Time for my epic reply post to this entire thread...
ArmorClassZero wrote:IMO, they need to reboot Vampire (again). Let VTM and VTR rest in peace, let the oWoD and nWoD go.
Yet another set of vamps that are obstensibly different from one another but ultimately are the same bloody thing? They can fuck right off.
Might as well stick with Requiem's take. Bloodlines have provided a near-perfect solution to the "my vamp has sharper fangs" syndrome.
FrankTrollman wrote:Masquerade players pretty much universally acknowledged that there needed to be a reboot of the franchise back in 2003.indeed the addition of 10 years of semi-canon Onyx Path shit has just made everything even more confusing.
Similarly, nWoD was a pile of shit that was on fire.
On the setting side, I need to hear a cogent explanation of why there are coteries of different
-Username17
Masquerade, from what I can tell, never worked as PnP setting. Great for computer games and tv shows and novels but shit for everything else. I've clocked both Bloodlines and Redemption but man, the idea of Gen as implemented and enumerated on never sat right with me.
Requiem (and NWOD in general) was pretty fucking dope. The recent Onyx Path era has been... unfortunate. But otherwise, the shit works even now in the upcoming 20's (even with the nu-metal, neo-gothic and bleakcore themes and style laced through everything). Gotta lotta VTM to VTR and MTAs to MTAw converts in my neck of the woods because OWOD ain't shit, system AND setting-wise.
Adventurers meeting haphazardly in an inn is not a valid reason for a game (and any and all variants). This kills a signifcant portion of the games out there right now. NWOD is one of the few games that said "hey, actually, there's no
reason your guys are together -- clash of destinies works as good as anything else, yeah go do that".
That's literally how. every. single. PC. in my games come together. Case in-point: last session at my club, two new Ghoul PCs met because A was sick of his mundane office job life and badly high on vitae and decided to follow B out a diner because B was obviously sketchy but
different and in order to intervene before a corrupt cop got his hands on him -- end of session, they passed out drunk in A's well-to-do studio apartment after being fixed up by B's vet Ally having been shot by the cop while doing a getaway.
And that is honestly a shitty example compared to some of the others over time. But it still fucking owns the vast majority of shit I've read in the gamebooks and from other people online.
hyzmarca wrote:I mean, while I hink it would be interesting to play around with stereotypes and say that all Ventrue are black just because I like the idea of suave black aristocrats playing against sterotype, that's not going to fly in a game where white people might like to play a Venture, you know. It's going to be seen as racist now matter what you do, if Vampire clans are tied to real world ethnic features.
Vamps are assumed to be White in both NWOD and OWOD, unless explicitly specified. Same shit today, regardless of whatever neo-liberal crap has wedged itself into the collective gamer psyche.
Your point's moot is what I'm getting at here.
But hey, Black aristocrats are fucking awesome. I have a Bloodline in my current NYC-based VTR chron which are essentially African-American royalty straight outta Harlem, originating from the South. They've got some numbers outside NYC though and have in the last couple decades finally got a handful out there on the west coast to represent the blood.
Anyway, other than your vozhd-sounding nick, it's all about authenticity. And the current writing staff and just culture... lack that. I swear, Lucien Soulban was one of the only writers they ever had that
got the fucking setting. He wrote both Blood In, Blood Out and Constantinople By Night's storyline and fuck me, those are both pretty fucking good, highly recommended.
FrankTrollman wrote:Doesn't really matter. The entire concept is The Masquerade. Every Vampire has to be able to pass for a normal human. It's completely non-negotiable. So if you want to distinguish types of vampires visually, your only choice is what kind of humans you want them to be disguised as.
The "vampire types should be visually distinct" concept is completely incompatible with Masquerade as a concept. It literally cannot end well, and "your product is uncomfortably racist" is probably an inevitable end result from pursuing that line of thought.
-Username17
Yes, agreed. The HU-man must be a thing. Or the whole godamm game falls apart.
