2nd edition: weapon Rate

[JeenLeen]

How does a weapon's Rate work in Exalted 2nd edition?
I understand it is the number of attacks in a flurry, so as an extension to the question, how do flurries work, particularly with regard to DV penalties, accuracy penalties, and ticks until one's next turn?

Also, could someone remind me how Hardness works? And can it block the minimum damage that one can do due to Essence 2+?

[meschlum]

A weapon's Rate is the maximum number of times it can be used to attack in a flurry, though you can do things besides attack - such as move, draw your weapon, and so on.

When it's your turn in the initiative order, you may want to do many things - attack multiple times, rush towards (or away from) someone, perform interpretive dance while reciting the alphabet in Old Realm, juggle daiklaives... as long as it can be included in a flurry, you can do it! You need to declare everything you're trying to do before rolling.

However, the more actions you perform at once, the harder they all are. Unless you use Charms, you suffer from the multiple action penalty, which reduces your dice pool based on the number of actions you are attempting (so there's a tradeoff between declaring lots of attacks which may miss a lot and declaring only a few which might not kill your foes). Again, unless you use Charms, each action you perform gives you its DV penalty, which stack. Finally (unless you use Charms), the Speed of the flurry is the highest Speed of all the actions you're attempting.


So if you're face to face with an opponent and have Initiative 2 (your opponent is slow and has 4), and want to hack them three times (your weapon Rate is 3, Speed 4, dice pool 9 dice), you declare a flurry of three attacks. This gives you a 3 die penalty to your first attack (roll 6 dice), a 4 die penalty to your second (roll 5 dice), and a five die penalty to your third (and last) attack (roll 4 dice).

If you miss all three times, or hit but fail to kill your opponent, you get a DV penalty of -3 (three attacks made, -1 DV per attack), for the next 4 ticks (4 being your Weapon Speed). Since your opponent has Initiative 4, they'll get to attack you while your guard is down (you act next at Initiative 2 + 4 = 6, and your DV is restored at that point).

If you hit with your first attack and decide to stop (your opponent is dead or invulnerable), you only suffer a -1 DV penalty but can't do anything else until your Initiative comes around again.


If your opponent is further away, you may want to declare a flurry of: Dash to your enemy, attack three times, then Jump to the next rooftop. This is five actions, so you have a 5 die penalty to your first action (Dashing, probably irrelevant unless you're on dangerous terrain), then penalties of 6, 7, and 8 dice to your attacks (roll 3, 2, and 1 dice), and a 9 die penalty to your jump. Your total DV penalty is -6, so you're really easy to hit. The slowest action you're using is the Jump, so your Speed is 5 - you act next at Initiative 7.

If you decide you're probably going to break your neck trying to Jump, you can abort before jumping. This reduces the DV penalty (Jump is -1 DV, so you're at -5 instead), but does not affect the Speed (you're still acting at 7 because you planned to Jump).

If your declared flurry was just Dash and Attack (once), you'd have a 2 die penalty to Dash (again, probably irrelevant), and a 3 die penalty to the (single) attack (roll 6 dice).


Hardness is applied before minimum damage. So, if you have Hardness 4 and Soak 6, facing a 10 damage dice attack from an Essence 2 opponent:

- Only 4 damage dice came up as successes: Congrats! Your Hardness cancels everything.
- 6 Damage dice came up as successes: 6 - 6 = 0, rounded up to 2 damage due to Essence ping (Essence ping is less common in the Errata).
- 8 Damage dice came up as successes: 8 - 6 = 2 damage.
- 10 damage dice came up as successes: 10 - 6 = 4 damage.

If you had Hardness 6 and Soak 4, then:

- 6 damage dice came up as successes: Hardness cancels everything.
- 8 damage dice came up as successes: 8 - 4 = 4 damage.
- 10 damage dice came up as successes: 10 - 4 = 6 damage.

So high Hardness means you don't get hurt by light blows, but may die to a strong one. High Soak means every blow hurts, but not much.

[emeraldstreak]

Hardness is checked right after DVs/counting threshold successes, and negates all effects of the attack if not overcome.

[JeenLeen]

I'm looking at a sorcerer using Wood Dragon Claw. If I'm reading multiple action penalties correctly, those can reduce my damage die enough that I don't get my Essence in auto-damage. Is that correct?

