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Nessus posted:I want a game that lets me explore the deep characterization of the monster in Nope.
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Sep 20, 2023 21:37
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The development problem with a vore-based RPG is that that the mechanics are invariably going to prioritize the players doing the voring over those being vored 
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Sep 20, 2023 22:09
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Putting on a video of That Scene when you manage to predate succesfully.
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Sep 20, 2023 22:11
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Lurks With Wolves posted:I see you have forgotten the second edition of Mummy: The Curse. Which is understandable, because it's an indistinct mess that doesn't solve the problems. Mummy was also made by a bad person, ol' C.A. Sulemain who wrote in his 'apology' letter that he admitted sometimes he did scare women because "his eyes blazed with an intensity some might call 'alarming'" or words to that effect.
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Sep 20, 2023 22:14
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Kurieg posted:THE WORDS ARE SPOKEN AND I MUST OBEY So, aside from all the very lovely and abusive crap tied up in this game, I do not understand how this was supposed to function as a play experience you'd have with a group of people? It just seems like the poster child for the problem a lot of the lesser WoD games and WoD rip-offs had where they present you with a really robust system for creating and mechanically representing a character based around some high concept concept in-universe mythology...and forgot the part where this is a character you're supposed to be using in an urban fantasy game to achieve some kind of goal.
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Sep 20, 2023 22:26
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KingKalamari posted:The development problem with a vore-based RPG is that that the mechanics are invariably going to prioritize the players doing the voring over those being vored No one tell them about Rôti Sans Pareil.
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Sep 20, 2023 22:59
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Dawgstar posted:Mummy was also made by a bad person, ol' C.A. Sulemain who wrote in his 'apology' letter that he admitted sometimes he did scare women because "his eyes blazed with an intensity some might call 'alarming'" or words to that effect. remember when green ronin said they were gonna put out a timeline that completely exonerated him? and that never happened? good times
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Sep 20, 2023 23:05
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KingKalamari posted:The development problem with a vore-based RPG is that that the mechanics are invariably going to prioritize the players doing the voring over those being vored
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Sep 20, 2023 23:11
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neongrey posted:remember when green ronin said they were gonna put out a timeline that completely exonerated him? and that never happened? good times It either exonerated him or exonerated them from not knowing at all and being completely innocent about working with him despite his misdeeds and all that came of it was... one of the founders having a meltdown on RPG.net and getting permanently banned.
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Sep 20, 2023 23:52
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KingKalamari posted:So, aside from all the very lovely and abusive crap tied up in this game, I do not understand how this was supposed to function as a play experience you'd have with a group of people? It was meant to function by basically forcing itself into other games via crossover. You play as a Beast in a mage Game or a Beast in a Werewolf game and occasionally everyone else has to sit on their hands while Decker Time happens and you, as the most important character, go over your horrific Saw level Snuff fic to replenish your power stat.
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Sep 21, 2023 00:16
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Kurieg posted:It was meant to function by basically forcing itself into other games via crossover. You play as a Beast in a mage Game or a Beast in a Werewolf game and occasionally everyone else has to sit on their hands while Decker Time happens and you, as the most important character, go over your horrific Saw level Snuff fic to replenish your power stat. Yeah, it's worth re-stating how deeply stupid the whole 'splats are secretly super into Beasts' was given their very existence disrupted the standard operations for all of them. Arguably the least was vampires but a Beast still probably disrupted feeding with their shenanigans. They made more work for everybody, especially werewolves and Geists.
