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SunAndSpring posted:I feel like this piece of fiction is just one "Nothing personal, kid..." and a katana away from hitting a 10 on the Edge-o-meter. Black hoods were the trenchcoats of the aughts. Loomer posted:Time is a flat circle. Tbf most of Lore of the Clans is terrible.
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Apr 13, 2015 04:32
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Loomer posted:goddamnit. I never read the pre-release text since I'd rather wait for the art, etc. What in particular stands out? quote:Let’s start with something simple, then: everything I say here is a lie. The whole chapter is like this. Other than the Malkavian chapter and the weirdly metaplot-reliant Assamites, the rest of the book ranges from boring and pointless to interesting but a rehash. You're not going to find the definitive statement on any clan here. The combination disciplines are neat, but some clans are shafted. The Merits and Flaws are mostly reprints. It doesn't go full White Wolf, but it's not outstanding new material.
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Apr 13, 2015 06:22
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moths posted:Antonio could only nod. And then everyone stood up and clapped. The handsome student teacher finally noticed her, and they fell in love and are still together to this day. There's no need to be embarrassed by playing a power fantasy RPG. Exalted, for example, can be a pretty cool game. The problem with Beast so far is that there's no drama to it. The fiction we've been presented with is just a straight up revenge fantasy. Nerd girl wants to school some dumb jock and she does it, and that's it. There's no tension to it. Compare to the intro fiction to Exalted 3e, where even though the Solar Exalt wins a fight, it's a near thing and she's flooded her home town to do it. The Heroes are a hamhanded way of establishing drama, especially when they're created by the PC avoiding conflict. What's worse is that, as portrayed by the dev commentary, they're completely ineffectual, vain buffoons. If they're sooo stupid and sooo arrogant, how do they threaten a Beast at all? Maybe they get some cool powers, but from Mors Rattus' post, it sounds like the Beasts have some effective powers of their own that would prevent simple powered-up humans from threatening them at all. People complain about Exalted's antagonist factions being too strong, but at least there you know why they're in opposition to your character and how effective they are, even beyond their combat powers. DSPaul posted:I agree. Onyx Path need to realize that we have severe mental scars from having to play RPGs with nerds. Clearly, the only responsible thing to do is revamp their entire publishing schedule in order to eliminate things that nerds might find cool. We need our fantasy games about sexy vampires and awesome magical powers to be a safe, nerd-free space; otherwise, all the cool people might start to think that we're nerds. Or, perhaps, they can come up with a reason to buy their game other than "You can pretend to beat up bullies!"
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Apr 14, 2015 01:13
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Plus, that power explicitly decreases the target's defense and health. Considering the average person's defense value is 2, that means the Beast has a free power that can do 2 damage, remove all defense, and do an incredible debuff as a reflexive action. If Satiety is like the other Integrity stats, it's out of ten, which means you could easily roll ten dice against maybe five to activate the power. The target better have taken Athletics! Of course, it's possible that the defense debuff is only supposed to happen on an exceptional success, even though it's listed under the derived properties in the normal success section, but with an average ten dice you can throw out, exceptional success are fairly accessible.
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Apr 23, 2015 19:26
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The book never admits that, most of the time, the Hero and the Beast are doing the same exact thing. Here's part of the entry on the Collector Hero, a Hero created by a Beast who hungers for Horde.quote:The Hero’s fixation for material objects increases. Even if he was previously a generous sort with little concern for worldly goods, suddenly he cares a great deal more about his possessions and the possessions of others. His home becomes a cluttered mess, piled high with trophies, trinkets, and baubles, some of which he may have simply taken because he wanted them. The concept of personal property is not lost on him; he simply stops recognizing other people’s right to have personal property. The words “you can’t have that” simply do not compute; if he wants something, he’ll get it by whatever means necessary, even putting himself or others at great risk in the process. Such a Hero often comes up with elaborate rationalizations for this behavior — he might feel that if he can take something, it should belong to him, by rights. After all, he wanted it more. For comparison, the Horde Hunger signature quote is, "I wanted it more than he did. That makes it mine." The Collectors explicitly get off on having things that other people want. Buying or trading for things can't satisfy them. Most Collectors are supposed to be thieves. The only difference between the Beast and his Hero counterpart is that the Beast does it for the art. When the Beast steals something, it's "a reflection of the greed of mankind," but when the Hero steals and hordes something it's because he's a meaniepants doodoo head. The Beast can steal from the Hero as much as he likes and the book won't judge, but if the Hero dares steal something back from the Beast's lair, then we're told that's completely unjustifiable, and don't you dare make the Hero's actions sympathetic in any way or we'll take