General Exalted Thread
Biigoh
Tanuki
- Location
- Tanukia
Try the hundred kingdoms in the east. You can basically port in almost any rpg fantasy setting in there and have it be legit fine.
Just note that large armies are few and far. And that disputes tend to be handled by champion duelists.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Oh, @Shyft. It amuses me greatly that "the GM tricking you" is something that you find surprising, or at least worthy of comment. My asshole of an ST does it frequently as a matter of course and then gloats about it.
See, the thing about 'GM tricking the player' is that fairly often, the 'trick' is often something to the effect of- I don't have a good way to describe it, but a lot of my recent play experience has been with fastidiously attentive people (moreso than I or less burdened by being the ST) to pick apart my scenarios before I can even think to complicate them.
But it's worth pointing out because bluntly, STing is hard and nobody knows how to do it right.
Now, at a 'practical' level, if there was anything you could've done as an ST, it would've been to prompt a roll if I clearly Wasn't Getting anything- but since this was not life/asset-threatening, you were not obligated to.
I had fun being played... and I think part of that was due to it being done fairly, as opposed to contrivance or with metaknowledge. Aleph stuck to Observable Traits to inform Xandia's decisions, instead of a greater cloud of metaknowledge that she and I have built up about Inks as a Character and force upon the region/setting. Inks is brazen proud and has an ego but tries to back it up. She's openly compassionate and willing to stick to her ideals in the face of adversity. She's irreverent to certain cultural mores (shame is for people without full body artwork).
To reiterate Aleph's key point- the crux of this whole mini-arc (of two sessions/2-4 scenes) is that she played me, the Player, more than Inks. Perhaps she shouldn't have? I had fun regardless.
But @Aleph brought up a key point here and I think I need to really underline it. I never used Judge's Ear Technique. I never even thought to use it. I honestly forgot I had it. There are a couple reasons for that.
1. We nerfed it. It's harsh but true- I'm less inclined to use it because not only is it less efficient than the corebook version (3-4m per statement), It's also more difficult to use in actual gameplay via IRC. Remember that everything we do takes time to type. Taking the time to pause for a highly reactive Charm that demands information is extremely awkward.
2. Inks did not spend a lot of time talking to Xandia. Nor did she ask many questions of Maleb about who her patients were unless it was necessary- like with the mountain giant gal. Her origin mattered to her diagnosis, whereas Creeper Guy and Priscia's largely did not.
Now, fundamentally, Aleph's decision as ST to change Judge's Ear is entirely in keeping with the kind of story she wants to tell. It flies in the face of the 'original intention' of JET was to bluntly get rid of fussy whodunnit plots and act as a stalemate breaker against perfect lying effects- which mythology and court intrigue are known for. Remember- Low Trust system. Aleph wants to largely play a high trust game at our metaphorical table, but the mechanics don't always cooperate, hence changing them.
Nerfing JET basically signals to me the player that I am not supposed to be able to do truth-telling at such a comprehensive scale. This boils down to the fundamental question of 'Is plot/counterplot, the 'lying game' actually fun for the player?'
I had fun today, but I don't know if I can continue to have fun if I keep getting tricked? Like, I honestly don't know. Will I learn from this experience as a player and start checking around before committing? Are the tricks and gotchas and potentially Real Meaningful Threats to Inks and her goals worth the tradeoff of a 'richer more textured gameplay experience'?
That's the challenge aleph has taken on- she's decided that the statement of 'Solars don't need to deal with this kind of plot' doesn't hold water for her. She wants to create play out of the ability to lie to a Solar. Here's the real challenge though- she has to make sure it's not work.
Work is not fun. Work is obligation, demands on my time, resources and attention. She hasn't made me work yet, and there's nothing to say that fun from other sources can counterbalance work here, but it's worth noting.
Like- Aleph points out in her post here that a character who can word something cleverly can get one over on the players... where do you draw the line at playing the player or playing the game? IF the player doesn't twig on the statement as 'This is fishy I should check it', then is it fair? It can be fair, but there are any number of variables one has to account for. I'm starting to ramble now, but it's an interesting topic.
