Anatomy of a Failed Design: Beyond the Supernatural

[DrPraetor]

Or... how not to fix Call of Cthulhu. I was reminded that I wanted to do this by some activity in other threads.



A good start would've been not to use the Palladium rules, but I want to keep the material in this failure focused on why it's a failure to fix CoC, with only limited recourse to "Kevin Siembieda is bad at his job". Palladium has 1.5 others games that are fail hybrids (failbrids?) of CoC and Sentai Ftaghn:
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=474870
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=54198

You might also entertain yourself with the following:
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=54297
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=56384
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=485931

[EDIT: Oops, one of those links was wrong.]

[DrPraetor]

First, more preamble.

We want to distinguish failures of design from bad conception. You have a conception - in BtS this is some mashup of Call of Cthulhu and Ghosbusters, among a spectrum of similar influences - which leads you to lay out the types of stories you're going to collectively tell and the challenges the player characters will face. From that conception, you can deduce design goals which you can then (fail to) meet.

So Beyond the Supernatural takes place in the same setting as Rifts, but in the present day. So, there are ley lines and alien dimensions but no super technology or vampire kingdoms or anything like that. Players characters are "investigators", like in Call of Cthulhu, but most of them are psychic.

The implementation varies between the two editions of BtS in many ways, and this makes a tough choice because it's not at all clear that the second edition is superior in design. Furthermore I'm actually more familiar with the first edition. BUT, after some heeing and hawing, I'm going to review the second edition anyway, mainly because it has a somewhat superior presentation.

So, let's get the first design failure out of the way - this is a Palladium game. So, you might be a Genius (your Psychic Character Class) and a Skeptic/Debunker (your Occupation, we'll get to this) - this gives you Anthropology at +15%, and as a Genius you can get an additional +30% in lieu of being telekinetic like the other characters, for total of 85% in Anthropology.

Anthropology. This is the behavioral study of man and other intelligent life-forms and their environments. Studies include societies, customs and beliefs, religions, and political structure, as well as rudimentary history and archaeological background. It is important to note that anthropology is more concerned with the study of modern races and societies than it is with ancient ones. This is especially important when dealing with alien races and cultures in order to avoid accidentally breaking taboos or codes of behavior. It also tells the anthropologist whether he may be dealing with a dangerous people (hate humans, fear technology or magic, are cannibals, worship demons, etc.). The skill can also be used to examine artifacts and ancient or alien ruins to identify the probable people/race, purpose, culture and technological level. The character can identify the period of time the item was used (contemporary or ancient), and whether it is human or alien, but is not skilled enough to tell whether an artifact is authentic or a forgery. Note: The anthropological student is one of the few who is well versed in the myths and legends of the past, and may know a few things about ancient gods, the spirit world, Faerie Folk, dragons, demons and other creatures once thought to have been flights of fancy conjured by the imaginations of primitive people. On the good side, those with a background in anthropology may know things that can help humans communicate with and fight these mythological beings. Base Skill: 40% +5% per level of experience. Bonuses: +5% to all Lore Skills and History.

Oookay - so first the good parts. Skill Ratings in BtS are somewhat higher than in other Palladium games for the same skills - officially, this is because BtS takes place in the well-educated modern world, but I suspect it's because of known failures from CoC. This is much better than Call of Cthulhu, in which not-only are the %s bullshit smaller, but you can't use your History skill because you're supposed to have Inuit Sociology or some such bullshit. In this game, individual skills are inclusive (it is okay for skills to overlap) even though the skill list is long. Nexus and derived games (Feng Shui) use the same conceit, so you have both a Police skill and a Private Investigator skill and if you need to gather evidence you go ahead and use whichever one you have.

On the bad part, 85% is still not that different from 50% ( you need to use the skill 6 times in order to have a 95% probability of succeeding more than half the times you've used the skill, and thus noticing the difference between having 85% and 50%.) So handing out an 85% instead of 55% anthropology skill is really disappointing as a genius PCC super-power.