Nah, racist tropes originate from inauthenticity. If you're not in or have thorough grounding in the culture, don't fucking write about Black people and Black issues. If you're from some inbred county shire in the midlands, then fucking write about that. If you're the son of Korean immigrants who owned a "Dae-Ho's Liquor" in Koreatown that got exorted out the ass and used as a front for a counterfitting operation, fucking write about that. Or, again, at least have some fucking grounding in it.
In other words, hire writers and designers who didn't listen to My Chemical Romance growing up and then Joy Division when they wanted to be grown up.
Voss wrote:The big thing is they need to not be a bunch of transgressive edgelords
Ah hah, ah hah, ah hah...
[url=
https://career.paradoxplaza.com/people/ ... n-ericsson]I don't think so.[]
Prak wrote:Like, if we're keeping the VtM clans (and I'm not saying we should, just spitballing)-
What the shit made you think
these were good ideas?
The tattoo idea alone is gonna swish all up down some Torrie/Daeva chick's face like the hung balls of her co-star.
Prak wrote:So make it magical. And honestly, most people who play the game aren't going to think about that.
...
...
...
You obviously don't know gamers.
nockermensch wrote:If your vampire setting doesn't have the coroner doing a necropsy on a dead vampire at very least muttering "this person... this person has been dead for HOW LONG?" in disbelief, then it's a bad vampire setting and I don't care about it.
And I'll posit that this is good for the setting because the clean up is the kind of urgent mission that the Prince can assign to the PCs: "Get in that morgue and clear the situation for us. Do not fail."
Agreed.
Longes wrote:WoD approach where you can't play as a mix of those is deeply unsatisfactory. It creates dead splats and badly suffers from prestige class problem, where big books are full of content that will be used by 1% of the tables. If you want to play, for example, Geist, or Promethean, your best option is to go fuck yourself.
Go fuck yourself.
(Kidding, obvs. This made me laugh. Thank you for actually puttin' some real-talk out there, compared to some of this shit I'm reading)
Actually, to note, we did almost get Geist voted in for last year's chron at the club but it narrowly missed out 'cause Mage beat it. Would've been a historical game, golden age piracy, several players really liked the idea, I think it suit the game pretty well. Henry Morgan would have been a Hunter and founder of a Compact and ultimately Panama City would have been a diversion for him and his fellow Hunters to access the Underworld through a faulty Avernian Gate deep in the jungle. Anyway, 'nuff said.
FrankTrollman wrote:- Whatever groups there are, they have to be able to play nicely together.
- None of the groups can be embarrassingly racist. I can't believes it's 2018 and I still have to say that, but obviously I do. If you roll out your groups and one of them is "Vampires, but Romany Vampires who have deception powers" or "Werewolves who are Native Americans and are deeply spiritual" or some shit, I am putting the book down. That shit was bad in the 90s, and in the last quarter century you have to at least have learned that that shit isn't OK.
- None of the groups can explode the setting in zero time. If one of the groups wants to destroy the Masquerade, obviously they are just going to hold a press conference tonight where they reveal that Vampires exist and then the Masquerade is over. Shit like that (see: Sabbat, Mage Traditions) is completely unacceptable.
-Username17
No, they just need a
good reason not to kill each other on sight. They're not fucking humans, they're monsters from a darkness deep.
I agree on the representation point.
Are you fucking serious on the third point? That really happened? What in the actual dickjizz...
ArmorClassZero wrote:To clarify my point about visual differences:
Obviously all the vampires types should have ways of maintaining the Masquerade, since that's a core conceit of the WoD (old, new, rebooted, whatever). The Nosferatu are all disfigured and deformed,
Edit: A kinda good example of what I'm talking about with visual communication would be the Jedi-Sith visual design.
They tried to do this with the base Nossies in VTR. Didn't work. At least, too many fuckwits IME used it as an excuse to be sex pests and blood fetishests while claiming "I'M NOT OBVIOUSLY CREEPY!"