On the one hand, getting a lie past a Solar can be an accomplishment, and allowing that is more interesting than being flat no-sold. But again one must strike that careful balance of 'work vs play'.
I think that's all I can say about it for now.
I've been waiting days to post this.
It's not my fault. I'm not to blame. It's the @Rook, the @Cornuthaum, who set this flame.
Unbreakable Diamond, the Ferry of Lethe
Lord of Death
Creature of the Queen of Suicides
To die at sea is a terrible thing. More terrible still in the battles of the Shogunate, when so many sailors met their ends buried deep within their ships, never to see the sky again.
The lucky die instantly, hit directly by weapons larger than men, dead too soon to realize their end was coming. The less lucky die quickly, as those weapons tear loose walls of jade and bring them crashing down upon them. The substantially less lucky die slowly, trapped in a room far below the waves, as fires burn their flesh from bone, as water seeps in through the cracks in the corners.
The truly unfortunate don't have time to drown. The sharks find them first, and tear them into a meal for five. If they have the smallest semblance of fortune, the light behind their eyes goes out before seeing one gulp down their heart, but Siakal's children have never found that important enough to ensure.
When one lives their life dealing out that fate, it can seem quite fair when they face it. But that is a lie. There is nothing fair about it. There is nothing fair about any of it.
When a ferocious, celebrated captain of the Shogunate watched a shark eat her kidneys, and awoke to the faces of those she had ordered dead in battle and to all the sailors who had died under her command, she was far from the first to realize that. But when she had finished having words with all those who remembered her from life, they may have been the first to make a journey to the dark places in search of a peace that eluded them.
They may not have been. But they were the first to come back.
Today, a fleet sails the oceans and rivers of the Underworld. It isn't always the same ships. Some sail with them for a time, and come and go without resentment. But the flagship is always the same - the phantasmal form of a Shogunate fast battleship, crewed by phantoms, and a cheerful, friendly captain dressed in mid-Shogunate high fashion, who speaks in an archaic dialect of Seatongue.
Unbreakable Diamond is not that ship, or its crew, or its captain.
Unbreakable Diamond is that ship, and its crew, and its captain. Whether the captain devoured the souls of her crew that day their ship sank in battle, whether the crew devoured the soul of their captain, whether they all travelled together and in drinking the power in the dark places beneath the world melded into one will, may never be known.
Unbreakable Diamond is the center of the Gentle Repose, an assassin cult spread across Creation, though centered in the West. It is her belief that death is natural. All things die. But they need not regret it. All people should die quietly, peacefully, and move on to Lethe and their next life.
Sometimes, the Gentle Repose assist them in this process - there are poisons that will put a man into a peaceful sleep from which he will never awaken, and when an excruciating death approaches, they may feel it is a kinder ending. This is most commonly euthanasia offered to the sick and wounded, but those who inflict cruel deaths may be given this gift whether they wish it or not.
Unbreakable Diamond and her fleet serve to welcome those who did not find peace in life. Those who cannot let go may find purpose crewing one of her ships. They may find joy in the delights, festivals, and dances ever held aboard the ships. They may need things done in Creation proper, and Unbreakable Diamond will assist them in this. Some will never pass on, but most do find the peace they were denied, and go to their next life happily.
She prefers not to inflict violent deaths, even against the cruel. But she is still one of the greatest battleships of the Shogunate and she is very, very good at it. She believes that ideally, all deaths would be gentle. But she is not under the impression that this is an ideal world, and sometimes a great deal of violence can prevent a great deal more pain.
It is because of this that she is the greatest enemy of Siakal, the Western Goddess of Battle and Slaughter, and the two have frequently hunted one another across the Western Oceans and faced one another in battle. Neither has yet slain the other, despite numerous attempts - they are creatures of different worlds, and can always escape into a realm the other cannot follow.
If mortals do battle at night or in a shadowland and near enough to the sea or the great rivers, she has been known to burst out into Creation, gunning down the children of Siakal and bringing battles to an end swiftly, taking all those who still wish to fight back to the Underworld with her, to live out the rest of their days in peace.