Since this is an Anatomy of Failed Design and not a review, I'm going to try to keep the Paladium-ology to a minimum, but one thing you notice if you've played Rifts is how much of the setting is derived (often without explanation) from the BtS setting.

[DrPraetor]

In 1988, before X-Files, before The Sixth Sense or the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show, and before Vampire the Masquerade, there was Beyond the Supernatural™. The concepts, at the time, were so new and different that many gamers found themselves at a loss when it came to setting up a campaign. Looking back at it, the original needed more background and setting information as well as a template for setting up adventures.

Oh Kevin, if only you were good at your job!

So credit where credit is due - that is a bitchin' mission statement, which should be tattooed on the inner thigh of whatever Nazi perverts are trying to reboot VtM. Because then we're sure they'll always see it.


But Kevin doesn't mention the giant squid-headed antediluvian horror in the room. Call of Cthulhu has exactly the same problems and it came out in 1981. What follows are 20 pages of mixed exposition and fiction intended to introduce the setting. It's okay? The penis-NPC named Victor Lazlo has too much screen time. I don't have any design problems with it, and:

Gamers ... wonder about the construction and logic behind certain game mechanics, rules and design choices. ... I'm lacing BTS-2 with asides, like this one, that I'm calling Game Designer Notes to share my thoughts and reasoning on why things are the way they are, sort of like the Director's Commentary on DVDs. I hope it helps context and clarify the rules,

These will come up. This particular game designer note continues later with:

Heck, just jotting down all your character's skills and other stats is a pain the neck.

IT'S A SHAME YOU WERE POWERLESS ON THAT FRONT, KEVIN.

As an aside and because he mentions it, Kevin Siembieda is from Detroit and that's why the good guys in Rifts live in Michigan while the post-apocalyptic Nazis are headquartered in Chicago.

Okay, to summarize this part, magic is real, but people have... instincts or government conspiracies or probably both, it's a bit garbled - that prevent them from knowing about it. It's a conceit shared with Mage and I find it very annoying, because in the real world people believe in magic and all kinds of other garbage that doesn't exist; but people who believe in cryptids are probably over-represented among tabletop gamers, so I guess you don't want to piss them off. Demons don't leave behind bodies when killed, that's established. There is a "secret war" against various grades of demons and ghosts and such, who secretly live amongst us and kill people or otherwise be monsters; there are demonic cults that worship them and other anchors that keep them in the physical world.

So while not communicated efficiently, the basic setting structure (that is, the design goal) is at least clear, there is a:

which can be defeated after solving some mystery. The authorities are either unhelpful or in-on-it, and at the end you aren't going to be able to prove it. The characters are mostly psychics or professional paranormal investigators who can very well show up together at the scene because they all read the same newspaper clipping.

That's not bad either.

The next section is on the Psychic World and for the rest of the book, there is a shallow gradient of a higher rules to setting information ratio. But, like all Palladium products there is never a hard barrier. This is a failure of organization but not of design, so I'm going to let it slide for now.

I'm going to close my pre-anatomy by comparing this to Rifts. The default Rifts adventure is The Seven Samurai, only instead of Samurai you are shape-shifting dragons and wookie wizards and magic ninjas and giant robot pilots. So you show up to some border town which can't really pay you and you liberate them from bandits. That's not a bad mashup, and people like it in spite of the gruesome train wreck of the rules.

Beyond the Supernatural has basically the same problems. The game balance isn't as bad (it almost couldn't be), but the mashup is less compelling and the goals are less ambitious. Still, ordinary people get psychic powers and have episodic adventures solving mysteries that let them vanquish different demons is a good pitch and you'll probably enjoy playing it. For this reason, BtS has enjoyed a loyal following for some time.

[DrPraetor]

While hunting for images from the book, I did stumble across the funny, explitive laced review:
http://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-an ... ernatural/

Also, if you care, here is a discussion of whether the supplements for the second edition are ever coming out:
http://palladiumbooks.com/forums/viewto ... view=print
I think the magic sourcebook came out but not the beastiary? This would be a mysterious decision, if true.

