- Location
- Singapore
I was more like... is it soak? Hardness? Armour?
General Exalted Thread
Frakir's brother
Goodbye.
- Location
- The Sea of Trees
Really, be category of surprise is too broad for any of those. As always, the true answer is Adorjan charms. Akumaize yourself today!
- Location
- Singapore
Gah. Making terrestrial martial arts is hard...
Ok. How much of a bonus an terrestrial martial art give?
Jon Chung
=][=
Go read all of them and figure it out.
This is not a crowdsourcing reference thread.
- Location
- Singapore
STALKING THROUGH THE SHADOWS
Cost: 2m
Mins: Martial arts 2, Essence 1
The Martial artist twists his essence to the concepts of secrets and shadow, assisting him in concealing himself from his victims. The martial artist gains a bonus to his stealth rating of (martial arts). Also, he ignores all penalties to stealth rolls due to the environment. Even the darkest rooms has shadows after all.
THE BLOW THAT CAME UNSEEN
Cost: 4m
Mins: Martial arts 2, Essence 1
Concentrating essence to his weapons, the martial artist's become even more deadly. Objects that inflict bashing inflict lethal. Objects that inflict lethal bypass hardness.
All surprise attacks have their damage doubled.
ATTACK, THEN RETREAT, THEN ATTACK AGAIN
Martial arts 4, Essence 2
The martial artist has launched an attack. The two opponents now face each other, in a final showdown.
Then the martial artist runs away.
This charm supplements an attempt to reestablish surprise. Disappearing from the sight and minds of his opponents, the martial artist fades away. Add the martial arts rating to reestablishing surprise. On a success, the victim is left wondering why he is injured.
SWIFT AS A SHADOW
Cost: 3m
Mins: Martial arts 2, Essence 1
The martial artist seeks his target, or flees from the body. As long as he is unobserved or in darkness, he triples his speed and movement. If he is observed, the speed is only doubled.
TO MOVE UNSEEN
Cost: 4m
Mins: Martial arts 2, Essence 1
The martial artist becomes invisible, becoming unseen by either man or machine. Of course, he can still be touched, smelt, or heard.
DARKNESS AVERSION STANCE
MINS: Martial 2, Essence 2
The character stands tall... and ignored. This is unnatural mental influence, which can be shaken off with the expenditure of 2 willpower.
ON THE WINGS OF THE RAVEN
MINS: Martial arts 4, Essence 3
The martial artist moves with supreme speed, his skill itself causing the world itself to hide his presence. The martial artist moves.... and disappears.
If he can get within an area within the next few minutes at a dead sprint, he can get there. If he can.
A barred gate where he has no key means his passage is stopped there, but a room with a door with a pickable lock is one he can get inside.
ENTROPY STRIKE STANCE
Mins: Martial arts 3, Essence 3
The martial artist attaced once... and then waits. The strike is backed by toxic essence. The victim rolls his stamina against the attacker's martial arts rating. When the attacker gets more successes, the victim obtains an internal penalty due to poison. This only applies when damage is done.
Another idea for this is one for causing crippling injuries. But I'm not sure whether it's too overpowered or not.
Ok. Hope it's not too overpowered.
Cost: 2m
Mins: Martial arts 2, Essence 1
The Martial artist twists his essence to the concepts of secrets and shadow, assisting him in concealing himself from his victims. The martial artist gains a bonus to his stealth rating of (martial arts). Also, he ignores all penalties to stealth rolls due to the environment. Even the darkest rooms has shadows after all.
THE BLOW THAT CAME UNSEEN
Cost: 4m
Mins: Martial arts 2, Essence 1
Concentrating essence to his weapons, the martial artist's become even more deadly. Objects that inflict bashing inflict lethal. Objects that inflict lethal bypass hardness.
All surprise attacks have their damage doubled.
ATTACK, THEN RETREAT, THEN ATTACK AGAIN
Martial arts 4, Essence 2
The martial artist has launched an attack. The two opponents now face each other, in a final showdown.
Then the martial artist runs away.
This charm supplements an attempt to reestablish surprise. Disappearing from the sight and minds of his opponents, the martial artist fades away. Add the martial arts rating to reestablishing surprise. On a success, the victim is left wondering why he is injured.
SWIFT AS A SHADOW
Cost: 3m
Mins: Martial arts 2, Essence 1
The martial artist seeks his target, or flees from the body. As long as he is unobserved or in darkness, he triples his speed and movement. If he is observed, the speed is only doubled.
