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Metapod posted:Wow I can't believe speaking a different opinion gets you probated around here this forum used to have integrity I am a fellow V5 apologist and I am pretty sure the reason I am not probated is that I don't use "submit reply" in lieu of the enter key to do paragraphs. [new post] I am really digging the creepy parasite vampires. Really tempted to have them as antagonists for a chapter of my chronicle.
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Aug 3, 2019 11:43
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Another fun thing might be, like, after a certain amount of combat actions, the ghouls just start looking obviously wrong. Like, your hands naturally become claws, or your mouth and skull disdend like a Xenomorph after using the tongue power too many times. Obviously at this point the ghoul's ability to physically heal wounds must be compromised, right? this is an interesting idea i missed earlier. maybe it's like when the ghoul heals lethal damage it's your jacked up flesh trying to fix the damage, so it ends up becoming deformed. using your chestbursting attack would damage the ghoul, which would accelerate the progress. I dunno how to track it though. I'm worried about adding too much book keeping to the bloodline which is vetoing a lot of the ideas i've been having myself. I'm going to learn how to do nice PDFs so I can put these bloodlines together in an easily shareable format. if we came up with a few more we could have our own Bloodlines - The Awful supplement, if other people want their bloodlines to go in there too.
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Aug 3, 2019 12:49
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EdithUpwards posted:What happens if someone embraces a spineless ghoul-puppet? Is that how it starts to spread? lmao EXCELLENT question. Could the parasite get maybe a bonus on bodyjacking during a contested diablerie? The ghoul dies, but now the parasite has control over this other kindred. They don't get access to parasite powers until they can re-implant themselves into a ghoul. Or, maybe the parasite dies, but this new host has to fight off the infection, and if they fail their spine eventually bursts out of their body? juggalo baby coffin posted:this is an interesting idea i missed earlier. maybe it's like when the ghoul heals lethal damage it's your jacked up flesh trying to fix the damage, so it ends up becoming deformed. using your chestbursting attack would damage the ghoul, which would accelerate the progress. I don't think this would require much more bookeeping than the Gangrel's bestial weaknesses. Maybe add something onto the parasite Geiger powers with like "when the power ends, roll Resilience. On a fail, gain a persistent negative physical trait." But yeah I'd love to contribute to a PDF. I've got a bunch of gibberish I wrote for my last V20 game, I'm not super familiar with Requiem.
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Aug 3, 2019 13:58
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juggalo baby coffin posted:this is an interesting idea i missed earlier. maybe it's like when the ghoul heals lethal damage it's your jacked up flesh trying to fix the damage, so it ends up becoming deformed. using your chestbursting attack would damage the ghoul, which would accelerate the progress. For the PDFs, you could do worse than sign up for STV just to steal the templates they use. They have both inDesign and Word templates for Requiem books, so you could extract just the 'bloodlines' writeups (or equivalent) and use that template.
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Aug 3, 2019 14:01
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MoonKnight posted:For the PDFs, you could do worse than sign up for STV just to steal the templates they use. They have both inDesign and Word templates for Requiem books, so you could extract just the 'bloodlines' writeups (or equivalent) and use that template. i'm stupid, what's STV?
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Aug 3, 2019 14:05
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juggalo baby coffin posted:i'm stupid, what's STV? Storyteller's Vault, WW's official 'publish your own fan content' program. They have templates for all the various game lines that are released for publishing, including Requiem (and I think there's even differences between 1e and 2e templates).
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Aug 3, 2019 14:32
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MoonKnight posted:Storyteller's Vault, WW's official 'publish your own fan content' program. They have templates for all the various game lines that are released for publishing, including Requiem (and I think there's even differences between 1e and 2e templates). They have templates for every edition except 5th, and for every published line in both oWoD and nWoD (and Exalted). And a ton of art assets.
