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  1. - Top - End - #961
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion II: No Longer Mortal

    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
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    How do you want her to fight? Hungry Ghost Style up to the form and making lots of unexpected attacks is an option, perhaps adding Charm-Smothering Technique and Scuttling Apparition Defense; appearing and disappearing constantly, slipping away from attacks, suddenly springing forward to stab party members in the back, etc.
    Focusing on Melee and doing a lot of debuffing/ crippling also works. Artful Maiming Onslaught, Soul-Cleaving Wound, Thieving Raiton Claws, Foe-Blinding Jab, maybe Time-Scything Technique and other Solar melee mirrors to attack multiple party members in general Solar-ish style.
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    Truth be told, I'm not sure if I'll go Melee or Martial Arts yet; I know I want her to have some ranged capabilities, and some hand-to-hand capabilities, enough of each to be scary without necessarily wiping the party.
    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
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    Unseen Wisp Method is always handy.
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    That it is. Not sure if I want to invest that much into Stealth, however...
    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
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    Eternal Enmity Approach towards Solars is tempting, but there's a better way. That way is Blood Before Surrender. When her father tries to persuade her to come home with him, blood gushes out of her ears. Or she starts to nod yes then seizes up, vomits blood at him, and yells "NO!" Or just crumples as if in severe pain at his arguments.
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    I actually went with Lesser Horrors Scorned already, but that does sound fun...
    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
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    Morbid Fascination Style + [insert horrific performance here]. Combo it with Withering Phantasmagoria for something that's not just sickening but physically agonizing to watch, but you can't stop watching.
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    Trouble there being that they can spend one Willpower to ignore that compulsion, roll Join Battle, and have it no longer be a problem. But I did still go with the idea of her using Performance.
    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
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    Depending on your group and the character's age...
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    Physically, ten years old. Actual age, twelvish.
    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
    You don't want "Agh, the DM is creepy."
    When you're right, you're right.
    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
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    If she's young, Maelstrom-Weathering Indifference and skipping cheerfully through a blizzard singing to herself is nicely creepy.
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    Humorously enough, I did in fact go with that Charm already...
    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
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    Dark Paths Found and Ghost Leaves No Trail are useful if you want her to get away and be a recurring villain, but by no means necessary; she can always use Necromancy to flee to the Underworld, or escape by fiat.
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    Indeed, an escape plan will probably be handy, just in case...

  2. - Top - End - #962
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion II: No Longer Mortal

    Quote Originally Posted by TheCountAlucard View Post
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    Truth be told, I'm not sure if I'll go Melee or Martial Arts yet; I know I want her to have some ranged capabilities, and some hand-to-hand capabilities, enough of each to be scary without necessarily wiping the party.
    Try this? Sure, it's temporary, but it's an option.
    Quote Originally Posted by Deophaun View Post
    It doesn't so much as demean the celestial monkey's existence, so much as fulfill it. Without the ability to be summoned to set off traps, retrieve objects from dangerous situations, and all and all be a party's guinea pig, the Celestial Monkey would languish in obscurity in the MM and do nothing more legendary than eat celestial bananas.
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  3. - Top - End - #963
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion II: No Longer Mortal

    Quote Originally Posted by Reynard View Post
    Try this?
    Truth be told, I'd like to avoid Dawn Solution for now; having a tough enough time trying to integrate the heaps of errata we've got as it is...

  4. - Top - End - #964
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion II: No Longer Mortal

    Quote Originally Posted by TheCountAlucard View Post
    Truth be told, I'd like to avoid Dawn Solution for now; having a tough enough time trying to integrate the heaps of errata we've got as it is...
    You know all the errata is compiled into an easy to use PDF with bookmarks and links, right?

  5. - Top - End - #965
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion II: No Longer Mortal

    Thank Sol for Plague of Hats.

  6. - Top - End - #966
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion II: No Longer Mortal

    Quote Originally Posted by Mikal View Post
    You know all the errata is compiled into an easy to use PDF with bookmarks and links, right?
    And that PDF has how many pages? 3rd Edition can go **** itself, give me 2nd Revised!
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  7. - Top - End - #967
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion II: No Longer Mortal

    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
    For my part, I have some thoughts; mostly I'd like it to be more like NWoD, except with lethality turned down a lot.

    *NWoD Attributes
    *Same Abilities as Exalted currently has (though I'd appreciate it if they'd call them Skills instead of Abilities)
    *Martial arts should work like fighting styles in NWoD, where you can only use weapons with their normal ability (Throwing for a throwing martial art, Melee for a daiklave martial art, etc), though Martial Arts prereqs on top of Throwing, Melee, etc. prereqs makes sense.
    *No Flurries. Extra actions should mostly be a function of higher-level combat charms, or Athletics charms that let you move instantaneously, or suchlike.
    *I have no position on whether it would be better to stay with ticks or switch to turn-based
    *Simplify attack resolution. Granted, the 10-step system is really like 7 steps in practice, but seriously. Have DVs reduce the attack dice pool instead of being rolled against. Get rid of rerolls as a commonly encountered thing. The damage system will require significant rejiggering so that it's not just "Bigger weapons are pretty much always better" like in NWoD, but I'm confident that it's doable.
    *Soak should stay in some form, being so tough that swords bounce off of you is important. Not sure whether ping should stay or be dropped.
    *Piercing. Piercing probably should not be a thing, and it definitely should not be a thing that high-damage weapons can easily have.
    *Death should be less likely than incapacitation. Consider charms that cap the number of health levels someone can lose in a single attack, and possibly make it so that you always have to damage someone again to finish them off after incapacitating them.
    I agree to these points as is.

    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
    *Health levels. Everyone needs more of them, and they need to scale automatically as you get more powerful. At minimum, give Exalts [Stamina+Essence] health levels over what mortals get.
    More health levels, yes, but also lower damage. As I see it, one-shotting Exalts should be possible, but it shold require more than a big hammer and an Excellency. It's a balance there.

