I was mostly just joking, since as you and others have noted, it isn't often interesting or all that useful.And this is why I never manage brevity. People always call me out on what I don't say.
General Exalted Thread
There are, in all honestly, about two or three of those charms in each tree on average. And a lot of charms otherwise.
3, 13, same number when criticizing for an audience of people who probably aren't gonna dig through the book to correct you
Peanut-007
Hat or Hair? America decides.
- Location
- Maryland, United States of America
Dice tricks did eat craft though, although that's more a function of 3e crafting being fucking weird. Some of the stuff in there felt more like it should be Sidereal Fate bullshit then Solar Golden bullshit. The Solars always struck me as being more Mad-science types then the Batman prepared for anything types.
- Location
- Earth Prime
I'd have to go back and reread it, but I think the melee and archery trees were the most guilty, after Craft, of "nothing but dice tricks" feeling like the lay of the land. I know it's melee I was reading through when I realized I had read a page or two of Charms and had no idea what I was reading because all the samey-feeling dice tricks were running together already.
Well, please do
Because with craft being excepted, they're really not as common as you make them ought to be.
Peanut-007
Hat or Hair? America decides.
- Location
- Maryland, United States of America
Crafts dice tricks are more noticeable because they're tied to the weird Craft exp/inspiration system which take up their own branch of the charmset. The dice re-rolls mostly act to let Solar's build of their own genius as it unfolds in front of them. The Twilight Blacksmith see's what she's doing right and builds on that rightness. The perfect mixture of metal she achieved for her sword in the furnace lets her give it a more perfect shape, exploiting the balance of malleability and hardness she achieved earlier to give it a shape that it otherwise wouldn't be able to take.
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My problem with dice tricks, in addition to taking up space that could be used for stuff I find more interesting, is that many of them don't actually tie into the mechanics.
In the base rules, before you get charms involved, the dice are just there to produce successes. Each d10 has just four different outcomes: 2 successes, one success, no success, and potential botch. These have different odds of occurring, yeah, but they're the only meaningful output of the dice. If Jane Hero tries to do something, it's exactly equivalent for her to roll 9 9 9 9 6 or 7 7 7 7 2 - a six isn't any closer to success than a two is, and a nine isn't a better result than a seven.
If you want a charm that gives you the skill to turn a just-barely-failure into success, that's cool - but "reroll sixes" doesn't do that, it just makes success more likely in the first place. A charm to actually do that would be something like "if you roll and fail by one, you can buy a single extra dice for a somewhat inflated cost."
Ultimately, because the numbers on the face of the dice don't matter except for signifying how many successes you get, dice tricks all have equivalent meanings - "you are skilled, and as such get more successes per dice"
In the base rules, before you get charms involved, the dice are just there to produce successes. Each d10 has just four different outcomes: 2 successes, one success, no success, and potential botch. These have different odds of occurring, yeah, but they're the only meaningful output of the dice. If Jane Hero tries to do something, it's exactly equivalent for her to roll 9 9 9 9 6 or 7 7 7 7 2 - a six isn't any closer to success than a two is, and a nine isn't a better result than a seven.
If you want a charm that gives you the skill to turn a just-barely-failure into success, that's cool - but "reroll sixes" doesn't do that, it just makes success more likely in the first place. A charm to actually do that would be something like "if you roll and fail by one, you can buy a single extra dice for a somewhat inflated cost."
Ultimately, because the numbers on the face of the dice don't matter except for signifying how many successes you get, dice tricks all have equivalent meanings - "you are skilled, and as such get more successes per dice"
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- Location
- Virginia
God there are a whole lot of people talking right past Kaiya.
She's explained umpteen million times that the internal structure of the dice roll is meaningful to her and other players. Other people patiently try to explain "no but see really they all get you to the same end point, it's all just random math to produce a number".
