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General Exalted Thread
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Not bad for PCs interacting with/acting upon organizations, but it doesn't really do much in the way of PCs being a part of an organization, or for organizations to act as a group and/or conflict with other organizations.
By the way, have I mentioned lately that I really like Geist 2e's krewe mechanics? Because I really like Geist 2e's krewe mechanics.
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That was deliberate. I think the game is probably better off without rules for that stuff.
PCs are individuals, not organisations. So there's no need for organisations-acting-on-organisations rules. And it's easy enough to run an organisation acting on an individual with the normal rules. So I just tried to cover individuals acting on organisations.
I would be interested in hearing about the krewe mechanics, though.
That seems like an odd position to take, given that we talking about a lack of proper mechanics to do Kingdom Building stuff with.
If you want your character create or lead and organization, you're going to need rules for your PCs acting as a part of said organization; if you want to be sending out minions to do things and delegating tasks to vassals or advisors, you're going to need rules for your organization to accomplish tasks at the scope of an organization; if you want to be setting up shop in Mordor and sending out armies to attack Gondor or convert Isengard to your cause then you need rules for organization-on-organization conflict.And while PCs are individuals, not organizations, the PCs in this situation are a part of an organization, and the culture and values of the organization has an impact on the individuals who make it up (at least if they actually want to consider themselves "members"). Like, for example, your rules have Organizations having a bunch of different , often conflicting, Intimacies that represent the various agendas of its membership. Meanwhile, I'm coming from a mindset of that says that organizations should have a set of Intimacies that represent the group culture or values, and a member takes on the Intimacies of the organization when they join.
Krewes sort of do this with Doctrines, Creeds, and Virtues, but I should probably do a proper dump post of krewe mechanics as a whole when I get home from work, so I'll go more into detail on those concepts then.
QafianSage
Ascending Ape
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It comes from the term for a carnivale group. In-game, a krewe is somewhere between a Circle, a death-cult (not necessarily of the evil variety) and a werewolf's pack.
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That seems like an odd position to take, given that we talking about a lack of proper mechanics to do Kingdom Building stuff with.
Nope.
That can all be handled quite cleanly with a mixture of the core rules, homebrew rules for how PCs can affect the operation of their organisations, and some loose guidelines for handling offscreen NPC actions and NPC-vs-NPC conflicts.
If your PCs want to send an army to attack Gondor, you'll need rules for sending armies. But you don't need rules for determining whether armies win or lose. So I wrote rules for making organisations do things, and not for how the things organisations do work out. That's something the GM just decides - and usually, organisations succeed. Farms generally do produce food, churches generally do hold regular services. There's no real chance of failure; they just need to put in the time, the effort, and the money.
Like I said, "Organizations never roll to make interesting problems disappear. You can't just allocate five successes to win a war unless the table agrees that the war was a tedious distraction from the real meat of the game. But you can allocate five successes to dictate that your organization's armies are very large and well-organized and well-equipped and enthusiastic as you lead them to battle."
If you set that rule aside, you pretty much have to write a whole minigame that's only loosely connected to the main game. Mandate of Heaven did that, CRM did that, I'm not too keen on the results. You could probably make it work better if you ran with DayDreamer's suggestion of a generalised downtime system, but that'd be a very major rewrite. Well beyond just adding a bureaucracy system.
You don't have to buy into an organisation's ideology to be part of it. Joining an organisation with an ideology you don't share will naturally lead to people trying to convince you, but the normal social rules handle that nicely.
FWIW, group culture and values are totally appropriate Intimacies under my system.
"Handled cleanly" or "core rules": pick one.
That's a fair point, one that I'll be better able to address once I've cranked out my krewe post.
Except, you're not leading them into battle? You're in your tower of evil sending forth your minions to do your bidding, remember? Not to mention, leading your organization's armies into battle wouldn't be "organization things," it would be "PC things along with quite a large number of people."
Also, I am giving my phone a bemused look from you saying that organizations shouldn't just roll to remove interesting problems, but your example skips over the process of recruitment, training, acquiring quality equipment, and keeping morale high. That might be due to differing opinions on what an interesting problem is, though.
I'm not saying there should be a rewrite, I'm saying that such rules should have been a part of the core rules in the first place.
I think, ultimately, my beef is as much about attitude as it is mechanics. In Geist, krewes are treated as legitimate means for accumulating and leveraging power and influence, as meaningful vehicles for affecting change. In Exalt, organizations are treated as static, parts of the status quo; who exist only for the PCs to act upon rather than as part of a living world.
You do, however, have to at least give token effort towards abiding by its ideology; otherwise you're more of some guy who says they're a member than a member.
