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food court bailiff posted:I gave in and bought Mage 2E. Mage is amazing, you made a good choice. Beast has issues which are manifold. Beast has a major issue in the text itself where it paints Beasts as some sort of necessary and good response to humanity and that they exist to teach lessons. These lessons typically don't teach anything and are just about abusing people, and the game says that you have done a good and necessary thing for it. It also codes Beasts as LGBT and persecuted by their nemeses, the Heroes, who are either ancient bloodlines or a response to the horrible things Beasts do depending on what section of the book you're reading from. The Heroes are depicted as MRA, Gamergate, etc. types. Except all the example Heroes tend to be more sympathetic as a result of what Beasts are and do. Beasts abuse people, suffer no real consequences for their actions, they're coded as a marginalized group while being forces of monstrousness and sometimes oppression, and the book says they're good and necessary for it all. There are other issues tied to its aesthetics (it can't pick between classical myth and fairy tale), it's themes (what the gently caress are they), the toothlessness of their principle antagonists, and that they push really hard for cross-splat compatibility despite it being nonsense, but no point in making this even longer when I can just link Kurieg's good breakdown on its history and issues. Here it is. This isn't to say there aren't some good ideas in Beast--its core concept has some worth, and the mechanics for Lair are great--and that the writers on it haven't been trying to correct the course going forward--future supplements have been much less kind to beasts and their moralizing justifications--but the problems are baked into the corebook itself, and it's hard to scrub that out. Ironslave fucked around with this message at 14:49 on Nov 14, 2017 |
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Nov 14, 2017 14:41
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Hoo boy, it's an amazingly regular feature of this thread when someone asks "hey, so what's the deal about Beast that you all cringe at the very mention of it", and then it's like "we have such sights to show you", and the subsequent " did they really write and approve and publish that" is sad yet somehow funny. Though more sad than funny, of course.
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Nov 14, 2017 14:43
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Mulva posted:I feel like the serial abusers written by a serial abuser whose super power is making people love them in spite of their actions and whose most striking antagonist in the core book is a teenage girl that got attacked in her bedroom should maaaaaybe be forgotten quicker than first edition Geist was, yeah. Well, we don't know that he was serial - there's only been, so far as I know, one accuser. One's enough. E: The long and short of it is: Matt MacFarland was accused of having sex with a teenage girl, and at least once did so without her consent. The accusation is likely true; his accuser was also his victim, and she was very clear about what happened and when. He is no longer employed on any projects at Onyx Path, got permabanned at RPGnet and has gone completely and totally dead on social media, so that's really all there is to it. No meltdowns, no public explosions. Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Nov 14, 2017 |
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Nov 14, 2017 14:43
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Even putting aside all of Beast's particular sins, its greatest and most foundational flaw is that it doesn't even live up to what should be its own elevator pitch. "You are the monsters of old, and you fight the heroes." Because: 1) "You are the monsters of old" isn't really true. You feel like a sea-monster of timeless lineage, or whatever, and in the event you get someone into your nightmare realm you can even look like a sea-monster, but for the most part the player characters are a lot more like magically-empowered otherkin, and all the ancient woo surrounding your kind doesn't really mean anything. 2) "You fight the heroes" is technically true, in the sense that the book defines "hero" as "rear end in a top hat who is driven to gently caress with you." But even after like three or four supplements now, including one that was all about heroes, quite a lot of the presented heroes come off as pathetic losers at best, and a great many of the Beast-Hero relationships come out accidentally 100% "Yes, the hero is right." Even in the core book where "heroes are just the worst" is at its strongest. Slather on all the other problems with the game, and you're living in an anti-SJW stereotype of otherkin revenge fic, where someone who thinks their soul is actually a dragon is tormenting Good Normal Folk, including token queer shields. Like, as soon as the game-line was announced, I immediately thought you'd be playing actual dragons and unicorns and dwarves and poo poo that have to go undercover as humans to survive, possibly overthrown in the past for misdeeds imagined and real, but now unfairly maligned as a shunned and mostly powerless minority. But, no, you just have the soul of the Loch-ness monster, and that makes you want to be a real prick.