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Sep 21, 2023 00:39
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I can see where the initial premise for Beast is appealing (You're the modern day incarnation of ancient mythological monsters! You play as sympathetic villains and fighting against Heroes that you created by the machinations of your own nature! You punish the wicked and make the world a better place through evil!) and after reading some of the long-form review, the idea that "You know the primordial truths of the Chronicles of Darkness" could be really neat IF it was designed as "There is a Universal Truth, and each RPG focuses on a group that sees one aspect of the Universal Truth." so no one... uh... race? class? what do you call the different focal groups? has the full Universal Truth. The Beasts see the Primordial Truth that underlies everything but can't grasp the overall Truth, the Prometheans see the Fabricated Truth and can easily see the different "parts" of the Truth but can't comprehend the individual pieces once truth has been sorted from fiction, ect, ect, ect. Instead it reads like serial abuser apologia wrapped in LGBTQ+ language that... when you learn about the McFarlands history, suddenly becomes painfully clear that it's not LGBTQ+ language, it's outright pedophilia apologia. A game meant for cross-play with other lines, where everyone has to be constantly asking "Where's Beasty?" when the Beast player isn't around, and where the sheer existence of the Beasts makes the entire setting a fundamentally worse place for EVERYONE. It's just... the original pitch sounds like an amazing concept for an RPG, building on the WoD stuff but going mythical rather than more modern horror for inspiration, and I hope the McFarlands are prepared for the very special layer of Hell I'm sure awaits them. Plus they hosed up a really interesting premise for an RPG. I'm sorry, rant over.
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Sep 21, 2023 03:00
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The thing about Beast which I can't overstate enough is how absolutely loving whiplash-inducingly baffling it was to see something like it coming on the heels of Demon: the Descent, a game which was nigh-universally praised for being some of the coolest poo poo the Chronicles of Darkness had done up to that point, which also had McFarland's name on it. So going from Demon to Beast was like a complete 180. I vaguely remember someone mentioning, and maybe it was even here on these forums, that there was some behind the scenes drama (it's White Wolf/Onyx Path so there always seems to be behind the scenes drama) regarding both games' developments and how much McFarland was actually involved in this or that, but from an outside-looking-in perspective all that was visible was a direct hard turn from "biomechanical divine cold war espionage" to "queer people ARE predators actually." Re: Onyx Path in general, I have seen a lot of rumblings of discontent in recent years of the "vague subtweeting" variety from people involved in working for Onyx Path about things like poor treatment from those in charge, getting stiffed on payments, etc. Nothing that I can concretely point to and I'm not plugged in enough to name names or know whose take is to be trusted above someone else's, etc, but I've seen sufficiently enough of these complaints that my impression of Onyx Path is that it sounds pretty lovely to work for and that if there's a decline in the quality of the stuff coming out that it's probably got something to do with this.
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Sep 21, 2023 03:04
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Randalor posted:so no one... uh... race? class? what do you call the different focal groups? quote:I can see where the initial premise for Beast is appealing (You're the modern day incarnation of ancient mythological monsters! You play as sympathetic villains and fighting against Heroes that you created by the machinations of your own nature! You punish the wicked and make the world a better place through evil!) and after reading some of the long-form review, the idea that "You know the primordial truths of the Chronicles of Darkness" could be really neat IF it was designed as "There is a Universal Truth, and each RPG focuses on a group that sees one aspect of the Universal Truth." so no one... uh... race? class? what do you call the different focal groups? has the full Universal Truth. The Beasts see the Primordial Truth that underlies everything but can't grasp the overall Truth, the Prometheans see the Fabricated Truth and can easily see the different "parts" of the Truth but can't comprehend the individual pieces once truth has been sorted from fiction, ect, ect, ect. The ultimate, absolutely vital part of Beast that they absolutely loving failed at providing that would make it a functional game is provide some kind of greater evil that would befall mankind if Beasts didn't perform their beastly deeds. Like if beasts don't teach people poo poo have something bad happen. Instead the book as much as admits that modern school systems make Beasts more or less irrelevant for most of the common lessons so Beasts have had to go full on torture porn to get their point across. The closest thing the gameline gets to actually providing a reason that Beasts