Also, if you have to start doing Blue vs Red, you've failed.
Longes wrote:"Supernatural Teenage Drama" is a mainstream TV genre that started roughly with Supernatural (not really), and continues with things like Teen Wolf, Shadowhunters, Vampire Diaries, The Originals, Van Helsing and Penny Dreadful. And arguably even superhero TV shows fall under the same umbrella. Penny Dreadful is probably the best out of those and is not the worst series to emulate.
Penny Dreadful's pretty legit. I need to get back on it.
FatR wrote:(1) You need a full reboot, as was already mentioned in this thread.
(3) You need to choose whether your system would be rules-lite and fast to run or complex and tactical, and stick with your choice. Also, in the latter case mechanical interaction should be actually interesting.
No, you don't. You just need people who aren't OPP working on it. That and that and an actual fucking publishing company with deadlines, vision, editorial oversight and shit. The kinda place you'd get fired in a heartbeat for the crap that's been put out in the last half-a-decade.
Tactical over rules-lite every time. People like choice and they like granularity. The people who will actually buy 'yo shit are those same people. No-one's saying it needs to be HERO but it
must be at least EOTE.
FrankTrollman wrote:When Masquerade went live, vampires were going mainstream. They had signed A-list talent to be in Interview. Today, vampires have already gone mainstream. Twilight was such a big property that they could take randos who couldn't act and turn them (at least temporarily) into A-listers. Breaking Dawn made over eight hundred million dollars at the box office despite being a shit movie with 25 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
So your target is no longer college age women who are discovering that there's a goth genre that had been chugging along without their knowledge for ten to fifteen years. Now your target is college age women who read Twilight books when they were in their teens and are now ready for more adult fare.
So all the dumb questions about whether and how much adult content vampire should have are irrelevant. A reboot of Vampire would absolutely need to have romance and death and shit because your target audience watched True Blood while they were children.
-Username17
I want to say you're full of shit but I think there
is a kernal truth in there (hey, fair is fair yo).
Again, Requiem got it right in the base setting (minus the stupid fucking clueless "fog of war domain segregation" shit). It's not one fuck-off massive vampiric conspiracy but, say, several major ones across the world that all play off each other in ways both direct (inter-Covenant conflict, torpor vendettas), and indirect (migration trends in the kine, firearm proliferation, modern tech, other supers).
hyzmarca wrote:No one wants to play a game where John Wayne Gacy is the hero.
You say that... but you shoulda seen how a few of the PCs from our Third Crusade-era Hunter chron a couple years back developed/were developing. That game got
dark towards the end...
FrankTrollman wrote:But in general, it's probably a bad idea to have any distinct supernatural type have a mad hate on for any other distinct supernatural type.
Agreed.
souran wrote:It's ok for Vampires and werewolves to have a tense relationship like old warhammer elves and dwarves.
It's also good for the game to have some antagonist factions that the players can feel fine about using their powers on without holding anything back.
The whole thing with vampires in Warhammer Fantasy only works because it's just that: fantasy. And it's pretty fucking high fantasy in that regard. In any other setting, they'd have burned them out long ago, they'd be in hiding or it'd be WOD-style conspiracy (it actually is for Lahmians). There's a lot of stupid shit in both WHFN and WH40K so I wouldn't use it is an example of your point.
Also, WH40K has a nazi fetish undertone which pisses me off. I stripped that shit right out when I hosted Only War back in the day.
ArmorClassZero wrote:Vampires don't have to strictly be, or fall under, any of those categories. The more compelling vampire, IMO is the one who's story is a tragedy.
and more of "What Shadow Government?
FrankTrollman wrote:"Every supernatural group is covering for themselves and also every other supernatural group."
