don't expect folks to read the entire manuscript before the campaign is over, but even a cursory skim, I think, would have laid bare that Beast was about harming people, enjoying it, and dunking on anyone who dared question your right to do so. Because people couldn't fathom that Matt McFarland of all people was a serial abuser. It just didn't make sense. People thought that the whole "LGBTQ people are all actually secret rapists and that's actually awesome" part of the text was some unfortunate synthesis of many different bits of text written by many different authors being stitched together at the last minute for the kickstarter draft. And people did raise a stink about how this looked terrible, OPP/Matt McF made a statement about halfway through the kickstarter that they had heard our feedback and would be making changes to be more in line with what we were expecting. Which mollified some people from withdrawing their pledges. Of course the actual text came out and it was barely touched at all and there was a sidebar in the ST section about how no really the kickstarter version of events where Beasts were Born and not Chosen is the correct version and ignore all edits to the contrary. That's part of what I mean when I say that Matt cashed in his clout and respectability for this book, not just with the Tradgames industry itself in order to ensure that it was actually published, but with people who bought his product that the unfortunate subtext was clearly unintentional. Even if he hadn't gotten #MeToo'd out of the industry, Beast was gonna follow him forever.
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Nov 2, 2020 23:47
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Halloween Jack posted:See, now I really want to know more about how Chill 3e came about and what went down with Growling Door. The rights are owned by two Canadians, who licensed it to GD. Since GD closed, content for Chill 3e is being developed by a company called Salt Circle, run by two Chill 3e writers named...Morgan and Jonathan McFarland. Jonathan is his brother. Jonathan was a freelancer on Chill 3e along with other things - I don't know if Morgan was, but they seem to be trying to salvage the game from their relative. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Nov 3, 2020 |
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Nov 3, 2020 00:07
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Kurieg posted:Because people couldn't fathom that Matt McFarland of all people was a serial abuser. It just didn't make sense. People thought that the whole "LGBTQ people are all actually secret rapists and that's actually awesome" part of the text was some unfortunate synthesis of many different bits of text written by many different authors being stitched together at the last minute for the kickstarter draft. And people did raise a stink about how this looked terrible, OPP/Matt McF made a statement about halfway through the kickstarter that they had heard our feedback and would be making changes to be more in line with what we were expecting. Which mollified some people from withdrawing their pledges. Of course the actual text came out and it was barely touched at all and there was a sidebar in the ST section about how no really the kickstarter version of events where Beasts were Born and not Chosen is the correct version and ignore all edits to the contrary. I don't think that whether or not McFarland was a serial rapist or not really figured into it. People backed Beast because it was an OPP product and those have all been good, or they didn't see the problems, or they were aware of them and but thought that kind of actually-my-weird-differences-that-make-my-peers-ostracize-me-is-cool-powers-I-can-exact-revenge-with story was good and queer empowerment, or OPP was going to fix it, or they liked the core concept and wanted something done with it... Like there are so many people who want to "fix" Beast, which speaks to some inherent appeal of the concept (personally I always found it daft, but apparently I'm in the minority?), and if you're a long-time World of Darkness fan you're probably used to having to pick out the good parts of a text anyway. And sure maybe it looks bad but OPP has never failed to deliver something good and interesting yet! Whoops.
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Nov 3, 2020 00:11
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Honestly at a certain point I think fixing Beast became an easy bit to do. After all it only takes one post of "well here's how I'd do it!" to derail a thread for days. Heck you barely even need that. You can just ask about it and the whole conversation will play out again paraphrased in entirety like a terrible forum jukebox.
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Nov 3, 2020 00:16
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I have a really easy way to fix Beast. First you sedate it, then you shave the area where you plan to make the incision...
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Nov 3, 2020 00:23
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I actually fixed it and Beast is now a game where you play delusional narcissists.
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Nov 3, 2020 00:28
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Halloween Jack posted:As far as I can tell, it was just down to Ron Edwards' comment about D&D causing brain damage, which was both a)taken wildly out of context and b) still a lovely way to say what he actually meant. The rivalry was really only sustained by a subset of extremely loud and aggrieved posters on one side. - Ron said that about Vampire, not D&D. - It wasn't taken out of context at all; Ron went out of his way to clearly and specifically state that he did very much mean "brain damage", and compared it directly to the sort of damage done to someone's cognitive development by child abuse. (It did seem like Ron was going with a rather specialised, non-standard definition of "brain damage" but that doesn't mean he didn't mean it when he said "Vampire causes brain damage", it just means Ron has a weird idea of what that means and also thinks Vampire is damaging to young minds in the same way getting raped is.)
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Nov 3, 2020 00:48
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The way I would fix Beast is just use them as antagonists in a Werewolf game. That is about all they are good for.