Unbreakable Diamond as Liege: Unbreakable Diamond crosses the seas of both the Underworld and Creation, and may well find scattered Monstrances there. She is a soldier by nature, and has a natural affinity for the Dusk caste, though the Moonshadow and Daybreak castes better-suit her purposes. Regardless, when able she chooses those who have known pain in life, who retain the kindness to wish others peace.
Her Abyssals are almost always given tasks in Creation - to run hospices, to seek to prevent wars and great bloodshed, to counsel the miserable, to protect her cults, and to take care of the tasks that prevent the dead from finding Lethe. She is not the most political Deathlord, but she despises Siakal, and would love to take the opportunity Abyssals present to have the goddess murdered.
It's not my fault. I'm not to blame. It's the @Rook, the @Cornuthaum, who set this flame.
Unbreakable Diamond, the Ferry of Lethe
Lord of Death
Creature of the Queen of Suicides
To die at sea is a terrible thing. More terrible still in the battles of the Shogunate, when so many sailors met their ends buried deep within their ships, never to see the sky again.
The lucky die instantly, hit directly by weapons larger than men, dead too soon to realize their end was coming. The less lucky die quickly, as those weapons tear loose walls of jade and bring them crashing down upon them. The substantially less lucky die slowly, trapped in a room far below the waves, as fires burn their flesh from bone, as water seeps in through the cracks in the corners.
The truly unfortunate don't have time to drown. The sharks find them first, and tear them into a meal for five. If they have the smallest semblance of fortune, the light behind their eyes goes out before seeing one gulp down their heart, but Siakal's children have never found that important enough to ensure.
When one lives their life dealing out that fate, it can seem quite fair when they face it. But that is a lie. There is nothing fair about it. There is nothing fair about any of it.
When a ferocious, celebrated captain of the Shogunate watched a shark eat her kidneys, and awoke to the faces of those she had ordered dead in battle and to all the sailors who had died under her command, she was far from the first to realize that. But when she had finished having words with all those who remembered her from life, they may have been the first to make a journey to the dark places in search of a peace that eluded them.
They may not have been. But they were the first to come back.
Today, a fleet sails the oceans and rivers of the Underworld. It isn't always the same ships. Some sail with them for a time, and come and go without resentment. But the flagship is always the same - the phantasmal form of a Shogunate fast battleship, crewed by phantoms, and a cheerful, friendly captain dressed in mid-Shogunate high fashion, who speaks in an archaic dialect of Seatongue.
Unbreakable Diamond is not that ship, or its crew, or its captain.
Unbreakable Diamond is that ship, and its crew, and its captain. Whether the captain devoured the souls of her crew that day their ship sank in battle, whether the crew devoured the soul of their captain, whether they all travelled together and in drinking the power in the dark places beneath the world melded into one will, may never be known.
Unbreakable Diamond is the center of the Gentle Repose, an assassin cult spread across Creation, though centered in the West. It is her belief that death is natural. All things die. But they need not regret it. All people should die quietly, peacefully, and move on to Lethe and their next life.
Sometimes, the Gentle Repose assist them in this process - there are poisons that will put a man into a peaceful sleep from which he will never awaken, and when an excruciating death approaches, they may feel it is a kinder ending. This is most commonly euthanasia offered to the sick and wounded, but those who inflict cruel deaths may be given this gift whether they wish it or not.
Unbreakable Diamond and her fleet serve to welcome those who did not find peace in life. Those who cannot let go may find purpose crewing one of her ships. They may find joy in the delights, festivals, and dances ever held aboard the ships. They may need things done in Creation proper, and Unbreakable Diamond will assist them in this. Some will never pass on, but most do find the peace they were denied, and go to their next life happily.
She prefers not to inflict violent deaths, even against the cruel. But she is still one of the greatest battleships of the Shogunate and she is very, very good at it. She believes that ideally, all deaths would be gentle. But she is not under the impression that this is an ideal world, and sometimes a great deal of violence can prevent a great deal more pain.