For example, if I have a Rate of 8 and do 8 attacks with my claw, my accuracy will stink due to multiple action penalties, but I can probably hit them a little bit on the last few due to them having penalties from multiple attacks (onslaught penalty?). However, if my read-through of the rules last night is accurate, I still wouldn't damage them since my multiple action penalties lower my damage from auto-ping to 0.
Is that right?

[meschlum]

Incidentally, my mistake on Hardness: it's based on the Raw Damage, not the dice rolled.

So an attack that rolls 10 damage dice will ignore Hardness 9 or less, even if only two of the damage dice come up as successes. While an attack that rolls 6 damage dice will be completely absorbed by Hardness 6 or more, even if all the damage dice come up as successes.

Not quite, no.

The Onslaught Penalty will reduce the target's DV based on the number of attacks, though you're cutting into your dice pool rather severely. The damage you do is not affected by your multiple action penalty, just by your odds of hitting.

Wood Dragon's Claw gives you 15 points. If 8 are assigned to Rate (requiring Essence + Occult = 8 or more, so Occult 5 and Essence 3 is the most likely case), you can deliver 8 attacks. The first one is done at -8 dice, and so on until the eighth which is done at -15 dice. With the Onslaught penalty, this means:

Attack #1: - 8 dice (assuming Dex 5, Martial Arts 5, Specialty +3, you have a base of 5 dice, with more from Charms and Claw Accuracy) versus full DV
Attack #2: - 9 dice (base of 4 dice + bonuses) versus DV - 1
Attack #3: -10 dice (base of 3 dice + bonuses) versus DV - 2
Attack #4: -11 dice (base of 2 dice + bonuses) versus DV - 3
Attack #5: -12 dice (base of 1 die + bonuses) versus DV - 4
Attack #6: -13 dice (base of 0 dice + bonuses) versus DV - 5: automatic miss unless you use Charms or have Accuracy +1 or more
Attack #7: -14 dice (base of -1 dice + bonuses) versus DV - 6: automatic miss again
Attack #8: -15 dice (base of -2 dice + bonuses) versus DV - 7: automatic miss once more

Note that effective DV cannot drop below 0, so you still need to score some successes in order to hit when delivering your flurry (if your base DV is 4 and you have a -8 DV penalty, your opponents still need at least one success to hit. But getting a +1 to DV still leaves you at a total of -3 DV, so the bonus does not help you avoid blows).

Also note that if you have 0 dice, you can't hit - so you need to get more dice (or automatic successes) from somewhere.

When you hit (i.e. attack roll successes > DV), the Raw Damage you roll is Weapon Damage + Strength + extra attack successes.

So if you roll three successes against a DV of 1, you have 2 net successes, meaning you hit and have Raw Damage (2 + Weapon Damage + Strength).

If you roll one success against a DV of 1, you miss, and do no damage.


So if you have very high combat skills, and invest more of your Wood Dragon's Claw points in accuracy, you have a chance of delivering multiple blows with your flurry. They probably won't do much more than your Raw damage (which is going to be somewhat low because you didn't put much into Damage), so soak will catch most of it. Pre-Errata, you get Essence ping for a minimum of 3 dice rolled per hit (you're Essence 3). Post-Errata, you get only one die (Wood Dragon's Claw is not an Overwhelming weapon).

Extreme flurries can be an effective tactic, but they leave you very open to retaliation afterward, tend to cost lots of motes, and are vulnerable to mobile defenses. If your opponent can jump out of the way (e.g. Leaping Dodge Method) you've just spent a lot of resources and left yourself vulnerable to whatever the opponent wants to do in return.

[emeraldstreak]

I'm looking at a sorcerer using Wood Dragon Claw. If I'm reading multiple action penalties correctly, those can reduce my damage die enough that I don't get my Essence in auto-damage. Is that correct?

For example, if I have a Rate of 8 and do 8 attacks with my claw, my accuracy will stink due to multiple action penalties, but I can probably hit them a little bit on the last few due to them having penalties from multiple attacks (onslaught penalty?). However, if my read-through of the rules last night is accurate, I still wouldn't damage them since my multiple action penalties lower my damage from auto-ping to 0.
Is that right?

Damage is unaffected by multiaction penalty. Your accuracy will suffer, though, and don't count on onslaught too much - there are ways to negate it magically.

However, Wood Dragon's Claw counts as Punch...so it is form weapon for almost all supernatural martial arts styles. There's a style called Ivory Pestle in the Ink Monkeys supplement. Its 2 mote extra action charm will allow you to deploy WDC without penalties on the attack, while any of the charms that remove penalties from your own actions (ie fivefold bulwark stance) will take care of the self-inflicted DV penalties generated by your flurry. Alternatively, you can wield club/staff in your other hand and use Ivory Pestle's form for unpenalized defense.

