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All right, so it's been more than a bit since we've gotten into Beast, and in that time, we've had some things percolating, and some things have kind of come up that, yeah, why not explain how things stand, then how they can be expanded, as well as some questions to see if we can start stirring up activity, all that fun stuff-but it's been a while as well, and I could do with something a little more bite-sized to get into, and I tend to be better motivated by adversity, and
Well, gosh, isn't it convienent someone did a thread on people's opinions and some of them are the things that grind my gears. Yeah, some of that sounds chewable.
Now with that said, I should establish that the comments I am going after are born more from a frustration with the game than a lot of the other arguments that come from bad faith and having never given it a chance-or at least it feels like that to me. I'm also not going after them because I don't think that Beast shouldn't be complained about-in fact, while i have my gripes with these comments, I think they still kind of point at that fundamental problem of the game's presentation, and that again these argument have their grounding. It's why I decided to take this bitching of mine over here, and to decidely decouple the complaints from the posters-oh, sure, it's not going to take five minutes to find whose comments I'm talking about, but I want to make it clear my gripe is not with the person having the problem, just the thing that was said, and I will do what I can to account for that going forward, so.
But with that said, the comments still stick in my craw, so lets get our Peter Griffin on and get into what grinds my gears.
So on the one hand, this is one of those comments that does feel like it's rooted in a first KS draft read for Beast vs the final product-Beast's actions don't cause Heroes to happen, Heroes happen on their own.
That asides, it's also one of those comments that gets across how poorly the core got across both it's themes about the individual versus the community (Hunger versus Kinship) and the risk/reward factor that comes with actively trying to build Lair, that thing that is the center of Beast's action. Broods operate in that middle space between older siblings trying to keep younger sibligns from being overtly stupid versus still being drawn toward the legendary acts that will increase their Lair but also draw in Heroes. This is one of those cores to the tension in the interaction of Broods and the greater family in any given Hive-everyone's cautioning wisdom, temperance and patience, but no one became a legend by playing it safe, and it can get a little galling when older siblings actively have this host of probably not the most survival-oriented actions and moments associated with themselves try to tell younger avenues to seek "saner" methods of gaining Lair.
I wish Beast had been that coherent, if wrong. The corebook is instead a giant fucking cluster fuck of people writing every which way to Monday, with some people thinking Beasts were basically LBGT Superheores with claws and other people treating them as right bastards-some as misbegotten and ill-fated individuals suffering from forces beyond their control, others as assholes whose every action is the cause of their own misfortune, what other people would call karmic justice.
There is a general vibe that places Beast on what I would call in other thread the "Dark Gray Line" of the humanity/monstrosity scale, and indeed Beast benefits from properly fixing it's baseline on that line. That said, Beasts do have room to move around from that line, maybe never becoming the squeakiest clean of still-monsters, but definitely not confined to pure villainy. Vigilantism is certainly a way to explore that Dark Gray Line, but there's other ways to explore it as well, and it pays to give attention to many forms and ideas in regards to that. The two are useful guidelines and easy checks, useful shorthand to give a quick communication of how Beast aligns itself different from the other gameliens, but shouldn't be the whole of the law. Beast is a game about the mythology of monsters on the whole, and it explores cycles of violence in many forms, and to really make that work, you need some solid alignment.
Okay, so I think people know I agree with this....sort of. Namely these days I argue they should actually have Satiety, along with that entire argument of formally making them a third set of Children of the Dark Mother alongside with Beasts and Insatiable.
As it currently stands, it should probably be griped about how Integrity and Morality aren't the same thing, that the more articulate point is that Beast postualtes that the idea of Heroism is not a psychologically healthy mentality to have regardless of it's actual moral or ethical component, and how even before Conquering Heroes gave us a slew of varied and interesting takes on heroes that all played to the 4 or lower rule, the corebook, even pre-kickstarter, gave us a three pronged spectrum that has resulted in the truism I hold for writing Heroes going forward, being "There should always be Sleeping Beauties, but there will always be Thaddeus Peterson's, and fuck that guy."