It is because of this that she is the greatest enemy of Siakal, the Western Goddess of Battle and Slaughter, and the two have frequently hunted one another across the Western Oceans and faced one another in battle. Neither has yet slain the other, despite numerous attempts - they are creatures of different worlds, and can always escape into a realm the other cannot follow.
If mortals do battle at night or in a shadowland and near enough to the sea or the great rivers, she has been known to burst out into Creation, gunning down the children of Siakal and bringing battles to an end swiftly, taking all those who still wish to fight back to the Underworld with her, to live out the rest of their days in peace.
Unbreakable Diamond as Liege: Unbreakable Diamond crosses the seas of both the Underworld and Creation, and may well find scattered Monstrances there. She is a soldier by nature, and has a natural affinity for the Dusk caste, though the Moonshadow and Daybreak castes better-suit her purposes. Regardless, when able she chooses those who have known pain in life, who retain the kindness to wish others peace.
Her Abyssals are almost always given tasks in Creation - to run hospices, to seek to prevent wars and great bloodshed, to counsel the miserable, to protect her cults, and to take care of the tasks that prevent the dead from finding Lethe. She is not the most political Deathlord, but she despises Siakal, and would love to take the opportunity Abyssals present to have the goddess murdered.
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- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Ah, the renowned Desslord.
Jon Chung
=][=
Another element to note - if we aren't in an explicitly high-trust game, players don't trust NPCs, since we're in a game which explicitly includes your players' past incarnations being poisoned and butchered at a dinner party and no promises that this won't happen to you, and powers that let me play a Night Caste that can perfectly pretend to be people's cute little daughter, baiting a hug and activating Crashing Wave Throw.
This can add a lot of slog to the GM's plate* having to deal with the fact that every single NPC statement can be treated as a potential trap, a poison pill meant to place them at a disadvantage or deliberate manipulation in order to advance some goal that may or may not line up with the players' own goals. This can cause half the session's real time to be eaten up by players debating with each other over which NPCs have what apparent agendas, whether these line up with their actual agendas, and what bits of information given to them with their most likely anticipated reaction are done so in hope of provoking that reaction, or the second-most likely reaction after the first is dismissed as too obvious, etc, etc.
Judge's Ear Technique slices through this in one stroke by making it impossible to outright tell a lie to a Solar. Its main value to the game is allowing players to trust others more easily, because if you have it, and some NPC states something outright in an obvious way without dissembling, you can actually trust that at least they honestly believe that their statement is true, rather than having to verify every statement via spycraft or ensure that everyone you're dealing with is pre-emptively discouraged from betrayal by the judicious application of blackmail and dead man's switches.
If you also include Sagacious Reading of Intent to go with your Judge's Ear Technique, most of the paranoia goes away, because you know out of character that direct statements are believed to be true and the overall motivation of the NPC you're talking to so you can cross-reference and make an educated guess at whether to turn on maximum paranoia mode. It is possible to believe that the person talking to you really is a cabbage merchant trying to get you to buy cabbages.
* Personally, I like this atmosphere of rampant paranoia, but most other GMs I've talked to don't.
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- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Worth considerations- but of specific note is this. I find that level of paranoia exhausting, especially in an IRC game. I should also note that most of my gaming sessions across my career are 3 hours, not the comfortable 4-6 that a lot of other games have (mostly due to scheduling). So I am usually seeing 2-3 scenes per session, 4 on a good day with planning.
I think also it's worth noting that the 'explicit statement that our past lives were ganked' is... Not that explicit? Like- It's a habit you get trained into by following the fandom, but it's also a habit that a player might want to break. Meticulous paranoia can be fun, but it also can be really disruptive. Especially when one player is more gung ho and another player is more circumspect.
Jon Chung
=][=
Right, thus my perception of Judge's Ear Technique and Sagacious Reading of Intent having a positive effect by short-circuiting the paranoia and allowing the game to proceed at a decent pace even if the players are being careful. You know you can trust that X believes that statement Y is true because your OOC magic power is telling you so, and you know what they're trying to get out of the interaction with you so you can make a quick decision whether or not to play along, rather than do the exhausting paranoia information-gathering, motivation-simulating pattern match dance.