can/should exist are the Insatiables, who are only really detectable by Beasts (for some reason) but they have the same mechanical problem that Heroes do, in that a freshly made Insatiable/Hero would get clowned on by even the weakest Beast, and they can both only get more powerful by killing Beasts. Not even getting into all the other ways Insatiables are mechanically inconsistent (I'm looking straight at you Null Snyper). Finally, Beast "Society" as much as the game defines it has 3 rules. "We are all Family." "We are allowed to be what we are". and "Eat to Live, don't Live to Eat". and those first two are literally Geek Social Fallacies #1 and #2 while the description of the 3rd one as much as says it's superseded by rule #2. The plot of the Beast Centric adventure within the book is being confronted by a Beast who is planning to ascend to godhood with an act of indescriminate murder and terrorism and used the player group as patsies to drop the tail of the person who's trying to stop her and the conflict as presented to the players isn't "Should we stop her" it's "can we ask her to tone it down a little? She's being a bit gauche." And if you don't stop her the players hometown is basically overrun by the supernatural FBI and they're just supposed to deal with that now because Hey, she's family. Also the only way to stop her is to kill the guy she's planning to ritualistically kill atop a pyre of bombs before she can because she's statted to be too powerful to beat (also that's against the geek social fallacies). Kurieg fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Sep 21, 2023 |
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Sep 21, 2023 03:57
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Kai Tave posted:but from an outside-looking-in perspective all that was visible was a direct hard turn from "biomechanical divine cold war espionage" to "queer people ARE predators actually." This is going to be a clumsy as gently caress read, but: Demon was a game made out of McFarland's lived experience of hiding his nature. The world (or God, or God Machine, or this subforum) would utterly reject an abusive sex predator and he knew that. Demon was the product of adapted his survival skills into a rad game about supernatural espionage. And that's, I feel safe to say, not abnormal. All of us hide aspects of ourselves. It can feel at times like your divergences from the norm will get you utterly annihilated by the world. That's damnably relatable. Anyone who's ever had to mask some integral aspect of themselves knows that horror, whether it's sexuality, gender identity, neurodivergeance, survived traumas, loves, or faiths you have or don't. I can extremely relate to that. I'm sure a lot of you also can. Not a lot of media speaks to that horror. Demon was incredibly well-received. And that, I think, emboldened him to go back to the same well. If a game about hiding his nature was such a landmark, what if the next game was actually about his nature? Which, holy gently caress, is the only way I imagine you get a game like Beast. It also explains why Beast's abuse is wrapped up and queer coded: He appropriated our fear of unjust persecution as an analog for his fear of just consequence.
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Sep 21, 2023 04:36
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The thing is, Demon has both McFarland and Rose Baily listed as developers so I guess my question is how much of Demon was actually Matt and how much was Rose? Like idk, I actually find it hard to imagine even from just a level of quality that Matt made one of the best CoD games with really tight themes, setting, everything firing on all cylinders, and then proceeded to just plummet straight off a fuckin cliff. It's not impossible, but everything about Beast has always made me wonder just how actually involved he was with Demon's finished state, because the two couldn't be more dissimilar if you tried.
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Sep 21, 2023 04:56
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I remember the original short elevator pitch for Beast being really compelling (So, what's Grendel's story?) but everything after that was a goddamn mess, and then the revelations about the author came out, and welp. OPP always struck me as semi-doomed from the start. Zero retail presence, confusing and incoherent online presence, so it's only audience was old time WoD fans who were online enough to know about new editions being kickstarted, with zero effort towards getting new players or trying to expand their mindshare. So their audience could only dwindle over time, as fans' tastes or hobbies change (or they start dying off) and there's zero plan for how to replace them. How could it be anything other than a slow slide towards oblivion? Also, the only way to keep those serial kickstarters funded is to comprehensively deliver on them (otherwise people will just get annoyed or irritated and stop backing them), which means releasing high quality products on time and not doing anything to make your limited, dwindling, irreplaceable audience throw up their hands and walk away in disgust (like, say, having the editorial side of the company be run by an abusive pedophile who'd write entire game lines trying to excuse away his pederasty). Gosh, can't imagine why they're running into trouble.
