GimpInBlack posted:

You could also pick up the Vampire Translation Guide on DTRPG if you want a reference for converting oWoD concepts to nWoD rules. It's pre-second edition though, so it might not sync up 100% any more.

jim truds posted:

I feel like Beast would work if it wasn't all about embracing your beast side. You have to feed it but if you can feed it through small things, intentionally not harming others, you get rewarded. Falling all the way into being a monster leads to a loss of the human part of you. I think it would also make sense if the Beast was more like a Geist. It is part of your soul but is a lot older then you and you are not it's first ride.

On the flip side heroes can be people given that same power but choose to embrace it. The heroes that take them are just as old, have spent all this time chasing these monsters for centuries, and have become just as beastly. The only difference is they have a friendlier face and promise you a lot of power for embracing them as a part of you.

This makes Beasts interesting as a balancing act between their 2 sides and Heroes are actual antagonists because they are power tripping assholes like the game wants them to be.

Daeren posted:

All this talk and I totally forgot that in attempting to be socially considerate, they set up the accidental reading that LGBT people (and minorities, and all out-groups) are abusive sociopathic deviants that can at best sublimate their urges

Yawgmoth posted:

How is it that literally every goon idea for Beast has been better by miles than what we're actually getting? Like seriously I would have actually funded any of these ideas over what we got.

paradoxGentleman posted:

I dunno, in a game about playing monsters such as Grendel and Medusa, it seems thematically appropriate to have Heroes.

Crossover friendly is all well and good, but you've still got to give the Beasts something original, I feel.

moths posted:

The Heroes are only "Heroes" because the "Beast" needs them to be. Because to admit a regular person's power over you acknowledges just how weak and powerless you really are. The Friendly's manager who threw you out for scaring kids? He must be a Hero of legend along the lines of Beowulf or Gilgamesh. Surely no mortal woman could pepper spray you, YOU the Primordial embodiment of fear itself, for groping her on the street. Lairs are hoarder's basements filled with useless trinkets pilfered from recycle bins. You're not Smaug, you're a guy who has convinced himself he's Smaug because the alternative is too dreadful to consider. You've found others like you, who reinforce your delusions in a toxic support group.
...
It's a meta-game about the headgames of the most broken losers living in the World of Darkness. You're playing a character whose delusional grandeur has eclipsed their reality.

Yawgmoth posted:

How is it that literally every goon idea for Beast has been better by miles than what we're actually getting? Like seriously I would have actually funded any of these ideas over what we got.

Flavivirus posted:

Yup. At this point I'd have to disagree with the person who said Beasts would get on with Seers and the Pure - that's the wrong category of antagonists. Beasts are more like the Strix, the Maeljin, or Abyssal intruders - terrifying entities that exist only to degrade and devour and whose very existence is a blight on the world.

Daeren posted:

Maybe that's just wishful thinking on my end because I really love a game where I can yell WELCOME TO YOUR DOOM and flourish my comically oversized black-and-red cape.

Daeren posted:

Like for real, aside from the bizarrely high power level of everything, a lot of the conceits of the mechanics of things like Lairs and Kinship Nightmares and poo poo are pretty novel, and I really enjoy how they work even if I don't always like what they do.

Night10194 posted:

Also this thread is making me think that as well as Hunter, Changeling might very well be for me, too. It's basically normal people taken by hosed up horror faeries and turned into something inhuman who escape and try to stay escaped, while trying to deal with their trauma, yes?

Yawgmoth posted:

I can't speak for RPG.net but OPP posters are by and large the best examples of Beast sample characters outside of an otherkin tumblr so I can't imagine that they are concerned with anything in the book.

tatankatonk posted:

tatankatonk posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV1fUwKMdAI

Effectronica posted:

It's amazing how Beast just keeps getting shittier and shittier, but with a clearly visible trend throughout. I mean Jesus.

Mexcillent posted:

lol you guys are still posting about this subpar anti bullying changeling rip off

quote:

Sleeping Beauty

Background: Heroes on the hunt have seen glimpses of a young warrior queen in their dreams, pointing the way to the Lair of their quarry. When they get to the creature’s Lair, she’s there, fighting beside them to vanquish the creature. She says she is sleeping somewhere in the real world and beseeches the Heroes she allies with to find her. To date, none of the Children or the Heroes who have encountered her can track her down.