    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
    *Either flatten or invert the death spiral. This is an epic fantasy setting with anime influences. Fights should get awesomer as they go on. Possibly eliminate wound penalties for Exalts (so all their health levels are -0), probably have a system where some charms are cheaper or even only available after losing a certain amount of health levels.
    Indeed. While I can see the point of such a system in other games, Exalted doesn't benefit from wound penalties. Also, paranoia combat never encounters them at all. Why have redundant mechanics?

    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
    *Combos. Combos should be about glorious attacks, not about quickly buffing or being impossible to damage. I'm not sure whether they should stay at all, but if they do they need to be about offense. I'd rather just dump the one-charm-per-action thing and maybe add a 1wp surcharge for using multiple charms on a single attack, with the surcharge removed for a particular combination if you spend xp for it.
    I personally think the Overdrive approach is a wonderful solution to this problem. Overdrive should be made part of baseline Exaltation, not work as charms, becuse it's in every Exalt's nature to do ridiculous stuff like that. It could also be codified to work with social combat or similar. In any case, the design that fighting longer gives you more power is entirely in keeping with Exalted aestetics.

    Also, there needs to be more stages that "one charm activation" and "no charm activation", much like D&D has free, swift, standard and full-round actions. The current system has the same price on picking your sword up fast as being immortal for one attack: one charm activation. There need to be more depth to the action economy.

    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
    *Perfects. After playtesting and making extremely certain that lethality was down to reasonable levels, make perfect defenses more expensive (either with mote costs or, preferably, making them all cost 1wp). Perfect attacks should cost about as much as PDs, so you have a way to get at people with enormous DVs. Perfects must not be so cheap that it's ever sensible to use one on every attack. It might be reasonable if almost every Celestial-level fight has a phase where every attack is a PA blocked with a PD until both parties run out of juice and the actual fight begins, but I'd rather not see that.
    Personally, I think perfects should be the last-line solution. Only in cases where it's entirely certain that getting hit will equal game over should perfects be a viable option. I think that forcing an Exalt to use a perfect should be a victory in itself, and every time the Exalt perfects he should swear to himself because he was pushed to that limit. Spamming perfects are for when Solars stand against Primordials and similar, not against a Dragon-Blooded with a Grand Killstick and an Excellency.

    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
    *Have a straightforward social combat system that works mostly like the physical combat system; but it should definitely be more difficult to brainwash people than to beat them up. Integrating their timescales would be good, so a character with strong social-fu can persuade someone to spare him, taunt to create an opening, and even convince someone to switch sides in-combat if he's really good at it (like, starting Solar talking to an Extra, or Essence 5 Solar talking to E2 Dragon-Blood).
    Yes, indeed. The current social system is perfect-or-die by design, the only difference being that the perfect is supplied by the system, it's the willpower cost to ignore mental influence. This needs to be tuned down in "lethality" and we need to put "health levels" on Intimacies and such (it's possible we already have that; I read somewhere that they Intimacied can have a level of strength equal to your Conviction, but that is not used or references anywhere else that I know of, and the book doesn't even tell you what level they start at from char gen).

    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
    *Also a mental combat system, because arguing about obscure lore, playing board games, navigating or tying up a bureaucracy, economic warfare, etc. shouldn't just be matters of DM fiat.
    What do you mean here?

    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
    *Also good support for non-violent physical competition, like racing.
    That's something I'm uncertain about, because having particular rules for small sub-systems makes the game messy. to the greatest possible extent, the rules should seek to be as encompassing and simple as possible.
    Last edited by Weimann; 2011-02-25 at 10:38 AM.
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  8. - Top - End - #968
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion II: No Longer Mortal

    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
    *Have a straightforward social combat system that works mostly like the physical combat system; but it should definitely be more difficult to brainwash people than to beat them up. Integrating their timescales would be good, so a character with strong social-fu can persuade someone to spare him, taunt to create an opening, and even convince someone to switch sides in-combat if he's really good at it (like, starting Solar talking to an Extra, or Essence 5 Solar talking to E2 Dragon-Blood).
    I'd like to point out that there actually is a good reason why social combat and regular combat aren't allowed to coexist under the current rules (Whether this is the actual motivation behind the seperation is debatable).

    As is, there are alot of minimum requirements to be a competent combatant in Exalted. You pretty much must have a maxed out attack Ability, maxed Dexterity, have a good weapon (perfect mundane weapon or an artifact weapon), have an Excellency for your preferred method of combat, Infinite (Ability) Mastery for said method of combat, a Perfect Defense, a suprise negator Charm, an anti-shaping Charm, and a Combo of at least that Excellency, the suprise negator, and the Perfect Defense. You also practically need Willpower 10 to sustain this method of combat. That's already alot of stuff practically assumed by the system just so you don't die and can penetrate your opponent's defense once he finally runs out of motes.

    If you allowed a fighter-type to be talked out of combat by more than pure roleplaying, then you have to add maxed Integrity and a perfect social defense like Elusive Dream Defense or Sagacious Reading of Intent to this already overloaded combat package, else a good social combatant will have a defense that you cannot penetrate and you become useless as a warrior.