TO MOVE UNSEEN
Cost: 4m
Mins: Martial arts 2, Essence 1
The martial artist becomes invisible, becoming unseen by either man or machine. Of course, he can still be touched, smelt, or heard.
DARKNESS AVERSION STANCE
MINS: Martial 2, Essence 2
The character stands tall... and ignored. This is unnatural mental influence, which can be shaken off with the expenditure of 2 willpower.
ON THE WINGS OF THE RAVEN
MINS: Martial arts 4, Essence 3
The martial artist moves with supreme speed, his skill itself causing the world itself to hide his presence. The martial artist moves.... and disappears.
If he can get within an area within the next few minutes at a dead sprint, he can get there. If he can.
A barred gate where he has no key means his passage is stopped there, but a room with a door with a pickable lock is one he can get inside.
ENTROPY STRIKE STANCE
Mins: Martial arts 3, Essence 3
The martial artist attaced once... and then waits. The strike is backed by toxic essence. The victim rolls his stamina against the attacker's martial arts rating. When the attacker gets more successes, the victim obtains an internal penalty due to poison. This only applies when damage is done.
Another idea for this is one for causing crippling injuries. But I'm not sure whether it's too overpowered or not.
Ok. Hope it's not too overpowered.
- Location
- U.S.
Generally scaling, based off of either Essence or Maetial Arts. Divide by 2 sometimes.
Do this, however
we can be sometimes, and if nobody wants to, they won't respond. It's a valid question for the pile of people who know lots of stuff.
- Location
- Singapore
Apologies. I'm on my phone, and cut off from my laptop. It's insanely hard to look through dogs through a phone screen. Words are way too small and you can't scroll. Can't copy and paste onto a Google doc to compile it all either.
- Location
- Washington, USA
Those charms are a long, long way from being ready to use in play. There's no clear unifying theme, and more than half the mechanics are missing. Entropy Strike Stance doesn't even specify the size of the internal penalty it inflicts.
Whenever you're talking about a non-trivial research project, which this definitely is, good starting point is to assume it will take at least a week of working several hours per day even after the proper tools are available. "Proper tools" includes, but is not necessarily limited to, a full-sized screen and keyboard. Might be possible to squeak by with less, and some things will turn out to be quicker and easier than you expect, but not everyone can be MacGyver.
- Location
- Singapore
Wait. A week? I thought you were supposed to do this on several hours.
edit: How frustrating. So much homebrew on first circle demons. And the site is lost.
[EXALTED] Index of Fanmade First Circle Demon
edit: How frustrating. So much homebrew on first circle demons. And the site is lost.
[EXALTED] Index of Fanmade First Circle Demon
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Frakir's brother
Goodbye.
- Location
- The Sea of Trees
My home brew was written in and off over the course of months. It takes however long it takes to get a product you are proud of.
- Location
- Washington, USA
Or, to be more faithful to the source material, buy "Crom, God of the Cimmerians" as an Ally or Mentor or something, then have him run interference on the Sidereals and otherwise handle those sorts of problems for you behind the scenes. See, I did a bit of research, and it turns out that
http://conan.wikia.com/wiki/Crom said:
Jon Chung
=][=
You're seriously suggesting a literal deus ex machina intervention over "don't give the fucking NPCs campaign-ending stupid powers"?
Wow.
Are you genuinely committed to the concept that it's reasonable to expect the GM to contort themselves into increasingly desperate knots to resolve game developer mistakes (and the gaming group to swallow it), or are you pulling my leg?
e: Hypothetically, would you prefer the scenario of Ketchup zipping by on agata-back and going for Grandmother Spider Mastery to kill everyone and destroy all infrastructure in your kingdom in one tick only to be stopped by the personal direct intervention of the Unconquered Sun, or him not being able to do that and needing to get the Dragon-Blooded to fight you by means of massing armies and laying siege? Because IME, you get better gameplay, better verisimilitude and better immersion out of the latter, and the former only works once.
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Jon Chung
=][=
Have you read the Exalted 2 combat rules? That is not how damage works.
- Location
- Singapore
You.. you know what? Let me reread them.
Hell, that's not how it works in 3e either. The question's valid for either, since both versions of the Charm have the clause, so going off my memory...
If you're using 2e, or a Withering attack in 3e, you roll the damage of the weapon + your Strength for damage, as if you'd rolled successes equal to defence/DV being applied.
If it's a decisive attack in 3e, you simply roll your current Initiative to deal decisive damage.