When an event breaks your flurry, or you decide to abort it, the attacks that were yet to happen neither waste motes nor penalize your DVs, as they never happen.

Opponents who deploy magic flurrybreakers can be dealt with high mobility (often magically derived). The exception is Day And Night Kata, and eventually tick-long perfect defenses invalidate the point of flurries.

[JeenLeen]

Unfortunately, we're limited to the core rulebook and, in general, pre-errata. Though the pre-errata helps me since my minimum damage is still my Essence (here, 3).

I also got word that, at least to start, artifact armor and weapons are banned, but I'm hoping between Wood Dragon Claw and Bronze Skin spells, I'll be tough and strong enough to function well. Might go Twilight caste so I get the auto-Essence in post-soak damage reduction, at least most of the time. (The DM has banned the Twilight-Resistance Charm combo to nullify all damage and regen motes.)

[meschlum]

Pre-errata? Excellent... Core only? Curses! No Raksha for you. Probably better for your sanity, though they are a way to get serious soak values.


Skin of Bronze costs 20 motes to cast, and Wood Dragon's Claw is another 10. You can recover these after casting the spells (yay, Sorcery!), but it's going to take a while and some stunts, most likely. And in the meantime, you're low on motes and can't boost your attacks (and defenses) as much as you'd like. Besides, you need to renew Skin of Bronze every day, so expect to be low on motes (Dragon's Claw has an undefined duration, but you probably want to have it off when in public, and may not be able to do things like play the piano when it's on).

Your optimal setup really depends on a) what type of foes you're worried about (high tier Exalts, single foes, small groups, hordes), b) the combat style you want to adopt (tank, kite, glass canon), the resources you want to put into combat (EVERYTHING!!! to as little as possible), and d) how easy it is to regain motes (from easy to difficult stunts)


Assuming you have Stamina 3, your unarmored soak with Skin of Bronze is going to be 15B / 8L.

A peasant (Strength 2, little to no weapon skill) will be rolling a few dice for attack, so even surprised (DV = 0), you can expect raw damage of 10 or less (Club +6B, strength 2, a few net successes). Skin of Bronze's Hardness will completely cancel this, so flurry at will to remove the pests.

A barbarian (Strength 3, Attack 6, Damage 8L (axe)) is going to ignore your Hardness and and have 1-3 damage dice per hit (assuming your DV is in the 2-3 range), so you'll take less than a wound per hit on average. Even with a DV of 0 (from a flurry), you're going to take 3-5 dice per hit if you're unlucky, so 1.5 wounds per hit - but you'll get hit a lot, so you die in 5 attacks or so. Don't flurry against lots of barbarians (or use Charms).

A combat monster (Strength 4, Attack 12+, Damage 12L+) won't notice your Hardness, and will hit, possibly many times, for 2+ wounds per hit. That kills you in 3 attacks or less. Get serious armor, charms, or some kind of useful trick. DO NOT FLURRY, or you die to a single attack if you miss.


Recap: Skin of Bronze's Hardness helps you against peasants doing Bashing damage. It's essentially worthless against anyone with a sharp weapon (it might help against a weakling with a kitchen knife), you still need to focus not being hit or having lots of wounds. Investing in not being hit is usually a good idea. Wood Dragon's Claw can give you +8 Defense, for +4 to your DV, which is considerable - that also limits your Rate, Damage, and Accuracy, which makes fights last longer, which gives your opponents more chances to hit. Be careful. Investing in a perfect defense is usually advised (Dodge is cheap in Charms and motes).


And, of course, if you happen to know any of the Fair Folk, all of these issues can vanish in a puff of wonder (and the souls of a few extras).

[JeenLeen]

I'm leaning towards Twilight caste, so thinking between that and Bronze Body my defenses will be pretty solid.

I was going to go for Dodge to get perfect defense, but I'm now leaning towards Resistance. If I get my Resistance to 5, that second Charm on the tree for the perfect defense (nullifies all damage, or gives extra soak) will probably work for most of my combat needs. It seems it stacks with Bronze Body, so between that and the Twilight -3 final damage, I think I'd be good just tanking and reducing most minimal damage to 0.

I do like having a fair bit of social and utility Charms. I'm thinking of starting the game by pumping up Resistance and Martial Arts to increase DV and the Resistance Charm's effectiveness, then going for Snake Style since that gives some DV boosts.