Guess what: I actually agree with you, I view dice as probability curves too, but the players who care about rerolls and doubles and whatnot are not lying that these things actually produce and convey meaning. If you're incapable of grasping this you're the problem, not Kaiya.
(There's also the much more subtle game design point where things like doubles and rerolls create a type of bonus that is stackable with some things, but not stackable with other things, which is meaningful on every level.)
She's explained umpteen million times that the internal structure of the dice roll is meaningful to her and other players. Other people patiently try to explain "no but see really they all get you to the same end point, it's all just random math to produce a number".
Guess what: I actually agree with you, I view dice as probability curves too, but the players who care about rerolls and doubles and whatnot are not lying that these things actually produce and convey meaning. If you're incapable of grasping this you're the problem, not Kaiya.
(There's also the much more subtle game design point where things like doubles and rerolls create a type of bonus that is stackable with some things, but not stackable with other things, which is meaningful on every level.)
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- Location
- Virginia
Really, if you want to talk about a system that ultimately only ever serves to reach one of two conclusions, with a complex internal structure that completely fails to convey anything of meaning or value, sorry actually I'm sick of discussing Ex2 combat.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
For instance, Excellent Strike is infuriating to fight against. It's not just a cheap way to increase your expected successes by 5%. Some defensive options fuck with an opponent based on how many 1s they roll on their attack, because the 1 is the "failure result," and so Charms make these failures into a flaw of your technique that the user capitalizes upon. But Excellent Strike rerolls all 1s on your attack roll before defensive Charms take effect, which negates those.
It's most notable in a duel between two Solar Meleeist, because Hail-Shattering Practice is a cheap, post-attack defensive Charm that will deduct successes based on 1s and 2s on the attack roll, and Excellent Strike makes it half as effective.
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Peanut-007
Hat or Hair? America decides.
- Location
- Maryland, United States of America
This comes down to a fundamentally different understanding of the dice then what I and what I suspect the writers imagine them as. The dice do not produce one of four success outcomes based off a weighted probability. They instead produce ten face outcomes which then correspond to the four success outcomes.
Most of the time there is no mechanical difference between these two understandings 3e introduces one. The face outcome of the dice are indicative of how well you succeed. Normally only tens and ones are significant enough deviance from the norm of succeed/fail that they begin to matter mechanically. Storyteller is almost agressivley anti-simulationist and so things can happen differently without them reflecting particularly in the mechanics. A withering strike which lets you take control of the battle doesn't distinguish between whether or not you caught their sword arm and succeeded at pulling them off balance in a way that would make your sensei nod his head in approval or in a way that would make them raise an eyebrow at the messy technique. Both of them come to about the same outcome so Storytellers squishy system doesn't normally care about the difference between the two.
Nine's could be beautiful examples of graceful technique and stylish skill , sevens could be providing the same function but with less finesse or more obvious effort being needed. Sixes could be an otherwise fine action brought down by a single flaw while ones are disastrous failures that might be worse then doing nothing at all. Storyteller generally doesn't care how close or far someone was from getting it because it doesn't matter. With the Exalted however it can.
A Solar's Glorious Golden Ass will never mess up so badly that it turns back on him in a disaster when he's exercising his flaw defying Essence. It simply doesn't happen anymore. The Essence of the Solar is one that overcomes failure so it can turn the grazes and near misses into success. The Abyssal embraces the worst of his failures and turns them into dark strength. Sidereals paradoxically succeed with failure and fail with success. There's plenty for charms to say using the numbers on the dice.
Now we can talk about the wisdom of integrating rerollers all day but I find this particular argument against them unconvincing. The numbers on the dice can totally mean something beyond pass harder, pass, fail, and fail in a possibly disastrous manner.
If you look at the dice as dice rather then as random probability generators you'll probably imagine what they mean differently.