I might like doing this, but anecdotally, most GMs and most players don't. Since it's unavoidable that some level of paranoia will develop in a game if enemy stealth/disguise capabilities are used as-written (low-trust game - zero-trust after Sidereals or Perfect Mirror users show up, IME), I appreciate that stuff exists to cut that time wasting loop.
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Aleph
Princess of Stabbity
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Notably, one of the big differences between how @Shyft is thinking of JET and how I am is that Shyft is thinking from the perspective of a Twilight player who's using JET, while I inherently think of it from the perspective of a Night player who's facing JET. Now, we've had the discussion about PC Charms vs NPC Charms before, and I'll ask @Jon Chung not to jump in again regarding Sidereals on that score, but it's worth emphasising that Inksgame is relatively unusual in not having met any other Celestial Exalts yet that Inks knows of - she's felt the effects of one or two, but never faced any directly. Most games do expect to deal with other Solars, or elder Lunars, or demon princes who have Panoply abilities that are balanced against singular Solar Charms, or whatever. And in a lot of games like that, players are going to want to lie to those people; saying things like "of course we're not here to murder you and steal the Book of Three Circles; whyever would you think that?" or "I'm absolutely loyal, sir, you can definitely count on me" or suchlike.
And this is where lies-as-play comes into effect, because in those cases JET means you just don't get to play that game of being a clever political actor or a sneaky con-man or a bold thief who bluffs their way through in plain sight. The ST either has to just never give JET to an NPC and thereby nerf the challenge or say You Don't Get To Even Try This. This is, fundamentally, why I support the Instant duration of Factual Determination Analysis over the scene-long Judge's Ear Technique - not for the ST to use against the players, but for the players to use against NPCs who feel competent and challenging. There's a reason I brag so much about Keris pulling off her lies and secrets against FDA-equipped Infernals, and it's because it feels amazing to get away with that sort of thing through clever roleplaying and well-chosen stunts.
And this is where lies-as-play comes into effect, because in those cases JET means you just don't get to play that game of being a clever political actor or a sneaky con-man or a bold thief who bluffs their way through in plain sight. The ST either has to just never give JET to an NPC and thereby nerf the challenge or say You Don't Get To Even Try This. This is, fundamentally, why I support the Instant duration of Factual Determination Analysis over the scene-long Judge's Ear Technique - not for the ST to use against the players, but for the players to use against NPCs who feel competent and challenging. There's a reason I brag so much about Keris pulling off her lies and secrets against FDA-equipped Infernals, and it's because it feels amazing to get away with that sort of thing through clever roleplaying and well-chosen stunts.
Jon Chung
=][=
Hmm. I'm more concerned with use against players... specifically, not using the Solar Charms in question against players, but using selective information control and outright lying by NPCs against players, any instance of which is perfectly logical for the NPC themselves to be doing in order to secure an advantage for themselves, conceal information or motives that may paint them in an unflattering light, plant information to encourage acts in their favour against their enemies, etc etc. By necessity, this requires the GM to create and hold in frame the image of the world each NPC is presenting to the players, the players need to hold in frame their perception of each NPC's projection of the world vs their own, evidence gathered, likelihood of falsehood or manipulation, etc, etc.
The larger the game's supporting cast of NPCs, the worse this gets, and that's just with regular non-magical people interacting on the Great Game / nation-state scale. Player paranoia will naturally rise in response. Anecdotally, involving other Celestials on top of this drives the player paranoia through the roof, because misplaced trust in others now comes with potentially immediately lethal consequences, so checking every statement, making sure all the people you talk to aren't Sidereals, etc becomes capital-I Important. In this context, I liked the fact that the players had access to a tool that allowed them to restore trust enough ("This person made a statement they believe is true. They did so because they want me to help them take out their enemy in exchange for favours and resources. They aren't using magic to contest my lie-detector magic because I'd get a rolloff if they did. I specifically asked them if they were a Sidereal or a Sidereal Acquaintance and they denied it, which was true. Okay, I can work with that.") that I could get through a session without having to waste half of it on confirmation spycraft *.