Origami Clock
Right twice a day
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Remember, Exalted Social Charms. Unless it's a DB House ( and you're not their ancestor), Malfeas/Yu Shan-connected (eliminate as appropriate for Infernals/Sidereals) or (portions of) The Guild, you could tell them that you're their boss, childhood friend or owner and they'd just have to go with it. Maybe a capstone for Qafian Bureaucracy would be literally walking into a place and Assuming Control, possibly aided by a stunt where the current Grandmaster (or equivalent) gets hammered into the dirt in an effortless show of superiority."Handled cleanly" or "core rules": pick one.
That's a fair point, one that I'll be better able to address once I've cranked out my krewe post.
Except, you're not leading them into battle? You're in your tower of evil sending forth your minions to do your bidding, remember? Not to mention, leading your organization's armies into battle wouldn't be "organization things," it would be "PC things along with quite a large number of people."
Also, I am giving my phone a bemused look from you saying that organizations shouldn't just roll to remove interesting problems, but your example skips over the process of recruitment, training, acquiring quality equipment, and keeping morale high. That might be due to differing opinions on what an interesting problem is, though.
I'm not saying there should be a rewrite, I'm saying that such rules should have been a part of the core rules in the first place.
I think, ultimately, my beef is as much about attitude as it is mechanics. In Geist, krewes are treated as legitimate means for accumulating and leveraging power and influence, as meaningful vehicles for affecting change. In Exalt, organizations are treated as static, parts of the status quo; who exist only for the PCs to act upon rather than as part of a living world.
You do, however, have to at least give token effort towards abiding by its ideology; otherwise you're more of some guy who says they're a member than a member.
Of course, that does mean that their protege will exalt and come back for vengeance after training on a mountaintop for a decade. What was Qaf's Act of Villainy again? Because inspiring insignificant characters to become enlightened and buff so they can ruin your smug face does seem vaguely appropriate.
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A big part of the reason that "just let the GM decide what happens" management systems fall flat for me, for Exalted, is that you're supposed to be playing divine superbeings that can easily be X times more intelligent, charismatic, or effective as an ordinary person. If the whole "you're free to act, but actions have consequences" pitch of Exalted is supposed to be an accurate representation of gameplay, there needs to be some way that GMs who aren't politically, economically, or social savvy to figure out what the consequences of banning slavery would be for the economy, or what the Guild embargoing your nation would do, or what demanding that everyone get educated would mean for your agrarian kingdom. Otherwise, it's too easy to the resulting consequences to seem arbitrary or wrong, or for the underlying actions to themselves seem pointless.
If Exalted where a mechanically light game, it would be okay to resolve things like "agricultural production problems" solely with a description, and have the GM arbitrate what that means. But Exalted isn't a mechanically light game basically anywhere else, and King/organization manager is pretty explicitly an archetype that PCs are allowed to pick as early as character creation. If there are no obvious mechanical hooks in the management game, it's too easy for PCs and GMs alike to dismiss it and not really put effort into figuring it out, or for it to come off as weird and jarring with the rest of the system.
Like, true story from a 2E campaign I was in. The PCs took over Paragon, the Guild decided to embargo us because of reasons, so we were going to have some kind of food crisis. I was playing an Alchemical crafter, and we had a Solar crafter too, so we said we were going to create some kind of magitech solution for the problem. The GM had no idea what to do—we had the stupid level of craft speed stacking, a bazillion successes, and a horde of thaumaturgically savy underlings we had been training. Similar problems showed up, with similar kinds of solutions—GM introduces "bad thing happens", PC says "I have a billion dice to throw at that problem, and should be able to resolve it trivially", GM either agrees, or disagrees, leading to conflict at the table or a session where we solve the problem in ways that sideline our actual institutional power.
Without a mechanical structure for resolving these issues, Exalted management isn't really a game of actions and consequences. It's a game of muddy GM fiat where PC agency on the organizational level is entirely dependent on how the GM thinks organizations work, which is kind of problematic.
If Exalted where a mechanically light game, it would be okay to resolve things like "agricultural production problems" solely with a description, and have the GM arbitrate what that means. But Exalted isn't a mechanically light game basically anywhere else, and King/organization manager is pretty explicitly an archetype that PCs are allowed to pick as early as character creation. If there are no obvious mechanical hooks in the management game, it's too easy for PCs and GMs alike to dismiss it and not really put effort into figuring it out, or for it to come off as weird and jarring with the rest of the system.
Like, true story from a 2E campaign I was in. The PCs took over Paragon, the Guild decided to embargo us because of reasons, so we were going to have some kind of food crisis. I was playing an Alchemical crafter, and we had a Solar crafter too, so we said we were going to create some kind of magitech solution for the problem. The GM had no idea what to do—we had the stupid level of craft speed stacking, a bazillion successes, and a horde of thaumaturgically savy underlings we had been training. Similar problems showed up, with similar kinds of solutions—GM introduces "bad thing happens", PC says "I have a billion dice to throw at that problem, and should be able to resolve it trivially", GM either agrees, or disagrees, leading to conflict at the table or a session where we solve the problem in ways that sideline our actual institutional power.