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Aug 3, 2019 17:27
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juggalo baby coffin posted:I'm going to learn how to do nice PDFs so I can put these bloodlines together in an easily shareable format. if we came up with a few more we could have our own Bloodlines - The Awful supplement, if other people want their bloodlines to go in there too. I could get behind this, feel free to put the Angle-Daughters in with proper attribution. And I did have an idea for an old Celtic sound themed Mekhet bloodline, might give that a think.
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Aug 3, 2019 17:40
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After many years of only being A PC, my fiance is finally gearing up to run her own game. It's going to me modern Vampire 2nd edition. I think I'm going to go against type and play a Gangrel. I'm usually a stealth/charm kind of player. What's more, I think I'm going to go hard into Animalism instead of Protean. I like new Protean (yes, even the downgraded claws) but having swarms of rats is highly appealing.
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Aug 3, 2019 20:09
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New protean let's YOU be the swarm of rats
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Aug 3, 2019 20:12
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Soonmot posted:EDIT: Jesus, looking back over my old posts. I came back to this thread right when Beast was announced and I forgot how into the concept I was. W E L P It was initially talked up in a way I found interesting too, before I saw that it was not anything at all that I cared to play. Mainly that I could not play Godzilla which I was vouchsafed to be able to.
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Aug 4, 2019 02:21
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There's a game to be made out of "you're a toxic monster and the only way to survive is to protect innocents from monsters more toxic than yourself" but wait i'm describing most every gameline nevermind.
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Aug 4, 2019 04:08
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Dawgstar posted:It was initially talked up in a way I found interesting too, before I saw that it was not anything at all that I cared to play. Mainly that I could not play Godzilla which I was vouchsafed to be able to. PHIZ KALIFA posted:There's a game to be made out of "you're a toxic monster and the only way to survive is to protect innocents from monsters more toxic than yourself" but wait i'm describing most every gameline nevermind.
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Aug 4, 2019 04:27
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Nessus posted:Personally I judge everyone who doesn't presciently and immediately develop a correct opinion and hold to it unflaggingly, especially about things like products in development. My embarrassment comes from holding out longer once the questionable content started being released. I don't think I totally disengaged from Beast until the info about Matt's behavior became public.
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Aug 4, 2019 04:44
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Soonmot posted:My embarrassment comes from holding out longer once the questionable content started being released. I don't think I totally disengaged from Beast until the info about Matt's behavior became public.
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Aug 4, 2019 04:49
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Soonmot posted:My embarrassment comes from holding out longer once the questionable content started being released. I don't think I totally disengaged from Beast until the info about Matt's behavior became public. I mean, that's still totally understandable. There's always a part of me that distrusts internet backlash, even in large quantities, until I see something for myself that tips the scales. People can generate bandwagon hate and c/p talking points, but when I saw the F&F breakdown I was willing to never think about playing that game again. I didn't even know about Matt being a rapist until then, since I don't really follow that sphere of news.
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Aug 4, 2019 04:50
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i think the problem with beast vs the other lines, apart from it being very badly written by a rapist, is that the beasts are explicitly sadistic in the way they feed. every other supernatural has a more 'moral' path to sate their compulsions, but beasts HAVE to scare and torment people. which might be an interesting thing to explore, if they weren't just presented as the Cool Good Guys.