your book and give you Hunter: the Vigil instead. It's the same thing with all the other pairs. Violent Beasts produce violent Heroes, Beasts that bully others get bullied back, and so on. The Beasts do terrible things because it evokes the most primal emotions of the collective unconscious. They're sensitive artists, you see. It's literally just that Heroes do it for the wrong reasons and that they don't demonstrate enough humility or sensitivity, which is insane. Part of the problem is that this book is so obviously written by different authors with different ideas, in obvious ways. As mentioned, the Heroes section talks about their willpower and experience mechanics, which doesn't make any sense. The Storytelling advice section then gives instruction on how to portray Heroes and gives the Integrity advice again, stating that they didn't do it before because, as NPCs, it doesn't actually matter. The overall aims of each section also don't match up. The Heroes section begins with a rundown of mythical heroes and focuses on the horror of having your psyche bound into these archetypes. It does not work at all with the ST advice to portray them as fedora wearing MRAs. edit: Dammit Who? posted:Beast is a game about being an abuser, but unlike Vampire it takes the traditional abuser's defenses (down to "actually, YOU'RE the abusive one!") entirely at face value. It's repulsive. I hadn't gone back to the RPG.net thread since Matt called me an MRA, but later on somebody brings up that Beast reminded him of domestic violence which he had a real problem with since his mom was a victim of that. He got a one-day probation and no other response. I found out what you're talking about. It starts with this great post. The basic reply to him was either "don't talk about serious subjects please" or what I said above, that Heroes don't have the necessary capacity for self-reflection or humility to be considered worthy of compassion in the same way that Beasts are. pospysyl fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Jun 3, 2015 |
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Jun 3, 2015 05:32
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Tatum Girlparts posted:Vampire doesn't suck because even though they believe they have God literally telling them 'eat people it's super cool' the point is they're loving dumb and probably wrong to think that, they're a bunch of sad corpses who are clinging to memories of human ritual and justifications. It's also not the default. What makes the Lancea Sactum, Circle of the Crone, and Ordo Dracul (all factions that are all about how cool vampires and sucking blood are) work is that they each represent minority opinions among other alternatives. Not every vampiretakes killing people as a holy mission. In Beast, it's an editorial statement that yes, Beasts rule, Heroes drool, and that terrifying people until they get permanent psychological damage is not only cool and fun, but also deeply significant to the human condition. Dammit Who? posted:That's the thing, though. Per Kinship, everyone who matters actually loves Beasts or at least is well-disposed toward them. Heroes are all weird outcasts explicitly compared to people who argue about console sales numbers on the internet or, well, tabletop roleplaying gamers. You're the cool normie kid insanely brutally murdering the stupid fuckin' nerds. It's not like WoD can't have bullies, or even sympathetic bullies, but bullies who are objectively in the right is fuckin' unpleasant. The Heroes sections do say that the Heroes have a strange magnetism that draws people to agree with them and support their efforts, but the fluff and sample characters do not bear this out at all. All the chapter fiction features Beasts in loving relationships with either other Beasts or monsters (from what I remember, mainly vampires). Heroes are always portrayed as weird loners whose psychological hangups leave them alone and without families, loved ones, or friends. Again, it's just incoherent. Ferrinus posted:Apparently some of the chievos Heroes get for confirmed kills actually make 'em really powerful? That's what I heard re the leak anyway. quote:In relation to Heracles’ twelve labors, many Heroes tack “Hercules” onto their name after achieving twelve kills. Those who claim the name are expected to show trophies for all twelve of those kills.
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Jun 3, 2015 07:20
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Ferrinus posted:Yeah, Vampire is just plain less chickenshit about the harm its characters do to the populace. Vampires aren't play-acting; they really and truly do hurt people, physically, even measurably. Meanwhile, Beasts "feed" the same way that Changelings do (by eliciting an emotional response, but without actually taking anything from the person whose emotions are evoked), and Changelings are, notably, the most benign playable monster in the entire drat game. The ST advice kind of addresses this problem. quote:Give spotlight to Nightmares and Atavisms. Give longer, more elaborate descriptions than you might otherwise. Focus heavily on the direct and indirect ramifications of these monstrous features. Don’t be afraid to give a quick cutaway, just a brief description of some of the ripples happening off-camera. If a Nightmare breaks a person’s will, show them at their family dinner table that Sunday. Show the family asking him what’s wrong, and gossiping about him when he goes to the restroom. Show us his fiancé, cupping an engagement ring, and opting to second guess himself and put it away when his lover’s behavior becomes erratic and disjointed. Show us his custody hearing where his defensive attitude costs him visitation rights with his children. This should happen quickly, but clearly. Once again, though, we run into the problem of inconsistent tone. If these are the kinds of effects Beasts regularly perform, then how can Heroes be unsympathetic? Usually they result from this exact