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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion II: No Longer Mortal

    What do you mean here?
    Basically a system for having battles of wits when you either don't want to just RP it or want the result to be rooted in the mechanics. E.g. making opposed War rolls for playing chess Gateway, perhaps adding some social combat with some Manipulation rolls to set traps or Presence rolls to psych him out. Or trying to get successes on a series of Lore checks equal to someone's Resolve to convince him you know more than him, with his successes subtracting from yours or with him trying to get successes equal to your Resolve first. Or making Bureaucracy rolls with a Wealth-related bonus to try to outcompete a rival's company and force them into bankruptcy. Or Bureaucracy rolls to jam up a Realm military base so that they're too busy arguing over payrolls to send anyone out to find the Anathema. Stuff like that.
    I'm not sure it needs a full system like physical and social combat do, but I'd really

    That's something I'm uncertain about, because having particular rules for small sub-systems makes the game messy. to the greatest possible extent, the rules should seek to be as encompassing and simple as possible.
    I'm thinking something similar to the Chase rules in NWoD, where both parties roll [Athletics, Ride, Sail, whatever] and whoever gets to a certain threshold wins.
    E.g. in a foot race you might have to get your opponent's Speed in successes before he gets your Speed in successes. Or both of you try to get to a certain number of successes based on the length of the race, and your Speed gives you a bonus.
    Or for something like a basketball game, both of you try to get to a certain number of successes first, those successes representing points; in a team game, each team tries to get to a certain total, and some team members can use their actions to remove successes from an opponent (like blocking shots, etc) instead of trying to score more themselves.
    Environmental obstacles can happen, Charms may be used, other skills may become necessary [e.g., a plesiosaur pops up in the middle of a boat race, and you have to fight it off while trying to maintain your lead], etc.
    Nothing very complex or specific, just a system that lets you resolve contests non-arbitrarily and throw complications into them if you want.
    Quote Originally Posted by Thespianus View Post
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion II: No Longer Mortal

    One of the few merits of Exalted's mechanics is that you can usually improvise exactly what you want with only a little thought. Look at those race rules you seem to want. You just laid out an extended contested (Dexterity+<relevant ability>) roll with a varied difficulty for each person. That is already contained in the rules! No complicated subsystem needed, just a basic outline and some stunts. As long as you set the required threshold at a decent level (I hate the way the rules default to only 3 successes in a game system where your dice pools are in the 20-30 range), your players won't care that they aren't using the Athletics Combat Subsystem 2.5.

    Gateway is actually mentioned in at least one place as an extended opposed (Intelligence + War) roll. IIRC there are even a few modifiers, but the game is intentionally left vague so you can stunt your plays to fit the situation. If you want to run a trivia challenge or a test of riddles, then an opposed extented (Int + Lore) roll sounds like the way to go.

    As for your mental combat idea, I'll be blunt and tell you that I think it sucks. When it comes to knowing things, you either know them or you don't. Opposed Intelligence+Lore rolls won't make you smarter or him dumber, nor will they make him more likely to accept your superior intellect. Social rolls are how you convince people of things.

    However, I will agree that Exalted does need true Mass Social Combat rules. I'm not talking about the stupid "convince everyone who is present at a scene of something" Mass Social Combat that we currently have. I'm talking about the sociopolitical and economic interactions between companies, political factions, and even entire cities that is supposed to be represented by the Mandate of Heaven rules but that fail miserably at their job.

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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion II: No Longer Mortal

    I know at least one merit gives you, among other things, the ability to make a Wits+War roll to gain some sort of advantage in Gateway.
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion II: No Longer Mortal

    Quote Originally Posted by Kyeudo View Post
    I'd like to point out that there actually is a good reason why social combat and regular combat aren't allowed to coexist under the current rules (Whether this is the actual motivation behind the seperation is debatable).
    Sorry I didn't address this in my last post. It's definitely an issue, and I see three main solutions to it.
    1) Make it much harder to talk people into submission in combat than out of combat. Impose a heavy situational penalty for trying to do so and leave it at that, or put a limit on how much you can affect someone's behavior during combat (exactly what form that would take depends a lot on the final social combat system). The problem is balancing it so social actions in combat are neither useless nor unstoppable.
    2) Make combat-readiness and social-readiness have decent overlap. Going with the NWoD ruleset, Resolve and Composure give you Willpower and help you resist things. So both a fighter and a social-fu guy will have them at good levels. However, "You must have everything on this list to survive, and you do not have these things by default" results in boring cookie-cutter characters. I don't want everyone to need 5 Resolve and 5 Composure to stand a chance.

    Quote Originally Posted by Kyeudo View Post
    One of the few merits of Exalted's mechanics is that you can usually improvise exactly what you want with only a little thought. Look at those race rules you seem to want. You just laid out an extended contested (Dexterity+<relevant ability>) roll with a varied difficulty for each person. That is already contained in the rules! No complicated subsystem needed, just a basic outline and some stunts. As long as you set the required threshold at a decent level (I hate the way the rules default to only 3 successes in a game system where your dice pools are in the 20-30 range), your players won't care that they aren't using the Athletics Combat Subsystem 2.5.
    On further thought, yeah. I'm trying to put things that are really easy to think of a way to handle on the spot into formal rules, which is stupid.

    As for your mental combat idea, I'll be blunt and tell you that I think it sucks. When it comes to knowing things, you either know them or you don't. Opposed Intelligence+Lore rolls won't make you smarter or him dumber, nor will they make him more likely to accept your superior intellect. Social rolls are how you convince people of things.
    That's fair. I can't say you're wrong.

    However, I will agree that Exalted does need true Mass Social Combat rules. I'm not talking about the stupid "convince everyone who is present at a scene of something" Mass Social Combat that we currently have. I'm talking about the sociopolitical and economic interactions between companies, political factions, and even entire cities that is supposed to be represented by the Mandate of Heaven rules but that fail miserably at their job.
    Yeah. Mostly what I want is a Bureaucracy system, something for interacting with and managing large organizations. However, I can't think of how to approach making a system that works for a range of large-scale tasks, like expanding a business, making yourself influential in a big organization (other than just spending xp on Backing), fighting a plague (on a management level, not just going house-to-house using Medicine charms on everyone), etc.
    What's needed here is probably a set of suggestions and guidelines rather than a rigid system.
    Quote Originally Posted by Thespianus View Post
    I fail to see how "No, that guy is too fat to be hurt by your fire" would make sense.