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Sep 21, 2023 04:58
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Kai Tave posted:The thing is, Demon has both McFarland and Rose Baily listed as developers so I guess my question is how much of Demon was actually Matt and how much was Rose? Like idk, I actually find it hard to imagine even from just a level of quality that Matt made one of the best CoD games with really tight themes, setting, everything firing on all cylinders, and then proceeded to just plummet straight off a fuckin cliff. It's not impossible, but everything about Beast has always made me wonder just how actually involved he was with Demon's finished state, because the two couldn't be more dissimilar if you tried. Everything is collaborative and the bench of experienced nWoD developers still working on CofD stuff was always fading over time. Dave B. back in the WoD thread a long time ago said that as much as he was known for Mage 2e, his real heart and soul was Deviant and that for McFarland as much as he was known for Beast his real heart and soul was apparently Promethean. Anyone aware of the premise of Promethean should take a moment to let that sink in (spoiler: It's considered a really excellent game but if you think about who made it then all the themes take on a new meaning). The truth is, McFarland and the other old guard White Wolf employees made some really good poo poo. The dude is absolute scum but he basically worked on tons of poo poo from the oWoD, nWoD, and CofD with a lot of that stuff being things I really liked (https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Matthew_McFarland). He was part of a team the whole time, so it's hard to say how much was him, but Beast was honestly not the first time his ideas of "you are different and world hates you for that...so you need to pretend to be human because they don't understand you..." appeared. It's just the least subtle.
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Sep 21, 2023 06:26
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Nessus posted:I want a game that lets me explore the deep characterization of the monster in Nope. Heh, kinda the point of Nope IS the characterisation of what turns out to be a non-sentient, if still pretty intelligent, possibly alien animal whose behaviour and reactions the protagonists come to understand and take advantage of as the finale has a lot of obvious Jaws references. It's something that could very well work in WoD. But yeah, Beast is just gross in so many visceral ways that add up to an unpleasant picture of the mind of a woke rapist. It's basically 'Marginalised people are predators, and that's good and you should protect them'. An early draft explicitly compared Heroes to Gamergate.
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Sep 21, 2023 06:32
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joylessdivision posted:Which never made any sense when you considered for more than a second what a Beast does to the supernatural ecosystem of a city. I'll be honest, when I read the reviews of Beast I thought they were doing another Black Dog style Freak Legion, because my kneejerk reaction to reading the excerpts was 'so yeah, these are the antagonists of W:TA'.
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Sep 21, 2023 08:31
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The key downfall of Beast is that if you take out the abuse apologia it disintegrates in your hands. The original "what's Grendel's story?" elevator pitch was cool, but doesn't feel to me like something you can derive back from the game we got, and if you take out "abuse elemental" Beasts lack definition. If there were a parallel universe where Matt fell under a bus before pitching the concept, so we'd never heard of it even as a cancelled line, nobody would be saying "the CofD line really needs a game line about Beasts". There's no archetype there for people to easily and intuitively grasp hold of like the other lines, save the abuse elemental archetype nobody you want at your table should be interested in playing anyway. And that, I think, gets into another reason for OPP's decline: CofD and WoD were their flagships, but WoD has been mostly taken out if their hands and CofD has hit a point where there really isn't that much conceptual space left for a new splat that's sufficiently dist8nct from the existing splats to be interesting. And a Kickstarter for a new game line is always going to be a bigger deal and get more eyes than a Kickstarter for a new supplement for an existing line.
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Sep 21, 2023 09:37
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Liquid Communism posted:I'll be honest, when I read the reviews of Beast I thought they were doing another Black Dog style Freak Legion, because my kneejerk reaction to reading the excerpts was 'so yeah, these are the antagonists of W:TA'. Deviant actually strikes me as "Freak Legion, only actually playable". You're all hosed up because a big conspiracy used you as a guinea pig. The key is that the game is about trying to handle that rather than emptily wallowing in hosed-upness for its own sake.
