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Mors Rattus posted:Beasts are hyperfocused on causing terror and fear. They are hunters - an Ogre, Beast or Darkling doesn't have to make waves. They're changed by where they were, but the Beasts are much closer to Keepers than to Changelings in outlook and demeanor. Beasts are pretty much universally terrible people, people that exist to hurt others. At best, you get a Beast who focuses their desire to hurt or dominate on 'deserving' targets, but the book is very clear that the hunger itself doesn't give two shits about 'deserving.' Mors Rattus posted:Heroes should be these people. They need rationales that make sense within their contexts, and those rationales need to be sufficiently strong, reactionary, and ingrained in their very identities that they’re unwilling to see other alternatives. Heroes believe that whatever a Beast does is a slight against humanity. Since Heroes are part of humanity, they see everything a Beast does as a personal attack, and an affront to their very identity. What in the ding dong heck is going on here
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Apr 14, 2015 03:54
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Mors Rattus posted:The first one was my takeaway from reading the entire book. Yeah, that's what I was getting at. I'm willing to believe your takeaway is an accurate representation of the book, so where are we? Surely a monster that exists to bring terror and fear actually is a slight against Humanity or whatever?
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Apr 14, 2015 04:00
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Apr 14, 2015 04:07
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The Lairs still sound extremely cool. I'm curious about the "if you die in your Lair, you die for good" bit - is there something where if you get owned outside your Lair you can automatically retreat to it? I'm assuming there is, since it seems obvious.
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Apr 14, 2015 05:25
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Mors Rattus posted:Behold, My True Form! lets you basically do a psychic terror attack. You have very broad control over how the damage manifests if you kill them - it might be death by fear, or you might turn them to stone. Yes! Yes!!!
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Apr 14, 2015 05:31
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Twibbit posted:Does that make Joker a "Hero?" No, he's a Beast too.  (not pictured: the kid is from a rich family and sent a series of EXTREMELY mean tweets to Anita Sarkeesian) Seriously though, the Ravager concept is a guy who drives around hucking bricks through windows, like the dirtbag kid from high school. If we're comparing to TV shows, Beast honestly reminds me more of Seinfeld or It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia than Leverage. A collection of unpleasant jerks with weirdly specific get-Satiated-quick schemes. Tremble, puny humans! A monster from the darkest recesses of nightmare has added two more stop signs to this intersection! Now there's four stop signs, and no cars can go!
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Apr 21, 2015 00:12
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Pope Guilty posted:The best use of consensus reality in a game is The Esoterrorists, wherein magic isn't real because humanity doesn't believe in it. The titular Esoterrorists are a cabal of evil pieces of poo poo who want to be the Seers of the Throne, so they carry out what are basically terrorist attacks on consensus reality- staged occult killings, faked evidence of the existence of monsters, hoaxes that make it look like magic is real- in order to break down humanity's belief that the world is fundamentally orderly and safe from magical dangers. The PCs are basically trying to a) wreck their poo poo and keep magic fake and b) make sure nobody ever knows about it. The Esoterrorists is quite cool- one of the things I like about it is how the titular conspiracies can actually summon monsters, but they're amorphous subjective things that take their shape from the will of the summoners, so any big esoterrorist group is going to have a lot of mad biologists and Disney imagineers alongside the occultists and what have you, in order to make sure that the form they want their monsters to collapse into actually works with the normal laws of biology as well as what little magic powers they can squeeze out of the current consensus.
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May 22, 2015 02:40
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May 31, 2015 11:06
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quote:"You can only kill someone once, but you can victimize them in other ways forever." --Matt McFarland, re: Beast quote:Heroes always have a catalyst, but that catalyst generally looks utterly wrong to the Beasts causing it. In only the rarest cases will a Beast be able to look at her own actions and believe the Hero is justified. 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. This game genuinely makes me less comfortable playing other games released by OPP.