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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion II: No Longer Mortal

    A thought on the "third edition" topic:

    Rather than making or remaking systems for things, you could try doing the opposite - designing guidelines to make as many things as possible fall under the Attribute+Ability mechanic.

    For instance, social combat. Rather than the intricate Social Combat rules meant to mirror standard combat rules (frankly, I disregard them entirely in favor of roleplaying), run two concurrent contested rolls - each person's offensive roll against the other person's defensive one, appearance and other factors providing modifiers as appropriate. Whichever player hits the threshold first achieves their goal in the social combat.

    Heck, you could do the same with the _combat_ rules - devise guidelines for how non-roll combat mechanics (soak/hardness, minimum damage, speed, perfects) modify the two concurrent contested rolls, and reduce the combat mechanic itself to the same elegant mechanic that already governs the vast majority of the game.
    Last edited by Indon; 2011-02-25 at 05:21 PM.

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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion II: No Longer Mortal

    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
    Yeah. Mostly what I want is a Bureaucracy system, something for interacting with and managing large organizations. However, I can't think of how to approach making a system that works for a range of large-scale tasks, like expanding a business, making yourself influential in a big organization (other than just spending xp on Backing), fighting a plague (on a management level, not just going house-to-house using Medicine charms on everyone), etc.
    What's needed here is probably a set of suggestions and guidelines rather than a rigid system.
    I agree. I agree with most of your changes, I'd also like to see

    1. A use for socialize: I seems currently Socialize is used for the half sketched out mass social combat system, but I'd like to make it more clear what Socialize is good for.

    2. A better physical mass combat system: I'd like to see the whole wear an army like gear concept gotten rid of. I like the revised version Kyeudo posted here a while back. Characters can take place as heroes in Mass combat, but I don't like that combat between armies now is all about how powerful the exalted who lead them are and the 10000 soldier are fairly meaningless.

    3. A better system for the Craft skills: Craft focused characters have to spend too many points on all the various craft skills. The common house rule of treating them as specialties could be a good change. (Actually I'm more ambivalent about this, but I do see there is a problem currently)

    4. Decouple writing skill from knowing languages: Now it is hard to know many languages. Now starting characters can't know more than 6 languages, and the more languages you know the harder it is to learn the next one. I'd like to see dots in Linguistics give you extra languages as normal, but you can also buy an extra language (for say 4 xp) in addition that just gives you the ability to speak the language and doesn't effect your Linguistics skill.


    Edit: I especially like your ideas of making combat less deadly. I think the results of must Exalted combat is the loser should flee of be unconscious, not dead.
    Last edited by a_humble_lich; 2011-02-25 at 05:51 PM.
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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion II: No Longer Mortal

    Quote Originally Posted by a_humble_lich View Post
    Edit: I especially like your ideas of making combat less deadly. I think the results of must Exalted combat is the loser should flee of be unconscious, not dead.
    I think what you mean is that the result of most Exalt on Exalt combat should be the loser flees or is unconcious. There is no way you can say that a mortal walking into a fight should have a good chance of surviving a loss, especially if his opponent is any sort of supernatural creature. Unconciousness is certainly possible for an Exalt, so long as there is some sort of change with how dying health levels work for the Exalted.

    However, when it comes to Exalts fleeing, on a narative level, the hero escaping a losing battle or a villian living to be a threat later on is a commonly reoccuring trope and a useful plot device, on a setting level this feels wrong. Exalts usually have some investment in the outcome of a fight. If a Solar and an Abyssal clash in a village somewhere, the Solar has to win or the village will be slaughtered. The Abyssal has to win to create that shadowland he needs to advance his plan to take over Nexus. From an IC perspective, neither can afford to run from this fight until it is clear that they cannot win and even then the outcome of retreating may be worse to the Exalt than death. Can you honestly see a Compassion 5 Temperence 1 Exalt abandoning a village of innocents in their hour of need?

    And when it does become clear one of them cannon win, how the heck is the loser going to effect his escape? He's probably empty on Essence and down a health level or two at the least. He has nothing availible to run. If you give him some sort of costless "escape clause" Charm, why didn't he use it in combat already to outmanuver his opponent? How do you make it easier to run away from someone while wounded than to chase down a wounded opponent? It just doesn't work on a mechanical level.


    With all this talk of a hypothetical 3rd Edition, does anyone want to form a think tank on just exactly how deep Exalted's flaws run? If we can find the deepest cracks and fix them first, that might fix other problems down the line before they are actually problems.

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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion II: No Longer Mortal

    Quote Originally Posted by Kyeudo View Post
    However, when it comes to Exalts fleeing, on a narative level, the hero escaping a losing battle or a villian living to be a threat later on is a commonly reoccuring trope and a useful plot device, on a setting level this feels wrong. Exalts usually have some investment in the outcome of a fight. If a Solar and an Abyssal clash in a village somewhere, the Solar has to win or the village will be slaughtered. The Abyssal has to win to create that shadowland he needs to advance his plan to take over Nexus. From an IC perspective, neither can afford to run from this fight until it is clear that they cannot win and even then the outcome of retreating may be worse to the Exalt than death. Can you honestly see a Compassion 5 Temperence 1 Exalt abandoning a village of innocents in their hour of need?

    And when it does become clear one of them cannon win, how the heck is the loser going to effect his escape? He's probably empty on Essence and down a health level or two at the least. He has nothing availible to run. If you give him some sort of costless "escape clause" Charm, why didn't he use it in combat already to outmanuver his opponent? How do you make it easier to run away from someone while wounded than to chase down a wounded opponent? It just doesn't work on a mechanical level.
    If I were burning Exalted to the ground...
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    ...and remaking it into its ultimate, glorious self that bears no resemblance to its previous incarnations, I'd implement a conflict resolution system similar to Mouse Guard.