But, I remind myself, this is not a review, it is an Anatomy of a Failed Design. For a good design, the challenges (monsters) and the player options need to be jointly optimized. That is, all the players need to have abilities that contribute sorta-fairly to the mix of challenges that they expect to actually face.

Therefore, I'm going to do the Monsters first and then dissect the rest of the book in reverse order, but first I'm going to lay out the very steep issue with party balance in this game. Now, a Rifts party is expected to include both of these guys:


and only one of those characters can render a devastating critique of the racist foundation of neoliberalism, so how is that remotely fair?

In comparison, the extremes of a BtS party aren't so bad:


Since they both have PhDs, although Peter is twice as good because he has two.

The Rifts Conversion book solves this problem by straight-up giving Noam Chomsky mutant superpowers, which are totally different from Magic and Psionics. You're welcome.

But, okay, we're looking at monsters that can challenge a party including Dr. Peter Venkman and Dr. Jean Grey.

The cover also includes a pretty cool party for a game like this. So you might ask - do I want to play Monster of the Week? No you don't it's fucking Bear World. https://www.evilhat.com/home/monster-of-the-week/ https://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55639

So, okay: Monsters.

This opens with... I think this is a design note?

many of the monstrous beings in Beyond the Supernatural™, including predators, delight in tormenting and terrorizing their victims before making a kill. And that, dear readers, is the essence of horror and suspense.

And it keeps going for seven paragraphs about how sadistically evil the monsters are. They're also insidious sociopaths, who like both literal and symbolic darkness (meaning ignorance, fear, etc.).
The monsters have plausible and implausible vulnerabilities. Many are very weak once tracked down and revealed.
Monsters also have a threat level (4, 6 or 10) which is how much of a power boost the forces of good get when confronting them, and a horror factor which we'll get to but replaces a SAN roll.


So... is the design goal that they're scary, and you solve a mystery to catch them? I mean, they're mostly not really, frankly. Oh, also, each monster gets a paragraph about how exactly it turns into dust and blows away when you kill it. After all those paragraphs of how evil they are, we've got:
[*] Banshees, which can see the future and go to where people are going to die. That's pretty creepy, and the penalties they hit you with by creeping you out are actually fairly stiff. But they're not particularly scary, to be honest.
[*] Bogey Men, who are pretty scary, in that they live in abandoned buildings, disguised as hobos, and capture, torture and eat a child every three weeks or so. They're not clever, skilled or intelligent though they have a Brewing skill of 80% for some reason? They're really quite tough in combat, though (note to self - come back to the monster stats when I get to the combat section.) Given the limited resources of these critters it isn't much of a mystery to deal with one.
[*] Boschala are random chimera. It's a sorta cool concept (they look like random mixtures of animal bits because they're trying to blend in, and failing miserably) and they're aggressive predators but also loyal to whomever summons them. They're quite tough in a fight, and they have weird rules for reproducing by melting together, which is gross but again not especially scary. When their pack gets big enough the summoner loses control of them, but they don't attack the summoner?

Discorporation: When slain, the Boschala's body turns into slime that dries to dust and blows away within 1D6 minutes. Analysis of the slime or dust shows it is a simple organic material similar to the composition of a snail.

(expletive deleted) SNAILS ARE MADE OF CELLS WHICH ARE JUST AS COMPLEX AS THE INDIVIDUAL CELLS OF A HUMAN.