Without a mechanical structure for resolving these issues, Exalted management isn't really a game of actions and consequences. It's a game of muddy GM fiat where PC agency on the organizational level is entirely dependent on how the GM thinks organizations work, which is kind of problematic.
QafianSage
Ascending Ape
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We've got soemthing similar in the works, actually. Are you looking at our notes?
And the current Act of Villainy is this:
Though this is by no means a final version.
Origami Clock
Right twice a day
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Nope, but I have been pondering Qaffy things lately. My E10 DT concept has gone the way of Culture Minds and interplay between a awesome and terrible cosmic mind thinking ineffible houghts and the mask-limbs it wears to interact with all the insignificant things around him that he has strange, abstract affections for which only become truly concrete when he lessens himself to interact with the world.
In the Yozi as mental illness (and my own personal interpretation of DTs as milder forms of the same) my tentatively named DT: Euidaimon, The Thousand-Facet Lotus would be Social Anxiety Disorder.
Yeah, funny things happen when you read Ian M Banks and play We Happy Few before you start storyboarding.
At minimum, you need a "meaningful opponent" clause on that. As it stands, you can bleed off Limit by making a random mortal run without warming up so they pull a muscle.
It's also not really an act of villainy. That's "what the Charmset as you describe it wants you to do anyway". And you don't get acts of villainy from "doing what the charmset wants you to do anyway". Acts of villainy need to be pointless and put you at more risk and invoke classic villainous things. And "being a harsh teacher" is not a villainous thing. There's just as many heroes who get their own masters doing the same.
An Act of Villainy for Qaf about being a "teacher" is more going to be dramatically revealing how you were the one responsible for some traumatic or formative experience in their past. "Yes, I killed your mentor." Or "Yes, I was the one who sent you the note that led you to that hidden manse". Or maybe it's one where you reveal that what they did was helping you all along. "And the best thing was, I wouldn't have been able to steal the Eye of the Fire Dragon if you hadn't distracted the Wyld Hunt".
QafianSage
Ascending Ape
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Thanks for the advice. As I said, that was the current AoV, and those ideas are nice ones.
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Exactly!
This is phrased like a rebuttal, but that's pretty much what I'm saying. Leading your organisation's armies is something we do need rules for, since it's something the PCs do. Organisation actions are resolved offscreen by the GM; when that's inappropriate, it's time to go from the organisation rules to the "PCs with large groups of people" rules.
As for Qaf specifically, ES suggested the ability to possess minions and act through them from a distance. And that's probably a good idea. But I'm not too fussed if Qafite Infernals suffer a bit of tension between "if you want something done right, you need to do it yourself" and "you can't show up in people's dreams if you're out doing things personally".
To me, having the GM arbitrarily decide what happens when you send out minions, based on their own assessments of the people involved, feels a lot like the way it actually works when you send someone out to do something. If you want the power and control over outcomes that's expressed through the ability to take actions roll dice to determine what happens, you're not gonna get it through delegation.
Interesting problems are defined by the players and GM. Like I said, the entire war could be compressed into an organisation roll if the table didn't care to play it out.
Similarly, if people want to play out the process of army-building, they're totally welcome to. My impression is that most people aren't that keen, though.
Sure, okay. Something to keep in mind if anyone here ends up writing 4e.
True. But I've never felt the current rules lacking in that department. Convincing the people around you that you're really a suitable member of the gang is a pretty normal social scene.
I agree. For the most part, the GM's resolution of actions shouldn't be too surprising to the characters. I wrote those rules under the assumption that players would have a pretty good idea of the effects of assigning successes when doing so, and Bureaucracy / Intelligence Charms should certainly let you go from "a pretty good idea of the immediate results" to "a shockingly detailed understanding of both the results and the possible implications of those results".
Anyway, obviously many GMs are going to need guidelines on how to handle economic and political affairs. It's a real shame that Exalted doesn't provide any. But those guidelines should just be guidelines; if past performance is any guide, well-defined rules for determining the consequences of banning slavery will likely spit out results that feel very arbitrary and wrong.
I agree; however, I don't think all large-scale actions should be resolved through the organisation rules.
To use the same example as you, crafting a cornucopia of endless food is, well, Craft. And there should definitely be rules for building huge stuff with the help of your army of followers. But you don't need an organisation minigame for that. You need Craft rules.
I see this as two separate-but-related issues. One is how to resolve actions groups of people take on your behalf. The other is how to resolve actions you take with the assistance of groups of people. The former is probably best handled by fiat; making the GM roll dice against themself seems like a waste of time and a recipe for strange results. The latter needs real rules.
mothematics
How wide is the concept of "you"?