You couldn't just embrace a person with a particular skillset unless they were completely on board with the Masquerade, and you would need constant implicit and explicit threats to keep them inline. Also, I think the core conceit of the Masquerade virtually rules out having an entire group of playable characters who's main trait is 'hot-headed', 'loose cannon', 'rebel for the sake of rebelling' aka the Brujah. They would've been persecuted relentlessly by their kin until 'natural selection' ruled out embracing anyone with those traits, (or if those traits were a property of the Brujah blood, the entire clan would've likely been genocided.)
Soon as I saw Elric Melnibone, I was like "Vampire Wars". You motherfucker, hah hah! That was honestly one of the more honest portrayals of the vampiric condition I've ever. I actually felt real bad for him, I was happy he was able to overcome the worst callings of his vampirism to bring down his fucked-up kin. And that ending! Screw that (admittedly, self-imposed) fate...
Nah, fuck shadow government. This is urban horror, not an espionage flick.
Yes, you can "just" embrace someone. This is totally a thing at my club. That's a Masquerade artifact because, as Frank pointed out in his VTM thread, the numbers were utterly, utterly fucked in VTM and WW knew it. In VTR they gave it a wide caveat by essentially knocking it down to "on your head be it if they fuck up". Much better. Self-policing over contrived bullshit any night. Any Prince that gets touchy about breeding better have
juice to back a restriction that severe.
Nath wrote:All too often, the Masquerade was the Ventrue overseeing the local government and police force and that was it.
This shit is why Masquerade did. not. work.
hyzmarca wrote:The vampire 1% are old money. Some of them made a killing in grain futures when a guy named Joe gave them a hot tip. None of them need to commit crimes, because they have diversified investment portfolios.
Vampire organized crime are the new money. Guys who don't have the connections and investments to do everything above board.
Legit.
Although I'd still put my stock with the Werewolves. Vampire are good an' all but they
freak out when it turns out Florida ain't gonna deliver oranges anywhere near what was projected 'cause its "what they know". Uratha keep it movin'... they literally have a Tribe with this as one of its core focuses.
Longes wrote:He's also a really bad writer and the fact that he keeps getting work is proof for me that he knows real magic.
BRUH!
FrankTrollman wrote:Definitely not. I mean, I'm sure he's a nutter, but he also never fucking mattered. Phil Brucato got his start at White Wolf writing under the Black Dog imprint in 1995. Destiny's Price, Freak Legion, crap like that. He wasn't the B-team. He wasn't even the C-Team. Phil Brucato was one of the pervy fanboys that wrote commissioned works that the main teams were explicitly ashamed to have their names associated with. It's only much later that he's allowed to contribute material to Mage's Second Edition or obscure expansion books like the Cult of Ecstasy splatbook. He's not a main author on Mage: The Awakening either. In fact, he was never allowed to be a main author on any main game line. He didn't become "important" in Mage until the entire company stopped actually existing.
...
I liked Destiny's Price.
(Although, it was seriously white boy at times, the general atmosphere was legit)
Remember listening to this in particular (among other tracks) while reading it one rainy night in London back in the day...
https://open.spotify.com/track/1fT3tLqL ... aDW8ohgdNw
I mean, that instrumental, that's
Mage
(I've never been one for the writers' or other fans' music choices at the start of the books. They don't really evoke the settings for me... at all. Tends to be neo-folk, IDM or metal wank...)
Longes wrote:Phil Brucato was the lead developer of Mage Second Edition, as well as a current lead developer of Mage 20th Anniversary Edition. He absolutely mattered for Mage development and matters even more right now. It's notable that Mage Revised edition's big changes were rolling back all of Brucato's craziness and making it more "street level". Which Brucato has now "fixed".
What in the fuck... what'd he change? Any particular horrors?
hyzmarca wrote:Longes wrote:FrankTrollman wrote:
Mage 20th Anniversary isn't a real thing. It never was. The entire company actually factually went out of business in 2006. It was bailed out by Icelandic videogame nerds, but went out of business again in 2012. And then it just sort of stayed out of business. Eventually the rights got sold to Swedish videogame nerds who are picking their ass making vaporware. But the bottom line is that anything done after November 2006 is only arguably White Wolf, and anything after 2012 just flat isn't White Wolf at all.