I'd be fine if it mattered in general, if there was some guideline for "seven means x, nine means y," some sidebar offering "maybe allow 'fail forwards' if they miss by one but have some sixes" - but the game system pretty clearly rejects that. If you want to be graceful vs graceless, that's a stunt when it doesn't matter, a seperate roll or a function of exceeding the difficulty when it does. And the success rules only ever care about successes and failures.
Like, I've got the corebook open, and until you bring in charms there is literally nothing with different numbers having meanings beyond how many successes they offer. Like, even hearthstones and supernatural merits don't touch them until you get into evocations. If they want the dice to be more than just probability generators, they should treat them like that in the core system, not just in a specific set of exceptions.
- Location
- London, England
I mean in terms of 'edits needed to the charm section' I wouldn't bother looking at the dice tricks. I'd look at 'charms that repeat their own mechanics' and 'charms that do basically nothing'.
The Mute keyword, for example, appears at least half a dozen times on charms that then go on to spend words explaining that they do not cause anima flare even when powered by peripheral motes.
And Solar Linguistics is dividend between 'pretty sweet charm I would take' and 'ok but would I ever use this'. Cup Boils Over, for example, let's you kill someone who reads your words... provided they have no actual intimacies (or 'unintelligibly abtruse' intimacies) and are capable of possessing such things in the first place. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone actually buying or using that charm.
The Mute keyword, for example, appears at least half a dozen times on charms that then go on to spend words explaining that they do not cause anima flare even when powered by peripheral motes.
And Solar Linguistics is dividend between 'pretty sweet charm I would take' and 'ok but would I ever use this'. Cup Boils Over, for example, let's you kill someone who reads your words... provided they have no actual intimacies (or 'unintelligibly abtruse' intimacies) and are capable of possessing such things in the first place. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone actually buying or using that charm.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
In the interest of not talking past Kaiya, I'm going to carry on!
Dice manipulation can have meaning or context- that's the mark of a good manipulation mechanic. There are good dice manipulation mechanics in 3e, both in isolation and in aggregate. I dislike how prevalent they are, but I am not going to sit here and say they don't function.
My fundamental argument is that the execution of the charm trees as presented in 3e was a profound step backwards, unlearning lessons from second edition that, despite opinions to the contrary, actually did have excellent game design alongside it's own awful issues. Remember, 2e had the 10 steps, and a concrete order of modifiers chart for arbitrating bonuses and checks. 3e does not. By the same token, 3e leaned away from Keyword mechanics, though I wholly agree that in 2e a lot of keyword mechanics were about binary resistances instead of meaningful interaction, contributing to whiff-splat and bad-touch memes.
But that aside, I have a treat for you. I've done these for the 2e Solar trees, so let's try this dance again. Today I tackle... 3rd edition Solar Archery.
Okay, so a handful of key points about my understand of 3e mechanics and it's charms- I might be incorrect, I may have to seek clarification, but I still consider myself reasonably capable of analyzing these mechanics.
This charm is a simple introduction to 3e Solar Archery- but I must state it's wording is somewhat convoluted. It's essentially an inverted penalty negator (removing a target's bonus, instead of removing a penalty to your own action). It also adds unnecessary boilerplate, because the Uniform Keyword should convey that the Charm works on Withering/Decisive equally. That covers the first clause.
The second clause is a firm example of what I would call a qualitative effect, and that makes it a solid Charm. By taking/enhancing an Aim Action, it allows the Solar to treat targets in total cover (defined in 3e as I guess being what 2e would call inapplicable?), removing that tag and replacing it with a +3 defense modifier.
My critique of this charm lies in the efficiency and efficacy of the writing, not it's effect- "This Charm reduces cover bonuses by 1" where Light/Heavy has no meaningful distinction. If there is such a distinction, it's that it's second clause requires the callout so that people don't get to shoot targets behind full cover at +2 Def instead of +3.
Sight Without Eyes
A comprehensive penalty negator that extends into a qualitative effect of 'Ignores visual impairment' before seguing into a secondary function that lets her see targets behind cover. I have thematic issues with this Charm but not mechanical ones. I wonder if it works on Blindness?