kind of thing. The PCs are being asked not to feel bad for the father in that story, but instead feel smugly justified that he's been given an encounter with the ur-fear. Not everyone gets to have a complete psychological breakdown from a Beast encounter, you know. This sort of treatment also, again, runs counter to a ton of the samples we're given. Taxi Man is pathetically harmless, and the book is filled with these lame creatures that don't actually attack anyone but just kind of act weird. A lot of theses Beasts feed on people, but don't actually antagonize anyone, which doesn't work as drama. It goes right down to the Hunger splats. These Hungers are supposed to be what motivates the Beasts into action, answering the question "What do they do?" Beast chronicles, I imagine, are supposed to be about Beasts fulfilling their Hungers and having that complicated in various ways. But so many of those Hungers are ridiculously easy to solve. In the Collector/Horde section, they're described as feeding on having what other people want, but one of the sample characters is a trucker that collects roadkill. Who the gently caress wants roadkill? How is he tapping into the great fears or desires of mankind? How is his collection going to complicate his life enough to actually create a story? The actual splat description says that they are driven to steal things, but the fluff doesn't bear this out, probably because it would make the Beasts unsympathetic. It just doesn't work. pospysyl fucked around with this message at 19:01 on Jun 3, 2015 |
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Jun 3, 2015 18:57
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MalcolmSheppard posted:There's nothing in my contract that regulates what I can say beyond NDA. Of course I'm going to exercise some polite discretion, but projects are sufficiently separate that Beast isn't my thing at all and probably won't be. My main stuff right now is Awakening, some WoD2 stuff and Scion (I designed "spine" Sardonyx mechanics, like the ones previewed). Speaking for myself, I don't have any moral outrage about Beast. It's Lord Raziere that has a problem with playing characters that do bad things, and like you said, doing bad things in fiction is what makes outgroups in fiction cool and likeable. Eating a man in fiction is cool! There have been a ton of WoD gamelines about outgroups that separate themselves from mainstream society through violence. Beast does a ton of stuff that Promethean does, including Hero generation through nightmares. In Promethean 1e, those mobs could be presented as justified, since the Promethean really is making things worse in that town if he stays there. What separates Beast, though, is its presentation. Promethean never felt the need to make sure we knew that the mobs were actually super terrible and bad and full of mediocre jerks. There's material in Beast that matches Promethean's treatment, but then there's the stuff that everyone's been complaining about. Promethean stands on the quality of its writing. It's confident enough in its own metaphors and allegories that it doesn't need to oversell its premise. The Beast writers, on the other hand, are terrified that we might not like Beasts, so they feel the need to grind it in. All I ask is a little bit of confidence in their own premise, as well as consistency. The rules are fairly coherent, but it comes with a bunch of fluff that disagrees with what the rules say and with the basic themes of the game. The general consensus among Beast detractors seems to be that there is potential for the game, along the lines of what you see in it. Beasts have cool enough powers and hungers that they can be attractive protagonists, and the idea of Heroes drawn out to kill their special souls is not irredeemable. It's the presentation of the fluff that is objectionable. I don't think an allegorical reading saves Heroes. The reading of them as reactionary homophobes is pretty obvious, but what makes homophobia threatening in the real world is its institutional support. As I said before, the book is super divided on the issue. Heroes receive superpowers to kill Beasts from the ether, and among those powers is charisma that attracts followers, which is somewhat effective. However, the fluff consistently portrays the Heroes as loners whose toxic personalities drive people away from them. They have trouble holding down jobs and waste their money on their quests. They don't have the institutional support necessary to truly equate them to homophobia. I haven't read Cabal/Nightbreed, but it sounds like the cops are better homophobic antagonists because they're cops, attached to an institution that can legally bring lethal force to the equation, as well as having access to vast resources. This doesn't even get into the fact that the abuse reading is just as valid. The post I linked to earlier does a good job explaining the parallels, but in short, Heroes are portrayed as receiving abuse from Beasts, whether it's physical violence, theft, or just being bullied and demeaned. The Hero comes by some ability to stand up for himself. The Hero then either triumphs over the Beast or is defeated by the Beast, demeaned for valuing his own needs over the Beast's. There are explicit parallels drawn between the behaviors of Heroes and Beasts. Collector Beasts and their Heroes steal, Tyrant Beasts and their heroes bully, etc. Flinching at the immorality of the Hero using violence against his abuser would be exactly the same as flinching at the immorality of the Beast scaring or eating people. It's just as irrelevant to the allegory. It would be just like getting mad at Danny and Wendy Torrance for killing Jack in The Shining. The abuse reading does focus more on the fluff than the rules, but the fact that the rules produce one reading, while the fluff produces something radically opposed to that reading, is an indication that there's a deep divide between them, and that is a serious problem for the book.