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Nov 14, 2017 15:20
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Are there other write-ups like this for wod books?
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Nov 14, 2017 15:23
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Kurtofan posted:Are there other write-ups like this for wod books? Some, yeah. Here's the base URL for the archive.
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Nov 14, 2017 15:29
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Beast isn't even as good at its own premise as Fireborn, a very similar game that focused entirely on being a reincarnated Dragon, and 'better than Fireborn' should have been a pretty low bar to get over.
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Nov 14, 2017 15:34
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The most succinct way to put what's wrong with Beast is that one of the example antagonists is a teenage girl trapped in a coma because she had the temerity to defend herself against one of them, and now she's a magic dream knight that's desperately trying to find her way back to her body while putting down the monsters that did this to her. And she's supposed to be the bad guy.
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Nov 14, 2017 15:35
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That Old Tree posted:Like, as soon as the game-line was announced, I immediately thought you'd be playing actual dragons and unicorns and dwarves and poo poo that have to go undercover as humans to survive, possibly overthrown in the past for misdeeds imagined and real, but now unfairly maligned as a shunned and mostly powerless minority. But, no, you just have the soul of the Loch-ness monster, and that makes you want to be a real prick. That could have been an actual real game. I might have even played it. It might get a little close to Changeling's territory thematically sometimes, but they could have co-existed just fine.
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Nov 14, 2017 15:41
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Kurtofan posted:Are there other write-ups like this for wod books? That Old Tree posted:Some, yeah. Here's the base URL for the archive. To clarify, that's the manually mantained offsite mirror for this thread, where people do all sorts of reviews of books they love/hate. I tend more towards the vitriolic rage side of reviewing. unseenlibrarian posted:Beast isn't even as good at its own premise as Fireborn, a very similar game that focused entirely on being a reincarnated Dragon, and 'better than Fireborn' should have been a pretty low bar to get over. Hindsight is almost assuredly coloring my views on this, but Matt had lots of people, from playtesters to Kickstarter backers, telling him that what he was doing was really lovely token allyism and not actually painting marginalized groups in any sort of positive light. And that a game with the tagline "YOU ARE A DRAGON" that doesn't let you spread your wings in downtown new york if you really loving want to fails on it's sole point of delivery. But I posit that Matt published the game he wanted to publish. It's a game where you are a supernatural rapist/abuser because if you aren't some bad thing will happen that we're never going to elaborate on. And everyone (except Demons) are compelled to be your super best friend, even the universe itself seems to bend over backwards to excuse your greater excesses. The fact that the chapter on Beast "culture" is basically Geek Social Fallacies 101 is just the piece of corn on top of the tightly coiled poo poo sundae. Even the token allowance of "Well Beasts aren't Born, they're made. I guess." gets undone in the Storyteller chapter with a sidebar on the true secret history of Beasts.
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Nov 14, 2017 15:58
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The first warning sign of Beast should of been that it ignored what I feel like is the cardinal rule of CoD, the monsters either are humans or want to be humans. Beast seems to be about learning that you were never a human and actually you're bigger, stronger, and faster then those fucks.