I feel this Charm needed explanation on it's timing and utilization, because it's a 1m Tick-long effect that has no associated roll- do you just activate it reflexively whenever you want? Is it meant to do that? Or does it require you to prepare an attack before activating it? I assume the former, but I am not certain.
Blood Without Balance
This is an interesting mechanic in that it hinges on 'Gambits' as defined by 3e. I have to bounce between sections to understand how these things work, mind, so bear with me.
What this Charm seems to do, is let you skip the Aim Actions required to make ranged decisive attacks outside a certain range band. And then if your attack is below a certain initiative, gain bonus dice to make up for it.
So- this is overall a good idea/mechanic that takes far too many steps for my preference/design ideology. Obviously that's not necessarily true of anyone but me, but It bears stating. The dice added by this Charm exist to offset the potentially low initiative of an opportunistic decisive attack- so this is what I'd call an 'agnostic' or 'mechanistic' dice manipulation. It exists to perform a function and not much of a mechanical or thematic statement.
Force Without Fire
This is a revision of 2e's Forceful Arrow, where 3e removed the Knockback keyword. For withering-attacks only, this Charm is a contextual attack based on for Short/Close range-band targets. On the one hand, limited context like this creates evocative images/limitations, but the complexity required may be a design tradeoff. The actual effect is to trade Initiative for knocking an opponent back into another range band. It also can stop 'rushes'. As I understand it, a Rush is basically tethering yourself to an opponent so that you can stay in slashing range.
Trance of Unhesitating Speed
...why did they get rid of extra-action charm templating/keywording? *sighs*. Okay, so this Charm is pretty straight forward- you split your Init pool and double 10s; I had to check and confirm that Decisive attacks normally do not double 10s. Since decisives ignore soak, the smaller pools and 'spikes' caused by exploding 10s make the comparatively smaller pools due to splitting more meaningful. Like Blood Without Balance, these double-10s are less about making a mechanical/thematic statement and more making the charm functional. Like with several other Charms, it waives the need for Aim Actions at-range.
One key mechanical/thematic advantage is that this Charm has a flat cost in and of itself, defraying that onto the idea of the Imitative pool itself. It has a good mechanical through-line for that reason.
Phantom Arrow Technique/Adamant Arrow Technique
I... don't know what to say about this one. It seems such an oddball effect. It's base rider is 1m/essence arrow. You can also 'burn' an intimacy into the attack for bonus dice? I guess it's so you can say "I shoot you with my love/hatred/perverse glee!' Which makes sense. I've had similar ideas, but this mechanization leaves me somewhat cold.
But, having said that, this is still the most meaningful dice manipulation I've seen so far!
The followup auto-expansion is much more thematically interesting in that it creates a qualitative effect (an indelible arrow) which in turn can be imbued with all sorts of meaning by player action.
Fiery Arrow Attack
It's an attack... with an arrow, that sets things on fire. It's... This is a boring but functional charm- it has a qualitative effect but it's main draw is that it can let the player launch fiery arrows without special equipment and the fire itself scales with the Solar's Essence. Also +1 autosux on Decisive Damage rolls, which is a Big Deal because Decisive does not subtract soak.
There Is No Wind
Here we have a categorical penalty negator like the vision one from earlier- with the added functionality that it waives the need for aim actions with Withering Attacks.
Accuracy Without Distance
So this Charm basically sets the 'Speed' of an Aim Action to 0, to use 2e terms, and/or makes it Reflexive so it segues neatly into the subsequent Attack. It also converts the bonus dice into automatic successes. I don't understand if this Charm waives the need for additional Aim Actions for attacking at medium+ range. I think if it were me, you'd likely go Slow Aim, Wait until your turn AWD Aim + Attack; Additionally AWD converts aiming dice into automatic non-charm successes.