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Jun 3, 2015 04:25
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Night10194 posted:I'm guessing the whole thing is meant as an allegory for out-groups, but the thing is, when you set up your metaphor for out-groups as a bunch of people with lethal superpowers who eat people, you suddenly make it look totally reasonable to want to fight them and stop them doing 'what's natural' to them. It's a hilariously mixed up and wrong-headed metaphor. 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.
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Jun 3, 2015 06:23
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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. Yeah, Heroes aren't actually chumps in combat, you're just supposed to think they are because look at 'em. With their stupid clothes and their weird hobbies. Fuckers.
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Jun 3, 2015 06:45
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Ferrinus posted:If we're going to use monstrosity as a proxy for queerness, why is it a petty and decaffeinated monstrosity whose victims all super duper had it coming? Why is PR so important? Because of the kind of queerness we're talking about if we assume this reading, I guess. In Cabal/Nightbreed, Boone was explicitly innocent; the Breed, while they wanted to get their murder on, lived abjectly and were persecuted by a serial killer with institutional support. That's your Platonic Beast-Hero dynamic. But in actual Beast, that's not what you get. Beasts have every advantage. The Nightbreed lived in a small close-knit community contrasted in the story with the vast unfriendly outside. Beasts exist in the World of Darkness, a game world about monsters where monsters are the most important thing. The outside world is narratively "smaller" than the inside, and Beasts are beloved by everyone who counts! They are the toasts of the town, princes of darkness. They're free to live happily wherever they choose, taking jobs as prosecutors(?!?), joining homeowners' associations, having cocktails with senators... Their monstrosity doesn't come in any material sense from who they are, so they have to put on an act (I'm queering court spaces by getting tough on offenders! We dropped off this poor guy in a rich neighborhood, and you won't BELIEVE what happens next!) in order to retain their "monster cred" - as you say, it's about building your brand. They don't even need to do that, really. A few hours hanging around at the cool vampire bar will give them enough cred for a while, even if they're just leeching off monsters who don't have a choice in how they present themselves. A Beast's perspective is the worst strawman of Gay, Inc., where a small class of wealthy politically active gays largely ignore the material suffering of their less well-off peers in favor of hijacking grassroots struggle to enrich themselves personally. They have no structural opposition. Anyone who hates them has to be an atomized weirdo, a Westboro Baptist with no capacity for self-reflection. Why, if Heroes could just sit down and really think about it, maybe watch a few HuffPo videos, they'd be fine upstanding Hunters. Beast, in this reading, asks us to accept this depiction of HRC gays, and not just to applaud it but participate in it ourselves. It even provides a standin for trans people in Demons, who cross an intolerable line in choosing to define themselves rather than be defined, and are explicitly said to not be kin. It's like asking a leftist to write a mean caricature of liberal politics and then accept it at face value, or those video games where you shoot a million guys and then the game stops and tells you what a bad person you are for shooting all those people. What response is there, other than to ignore what the game is telling you or to decline to play it?
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Jun 5, 2015 02:32
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SunAndSpring posted:I don't even understand why they tried to say Beasts were stand-ins for outsiders and the LGBTs and all that. Why would any of them want to have unrepentant monsters represent them? You figure something like Demon or Changeling or Promethean would suit them better, what with the themes of rebellion, escaping abuse, and finding peace with yourself that those lines have, plus the fact that you can play as a good guy in those lines instead of an abusive jerk. Well, MalcolmSheppard was right that there's a long tradition of LGBT people using monsters and monstrosity to write about themselves. That's why when I did that kind of reading I focused on the relationships Beasts had with the rest of the setting rather than the specifics of their interactions; when you write a vampire story where vampires are understood to be lesbians/gays, it's also understood that you're not saying gay people literally drink the blood of others for sustenance, but that gay relationships are at once enticing, shameful, and potentially physically harmful to people living in a homophobic society. It returns power to sexual minorities while acknowledging the conditions in which they live. That's why presentation, and knowing