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Nov 14, 2017 16:07
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food court bailiff posted:I gave in and bought Mage 2E. Everyone else is handling the Beast thing strong enough. I asked the thread that very question and got similar responses only a few months ago. After doing my own research I hate it about as much as anybody else in this thread probably. Anyway, the other stuff is Dark Eras. It's historical setting supplements to run a game in such as the Wild West or French Revolution or so on. In the first one it was primarily single splat settings (Prometheans in the Great Depression) with the occasional crossover game (Vampires and Changelings in Elizabethan England). Dark Eras 2 is being worked on now and they just released the final(?) list of settings and splats. All of them are now crossovers and some of them even cover 3 different splats for the same period. I'm a huge fan of Dark Eras because I'm a history nerd already and this lets me channel that in a fun way. e: Hell I'm starting a Promethean game in a few weeks having never run or played it before. Naturally I went straight for the 1816 Central Europe setting because I find it more exciting than trying to run it in modern times. Xinder fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Nov 14, 2017 |
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Nov 14, 2017 17:58
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Changeling 2e KS is up. 50k Goal. 60k: Entitlement rules and guidelines will be added to the Changeling 2e Companion. All core rule PDF backers or more get the Companion as a PDF, too. 65k: Novella. All core rule PDF backers or more get it. 73k: A section on Crown Regalia will be added to the Book of Kiths, which is a supplement that will expand on the Kith rules. All hardcover physical backers or more get the Book of Kiths as a PDF, too. e: Backers can read the first two chapters but I'm having access problems. Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Nov 14, 2017 |
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Nov 14, 2017 18:38
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Inspirational Media for Changeling 2e: Grimm's Fairy Tales, Jessica Jones season 1, Labyrinth, MirrorMask, Once Upon a Time (the tv show), Over the Garden Wall. This book also has a content warning for abuse and trauma, mentions that chapter 7 discusses techniques to help prevent players from being endangered by use of painful themes, and defines 'madness' as the game uses it - specifically, the refusal to allow either Faerie or the mortal world to dominate their perceptions, and rather take ownership of truth in the face of anything trying to make their perceptions conform. Fetches have magic powers now, called Echoes. The lexicon has a section for various terms used by nWoD systems as well as its standard IC term list.
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Nov 14, 2017 19:53
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I hope I can get my poo poo together before this ends. I'd like to throw in $25.
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Nov 14, 2017 20:23
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Chapter 1 opens with Seemings. Beasts, AKA Grims, Coursers, the Savage are people who were captured like wild creatures and caged, and submitted to it, until they realized that in submission they were even more a captive than in the cage. They then broke free with savage courage, setting out on their own. They are clever, wary and rarely think far ahead. They take what they want, live simply, and focus on their own needs above all. They are less likely than other Seemings to believe in their freehold as a government or organization, but are instead fiercely loyal to the group of other changelings they see as 'theirs'. They decide what's best for them and theirs first - anything else is just a bonus. They have no real use for complex codes, focusing first on survival and then on gratifying their own needs, with anything else coming after that. They can be kind - they just don't tend to think big. They're self-reliant, and hate owing anyone anything. They will never be owned again. Blessing: +1 to a Resistance attribute during chargen. +3 to Initiative rolls and +3 Speed. You may choose to deal Lethal unarmed. If you are Spooked, Shaken or have some other fear-based Condition, you must spend 1 Glamour per 3 consecutive turns to get the speed/initiative/damage type boosts. Curse: On top of your other breaking points, you risk Clarity damage (dicepool of Wyrd/2, round up) whenever acting without thought causes significant harm or complications for someone else. Regalia: Steed. Darklings, AKA the Bewitched, Mountebanks, Wisps are people who hid in the darkness and were forced to stay there, but who became fascinated by the night. They learned to master it, to trick and blackmail their way to freedom by mastering the secrets of those around them. They broke free by studying the things in the dark and finding the secret that would get them out, by stealth and tricks and curiosity. They are tired of being afraid. They will never be truly rid of it, but they have learned to wield fear like a knife, making themselves into more than the cowardly creatures the Keepers meant them to be. They spy and thieve on their own terms, and they may often by overlooked, but they know many secrets. Blessing: +1 to a Finesse attribute during chargen. You may spend 1 Willpower to touch something insubstantial and become part of it for three consecutive turns - smoke, shadow, sunbeams, whatever. This costs 1 Glamour if anyone is looking directly at you at the time. Curse: On top of your other breaking points, you risk Clarity damage (dicepool of Wyrd/2, round up) whenever a secret or important piece of information you know turns out to be false. Regalia: Mirror. Elementals, AKA the Sprites, Torrents, Unbound are those who were lonely and weak and felt like scenery. They were blamed for things they could not control, and it enraged them. That fury rekindled their memory of the real world, allowing them to find a way to return. They command nature, serving as the will that makes it