    Step 1: Both participants state what their Goal is. Why they're fighting. It can't be "So I can kill the other guy". In this case, Solar Bob's would be "Defend the inhabitants of his village", and Abyssal Melvin's would be "Slaughter the villagers".

    Step 2: Fight. (You would have something like a Disposition score, that slides back and forth to represent how well you're doing.)

    Step 3: Compare how well the loser did before they lost. If the winner had almost no Disposition left, then the loser gets a Major Compromise. If he had some left, a Moderate Compromise. If he had very little taken away at all, the loser gets a Minor Compromise. And if the loser did nothing against the winner, then he gets no compromise at all.

    To use the above example, if Melvin wins, he gets what he wants and the villagers are slaughtered. However, if Bob gets a Major Compromise, then maybe he severely wounded Melvin and now Melvin won't be able to plague the area for a while, and Bob can go forth to hunt him down more easily later, and he managed to distract Melvin enough that a small number of villagers were able to hide in a cellar so the whole town isn't destroyed.

    If Bob got a moderate compromise, maybe he gets the above, but is also severely wounded in the process.

    If Bob got a minor compromise, maybe he's wounded and only gets one of the above.

    If Bob got no compromise, then maybe he managed to fight off the Abyssal, but not before Melvin killed everyone down to the last man, woman, and child.

    Why didn't Melvin kill him too? Maybe Bob used his Essence to appear like a much scarier foe than he really was, and only after Melvin left, did Bob collapse in a broken heap. Maybe Melvin kicked him 6 miles away, and Bob woke up several hours later in a crater. Maybe Melvin just decided he'd rather leave the Solar to bleed out a bit before coming back and finishing him off at leisure. Maybe, in his Abyssal cruelty, Melvin left Bob to contemplate his horrible failure because the mental anguish of others makes Melvin happy.

    All of these examples could go lots of different ways, with lots of different compromises and circumstances, and uses of context that would be present in a longer campaign but aren't in short-lived examples.

    I think abstraction is definitely the way to go.

    The only problem is that it does take a bit of convincing. I've met a lot of people who sneer at this pretty much automatically. They play stuff like D&D, and White Wolf, and GURPS, and BESM, and complain about lethality, or lack of player agency (usually not in those words), or anticlimactic moments, or how things feel "unfair", or how most social systems feel like "mind control", but then you give them the solution and they assume it'll be terrible and unfun without even giving it a chance.

    Abstraction in roleplaying games. It's a good thing.

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    @Xefas: Yeah, I tend to knee-jerk dislike anything where the rules are mostly about what happens on a story level. Crunch is fun for me, so long as it allows for a pretty wide variety of viable builds and isn't too complicated. I can certainly see that approach working for a lot of groups, but it's not what I'd like to play.

    Quote Originally Posted by Kyeudo View Post
    However, when it comes to Exalts fleeing, on a narative level, the hero escaping a losing battle or a villian living to be a threat later on is a commonly reoccuring trope and a useful plot device, on a setting level this feels wrong... Can you honestly see a Compassion 5 Temperence 1 Exalt abandoning a village of innocents in their hour of need?
    Well, yeah. Moral dilemmas are supposed to be a big part of the game. To me, having to choose between your life and accomplishing a goal seems like exactly the kind of thing that should happen regularly. The Compassion 5 guy can burn a Willpower and take a point of Limit to abandon them, or he can stay and die. That's the player's choice. If he thinks playing out a heroic sacrifice will be enough fun to be worth having to make a new character and so on, and the rest of the group has no problem with it, more power to him.

    And when it does become clear one of them cannon win, how the heck is the loser going to effect his escape? He's probably empty on Essence and down a health level or two at the least. He has nothing availible to run. If you give him some sort of costless "escape clause" Charm, why didn't he use it in combat already to outmanuver his opponent? How do you make it easier to run away from someone while wounded than to chase down a wounded opponent? It just doesn't work on a mechanical level.
    If a character doesn't try to flee until he's used up everything he could have used escaping to fight, then that's the choice he made. He can still try to argue his opponent into sparing him, or run away mundanely. And from an ST perspective, you can certainly have his opponent take him prisoner, or let him go due to confidence that he won't do better next time, a short-sighted Urge, amusement, respect for his failed efforts, or whatever. If the villain killed the protagonist the instant he could in every story, most fantasy and anime would be a lot shorter.
    So Solar NPC Bob drags Abyssal PC Melvin off to preach at him about how everyone can be redeemed by the UCS. Or NPC Melvin cackles and leaves PC Bob unconscious as he slaughters the village, and PC Bob wakes up in a pile of corpses.
    And if your PCs insist on killing their enemy, that's perfectly fine. You can always send more enemies after them. It's a game.
    The issue is when it's really easy to accidentally instantly kill a PC or NPC Exalt, in the first case because it's not always fun and can mess up the plot, the second because fights that are determined the instant the first hit connects tend to be boring.

    With all this talk of a hypothetical 3rd Edition, does anyone want to form a think tank on just exactly how deep Exalted's flaws run? If we can find the deepest cracks and fix them first, that might fix other problems down the line before they are actually problems.
    Fixalted probably counts as a think tank, it might be worth discussing things with the people there. There are also plenty of people on rpg.net who are intimately familiar with the mechanics, but they generally seem to think that any attempt at a fix either creates bigger problems or doesn't really fix anything.

    IMO, the root of Exalted's combat problems is lethality. It's too easy to create a situation where any hit is instant death. So there are lots of defenses that make you impossible to harm. So there are lots of ways to get around those defenses so fights can actually happen. And so the combat system is like an onion, where every layer is labeled either "You're invincible" or "You're dead." I think it'd starting fresh would be easier and more likely to get a functional final result than trying to peel back through "If we get rid of ping and piercing soak-monster builds are hard to beat, if we remove the DV caps you'll need to spam perfect attacks to hit enemies with high DVs..." and so on until you get to a place where a wide variety of builds can survive and fight just fine and not too many are unstoppable.
    Quote Originally Posted by Thespianus View Post
    I fail to see how "No, that guy is too fat to be hurt by your fire" would make sense.

