ITT: Good concepts done poorly

Actually the sexualized elements have been there since Bram Stoker's Dracula. Vampires do still need to be less romantized and more monsters though.

Yeah it's a pretty firmly established trope. I just meant more it hampers the horror of it, especially to the sort of person likely to be playing WoD.

This is your antagonist for today.

Jesus fucking christ, you think they'd at least be subtle about it

Should have made Hunters their enemy. If Beasts can blend with any supernatural being, then Hunters are the perfect rival.

The art was also laughably bad

Not in the least. Her entry also has doxxing rules, which are absolutely fucking absurd. If I recall correctly, the equivalent of a /b/ raid can permanently cripple the finances of a Gates-tier billionaire. Really baffling

hahah i bet she has really smelly feet ahaha

It's way worse. Technicaly, it can even cripple networks on par with schrecknet.

Wew lad. Kind of makes me want to roll up a Free Council memester waging a proxy war through imageboards and kekist syncretic cults. Become the notorious hacker, For Chans

Fucking do it user. Engage in literal memetic warfare.

That's up in the air for me because willingly damning a person to the same existence just to be "a real boy" again is pretty malevolent. imo

I mean at the same time, its not Damming since its always a state you can grow out of. Its like saying "puberty and middle school sucks, so damning a being to be born and go through that is fucking horrible."

Wait, user! Read this first! It'll get you in the correct mind space.

readcomiconline.to/Comic/Global-Frequency/Issue-3?id=81211#1

>I give my life
>not for honor
>but For Chans

>I'm still
>In a meme
>Snek eater

Haha, I worked on/playtested Abandon All Hope and also submitted art for it I have one piece of shitty art in the book, see if you can guess which one, which was done with zero context whatsoever, though my buddy (one of the two main devs) did most of the interior art himself.

I don't disagree. The premise of the game is its strongest selling point by far, as the mechanics are also pretty wonky (though kinda fun, in that quirky "I'd never willingly run this myself but it's kind of neat sort of" way) and outright broken in certain cases.

Anyway, I'm using pic related as my submission for a "good concept done poorly".

Did you get run through the premade adventures? They seem so fucking meatgrindery, especially the last one, that I'm surprised they were playtested at all.

(also the persistent swapping of PSY and HP)

Yes, they're shit. The only fun I had with the premades was the last one when one of the devs wanted to test out "high level" characters, so gave us all super buffed stats/gear/etc. and just let us run at problems head-on. It turned into literally DOOM, and it was fucking great entirely and completely by accident and much to the chagrin of the GM, who felt it was too over-the-top and almost entirely lacking in "horror" (I put that in quotations because nothing in any of the games I played was ever atmospheric enough to merit even dread or suspense, let alone horror) for how he wanted the game to play even with experienced characters. We basically made a mockery of the game rules and the monsters due to the way their fucked up stat/dice system works on the high end, at which point we were basically relegated to acting like munchkin-y powergaming assholes because it truly didn't matter anyway.

The best "real" premade is the one that involves the lead-up to the disaster, with the lunch room and gangs and getting locked up when the demons come out and all that. But even that one is only passable, and there are really only two memorable things from it when really it needed to push hard to set up the themes and tone of the game. In reality, all 4 times I played through it slowed down massively with terrible pacing issues, fussing around in events and scenes that had no relation to anything else or reason to be there, and "railroady" bits that basically mandate certain player actions for the adventure to progress at all.

I tried fixing way, way more than what actually made it into the book, but I experienced a lot of push-back from both devs who felt the changes I was suggesting were unnecessary or that suggestions I had didn't properly align with the game's design philosophy (whatever exact philosophy that is still mystifies me to this day).

To follow up, the entire Abandon All Hope system was, I suspect, primarily just a vehicle to realize the main designers' (my buddy's) desire to pump out "weird, quirky, spooky" art, as well as being a broadly experimental project on game design in general (as I know for a fact he had no real game design experience prior to that point aside from elaborate houserules and racial packages he made up for D20 that were utter garbage). As the art was being produced for ages, long before the game concept was ever a thing itself.

I do feel a bit bad talking about the game like this, simply because the two guys did put their best effort into it (particularly the second dev, who I met initially through the first dev I knew back in high school); they're genuinely nice guys with the best intentions, but in terms of design ambition they really left a lot to be desired.

I did work on one other RPG from the second dev who I became pretty good friends with before his life got a bit complicated, called "Darwin's World". It's a D20 post-apocalyptic standalone game, with supplements available, and it's alright. Leagues better than AAH, but still just another 3rd party D20 OGL bandwagon title. More love and thought went into that one though, IMO.

