Solars have Supernals. If you want flashy anime effects at Essence 1, get Supernal Melee.
General Exalted Thread
- Thread starter Aleph
- Start date
- Location
- Singapore
Huh. That is true. But this is supposed to be a newly-exalted solar.
I.e. Less than a day.
Doesn't matter? that just means they have 10 Charms instead of 15.
Fire and Stones Strike, Rising Sun Slash, Hungry Tiger Technique. Three Charms.
okay but that's literally not how it works. You get ten Charms of your choice, and a Supernal. If you wanna run to Essence 5 effect, you can. Your build will be massive lopsided and it will be hilariously easy to attack you from angles you can't defend, but you can.
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- my house
Unfortunetly it'll be awhile. Cant really get the books atmFive sessions a month was my assumption. 25xp, 20 Solar XP. It costs more to raise attributes past 3, but to raise all your low attributes to 3 is 4xp to 2, 8xp to 3. This raises a lot of excellencies and just generally makes it easier to act outside your normal wheelhouse. Once I have all Attributes at 3+, I'll be evening out my miscellaneous skills. If I had any artifacts, I'd buy Evocations, nearly all of which do those "Cool new thing" stuff you mention. Or Sorcery, of course.
To be clear, if you aren't aware: Splat XP is a 3e thing you earn via roleplaying your intimacies, doing good teamwork with other PCs, or acting out the themes of your Caste in various ways. It's capped at 4 per session, and cannot be spent on Splat Charms. Solars have Solar XP, Dragonblooded have Dragon XP, and it can safely be assumed this trend will hold.
So you have a main XP track you can spend on anything, and a secondary one that can be spent on anything but Splat Charms, which provides its own encouragement to fill out your character without just Charms.
I'm very glad!PM me if you need any help building characters, I've memorized about 60% of the Solar set, and am more than happy to lend my madness to you!
You being aware doesn't sound like a reason to not shill Scion 2e, though.
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- my house
Is scion 2e even out?You being aware doesn't sound like a reason to not shill Scion 2e, though.
Technically, no. For those who backed the Kickstarter or bought it via Backerkit, then for all practical purposes 98% of it is out.
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- my house
How is it so far?
...Is this a trick question, or have you just not been paying attention?
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- my house
I know people think it's good, but the specifics haven't been covered
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No one has gone in-depth on mechanics here, for awhile, at least. You or someone else just sorta go "Storypath shilling!" and a few other people laugh at the in-joke, and no actual pitching for the system is done. It's just, well, a cute little in-joke.
Fair. I'll start working on a dump this week then.
- Location
- Earth Prime
Dice-manipulation mechanics can be important to depicting HOW a character does things. But they need not be umpteen different Charms in as many different Abilities. Excellencies actually captured this quite well in 2e:
Dragonblooded were the worst-designed of these, being Solar Excellencies with lower caps. They likely would be better-done following the Infernal model, tying things to their Elements in some fashion, and behaviors or actions associated therewith.
Lunars could be more interesting with dice-adders that are committed motes associated with their shapeshifting.
Well done, these Excellencies make strong statements about the nature of the Exalt. Dozens of dice-manipulation Charms in every tree of the Solar Exalted alone choke wordcount and become eye-glazingly similar. It's actively frustrating to me to read the 3e Charm sections because they have a lot of "here's some fluff, and here's how it only amounts to manipulating the dice after you've rolled them in some fashion" Charms, and they all start to feel similar to the point of sameness. These Charms sound more like stunts that have weirdly complicated mechanics, rather than actual Charms.
- Solars got +1 die per mote, bought associated with skills. Or could spend 2m per auto-success.
- Lunars were similar, but had them tied to Attributes, signifying their broader applicability and adaptability (but at a lower cap, signifiying their lesser maximum prowess).
- Sidereals had the most interesting early one, giving them an Excellency that changed the target number on the dice. This signified their ability to manipulate Fate and thus probability, rather than "just" to be excellent.
- Infernals really got experimental, theming their Excellencies and tying them to actions with particular behaviors.
Dragonblooded were the worst-designed of these, being Solar Excellencies with lower caps. They likely would be better-done following the Infernal model, tying things to their Elements in some fashion, and behaviors or actions associated therewith.