If they did, they would be surprised at what they see: a sickly teenage girl named Melanie, trapped in a coma for the past two years. Doctors and nurses regularly check her bedside, as do worried family members. Her mother spends the entire window of visiting hours sitting with her daughter, either knitting or working on crosswords to pass the time. Her father drops in when he can. They have no idea what caused their presumably healthy daughter to fall so ill, and the doctors are equally stumped.

Melanie fell into the coma after an enterprising Collector sought her out to take God-knows-what from her in order to feed his own hoard. He never got what he wanted; instead of cowering, she gave chase, following him right back to his Lair where she killed him. When she tried to make it back to the real world, however, something went horribly wrong. Her body made it back, but her soul remains in the Primordial Dream, just out of reach. She learns a great deal from the other Heroes she encounters, though she has yet to chase a Beast back out of the Primordial Dream into the mortal world. Through their guidance and a heavily assisted kill, Melanie does not even need a physical presence to strike out at her enemies.

With each victory, Melanie grows stronger, and in her hospital bed, she twitches in her sleep, her hands clenching into fists and unclenching. Her body shows remarkably few signs of atrophying despite the coma, and it gives her parents and doctors hope that one day they may see Melanie, their darling daughter, walk and smile again. They have no idea what keeps Melanie preserved through her coma. When Melanie awakens, she will take everything away from the creatures who took away years of her life.

Description: In the physical world, Melanie is a gaunt, delicate slip of a girl with pale, dull, lifeless hair and glazed-over eyes. She rests in a hospital bed, wearing a thin hospital gown that does very little to protect against the elements. Then again, she doesn’t need to worry about that.In the Primordial Dream, her hair is a lustrous blonde mane and her eyes are a clear ice blue. Her armor gleams with light reflected from some unknown source.

Storytelling Notes: Melanie does not fully understand what has happened to her, or how to free herself. She knows that her body is asleep somewhere, but doesn’t know if she can get back to it or how. She is young and scared, and likely not aware of how long she has been separated from her body. Still, she’s smart and determined, even if she assumes that any Hero she meets will help her get back to her body.

Melanie’s Life is Comatose; since she is stuck in a coma, she can’t do much else in the physical world. She’s trapped between worlds and can’t reach her body to fulfill her destiny as a Hero. If anyone who wishes to do her bodily harm finds her body, she has little to no recourse to defend herself.

Her Legend as a Dreamer stems from the way she can manifest her full potential and fight what she sees as the good fight. Dreams are where anyone can be who they want to be. In her mind, Beasts do the most damage in dreams; humanity’s inner demons trouble dreams enough without the Begotten cultivating and preying on those fears. With her powers as a Hero, she can follow the Children from dreams back to their Lair, the place where they can be who they truly are, and show them how it feels to be the victim.

quote:

The Hero has expectations. Forget his delusions and his ego, and even forget the monster that made him a zealot in the first place. It’s not the Beast who taught him how the tale is told. He goes to the movies; he reads books; he plays video games. His culture’s rammed the plot into him since he could understand words. The story belongs to him.

Sometimes the Hero’s not perfect, but it’s always about him, no matter how dynamic the villain may be. The Hero could be summed up in totality by his chiseled jaw and his big gun, but the camera always owes allegiance to his shallow perspective. That structure manipulates us into believing what the Hero believes: that deviation is abnormal, immoral, and subversive. These narratives build him into the worst kind of Hollywood mogul, the director-writer-producer-star, wrapped up in a crusader’s moral compass.

Beasts set out with the same cultural cues as their nemeses, but they learn to see through the self-aggrandizing Heroic media. The Beast knows the Hero doesn’t earn his title without her. The story isn’t told if the monster doesn’t burn the countryside. This is the truth Heroes can never hide; the Beast is the actor. The Hero reacts, defined by what he opposes, doomed to wait out his miserable life hoping some troll will carry off a goat.

quote:

Melanie fell into the coma after an enterprising Collector sought her out to take God-knows-what from her in order to feed his own hoard.