Mage 20th Anniversary was made in 2013, one year after White Wolf studios fucking closed forever. It's a fan project. No one fucking cares. It is exactly as much a new edition of Mage as Princess or Witch is. Jesus Fucking Christ.
-Username17
Who gives a shit if White Wolf studios closed? Mage20 is being sold as a Mage the Ascension product. What does the identity of the producing company have to do with anything? You might as well claim that D&D 3 was not a
real D&D product because TSR closed. Paradox lets Onyx Path make and sell oWoD products. Princess and Witch are not being sold as oWoD products. Yeah, Phil Brucato is a fanboy turned writer, but that doesn't make the product illegitimate.
CCP was the one that licensed oWoD and nWoD to Onyx Path. That's because CCP didn't care about the tabletop market and just wanted the IP so that they could make a huge, epic, oWoD MMORPG.
Their reach exceeded their grasp on that one.
When Paradox bought the IP, they pulled Onyx Path's oWoD license as fast as the existing contracts would let them, and just left Onyx Path with the nWoD, which they renamed to Chronicles of Darkness.
This of because Paradox thinks that the nWoD is flamming garbage and just wants to develop the oWoD IP. They are right.
And while they are treating oWoD20 as a fourth edition, as shown by their naming scheme, they're basically dropping all of oWoD20's metaplot in favor of actually moving the setting forward into 2018.
They're also rewriting the rules from the ground up. Because they know that the old rules sucked, but also that no one buys Vampire for the rules.
That's really the smart thing. They know that the tabletop game is important, but it's not the money maker. It's the foundation for the rest. The real money comes from licensing and merchandising. From multimedia. From toys. From movies, television shows, from Lego playsets. Vampire at one time had that. It had television shows. It had video games. It had movie deals. And White Wolf squandered all of that. And CCP ignored all of that in favor of its vaporware. Paradox isn't setting out to make a better game, or to even appeal to fans. They're setting out to build a multimedia empire on the back of a really, really good IP that has been grossly mismanaged.
And to do that, they need to exercise control. And they do.
The only reason Mage20 exists is that paradox couldn't stop it from going to print. But Onyx path isn't going to be allowed to make more oWoD20 products beyond what they've already licensed. Instead, they're left with the shit-stick that is Chronicles, and can screw that up as much as they want because it isn't worth anything.
You're full of shit on the NWOD point.
Everything else in this post is legit, accurate and fucking solid. I was right there back in the day calling all this shit out and and there were a few other wise gamers calling it out before me. But the tragedy still struck...
NWOD was great but that mismanagement and lack of tight stewardship is what fucked it over, not the actual IP itself as it used to be in the WW era.
DrPraetor wrote:That the setting attracted writers who really believe in Chaos Magick or whatever is not a surprise, but this is not dispositive for responsibility in making the setting ill-conceived in the first place.
Ahhh, so that's where it comes from? And here was me thinking WW's designers actually came up with something groundbreaking in terms of game systems for magic... how little I truly knew.
Prak wrote:So, basically, "Objectivists are shitty at writing propaganda for their own contradictory bullshit philosophy?"
News at 11.
In other news, Ken Levine wants his Atlas Shrugged copy back... so he can burn it.
ArmorClassZero wrote:So I was playing the new-ish Vampire game We Eat Blood & All Our Friends Are Dead and it occurred to me that the setup of the game is the protagonist (you) being a super-brand-new Neonate basically being left to flounder about and wander around on your own for a bit, which is a ridiculous premise. Under no circumstances would a Childe be left alone in such a manner to figure things out for themselves. The entire Creation Rites of vampires would definitely need to be looked at in any Reboot of Vampire or new edition of VTM. VTM at least had the rule that you need the Prince's "O-K" before you could sire a Childe, and it was understood that your Sire had the go-ahead before they made you, but that probably isn't enough by a long shot since maintaining the Masquerade is something that concerns ALL Kindred, the creation of any new vampire concerns ALL Kindred, and that Childe would essentially have the eyes of the (vampire) world watching them at all times.