Lunars could be more interesting with dice-adders that are committed motes associated with their shapeshifting.
Well done, these Excellencies make strong statements about the nature of the Exalt. Dozens of dice-manipulation Charms in every tree of the Solar Exalted alone choke wordcount and become eye-glazingly similar. It's actively frustrating to me to read the 3e Charm sections because they have a lot of "here's some fluff, and here's how it only amounts to manipulating the dice after you've rolled them in some fashion" Charms, and they all start to feel similar to the point of sameness. These Charms sound more like stunts that have weirdly complicated mechanics, rather than actual Charms.
Wordcount isn't choked by mechanics that serve a purpose to do a thing you don't like. All of those Charms have a purpose and do a thing. That is like me accusing Scion of wasting wordcount on Paths because I feel it restricts flexibility in character design. No, it just does a thing I don't like.
- Location
- Ottawa
Hey, page 2000!
Anyway, something I wonder about dice tricks. Does it really matter exactly what they are?
I honestly don't see any particular rhyme or reason to why one ability might reroll 6s and another might reroll 1s, why some Charms (like Awakening Eye) have weird unique mechanisms and other don't, and so on. And posts like Kaiya's would hold together just as well, at least to the eye of a reader, if you replaced the dice tricks with different ones.
I suspect that the exact mechanism of the dice trick is surprisingly unimportant. The player can probably construct a justification for whatever.
Anyway, something I wonder about dice tricks. Does it really matter exactly what they are?
I honestly don't see any particular rhyme or reason to why one ability might reroll 6s and another might reroll 1s, why some Charms (like Awakening Eye) have weird unique mechanisms and other don't, and so on. And posts like Kaiya's would hold together just as well, at least to the eye of a reader, if you replaced the dice tricks with different ones.
I suspect that the exact mechanism of the dice trick is surprisingly unimportant. The player can probably construct a justification for whatever.
Well, some specifics are needed. Reroll/double tens means "When do do well, you do _really well",_ tens are already good, this makes them better and improve the rolls. Reroll 1s means you never botch, and additionally provides protection against a wide variety of Charms. I honestly have no idea why Awakening Eye is what it is, it's a weird Charm.
I know if a Charm said "rerolls 4s" I wouldn't have the response I did to reroll 1s and 6s.
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While those do tell a story, it doesn't stop other dice tricks from telling other stories
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- Earth Prime
The reason it chokes the wordcount is because it's largely redundant. They don't do new and different things. They are often rehashes of similar, if not identical, dice tricks in other Charm trees. That's the thing that is a step backwards from 2e to 1e in 3e: they fell too much in love with the notion of manipulating the underlying mechanics, and lost sight of it actually being a meaningful use of word-count.
I won't deny that you might lose some tiny nuances between Charms if you simplified it to a shorter list of dice manipulations and consolidated that into Excellencies, but I don't think the slight gains are worth the massive wordcount and thus enormous inflation of page count and cost-of-printing that it costs to gain them. The mechanics between them just aren't unique and different enough to really warrant it.
It's not that they do something I don't like. It's that they spend so many words on so little effect. And worse, that all those words get in the way of finding more unique and interesting effects, because you can't easily parse the enormous Charm trees to differentiate "yet another die manipulation" from "something new and different." Worse, you can't look at the Charm names and determine whether this is "die manipulation trick aleph" or "die manipulation trick omicron." Or "like die manipulation trick bet, but sliiiiightly different in that you can't keep as many of the altered dice."
Of course not. But there comes a point of diminishing returns on the actual quantity of different stories to be told and the number of Charms spent making up dice mechanics to tell them. 3e has far passed that point.
2E's structure was sufficient to tell the stories needed. And nothing says you can't have a few more dice manipulation tricks, if you absolutely, positively feel this particular one is new, interesting, relevant, and does something that is needed by the splat. My point is that 3e stepped away from the coherent, neatly packaged and well-organized method of unifying all the "same dice trick, done again" Charms, in favor of, well, "same dice trick, done again but slightly differently" Charms repeated over and over and over. If my eyes didn't glaze over with "wait, what does this actually...mean?" after the umpteenth dice trick Charm in a tree, I'd have less problem with it. And I like fiddly mechanics, as a general rule.