The obvious statement here is that a Solar is Best at Aiming. They can do it faster than you, more effectively. I would argue that this could be done better still as a Charm, but it functions.
The Essence 5 repurchase I think evokes the 2e version I'm more familiar with, in that it lets you fire a withering attack at a crashed opponent. (I don't fully understand what that means so I can't critique it). Even if the attack 'misses', it still rolls damage- does it mean Decisive or Initiative damage, or both?
Arrow Storm Technique
This is a massive area-effect archery attack, relying on 3e's Range Bands more than concrete yard-measurement. Not an argument for/against, but worth acknowledging. Every target takes [Perception + Divided Initiative] damage.
I think this is a fair charm. I'm wondering why these multi-attack charms keep saying 'The Exalt's Initiative does not reset until every damage roll has been completed.'
Flashing Vengeance Draw
It's a Join Battle Adder that lets you make an Unblockable Attack if you're first. This makes the obvious statement of 'The Solar is the fastest draw in the Direction'.
Hunter's Swift Answer
This is essentially an 'Attack of Opportunity' mechanic. One I only find obnoxious in that such a mechanic seems poorly placed in Charms- and/or could have better been a counterattack charm with the 10 steps of combat in 2e. It's novel that it's attached to the Disengage action, so credit due there. At the very least there ought have been codification and templating for off-action Attacks like these!
Immaculate Golden Bow
I think this stands as self-evident. You make an artifact with Essence, complete with Evocations- Like i am pretty sure the default weapon gets some Evocations before you start buying more via repurchases. This charm offends me at a design level even if I appreciate the appeal of such a potentially awesome homebrew opportunity.
Like... let's assume that you get 4 evocations by default with this charm (it doesn't say either way but the corebook says a powerbow is a 3 dot artifact, which means it has Evocations). You have to brew up all 4 of those yourself with your ST- and you get them for the cost of a single charm. And then you can buy more evocations with xp. I still don't know the average spread of XP per session, was it 16 or 20 from the xp exp split? In any case either the game gives you a lot of resources to buy these things, or you hyperspecialize into homebrew madness.
Dazzling Flare Attack
This is a charm that is a combination of potentially meaningful dice manipulation with a quantitative/qualitiative effect. I say potentially, because the manipulation and tracking of a die result is not inherently meaningful without due consideration. If you roll a 10, you get +1 autosux on the 'attack' not the damage roll, just the attack. Every 10 after the first adds 1 to the raw damage. It's these if-statements and conditional logic that trip me up- not that they're hard to understand, but that there are so many of them.
The far more interesting element of the Charm to me is that it's a flare, that can be used to void stealth attempts. I almost wish this were a Dragonblooded Charm (I haven't read their book), for how it 'fits' into the narrative. The Solar equivalent in my mind would've been a Holy effect, but 3e apparently dropped that in favor of something else I haven't seen or completely.
In terms of formatting, this Charm... should not have been written this way- it's reliant on Fiery Arrow Attack anyway, so it would've made more sense to just expand the text of that charm with a repurchase or similar, instead of making it a Brand New Charm. Like in context of 2e, you had to pay for each charm you added to a combo- whereas 3e does not have any kind of combo-creation system for good or ill. So splitting things up into separate Charms was as much a statement of 'you cannot seamlessly segue from one into the other, you have to train/practice to do this'.
This is not a statement of 'Bad Charm', this is 'Could have been written more efficiently with fewer words'.
Seven Omens Shot
So this Charm requires you to aim for 3 'rounds', converting the bonus dice to successes like AWD, and adds sux over DV to your intiative when rolling decisive damage. It's apparently supposed to stack with AWD, but I don't fully understand how it's supposed to work. Like, if you aim for 3 rounds, are you getting +3 dice per round, for a total of 9? If so, AWD's function here is to you aim faster in exchange for fewer successes... but how can you shorten it to 0 aim actions? Can you?