I don't think I'll ever work with either of them again, even assuming they had another project to work on. Good guys though, I still go drinking with them every now and then.

>Good concepts done poorly
Pretty much just the official tagline for White Wolf?

Planescape.

Basic concept: Exploring the realms of fiends, angels and faeries, traveling to worlds unseen, battling opponents who can shake the very foundations of creation itself, the ultimate melting pot.

Actual Execution: Running around a smokier, edgier Waterdeep full of jaded, stuck-up cynics whilst avoiding run-ins with lunatics from a bunch of philosphical gangs were many of their ideologies don't even make sense if you spend a few minutes thinking about them and playing dogsbody to a bunch of Mary Sue NPCs.

I'm definitely going to use this in my upcoming Hunter: the vigil game.

But that’s just Vampire and Hunter.

>FATE
What makes you say that, user?

Hey, thanks for all the awesome info. I didn't mean to hate the game, it's clear a lot of love was put into it, but you can really see its 3.5 origins sticking out like a wart. Weirdest thing for me was the mix of pre-gehenna and post gehenna life, the game mostly assumes that you'll be in hell either by the time the game starts or slightly after, yet there's still entire sections and feats dedicated to helping you pre-gehenna.

I think the entire book would have been much better if it was just released as a system agnostic book, rather than having its own system or being tacked onto 3.5, or even be made for a generic system like GURPS or savage worlds. Either way, it's a interesting game, I would for sure nick the setting and make my own campaign out of it

As for a complete random guess to what art you drew, did you draw this lovely chap?

Also as an add on to that, I find it really odd that the game suggests to use demons sparingly, yet throws one of those corpse guys at you almost immediately after shit hits the fan in that beginner adventure.

Oh, and also the fact you can just manifest 10 more demons just because you're unlucky is just an extremely shitty play mechanic, makes the game feel less horror-y and more meatgrinder-y

>combined with the ubiquity of scripts so thoughtfully provided by the world's hacker community
A fucking script kiddie.
>Null Snyper lives alone in a single-room apartment which she rarely leaves.
Proper hackers use a burner laptop at an internet cafe.
>only time she dares venture out is to acquire new computer hardware to upgrade her setup
Confirmed to know nothing about computers. Just rent time on Amazon if you need to compute something.

The horror of vampires and sexuality wasn't so much that they should be ugly and gross, but more of a sexual predator thing and especially a defiance of traditional morality and values. We're not in the Victorian Era so the later doesn't bother people much, and the former doesn't work on a lot of people if its in the context of fiction and said predator is cute.

B-but I like Planescape, even with all of its edgy philosophy 101 BS.

Honestly, just don't use faces of sigil and ignore faction war, and I don't see the problem. I like the idea of carceri in general, I like how the hive is so filthy it has random portals to the paraelemental plane of ooze, I the stupid edgy teen slang, I like the outlands and how the gate towns can shift in and out of their appropriate planes depending on how the town acts

Then again, I'm almost sure I'm mentally retarded

>What makes you say that, user?
A lot of reasons that I don't want to drone on about here. Suffice it to say, I see Fate as the worst aspects of both the narrative and traditional gaming worlds colliding, whilst also miraculously avoiding almost all the primary benefits of both of them.

>Did you draw this lovely chap?
Nope, that was by the dev who did most of the interior art and monster stuff,
my buddy (Miguel). I did the shitty line art space station, after which (or possibly before, I don't know for sure) the cutaways were added which are entirely different from what I drew, the description for which I was given also did not match at all what was in the book. I was also told it would be a minor contribution, not what the "main picture" of the ship would be in the book (they even went so far as to put my shitty sketch in the book MORE THAN ONCE!).
This would be silly enough, except that as a contributing artist I asked to be paid a very modest sum of (if I remember right) $20, as the full-size but still-shitty sketch was quite large originally. Both my friend and the other dev "forgot" about this nominal fee of mine given a couple of weeks, and since then I've never once brought it up out of embarrassment for everyone involved including myself and my "art".

>cont:

>Hey, thanks for all the awesome info
You got it! I'm consistently surprised to hear that people have actually played Abandon All Hope, let alone heard of it (although I know they did do a tiny bit of promotion/sale at a couple cons, but didn't amount to more than two dozen copies or so from what I remember). It's a fun, but strange, little group of people that has coalesced over the years. I ran a few campaigns and played in some with those gentlemen, albeit in circumstances other than those dealing with their own systems (save for a brief Darwin's World game that ended in misery, due to the GM/Dev having secretly implanted a bomb as an 'upgrade' inside one of the cyborg PCs, going off inside a cavern with all of us inside and the GM giving us a sort of shrug and a "so do you want me to retcon that or...?").