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Jun 4, 2015 18:30
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Dammit Who? posted:That, of course, is where the cracks begin to show. What queer person imagines themselves in their secret heart to be a horrible assistant principal? Or an overly-scrupulous health inspector? Do they read Matilda and sympathize with Headmistress Trunchbull? Beasts don't reclaim power, they exist in it as their natural right, and they employ it in ways that can only be described as petty. Things that would be sympathetic power fantasies in the specific become cruel parody when written generally - Jo is a straight up antifeminist trope, the trapdoor spider who goads men so that she can unjustifiably destroy them. Beasts are feminists and gay people written from the perspective of their enemies, as tinpot dictators in tiny fiefdoms who exult in crushing the helpless and adopting a mien of aggrieved innocence when challenged. This is a great post. I will say, though, that I don't have a problem with the Beasts' queerness being powerful. While Jo is terribly written, there is something to be said about using queer performance as a transformative tool. I think the problem is better stated as that Beasts exist far too comfortably in institutions, when, if the queer performance metaphor is fully fleshed out, they should be threatening those institutions with their every move. This ties into Ferrinus' objection, since Beasts are allowed to feed in consequence free ways, destroying any drama feeding might bring. There are mechanics that make Beasts truly threatening to others, but it doesn't work at all with the fluff, which Crion got into before. How does a starving Beast that gives nightmares to everyone near it become a high ranking health inspector? How do they ascend to an administrative position in a school? Trunchbull only works in Matilda because she doesn't represent anything other than the cruelty of the institution, but Beasts can't represent institutions if they're set up as the Other! It's then that they become the antifeminist trope, feminists and gay people who really do use institutions to humiliate their opponents. This comfort extends even to the allegorical fantasy elements. The Beasts are in charge of every single otherworld that has been presented in every other line. They're above the institutional problems of these otherworlds, and can even inflict those problems on other people with their Lairs. A Beast's power is so strong that there is nowhere that he feels uncomfortable or alien, which is crazy if we want to say that Beasts represent a marginalized group. It could be that this is a super-progressive "post-queer" work, which presents a world in which gay people and women are fully accepted into the structures of power. That reading is ultimately a hopeful one, since Beasts can exist and find fulfillment. The book constantly tries to sell us this image of the happy, satisfied Beast. Of course, that reading is problematized by the fact that, despite the authors' objections, the book is incredibly bleak. Nothing is permanent, safety can be threatened without warning or recourse, and standing up to that threat will surely drive someone insane. The book goes as far as to mock PTSD triggers, which completely destroys any idea that this represents a leftist utopia. The reason this problem exists is, again, because the book is deeply incoherent and inconsistent. Read on a paragraph to paragraph basis, I simply can't imagine how this was written, since a single paragraph can negate the very paragraph that came before it. It's schizophrenic. edit: Swagger Dagger posted:Say what you want about the mechanics, but I think they handled the metaplot/setting changes between editions pretty much perfectly in Mage 20th, and if they take their cues from that, I hope the other 20th edition lines will be nice. I love the new Tradition names and philosophies! It was exactly what I was hoping for with the reboot. Not having them as the default presentation, however, really hurt them. They could have used a lot more space to be fleshed out, and having them written up as full splats would sell their legitimacy. It was a huge missed opportunity, all because Brucato was afraid of upsetting the old fans. I am glad that they appeared in the book though, and I hope there's more about them in the Book of Secrets. pospysyl fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Jun 7, 2015 |
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Jun 7, 2015 05:48
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"Alright Orson, I need to feed. It's Halloween, so I look outside to see if anyone's messing with the kids and their candy." "Yeah, you see a kid snatching some candy of out of a younger kid's bag. You recognize him, his name's Brent." "Do I know where he lives?" "I mean, yeah, but you can just scare him and you'll be fine." "Okay. I break into his house. Is there any candy around?" "Hey, Orson, can we get to my character now?" "No! Orson, is there any candy around?" "...Sure." "Alright, so I want to poison that candy, just enough to make him throw up, okay? Do I need to roll anything?" "Brent's like twelve." "So?" "...Fine, you poison the candy." "I'll hide in the attic until Brent comes back. NOW we can get to you, Alice." LATER "Alright, is Brent home?" "Yes, he gets home, and you hear him throwing up." "Great. I sneak up behind him and choke him with a bag." "You're going strangle a child to death." "I just want to scare him!" "Can we not?" "Look, I hold it until his face goes blue. Does he kick me?" "Jesus, Magda." "This is the game!" "Just wrap it up." "Fine. I use You Deserve This on Brent. That lets me turn the house into one of my Chambers, so I can keep torturing Brent, right? And he'll get a ton of nightmares too, forever?" "We're not playing this game anymore."
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Jun 8, 2015 02:32
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This preview actually unsold me on Huntsmen. Before, I figured they filled a nice niche of scary fairytale antagonists that could actually interact with individual changelings or motleys without being an apocalyptic threat to the entire freehold. In 1e that role would be filled by a powerful changeling or a factionless weird creature like the briarwolves. The main thing was that, like the briarwolves, they would just be a part of the toolbox that individual STs could take or leave as suited their chronicle. This preview shows just how deeply rooted the Huntsmen are going to be in the Changeling setting. The book's going as far as to say that these individual antagonists are the primary reason for Courts to exist at all. Now it's hard to imagine playing a game of Changeling 2e without using the Huntsmen when even they're explicitly a part of the Y-splat rules. I'm absolutely not a fan of 2e's strategy of picking out pet antagonists to spend tons of wordcount on and placing them in a privileged context in the rules. Beast's Heroes and Changeling's Huntsmen are just the most blatant examples of this. I'm mixed on the idea of customizable Courts. It's really great in that it allows for creating new courts and a lot more cultural diversity. The original book paid lip service to the idea that not everywhere in the world even has the four seasons and that different parts of the world would have different court systems, and now it's actually delivering on that premise. However, being forced to design a setting within certain limits is going to produce more memorable and creative settings than complete freedom. The Miami setting is my favorite out of all the corebook sample settings of 1e because of how it stretches the concepts of the Seasonal Courts. Having it instead be the Court of Drugs, the Court of Muscle, the Court of Universities, and the Court of Sexy duking it out would take away the charm of the setting. The results of the original system don't look to be dissimilar from the results of this one. In the sample ones you can already see that the Courts tend to gather around certain industries and parts of town, which is exactly what the seasonal Courts would do (again, just look at Miami). I do unequivocally enjoy the new Freehold building rules. They're going to do a lot to drive community-based plots, which is just what I want from Changeling.