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Sep 21, 2023 09:39
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Grendel, the Nope vacuum, the It Follows sexual stigma monster, and the Smile mental illness demon aren't really strong characters (or in some cases characters at all). They don't really do things besides torment and murder people. They don't have arcs, they don't communicate, they're not human, and they aren't relatable. So it's not an interesting premise and I think most groups are over the era where making people feel unwelcome and uncomfortable at a table is considered acceptable.
Name Change fucked around with this message at 10:47 on Sep 21, 2023 |
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Sep 21, 2023 10:40
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Hey, Jean Jacket very much does communicate!
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Sep 21, 2023 10:52
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Oh hey that's a lot of posts in the TG Industry thread, I wonder what... Oh, Beast. My favourite Beast moment was in the dedicated RPG.net thread after the draft was released to kickstarter backers, and there was a very *understandable* pushback against the whole thing. After the problem parts were explained, patiently and in detail, to Matt McFarland in the thread, he seemed pretty shook - he said he had a lot of thinking to do about the whole thing and disappeared from the thread. Then a day or two later came back all "gently caress y'all, I'm still 100% right! It's you, the children, who are wrong," and just doubled down on everything. Then the abuse allegations came out and everything just sort of clicked into place. My least favourite Beast moment was in the same thread where the neurodivergent fan just really identified with the whole concept of Beast because they felt like simply by existing as who they were they inevitably hurt the people around them, and as a result loved the game and hated any and all of the suggested changes other posters were putting up in the thread. That was some sad feels, man.
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Sep 21, 2023 11:24
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Kai Tave posted:The thing is, Demon has both McFarland and Rose Baily listed as developers so I guess my question is how much of Demon was actually Matt and how much was Rose? Like idk, I actually find it hard to imagine even from just a level of quality that Matt made one of the best CoD games with really tight themes, setting, everything firing on all cylinders, and then proceeded to just plummet straight off a fuckin cliff. It's not impossible, but everything about Beast has always made me wonder just how actually involved he was with Demon's finished state, because the two couldn't be more dissimilar if you tried. Rose is very good at her job so I like to think it was mostly her, but we're friends now so bias.
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Sep 21, 2023 13:04
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Falstaff posted:My least favourite Beast moment was in the same thread where the neurodivergent fan just really identified with the whole concept of Beast because they felt like simply by existing as who they were they inevitably hurt the people around them, and as a result loved the game and hated any and all of the suggested changes other posters were putting up in the thread. That was some sad feels, man.
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Sep 21, 2023 13:26
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Falstaff posted:My favourite Beast moment was in the dedicated RPG.net thread
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Sep 21, 2023 14:27
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I remember that - their reasoning was that she had lowish integrity but in cofd integrity is not linked to some objective moralit so even that was kind of hollow
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Sep 21, 2023 14:38
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Gonna take a brave stance and say that even Beast's elevator pitch sucked. 'Mythological monsters like Grendel' is such a broad topic that it's hard to imagine a single splat that encompasses them all. And the splat doesn't! Instead it's about weird assholes that kin vague monster concepts. Warthur got it right, in that post-Demon, there really isn't any monster types begging for a splat.
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Sep 21, 2023 15:00
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Kurieg posted:But you see they actually represent the fear of Rapio, an ancient latin word that meant imprisonment It bloody well doesn't. Rapio means 'I grab/steal/abduct' (hence where the modern meaning derives from).
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Sep 21, 2023 15:22
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Scrap Dragon posted:Gonna take a brave stance and say that even Beast's elevator pitch sucked. 'Mythological monsters like Grendel' is such a broad topic that it's hard to imagine a single splat that encompasses them all. And the splat doesn't! Instead it's about weird assholes that kin vague monster concepts. Warthur got it right, in that post-Demon, there really isn't any monster types begging for a splat. I remember being told I could play Godzilla which was not even remotely doable from any of the text.