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Aug 4, 2019 04:59
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juggalo baby coffin posted:i think the problem with beast vs the other lines, apart from it being very badly written by a rapist, is that the beasts are explicitly sadistic in the way they feed. Another way to put it is that Beast literalizes the metaphor, stripping away the protections of a loose metaphor and a wider genre. Vampire has themes of abuse and codependence, but they're not literal. You're drinking blood or contaminating people into your cursed ghouls, and those acts can mean multiple things, and they can even just mean very little at all if you want a beer and pretzels game that doesn't think a lot about it. Changeling has themes of trauma, but you're not literally suffering flashbacks, and the things that stand in for trauma in Changeling can also stand in for other things entirely. (I think the abuse metaphor in Changeling tends to be overemphasized; a lot of its charm and appeal lies in its strange, bewitching atmosphere in ways that have nothing to do with suffering or even with surviving or overcoming hurt, just exploring and having one foot in another world.) The flexibility of fiction means these things aren't so blunt and loud and inescapable. They're themes, but they're not allegories; something that evokes a theme in one sense need not in another context. Beast has no subtlety. You are literally abuse elementals. Your dark inner self eats Abusing People and you starve to death if you don't Abuse People enough and you need to manage your Abuse of People to keep your powers running at peak. You don't jump people in an alley and drink their blood, you knock them unconscious, drag them home, tie them up, lock them in a basement, and torture them with their powerlessness and the uncertainty of what you're going to do next. The text of the book specifically describes Beasts doing this. Beast has its player characters doing the things real life, everyday villains do, the kind some players might actually have been victimized by. No exaggeration, no adaptation, no gloss, no room for interpretation. The powers are made up but the monsters are real.
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Aug 4, 2019 05:17
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In my mage game, the cabal just walked into a Duel Arcane they knew, and the enemy (a secret Tremere in the Adamantine Arrow) knew, was going to be a fight to the death. They managed to all survive, though the Thyrsus was unconscious and totally out of resources and on fire, the building they were on the roof of was on fire, the city electrical grid was devastated, and they'd all lost copious blood. But the Mastigos who had been most the nemesis of this particular Tremere used her new-learned Adamant Hand Style to fight the Tremere while teleporting and flying through a storm far above the ground, with a knife. And won. Just barely. I like how Awakening can seamlessly transition between careful politics and intrigue and murder and mysteries, to midair knife fights with wizard vampires while a giant electrical system spirit shaped like a stag grounds a whole storm's worth of lightning creating immense rolling blackouts. And now the game is kicking into high gear, because the whole Consilium knows that fight happened, so it's time to put up the evidence that the Tremere have infiltrated deeply and move to open warfare.
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Aug 4, 2019 05:31
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And then on the flip side you’ve got the thing where what a Beast wants from a victim isn’t real enough. Vampires want something material from you - your blood. You might hate or fear them as a result but that’s your subjective reaction to an objective event. Meanwhile, Beasts want nothing but your care. Please, find them scary! Please! If you don’t hate and fear me I’ll LITERALLY shrivel up and die! It’s a game about building brand engagement.
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Aug 4, 2019 05:35
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its good that they i guess commissioned a game about being all the other mythological monsters that don't fit the current gamelines, but ended up with Rapist: The Molestening because there was no oversight. in better news i have secured the STV templates and am trying to use my doodoo brain to figure out how to use them
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Aug 4, 2019 05:41
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Ferrinus posted:Please, find them scary! Please! If you don’t hate and fear me I’ll LITERALLY shrivel up and die! It’s a game about building brand engagement. All about building your legend as a legendary monster or something. You don't actually start with any powers and have to just use trickery and masks and poo poo until your legend really gets rolling. Your mortal enemy would be the Scooby Gang
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Aug 4, 2019 06:12
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Joe Slowboat posted:In my mage game, the cabal just walked into a Duel Arcane they knew, and the enemy (a secret Tremere in the Adamantine Arrow) knew, was going to be a fight to the death. They managed to all survive, though the Thyrsus was unconscious and totally out of resources and on fire, the building they were on the roof of was on fire, the city electrical grid was devastated, and they'd all lost copious blood. This is amazing. Zereth posted:... You know now I kinda want to see a game where this is the elevator pitch I was about to say it's Scooby: The Dooing.
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Aug 4, 2019 06:22
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Soonmot posted:This is amazing. the 'race' axis is which type of old man you are (creepy and thin, fat prospector, stuffy mayor), and the 'class' axis is which business you're running that needs you to scare teens (it's always real estate).