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Jun 13, 2015 05:27
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Ferrinus posted:Did all the other Seemings tie themselves to the way you were captured in the first place the way Ogre seems to? It seems like the writers really don't want the Gentry to ever reach the mundane world, so they can only kidnap people in the Hedge. The Seeming backgrounds, then, would explain why you were in the Hedge in the first place, which would also have to do with how you escaped. I think the Hedge is going to be much more easily reached, like you need to feel some powerful emotion to open a door to it. It's more Alice in Wonderland, Where the Wild Things Are, or Labyrinth than classic abduction and changeling fairy tales. To me, it's a bad change. One of the major struggles of the 1e setting was preventing other people from being taken, but if somebody can throw a temper tantrum and find their way into the Hedge, then there's no way to save anyone, not even a false hope. I suppose the Scarecrow Ministry might get more play in 2e, but it still takes away a large dramatic hook with little to show for it. It makes the whole thing more personal, when part of the fun of the 1e setting was the focus on community and drawing together against impossible threats.
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Jun 17, 2015 20:57
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Mexcillent posted:lol Phil Brucato has always hated the Traditions. They're the mean unsmiling Indians who don't let hippies commodify their sweat lodges and etc. Well, more mean Indians that don't take kindly to Brucato's particular brand of leftist liberalism. The Traditions advocate a more permissive liberalism, where they can uphold their religious or cultural practices in peace and perpetuity, while Brucato wants full Marxist communism for everyone, whether they like it or not. Even if they reject this kind of revolution, they still need it. They're just held back by false consciousness. Holding on to individual cultural practices as valuable is, to Brucato, misguided at best, actively supporting capitalist hegemony at worst. I do agree, though, that his use of cultural aesthetics for this kind of satire is very ironic and uncomfortable. He enjoys them as aesthetics, but not as fully fledged ways of life, which is troubling.
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Jun 23, 2015 17:57
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It can be true that all temporal law furthers the goals of the Exarchs and the Seers while still allowing for the Arrow lawyer. It's actually an amazing personal conflict written directly into the character sheet. The writeup reads:quote:Mages join the Arrow when they want to define themselves by supporting others, learn self-discipline and control over their magic, come from a martial or regimented background and want to keep that ethos, or believe magic should be wielded with honor and responsibility. The bolded phrases are particularly relevant to the Arrow Esquire. He's an ADA so that he can face vital, real life challenges as a daily matter of course, but at the same time, some die-hard Arrow elders frown on his participation in a temporal institution. Is his Arrow Status at risk because of the attention he pays to being a good lawyer? What if he finds out that the very insitution of law is supporting the Seers? How does he deal with the fact that he's been helping people while still supporting the Lie? These are interesting questions! It's the very point of the setting for characters to interact with the setting, learn about it, and let it impact their decisions. The idea that every PC has to act as if they have the very metaphysical nature of the universe solved makes the actual game pointless. What mysteries can they uncover? What conflicts can they possibly have if they can recognize the Seers effortlessly as a matter of character creation? Crion posted:The problem with the prosecutor Arrow isn't that all prosecutors are monsters. It is that all prosecutors are subject to the whims, rules, and dictates of Sleeper government, whereas the Arrow write-up explicitly states: There's a confusion here about the distinction between the organization The Adamantine Arrow, and an individual Adamantine Arrow. Sure, the organization would never attach itself to temporal values, but an individual Arrow might still like being a lawyer, or heck, even still enjoy watching movies or using language. Both of those are temporal ideals! If you watch The Matrix, you'll notice that Neo doesn't reject his entire existence as soon as he takes the red pill. The point of the movie is that it takes work and sacrifice to learn enough about the entirety of the illusion to completely break free. An individual Adamantine Arrow just starting out probably hasn't realized the extent of the Lie ("just how far the rabbit hole goes", so to speak), and so he might still see the Law as a worthwhile ideal, especially if he's dreamed of being a heroic lawyer his whole life. It's going to take some experience to learn that the law is not the best way to break free from the Lie, and to start doing more beneficial wizard things. Or maybe he'll decide that wizard things aren't so beneficial and decide to the join the Free Council, who are totally into the value of Law as a pure platonic ideal. Who knows? It's character development. The point is, it takes time to become the kind of Arrow who buys into the party line and supports the organization's general philosophy. The sample character probably isn't a very high ranking or established member of the Adamantine Arrow, but it's a very good starting place for one.