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    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
    @Xefas: Yeah, I tend to knee-jerk dislike anything where the rules are mostly about what happens on a story level. Crunch is fun for me, so long as it allows for a pretty wide variety of viable builds and isn't too complicated. I can certainly see that approach working for a lot of groups, but it's not what I'd like to play.
    Yeah. I said the same thing (typically in a louder and more vulgar fashion - as is my nature), up until the point where someone I respected finally sat me down and forced me to play Burning Wheel with an open mind.

    That's not really possible over the internet, though. I guess the best I can do is to suggest learning about game design. Not just particular mechanics, like cards vs dice, or dicepools vs die + modifier, or DC bellcurves. But the behavioral engineering type of game design. Start thinking about "What behavior does X mechanic in [my favorite system] reinforce?" and it might surprise you.

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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion II: No Longer Mortal

    Quote Originally Posted by Xefas View Post
    Yeah. I said the same thing (typically in a louder and more vulgar fashion - as is my nature), up until the point where someone I respected finally sat me down and forced me to play Burning Wheel with an open mind.

    That's not really possible over the internet, though. I guess the best I can do is to suggest learning about game design. Not just particular mechanics, like cards vs dice, or dicepools vs die + modifier, or DC bellcurves. But the behavioral engineering type of game design. Start thinking about "What behavior does X mechanic in [my favorite system] reinforce?" and it might surprise you.
    Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of systems like Mouse Guard. It sounds excellent for telling a story, excellent for bringing the feel of improv into game mechanics, and those are definitely things I want out of a game. But not Exalted.

    The thing about Exalted is, the Exalted world isn't actually that unique. As much as we all squee about its heroin-pissing dinosaurs and suchlike, at heart it's a kitchen-sink setting, and those are a dime a dozen. It may be on a more epic scale than, say, Forgotten Realms, but it's the same core principle.

    The unique draw of Exalted, as I see it, is the way the rules interact with the world. Charms aren't just a way to abstractly say what characters are capable of, they are real things people learn. In some cases (Yozis being a cool example), your charms even determine your personality. Motes are real and countable. Stats like the Virtues actually represent how people think, and have an effect on their actions both in-world and mechanical. In short, Exalted isn't just a kitchen-sink of fantasy concepts: it's a kitchen sink of fantasy gaming concepts. Exalted is a world built off of game rules, rather than the other way around. Now this doesn't mean the game rules don't occasionally need updating to create a more fun game. But it does mean that if they don't feel "gaming"-y, if they're so fluid that they don't constrain and limit the setting, then the unique draw of Exalted will be lost.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Urpriest View Post
    The unique draw of Exalted, as I see it, is the way the rules interact with the world. Charms aren't just a way to abstractly say what characters are capable of, they are real things people learn. In some cases (Yozis being a cool example), your charms even determine your personality. Motes are real and countable. Stats like the Virtues actually represent how people think, and have an effect on their actions both in-world and mechanical. In short, Exalted isn't just a kitchen-sink of fantasy concepts: it's a kitchen sink of fantasy gaming concepts. Exalted is a world built off of game rules, rather than the other way around. Now this doesn't mean the game rules don't occasionally need updating to create a more fun game. But it does mean that if they don't feel "gaming"-y, if they're so fluid that they don't constrain and limit the setting, then the unique draw of Exalted will be lost.
    I disagree that the two are mutually exclusive.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Xefas View Post
    I disagree that the two are mutually exclusive.
    I think the point that he's trying to say is that if you build a game where in-game concepts are also in-character concepts, if you change the mechanics, you must necessarily either change that mechanics-setting relationship, or change the setting.

    I don't see that as a matter of opinion, but as a sound logical claim.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Indon View Post
    I think the point that he's trying to say is that if you build a game where in-game concepts are also in-character concepts, if you change the mechanics, you must necessarily either change that mechanics-setting relationship, or change the setting.
    No.

    But it does mean that if they don't feel "gaming"-y, if they're so fluid that they don't constrain and limit the setting, then the unique draw of Exalted will be lost.
    He's saying the above in contrast to my notion that Exalted would be improved by having more narratively abstract resolution mechanics.

    I'm saying the two are not mutually exclusive.

    To give an example: Free Market. Very similarly to Exalted, its mechanics are transparent with the game. Just like, in Exalted, you can say "I learned Murder Is Meat, and that's why I'm crazy", in Free Market you can say "I gave an Attaboy to my MRCZ leader, which granted him 2 Flow, and in exchange, he let me use his Mindscrewer 2000, which has the tags Ominous, Unnecessarily Violent, and Ephemera, to remove the Memory I got yesterday in response to that Ghosting Challenge."

    All of those are game mechanics, and terms that define the way the setting functions. Every single term on the Free Market character sheet is an in-setting term, which is something that not even Exalted can boast.

    At the same time, many of its conflict resolution mechanics involve abstraction.

    There seems to be this idea that you can't have a mechanically dense game that also tells a good story. I would cite Burning Wheel, which is easily as complicated as D&D or Exalted, with a Core Book + Character Burner, Monster Burner, Adventure Burner, and Magic Burner. In combat, you easily have more options than the majority of Exalted characters. But all of those mechanics are well designed, and tell a good story.
    Last edited by Xefas; 2011-02-26 at 11:44 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Xefas View Post
    He's saying the above in contrast to my notion that Exalted would be improved by having more narratively abstract resolution mechanics.
    Yeah.

    It feels 'gaming-y' precisely because of the relationship between in-game and in-character concepts that I mentioned.

    Quote Originally Posted by Xefas View Post
    At the same time, many of its conflict resolution mechanics involve abstraction.
    Exalted's combat mechanics also involve a degree of abstraction.