- Location
- Washington, USA
I am genuinely committed to the concept that it's reasonable to expect the GM to use the whole game, along with a campaign setting complex and internally consistent enough to maintain verisimilitude, rather than treating almost everything other than the combat system as an optional annoyance. When you were hammering out that Jeeves Manse concept, did you look at any of the worked examples? Every one of those has a couple hundred words describing the manse's context in the world, what materials it's built from, in what style, and how the geomantic powers and disadvantages tie into all that, and each other, in practical terms. Establishing all that information is a necessary part of the rules for designing a manse. Skip it, and you'll be missing something important.
"Deus ex Machina" doesn't just mean "any situation in which gods were involved at all." Crom is a well known (albeit usually very distant) character in that setting, whose relevant capabilities and motivations were established far in advance, and Conan's relationship with him is an iconic element of the whole series. If some player came up to me, wanting to play a Conan-as-king-of-Aquilonia-inspired Dawn-caste Solar, and said OOC that they didn't want to have to worry about geomancy or spirit courts or astrology or any of that kind of thing, so they could just focus on the more physical stuff, barbarian honor and conventional military tactics and so on, I might say something like:
"Okay, put at least three of your Background dots into Mentor (Crom), and then he'll take care of keeping the machinations of Heaven on your side, or at least out of your way. Your people are his domain, so your successes are good for his career... but throwing in some prayers, including mentioning him in random stunted oaths, helps too. He'll also subtly arrange for some of his other problems to end up IN your way, ripe to be solved by violence. If Crom ends up needing to intervene to save your life more directly, you'll want to repay that with some proper sacrifices, or else risk losing his support."
Where is the 'contortion into increasingly desperate knots' in that policy? A bought-and-paid-for friendly NPC deals with other NPCs, mostly off screen, to avoid subjects the players don't want to engage with, and the game moves on. No real fundamental difference between that and hiring an accountant, or butler, or chef, or spy, instead of trying to do it all yourself. If somebody else wants to be less Conan, more Sun Wukong, they can skip the divine patron in favor of whatever charms or social connections or other assets they feel they'd need in order to personally provoke and ultimately overcome the wrath of Heaven.
Jon Chung
=][=
I certainly did! Note that I took Indestructible and max fragility for fun. The cost of one practically cancels out the gain from the other. Feel free to remove that if you like, it doesn't actually affect the manse's nonsensical output. Reduce the Hearthstone by one point.
Note that there are people in-setting who could very credibly have had one of these babies running for five thousand years or something. Do you think that's appropriate for your player characters to run up against? Because if they can build it, Elder Bob can build it too, and Elder Bob's got that five thousand year head start, pumping out Five-Metal Shrikes until he can have fun inventing creative names for a collective unit of Five Metal Shrikes too numerous to count by eye.
How exactly is your divine patron supposed to prevent Ketchup (or some other Essence 7+ Sidereal of your choice) from doing an agata flyby with Grandmother Spider Mastery to one-shot kill your entire kingdom of Aquilonia, followed up promptly by Avoidance Kata to have never been there? Crom cast as an Exalted god (presumably, something like an Ahlat or a Golden Lord) does not have the ability to prevent this act, the political leverage to influence Ketchup's actions or or the personal prowess or access to sufficient proxy military force to credibly threaten Ketchup with retaliation for having done it, even assuming they can figure out Ketchup did it in the first place given how extremely easy it is to do this by stealth.
Your solution to this problem: Ketchup, despite having the ability to wipe your player character and their kingdom out, the desire to wipe him out and the convenience to wipe him out with a minimal expenditure of effort and time, with a pretty decent chance to get away with it completely... does not wipe Conan out because you're exerting GM fiat to prevent him from doing so through the handwaved excuse of a three-dot Ally background without the ability to credibly prevent Ketchup from doing anything. This strains suspension of disbelief.
My solution to this problem: Grandmother Spider Mastery does not exist, or its range is strictly limited to a radius of, let's say, one mile tops instead of "everything you can see", and the same principle applies to Essence Shattering Typhoon or The Empress Lives for All or whatever other retarded elder bullshit he might have. Ketchup cannot wipe your player character and their kingdom out in an instant, in perfect safety and absolute convenience. If he wants Aquilonia destroyed, he needs to get the Realm to move forces of mortal soldiers and Dragon-Blooded officers to destroy Aquilonia the hard way, and/or he needs to somehow get the Bureau of Seasons to collectively organize to drop a tsunami on your coastline, actions which are vastly easier to interfere with or survive than a lunch break agata ride followed by instant game over. That 3-dot ally deity might actually credibly manage to help Conan here, because the weaker Ketchup's personal power, the more susceptible he is to outside influence or pressure, the more he needs to involve outside organisations the more likely it is that plans leak or can be sabotaged, etc etc.