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Nov 3, 2020 01:04
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Personally I'd be hesitant to even do that, as they're way too deeply tied to themes and ideas I'd just rather not have to deal with at the table.
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Nov 3, 2020 01:11
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I spent the last last three pages reading though the thread only to realize that Matt McFarland =/= Matt McElroy. What the gently caress, OPP. (Actually, I know what the gently caress. It's this lovely industry.)
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Nov 3, 2020 01:31
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Kurieg posted:Because people couldn't fathom that Matt McFarland of all people was a serial abuser. It just didn't make sense. People thought that the whole "LGBTQ people are all actually secret rapists and that's actually awesome" part of the text was some unfortunate synthesis of many different bits of text written by many different authors being stitched together at the last minute for the kickstarter draft. I'm not even talking about the horrid new light that Matt's exposure cast over Beast. I'm just talking about how people recognized the text to be very bad even before we knew its developer was himself very bad, but there were a lot of people who preordered Beast sight unseen and only realized too late what their money had funded. The text was provided to read for free, and you didn't need to read a deep synthesis into it to see how ugly it was. Eastmabl posted:I spent the last last three pages reading though the thread only to realize that Matt McFarland =/= Matt McElroy. Yup, Onyx Path had two separate Matt McPredators.
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Nov 3, 2020 02:04
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I Am Just a Box posted:I'm not even talking about the horrid new light that Matt's exposure cast over Beast. I'm just talking about how people recognized the text to be very bad even before we knew its developer was himself very bad, but there were a lot of people who preordered Beast sight unseen and only realized too late what their money had funded. The text was provided to read for free, and you didn't need to read a deep synthesis into it to see how ugly it was. So am I. Reading the text in the context of 2014/15 Matt the result was "Well this is terrible, it must be a mistake."
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Nov 3, 2020 02:10
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Yeah, I think a lot of people came into Beast from Demon and blind-backed, because Demon was amazing, and then didn't worry about it until the product was done and went 'oh poo poo, what the hell is this?!'.
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Nov 3, 2020 02:11
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Oh, I had missed that the other Matt was also a predator. God that's depressing.
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Nov 3, 2020 02:14
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Roadie posted:See Exalted, where the authors just kind of hosed around for ages and then the book was left 'in layout' for something like a full year. I mean if you really want to talk Exalted and lack of editorial oversight I think the stronger example is John Chambers overseeing 2E with such a hands-off approach that Infernals got approved without edits.
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Nov 3, 2020 03:39
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I think the lack of higher oversight was, for a long time, regarded by Onyx Path as a feature, not a bug - although they started out doing licenced WoD/CoD/Exalted stuff being a home of creator-owned properties was always a big part of the game plan, and a big emphasis was put on presenting this image of being a very creative-friendly company which stepped back and let designers do their art, at least to the extent that they could when they still had to go through an approvals process for lots of stuff. (In the CCP days, CCP didn't give a gently caress and the one dude doing approvals was one of Richard Thomas' old White Wolf staffer colleagues, so there was a lot of freedom there.) Plus they sold a lot of their projects - especially the Kickstarted ones - on the back of who was doing the design, either out of a spirit of Getting The Band Back Together (like getting Phil Brucato back to do Mage20) or for the sake of signalling that the game was in a safe pair of hands (my understanding is that before botching Exalted 3E, Holden and his creeper buddy whose name I forget were pretty well-regarded by the Exalted fandom). Obviously the story is more complicated than that - like the actual pay for Onyx Path projects ain't that great (so bog standard for the RPG industry which chronically underpays professional designers) which isn't really creator-friendly. But that's the image they were projecting - and arguably "The pay isn't great but we step back and let you do your magic" is a much better deal, so long as the person signing onto that is aware of the first part, than "The pay isn't great and we expect you to meet particular targets of timeliness and follow specific guidelines". Then a bunch of stuff happened to mitigate against that practice, at least when it came to licenced stuff as opposed to wholly creator-owned bits, such as: - Exalted 3e being astonishingly late, along with a bunch of other products being astonishingly late but with (somewhat) less drama associated. - Beast. - Paradox bought out White Wolf and ParaWW actually had a vision for the product line which wasn't "Eh, just make sure Onyx Path don't do anything which might trip up the MMO", which meant the approvals process changed - to the point of an entire book being given a "Just so you know, this is not at all canon" text box at the start.
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Nov 3, 2020 17:46
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Holden and Morke had truckloads of good will within the Exalted community when Ex3 was proposed, because for the longest time they were making free stuff for the game and basically keeping the line alive on their own dime. Ink Monkeys was a ridiculous amount of work put into 2nd edition with no return whatsoever.
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Nov 3, 2020 17:49
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Wait, Mage fans were actually clamoring for Brucato to head Mage20? Or even a large fraction of the fanbase?
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Nov 3, 2020 18:00
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