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Sep 21, 2023 15:30
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feedmegin posted:It bloody well doesn't. Rapio means 'I grab/steal/abduct' (hence where the modern meaning derives from). Yeah but Matt McFarland is a rapist trying to justify himself So....
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Sep 21, 2023 15:31
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Scrap Dragon posted:Gonna take a brave stance and say that even Beast's elevator pitch sucked. 'Mythological monsters like Grendel' is such a broad topic that it's hard to imagine a single splat that encompasses them all. And the splat doesn't! Instead it's about weird assholes that kin vague monster concepts. Warthur got it right, in that post-Demon, there really isn't any monster types begging for a splat. Eh. Deviant (and to a lesser extent Changeling before it) shows that you can have a really broad set of aesthetics in a splat if you have a strong narrative core sticking them together. The problem is that Beast as written doesn't have that. Every time it comes up, I keep thinking that you could make a decent game from Beast's base concept if you really drill in on "beasts are mythic monsters but the world's moved past those myths, and they want to live their lives but their presence keeps making people go on mythic quests to slay them". It's too slice of life to be a home run, but there could be something there? And then I remember that it's Beast and it's absolutely not worth the effort.
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Sep 21, 2023 15:32
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I'm pretty sure that game you described is just Fireborn.
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Sep 21, 2023 15:38
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Scrap Dragon posted:Gonna take a brave stance and say that even Beast's elevator pitch sucked. 'Mythological monsters like Grendel' is such a broad topic that it's hard to imagine a single splat that encompasses them all. And the splat doesn't! Instead it's about weird assholes that kin vague monster concepts. Warthur got it right, in that post-Demon, there really isn't any monster types begging for a splat. Edit: Coming at it from the other direction, one could probably theorize a splat that encompasses the Gill-Man, the Phantom of the Opera, Dr. Moreau's beasts, the Invisible Man, Dynamo Dan the Electric Man, killer apes, and any other Universal movie monsters I forgot. But why? Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Sep 21, 2023 |
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Sep 21, 2023 15:50
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There are parts of the pitched idea behind Beast that could make a solid RPG. Having the essence of a mythological beast inside of you that warps reality with its sheer presence when awoken is a good idea. Being a righter of wrongs, and how the wrongs are defined and how far you go is a good idea (for example, if your beast is the Kraken and you follow Poseiden, do you ignore the people eating sushi bought from the mall food court, or do you go Greek Mythic on them? Just how much control do you have vs the beast's compulsion to fulfill their sense of Justice? How do you work as a group when your Justice and your team member's Justice come to cross-purposes?) Actually, is there an RPG like that? Is that what Fireborn is?
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Sep 21, 2023 15:51
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If you want to play monster in cofd vampire does offer you a lot of space - hilbily vampires, mermaind vampires, bee vampires and so on. And if you want to explore being cast out from humanity there is promethean (or demon if you do not give a drat about whole being human thing and want to play something else).
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Sep 21, 2023 15:51
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Kurieg posted:I'm pretty sure that game you described is just Fireborn. Now there's a game that feels primed for a comeback but who knows who has the rights or if anybody would actually care.
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Sep 21, 2023 15:53
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Randalor posted:There are parts of the pitched idea behind Beast that could make a solid RPG. Having the essence of a mythological beast inside of you that warps reality with its sheer presence when awoken is a good idea. Being a righter of wrongs, and how the wrongs are defined and how far you go is a good idea (for example, if your beast is the Kraken and you follow Poseiden, do you ignore the people eating sushi bought from the mall food court, or do you go Greek Mythic on them? Just how much control do you have vs the beast's compulsion to fulfill their sense of Justice? How do you work as a group when your Justice and your team member's Justice come to cross-purposes?) Fireborn is playing a dragon reborn in human flesh in a modern day where magic is beginning to return to the world. You have flashbacks to the mythic ages where you ruled as a flying reptilian god and have to square that with your modern life and do you actually want that trouble or do you enjoy having thumbs and video games.
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Sep 21, 2023 15:54
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