I... don't understand how this charm works. I really don't. Which means I can't really analyze how it conveys meaning.
Setting that aside, it's thematic place is fairly clear. You take a long, patient shot, aiming until you can strike that perfect blow. I'm honestly not sure if this makes a statement though, because if other splats get aim magic, then it's not really telling me anything about Solars other than 'They have to aim for 3 rounds to hit people really hard'.
Forgive this brief tangent, but I want to expand on that- in 2e, only two splats got TN manipulation, Sidereals and Infernals, and the latter only in limited ways. Because TN manipulation was also synonmous with Fate manipulation. So only fate-manipulating entities could do it. This was an important part of conveyance and thematic comparison/contrast. Conversely, if you made it so everyone could manipulate TNs, then the feat itself stops being meaningful or becomes a general 'Thing' Exalted or magical can do.
Revolving Bow Discipline
...Why was this laid out like this? Someone bap the editor with the corebook, please.
Mechanics! This is the rapid fire battering down defenses Charm. I find it interesting/telling that this has a flat cost and just says 'You keep attacking until you miss'. You don't have to pay to attack beyond any supplemental or reflexives as well. It has limitations/boilerplate so you can't abuse it on Crashed opponents, and you are rewarded with willpower for crashing foes. A reward signals something very clear- that you want to crash people, that crashing is good and you get good things for it.
Finishing Snipe
A 'Free Attack' that is giving me nam flashbacks to Shrikes, this attack of opportunity mechanic lets you make an immediate Decisive attack on a crashed character within 'range', not a specific range, just Range- crashes. It provides no other bonus. My question is this- What defines 'A simple action that would prevent her from attacking?" Like... this is so subjective. I'm sure it's supposed to mean something like 'You are not already taking a Simple Action' But... I don't know. It just feels vague.
Rain of Feathered Death
I.. what is this, I don't even. You had a perfectly good mechanic in Trance of Unhesitating Speed? The fuck is this charm trying to say....
Okay, you fire one shot, and it splits into [Dex] arrows for 3m each. You then roll each damage pool in order, subtracting damage successes from Intiative until you get to zero? But you can't do less than [Essence] damage per hit anyway?
I. What is this. I don't even.
Shadow-Seeking Arrow
Building off of Dazzling Flare Attack (and acutally reasonable as a standalone Charm), it lets you Attack of Opportunity (there it is again!) against an opponent you spot with an Awareness check. It has the Uniform Keyword, so it's Withering/Decisive-OK.
This is... I'm sure this is a cool charm to use, but it also seems like such a Stop/start mechanic. You have to track who's in stealth, if they're spotted, then resolve X attacks for total # of stealthed opponents. Like- I honestly want to see a combat run with a ninja team vs someone using this charm, I want logs, I want to see how this gets run. It's mechanistic and solid, creating a useful if fairly uninspired ability or action. "I can attack people I spot in hiding outside of initiative order."
"I get to attack more often."
Searing Sunfire Interdiction
Okay, this is a Charm that is a gambit in and of itself with it's own built in Difficulty, and you're given double 9s to make the gambit more likely to succeed. You also get to go first if you take an Aim Action beforehand, with callouts for resolving magic vs magic. (Oh Charm Rolloff, how I miss you...) If the gambit goes off, it forces the target to be delayed by a number of ticks determined by the roll. I can tell you right now that this kind of thing would not fly in a 2e game, where tick manipulation was one of those third-rail mechanics. I can't speak as to how it works in 3e.
I think this is exacerbated because... I think Ticks are just 'Where' you are in the initaitive order, and there are only so many Ticks in a given Round? Like # of Ticks in a round = # of different Initiative Values. So if you have 6 people all whit Initiative 20, there's only One Tick, but if there's 6 people with Init 4 5 6 7 8 9- that's a 6 tick round? Please correct me if I'm wrong!