I think there's a spell in Rifts that thinks Influenza is a bacterium. Kevin flunks middle school biology

Someone drew a picture of one of these and put it on Deviant Art:


[*] The Brain Borrower is pretty scary - but the brain worms in Wrath of Khan traumatized me as a child. They eat part of someone's brain, anesthetizing the brain (which, minor point, you don't need to do because the brain has no pain receptors) and then puppeting the person around at reduced competence but with some useful psychic powers. Then a few days later they eat the rest of the brain to finish the person off. They're usually agents of bigger baddies, employed as a terror weapon. As brain worms go, they're not the scariest, but okay.
[*] The Dar'Ota is a succubus. They've got, on first inspection, a legitimate skill set to be evil infiltrators and are also fearsome combat monsters once they revert to hideous saurian form. We'll have to talk about the combat in the combat chapter and the skills in the skills chapter to assess whether the Dar'Ota is a successful design. But, one reason I possibly should've reviewed the first edition instead - the Dar'Ota knows spells which are not in this book. This is the picture from the book of the monster form (not the sexy lady form):


[*] The Devil Ghost is pretty freaky looking - it's a winged skeleton with forked insect legs. It's power is dream projection and it's modus operandi is to engage in elaborate confidence games in which it uses clairvoyance and dream projection to trick people into elaborate plots that end up spreading chaos - or sometimes it just gives motivational speeches to serial killers. Killing people in their dreams would be scarrier but we were promised demon manipulators too, so here is one.
[*] Dimensional Ghouls are fairly smart ghouls with some magical powers (especially significant teleportation), who are... mostly harmless? They occasional kill homeless people who are dying anyway, but don't hunt healthy humans. They... like to watch humans engage in "depravity", so that's worth extra gross points. You can force them to carry you through their portals although it does you damage. That's a decent creepy gimmick. I rather like this monster for atmosphere but it does nothing for the design goals.
[*] Dybbuk are a much nastier class of ghoul, which are tanks with superhuman stats that can inhabit recently deceased corpses as a disguise. Unfortunately, it's more silly than scary (it's got four arms), but as a statline for a mashup of pyramid head and the Bug alien from Men in Black it would work. They hate one another but like to be senior henchmen to demon lords with other lesser types of ghoul below them in the org chart... for some reason?

[*] There are five entities presented - that is, purely spectral critters, pseudo-ghosts but not the spirits of dead people. All of them are PPE (spell point) vampires. You have the standard poltergeist, the generic haunter/repeater, the "syphon" - a treasure haunting ghost (which makes whoever owns the item it's servant to try and do evil), the tectonic entity which forms a body out of garbage and tries to murder you for your spell points, and the possessing entity which behaves like the demon from the Exorcist and tries to do as much harm as possible whenever it possesses people. Both the syphon and tectonic entity are cool monsters of the week, I think - the others are meh.

Lots of other Palladium products mention entities without saying what the fuck that's supposed to mean - you have to have read BtS to know that's what Kevin Siembieda calls pseudo-ghosts.

[*] Grave ghouls are totally standard ghouls. Like the more interesting dimensional ghoul, they're not that dangerous and why are they even in this book?
[*] There are Gremlins, which have the powers you'd expect Gremlins to have but don't come from Mogwai (unfortunately). They have significant technical skills and the various technology psi powers which they use "to their maximum potential for destruction and evil".
[*] There are Hell Hounds, which are vicious dogs that fight to the death when... cornered, hurt or angry... so, all the time? They're evil in spite of having normal dog intelligence - frankly, regular rabid dogs would be scarier than these things. Oh, they're immune to non-silver physical attacks, so I guess that matters.

And then the monster lists stops here at H, with an advertisement for their bestiary - http://palladium-store.com/1001/product ... tural.html - that may not be out yet? - with an apology for hitting their page limit.

Well, having a deficient monster list in the basic book is not excusable in a horror game which is really about the monsters, and their editorial decisions are awful because they stopped at H, and included monsters with spells, so as an editing decision it's a trainwreck. They've also got three flavors of ghouls, which is two more than you need. That contributes to a failed design.

So, is this a design success otherwise? Editorial clusterfuck aside, we have to delve into the skills and combat of the monsters further in other chapters, but the biggest problem is the monsters themselves. They are at best okay. This game would've been much better off with the public domain HP Lovecraft monsters, which are creepy, weird and evocative, than with this mix of cheesy urban legends and generic schite. If the Lovecraft monsters are more amoral and you're looking for something more actively evil, there's plenty of inspiration to crib from, from Warhammer demons to plague zombies and no excuse for having a horror RPG in which the core bestiary isn't scary!