* Even though I delight in lying to players, it really is a bunch of extra work.
I see the tradeoff where the players can't lie to a fellow Solaroid (and must resort to lying by omission and being at least partially honest about their goals) to be worth their frustration in that particular conversation in exchange for all the work I don't have to do in the context of other conversations and all the paranoid behaviour that having that capability saves them in-game. It might be the case that my games are vastly more antagonistic (zero trust!) than the baseline we're assuming here and therefore this isn't usually a problem, but in this context, I like that Solar Bob can tell the cabbage merchant is not lying in a system-mechanical way that leaves no doubt as to this fact (and doesn't cost him chunks of his life bar...) to be a real time-saver.
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Cornuthaum
Be kind to each other.
- Location
- Austria
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Tell me, do you fear dess?
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Except that's the core of the problem. The tumour that is JET also tells then when you're lying by omission. And it's a scenelong so the GM has to constantly provide this information - not just when the PC deliberately tests a statement.
I detest JET with a fiery passion because it massively increases my workload and my overhead as a GM. For every bit of dialogue during an entire scene, I have to evaluate my precise phrasing and tell the player not only if the character is lying directly, but also if they're lying by omission. No. Fuck that. I'm already having to simulate an entire world with smoke and mirrors. JET demands that I also track whether every single character the PCs interact with is telling falsehoods or meaningfully not providing enough information.
And on top of that, it's a bad genre power. Mythological characters get lied to and deceived all the fucking time. It might be acceptable if it was something like Eye of the Unconquered Sun - which is to say, Obvious, high essence, and something you can't walk around with all the time as an overt and terrible work of Solar power - but I am not going to shut down a major facet of human interaction with a scenelong low cost low requirements Charm with no meaningful counterplay which doesn't even use the existing mechanics for detecting lies and in fact entirely invalidates them.
Jon Chung
=][=
Well, that's the thing - I'm already doing this. The majority of my NPCs with reason to do so are lying to the PCs constantly in various ways, so if I want to correctly handle what they're thinking and what they expect to happen when they interact, I need to keep track of what they're trying to do with regard to manipulating the PCs. The specific thing I found helpful was that the ability to tell when people are directly telling the truth saved time dealing with absolute PC paranoia once the game had already reached that state, since using a Charm to check uses a lot less time than investigating each NPC's claims even if that could be handled in an offscreen investigation single roll.
Assuming the cost of simulating what each NPC knows vs what they're saying to the PCs is already paid for due to how I'm doing this anyway, what is nice is the cost of adjudicating player actions to try to find out what each NPC knows vs what they're saying to the PCs is reduced. There are other ways to handle this besides Judge's Ear, but it actually saved me time.
Does anyone besides masochists use the 2E social system? It's not ideal to completely shut down the ability to lie to Solars, but in this particular case, I was wasting so much time that the tradeoff was worth it.
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From an outside perspective, you are assuming no trust and ES and Aleph are assuming high trust (or at least medium trust).
ES and Aleph avoid paranoia in-game by frontloading it into Keris's build. If that cabbage merchant is an assassin, then Keris gets excited and stabs him. ES and Aleph also really hate running combat in 2e, so ES won't throw Keris up against a peer opponent and Aleph would have Keris run away from a fight like that. Basically, Aleph trusts ES to not lie to her in ways that could cause paranoia while leaving in all the ways that lies can cause interesting games. The moment you have players who actually want to use the combat system, that falls apart. The moment that your players draw enough attention that they really need Sidereal killsquads for an actual fight, it falls apart. The moment that you get an actual Wyld Hunt on your ass because you don't habitually run away from people you could absolutely kill, that falls apart.
Maybe Aleph will be able to run Inksgame without inspiring paranoia in Shyft. She seems to be off to a good start. I don't know if she can keep that up.
I will say that cutting out JET from all the games ever because it is a tumor will leave most of those games with a big hole, probably without any of the bandages and sterile operating environments that ES and Aleph are using.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Alright, synthesising a response...