And VTM Bloodlines (the video game) also does this as well. You're created, your Sire is destroyed, and the rest of the Vampire world, who is present at the time of the local Prince deciding NOT to execute you on the spot (since you were illegally created), collectively shrug and say, "Not my problem," and "Good luck out there, kiddo!" except for Smiling Jack and Nines Rodriguez, two Anarchs. It's absurd to think that the Camarilla would not be responsibly teaching such neonates, and almost as absurd that they would put all the responsibility on the Sire. And while it works because the video-game needs to give the player freedom and whatnot, it would just NOT be a thing within the setting. A Childe would probably have been assigned to a coterie of older vampires for the explicit purpose of learning all the rules. And no-one in the vampire world would be ignorant of who you are or your station. It's likely that they would eventually get around to trying to use you in their own schemes, but only after they've made sure you're not going to fuck up the Masquerade.
What? That doesn't happen in Bloodlines.
- LaCroix actively fucking sets you up with a Haven. Initially, he sent you on stuff with the intent of getting you killed but once he realised you were a self-started/self-sufficient (which the majority of real-world players of that game aren't, I'm not sorry to say...) he actually entertained you as a valued agent (since no-one else would take him seriously, especially among the Primogen). This is especially true if you were also Ventrue (I was first-time!) Only when his Megalomania started cracking through in the late stage of the game did he go back to trying to kill you again. Swings-and-roundabouts
- Strauss actually does try to look out for you from the start. He feels bad in his own way that you've been fucked over by the city's tense politics. And if you're Tremere, he absolutely tries to bring you into the fold (haven in the chantry, yo). Through your convos with him, he schools you in the subtler side of your new unlife and tries to impart some wisdom, not unlike Beckett.
- Beckett looks out for you too and actually grows fond of you as the game's main storyline progresses. He could be said to recognise some of himself in you, a pariah among his kind, the guy everyone calls when they need shit done or something answered but who no-one truly tries to claim. And while Beckett might like it that way because he truly pitties his fellow Kindred, the wider society and does not actively pursue all the politics, that's not necessarily the same for you. The fact he fucking goes out of his way to warn
you, you of
all kindred, I think, really shows this.
- Gary and Issac are arguably much more pragmatic but if you're a Nosferatu or Toreador respectively, they does actually want to bring you into their folds.
- VV does a bit of a lookout for you. She's more powerful than she let's on (possibly more so than Issac, honestly) and she gives you free reign of her club for feeding once you've helped her out.
- Andrei actually does try to school you, even while he's trying to destroy you. Had he (or one of his bishops') gotten to you first, he'd quite likely have taken you under his wing, since he infers your Gen is actually lower than it should be as a neonate in the modern nights (but not lower than his, otherwise he'd probably diablarize you on the spot)
- Mercurio even does a lookout for you. In fact, he's arguably the most helpful of all, since he sets you up with the good shit weapons-wise and is entirely loyal pretty much from the start.
Longes wrote:Beasts are people who sold their souls to an alien dreamspace horror and got fancy powers from that. In return, Beasts have to feed said horror by inflicting pain and suffering on people. This can range from keying someone's car to feed your hunger for destruction, to stealing shit to feed your hunger for the hoard, to being an obstructive bureaucrat to feed your hunger for power. Feeding generally involves the target suffering an Integrity break, but high level feeding requires murder.
Beasts have an in-universe rationalization for feeding that they are "teaching lessons" to people by scaring the shit out of them, but you explicitly don't have to teach shit, and lessons can be completely arbitrary. One of the Beasts in the book hunts bad tippers. The example of feeding is a character poisoning a frat boy and choking him in his own vomit for the evil crime of stealing halloween candy. Another example is a pair of beasts tag teaming - one keeps a treasure hidden in a cave and spreads rumors to attract people and feed on their greed, another murders them for the crime of trying to take that treasure and thus feeds his hunger for punishment. It may sound like entrapment, because it literally is.