more than simple chaos. They cannot recall how to be less than their best and strongest, and they seem themselves reflected in all the world. They are unpredictable, chaotic, but always relentless. Some are slower, some faster, but none of them can be stopped. They tend to identify with their specific natures more than most changelings, and their element can often determine a lot about them. They follow their guts, always, however, because their nature is who they are. They were made into something alien, something inhuman, and it's hard for them to push back into human modes of thought at times. They live in the moment, often single-minded, to try and recapture their elemental purity. Blessing: +1 to a Resistance attribute during chargen. As long as you are touching or surrounded by your element, you may use it to make mundane actions at a distance of up to three yards, using your normal stats. This includes unarmed attacks but not weapons ones. This costs 1 Glamour per action if you have less than half your max Willpower left. Curse: On top of your other breaking points, you risk Clarity damage whenever someone browbeats, coerces or forces you to act against your will. Regalia: Sword. Fairest, AKA Muses, the Sovereign, Unicorns were beloved and paraded around and treated like dolls, and they escaped by rejecting their desires, shocking the creatures around them and commanding them. They cannot help but be adored - they have it all, everything people want, and people naturally follow them. They refuse to just 'know their place', and they demand seriousness, because they've had enough witless, meaningless chatter to last a lifetime. They take bold action, inspiring others to follow, picking up those that falter. They put in a ton of work to meet everyone's expectations and surpass them, though many can't tell they're doing so, because they make it look easy. They are never just the picture other people have of them, and while they can obey social niceties, they prefer to be kind than to be polite - as long as you deserve it, anyway. They love their toys, because they are earned, and many, at heart, dream of going back and taking over Faerie, destroying their old masters and their ways. Since that's impossible, they prefer to make paradise here. Blessing: +1 to a Power attribute during chargen. You can spend Willpower to give the normal +3 bonus or +2 Resistance trait for other people, though you can still only spend 1 Willpower per action. This costs 1 Glamour if any Condition is in play that would cause mistrust or contention between you and your target, such as Leveraged or Notoriety. Curse: On top of your other breaking points, you risk Clarity damage whenever your action or inaction directly leads to misfortune for your allies. Regalia: Crown. Ogres, AKA Bruisers, Gargoyles, the Terrible were savage, brutal fighters who inflicted terrible pain in order to survive. When they realized the horrors they were committing, they found no comfort in those around them - and so they rebelled, fleeing in order to prevent the pretty words of others from clouding their minds again. They were deceived, and they have vowed to resist temptation to be deceived again. They know they are fearsome and terrifying, and they have no patience for tiptoeing around that - or anything. They keep people away, to avoid being hurt again. They are the most loyal to the freehold, ready to defend it, but careful not to do anything they'll regret. When they smash, it's because someone deserved it. They protect others, bloodying their hands so no one else has to. They're already monsters, after all. They were too weak to fight back when they were made to commit atrocities, so now they refuse to allow themselves to be used, to be beaten. They find it difficult, however, to look at problems from a lens other than force, and it's so easy to just be the monster, even when they don't need to be. They cannot erase what they did - but they try to make up for it. Blessing: +1 to a Power attribute during chargen. When you deal damage to another character, you may cause the Beaten Down Tilt on them for three turns. This costs 1 Glamour if the attack was made on your own behalf rather than on someone else's. Curse: On top of your other breaking points, you risk Clarity damage whenever someone you don't consider an enemy flees or cowers from you. Regalia: Shield. Wizened, AKA Domovye, Hatters, the Shrewd were set to making something - something perfect, something great. And when they were done, they found it was meaningless, that nothing they were promised was real. They destroyed what they made, and used the remnants to outscheme the Keepers and become free. They are happiest working, and cannot help but feel at all times that theym ust be doing. They solve problems, and if they talk too much, it's because they had no company before. They give too much advice, but only because they have made mistakes and hate to see others make the same. They are the industrious, clever hands that keep the freehold together, manipulating and using a soft touch where the Fairest rely on force of personality. They can be too pragmatic, but they are always accomplished workers, even overachievers, who hate to feel helpless. They hate the Gentry, and always wonder - why would a creature who needs nothing, wants for nothing, take them away and set them to some stupid, useless task that they don't even appreciate. They have vowed to never be taken advantage of again, to never allow their work to be dismissed, and those that do it can shake their confidence...or enrage them. Blessing: +1 to a Finesse attribute during chargen. You can take a Build Equipment action to turn one material into another, as long as you have appropriate tools - a spinning wheel, say, to spin straw into gold, or an anvil to forge steel to diamond. This counts as a +5 bonus for determining the required successes. This costs 1 Glamour if you're jury-rigging, but if so, you can improvise your tools, too - a ceiling fan instead of a spinning wheel, running over with a car instead of using a forge. Curse: On top of your other breaking points, you risk Clarity damage whenever an unpleasant surprise takes you off-guard. Regalia: Jewels.
