YMMV / Beast: The Primordial

• Broken Base: The game earned a lot of controversy, even back when only the playtest versions and developmental teasers were revealed:
  • The Begotten's mythical background and claiming other monsters as their kin has led to complaints that their personal mythology lacks identity and is a bit overbearing. This was partially addressed with the rework since the early editions.
  • A very vocal complaint accusing the designers of shoehorning a ham-handed "minorities vs. oppressors" and/or "intolerance is morally wrong" motif into the game design via the Beast/Hero conflict.
    • Often made worse by observations that, if this is the case, it's a fundamentally Broken Aesop, since Beasts are monsters and do terrorize people just by existing. Although it should be noted that Heroes are created by — and find it easier to locate — Beasts with consistently low Satiety. I.e., the ones who have done less to victimize people in order to feed and have held off feeding for so long that they have starved their Soul and forced it to go hunting on its own. Beasts who indulge in their hunger, on the other hand, are less likely to trip the Hero's radar.
  • Early versions of the backer draft seemed to focus heavily on Have You Tried Not Being a Monster?, with many people reading Beasts as an allegory for the LGBTQ+ community... which many readers felt did not read well given the intensely harmful and destructive nature of Beasts. The authors revised it to remove this implication (among other changes), saying it was unintentional, but in general the changes led to a further multi-way Broken Base between those who felt the changes adequately addressed the initial complaints, those who felt it didn't go far enough, those who felt the changes were unnecessary in the first place, and those who felt the changes entirely missed the point.
  • One Broken Base began because some people had bought into Beast specifically because they saw it as relevant to such issues, which the rework seemed to have toned down. Where previously a human became a Beast by accepting the Beastly Soul they always had, coming into touch with their true nature, now they agree to have their souls devoured and replaced by a Beastly Horror. The game has a middle ground, however; it's not unheard of for Beasts to find their Horror as their true selves without guidance, and In-Universe Beasts debate whether they were always that way or not. Players are free to choose either approach.
  • Then there's the argument of whether Beasts' new cultural belief that their purpose of teaching wisdom through fear is a great way to make them relatively productive members of society while feeding their Hunger, or just gives them a new mandate to hurt people. The argument tends to skirt around the fact that Beasts can get feed their Hunger by simply watching another supernatural feed their own "hunger", such as a Changeling gathering Glamour from someone, and that other supernaturals (such as vampires and werewolves) can be far more lethal in feeding their own Horror Hunger. This actually gets discussed in-universe with The Union blurb comparing this to mundane abusers "teaching" in the same way.
• Critical Backlash: The game attracted considerable backlash, especially early on; some of the reasons (especially the Have You Tried Not Being a Monster? issues) were specific to early drafts and were later addressed.
• Designated Hero: One of the core criticisms of this splat is that Beasts make a pretense to being a positive force for humanity due to the "teaching lessons" motive that some of them purportedly share. The thing is that Beasts are creatures of primordial nightmare, but most of them do not act like The Cowl or the Terror Hero. The fluff around them also includes a great deal of Disproportionate Retribution and Evil Is Petty moments, making most Beasts look like violent and frankly evil people, several fluff examples in the core book were effectively serial killers. Their "crossover friendliness" basically amounts to all other splats (except demons) inexplicably liking them, obliging them, and acknowledging them as first among equals if not superiors by virtue of being the "elder" type of supernaturals even if this makes no sense with a splat's own lore.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Many readers accuse the game itself of giving Beasts this treatment; especially in earlier drafts, it went out of its way to excuse Beasts and demonize Heroes, despite describing situations that made the Beasts come across as abusive.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Nemeses seem to be the most popular Hunger among fans, seeing how it's the easiest to channel in a positive way.
• Fanfic Fuel: Beasts have an entire set of rules specifically designed to cooperate with other supernaturals in order to encourage crossovers, which can be fun to try adapting to fan supplements. After all, wouldn't you be interested in how Beasts would interact with Geniuses, Princesses or Leviathans?
