What about gaining motes by spending willpower? If there's an existing Charm for that I haven't read it yet, but what's a good exchange rate that way?
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What about gaining motes by spending willpower? If there's an existing Charm for that I haven't read it yet, but what's a good exchange rate that way?
Perfect Strike Discipline lets you gain a full melee excellency for one willpower, so 10m/1wp in that case, but it's a restricted use charm with high prereqs so I wouldn't automatically assume that you could introduce similar effects elsewhere without unbalancing things.
If the ST is using it as a PDF (which is a likely one what with the finished product planned to be a print-on-demand thing, making the PDF the cheaper option) and reading it on a laptop, the reader software might have a search function, like how you can press CTRL+F to search a webpage. I know Adobe Reader has it.
And suddenly I am facing a major conflict of priorities regarding the Dawn I'm building: whether to start with Rising Sun Slash and Hungry Tiger Technique or Peony Blossom Technique and Iron Whirlwind Attack. On the one hand as I develop and improve my artifact weapon over time I plan to mostly focus on alpha strike capability anyways which should make focusing on the multi-target line with my Melee Charms the obvious choice to avoid redundancy... On the other hand assuming I want a "carry all threshold successes over to decisive damage" Evocation at some point it feels kind of hard justify making it Essence 1 when Hungry Tiger Technique is Essence 3 even if I put heavier restrictions on the Evocation, and unless there's a way to get Supernal Evocations I don't know about that's a pretty big roadblock especially when this is for a play-by-post so who knows when or if I'll ever reach Essence 2 at all.:smallsigh:
Help?
When in doubt, go with the Charms that sound cooler! :smallbiggrin:
What do you mean, this isn't a serious response? We're playing Exalted, for Pete's sake!
I'm pretty sure that Supernal Evocations will never be a thing, especially considering the brick wall between Supernal Occult and Sorcery. I'd honestly go for the ones that specialize, since that way you'll never have to worry about spreading yourself too thin.
That's kind of the problem. At first I snatched up Hungry Tiger Technique without even thinking about it because it screams "Giga Drill Break" to me, but then I remembered that Giga Drill Break is specifically what I'm hoping for my Evocations to eventually add up to. And in the meantime Invincible Fury of the Dawn is both freaking cool-sounding and not eventually redundant.
I wouldn't worry about it, honestly. Take Hungry Tiger Technique for now, if that sounds cooler at the moment, and if you happen to roll the dice and be one of the lucky fellows that lands a PbP game that lasts for the years necessary for the redundancy to even come up, you can deal with it then. Assuming that, should that very unlikely event come to pass, the also very unlikely event that your Solar combat monster is somehow rendered a non-functional chump in battle due to one redundant Charm purchase, which they won't be, also happens, I'm sure you can work something out with the Storyteller.
...Wait a second, I've been forgetting this whole time that an artifact's first Evocation is free with attunement. With that slot free all I have to do is drop my one Athletics Charm that's kinda tangential to my concept anyways and I can start with Hungry Tiger and Iron Whirlwind.
HA!
:biggrin:
Incidentally, that also means I need a starting Evocation for my armor.
It doesn't. That said, all of the sample artifacts give some sort of power atop the base artifact stats. For some (Spring Razor, Volcano Cutter) this is a free evocation; for others it's a passive bonus (Freedom's Cadence doesn't count as armor for the purposes of MA/Charms, Adorei offers a slight boost to Accuracy and withering damage if it likes you, Black Razor accumulates bonuses as it draws blood).
Yeah, that's what I meant. I'll be keeping this one as an Evocation for formatting purposes, but I'm pretty sure "changes size" is well within the bounds of a free-with-attunement effect.
I made a withering damage calculator.
Holy crap, Black Claw Style is hilarious.
Unfortunately, while I like all of the Martial Arts styles, nearly every Charm goes ahead to remind me that Terrestrials are probably going to get the unnecessary triple-shaft again this Edition.
But at the very least I think the Terrestrial/Mastery keyword system is tremendously better than 2e's Martial Arts system. Which, isn't saying a lot, but still. I'm very interested to see how Sidereals interact with Martial Arts and if Sidereal Martial Arts function this edition.
New favorite bit of text:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Artful Maiming Onslaught (p550)
In other words, HBO's Tyrion vs. Book Tyrion. :smalltongue:
Seems that only a one or two of Essence 1 Dodge Charms are less than useful for a character whose Parry is two points higher than Evasion, despite my worries. Disengaging is something every combat-focused character will want to do at some point, I presume.
So this was probably already revealed and discussed to death like a year ago, but apparently the new story behind Lunars only having three Castes is that they dismantled their original five themselves and used the pieces to build the current ones. Which I think is pretty darn cool.
The Lunars are supposed to be badasses this edition, so it makes sense that they did something badass.
The Silver Pact has aparently changed to "A lose confederation of Lunars with te same general goal who provide favors and get neew lunars set up with their tats without expecting them to stick around.
Over on Onyx Path I even asked if I could play a Lunar who got his tats and then said "yeah, good luck with all that 'destroying the realm' stuff. Imma go find a bunch of exotic/cool/dangerous critters to test my new powers against/and or take the shapes of" and was told I could.