>I think the entire book would have been much better if it was just released as a system agnostic book
Absolutely, 100% agreed. The guys actually write pretty compelling fluff, to the point where I described the premise to my dad once as I was doing the art for it and years later he still remembers the core setting concept ("you mean that one with the spaceship that flies into hell?"). I could see them doing a lot with this kind of format.

>Oh, and also the fact you can just manifest 10 more demons just because you're unlucky is just an extremely shitty play mechanic, makes the game feel less horror-y and more meatgrinder-y
Shit yes. Just the worst, and it's ENTIRELY luck-based; whereas fluff-wise, the demons are supposed to be drawn to you because your character is somehow giving into a vice, becoming weaker, going mad, giving into an impulse, etc. but it does not feel like that at all in play. It's like a boardgame. But, it's also the terrible and junky mechanic that helped catalyze our only fun DOOM guy session with our ridiculously broken characters, so I can only truly fault it in its poor execution of intent.

user, liking something that's kinda dumb but fun doesn't make you retarded. Quite the contrary, it makes you non-autistic. I'm very fond of Metal Gear and basically any fighting game. I really enjoy their stories and like their characters and I have fun talking and theorizing about them. But I'm fully aware that they are mostly dumb as fuck and make no sense. Kotal Kahn is still a dope motherfucker to me.

It would be cool if you ditch everything about it:

If there's no social things going on or politics like in Vampire or Changeling, you're just playing Serial-Abuser simulator.

Beasts need to not be right, but they also need a reason to exist besides that. Currently they're walking masses of misery that they willingly spread, even when they're the 'good guys'. They have no prupose but to be dicks.

Beast really needs to work at its cosmology, to provide a reason for Beasts to do what they do.

for example:
Sure they might be dicks, but by feeding suffering and fear into the primordial dream they're keeping something worse at bay. Thus justifying their existense and giving them some kind of pathos.
(Though that's similar to some bits of Mummy)

Just want to remind you the author was a confirmed rapist.

IIRC the doxing rules are on Hurt Locker. They're as bad as you're saying, but get the facts straight.

>Proper hackers use a burner laptop at an internet cafe.
lol, no we don't

a proper hacker knows how to hide its footprints
if they can track you to an internet café you don't know your shit

Who isn't these days?

Kill yourself.

Scion, definitely.

I'm not.

Well you're in luck. A second edition is in the works that will have mechanics that don't utterly break the moment you hit legend 4 this time! Coming out soon(tm)

So what you're saying is that you're an unconfirmed rapist?

Good.

You've gotta be baiting.

Can you go more into depth about this? None of that really happened in any of my planescape games, though maybe I'm just an outlier

It's very dense for a rules light game, encourages players to stick to their good skills and rarely deviate, and it's easy for newer GMs to fuck things up if they aren't careful.

I like the aspect system but the rest of the mechanics aren't that great.

Speaking of neat ideas that really could use a redo, did anything ever become of Cthulhutech 2e? I remember it was in beta at some point.

Basically what my group came up with.

Beasts are apart of a concept that basically goes Reality is a story we tell ourselves.

Beasts know that any good story needs a villian. For game reasons only beasts can do this. But Every good story needs a protagonist.

Beasts find people to make protagonists. Sometimes they fail and kill these people. Other times they do their job too well and make Heroes.

But we basically only play God Machine and Demon so we're never gonna run that.

Its still in Beta last I checked a few months ago.

...

That screen cap leaves out her origin, which says she was an Hispanic teenager who faced bullying for her accent

Even when they made a villain who's every negative stereotype of a Veeky Forums troll they couldn't resist making her a woman of color subjected to racist harassment. Seriously what the fuck is this.

Beast is fucking SJW shit-tier "propaganda". I hate it with a flaming passion. And this is coming from an actual faggot.

Fuck Beast and everyone who wrote for it.

That sounds good, actually.

It's really not hard to make Beast work. Just do essentially anything other than what the creators did with it and you should be good

The problem with Beast as a 'good concept done poorly' is that only a tiny tiny bit of it is good; focusing on fear creating human/monsters with vague links to some kind of metaphysical narrative

The things that make it better, i.e making the Beast more sympathetic, fleshing out the concept of a universal Meta-Narrative, etc is all entirely separate from that core concept.

Basically Beast is shit and I wish OPP would give it another try with some new writers.