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Aug 4, 2019 06:49
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Nessus posted:People tried to write like five different non-lovely versions of Beast, you are hardly alone in this folly This I think points to the most frustrating thing of Beast, the fact that there's been at bare minimum a dozen alternate pitches and reimagings just on this forum alone makes it feel like maybe it could have been something? Something that might have fit nWoD/CoD and generally deserved to exist? There's something about the way Beast pitched itself and in the way it utterly loving failed to follow through on that pitch that inspires curiosity to match its revulsion. The recurring refrain back during the F&F review was "This loving sucks, why did they do it that way? Shouldn't it be this way?" There's something in Beast's utterly wasted potential that gets people to talk about it, and what's doubly frustrating about Beast is that it's rotten right down to the loving core. The other refrain from the people re-pitching Beast, and a refrain that's totally correct, is "this poo poo is unsalvagable as written, to do it right you need to start again from the top." Not at all surprising to me is that the most interesting Beast book is Conquering Heroes because it's a really good resource for NPC Hunters and other weird poo poo you could throw in a different campaign. It still doesn't justify the existence of Abuse: The Apologia of course.
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Aug 4, 2019 07:23
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What's a good way to finalise the details of the different bloodlines from the thread? we need like a standardized layout and to get all the powers sorted out. would a google doc be a good idea?
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Aug 4, 2019 08:22
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Omnicrom posted:This I think points to the most frustrating thing of Beast, the fact that there's been at bare minimum a dozen alternate pitches and reimagings just on this forum alone makes it feel like maybe it could have been something? Something that might have fit nWoD/CoD and generally deserved to exist? There's something about the way Beast pitched itself and in the way it utterly loving failed to follow through on that pitch that inspires curiosity to match its revulsion.
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Aug 4, 2019 08:40
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Zereth posted:... You know now I kinda want to see a game where this is the elevator pitch I feel this might be the only way to reframe Beast, the line to start from if you want to try adapting them without remake them wholesale. They're already halfway there; change their Hunger system around, you've still got a game about being a narcissistic and/or delusional monster, and the thrust becomes weighing how far to go against the chances of being caught, of creating a Hero, and to keep your own sense of humanity, with the game dangling power and fame in front of those monsters willing to lean in as far as possible.
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Aug 4, 2019 08:46
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I have made a google doc for the bloodlines from this thread: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fdu1KTjxEWLVsfkggjz5o9Uw20C-tGVGi9OKZJpGL3U/edit?usp=sharing feel free to comment or edit, don't be a dickhead though. there is a template at the top for adding a new bloodline to the list, which i made based on the headings in the Bloodlines series of books. you don't have to fill out every section, and there are a lot of blanks in the existing bloodlines that can be filled in or not. i'd like to finalise the Parasitism discipline based on what we talked about here, and figure out wtf to do with the benthic kings discipline (or if i should just give them majesty).
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Aug 4, 2019 10:06
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One thing about Beast that really seemed incongruous was that the game constantly affirmed the beasts' behavior. What they're doing is actually good, their victims needed to be taught a lesson, Heroes are actually bigots oppressing Beasts for being themselves, etc. I remember discussions about how this didn't make any sense being met with intense pushback and defensiveness. Which made sense after finding out why - it was written from an abuser's perspective. Beast is a missive describing how real-life monsters justify themselves. The monster writing it couldn't understand how anyone had problems with this. Heroes are bad because they needed to be. Victims are deserving because of course they were. Beasts aren't bad guys, they're just acting in accordance with their nature. Beast's core conceit was that abuse is cool and making a game about it is a good idea. That's why it's fundamentally irredeemable. Terry Pratchett has a quote about the only sin being in treating people like things, and that seems relevant. There's no way to spin Beast that isn't about de-personing others to gratify yourself, and that's reprehensible.
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Aug 4, 2019 14:09
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The thing that strikes me about Beast aside from the questionable nature of how it's framed is that there isn't really a "something else" besides feeding and brand-building (which largely comes from feeding). Like maybe I'm wrong but that seems to pretty much be it? A version of Vampire without any vampire politics that was just about manipulating or tricking people into being fed on feels like it wouldn't be worth playing even if any abuse-related aspects were taken into consideration and improved on, if they even could be.