Ketchup is not the only entity who has it out for Solars building kingdoms. In every case where an asshole elder NPC has the ability to push some blindingly stupid button and end the campaign and chooses not to, the GM needs to find ever-less believable excuses for all of them to explain why they haven't pushed their win buttons yet. I do not want to do that. Every time I have to do that, my spite meter increases. If the excuse I need to use is "the nonsensically powerful elder asshole doesn't squish you as an afterthought because another nonsensically powerful elder asshole would mind" in a game where crushing the jewelled thrones of the world beneath my sandaled feet is supposed to be possible, my spite meter increases exponentially.
Do you see why I'm characterising your approach as "contortion into increasingly desperate knots" yet? Because if we take all the stupid shit in the game as-is, I need to contort very energetically to somehow justify why the setting still exists.
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- Location
- Washington, USA
The UCS need not be directly or even personally involved. Let's say Chejop Kejack (or some other elder sidereal) knows Grandmother Spider Mastery, but at some point in his (or her) career, perhaps as a procedural prerequisite for that Sifu background, swore an oath - sanctified by the Eclipse anima power of one of the Mice of the Sun, or equivalent - to refrain from destroying vast swaths of Creation except under narrow "Godzilla threshold" circumstances. So, the Charcoal March stylist could scrape Sarnath down to bare bedrock on tick zero, it's not impossible... but they also know that an unjustified attempt to do so might start with a botched attack roll, followed by a botched activation of Duck Fate to avoid terminal-velocity fall damage, and then it would all be downhill from there. The result is that they usually need to have the Dragon-Blooded fight you by means of massing armies and laying siege, and when they do, there are rules of engagement which also prevent the Dragon-Blooded from simply using their own innate powers or ancient artifacts to nuke you instead.
Now, if you start throwing around adamant-circle attack spells to break that siege, or otherwise escalate the conflict to a point where potentially sacrificing a centuries-old master's accumulated expertise starts to seem like the safer option from the perspective of preserving Creation as a whole, well, that changes things. Strategy in a multipolar environment involves not making yourself look like a big, obvious threat, at least not until you're prepared to take on everyone else at once. Big guns get saved for big targets. When the Scarlet Empress uses Tenebrous Apotheosis Shintai to transform into a palate-swap of Ramiel, and takes command of a horde of flying demons so vast it fills the sky from horizon to horizon, Ketchup Carjack should be able to roll up his sleeves and say "Fortunately, there's a secret forbidden technique which I mastered long ago, and have been saving for just such an occasion." The idea that elder exalts lack the capability to cause massive, campaign-ending destruction, even when sorely provoked, fails the Usurpation-OK test; somebody made all those messes.
Jon Chung
=][=
And if I do that for Ketchup, I still have to invent a similarly stupid reason why every single entity with this nonsensical Creation-Slaying capability (or something equally retarded, like the ability to shit out Artifact 5s like baking cakes) does not want to or is unwilling to use it unless I need to do a GM asspull, when I can simply remove the capability. As GM, I retain my ability to use GM asspulls whenever I want, so nothing has been lost.
Which causes me less work, less irritation and less disbelieving players?
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Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
I am reminded of a point I've made before; "It is thus the job of developers to prune and cut things out if they do not fit the themes and goals of the game. It's not a question of, "why shouldn't we have [thing]?" it's a question of why should we? The expenditure of wordcount must justify itself. The mechanical complexity, however small, must justify itself. The thematic statement of what the game is about must justify itself. It is not enough for [thing] to be harmless, it must be actively beneficial to the game, it must serve a purpose that is not otherwise served."
That is, it is all very well to say that the existence of charms such as Grandmother Spider Mastery does not necessarily imply that the setting should have imploded by now, that there are reasons why a Sidereal will not, as opposed to cannot, turn up in your campaign and casually wipe out the player's kingdoms, that the GM can provide more or less plausible justifications for why this does not occur. And why that doesn't happen. And that. That too. And that whole mess as well. And...
Regardless, the point is it is insufficient for this to be possible. The better question is, why is it desirable that the GM should have to do this in the first place? What stories are enabled by the potential for a single Sidereal, with no especial effort if the GM doesn't actively work to stop them, to deploy an orbital laser cannon? Why should this be possible?