Night10194 posted:

I would play this character in a heartbeat. What the hell is wrong with someone who fought back against her attacker, won, and now quests to return to her family by fighting the horrors that put her in hell?

Omnicrom posted:

So Beast is going to become the new version of chapters 1 and 2 of the 2e Infernal Exalted splatbook.

Kurieg posted:

Beasts need a reason to exist given in the text, a justification for the crimes they commit. If all their murdering, torturing, and owning people on the basketball court with the power of existential dread is simply for their own self perpetuation then they don't have a leg to stand on in the "mean hero won't just lay there and take it" argument.

MonsieurChoc posted:

On 4chan, DaveB said some of his fellow developers believe balance is a myth.

Roland Jones posted:

Yes, RPG.net moderation is just terrible. That Matt McFarland is a mod there himself probably further adds to the confusion people have over this.

spectralent posted:

LatwPIAT posted:

Matthew McFarland being a moderator on a forum where games being made by the company he works for are discussed means there's a conflict of interest between McFarland and those discussions, not the moderation staff as a whole.

spectralent posted:

Oh wow I bailed out of the RPGnet thread when it became obvious that I was headbutting a brick wall with increasing force, but in response to "Melanie is only a teenage girl" someone posted:


Jesus titty shitfucking christ what the actual making GBS threads fucknuggets.

quote:

Sleeping Beauty

Background: Heroes on the hunt have seen glimpses of a young warrior queen in their dreams, pointing the way to the Lair of their quarry. When they get to the creature’s Lair, she’s there, fighting beside them to vanquish the creature. She says she is sleeping somewhere in the real world and beseeches the Heroes she allies with to find her. To date, none of the Children or the Heroes who have encountered her can track her down.

If they did, they would be surprised at what they see: a sickly teenage girl named Melanie, trapped in a coma for the past two years. Doctors and nurses regularly check her bedside, as do worried family members. Her mother spends the entire window of visiting hours sitting with her daughter, either knitting or working on crosswords to pass the time. Her father drops in when he can. They have no idea what caused their presumably healthy daughter to fall so ill, and the doctors are equally stumped.

Melanie fell into the coma after an enterprising Collector sought her out to take God-knows-what from her in order to feed his own hoard. He never got what he wanted; instead of cowering, she gave chase, following him right back to his Lair where she killed him. When she tried to make it back to the real world, however, something went horribly wrong. Her body made it back, but her soul remains in the Primordial Dream, just out of reach. She learns a great deal from the other Heroes she encounters, though she has yet to chase a Beast back out of the Primordial Dream into the mortal world. Through their guidance and a heavily assisted kill, Melanie does not even need a physical presence to strike out at her enemies.

With each victory, Melanie grows stronger, and in her hospital bed, she twitches in her sleep, her hands clenching into fists and unclenching. Her body shows remarkably few signs of atrophying despite the coma, and it gives her parents and doctors hope that one day they may see Melanie, their darling daughter, walk and smile again. They have no idea what keeps Melanie preserved through her coma. When Melanie awakens, she will take everything away from the creatures who took away years of her life.

Description: In the physical world, Melanie is a gaunt, delicate slip of a girl with pale, dull, lifeless hair and glazed-over eyes. She rests in a hospital bed, wearing a thin hospital gown that does very little to protect against the elements. Then again, she doesn’t need to worry about that.In the Primordial Dream, her hair is a lustrous blonde mane and her eyes are a clear ice blue. Her armor gleams with light reflected from some unknown source.

Storytelling Notes: Melanie does not fully understand what has happened to her, or how to free herself. She knows that her body is asleep somewhere, but doesn’t know if she can get back to it or how. She is young and scared, and likely not aware of how long she has been separated from her body. Still, she’s smart and determined, even if she assumes that any Hero she meets will help her get back to her body.

Melanie’s Life is Comatose; since she is stuck in a coma, she can’t do much else in the physical world. She’s trapped between worlds and can’t reach her body to fulfill her destiny as a Hero. If anyone who wishes to do her bodily harm finds her body, she has little to no recourse to defend herself.