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Jul 8, 2015 04:10
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Right, so the phrase "Never would the Adamantine Arrow tie itself to temporal ideals" is itself a paradox, because the Adamantine Arrow itself is a temporal institution. Atlantis is a myth, and 2e describes the Arrow as being founded in Alexandrian Greece. Wanting to fight things and challenge oneself are completely temporal ideals. This doesn't mean it's a bad writeup, because 1) the phrase is specifically referring to the utilitarian consequences of engaging in large-scale political wars and 2) it's alright for a political splat to not have an internally consistent philosophy and to have members that agree with only parts of that philosophy. The Lancea Sanctum, Circle of the Crone, and Ordo Dracul don't have internally consistent philosophies either, and that's largely what makes them interesting. The Adamantine Arrow isn't real, you guys. It's okay not to like it or their fictional members.Mendrian posted:I don't really support unilateral, dogmatic approaches to the Orders. The game is fundamentally about philosophy, and competing philosophies. Within each order are often competing interpretations of philosophies. Hell in the Arrow book you have members who think that Sleepers should be protected at all costs and then you have Arrows who believes Sleepers are fundamentally uninvolved with the struggle for conceptually dominance with the Seers and that therefore their casualties are inconsequential. That's a pretty big divide, and yet both groups can embody the Arrow concept. A platonic Arrow sample character, whatever that might look like, would serve the ST as a guide for creating NPCs more than players looking to play a PC. The ST does need support, but for the game to actually be playable, splats should be presented as more wide than narrow. Ferrinus posted:Interesting. Could you perhaps quote some of these arguments. DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:The real reason it's totally absurd that a lawyer would ever be in the Adamantine Arrow is that, as a lawyer, no matter what you do: you're not the one who's going to jail, you're not the one who's going to face the penalty. At the end of the day, no matter what your clients did and what the court decides (or, of course, more realistically: what you and the other side settle) you just go home. tatankatonk posted:So then it would be pretty stupid for the adamantine arrow to be the good apple working for the evil tree that's actively enforcing Seer hegemony Imagine saying either of these quotes to someone playing Mage for the first time who brought a lawyer Arrow to the table. I don't think you guys are quite the turbonerds that would say these things verbatim irl, but just imagine explaining to someone that no, having a wizard lawyer interferes with my Marxist reading of this game of pretend in such a way that I cannot take your character seriously. That's a deeply unpleasant conversation to have. Ferrinus posted:He just isn't an Arrow. He doesn't do anything that Arrows do and therefore doesn't exemplify anything about the Order. Taking your job seriously and preferring to win rather than lose just doesn't set you apart in an interesting or useful way. He's hardly even an interesting fixer-upper, since he fails to live up to his splat's ideals in pretty much every way except for the fact of being Awakened at all. I think what you're getting at here is how Arrow Esquire is, specifically, an Arrow, rather than a Silver Ladder member or, as many have been saying, a Seer. What about that paragraph describes the Adamantine Arrow and its composite members? One way is that it illustrates that not all Arrows have to be on the street punching things. "Challenge" and "struggle" can be more widely interpreted. You've gone on to argue that widening these concepts dilutes what struggle and challenge actually are, which is totally fair. It's going to be really awkward when a guy who had his arm torn off by an Abyssal demon has to listen to how Arrow Esquire was yelled at by his boss in the Adamant Breakroom. However, I don't think people looking to make PCs should have to worry about sustaining the fidelity of the setting while playing the game. They shouldn't need to worry about breaking the setting with their sacrilegious concepts. While you might be very attached to the vision of Arrows as being dedicated to physical violence, which I'm sure is very worthwhile for your own games, I think the game would suffer for that being the only plausible reading. As I see it, the paragraph itself puts forward a couple of things that support and develop the image of the Adamantine Arrow as a playable splat. First, the idea of struggle. It's obviously a stressful job, and from what we know of the magical style mechanics, the stress of the job may actually empower the Arrow's magic. It speaks to the personality of the Arrow organization that its member specifically seeks out a servile role, rather than seeking a leadership position, that he rejects easier alternatives, and that he loves the challenge. Second, the destructive nature of it. While some people in this thread have been repulsed by the use of institutional force necessary for a prosecutor, that's exactly what makes the description feel vital. Part of the problem for the Adamantine Arrow, for me, was how the Arrow came by its opponents. This job allows the Arrow to find rotten people that need to be destroyed, and people are indeed destroyed in courts of law, at least in legal dramas, the genre this character is operating in. Arrow Esquire may not be doing physical damage, but he is doing real harm to his enemies. That's why I'm not just trying to defend this as passable, I genuinely feel that this is a good sample character. Pope Guilty posted:I'd rather have 5 pages of Mage ideology chat than 5 pages of Mage mechanics chat any day. Same, but reverse.