In any case, you can use this Charm to force someone to give up their turn. My critique of this mechanic is that it's... context-agnostic. It's focused on quantitative manipulation of numbers and relative positioning than any meaningful impact on the game world. Oh yes it has fantastic tactical viability, but it's 'orphaned' from the rest of the play space when it focuses on things like Initiative Order. Like, what I'm trying to explain here is that this Charm is in my mind, inferior to one that knocks an opponent off a cliff. Not that it's useless, just functionally less interesting. Granted, it's advantage is that it will always work regardless of context.
Hmm, repurchases... So the first one makes it easier to pass the gambit. The 2nd one 'resets your attack'? I guess that means you get to attack again- which makes the 'cannot use on same person twice' clause reasonable. An E5 upgrade (and this is very much Supernal Fodder) lets you use it twice on the same target- and forcing the target back twice shoves them a range band away. Again, useful, but context-agnostic. At E6, you can use it as often as you want? A 2nd E6 repurchase lets you attack one person for Cost+ WP, then just Cost for ever new target.
Okay so this is the first really big Charm that I've run into. It's designed as a tactical tool around battlefield timing control. Fine in and of itself, but I look at it and feel cold. This is not a Solar Charm. This is a 'metagame' Charm. This is intended entirely to be a thing that makes less of a statement about Solars and more plays into the initiative system as a platform for having fun. Nothing about this Charm says 'Solar' to me except that it's in the midst of a Solar Charmtree.
Solar Spike
Another aim-waiving Charm. (See, templating!) Okay so this is... Like Phantom Arrow's intimacy-stapling effect. Why didn't it lead off of that charm instead of Dazzling Flare attack? Anyway, Attack at range without aiming, replaces damage with Willpower * intimacy rating she is invoking to protect/uphold. This Charm reminds me of an overal trend I saw with 3e Charms in that they wanted to distribute competency across more character concepts, so you didn't have to buy a billion combat wombat charms to be effective- this is what I'd call a 'Shore Up' Charm. This is for your Socialite or non-combat spec character to bring in some muscle without violating their concept.
I think it could be worded more elegantly and boilerplate stripped out by templating/keywords, but it's functional. It makes the statement that a Solar can fight with their Willpower and Intimacies, but not much else.
Heart-Eating Incineration
...that sounds like a Lunar Charm. I'm sorry but it does. Okay, expands Solar Spike, conditional on Bonfire Anima, turns it into a living projectile image. Adds Intiative to Solar Spike's Raw Damage, and triggers Initiative Reset. It lets you regain motes if you kill the target.
...But why though? This Charm is an incoherent thematic mess. It tells me nothing meaningful or interesting about Solars other than 'They shoot their Feelings' and they can om-nom motes from things they kill; the most evocative part is that the target burns to nothing, but that's it.
Dust and Ash Sleight
... sonnova... I need to hurt something. Sure, you can make Seven Omen Shot faster- so they explicitly wanted that Charm to be slow so you'd have to buy upgrades for it to create an illusion of progress. And then instead of doing anything interesting with this, they just say buy the charm again and you can get the bonus successes back! This is what I mean by meaningless dice manipulation.
Heavens Crash Down
Okay, so this is a 'Chips are down' Charm. You're Crashed, Can't use it in Perilous or to force yourself into Perilous, and relies on you being at your -4 HL. (How often does that happen I wonder? Legit curious). This is a Limit Break, a desperation move. It makes the attack strictly better, and skips the intiative system almost entirely in favor of smashing the opponent directly. 'Clash' as I understand it is the 3e system term for attacking on the same tick/cross counter.
Streaming Arrow Stance
Another aim-waiving Charm! This is probably meant to be synergistic with the fact that most games are 3-5 PCs, so obviously this lets your archer help the melee and martial arts guys and 'compresses' the timing so you aren't stuck spending a lot of dead rounds Aiming.