The variety exists, while the Integrity is there to denote that whatever the case, the position of being a Hero is also usually not the healthiest one to take.
Also, yes, Hunters are indeed people who act out loss. Heroes, however you slice them, do not, even if they pretend to. It is not thematically what they are about. Let each do their own thing and let them do it well.
I'm going to take the whole assemblage of notes under this and just simply say that, even if we weren't building a splat that, by the nature of the foundation it's work from, didn't rest on the dark gray line between conventional Chronicles protagonists and most of their antagonists, we're still in a game about playing monsters, so "If Good Guys" misses the point hard core.
Beast is not Inferno and gains nothing from pretending to be Inferno. It's more interested in the morally gray area of confronting that part of ourselves rooted in the animalistic and atavistic, aspects of ourselves that has done much to give rise to our civilizations but is also used to deny core aspects to our being. Beast is a game about how humanity is messy and not as divorced from our primordial self as we'd like to think, how we are driven by fear and our need for security, and how an overt dedication to that security can end up being predacious or enfeebling in it's own right. Beast's act as a force of clarity often by remvoing the moores that allow for comfortable deniability and allow people to come face to face and to terms with their fears and desires.
Beast has a lot to say and explore in regards to the humanity/monstrosity divide by deliberately ignoring and blurring the lines, allowing by comparison people to realize the monstrosities that still exist in the protagonist bunch while also still exploring the humanity of those who go to the otherside, exercising empathy via the angle of family to lend understanding to that monstrosity and coaxing the human heart behind them out. Having an overt factionalism to Beast itself does terrible things for this angle of familial empathy, judgment, and the exploration of both.
I have floated around the notion that a soft sort of factionalization centered around how some Beasts, Insatiable, and Heroes do take cues and direction from their other siblings, and so some Beast fully embrace an Insatiable mentality while other act Heroic-but again, that's more soft philosophizing. On the whole Beast does more interesting things by saying "fuck the lines that divide people" and instead treats all of monstrosity more holistically. It also comes again to the individualist, found-family aspect of Beast, where in each Beast has the room to decide who, what, how, and why works for their particular corner of the family-accounting for the wisdom of other family members, but also leaving room to stand on their own and make decisions on their own. It's that Hunger vs Kinship theme again-the trans-valued wisdom of the family in co-operation and in competition with the trans-valuing wisdom of the individuals within it.
So the thing of the matter of this is that, with one exception, every single splat has a "recognize that someone else is of your own like" and usually have to make an effort to hide internally. Vampriec Predatory Aura, werewolf smell and branding, mage sight revealing mage aura, Azothic Presence, seeing through one another's Mask, seeing the geist haunting the hollow of your soul, the senses attenuated to Sekhem, and the general metaphysical-if-not-visible nature of Scars is a facet in place to allow monsters to see and group with each other. It's usually not even hard for monsters to get a sense of someone else being a monster from there. The Kinship powers of Beasts basically allows them to play along in accordance ot the same terms as everyone else, and is a pretty open field unless they've made the familial connections to blend in. This argument also has a bad conception of how the "Masquerade" of Chronicles works in general and how monsters connect just within their own sphere, accordingly.
Interestingly, the one case where this argument has ground is also the one where you have to roll to beat their spoof, and winning creates problems for you both. And this is why demons aren't kin, kids.
The problem with this argument is that it ignores how pretty much every splat tends to have iterations and versions of the same powers across the board. No longer as badly copy-pasta'd as they used to be in 1st Edition, but as a off hand example, werewolves, demons, and mummies have that as a direct capability, and vampires, changelings, sin-eaters all have abilities that are only just shy of "instantly know you're lying to me."