Finally, this list of monsters does not give the players a good chance to utilize their mystery-solving or demon-cult-busting skills, with a few exceptions that have magical powers.

A successful design would have only monsters that serve to contain their own plot hooks, and none at all of the monsters which exist only to serve as dispensable combat flunkies of higher level demons that aren't described at all in this book.

Next section, the Lazlo Society.

NOTE: I might edit or expand this part a bit before moving on.

[Username17]

In any Monster of the Week scenario, it's entirely reasonable for one of the monsters of the week to be a conjuror or mastermind whose shtick is that they have a bruiser monster or a pack of lesser monsters that follow their orders. It's entirely reasonable to have trolls and goblins and hell hounds that don't really have much going for them other than as a tactical challenge. Provided of course that you establish that their position in the story is to be a minion rather than the main villain.

But unless you're going the full D&D, there's no reason to have three tiers of Ghouls. Like, it's one thing if you actually intend to have a leveled game that genuinely has three tiers of lots of things and a big monster manual, but that's not what BtS was about so there's no justification for that. Especially if they were going to cut the monster listings for space.

-Username17

[Nebuchadnezzar]

Neither of the BTS expansions were published and, at more than a decade out, I believe have the longest pre-order period in the PB catalog. In that the magic book would just be cribbing of Nightbane's version of invocation magic it seems that refunds would yet again be in order.

[DrPraetor]

it's entirely reasonable for one of the monsters of the week to be a conjuror or mastermind whose shtick is that they have a bruiser monster or a pack of lesser monsters that follow their orders... But unless you're going the full D&D, there's no reason to have three tiers of Ghouls. ... Especially if they were going to cut the monster listings for space.

-Username17

To clarify what I was saying above: if you only have space for 14-18 monsters (depending on how you count), every one should support a story on it's own, which means you don't have space for flunky monsters. And, if you are going to include some flunky monsters, you need maestros for them to enflunk, and they really aren't any. The only greater demon in this book is the Tectonic Entity, and it's a bruiser itself that furthermore lacks the intelligence to have flunkies. On other hand, if you did have unlimited space, go ahead and have three flavors of Ghouls.

At the risk of never finishing this thing, in the sake of fairness I'm going to skip between editions for material.

Banshee (H .F. 14)
Boschala (H.F. 18)
Burrowers (H .F. 12)
Dar'ota (H.F. 15)
Dimensional Ghoul (H.F. 12)
Dybbuk (H.F. 14)
Entity: Poltergeist (H.F. 10)
Entity: Syphon (H.F. 10)
Entity: Haunting (H.F. 14)
Entity: Tectonic (H.F. 14)
Entity: Possessing (H.F. 10)
Garkain (H.F. 14)
Gargoyle (H.F. 16)
Gurgoyle (H.F. 14)
Grave Ghoul (H.F. 12)
Gremlin (H.F. 10)
Hell Hounds (H.F. 16)
Malignous (H.F. 16)
Nacarant (H.F. 17)
Sowki (H.F. 14)
Spider Demon (H.F. 16)
Tokolosh (H.F. 12)
UFOnaut (H .F. 9)
Werewolf (H .F. 12)

Elementals (H.F. 12)
Goqua (H .F. 18)
Mindolar (H.F. 16)
Vampires (H.F. 14)
Ancient Gods and Demigods (H.F. 18)

The design goals of the 2nd edition monster list is that we want to defeat the big bad by solving a mystery, by discovering it's weaknesses, or by unmasking it's conspiracy or cult. The 1st edition doesn't make it clear that this is what the monster list is going to support, while the 2nd edition doesn't have enough support for any of those.

So the first edition also had:
[*] The Garkain which is... a human-looking but animal-intelligence winged thing, that flies around and eats people.
[*] Gargoyles, which are... dumb winged lizardmen who fly around and kill people (Gurgoyles don't have wings.)
[*] The malignous, which possesses ordinarily bugs and transforms them into giant monsters. It has animal intelligence.