Her Legend as a Dreamer stems from the way she can manifest her full potential and fight what she sees as the good fight. Dreams are where anyone can be who they want to be. In her mind, Beasts do the most damage in dreams; humanity’s inner demons trouble dreams enough without the Begotten cultivating and preying on those fears. With her powers as a Hero, she can follow the Children from dreams back to their Lair, the place where they can be who they truly are, and show them how it feels to be the victim.

Androc posted:

Suddenly, I want to play a board game about being Cheiron Group board members.

Soonmot posted:

I don't think the huntsmen dillute the True Fae at all, as I don't think the True Fae should be anything less than a force of nature that you will never beat, only survive.

Crion posted:

Because the entire narrative engine that 1E ran off of was the exceedingly terrifying personal relationship between the Changeling and their Keeper. They were, very intentionally, not 1% capitalist overlord/business executive stand-ins who don't get their hands dirty. This is like the weird reverse of ruminating on why the Exarchs in Mage don't pop down from the Realms Supernal to deal with troublesome Pentacle cabals themselves. The True Fae aren't Exarchs, and making them knockoff Exarchs served by knockoff Seers with a slight aesthetic change would do both lines a disservice.

Wales Grey posted:

I don't disagree with you, it's definitely a move for the better, but there's still the underlying current of "The People You Torture/Torment Need And Deserve To Be Taught A Lesson".

Cryophage posted:

Sorry, should have been clearer with my original query: I get why the the game designers are pushing the naming convention, but I'm not clear on what the in-universe justification is.

Poltergrift posted:

Now that I think of it, they are kind of opposite principles defined by their relationships to Belle. Gaston's antagonism to the Beast is based on his desired relationship to the object of their mutual weird affections, and vice-versa.

Maybe if Beast had been about how both parties are forced into unpalatable narrative roles and how that affects innocents, then we wouldn't have... Beast. Instead, we might have something somewhat-to-much better, like Leviathan or Vampire.

CommissarMega posted:

You know, the game could be much better, both in quality and potential sales potential if they made the narrative itself the villain. Beasts and Heroes create each other, and it's useless to say which came first (think 'chicken or the egg'). Under normal circumstances, a Beast comes along, does nasty poo poo, and is slain by a Hero. Okay, cool- but it's a lovely deal for Beasts, since they were regular, normal working Joes and Janes who've suddenly been conscripted into some kind of crazy metaplot for unknown reasons (maybe the God-Machine likes lovely fantasy, who knew), and at the end, they have to die.

Thing is, Heroes would have a lovely time of it too. Look at King Arthur, slain by his son, while his wife cheats on him with his best friend. Luke Skywalker lost his dad to the dark side, and his adoptive parents to friggin' stormtroopers. Peter Parker also lost his uncle. A Hero's emergence is heralded by chaos, death and destruction, often to his closest relatives and loved ones because that provides both a heroic catalyst and ratings gold-drama. Maybe some sociopaths are cool with this, but people like Melanie? No loving way she's going to take this lying down (metaphorically, I mean).

So start off your sourcebook with Beasts, because maybe they were the first to look at the narrative and say 'gently caress this poo poo', but later on you can expand the line to include Heroes, because while Ye Olde Age™ Heroes might have been okay with loved ones dying left and right, what with the Crusades and plagues and all, and having an easily-blameable Beast right there, as time went by they too began to look at the Narrative and decide it's poo poo. BAM! Second sourcebook, holla holla mo' nerd dolla, hire me now OPP.

Demon: The Fallen posted:

A Fractal child isn’t afraid of her father’s red skin and metal eyes. A Fractal child doesn’t care how many scales made out of pennies her mother has instead of hair. That’s just mom and dad, and they are, to the Fractal, perfect.

Axelgear posted:

Worth noting that this is the same God-Machine that possibly created humanity solely to mine uranium. "Simple and direct" is a phrase that seems to be anathema to it.

Honestly, I think that idea makes me love it even more; it adds a whole new level of paranoia to Demon, simply because it suggests that the God-Machine might have built certain angels specifically to fall, and every bit of rebellion and seeking their own little dominions or escapes could be parts of its grand master plan. When even rebellion serves The Man, how do you set yourself free?