what your story is about, is so important. It's not wrong to write vampires as gays, but if you're also depicting your vampires as secret cabals of manipulators subverting political systems against the interests of the people they govern, you have to broaden the character of your vampires and make the analogy less direct or you leave yourself open to some fairly unpleasant readings. That's why Anne Rice's vampires don't run boardrooms, and why WoD vampires aren't as closely mapped to gays and lesbians as they are in other stories. Professor Susan Stryker of the University of Arizona has a very good monologue about monstrosity and transgender people which I'll quote bits from here (warning, the full text is some strong-rear end reading): quote:The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster's as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist. (emphasis mine) What Stryker understands and Beast doesn't is that Frankenstein's monster killed the doctor's loved ones out of a real and sympathetic rage against its abject conditions and its creator. Shelley spends a good fourth of the book giving the monster the time and space it needs to explain itself. Interview with the Vampire is *about* the internal life of a vampire. Beasts, on the other hand, just want power over others and don't particularly care how they get it or what they do with it once they have it. They're a thin power fantasy. To be clear, this can be just fine! There's a place for power fantasies, especially among the young. If Beast was a weird fansplat written by some queer teen and shared among friends, I wouldn't say word one against it in public. I might laugh at how silly it is in private, but teens gonna teen and you've gotta let them in order for them to grow up big and strong. As the work of an outcast child, some of Beast makes sense and is excusable- the very obvious abuse reading and Heroes (here standins for personal tormentors) can be politely ignored because the author wouldn't be in a position to imagine themselves, even in fantasy life, as anything other than the victimized. This paragraph, for instance, is Kid Logic: quote:Ultimately, Beasts recognize that the Hero cycle is as much a part of their nature as their Lair and their Soul. Humanity fears Beasts — that’s the intrinsic truth of what they are — and what humanity fears, it invariably attempts to destroy. Beasts quickly learn that they can’t become angry that people have that reaction; it’s reasonable. At the same time, though, the Children know that they have a right to exist. The world is a terrifying place, and the monsters in the dark are there for a reason. The dominant narrative may be “Hero arises, kills the monster,” but the Begotten see past that and know that it doesn’t have to be that way. Heroes, on the other hand, never question their own heroism — and that is why Beasts hate them. It just makes sense that you'd be bullied for your sweet-rear end cape and your assured resemblance to Magus from Chrono Trigger due to extreme jealousy, but do NOT push me in a puddle again BRAD, my mom makes me clean this myself! Jo the Mansplainerdestroyer who is also secretly a hydra or whatever is straight up a Tumblr "monstersona", a reaction from someone with bad things in their real life. You can, and in my opinion should, forgive this kind of thing from a young amateur writer creating a coping mechanism to share among like-minded friends, but Matt McFarland is a grown man and professional author writing material for sale to the general public. 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.
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Jun 7, 2015 04:59
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tatankatonk posted:I FOUND IT My god in heaven.
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Jun 7, 2015 08:39
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We just wanted to be Godzillas
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Jun 7, 2015 08:54
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That character creation example makes me so upset. There are people I know in real life who I would not be able to show that to for fear of their emotional wellbeing, but more to the point: who could I show it to? What normal person would read the kind of poo poo that Beasts get up to and not quietly ask the police to put me on some kind of list? This isn't drinking the blood of the living or hunting down mutant spiders or even tv versions of slashers! Abusive school officials, parents, monstrous prosecutors, all these things exist in real life! They're not for sitting around chortling about how loving transgressive you are. It's not a joke, it's not funny.
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Jun 8, 2015 02:21
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To clarify, in case people from other places who haven't followed the whole conversation (who could blame them) are reading: I'm not saying you can't include abusive relationships in tabletop roleplaying games. It's not always (or often) appropriate, but done thoughtfully it can even be helpful. The attitude where "Magda" turns to the camera and snickers AIN'T I A STINKER is not a thoughtful treatment of child abuse.
