Quote from: Darrin Kelley;948263The more forbidden the subjects seem, the greater the appeal to adolescents.It's something the company has been pushing hard since their very genesis.

Heh, too bad for Onyx Path that the forbidden subjects these days are true freedom of speech, dissent from coastal elite platitudes, and right-leaning pushback against leftist culture war excesses.

Quote from: Marleycat;948234You're correct but as a ST you know you can have a much better reason. Hell, I'm usually just a player unless it's Palladium Fantasy and I can come up with 5-10 reasons right now while drinking a serious amount.

To be sure. Something in the vein of Eva Ibbotson, perhaps? But I'd still want to make some alterations so that enacting elaborate revenge-fantasies wasn't something the game actively pushed the players towards doing. That sort of thing leaves me very uncomfortable very quickly.

Quote from: Marleycat;948234How weird is it that I only will ST Palladium Fantasy or Mage either version yet won't even try something like DnD ever?

Not weird at all, I won't GM DnD either. I'll play it happily enough, but it's just simultaneously too weird and too generic for me to figure out where to start with it. Oddly enough, I think I could get interested in running some sort of early-edition DnD, which seems to have been more weird and less generic - but I've never really gotten around to checking any of those editions out.

Having read that awful review (which, seriously, is as bad as the game, if for wildly different reasons), I honestly can't think of a single way that Beast could be salvaged other than simply starting over from complete fucking scratch, starting with the core conceit.

I suppose there are some decent ideas in there. People seemed to like the Lairs, but to me the review at least seemed to make them out as complete waffly conceptual garbage. Maybe it was the hoity toitey jargoning that ruined it for me, though to be honest I'm not shocked to find that the same guy did Demon: the Decent.  Full of conceptual ideas that are mechanically... wtf, or utterly losing me when one of the 'awesome' demonic powers is essentially weaponized punning.

Nope, the whole goddamn book is tainted with smug, arrogant stupidity from the ground up. Burn it down and start over, maybe with... I dunno... a foundation maybe?  .  Maybe find a writer who isn't interested in sucking his own dick?  Wait, that wasn't inclusive enough of me: Find a writer who isn't interested in sucking zir's own non-specific external appendages... if they can be bothered to even have those. Maybe they identify as amoeba.... I can take this sucker all the way down that inclusivity rabbit hole.

Im reading through the KS version. Not sure what iteration. But yeah can see where things went a little wonky here.

I think part of the problem is that the writer cant seem to stay on one track. Im reading the Hero section and in one sentence they are being painted as cowards and in the next as victims. And then back to painting them as wretched and back again to victims and then around to being locked in a role they didnt ask for, and then... you get the idea.

I like the idea of the monster creating the hero and how each hero created is based on the beasts personal theme.

I want to expand on my criticism from last night. There is a bad idea that these game lines seem to have picked up like a case of the Clap from, as near as I can tell, Borgstrom (Exalted's first Fae Folk supplement), that keeps coming back even though, again as far as I can tell, the Borg moved on to spread his/her personal brand of Disappear-Up-My-Own-Ass writing to other things.  Hang on, because I'm going to get at least a little deep...

In language we use Metaphors to help explain difficult or complex concepts... in a more abstract sense to help us understand the world
Stories are really nothing more than really fancy metaphors.
Ergo: Stories as metaphors help us simplify, and understand the world around us.

Seems a bit high minded and even a bit pretentious, but only because in order to see it you have to naval gaze the story to get that laid out... but in this case it's crucial to understand where Beast runs right the fuck off the rails even before you get into the Mary Sue special snowflake murder-monsters part of it.

Now, for a moment we're gonna go back to the Borg here.  I won't lie, Borgstrom is a talented writer, gifted in constructing evocative and poetic assemblages of words that can draw readers in. But Borgstrom is not any sort of storyteller, which is undoubtedly why most of the fiction in Noblis and on Hitherby Dragons was constructed in short snippets, loosely collected, forcing the reader to fill in the gaps... but that's an inference. I know Borgstrom isn't a gifted storyteller for another, more blatant reason.