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Nov 14, 2017 20:54
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At a glance: A lot of Hill's more extensive overhauls from the early previews seem to have been walked back. IE - Seemings are back to being about your durance. The Seasonal Courts are explicitly tied to the first four stages of grief. Kiths are back to being a subclass of Seeming, but are still divorced from specific ones. Only 12 example Kiths in the text with a section on how to make your own later in the book. Also the example Kiths have much larger write ups than the little blurbs they got in 1E.
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Nov 14, 2017 20:54
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I guess that makes sense if the Book of Kiths is going to be the second book they make as part of the Kickstarter. After C20, it's nice to see vaguely reasonable decisions about what goes in the book and what has to go elsewhere.
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Nov 14, 2017 21:05
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I'm honestly disappointed on the focus on the four seasonal courts over making your own, that was the bit I liked the most of the major changes.
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Nov 14, 2017 21:05
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The luna moth is an interesting choice for the cover of the book. Their lifespan is harshly limited by the fact that they have no mouths and will die of starvation within a week of emerging.
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Nov 14, 2017 21:15
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I think the making your own court rules are still in the book at least
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Nov 14, 2017 21:19
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Pope Guilty posted:The luna moth is an interesting choice for the cover of the book. Their lifespan is harshly limited by the fact that they have no mouths and will die of starvation within a week of emerging.
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Nov 14, 2017 21:21
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Yawgmoth posted:Important question: do they need to scream? Who doesn't?
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Nov 14, 2017 21:22
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Pope Guilty posted:The luna moth is an interesting choice for the cover of the book. Their lifespan is harshly limited by the fact that they have no mouths and will die of starvation within a week of emerging. i'm outing myself as a huge dweeb here but my undergrad thesis was a poetry anthology and sort of the crown jewel of the whole project was a piece about this exact concept i was hype for Changeling 2E already but this certainly doesn't hurt
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Nov 14, 2017 21:30
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Mors Rattus posted:Changeling 2e KS is up. Backed, they're already almost at 40K
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Nov 14, 2017 22:34
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JesterOfAmerica posted:I think the making your own court rules are still in the book at least I hope so. I don't like the seasonal courts and most of my character ideas rarely fit well into them.
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Nov 14, 2017 22:43
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Just about 42K now.
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Nov 14, 2017 22:51
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$47K, they should have their goal by tonight. Looks like Dark Eras 2 flopping wasn't because of people turning away from CoD in general.
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Nov 15, 2017 00:04
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Kavak posted:$47K, they should have their goal by tonight. Looks like Dark Eras 2 flopping wasn't because of people turning away from CoD in general. Yeah, which is nice. I wonder if the Dark Eras semi-flop was because of sequelitis or because people got soured on the original Dark Eras survey madness?
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Nov 15, 2017 00:09
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If I had to guess, I'd say DE2 did poorly because of a combination of reasonably lacklustre eras, and how long DE 1 took to come out after the initial Kickstarter.