I believe the point is to encourage specialists and enforce niche protection; lots and lots of minor charms that accumulate to make you bad to the bone, thus encouraging you to keep sinking resources.
Even if that was a worthwhile goal, I can't help but feel half as many charms at twice the cost would have been a far better method of achieving this. I really feel like someone needs to write some guides to the charm trees to help people grok what's out there.
I think part of my objection is probably just my own preference for constant passives over activated powers, but it really is a lot of charms. I almost want to suggest that WW publish them in small, separate caste or Essence level books, not lumped in with the rest of the rules. Sort of like what they did with NWoD, the splats are basically templates applied to the same character generation rules in the core rulebook, just do that with castes. If they don't cost too much, I don't imagine players would object very strongly, if at all.
Do spirits know who prays to them and when?
Yep. Likewise, most Charms require Ability 5 - you can dabble or you can invest deeply, but it seems hard to do something in between. And if you invest deeply, on the way to getting the flashy Charms, you will almost inevitably have to pick up a lot of minor Charms that don't give you any qualitatively new capabilities, but do make you better at what you can already do.
It does seem like 3e is geared to the people who find "I get marginally better outcomes on something I could already do" to be a fun and interesting new power. I have seen a fair bit of discussion about people finding the dice tricks satisfying and enjoyable, getting a rush from "Haha, you think I failed, but I can reroll that with bonuses, this is awesome": it is evidently something some people like.
But I don't feel that way - I mean, in a current 2.5 game, the ST waived Excellency prereqs for Lunars, with the result that I'm playing a Lunar who has no Excellencies at all. I will pretty much always pick Moon and Earth Blessing (allows you to turn a miles-wide patch of even the most inhospitable land fertile for a year; interesting story-shaping Charm that lets you do something genuinely new; completely useless in combat) over a Dexterity Excellency. The Charms that excite and interest me are ones that unlock new capabilities, that change the way my character interacts with the world. I don't mind having dice tricks present for when the thing that's slowing my character down is "can't get enough successes", but the omnipresence of such Charms in 3e mean that you don't really have a choice about taking them.
3e does have some Charms I find intrinsically interesting, but they're typically gated behind lots and lots of less-than-interesting (to me) prerequisites. One of the things I really liked about the Solar charmset in 2.5 was that your low-Essence starting Charms could already give you a set of very powerful and flexible tools. "The most interesting Charms are up a tree with five prerequisites that are either Excellencies or narrow/situational charms of marginal utility" is what the 2e Lunar charmset could be like (I'm looking at you, Implausible Lunar Panoply), and I think every Lunar I've ever played has done sorcery or martial arts as a consequence.
Partly this is because I only ever play Exalted in PbP. My longest-running current game has given us roughly 70XP over three years. This idea of "a new Charm or a new spell every week" is not, in practice, the paradigm I play in. I have to choose Charms very carefully because it will be months before I get another one. In these circumstances, Charms like "you can add +1 to Guile for only 1m rather than 2m!" feel like a kick in the teeth. My criterion for Solar Charms in 2.5 was "I need to be able to envisage how I would use this Charm, and how it would be cool and have an interesting effect on the game", and the nice thing about the Solar charmset was that this criterion gave me plenty of options without having to take too many speed-bump Charms along the way. In 3e I don't feel like that is the case.
At this point I've pretty much just decided I'm not in the target audience for 3e. But that's okay: I'll still have 2.5, and my existing long-running 2.5 campaigns are not pure-Solar games so probably aren't going to convert anytime soon. My entire pattern of reaction to 3e has pretty closely traced my reaction to D&D 4e, so I've been through this before.
(The progression is:
(1) very enthusiastic and active player of previous edition
(2) when new edition is announced, get very excited, follow all rumors (in case of Exalted, also drop a hundred something bucks on the Kickstarter)
(3) get depressed by developers and fans of new edition trashing the previous edition and implicitly criticizing everyone who liked it, and/or by reading statements from developers that shout YOU ARE NOT OUR TARGET AUDIENCE, consequently withdraw from online discussion for a while
(4) rush to get the new book when it comes out / avidly read through backer PDF
(5) ... get the feeling that developers were right, I am indeed not their target audience
(6) play some games to see if this feeling goes away in play. For 4e D&D: I had fun, but the play experience pretty closely matched what I'd expected from reading the book, and I couldn't muster the enthusiasm I'd had for the previous edition.
For Exalted: this is where I am now. I'm in a game and have made a character. I was simultaneously making a character for a 2.5 game, in a splat I've never played before (Infernals), and... yeah, 3e chargen was less fun, because I'm starting with 7ish Charms I don't actually want in order to get the one that I do want, whereas in the 2.5 game it felt like "Aaargh, should I take cool and evocative Charm A, or cool and evocative Charm B? DECISIONS". But we'll see how it plays!)
I would punch a baby for more charms like Moon and Earth Blessing in ex3 (admittedly it was one of my favorites in ex2 as well). One of the reasons why Sorcerous Workings seem to be so attractive is because there's a shedload of things that Charms don't even begin to cover. (It's also, independent of that, a really good subsystem. I kind of suspect all my characters will wind up being sorcerers of some flavor or another just because of the sheer versatility from even Ambition 1 Workings.)