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Jul 8, 2015 21:25
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Crion posted:Guess I'm not really surprised how quickly this conversation has moved from "neither of these sample characters actually represent specific, legible instances of the faction they purport to describe" into handwringing about that most sacred, insipid cow: the theoretical new player who must be simultaneously treated as an infant and a flight risk. All I'm saying is that the setting should exist to serve the players. The players shouldn't be playing the game to support the setting. Perhaps that's a stronger statement than I intended! I don't consider myself a new player, but I would enjoy Mage a lot less if I had to worry about insulting the integrity of the setting with an unusual character concept. Generally speaking, I don't take the setting particularly seriously as a fictional enterprise. When I play Mage I don't consider myself to be participating in a greater story that has significance I put at risk if I don't treat it with complete fidelity. I can't imagine playing like that. As an experienced player, I'm glad to see the book present a splat that is easy to grasp and design characters for. It might not be as meaningful to you, but I consider it more functional as an inspirational document. It's good for new players too, but I honestly don't know how many new players this game is going to attract. It's not a primary concern for me as a consumer. quote:Edit: And if we're going to go down this road, then it's just as reasonable to conclude our doe-eyed new player is going to see that neither of the sample characters is a physical combatant at all and assume the Arrow prefers indirect means of conflict resolution besides violence. I am also not sure why there SHOULDN'T be a platonic Arrow sample character "for the ST" included with the corebook, if being platonic exemplars of an Order is something we're restricting to NPCs. I agree with this. Like I said, there should be resources for the STs. But the whole entry is about the platonic ideals of the Adamantine Arrow. The information you would need to make the platonic Arrow is already there. I think the role of sample characters should be to demonstrate some flexibility of the splat beyond the description and in doing so stretch the definition of the splat in interesting ways. There is stuff in the writeup that suggests that, yes, the Adamantine Arrow as an organization does sometimes prefer indirect means of conflict resolution. The fact that they stopped participating in wars points to that, as well as the line, "The Order as a whole regards true pacifists with disgust, but they’re not bellicose — peace can be a far greater challenge to achieve than petty bloodshed." I never read the original Adamantine Arrow splatbook, so maybe this is a 2e innovation, but if someone came away with the impression that sometimes the Arrow solves problems without murder or violence, they wouldn't necessarily be wrong. They would certainly be correct in observing that some Arrow members are not entirely concerned with physical violence. Ferrinus posted:Neither of those quotes reads as "an Arrow can only be played in this way", and the writer of the Arrow sample characters is not a first-time player with wide eyes and a trembling lower lip. I guess they did present the option of being "stupid", but that's not exactly an attractive choice. Again, that confrontation isn't just a problem between an experienced player and a novice. If someone threw a fit over my Arrow lawyer character I'd be offended too. quote:But as Zimbardo says, a lawyer has no skin in the game. They're not at existential risk. It's not Arrows that have you foreclosed on if you cause trouble, it's the Invictus. Yeah, I agree, but you also see how a lawyer Arrow could have political and social force in the larger organization, whether it's taking care of jobs for them or being at odds with the people who trained him (I quoted you below). If there was a sentence added to the blurb that said that the Arrow lawyer provided legal cover for other mages or described some other role in the larger Arrow organization, I probably wouldn't complain, but I've already explained how, at least psychologically, the sample character is recognizable as an Arrow. You probably could make a prosecutor character for any of the Orders and have it make sense, because prosecutors have diverse goals for and philosophies towards their jobs. Ferrinus posted:The thing is that while this is evident to me, who's been following Awakening since its release, it is not actually evident in the preview. It's all praxis, no practice. That stuff would probably be in the mechanics. The Onyx Path post included a sample Merit that exclusively allowed Adamantine Arrows to use their combat skills for Yantra rolls. It's up to our theoretical PC to take it, but there's probably going to be a lot of material in the book that supports martial Arrows. The Oath Merits in the corebook should provide some idea of what "dynamic action" the Arrows get up to and how they come by their "charges". The Mystery section might also allude to the practice part when we learn what a capital-M Mystery is. There are a lot of references to other parts of the book here and my hope is that they deliver. There is a lot of practice hinted at in the writeup that needs more space to be developed. The Adaptability is Strength tenet of the Adamant Way prescribes that Arrows should strive for a "balanced and perfected self," but how do they do that? What training is required to balance and perfect the self? What specific ascetic practices are necessary to complete the Service is Mastery tenet? If I had my druthers, I'd excise parts of the Hubris section to make room for more specifics.
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Jul 9, 2015 00:05
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Mors Rattus posted:So, someone wanted to know if there were idealist Seers. I too miss Werewolf: the Apocalypse.
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May 6, 2016 22:45
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Actually, the role of anger and radical violence in leftist politics is compelling and worth telling a story about. Unfortunately, there's no way this game is getting finished.
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Feb 8, 2017 20:30
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Ferrinus posted:Hah, “deal base damage on a success, deal damage +1 on an exceptional success, that’s it for damage” is an idea I had like last year. I’m not too enthused with the skill and attribute list, though, or the weirdly elaborate way dots are assigned. The attributes specifically seem like a weird way to stop players from dumping stats. I like attaching skills to your Paths, but it seems like that forced them to drastically reduce the skill list to allow for overlap. Maybe if they had more skills and extra free dots it would work better. Also, is there a thread for pointing out typos? Because while the book says that you can have max 3 in a skill, the example character didn't follow that rule. 3 dots is trivially easy to get with the skill system, so I have a feeling the example is the way to go. That means that the skill descriptions kind of oversell what 5 in a skill means. edit: I do really like the specialty rules! It's probably easily forgotten, but it seems like it would be fun to use. pospysyl fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Jan 30, 2018 |
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Jan 30, 2018 20:31
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What I don't understand is why they added the punishments for invoking a contact more than once. If you only want players to invoke a contact once per session, just make that the rule! The only reason for it I can think of is to create another condition to use for momentum, but there are already so many of those to keep track of.