Note on Twilight: DM has said Twilight caste cannot use that Resistance Charm that replenishes motes when you take damage, since that gives free motes in combination with the Twilight caste ability.

[meschlum]

Since you're pre-Errata, note that you'll want to put that into a Combo - otherwise, if you end up in a fight, you'll either be able to boost your defense OR be able to use your offensive Charms.


You have 10 Charms and 15 bonus points.


Serpentine Evasion is +2 DV for 3 motes (a good ratio) and requires 2 Charms. The issue is that your opponent could get lucky - you declare the use of the Charm before knowing how many successes they get (for each incoming attack, though you know how many dice are used and which Charms apply).

Snake Form is 3 charms (including Serpentine Evasion), but once you've adopted the stance it stays on (and the motes remain committed).

Iron Skin Concentration is a chance to cancel all damage for 2 motes, if you make the Resistance roll. It requires 2 Charms. Unless you have a Combo, you can't use this and Serpentine Evasion at the same time (against the same attack, or even against different attacks).

If you want to be able to use Serpentine Evasion and Iron Skin Concentration, you need to buy a Combo (2 bonus points for just those two Charms). Activating the Combo costs 1 willpower, and allows you to activate either Charm, or both (or neither) on any incoming attack for the duration of your action. However, you can't use any other Charms, so you can't but dice to attack (or defend) with. A more complete Combo would include a Martial Arts Excellency, allowing you to spend motes on attack or defense (and require 3 bonus points and another Charm).

Examples

You are facing off against the Mortal Master of Swords (high accuracy, low Essence) and the God of Slow Destruction (high essence, lower accuracy). You act first (Tick 0, Speed 5), then they act at Ticks 2 (Mortal, Speed 4, 3 attack flurry) and 4 (God, Speed 6, single attack)

Serpentine Evasion: you spend 12 motes but still get hit a few times by the Mortal and take wounds.

Iron Skin Concentration: you spend 8 motes, get hit by all the attacks, soak the Mortal's attacks, and are wounded by the God.

Combo: you spend 1 willpower and 9 motes, soak the Mortal's three attacks and parry the God's.

On Tick 5, you attack one of your opponents and fail to kill him.

On Ticks 6 and 10, the Mortal attacks you again. The God attacks you on Tick 10 as well.

Serpentine Evasion: you spend 21 motes trying to parry. More wounds accumulate.

Iron Skin Concentration: you spend 14 motes trying to soak damage. More wounds accumulate.

Combo: you spend 1 willpower and 14 motes (6 times Iron Skin, one time Evasion), and are not hurt.

On Tick 10, you probably try to run away, because even with a Combo you're low on motes and have not managed to do much damage.


Offensive Combo: Serpentine Evasion, Iron Skin Concentration, Martial Arts Excellency.

On Ticks 0 and 5, you spend a pile of motes to hit your opponent, wounding them severely. Plus, when attacked by the Mortal, you can spend more motes to increase your DV further. It still costs you 2 willpower to activate the combo twice, but you can use it to attack too!

Basic Option: Martial Arts Excellency.

Not a combo. On Ticks 0 and 5, you can boost your attack roll. When attacked by the Mortal or the God, you can boost your defense (it costs you 4 motes to raise your DV by 2, so it's only a bit more expensive than Serpentine Evasion). Does not cost willpower, more expensive than Serpentine Evasion, can boost your DV higher.

Seven Shadows Evasion: For 3 motes, dodge an incoming attack. Even from the Mortal. Much better than Serpentine Evasion.

Snake Style: Commit 5 motes to the Style, and your opponents have a harder time hitting you. You might manage to avoid the Mortal by activating Serpentine Evasion now.

[emeraldstreak]

Don't count your chickens before they hatch. Partly because of the line's perennially hazy rules-writing, STs are given broad authority to adjudicate and challenge.

The safest approach to a Core-only game is a combo of Reflex Sidestep Technique, Seven Shadow Evasion, and Leaping Dodge Method; coupled with vociferous arguing in favor of stunt awards on perfects (against Core RAW but fairly popular and errated so later) and frequent/rich stunt awards (supported by Core RAW but in reality entirely ST-depended and limited in errata) magnified by an appropriately combat-applicable Motivation.

A Core Resistance character can do really well if the ST isn't throwing curve balls, or be ripped apart by the first Abyssal you meet, or even be put down by peasants in a tavern brawl if the ST is running a tight ship.