    But not regarding the mechanics you clearly want to change. Your proposed ideal fix would remove, as game concepts, some of the kind of stuff that Urpriest is talking about (as an example, perfect attacks/defenses). Not all of it, probably, I suppose it'd depend on the details of your idea implementation. But some.

    Which is where I clarify his point that the options would be to lose that 'gaming-y' feel, or to change the setting, for instance to remove perfect attacks and defenses.

    Quote Originally Posted by Xefas View Post
    There seems to be this idea that you can't have a mechanically dense game that also tells a good story.
    What?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Indon View Post
    Exalted's combat mechanics also involve a degree of abstraction.

    But not regarding the mechanics you clearly want to change. Your proposed ideal fix would remove, as game concepts, some of the kind of stuff that Urpriest is talking about (as an example, perfect attacks/defenses). Not all of it, probably, I suppose it'd depend on the details of your idea implementation. But some.

    Which is where I clarify his point that the options would be to lose that 'gaming-y' feel, or to change the setting, for instance to remove perfect attacks and defenses.
    I'm not sure where you're going with this. Yes, for the system to change, then the system would have to change. However, I disagree that the setting would have to change or the setting-mechanic transparency would have to change.

    Exalted is not 100% transparent. Characters don't typically say "I have 5 Dots in the Past Life Background, so I can add 5 dice to my Charisma plus Performance check, which is not constrained by the dice-adder cap for Charms, and I'll still have 4 uses left this session." or "I have two 'minus 4' health levels remaining".

    By altering things that are not transparent, you can preserve the Exalted setting while also adding some much-needed abstraction.

    What?
    This was a reference to this:

    Quote Originally Posted by Urpriest View Post
    Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of systems like Mouse Guard. It sounds excellent for telling a story, excellent for bringing the feel of improv into game mechanics, and those are definitely things I want out of a game. But not Exalted.
    It seemed like his sentiment was that for some reason you would have to sacrifice freedom in storytelling to get the Exalted feeling.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Xefas View Post
    I'm not sure where you're going with this. Yes, for the system to change, then the system would have to change. However, I disagree that the setting would have to change or the setting-mechanic transparency would have to change.
    It would necessarily become less transparent if you removed mechanical in-game concepts while maintaining their in-character equivalents, would it not?


    Quote Originally Posted by Xefas View Post
    It seemed like his sentiment was that for some reason you would have to sacrifice freedom in storytelling to get the Exalted feeling.
    Well, you probably do need to sacrifice access to story elements the Exalted system reflects poorly - unless you want to improvise a power system for it, at least, and there're a lot of power systems available to draw from for inspiration.

    For example, if you want an Exalted story about the success of the Thousand Rivers project and the ascendancy of non-Exalted humanity, you're probably going to need to expand upon the Thaumaturgy rules. The game material points you in the direction of the things you'd need (Thaumaturgy that allows mortals to emulate the powers of Exalts, for instance), but you'd need to write the procedures and such, probably in collaboration with your players, as you forge that story.

    There is no such thing as an absolute sacrifice in gaming - but the effort-return ratio for a thing can be higher or lower.

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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion II: No Longer Mortal

    Quote Originally Posted by Xefas View Post
    No.



    He's saying the above in contrast to my notion that Exalted would be improved by having more narratively abstract resolution mechanics.

    I'm saying the two are not mutually exclusive.

    To give an example: Free Market. Very similarly to Exalted, its mechanics are transparent with the game. Just like, in Exalted, you can say "I learned Murder Is Meat, and that's why I'm crazy", in Free Market you can say "I gave an Attaboy to my MRCZ leader, which granted him 2 Flow, and in exchange, he let me use his Mindscrewer 2000, which has the tags Ominous, Unnecessarily Violent, and Ephemera, to remove the Memory I got yesterday in response to that Ghosting Challenge."

    All of those are game mechanics, and terms that define the way the setting functions. Every single term on the Free Market character sheet is an in-setting term, which is something that not even Exalted can boast.

    At the same time, many of its conflict resolution mechanics involve abstraction.

    There seems to be this idea that you can't have a mechanically dense game that also tells a good story. I would cite Burning Wheel, which is easily as complicated as D&D or Exalted, with a Core Book + Character Burner, Monster Burner, Adventure Burner, and Magic Burner. In combat, you easily have more options than the majority of Exalted characters. But all of those mechanics are well designed, and tell a good story.
    Hmm...you do provide good examples. Since I'm not very familiar with more story-based RPG systems, I wasn't aware they could get so mechanically involved. This does indeed seem closer to something Exalted could manage.

    Still, I think that part of Exalted's charm is that it riffs off of established gaming structures. When I said that it was a gaming system made into a world and not vice versa, I don't mean just that the system maps well to the world, but that the system is partially based on independent, preexistent styles that in turn are forcibly applied to the setting. In a way, Exalted is a partial Tippyverse, to use this forum's terminology. The mechanics Exalted forges into its setting are by and large quite recognizable, and while they're modified to feel Exalted-y they still are very much a part of traditional gaming. Once Burning Wheel derivatives become more popular, I could see a world that riffs off of them being interesting. But currently they aren't common enough for Exalted to get much mileage by referencing them in its world design.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Indon View Post
    It would necessarily become less transparent if you removed mechanical in-game concepts while maintaining their in-character equivalents, would it not?
    You wouldn't have to do this, necessarily. Exalted is not 100% transparent. There are some game mechanics with no in-setting equivalent. Health Levels, for instance. Health Levels are already an abstraction with no in-setting equivalent. If we abstracted them further, it would not change the setting at all.

    In fact, I think abstracting them in the correct way would actually make the system reflect the setting more so.