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Jan 30, 2018 23:31
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Rand Brittain posted:1) The book really shits on the Traditions, which is the opposite of what needed to happen, because people have developed a serious hate-on for them as a result of everything that's happening in the world right now (waves hand vaguely at the universe), but they got a blackwashing instead of a whitewashing so now it's canon that wizards hate light bulbs instead of insane fanon. I got the sense that originally Brucato or other people working on M20 wanted to update the Traditions, placing the metaplot sometime after Revised and making them more culturally aware and playable. That's where the new Tradition names come from. Somewhere along the line it was decided that M20 had to function as fanservice first, so the new Tradition updates were relegated to a hypothetical sidebar and haphazardly throughout the book because editing 800 pages is hard.
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Feb 13, 2018 20:00
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Mors Rattus posted:I have been working on this for a day or two now - the Tanrilar, or Turko-Mongol Pantheon. Eventually I am going to turn this into a document I can sell via the upcoming DM's Guild-style program for Scion, even if I'm not a huge fan of DM's Guild style royalties vs normal DTRPG ones. I welcome comments and thoughts! I think the motif is off. The other pantheon motifs are pretty concrete, like "offer tobacco to the manitou," "get asked for aid," or "play with some yarn to alter fate." Depending on what you mean by "Entering and altering the spirit world," it's either too difficult or too easy to do in play. If you have spirit world stuff in mind for their signature pantheon purview, you should consider that characters aren't required to take the signature purview boons. Otherwise, I think the fluff is very good! I'm curious what you have in mind for the pantheon purview. pospysyl fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Mar 17, 2018 |
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Mar 17, 2018 19:15
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Ok cool. That, and Attacking Marvels require spending Legend while the Heaven's Fire boon only requires imbuing Legend, which is a straight upgrade. I really like the Spend vs. Imbue differentiation for the various powers. It's a little confusing at first, but as soon as you get the distinction it's very intuitive. It's probably easy to teach too.
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Mar 18, 2018 18:17
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Another thing I like about imbuing Legend is the way that increasing Legend allows your power to increase exponentially. Not only do you have more Boons to play with and can spend Legend more often, you can have more and more imbued powers active at a time, letting you throw around more effects at once.
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Mar 18, 2018 21:30
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Your innate boon has to match one of your patron's purviews, but you can get any purview you want with a Relic or Guide. So if you're a scion of Hanuman, you can only get Beast (Monkeys) or the generic purview (I think) for free, but you can get any Beast boon by allocating a few Birthright points.
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Mar 23, 2018 15:56
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I don't give beats for dramatic failures. It's just a bad rule, plain and simple. I know it's meant to encourage people to go for unlikely feats, since otherwise there's no mechanical reason to try rolling a chance die, but if you as a ST really want players to do that you'll have to present challenges that players will actually really want to roll dice for, even if they're unlikely. The point of the game isn't to "roll dice", it's to tell a participatory story. Giving people bennies for rolling more dice turns it into a dumb game of Yahtzee.
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Apr 3, 2018 22:32
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I use an advancement system similar to the one in Scion. At certain milestones (usually after the end of a story or an otherwise natural resting point) I tell everyone to add one to their power stat and additional points to allocate to their various stats depending on the game. I find it's a good middle ground between a leveling system and point buy.
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Apr 4, 2018 19:45
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+3 xp for creative nonviolent solutions [in a game where you play as a bloodsucking vampire.]
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Apr 11, 2018 19:41
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Attorney at Funk posted:Nobody who gets mired in Beast arguments is allowed to get mad about Mage chat ever again. Really feels like every week someone wanders into the thread and wants to know about Beast and Matt McFarland and everyone just falls over themselves to explain it and rehash all their issues with them again and again. Putting it into the OP wouldn't even work because there's already an F&F we can link to and it's never enough.
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Apr 25, 2018 21:21
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I remember the good times when Requiem 2e's Daeva write-up was considered puerile and ill-advised.
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Aug 4, 2018 20:35
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Dawgstar posted:You're a Lupus, so congrats on having the highest starting Gnosis possible. Bump up your Rage and your Willpower because you'll need both at decent levels and then figure out what Gifts you want and make sure you have decent dice pools for them. And you're a Ragabash so Stealth and Subterfuge will probably come up a lot. Brawl and Athletics will never hurt. Crinos form can carry you through most fights. Try to pick up gifts that use Gnosis, since you'll be able to use those a bunch. Lupus also has another advantage in that while they have limited skills they can choose from, all of their Lupus Gifts will key off of those skills, so you'll only have to worry about the dice pools for your Tribe and Aspect(?) gifts. For you, that benefit will transfer over to your Red Talon gifts as well.
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Aug 9, 2018 00:40
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 11:40 |
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cptn_dr posted:I've got basically no exposure to Masquerade outside of Bloodlines and this thread, but I've been reading V20 and some of Revised, and I really dig that semi-apocalyptic vibe. Are there any novels that are good, or at least enjoyable-pulp bad? I've got a hankering for reading about a world where the apocalypse is on the horizon and things are winding down/ ramping up, where there's not much you can do except rage against the futility of it all. I can second Loomer's recommendation of The Dark Ages Vampire clan novels. IIRC, the inciting incident is the fall of Constantinople, which makes for a suitably apocalyptic setting. I also enjoyed the Werewolf Apocalypse novel, but you need to have read the other main Werewolf novels to really appreciate it. Those are fine as well, but ironically they don't really have an apocalyptic tone to them at all.
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Nov 10, 2018 17:04
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