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NonSequtur
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m8 you're talking godbound design issues and didn't mention a chargen character destroying a city-state with a megaphone, a gift and a fifty second speech?
i'm hurt
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the wound in my soul for not being able to find the speech has made me forget
mothematics
How wide is the concept of "you"?
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I mean honestly just look at Black Manta or, like, the Janitor from Scrubs. Both are equally mythical in their pettiness and appropriate.
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Oh right I remember that comment, and I also remember that checking out again Conviction of Error made me go wonder just how you did it, given that nothing in the text makes me think that a megaphone would useful at all for enhancing the gift?
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Oh right I remember that comment, and I also remember that checking out again Conviction of Error made me go wonder just how you did it, given that nothing in the text makes me think that a megaphone would useful at all for enhancing the gift?
I figured saying an entire city was present would be untenable if they couldn't hear me.
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I think we mostly agree, but here's the disconnect (from my end): systems allow for clear and material engagement with otherwise abstracted elements of the setting. The reason I want banning slavery to have obvious mechanical hooks, where banning it gives obvious mechanical disadvantages or causes conflict, is because otherwise it will (at least for some tables) not be impactful in the same way.
Exalted is, to me, at its best when it does Fable 3 gone right. You cast down the tyrant from their throne of bones and iron, deliver freedom to the people of the realm, only to find out... ruling is hard. The Realm is there in the distance, and you know they're going to make a play for you at some point. You need to keep taxes high, keep demanding the young and the strong join your army, because you'll need them to fight. You can't just abolish slavery, because disrupting the current system would cause chaos, and you already have three different rebellions going on. You're asked to weigh in on local political issues that you don't fully understand, and are sure to offend some people.
A good GM can absolutely pull those kinds of issues well, and an engaged table can play off of that. But it's just so much easier for everyone if the organization has (for example, which might not be implemented) some kind of "labor pool" stat that you can allocate to various ends like military or agricultural or economic, and your nation has a background called Slavery at 2 dots, which gives you some kind of abstracted bonus to your labor pool, but imposes some kind of risk of slave rebellion for action botches, or a bunch of possible downsides depending on the organizational culture.
Everyone is instantly on the same page about what abolishing slavery would mean, for them as the head of the organization. A period of instability where they've got less labor pool to throw at problems, with some ability to convert those slaves into legitimate citizens. If the organization supports some kind of "institutional loyalty" stat, you know that you might get some penalties depending on the details of how that abolition goes down.
These kinds of stats—just by existing—generate stories, distinct from any actions that actually rely on them. The fact that the neighboring kingdom has iron mines that give them +2 to industry motivates the PCs to go out and take them in a way that abstracted narrative descriptions about how taking some vaguely defined iron mines can result in vaguely defined better equipped armies that, in turn, help you in war in vaguely defined ways... just doesn't.
Like, I think that the specific kinds of actions you can take based on your organization's stats, and the specific consequences there, should be left, to a reasonable degree, to the GM. I also think that you can get more interesting results by having miscellaneous delegated actions use a system and have some fair-seeming randomness. It can suck, but it's interesting when your diplomat utterly botches a negotiation roll and accidentally's you into a war. If the GM just declares that, it's terrible and seems unfair. If it's the outcome of a dice roll, it's unfortunate, but acceptable. Similarly, it's great if the exploration you funded rolls crazy high and gets you way more than you expected. I, similarly, think that these kinds of rolls should still be PC-motivated. If they aren't personally overseeing the operation, they choose to delegate it to an NPC, whose statblock and general attitude they need to get a sense of.
tl;dr having a system motivates engagement and interaction in a way that leaving it abstract doesn't necessarily do, and I think it's more valuable to have that engagement than the cost in system complexity and clutter.
That said, I'm imagining this as part of a much larger framework shift for how Exalted operates (such as the previously mentioned "downtime activities" category of actions, where this would much more seamlessly slot in, so take all of this as personal bias. If I ever write up the Horizon Break -> Exalted port, this is definitely one of the things I'll include, though).
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No, I meant that since Conviction of Error has nothing to do with speaking in it's use, so I couldn't understand what a megaphone would enhance. Otoh if what you actually meant Impenetrable Deceit, which does specify in involves speech, then nevermind continue with your regularly scheduled crime against free will.I figured saying an entire city was present would be untenable if they couldn't hear me.
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That last bit might be the root of the disagreement.
You're thinking about how the game could be built from first principles, I'm thinking about how the game can be patched right now.
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That sounds right. I don't think the game can be patched right now (1e, 2e, or 3e). There's too much fundamentally problematic about it, all the way from the resolution system on upwards, to be turned into something I would consider satisfactory.