In pursuit of play/counterplay, there are a host of considerations one must account for. Are you using the session time effectively? Are both players having fun? Are you playing 'fairly' that is to say not leveraging the advantage of one side over the other- and the ST almost always has the advantage until a Charm says otherwise.
I think to @EarthScorpion 's point of JET as a 'tumor', the real question that other STs should ask and answer is- "who has fun doing it this way?"
like- I, Shyft, the Player, am not represented by stats on a character sheet and even if I were, I am not Int 5 Per 5. If I don't notice something out-of-game, if my storyteller is better at communication, better at describing and ommiting details to generate a specific response- is that fair? Consider the counter example. Everybody understands that a given player is not going to be a brilliant salesman or speech writer, but they're still going to let them roll well if they have a good pool at it.
So a question that must be answered is 'Where do the game mechanics draw the line of player capability vs character capability'. And then where do the tables draw that line.
Regarding @Aleph 's experience- I as a player have almost never faced JET- I have only used it or been had it used against me in games I've run. And i preferred to let players use it than not, simply because I felt it was important to the Solar Experience that they get to have access to such information at their fingertips. I did not use it as effectively or as nuanced as I could have, sure, but I still believed it was important.
So this comes back to a core question of 'Who has more fun?' or 'Where do players and STs get their fun'? Like... if a hypothetical ST gets their entertainment by outplaying their players, of being adversarial and metatextually clever, that's fine- especially if the players are all agreed to play by the same rules. If the ST is lording their greater skill or ability over them, that's awful.
In context of Inksgame, I feel safe in saying that Aleph wants to have fun writing clever people and to reward me for counter-playing their cleverness? The challenge is that I may not be clever enough, may never be. What happens then?
In pursuit of play/counterplay, there are a host of considerations one must account for. Are you using the session time effectively? Are both players having fun? Are you playing 'fairly' that is to say not leveraging the advantage of one side over the other- and the ST almost always has the advantage until a Charm says otherwise.
I think to @EarthScorpion 's point of JET as a 'tumor', the real question that other STs should ask and answer is- "who has fun doing it this way?"
like- I, Shyft, the Player, am not represented by stats on a character sheet and even if I were, I am not Int 5 Per 5. If I don't notice something out-of-game, if my storyteller is better at communication, better at describing and ommiting details to generate a specific response- is that fair? Consider the counter example. Everybody understands that a given player is not going to be a brilliant salesman or speech writer, but they're still going to let them roll well if they have a good pool at it.
So a question that must be answered is 'Where do the game mechanics draw the line of player capability vs character capability'. And then where do the tables draw that line.
Regarding @Aleph 's experience- I as a player have almost never faced JET- I have only used it or been had it used against me in games I've run. And i preferred to let players use it than not, simply because I felt it was important to the Solar Experience that they get to have access to such information at their fingertips. I did not use it as effectively or as nuanced as I could have, sure, but I still believed it was important.
So this comes back to a core question of 'Who has more fun?' or 'Where do players and STs get their fun'? Like... if a hypothetical ST gets their entertainment by outplaying their players, of being adversarial and metatextually clever, that's fine- especially if the players are all agreed to play by the same rules. If the ST is lording their greater skill or ability over them, that's awful.
In context of Inksgame, I feel safe in saying that Aleph wants to have fun writing clever people and to reward me for counter-playing their cleverness? The challenge is that I may not be clever enough, may never be. What happens then?
Ah, that's the thing.
It's not part of the social combat system. Explicitly so. It's in a section which is explicit that it's an exception to the (awful) social combat rules. It's part of the "Reading Motivation (Investigation)" section on p131.
Article: Characters can also evaluate motivation with (Perception + Investigation) at the listed difficulty as a standard dice action when they suspect a character in the scene has just lied. Success discovers whether the statement was a lie or significantly deceptive omission, though the character does not discern the truth.
The difficulty mentioned is (half your Manipulation + Socialise, rounded up).