Beast IS probably the only game that needs to think about cross-game balance, which makes it interesting because there's also a decent argument about how, handling it's own internal themes and ideas, it could probably stand to be more powerful? but with how things go now and anticipating to keep it around there, I think this thread did a pretty decent job of explaining how Beast is actually very middle of the road.
The refutation for this actually deserves a much longer and comprehensive explanation than the relative space I'm trying to keep to individual answers, so for now, we'll give a really basic "Yep, the corebook did a bad job of explaining the inter-relationship between Broods formed from collected Lairs in the larger Hive and how they usually organize around, against, and/or in synthesis to the standard set by the Apex-but it is there."
It's an admittedly really weird piece where those merits were supposed to start showing up in other books and somehow never did. But I'm not entirely sure I agree with how overtuned some of these are, with costs for the advanced and epic merits tending to run high. Still, if any argument can be made against them not becoming more widespread for other splats, a reconsideration for their position should definitely be had, yes.
And finally
Thicker than Water.
So. I have a particular bugbear with this argument, and I was going to initially try and communicate my bugbear by basically quoting all the times it's come up since the Kickstarter. I quickly abandoned that idea, partly becuase people don't list it by name, but also because jesus fucking christ how much does this one thing come up. So I'm going to opt, instead, to show a really old* example of this before getting into it, and I hope that between this explanation and the following time-stamp, you'll get the position I'm coming from.
...
So the problem with this argument isn't simply that it's bad, it's that it's never been good.
To draw the picture, let's point out that a like-calls-to-like psychosymbolic sympathetic connection that comes from being a living magical symbol for monstrosity gives a benefit that you can just as easily get from borrowing from the subection's explanation of it on pg. 162 of the Beast corebook, ahem, "meeting in a pleasant environment, wearing appealing clothing, playing appropriate music, or otherwise making the situation more comfortable." It only applies to full on monsters, being one of those rare instances where the "Fundamentally Human" category of Kinship actually means anything since it at best offers average for them. It's chief benefit is allowing you make Social Maneuvering rolls daily instead of weekly, and this is for an optional subsystem by the way. And you can fuck it up easily-in fact, being a splat we set our baseline of being on the Dark Gray Line, there's a clear conflict in place for employing it in the first place.
All this hullablaloo for a benefit that so cheap that most of your urban horror protagonists are going to get it on virtue of playing to tropes of the genre. The Daeva get this benefit more often just dressing for the evening than Beasts. Most everyone gets this benefit for just playing to the expectations of the game. For Beasts, it's a flimsy benefit put in place because of how much of a hurdle they have otherwise.
I don't get it, I don't think I ever will. The only actual thing about that demonstrates a problem is how little it shows up in actual play. On that score, it's lack of use does make a decent case that it's an excessive feature that could be given up to provide more space to more substantial feature. But, like. I don't get the whole big deal people seem to have. I just don't.
------------------------
Soooooooooooooooooo, going forward and beyond the selfish value of trying to kickstart my writing gears, why this thread?
Well, honestly, being very optimistic, I'm getting the feeling that Beast may be starting to pick up in conversations, and I feel like the granular details are the sort of things I tend to not talk about as much, taking my direction more at a top-down, inside-out sort of approach. That's a useful way for forming a coherent base picture, but it does tend to overlook the granularities of things that can be used, examined, and pieced together, and admittedly a lot of people's problems with any given media tends to be less of a "big picture" affair, but in how a wall of division from the work tends to emerge piece by piece, brick by brick, problem by problem. So by creating a venue to talk about the smaller, more particular bits, we can possibly get conversation going that provides edification for why pieces are there in the first, actually looking at if it serves those purposes, and if it could do with refinement, replacement, or absence.