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Aug 4, 2019 14:18
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Since blood is a much more concrete and concretely-limited resource than, uh, fear and awe, even a Vampire game completely bereft of Covenants or setting history or whatever would rapidly develop politics as the characters were forced to negotiate feeding rights and the maintenance of shared secrecy.
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Aug 4, 2019 14:29
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01011001 posted:Like maybe I'm wrong but that seems to pretty much be it? The "everyone else thinks you're rad!" rules also seem to stifle any conflicts that might shift the game's focus away from being terrible.
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Aug 4, 2019 14:43
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Ferrinus posted:Since blood is a much more concrete and concretely-limited resource than, uh, fear and awe, even a Vampire game completely bereft of Covenants or setting history or whatever would rapidly develop politics as the characters were forced to negotiate feeding rights and the maintenance of shared secrecy. I didn't even think of this aspect prior but the whole brand building thing also undermines the urban fantasy/horror "keep the normies ignorant" thing in a big way, undermining the "be a monster/be a person" conflict that exists in pretty much every line in some capacity or another in favor of "be a monster/no really, be a monster, it rules".
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Aug 4, 2019 14:50
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This is pretty much why the actual book’s description of typical Beast activities boils down to “wait for plot hooks”.
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Aug 4, 2019 14:53
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juggalo baby coffin posted:I have made a google doc for the bloodlines from this thread: I'll take a whack at the benthic kings, or actually an alternate version. I love the one posted, but I also kind of want crabpires. Working the next few days, so it'll be a hot minute.
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Aug 4, 2019 16:30
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moths posted:One thing about Beast that really seemed incongruous was that the game constantly affirmed the beasts' behavior. What they're doing is actually good, their victims needed to be taught a lesson, Heroes are actually bigots oppressing Beasts for being themselves, etc. This is also part of why I don't like the idea of using Beasts even as a deconstructed villain context. It would be akin to importing MYFAROG's Swole Vikings or FATAL's child-eating ogres as bad guy factions rather than standard PCs, but the problem is you'd be incorporating bad ideas written by bad people into your not-as-bad game when there's a wealth of other material out there you can use.
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Aug 4, 2019 21:46
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Yeah the only thing from Beast I imported to my have is the general idea of sleeping beauty, and I'm content with the dream monster that attacked her being a one off gribble that's never explored. Worse comes to worse, I'll used it to introduce changelings.
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Aug 4, 2019 23:00
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moths posted:One thing about Beast that really seemed incongruous was that the game constantly affirmed the beasts' behavior. What they're doing is actually good, their victims needed to be taught a lesson, Heroes are actually bigots oppressing Beasts for being themselves, etc. If you want a real short summary of why Beast is bad and Beasts are terribly written just look at that Hunt Club perception write up about them. It's literally just them saying "With how they are they should be the natural masters of mankind. But I cannot allow that.". Mind you, the Hunt Club are a bunch of abusive serial killers. When a collection of serial killers are written as looking at you (with something like awe, which itself is really loving bad in the implications) and saying that yes, you are eviller than them and your powers to abuse, violate, and destroy innocent human beings is beyond anything they imagined then maybe any writer that gets involved in the project with the intent of portraying Beasts as anything but the blackest sort of monster should sit down and think about what it is they're doing and have done with their life. Archonex fucked around with this message at 23:14 on Aug 4, 2019 |
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Aug 4, 2019 23:11
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Archonex posted:If you want a real short summary of why Beast is bad and Beasts are terribly written just look at that Hunt Club perception write up about them. For what it's worth, I recall that Dave Brookshaw (one of the collabs on Beast) inserted the line about Beasts being buddies with Changeling's True Fey as a way of poking a hole in the Mary Sue bubble. Link is here. I take this with a grain of salt, but given how sadistic and antagonistic Changeling's Gentry are, they're not exactly the type of faction PCs are expected to team up with in most lines.
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Aug 4, 2019 23:33
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