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Nov 15, 2017 00:10
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I suspect most people just have a favorite game line or a couple of favorite gamelines and aren't all that into a product that divides its attention among all of them. Speaking for myself I don't really care about Mummy, Hunter, or Vampire at all, and don't even want to own something with Beast material in it.
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Nov 15, 2017 00:10
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It should also be noted that Changeling 1e was wildly successful in its original run. They originally planned a very limited run for it but it exploded in popularity to the point where they expanded the planned book run at least once, and maybe even twice IIRC. It's extremely popular, and easily the most well known/well-regarded nWoD game aside from the Big Three from my experience, with only Hunter even coming close. People have been waiting for this for a long time.
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Nov 15, 2017 00:20
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Changeling is also the only nWoD game I've ever seen people talk about wanting to play in real life, although that's with a whole sample size of one.
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Nov 15, 2017 00:21
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Changeling is also the only nWoD game I've ever seen people talk about wanting to play in real life, although that's with a whole sample size of one. I've run into more IRL Changeling games than Vampire: the Requiem games, although that's with a sample size of a major city.
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Nov 15, 2017 00:54
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I am going to have very mixed feelings until I see sections addressing the Hedge and the like. I really hope they've figured out how to properly incentivize player and character engagement with the setting. I am glad for a few things I've noticed, though; like Bridge Burners actually not being the most sensible people in the room anymore, or that the breaking points list Clarity damage. I am curious what that implies.
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Nov 15, 2017 00:54
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Did 1e Changeling end up getting more books than Werewolf in the end? It's understandable how that kind of worked out. Vampire is the 'flagship' game and there's no shortage of vampire media. Mage is your game for your Deep Debates and also for a freeform magic system that is at least semi-functional - and moreso in 2e with less eyeballing going on. Changeling works as a 'fairytale game' and you still have the court-politics stuff that draws people to these kinds of games. The breadth of player character visual types is also a draw. Werewolf leans more towards the more 'focused' games like Promethean on the flip side. The spirit world in CofD is cool, but Uratha deal with it in a specific way. Additionally, depictions of werewolves in popular media don't always neatly map to what the Uratha are. Speaking of, do other gamelines go into any depth about Spirits? Werewolf is all about it, Mages have it be a tenth of their purviews and they can mess with it if they feel like, but for everyone else it seems mostly "whoa, wtf was that thing that possessed my doll/dog/friend" or "what is that weird monster".
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Nov 15, 2017 00:57
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I was irritated af when Dark Eras1 got a Beast injection that literally nobody wanted. ...Especially since it took the place of some of the better settings that "didn't" get more votes*. *That totally got more votes.
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Nov 15, 2017 01:03
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bewilderment posted:Werewolf leans more towards the more 'focused' games like Promethean on the flip side. The spirit world in CofD is cool, but Uratha deal with it in a specific way. Additionally, depictions of werewolves in popular media don't always neatly map to what the Uratha are. Editions probably changed things the most here, compared to other books, with first edition being about 'spirit police' and second edition being SlasherHunter x10. quote:Speaking of, do other gamelines go into any depth about Spirits? Werewolf is all about it, Mages have it be a tenth of their purviews and they can mess with it if they feel like, but for everyone else it seems mostly "whoa, wtf was that thing that possessed my doll/dog/friend" or "what is that weird monster". Most of the depth was in werewolf, with the majority of the information in Predators and other Werewolf books, then the Book of the Spirit (a blue book). The spirit thing didn't seem to go over so well so it seems like they placed less of an emphasis on it as books went by. Werewolf seems to have more books, but only by 3. nofather fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Nov 15, 2017 |
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Nov 15, 2017 01:42
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And Changeling is funded.
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Nov 15, 2017 01:59
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I think my draw to CtL is that you can straight up do classic romance stories while running with the gothic themes inherent to the setting. You don't just have to be broken people trying to keep your poo poo together, you can be broken people finding your strength and becoming more after your durance. It's also the only CofD book of the two that I've read where running a gang of thieves, heisting important gewgaws and then getting into sword fights on cobble streets while snow falls is something you can pull off thematically.
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Nov 15, 2017 02:42
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