So, at the risk of opening a flood gate, I kind of want to open this thread up to, ideally, the issues that don't get talked about as much, the little nagging arguments that do get constantly made, or the "not as big issue with the game but it bugs me" style of argument. Not the beams that usually get in eyes, but more the motes, not the wall, but the bricks. I want to see if we can reach some closure and better understanding of these smaller subject, or perhaps realize some of the mismatches and come up with ways it can better fit, or otherwise how the issue it fills can be reworked.
But mostly, as the title goes, for or against, it's kind of just a thread to chew on the gnats of the game.
*For comparative values of the words "really old".
Well, gosh, isn't it convienent someone did a thread on people's opinions and some of them are the things that grind my gears. Yeah, some of that sounds chewable.
Now with that said, I should establish that the comments I am going after are born more from a frustration with the game than a lot of the other arguments that come from bad faith and having never given it a chance-or at least it feels like that to me. I'm also not going after them because I don't think that Beast shouldn't be complained about-in fact, while i have my gripes with these comments, I think they still kind of point at that fundamental problem of the game's presentation, and that again these argument have their grounding. It's why I decided to take this bitching of mine over here, and to decidely decouple the complaints from the posters-oh, sure, it's not going to take five minutes to find whose comments I'm talking about, but I want to make it clear my gripe is not with the person having the problem, just the thing that was said, and I will do what I can to account for that going forward, so.
But with that said, the comments still stick in my craw, so lets get our Peter Griffin on and get into what grinds my gears.
Beasts are hunted but have no oversight on keeping Heroes from being created. Vampires have a governmental body to enforce the masquerade, Beasts do not. The Apex doesn't care and the Dark Mother doesn't care. Makes Beasts seem very anti-survival.
That asides, it's also one of those comments that gets across how poorly the core got across both it's themes about the individual versus the community (Hunger versus Kinship) and the risk/reward factor that comes with actively trying to build Lair, that thing that is the center of Beast's action. Broods operate in that middle space between older siblings trying to keep younger sibligns from being overtly stupid versus still being drawn toward the legendary acts that will increase their Lair but also draw in Heroes. This is one of those cores to the tension in the interaction of Broods and the greater family in any given Hive-everyone's cautioning wisdom, temperance and patience, but no one became a legend by playing it safe, and it can get a little galling when older siblings actively have this host of probably not the most survival-oriented actions and moments associated with themselves try to tell younger avenues to seek "saner" methods of gaining Lair.
Beasts written from a "morally right" perspective, either have them be inherently villains or have them be vigilantes.
There is a general vibe that places Beast on what I would call in other thread the "Dark Gray Line" of the humanity/monstrosity scale, and indeed Beast benefits from properly fixing it's baseline on that line. That said, Beasts do have room to move around from that line, maybe never becoming the squeakiest clean of still-monsters, but definitely not confined to pure villainy. Vigilantism is certainly a way to explore that Dark Gray Line, but there's other ways to explore it as well, and it pays to give attention to many forms and ideas in regards to that. The two are useful guidelines and easy checks, useful shorthand to give a quick communication of how Beast aligns itself different from the other gameliens, but shouldn't be the whole of the law. Beast is a game about the mythology of monsters on the whole, and it explores cycles of violence in many forms, and to really make that work, you need some solid alignment.
Heroes being only low integrity - This seems added to make Heroes look like the bad guys. Having morally grey Heroes or even ones who are Hunters who lost someone to a Beast would be perfectly fine to have and be more interesting the M'Lady Guy.
As it currently stands, it should probably be griped about how Integrity and Morality aren't the same thing, that the more articulate point is that Beast postualtes that the idea of Heroism is not a psychologically healthy mentality to have regardless of it's actual moral or ethical component, and how even before Conquering Heroes gave us a slew of varied and interesting takes on heroes that all played to the 4 or lower rule, the corebook, even pre-kickstarter, gave us a three pronged spectrum that has resulted in the truism I hold for writing Heroes going forward, being "There should always be Sleeping Beauties, but there will always be Thaddeus Peterson's, and fuck that guy."