Unfortunately not.

[*] The Nacarant, which absorbs people and add them to it's body, growing bigger each time. It's made of red slime so it's sorta the blob.
[*] The Sowki would actually support the mystery solving aspect, since it uses illusions to disguise itself as a human and then acquires flunkies and otherwise does evil. It's a three-eyed snake dude that is super-arrogant.
[*] Spider Demons, which like to have cults. They know lots of spells are care a lot about hording magical knowledge, which they use to manipulate human minions.

No, unfortunately.

[*] The Tokolosh is a dangerous-because-it's-playful-and-stupid sea serpent thing, the UFOnaut is actually benevolent.
[*] The Werewolf is a wolf-demon that can disguise itself as a human, but isn't clever or subtle enough to fake humanity for very long and thus doesn't really support a mystery.

[*] Elementals are powerful and dangerous because the have no regards for humans, but don't engage in evil plots on their own. They do possess people or objects in order to stay on earth, so I suppose that's a mystery/weakness.
[*] Goqua and Mindolar.

The goqua is a hideous creature that resembles a demonic slug or hellish larva in a pupal state.
...
The mindolar are giant slug-like beings which can be summoned from another dimension by men of magic.

So why these two monsters?
The goqua is bigger (10x as many hit points) and has both spells and psionics, the mindolar is still plenty big and has a mind controlling bite. Goqua are evil and enjoy toying with humans in elaborate games; mindolar are evil but hate being here and will perform services in order to get sent back to their own dimension. So the mindolar "weakness" is that it will cooperate if you try to banish it.
The goqua supports mysteries pretty well.
But even with an expanded monster list, that's too many slugs. Thematically, the only real difference between them is their personality.

This image shows up if you google either monster

[*] Palladium Vampires are essence fragments/flunkies of the Master Vampire, who is in turn a pawn of a Vampire Intelligence, which is a special category of alien intelligence and doesn't need stats because they never show up (?). The lesser vampires have wide-ranging damage invulnerability but are otherwise disposable mook vampires like in Dusk 'til Dawn. So it's the classic vampire mystery where you have to unmask and destroy the original vampire. Vampire intelligences are later retconned to be more like other supernatural intelligences:

(and the minor vampires got an upgrade in competence so you could at least talk to them.)
Anyway, given the minor vampires are animals and can't be cured, this isn't a satisfying mystery, although I suspect the second edition would have gone with the Rifts version.

[*] Supernatural Intelligences are evil gods, who look like generic Lovecraft monters with lots of eyes and tentacles and stuff. They make witches who have magical powers and have demon familiars disguised as animals.

[*] Finally we get random generators for arcanist cults, and random generators for monsters. Notably, the random generator for arcanist cults couldn't have been used in the second edition because the second edition doesn't have the rules for magic, either.

We also get five pregenerated adventures but if we're talking about second edition as a failed design, was this smart stuff to remove? Do these monsters support the stated goals of providing interesting challengs for characters who:
[*] Investigate mysteries
[*] Study monster weaknesses
[*] Unmask cultists?
Well, the first edition had at least some rules for cultists, and a few more monsters who might engage in a plot which could in turn be a mystery, but overall the support is poor. We can dig into the design failures more if I ever make it to the skills section. As for the second edition, the choice of which monsters to remove (and/or the laziness not to replace them with similar monsters that only use psionics) is a real failure of design, especially as the second edition spends all these pages in laying out the detailed backstory of this Lazlo guy and has all this in-universe fiction (which, note to self, I need to compare editions and see if the stats for the participants have vanished.)

As for the other removed stuff, I'll cover that next-post. Since the stated goal of the new edition was to provide people with more guidance in how to actually play the game, the choice not to include any sample adventures is a particularly strong design failure.

[Shrapnel]

That slug thing is totally a mutant opabinia.