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Jun 8, 2015 02:37
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LatwPIAT posted:I haven't read every single critique of Beast on RPG.net, but given his overall attitude to people who don't like Beast, it's hard to read this as something other than giving himself a carte blanche to dismiss out of hand any criticism he doesn't like. What I hope to get out of McFarland's eventual thread is an acknowledgment of the concerns raised here and elsewhere, and a statement that makes it clear he does not consider those concerns minor, is taking them seriously, and is dedicated to making the work non-harmful generally. I believe this can be done without necessarily compromising the themes he was going for. I do not consider publishing a substantively similar work with trigger warnings added, as others have suggested on rpg.net, to be appropriate. They can be appropriate, but in this context I feel they would be a "get out of jail free" card. I am not the custodian of Matt McFarland's soul- I have no idea what he personally thinks of all this, so I am choosing to live in hope.
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Jun 9, 2015 07:31
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Adept Nightingale posted:I don't at all think this is what McFarland or the other writers set out to do, and that's where the static's coming in. [...] Yes, I agree. From what other people who've known him longer say it seems very unlikely that McFarland would intend for his work to come across this way. quote:(Heroes, in particular, feel like they were written as a form of catharsis for the creators). This, though, bothers me. A game-as-polemic where you're here to imagine beating up all the fuckers that the creator of the game personally hates is not really a good look even if I, too, hate the fuckers. Mage, for instance, has a standin for the ruling classes in the Seers of the Throne. Those are some real fuckers, in-game and in real life! But the game isn't about killing Seers, and moreover the game understands why someone would want to be a Seer - wealth and power can salve the conscience pretty well. The honesty about how the ruling classes perpetuate themselves and how the things they actually do are at a remove from their real-life counterparts (you're arranging proposed roadways into Evil Runes, not lobbying for juveniles to be tried at adults) means that people want to run Seer campaigns; these properties also make those campaigns something the game can support without falling apart. All Beast does is throw glaringly unsupported assertions one after another in a desperate attempt to keep people from playing "the wrong kind of Beast game". Like, okay. Let's take Beast exactly as it seems to have been intended - Beasts are the marginalized, Heroes are extremist zealots who are not mentally ill. Beast has at its core a fundamental ignorance or dishonesty about where extremists come from. As we've all noticed, Heroes are all atomized weirdos radicalized by a single encounter with the supernatural, which they may have never encountered or put any credence in before. If another Hero exists and has a similar obsession, it's basically a coincidence. This is not how extremism works. Guys like Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh are referred to as "loners", but the truth is they both had an active ideological support network. McVeigh spent years on the gun show network, spreading his ideas and soaking up new ones. He gave out literature to like-minded friends. He regularly referenced The Turner Diaries. He was tutored in bomb-making by Terry Nichols. Harvard was awash in Ted Kaczynski's brand of anti-technological despair when he attended and taught there. When he encountered the work of French philosopher Jacques Ellul, he was delighted to find someone writing what he already suspected. When he finally published his manifesto, the press and public were shocked by how unremarkable the ideas in it were - not mainstream, but reasonable and a reflection of more common attitudes. As science author Robert Wright put it in TIME magazine, "There's a little bit of the unabomber in most of us." Extremists don't emerge from a single traumatic incident and don't produce their obsessions ex nihilo, they're grown over a lifetime of soaking in attitudes already present in society. TERFs and MRAs and white nationalists aren't boxes of coincidentally-obsessed loners, they're support structures and lobbying networks who police themselves ideologically. A Slasher can be a lone nut, but a Hero never is. Beast's misunderstanding of how extremists (and hence, Heroes) work means that it has a hard time portraying them in ways that make sense. Take Melanie, for instance. She's loving awesome. Like the star of some unmade Nightmare on Elm Street spinoff, or a changeling culture hero battling against all odds in Arcadia, she's an inspirational tale for people who've been shat on by the World of Darkness. Nothing she's described as doing sounds anything less than laudable. But she's a Hero, and the text says Heroes are narcissistic and incapable of self-reflection, so she must be bad somehow! This leads to reactions I've already seen over at rpg.net, where people start combing through the rest of her character sheet looking for something they can interpret as evil in order to resolve the text's contradictions. Ah, she has a Specialty of Finding Weaknesses, eh? How unlikely, for a long-term monster hunter! She must have been a real bully before being attacked. What a piece of poo poo 'mean girl', throw her in the garbage with all the rest of the Heroes. At best, it makes the reader do all the heavy lifting and go through some serious contortions in order for things to make sense. At worst, it's one of the unfortunate tendencies of the more immature wings of the social justice community, where someone is declared Bad by a local authority and there's a brief scramble through their previous output (Tumblr posts, instagrams, whatever) to find things that can be interpreted or misinterpreted as justifying the declaration. If Heroes are bad, I should be able to come to that conclusion without the text constantly and explicitly reminding me so. If I can't, it means something's gone badly wrong. Dammit Who? fucked around with this message at 13:59 on Jun 9, 2015 |
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Jun 9, 2015 13:56
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NutritiousSnack posted:They banned someone from harmlessly saying it reminded them of what a wife beaters own self rationalization would be. Just to reiterate: this was an RPG.net mod, not to my knowledge any writer or staff member of OPP.