The variety exists, while the Integrity is there to denote that whatever the case, the position of being a Hero is also usually not the healthiest one to take.
Also, yes, Hunters are indeed people who act out loss. Heroes, however you slice them, do not, even if they pretend to. It is not thematically what they are about. Let each do their own thing and let them do it well.
If Good Guys:
If Evil Guys: More thematically if Beasts fed off the presence of Sin like Pride, Greed, Envy, Sloth, Lust, Wrath, and Gluttony I feel like it would be more thematic for them as villains.
Split Beasts into 2 factions like how we have the Vampire Covenants vs VII, Forsaken vs Pure, Pentacle vs Seers, Prometheans vs Centimani, Changelings vs Loyalists/Privateers, Hunters vs Slashers, Mummies vs Shan'iatu, Angels vs Demons, and Deviants vs Devoted... Man its almost like we have a theme here?
Maybe take the idea of Beasts who cleanse Sins and Beats who instill Sins and put them into two rival factions? Sounds good. Sounds better than BtP is right now imo.
I have floated around the notion that a soft sort of factionalization centered around how some Beasts, Insatiable, and Heroes do take cues and direction from their other siblings, and so some Beast fully embrace an Insatiable mentality while other act Heroic-but again, that's more soft philosophizing. On the whole Beast does more interesting things by saying "fuck the lines that divide people" and instead treats all of monstrosity more holistically. It also comes again to the individualist, found-family aspect of Beast, where in each Beast has the room to decide who, what, how, and why works for their particular corner of the family-accounting for the wisdom of other family members, but also leaving room to stand on their own and make decisions on their own. It's that Hunger vs Kinship theme again-the trans-valued wisdom of the family in co-operation and in competition with the trans-valuing wisdom of the individuals within it.
They immediately recognized other monsters for what they are; this destroys the core themes of secrecy in a lot of the games. It sucks being a Winter courtier or a Kindred trying to maintain the Masquerade and someone just walks up to you all 'sup I know you're a fairy/vampire'
So the thing of the matter of this is that, with one exception, every single splat has a "recognize that someone else is of your own like" and usually have to make an effort to hide internally. Vampriec Predatory Aura, werewolf smell and branding, mage sight revealing mage aura, Azothic Presence, seeing through one another's Mask, seeing the geist haunting the hollow of your soul, the senses attenuated to Sekhem, and the general metaphysical-if-not-visible nature of Scars is a facet in place to allow monsters to see and group with each other. It's usually not even hard for monsters to get a sense of someone else being a monster from there. The Kinship powers of Beasts basically allows them to play along in accordance ot the same terms as everyone else, and is a pretty open field unless they've made the familial connections to blend in. This argument also has a bad conception of how the "Masquerade" of Chronicles works in general and how monsters connect just within their own sphere, accordingly.
Interestingly, the one case where this argument has ground is also the one where you have to roll to beat their spoof, and winning creates problems for you both. And this is why demons aren't kin, kids.
Some of Beast's merits/powers are incredibly overtuned compared to the games they'd potentially meddle in (Mage being the exception I guess). Imagine a hobgoblin trying to deceive or trick a group and the Beast can just slap down Mimir's Wisdom etc.
Beast IS probably the only game that needs to think about cross-game balance, which makes it interesting because there's also a decent argument about how, handling it's own internal themes and ideas, it could probably stand to be more powerful? but with how things go now and anticipating to keep it around there, I think this thread did a pretty decent job of explaining how Beast is actually very middle of the road.
I really struggle to play Beast because there's no cohesiveness in the game, nothing that contextualizes my character's existence as a Beast; there's no Beast society; there's no Beast laws; there's no Beast traditions, and so on.
In my humble opinion, advanced and epic merits are just ridiculously overtuned. Some of these just costs 2-3 xp and are magnitudes stronger than supernatural powers in other gamelines without requiring fuel/willpower to benefit from. I think these should either have been made more widely available or not been done at all. I think this might be an opinion not shared by most people, but for a game with an emphasis on crossover, I think they are really an imbalance in gameplay.