But what's really damning is that the writer of Beast, Matt McFarland, got called out as a child molester. It's a book about abusers written by an abuser and couched in justifications for abuse.
Beast is such a shit template. And they did a new one which was, like, mad scientist leftovers or some shit? Forgetting the name here for a moment...
Didn't know McFarland was the lead on Beast. Now that makes some fucking sense. Oh my God, did you
see the fucking turnaround on that whole debacle? The mods on RPG.net like to hold themselves as the guardians of a safe community and shit and align themselves with the kind of people that accuse people of seriously heinous shit but then, when one of their own is actually the real deal... man, they took their sweetass time before they got rid of him, yes they did.
Longes wrote:Frank, Chronicles of Darkness haven't killed anything because CoD was released long after White Wolf died. Chronicles of Darkness is the second edition of nWoD, and it has some genuine improvements, like linear xp costs post chargen. It's still fundamentally nWoD but slightly less shit.
They didn't improve anything. Exponential EXP costs were better -- shit actually cost. The whole beats thing is crap. They fucked the system when it was already pretty sweet. We actually have players at the club who outright refuse to play with the rules and any of template from Mummy onwards because of how utterly they jacked they system. One in particular fucking rages any time that particular game is mentioned because of his high hopes for it.
FrankTrollman wrote:Wiseman wrote:Beast is certainly worth an OSSR here.
Not really, no. FATAL or RaHoWa isn't worth an OSSR either. It's essentially a fan publication where the fan in question is apparently a guy who pointedly didn't deny molesting a teenage girl. So... that's terrible. You similarly wouldn't do an OSSR of Myfarog, since the only reason anyone ever knew or cared about that particular heartbreaker is that it's written by a racist murderer.
Bad games that have basically nothing to offer and are only famous because the people who made them turn out to be IRL criminals should not be given the OSSR treatment. If they were famous because they had an actual rabid following (Unknown Armies) or were backed by a "real" company with money and advertising (Scion), then they might be important enough to talk about even if they are total trainwrecks.
But Beast has no redeeming features
and also only "existed" as a bizarre confidence scam to cause a couple thousand remaining nWoD fans to pledge support to "keep the game alive" despite the fact that by any possible sane measure the game in question had already been dead for
years.
But anyway, I remembered the thing that really set me off about that Beast review:
Kurieg wrote:My only request is that you do not blame Onyx Path Publishing for what you are about to read. The blame rests solely with Matt McFarland.
What the shit? Onyx path is like
one dude. He chooses what he promotes and what he doesn't promote. People are perfectly able to go do their own kickstarters without having him put his "Onyx Path" label on them. In essence the only thing that Onyx Path really does is evaluate submissions and either positively endorse them or not. Onyx Path positively endorsed Beast. The label was put on not by Matt McFarland, but by Richard Thomas. It is absolutely fair to blame Onyx Path for choosing to associate itself with that kind of edgelord abuse-justifying bullshit. That's like Richard Thomas' whole thing.
Remember how Onyx Path decided to put their name on an edition of Exalted? Remember how Exalted was cannibalism justifying edgelord bullshit from the beginning? Yeah, that's because Onyx Path Publishing is just that kind of outfit.
Of course you should blame Richard Thomas for the fact that he puts his logo on things that are not only bad games but actually exist as justifications for bad behavior by bad people. Richard Thomas is obviously a bad person and he has repeatedly demonstrated that by helping to publish screeds of badness. Not once, but over and over again.
To remain a fan of Richard Thomas before Beast came out requires a ridiculous level of naiveté. To stay a fan
after is just fucking sick.
-Username17
He also doesn't pay his writers, allegedly. Hasn't for years.