Borgstrom consistently mistakes the rules of telling a story, the metaphor of the story, for the story itself.  This is nowhere so blatant as the Fair Folk supplement, where creatures of the unfathomable Chaos that exist outside of reality live according to... the rules of a three act play. They literally travel at the speed of plot, among other many, many terrible ideas.    The rules, or rather Techniques, of telling a story, or using language, become the story itself. The Metaphor becomes a means of explaining another Metaphor, and we get caught in a recursive loop of metaphors like some twisted oroboros.

Which brings us back to Beast: The Fuckening.

Sure, I could point out examples across the White Wolf line, such as the Pun Power from Demon (which, when you include the example in the book winds up being an onion of bad ideas. Each time you think you've peeled away the bad ideas, another one underneath is found...), but Beast can stand on its own here.

Now, as I've already admitted, I'm more familiar with the reviews of Beast, but in my favor that linked review contains an absurd amount of quoting and detail.

Beast may not be as blatant as Fair Folk was, but the festering sores of the Borgstrom Clap stand out to even casual inspection, taken second hand at that.  Consider the constant refrain regarding the links between the Beasts and Heroes, how the presence of a Beast creates heroes. By itself, relatively harmless fun, but then you see how Heroes and Beasts are more firmly linked through the metaphor (which is, I will point out, already inside a metaphor of the 'story' being told through the medium of an RPG) of Stories. Heroes are caught up in the 'fictive' idea that they are, well, heroes, and the Beasts are, well, beasts.

As a deconstruction of the idea of heroes, it could be clever if we didn't constantly get the message that this is a nerdlinger power-revenge fantasy.  Heroes draw their power from the use of the metaphor of a story, draw allies from the idea that they are storybook heroes, and force weaknesses on Beasts based on the story-metaphor that beasts have to have weaknesses.

And therein lies one problem, one example of where the game breaks down because it's busy crawling up its metaphorical ass.  The Beasts don't have weaknesses in the rules, because the Beasts are... what? Not part of the Story? More Real?  The Hero applies a weakness they make up in their own mind and somehow make it real, because Story, motherfucker!

But, as the reviewer points out, this doesn't work because the Hero can't actually exploit those weaknesses, because the Beast can go away and shed the vulnerability before the Hero can use it.

Over and over again we see rules being written so very loosely, or with so little thought to mechanics, because the writers are more interested in telling their recursive subversion (which, I'm sure they think it incredibly clever... never mind that its some two decades old now even for WW) than they are in making sure their 'Story'... in this case 'game'... works As A Story/Game.

Now, don't get me wrong: In the right hands, and the right medium, this sort of recursive story idea, the deconstruction of story using story ad infinitum, can work.  I'd let Phillip K. Dick run wild with it on an LSD bender any day of the week and I'm not even a fan.

But in a game? A game where the players should be creating the 'story' such as it is, organically through play? Not the medium, my friend, and clearly the writers of Beast aren't the right hands... though we could trace it farther back to the Borg, they learned their craft from the wrong person, which can't be helping.

And the hell of it? Unlike Demon:the Descent, Beasts... in their interpretation as creatures of Nightmares and bad dreams.... have far more excuses for these sorts of metaphorical 'story' powers than almost any sort of monster you could imagine.  

Of course, that leads to another problem: No clear conceptual idea of what Beasts are supposed to be. Are they mythic monsters like Grendel or Leviathan, or are they Bad Dreams? Bad Dreams don't call for Heroes, now do they?

Its like they couldn't decide if they wanted to make a cake or do laundry, so they decided to make the cake in the washing machine....






Because how else to end this post, but with a seriously bad metaphor?

Spike, I don't know if you've stopped taking the meds, or finally found the right ones, but you're on a roll lately.

Kudos.

Quote from: Spike;948521Of course, that leads to another problem: No clear conceptual idea of what Beasts are supposed to be.