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Many of the criticisms this game gets were actually aimed at the earlier preview, and were either removed or toned down in the final version of the book, yet fans still complain about them when listing the reasons they dislike this game. Most notably:
  • Heroes being Beasts' victims who got transformed by the abuse they suffered has long been dropped in favor of making them people with a sensitivity to the disturbances of the Primordial Dream, and they no longer are all narcissistic irredeemable sociopaths with low Integrity; in fact, Conquering Heroes features several with high Integrity and who never got abused by Beasts before they got their abilities. Yet detractors still usually think of their earlier version when they complained about them being Strawmen and Designated Villains.
  • While the infamous "teaching Lessons" was added later through rewriting, the final version of the book makes it clear not all Beasts adhere to this way of thinking, that some just use it as an excuse, and that it doesn't necessarily make them in the right (one of the texts in the book involves a mummy questioning whether humans even still need to learn these lessons at this point and suggest Beasts are just Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life).
  • In general, Beasts being Designated Heroes. The final draft of the book admits that while the book is focused on their perspective, and as such tries to portray them as sympathetic, they can sometimes really be evil, and neither them nor Heroes are necessarly right — at the end of the day, it's up to the players if they want to play their characters as straight villains or Reluctant Monsters.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In the Hunter: The Vigil splatbook for Beast, a Hunter explicitly compares Beasts' attitude that their need to feed is perfectly natural and that they're doing their victims a favor anyway to a neighborhood elementary school teacher who had molested him and others as a child, possibly echoing concerns of real-life detractors about the game line. Beast's head writer, Matt McFarland, was later fired by Onyx Path and RPGnet in the wake of child molestation charges.
• Jerkass Woobie: Beasts and Heroes. To wit:
  • Beasts are a race of mythical monsters in human skin, and even from birth have the urge to dominate, destroy, and devour. That instinct comes packaged with a human conscience, and even after Devouring and their imminent acceptance they've never been really human, it remains. To make it worse, following their urges actually is the best option, as if they don't feed, their Horror will take the initiative and Mind Rape humans in their dreams, whether the Beasts themselves want it or not. Quite simply, they're what happens when an Always Chaotic Evil species is aware of what they are, and hate it.
  • Heroes are (usually) psychotic (always) narcissists who will cheerfully ignore logic, reality, and common sense if it means they were always right all along. They got this way because, frankly, being a Hero is all they have; before they picked up the quest, they were fundamentally broken individuals who were so desperate to have a self-identity that "killing monsters that look like people" was about the only thing that could let them not be themselves. Some Heroes are genuine villains and entitled brats with guns, but the majority, as mentioned in the Storytelling chapter, should come with an incredible dose of ambivalence for this person who has no lines he won't cross, and yet desperately needs you (you being a Beast, who likely created him) to feel some sense of worth.
• Paranoia Fuel: Anyone around a Beast can potentially become a Hero, including relatives and loved ones. Both the main rulebook and Conquering Heroes provide multiple examples of Beasts whose best friends, lovers, or family members turned Heroes and almost immediately tried to kill them on the spot, no matter how good their relationships previously were: Marian Jones immediately went from loving, perfect Housewife to trying to murder her son the moment her transformation happened; and Daniel Greene immediately killed his beloved boyfriend upon his.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: After complaints about Heroes being too one-dimensional and Unintentionally Sympathetic, the final version of the book retooled them to clarify not all of them were self-imbued sociopaths, and Conquering Heroes explored what makes them a bit more, giving them depth and complex sample characters in the process. Many fans are starting to feel their concept has officially been redeemed compared to earlier drafts.
• Ron the Death Eater: In tandem with the accusations of Draco in Leather Pants towards Beasts, readers often accuse Heroes of getting this treatment.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The ability to feed vicariously through other supernaturals is fairly broken in game lines where gaining points of their "fuel" stat is meant to take effort and entail risk. The fact that the Beast needs no consent or even awareness of its presence only compounds the issue.