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Message: <blockquote data-quote="VelvetViolet" data-source="post: 9837983" data-attributes="member: 6686357">A lot of my initial criticisms are undoubtedly kneejerk reactions that I would change my mind on after time to cool down and reflect. Other times, I don't change my mind from my initial reaction but instead become better able to articulate and defend it. I'll give an example of the latter.When the second edition of Chronicles of Darkness came out and introduced the God-Machine Chronicle, myself and others were skeptical of the god-machine concept and what it tried to accomplish. The writers were aiming for emulating Call of Cthulhu, but myself and others felt they didn't do a good job and hamstrung themselves by writing lolrandom stuff like (paraphrasing) "the God-Machine wants humans to mine more uranium! Or maybe it doesn't? Who knows! We'll leave it up to the GM." It sounds like they were simultaneously indecisive and trolling their audience. (Some writers literally admitted they trolled their audience, so...) I lost interest in the games due to this disagreement and the cyberbullying explosion caused by the 20th anniversary releases, so I left around that point and didn't think about it again for years.Years and years later, I bought and read Midnight World and it showed me exactly what I was looking for. It took the concept for the god-machine and improved upon it in every way. In that game, there are numerous "corpse universes" floating across the multiverse playing host to "dread beings" with their own themes and motivations. The titular midnight world has the misfortune of being thin-skinned, so the dread beings can send agents to invade and spread their agendas. This neatly fixes all the problems with the god-machine concept. The dread beings have defined goals (alien as they may be to us), they have defined themes and aesthetics to distinguish them, and there's an infinite number of them all operating at cross-purposes. The problem with the god-machine is that it tried using a single dread being equivalent to cover all of that conceptual space at once, so of course the execution fell flat for me. While the PCs don't need to know that there is more than one dread being and thus might not notice a difference, for GMs I think this design makes way more sense.YMMV. Ultimately all art, enjoyment of art, and criticism of art is subjective, but the customer is always right in matters of taste.</blockquote>

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