    Well, you probably do need to sacrifice access to story elements the Exalted system reflects poorly - unless you want to improvise a power system for it, at least, and there're a lot of power systems available to draw from for inspiration.
    I'm not sure how what you're saying here has to do with what I said that you quoted. What you're quoting is the continuation of a tangent that I made that had nothing to do with Exalted in particular (and in retrospect, I probably should have kept to myself, as it's just confusing the point).

    Quote Originally Posted by Urpriest View Post
    Hmm...you do provide good examples. Since I'm not very familiar with more story-based RPG systems, I wasn't aware they could get so mechanically involved. This does indeed seem closer to something Exalted could manage.

    Still, I think that part of Exalted's charm is that it riffs off of established gaming structures. When I said that it was a gaming system made into a world and not vice versa, I don't mean just that the system maps well to the world, but that the system is partially based on independent, preexistent styles that in turn are forcibly applied to the setting. In a way, Exalted is a partial Tippyverse, to use this forum's terminology. The mechanics Exalted forges into its setting are by and large quite recognizable, and while they're modified to feel Exalted-y they still are very much a part of traditional gaming. Once Burning Wheel derivatives become more popular, I could see a world that riffs off of them being interesting. But currently they aren't common enough for Exalted to get much mileage by referencing them in its world design.
    Ah, this segues nicely into my next point. Aside from this whole debate with Indon, I feel I need to mention something else. At this point, I've more been playing the devil's advocate than anything else. But, to my true opinion (which your opinion helps illustrate nicely):

    Part of Exalted's problem is that its setting is...good, but its writing has problems. Mainly, that a lot of different people with a lot of different opinions about what the setting and game should be have all been writing on the same material without bothering to communicate.

    In my opinion, while you could preserve the Exalted setting perfectly in every way 100% while improving the mechanics to an incredible extent, you will never make it as compelling a system as if you did some editing to the setting as a whole.

    In the same way that D&D is all about combat, but has terrible combat, Exalted tries to have this rich mechanic-setting transparency and fantastically fails to do so properly. Its mechanics are broken, and its setting is disjointed, and they try to mesh, but both are too mangled.

    Furthermore, a lot of arguing goes on about what is and isn't acceptable about characters and about charms and about the setting in general. It's not because the person you're arguing with is stupid. Its because the setting gives mixed signals. And because of this, you will never make an Exalted fix that fixes it for everyone.

    So? Well, so, the problem is fundamentally unsolvable. The best you can do is fix it for some people.

    I have no doubt that I could build a system that very well replicated a game where the players are returning God-Kings empowered by the sun, who go around performing larger-than-life feats of heroism in a world that intrinsically shuns them. Where the world has a fetish for the number 5, and everything is elementally themed, and there are divine bureaucracies, and a spooky Underworld, and demon-spirits and all this kind of thing. It would capture Exalted perfectly for me.

    Would it fix it for Urpriest? Probably not. He's expressed part of the setting that he likes that had barely even occurred to me. Riffing on other settings just isn't important to my personal, intimate take on Exalted. However, I respect his opinion, and I could never say he's incorrect with his take. The setting is too subjective for that.

    All I need to enjoy Exalted is a game where the players are returning God-Kings empowered by the sun, who go around performing larger-than-life feats of heroism in a world that intrinsically shuns them. Where the world has a fetish for the number 5, and everything is elementally themed, and there are divine bureaucracies, and a spooky Underworld, and demon-spirits and all this kind of thing. Etc etc.

    That, to me, is Exalted. The current mechanics don't give me that. They give me a game that reward optimization and system mastery over roleplaying a shunned God-King, where it takes 5 hours to make a reasonably experienced character whereas I could be spending that time raiding decrepit manses and fighting demons, where artifacts range from stupidly useless to stupidly overpowered, and absolutely no ones charm set functions as advertised.

    I could fix all that. And a million other things I find are wrong with the system. And all I would have to sacrifice are setting elements that I don't care about at all. And it would be Exalted to me. But it probably wouldn't be Exalted to anyone else.

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    Default Re: General Exalted Discussion II: No Longer Mortal

    Quote Originally Posted by SurlySeraph View Post
    Fixalted probably counts as a think tank, it might be worth discussing things with the people there. There are also plenty of people on rpg.net who are intimately familiar with the mechanics, but they generally seem to think that any attempt at a fix either creates bigger problems or doesn't really fix anything.
    I've looked at Fixalted several times. The problem is that most of what Fixalted contains are patches for existing pieces of the system or complete rewrites to systems other than the Storyteller framework. What I was talking about is examining the very underpinnings of the system, looking over each piece of mechanics to see if maybe some of the problems Exalted has actually start deeper than just the subsystem where the problems are observed.

    IMO, the root of Exalted's combat problems is lethality. It's too easy to create a situation where any hit is instant death. So there are lots of defenses that make you impossible to harm. So there are lots of ways to get around those defenses so fights can actually happen. And so the combat system is like an onion, where every layer is labeled either "You're invincible" or "You're dead." I think it'd starting fresh would be easier and more likely to get a functional final result than trying to peel back through "If we get rid of ping and piercing soak-monster builds are hard to beat, if we remove the DV caps you'll need to spam perfect attacks to hit enemies with high DVs..." and so on until you get to a place where a wide variety of builds can survive and fight just fine and not too many are unstoppable.
    I agree entirely. If you want to get combat that works, you have to start by looking over the base engine, getting the crap cleaned out, and then redesigning every combat Charm ever written so that they fit within a new paradigm.

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    So, four out of the Five Magical Materials have Celestial Battle Armor made out of it. What about the other two (yes, despite the name, there are six materials within the Five Magical Materials now)? Originally, there was no jade Celestial Battle Armor, since Terrestrials could not attune to Celestial Battle Armors anyway, but what about Jade Caste Alchemicals? And what about Adamant Caste Alchemicals - do they not deserve an Adamant Celestial Battle Armor of their own?
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    Why would Alchemicals need Celestial Battle Armor? They ARE Celestial Battle Armor!

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