One of the neat things about the nWoD is that they map onto metaphors for different aspects of human life, and as a set of horror games those metaphors and aspects are generally "unpleasant" (but in a good, fun way!).  Vampire is about predators (rapists, exploiters, etc.), Changeling is about abuse survivors, Promethean is about being isolated, etc.  There's overlap to be sure, but even then there's (usually) some new twist that makes the overlap worthwhile.  You can have Hunters who have been isolated, or Mages who are predators for example.  

Beast tries sooo hard to be everything for everybody ("they're monsters, but they're made that way so they're victims, but they terrorize people so they're monsters, but they don't -have- to terrorize too much, but..."), it ends up as not much of anything.

Quote from: Spike;948521Are they mythic monsters like Grendel or Leviathan, or are they Bad Dreams? Bad Dreams don't call for Heroes, now do they?

I can hear the response now: "Both and neither.  Make it your own.  Player empowerment.  Blah blah blah."

As I said before Spike.  Dreamer: the Infection.  Just a horrible dream plague that only Nurgle can dream of.

Quote from: Spike;948521Now, for a moment we're gonna go back to the Borg here.

I see her rule sets as the Rube Goldberg machines of the gaming world. Do they do what they're intended to do? Yes, and often quite competently. But they're also overly complex and poorly communicated, especially when compounded by her love of flowery language. She's also good at writing non-mechanical bits that, while also overly flowery, do have their own internal consistency. Other people who don't have her skill(assuming they even overlap with her skill set in the first place) try to copy her, and we get this. Done well, what she does is often annoying and obtuse. Done poorly, well, . . .

Quote from: CRKrueger;948526Spike, I don't know if you've stopped taking the meds, or finally found the right ones, but you're on a roll lately.

Kudos.

A bit of both...

Quote from: Spike;948521Of course, that leads to another problem: No clear conceptual idea of what Beasts are supposed to be. Are they mythic monsters like Grendel or Leviathan, or are they Bad Dreams? Bad Dreams don't call for Heroes, now do they?

Its like they couldn't decide if they wanted to make a cake or do laundry, so they decided to make the cake in the washing machine....

1: The manuscript makes it more clear that the Beasts are sometimes manifestations or re-incarnations of legendary monsters. But others seem to be more recent births as it were. Legends made semi-real. In a way they are an outgrowth of WODs old concept of collective belief imposes reality.

2: Thats the impression I get too. They keep swinging back and fourth that in the end theres hardly any sense to it. Maybe that was intentional. But for fucks sake Changeling at least made some sense.

Quote from: san dee jota;948528One of the neat things about the nWoD is that they map onto metaphors for different aspects of human life, and as a set of horror games those metaphors and aspects are generally "unpleasant" (but in a good, fun way!).  Vampire is about predators (rapists, exploiters, etc.), Changeling is about abuse survivors, Promethean is about being isolated, etc.

Been thinking about the same things lately. My quick list...

• Vampire: Selfishness
• Werewolf: Prejudice
• Mage: Arrogance
• Wraith: Despair
• Changeling: Trauma
• Promethean: Lonelyness
• Hunter: Fanaticism
• Demon: Obedience
• Beast: Fear

Let me just say this....

Fuck Beast: The Primordial.

And while we're on that, Fuck Demon: The Descent and the entirety of Onyx Path's contributions for New World of Darkness.

nWoD 1e was cool, but this 2e Chronicles bullshit is just awful.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;948613Fuck (snip) the entirety of Onyx Path's contributions for New World of Darkness.

nWoD 1e was cool, but this 2e Chronicles bullshit is just awful.

I keep seeing people saying this, or variations on it ("they went all SJW and hate free speech!") from multiple people.  Could someone elaborate (I ask from a place of ignorance, not debate)?

Quote from: san dee jotaI keep seeing people saying this, or variations on it ("they went all SJW and hate free speech!") from multiple people. Could someone elaborate (I ask from a place of ignorance, not debate)?

I'll second this request, but with a focus on the mechanics, because I've also heard those were handled poorly and I can't find the detailed post about the problem with 2e combat that was once posted on this forum.

Oh, and a very specific game request: did 2e Promethean really remove the tricks for allowing some powers to transfer to the created's human form after the transformation?