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Jun 9, 2015 13:57
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Mormon Star Wars posted:Black Hat Matt post: Oh, good! This is basically what I was hoping for.
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Jun 10, 2015 11:14
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unseenlibrarian posted:"I want to be a dragon or a giant death squid" If only someone had made a game where you can be a squid, but also a kid...
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Jun 10, 2015 11:56
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I look forward to "Christopher Lee Dies... LIVE!" as the final Charlemagne album.
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Jun 11, 2015 13:33
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Ormi posted:It's pretty fantastic how half of the Hunter Conspiracies are later revealed to be secretly under the thumb of out-and-out monsters/witches. Mm, yes, a righteous helping of dramatic irony. That kind of thing works better in the nWOD where supernaturals don't generally completely control major organizations, so their level of influence over compacts and conspiracies is actually remarkable. Like, in the new world of darkness it is not at all clear that killing literally every supernatural would improve the world such that the average guy on the street would notice or care. So Hunters end up caught in the same trap mages are, where they care a great deal about things which actually are important but which people outside their subculture quite justifiably don't give a poo poo about. Hunter paranoia is correct, they are everywhere- but only in Hunter's relatively tiny world. They end up with the choice of either staying a cell and maintaining autonomy at the price of effectiveness, or moving up into the compacts and conspiracies where they get more support and more chances to effect their goals... but are also constantly looking over their shoulders and twitchily glaring at everyone else they meet because you're all working for a thousand tiny Illuminatis, they're all in on it, you might be in on it, the plastic tips at the end of shoelaces are called aglets and their true purpose is sinister. Y'all are right that explicitly defining who's influencing what in books isn't the greatest idea, though.
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Jun 12, 2015 01:45
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I'm not saying that people who love oMage also love Hitler, and want to tenderly kiss him on his bristly-mustachioed mouth muah muah muah, but I'm not not saying that either.
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Jun 26, 2015 01:49
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Hey, they might not be Seers. Maybe the Adamantine Arrow is just metaphysically evil, like summoning zombies? Open your minds
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Jul 8, 2015 00:40
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Mors Rattus posted:I get being skeptical of law enforcement and the justice system, but I am really baffled by the position that it's impossible for a DA to not be a Seer. Maybe it's possible in the World of Darkness, a world notably more idealized and moral than irl?
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Jul 8, 2015 02:33
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Ferrinus posted:So the Guardian writeup is really good, because whoever's responsible for it wasn't quietly ashamed of the role the Order serves within the Pentacle and so didn't spend half their allotted space assuring us that Guardians don't have to be spies, assassins, or cult leaders! What's the mundane profession of each presented sample character? Who cares! I'm beginning to suspect that writing against type when giving an example of a type is a bad idea.
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Jul 15, 2015 06:02
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Attorney at Funk posted:The struggle of the Pentacle vs the Seers is the struggle of D&D fans vs d20 Modern fans. *gurps a lil* oh, excuse me
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Jul 24, 2015 03:49
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Cabbit posted:Finally, the fabled Tome of Page XX. Should've had a Book XX in Grimoire of Grimoires.