Incidentally, that answers the point that @Shyft has previously raised about Socialise being pretty useless and largely serving to constrain you and make you suck. Well, yes - its major part as your DV-alike against people knowing you're lying is entirely negated and thrown out the window by JET.
So, yeah, solution to JET? Let it instead let you make reflexive "tell if someone lied" rolls. If you don't have enough Investigation to beat a good liar... well, sucks to be you. Invest in it more if you want to be King Solomon. Don't bypass the system. Don't give Investigation 2 characters the capacity to completely no-sell a basic facet of human interaction as part of a scene-long low cost non-Obvious Charm.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Right, but this comes back to the fundamental point of being your solution, a solution. You clearly don't like the gameplay allowed by JET being Invest 2 and so innocuously costed, which is cool for you/your table.
In terms of design, socialize-as-throttle is at best a neutral mechanic because it's meant to act as a soft stick towards optimization. If you aren't good at Mass Social Combat, don't get into mass social and/or force mass social into Not mass social. This is hardly clear in the books though.
Social combat as presented in 2e is... complicated. We go on about saying it's terrible (and it really is not good), but we almost never talk about what it is, just the conclusions we draw from it to illustrate how bad it is. I have to leave for work sadly so I can't review it for the sake of the discussion.
A key point here is abstraction- is it more important to include a basic tennent of human interaction (lying and manipulation), or is it more important to abstract it in service to the kind of game convention Exalted wants to present?
Problem - JET also goes directly against the genres Exalted wants to emulate, because as previously mentioned mythological characters (and also anime characters) get deceived all the time and "infallibly knowing when people are lying" is no where near as common as "wuxia air jumps" (to take Graceful Crane Technique as a similarly ubiquitously priced thing). And it acts directly against the stories of the strong being overthrown by the weak, which Exalted otherwise wants to promote - because deception is one of the most potent tools the weak have against the strong.
And yes, when one of your Attributes is Manipulation, I'd say it's pretty damn important to have manipulation in the game in a way which doesn't make characters trying to be clever be made to suck because Solar Stupid McBlunt managed to scrape together Investigation 2 and bought an Investigation Excellency. When your backstory relies on the Solars having been deceived by their viziers and their servants, it's kind of important that Solars can, in fact, be deceived without requiring absurdly convoluted reasoning as to how no Solar ever wound up asking a question that a Dragonblooded or Sidereal couldn't safely answer without being ridiculously evasive (and even then the stupid "Oh yeah, it also tells you about half truths" clause gets in the way of being evasive).
I show JET all the respect I would show a scenelong 3m charm which says "I am an invalid target for Archery and Thrown attacks". Because they're effectively doing the same thing in how they limit and constrain scenes.
One of the things that I like the most about Storypath is how the Procedural system gives proper context to the process of acquiring, parsing, and using information. When I looked through the Charm trees a week or two ago after having the opportunity to absorb Storypath, Sociallize practically slapped me in the face and screamed "I AM AN INFORMATION GATHERING SKILL, NOT AN INTRIGUE SKILL!"
But Jon, if you don't use the social system, then Linguistics has literally no mechanical function.
- Location
- Virginia
Ex3 has a mechanical answer to this question, in the form of the entry Investigation charm, Watchman's Infallible Eye:
There is a similar charm in Occult, Uncanny Perception Technique, that gives you a unique sensory cue (like the sound of bells, or the smell of brine) when you could use Spirit-Detecting Glance.
... Is that a shipgirl?!
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Do you fear dess my friend?
Salty
Shadow Cabal Assumptor Supreme
- Location
- Sun, Moon, Talia
- Pronouns
- I/Me
BRB; writing up sexier, better looking (and playing) Chinese knockoff to cannibalize its powerbase and assume its throne.
Peanut-007
Hat or Hair? America decides.
- Location
- Maryland, United States of America
Since gods only disappear when what they represent fully disappears would it be possible for the god of a lost but not forgotten martial arts style to teach someone that style?
Or am I misunderstanding how gods keep existing in Exalted?
Or am I misunderstanding how gods keep existing in Exalted?
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