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[HelmsDerp]

I find it helps to choose either presence or manipulation to build around, and then pick skills and merits that supplement/build off of having lots of dots in that trait. You can lead by force of personality or you can subtly pull people's strings, but it takes a lot of investment to be good at both styles.

Is this purely a mortals question or are you looking for advice on social supernats too?

[HelmsDerp]

Why do I like Beast? When the kickstarter draft became available I was clawing my way out of a really dark place and in so many ways the game was an eerily accurate metaphor for the things I was struggling with. I'm a sadist and I'm prone to violent intrusive thoughts, especially when stressed, and I didn't know what either of those things were, just that the inside of my head was an increasingly and acceleratingly awful hellscape. See, having a violent intrusive thought and not knowing what it is or having any effective strategies to control or cope with it is pretty damn stressful, which creates...

[HelmsDerp]

Size is pretty clearly an abstraction though. Size 5 is your normal human, size 10 is a small car. Even a small car is way bigger than two people, or ten Size 1 flashlights, and it takes way more than ten cars to make a skyscraper.

I haven't done any kind of math based on the examples to see if there's some kind of consistent pattern, like "each Size is roughly 50% bigger than the one before" but I suspect there isn't one.

[HelmsDerp]

Beasts have access to an odd mechanic called "Effective Size" where they seem bigger (and soak damage accordingly) without actually taking up more space. An Incarnate going all out can reach effective size 36, although they only occupy size 16 of real space.

There was a dragon True Fae in Changeling 1e who had a base size of 20 and could increase his size by spending glamour. I don't think there was an upper limit.

[HelmsDerp]

Of course, in a crossover game refueling may get much easier for many splats. Werewolves and some Beasts can heal fast enough to sustain multiple vitae per hour for a vampire ally. Beasts inherently benefit from other splats feeding nearby. Sin Eaters gain plasm from bringing themselves or others near to death in the appropriate manner, and fast healing also makes that more sustainable, etc.

[HelmsDerp]

Considering that lava would deal 5-6 lethal per turn (depending on full or partial contact) I wouldn't increase the damage any more because you're already looking at a near instant kill weapon on anything that's not massively fire resistant. What you can do instead is give it an armor piercing rating. There are stats for thermite in Hurt Locker, it doesn't deal any more damage per turn than lava but it ignores more armor than most characters will ever have, so there's no soaking it the way some supernats can with regular fire damage.

[HelmsDerp]

Even if that's true there are multiple grappling merits that allow you to deal damage while performing another action. Close Quarters Combat allows you to deal lethal while breaking free, Standing Throw/Takedown allows you to deal bashing while dropping the enemy prone, Joint Lock deals damage while also establishing a restrain. It's entirely possible to build a grappler where something like half of the possible moves on your list deal damage in addition to their normal effect.

[HelmsDerp]

There are also a few abilities that allow you to attack multiple targets with one attack, but with one very conditional exception you can't attack the same person multiple times in a turn.

...Unless you can reliably gain an exceptional success as a grappler....

[HelmsDerp]

Skyscrapers are the corebook's example for size 100, and the Saturn V is more comparable to those than anything else on the size chart. I would say it's at least size 80.

[HelmsDerp]

Beast is the most crossover friendly splat, and the only one with several core mechanics to explicitly enable it. They're powerful enough and versatile enough to fit in with most groups without being flat better than anybody.

[HelmsDerp]

It sounds like you want damage to be a bit more random and weighted toward higher numbers (fatal or near fatal damage) being easier to achieve. I think probably the best way to do that without breaking the system is to give more weapons 9 or even 8 again. That increases the average number of successes 10-20%, and makes a successful roll scarier because of the increased chance of cascading successes, without making total whiffs any less likely or removing the possibility of flesh wounds.

You could also pair it with another hack I've considered, which is having weapon modifiers match...

[HelmsDerp]

One thing I really like about this is the additional clarification on how the Primordial Dream works and why the advent of modern communications have made it such a mess to navigate. The core book talks about it, but Building a Legend really helps me understand how the Primordial Dream is supposed to correspond to local threats, only now we're adding fears from all over the world and inventing them whole cloth, which makes it nearly impossible to sift out true warnings from false. Great, we've given the whole world anxiety and when the alarm bells never cease you just learn to tune them out.