There is interesting stuff in the Craft rules they've devised, for instance, even though I think they're sadly not as playable or useful to actual gaming as I would like.
The fact that I can't read the Charms in the 3e book without getting lost and bored and feeling like I've read all this before earlier in the book is the problem. It is all too clear that the designers were fans who got caught up in their "vision" or their "hey, this is cool mechanics" stuff, and couldn't bring themselves to pare down and edit for coherence and conciseness.
This is unfortunate, because they had some really good ideas. They just needed to have somebody who could point out the flaws and help them consolidate, rather than letting them spin out and out and out without actually adding more to it.
No love for the Third Excellency?
Did anyone even buy that thing? 
Okay, but they're actually spending words on significant effect. It's just that you aren't their target audience, so the effect is lost on you. The "flaws" you are talking about here aren't flaws. They're game design targeted at people who aren't you. There are actual fuckups to complain about in 3e. This isn't one of them. This is "people have diverging tastes".
like, again, seriously, this "new and different stuff" is not actually the benefit you think. You know what actually happens in 2nd Edition when you have sixty different tricks?
You use five different tricks because most of them aren't relevant to most situations, and those 5 tricks are maximally efficient use of your mote pool. I've done the "tons of different tricks" thing, I played at 800+ xp with all the tricks in the world.
It's really not that fun.
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- Location
- Earth Prime
And this is why I never manage brevity. People always call me out on what I don't say.No love for the Third Excellency?
The Third Excellency is...an interesting one. Its problem is that it's a Charm you have to buy separately, it can't get you MORE success than you otherwise would, and its biggest advantage (preventing botching) can be achieved much more reliably with the Second Excellency. It doesn't really "tell a story" that isn't covered by the other two, already, at least not for Solars.
It honestly is probably best for Dragonblooded and Lunars, because it lets them reroll the whole die pool whereas limits to how much they can add are much harsher.
I find it odd that the biggest and best defense for umpteen bazillion dice trick Charms that have limited actual difference in how they play out is that the nuances of how they're different tell a different story of "how" the Exalt achieves his supreme success and skill, so you can pick and choose between these nuanced devices (like, say, maybe 10 out of 100 of them) to get your swordsman who has an average DPR roughly on par with that other, similarly-skilled swordsman's DPR to be "distinct" and "different" based on what precise dice tricks each of them use...
...but then, when people suggest that there should be actually new things as the majority of Charms, "meh, you'll only use 5 of the maybe 60 tricks available." Well, yes, that's how things work if you want there to be less overlap: each build uses only a few of the myriad options.
You're accusing me of mistaking my personal taste being unsatisfied for there being actual bad design. Yet, you haven't identified my "taste," nor to what the design in question caters. I have attempted to do both, and addressed my arguments towards why it is not merely my taste being uncatered to that upsets me (in fact, my taste is for neat games to play with the mechanics, and I still find this design to fail to appeal), as well as towards explaining how the tastes to which this design supposedly caters (if I understand the claim correctly) are not well-served by this design, either.
So, I get it, you like this design, but you're not actually addressing what I'm saying. You're deciding that anybody who criticizes it must have differing taste, and that that means there is no objective discussion to be had.
At least, that's how your arguments are reading to me. This is not conducive to discussion.
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Azrael
Sakura Saber
- Location
- Throne of Heroes
No love for the Third Excellency?
Compared to the ability to just throw in 10 dice/5 successes, rerolling your pool just... isn't useful. Especially since its an either-or situation, since the Third can't be used with any other Excellency.Did anyone even buy that thing?
It's actually best on Sidereals while using an IMA form for their Infinate Ability Mastery effect and the 3rd Excellency to reroll 21 dice at TN5And this is why I never manage brevity. People always call me out on what I don't say.
The Third Excellency is...an interesting one. Its problem is that it's a Charm you have to buy separately, it can't get you MORE success than you otherwise would, and its biggest advantage (preventing botching) can be achieved much more reliably with the Second Excellency. It doesn't really "tell a story" that isn't covered by the other two, already, at least not for Solars.
It honestly is probably best for Dragonblooded and Lunars, because it lets them reroll the whole die pool whereas limits to how much they can add are much harsher.