If you want Sidereals to be capable of deploying magical mass destruction from Heaven... They can already do that! It's called the Bureau of Season's capacity to create martial weather. And this is called out as something which requires considerable effort, and is a major reason why nobody wants to try and bully the Bureau of Seasons into doing what they want, because nobody wants a thunderstorm shoves up their ass. Nobody has to justify why the Bureau of Seasons doesn't drop a hurricane on every upstart Solar kingdom, because the game acknowledges that capability, and takes the time to establish that the Bureau of Seasons doesn't flex that muscle save under extraordinary circumstances, so that the GM doesn't have to think about it unless the story actively calls for that kind of measure.
There's a fundamental difference between the GM being able to use a tool if they want to put in the effort of unlocking it, and the GM having to put in the effort of locking away a tool in order for the story to make sense. The first can be a spur to creativity, and help to shape a story. The second is more likely to be an unwelcome tax of effort levied upon already the most overworked person at the table.
That is, it is all very well to say that the existence of charms such as Grandmother Spider Mastery does not necessarily imply that the setting should have imploded by now, that there are reasons why a Sidereal will not, as opposed to cannot, turn up in your campaign and casually wipe out the player's kingdoms, that the GM can provide more or less plausible justifications for why this does not occur. And why that doesn't happen. And that. That too. And that whole mess as well. And...
Regardless, the point is it is insufficient for this to be possible. The better question is, why is it desirable that the GM should have to do this in the first place? What stories are enabled by the potential for a single Sidereal, with no especial effort if the GM doesn't actively work to stop them, to deploy an orbital laser cannon? Why should this be possible?
If you want Sidereals to be capable of deploying magical mass destruction from Heaven... They can already do that! It's called the Bureau of Season's capacity to create martial weather. And this is called out as something which requires considerable effort, and is a major reason why nobody wants to try and bully the Bureau of Seasons into doing what they want, because nobody wants a thunderstorm shoves up their ass. Nobody has to justify why the Bureau of Seasons doesn't drop a hurricane on every upstart Solar kingdom, because the game acknowledges that capability, and takes the time to establish that the Bureau of Seasons doesn't flex that muscle save under extraordinary circumstances, so that the GM doesn't have to think about it unless the story actively calls for that kind of measure.
There's a fundamental difference between the GM being able to use a tool if they want to put in the effort of unlocking it, and the GM having to put in the effort of locking away a tool in order for the story to make sense. The first can be a spur to creativity, and help to shape a story. The second is more likely to be an unwelcome tax of effort levied upon already the most overworked person at the table.
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- Location
- Washington, USA
Artifacts require exotic components, stuff you can't fake with WST. Eventually, Elder Bob needs something he can't produce in-house, runs off to fetch it, and when he gets back the place has been burgled, if not outright pillaged. Bigger prizes attract more and better thieves. Sunday 26 February 2012 The High First Age was indeed awesome, and they built some incredible things; then, over the course of the Usurpation, Shogunate, and Balorian Crusade, many of those wonders were destroyed or lost. Now the Exalted Host is scattered and divided, squabbling over scraps. If someone built, or even discovered and restored, a fully functional Factory-Cathedral in the Time of Tumult, everyone would want a piece of the action, and some of them might be willing to destroy the prize just to deny it to their rivals. Using, say, the 5-dot moonsilver grand grimcleaver Death At The Root, geomantic sabotage sufficient to ruin the work of years could be accomplished in less than an hour.
Jon Chung
=][=
None of which applies if you can make a magic fabricator that shits out artifacts you can use as components to build artifacts with, complete with portal to the Deep Wyld and minion that can use Wyld Cauldron Technology, until you can blot out the sun with flying battleships. Note that Wyld Cauldron Technology is explicitly the source of "impossible" components that are required to build High First Age artifacts, this is used as the rationale why a Sidereal or Lunar with 10s in all stats and a maxed out crafting tree cannot rebuild any of it.
Again, repeating (with some disbelief that I have to): why is the capability to make this in the game?
I'm genuinely astonished that someone would go to these lengths to actually defend all the stupid bullshit poorly-paid, non-directed freelancers without a line editor have written for this game.
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- Location
- Singapore
Artisan mountain folk?
A question. Is there an in universe reason why the Primordials didn't just run when the first of them died?
- Location
- United States
They surrendered after the first of them died
RedV
Refuelling
- Location
- Right here
He's asking why they didn't leave Creation en masse and build a new world once it became clear that they were being killed/ losing. We know they can jump ship, since Zen-mu was a thing.