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Aug 18, 2015 08:38
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MonsieurChoc posted:Ultimately, in the old WoD, the world was created by God and Earth is the center of the universe and humanity is special. And while there are a lot of dark things in there, that central cocneit ultimately makes it a very hopeful one. We matter, what we do matter and we are the center of the universe. There's an arrogance in there that rally rubs me the wrong way, and it also doesn't help the horror tone that the setting wants to establish. That's an interesting idea. Would you consider, say, Unknown Armies to be inappropriately arrogant or hopeful because of this?
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Aug 24, 2015 05:12
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MonsieurChoc posted:UA is, I feel, a very different beast thematically, and the negativity over us getting the world we deserve beats out the fact that we are still the center of the universe. I disagree. While both Worlds of Darkness are misanthropic in the sense that they hold little hope of human redemption and fighting evil is generally a prolonged and elaborate form of suicide, both are very much about human flaws and psychological conditions. Bringing in a tired Lovecraftian misanthropy helps them not at all. I don't consider it to be "arrogant" for tabletop roleplaying games set in a real-adjacent world to consider humanity the center of the universe, because that's effectively the case in the *actual* real world. There may well be vast and terrible critters lurking in the black, but they don't matter because it would take longer than the lifetime of our species for them to say 'hello' and us to say 'hello' back. We are important by default. Daeren posted:UA's refrain of "You Did It!" is meant to be exactly as terrifying as it is empowering, after all. Yes, that's my point.
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Aug 24, 2015 05:28
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MonsieurChoc posted:Edit: Like, what you're saying is that making a universe where were not the center is "tired lovecraftian mysanthropy" and I still can't wrap my head around how wrong that is. I mean, misanthropy means hate and that would put us at the center too, just out of hatred instead of love. I-- okay, look. The reason Lovecraft is scary isn't because there are outer space monsters in it. That's just a "creature in the back of the cave" story with the biggest cave imaginable. Lovecraft's stories are about the dark side of that Sagan speech- how ultimately, and in a cosmic sense, there is no difference between you and the cultist who jammed railroad spikes into his eyeballs to summon Ythoggua. You thought that you had some kind of legitimate claim to existence, but actually They are the ones who are legitimate! It ultimately doesn't matter what you do to anyone, or to what anyone does to you! Virtue and vice are equally meaningless! That's the antihumanist, the misanthropic perspective. And don't get me wrong, these kind of stories can still be scary, in the right hands and the right context. The Worlds of Darkness are humanist horror stories. You play a monster who is mostly a person. The Promethean quest for humanity would not be well served by a sidebar stating "actually, none of this matters because the Earth is nothing more than a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam, cf Carl Sagan". The vampiric downward spiral of Humanity would not be improved by a reminder that Humanity is objectively unimportant. Even for mages, the whole point is that the creatures from beyond the outer realms consider Earth and humanity quite important indeed, and that you could choose not to do things that accidently let Them in (but you won't).