And finally
Thicker than Water.
Thicker than Water - Beasts automatically increasing their Impression with other splats and monsters by +1. This is mechanical benefit that should be left to roleplay, doubly bad in that it is a passive ability they have.
For some reason, they default to a higher impression with the Others, than the Others themselves. So a Beast has higher default impression with any vampire, than the vampire themselves has.
So. I have a particular bugbear with this argument, and I was going to initially try and communicate my bugbear by basically quoting all the times it's come up since the Kickstarter. I quickly abandoned that idea, partly becuase people don't list it by name, but also because jesus fucking christ how much does this one thing come up. So I'm going to opt, instead, to show a really old* example of this before getting into it, and I hope that between this explanation and the following time-stamp, you'll get the position I'm coming from.
Originally posted by 07-05-2015
Originally posted by 07-05-2015
So the problem with this argument isn't simply that it's bad, it's that it's never been good.
To draw the picture, let's point out that a like-calls-to-like psychosymbolic sympathetic connection that comes from being a living magical symbol for monstrosity gives a benefit that you can just as easily get from borrowing from the subection's explanation of it on pg. 162 of the Beast corebook, ahem, "meeting in a pleasant environment, wearing appealing clothing, playing appropriate music, or otherwise making the situation more comfortable." It only applies to full on monsters, being one of those rare instances where the "Fundamentally Human" category of Kinship actually means anything since it at best offers average for them. It's chief benefit is allowing you make Social Maneuvering rolls daily instead of weekly, and this is for an optional subsystem by the way. And you can fuck it up easily-in fact, being a splat we set our baseline of being on the Dark Gray Line, there's a clear conflict in place for employing it in the first place.
All this hullablaloo for a benefit that so cheap that most of your urban horror protagonists are going to get it on virtue of playing to tropes of the genre. The Daeva get this benefit more often just dressing for the evening than Beasts. Most everyone gets this benefit for just playing to the expectations of the game. For Beasts, it's a flimsy benefit put in place because of how much of a hurdle they have otherwise.
I don't get it, I don't think I ever will. The only actual thing about that demonstrates a problem is how little it shows up in actual play. On that score, it's lack of use does make a decent case that it's an excessive feature that could be given up to provide more space to more substantial feature. But, like. I don't get the whole big deal people seem to have. I just don't.
------------------------
Soooooooooooooooooo, going forward and beyond the selfish value of trying to kickstart my writing gears, why this thread?
Well, honestly, being very optimistic, I'm getting the feeling that Beast may be starting to pick up in conversations, and I feel like the granular details are the sort of things I tend to not talk about as much, taking my direction more at a top-down, inside-out sort of approach. That's a useful way for forming a coherent base picture, but it does tend to overlook the granularities of things that can be used, examined, and pieced together, and admittedly a lot of people's problems with any given media tends to be less of a "big picture" affair, but in how a wall of division from the work tends to emerge piece by piece, brick by brick, problem by problem. So by creating a venue to talk about the smaller, more particular bits, we can possibly get conversation going that provides edification for why pieces are there in the first, actually looking at if it serves those purposes, and if it could do with refinement, replacement, or absence.
So, at the risk of opening a flood gate, I kind of want to open this thread up to, ideally, the issues that don't get talked about as much, the little nagging arguments that do get constantly made, or the "not as big issue with the game but it bugs me" style of argument. Not the beams that usually get in eyes, but more the motes, not the wall, but the bricks. I want to see if we can reach some closure and better understanding of these smaller subject, or perhaps realize some of the mismatches and come up with ways it can better fit, or otherwise how the issue it fills can be reworked.
But mostly, as the title goes, for or against, it's kind of just a thread to chew on the gnats of the game.
*For comparative values of the words "really old".
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