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Aug 24, 2015 06:36
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LatwPIAT posted:There's a huge excluded middle between "one spy ending the Cold War singlehandedly" and "nothing you do can ever have meaning or apparent consequences". Like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which starts off with 'there's a spy in MI6, Smiley, please find the bastard', and then Smiley finds the bastard and Karla no longer has a spy in MI6 and his plot to spy on the US is foiled. The motivations and consequences of that plot are readily apparent, and it ends in a bittersweet victory, but still a clear victory for British Intelligence (as does Smiley's People, which ends in a resounding victory). The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is an emotionally draining tale, but that doesn't mean that the character's actions are without discernible reason or consequence. You're sort of right here, I think. Le Carre's books pretty consistently make the point that nominal victories in the Cold War are moral losses, though. Reading Tinker Tailor between the lines gives the distinct impression that everyone already knew who the mole was, and that Smiley's job was just to rip the bandaid off, as it were. They certainly don't thank him for it; The Honorable Schoolboy shows a Circus stripped down to the insulation with no money, no agents, and no way to pretend England is even the slightest bit relevant. At the end Smiley gets bumped out for people who are better at sucking up to the Americans, and the Circus effectively becomes an annex of the CIA. Smiley ultimately punishes Karla for his one moment of decency and humanity, and there's a bit of enthusing again about how impressed the Americans will be, which is a hell of a way to measure a victory. Not that I'd actually want to play a le Carre character in a game, their lives are so relentlessly depressing that the only thing for them to do would be to find another line of work. Demons don't have that option, so the inspiration they take from le Carre is that you have to define your own stakes if you want to stay sane. You're not going to significantly derail the God-Machine any more than you can win the Cold War, just as it's not clear what either of those would look like - if the God-Machine started malfunctioning tomorrow, how could you even tell? The critical thing here is that the God-Machine isn't your nemesis. The God-Machine isn't Karla. The God-Machine is Russia, and Russia doesn't want things, not intelligible things. Karla wants things. You have to narrow the scope of your conflict. Say you find out that the God-Machine's going to set off a dirty bomb in Elephant Butte, New Mexico in order to influence a struggling author's work such that his next novel is a best-seller that produces a specific psychic engram in the reader. Your ring manages to stop the plot in the nick of time, hurrah! Later you find out that a French children's TV show has started broadcasting subliminal messages that produce the engram anyway. So you didn't really stop the G-M's plan, and you're not even sure what the goal was, or how to identify a goal from an endless chain of IF-THENs. But ~1400 people are alive who wouldn't be if you hadn't intervened, and you sleep pretty good that night. *That's* the victory, in the tiny part of the actual struggle you've marked off and said 'this is mine'.
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Aug 31, 2015 16:58
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The proliferation of cell phone cameras and youtube makes it easier to capture evidence of vampirism, but it also degrades the concept of "evidence". For example, let's say there's an actual "slenderman" type creature active in the real world right now. If somebody posted a video and said "yes, I know there are dozens if not hundreds of 'creepypasta' videos in this same genre, all competing to have the best production values, but this one's real! You gotta believe me!", would you believe them? Even given that there are actual irl murders attributed to the slenderman? If there were a group of people who actually believed in the slenderman based on those videos, would it matter to anyone else? People will happily dismiss the evidence of their own eyes if you give them a context that makes it easy to do so. All it takes is a few supernatural Vine stars showing themselves "bench pressing a car, for real! *wiiiink*" and suddenly nobody's taking your cell phone vid of a guy outrunning the 12:10 train to Sacramento seriously. (We used this to our advantage in the last crossover game I played, working from the principle that if you saw a bunch of vaguely-teen/post-teens arguing in a McDonald's booth about vampires and werewolves, you would not imagine for a second that something important was going on.)
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Sep 7, 2015 00:48
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Hey guys, your favorite brands here, just posting an extremely bae and on fleek video of some supernatural shenanigans that is definitely real and not a viral advertisement
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Sep 7, 2015 01:07
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Shockeh posted:The alternative is you just be a bit 'Gaiman' about it - There's no reason why all these things can't be true, at once. They just are, and their ability to all be true at the same time despite being apparently contradictory is why they're ineffable, and you're not. It's been a while, but wasn't it an important part of the oDemon backstory that the universe used to be like this - with Adam and Eve being simultaneously two humans created from dust and a race of protohominids slowly evolving in the African savannah - but that it isn't anymore, in the oWOD present day?
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Oct 5, 2015 14:41
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Looking forward to the new merit "Swedish Vampire", which grants +5 autosuccesses to attack rolls and renders the character immune to aggravated damage
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Oct 29, 2015 14:08
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Prison Warden posted:Oh good an rpg company targeting old grognards. Finally! I think that's a typo, since literally two sentences later he says "25 and older"
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Oct 29, 2015 17:39
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 08:14 |
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Immediately taking a steaming dump on a big portion of their fanbase would be a weird decision for Paradox to take, to say the least. I'd say there's a fairly small chance of nWOD actually getting thrown under the bus. I'd say "no chance", but I have the leering skull of Mike Mearls hovering behind my left shoulder atm
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Oct 29, 2015 18:23
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