Whispered Prayer of Judgement
I can't facepalm hard enough. Okay, so it keys on Aim Actions, that's good (though a bunch of Charms waive them?). But all it does is add dice. This just says that an E5 Solar (or 2 if you're Supernal) can hit Harder than normal after aiming.
Okay, so you're all probably going to take my snarky tone of 'Shyft holds a grudge'. I suppose that's fair, but I hope some people find this insightful.
Edit: In hindsight I needed a concluding paragraph:
Offhand, very little of this Charmtree looks synergistic- these are all one-off effects or short 'sub tree's that speak to small slices of 'Archery' tropes. I suppose it's fair to say that a Charm Tree ought feel like a Moveset, instead of a series of vaguely compatible effects that tend to vie for space on both my character sheet and my mind.
Like, there are 26 Charms here, not counting repurchases. A great deal of them just change some largely interchangable function of the dice or your final results. There's a glimmering of what the Solar Archer is supposed to be like here, but again 3e is not actually trying to tell us what Solars Do with their Charms.
Dice manipulation can have meaning or context- that's the mark of a good manipulation mechanic. There are good dice manipulation mechanics in 3e, both in isolation and in aggregate. I dislike how prevalent they are, but I am not going to sit here and say they don't function.
My fundamental argument is that the execution of the charm trees as presented in 3e was a profound step backwards, unlearning lessons from second edition that, despite opinions to the contrary, actually did have excellent game design alongside it's own awful issues. Remember, 2e had the 10 steps, and a concrete order of modifiers chart for arbitrating bonuses and checks. 3e does not. By the same token, 3e leaned away from Keyword mechanics, though I wholly agree that in 2e a lot of keyword mechanics were about binary resistances instead of meaningful interaction, contributing to whiff-splat and bad-touch memes.
But that aside, I have a treat for you. I've done these for the 2e Solar trees, so let's try this dance again. Today I tackle... 3rd edition Solar Archery.
Okay, so a handful of key points about my understand of 3e mechanics and it's charms- I might be incorrect, I may have to seek clarification, but I still consider myself reasonably capable of analyzing these mechanics.
- The base Storyteller system is unchanged, d10s at TN7, Attr+Ability pools + other modifiers.
- Solars get their 'Excellencies' for free under a condition
- There are no longer 2nd and 3rd excellencies- it's now 'Add dice only' and 'increase static values', with a contextual Supplemental/Reflexive split.
- (oh god why why?)
- The real reason is that their dice manipulation mechanics play nicer with the ability to increase your pool than adding successes 'after' a roll. so 2nd excellency got axed.
- 3rd excellency was cut out likely because of re-roll mechanics included later on.
- Supernal exists to create 'spikey' characters that can dig deep into a tree and become meaningfully powerful/distinct out of chargen.
- Starting characters can pick 15 charms before bonus points.
- 3e charms are not (all the time) borgstromantic. We are not expected to read them as communicable pieces of information, but as natural consequences of 'A Solar in Action'.
This charm is a simple introduction to 3e Solar Archery- but I must state it's wording is somewhat convoluted. It's essentially an inverted penalty negator (removing a target's bonus, instead of removing a penalty to your own action). It also adds unnecessary boilerplate, because the Uniform Keyword should convey that the Charm works on Withering/Decisive equally. That covers the first clause.
The second clause is a firm example of what I would call a qualitative effect, and that makes it a solid Charm. By taking/enhancing an Aim Action, it allows the Solar to treat targets in total cover (defined in 3e as I guess being what 2e would call inapplicable?), removing that tag and replacing it with a +3 defense modifier.
My critique of this charm lies in the efficiency and efficacy of the writing, not it's effect- "This Charm reduces cover bonuses by 1" where Light/Heavy has no meaningful distinction. If there is such a distinction, it's that it's second clause requires the callout so that people don't get to shoot targets behind full cover at +2 Def instead of +3.
Sight Without Eyes
A comprehensive penalty negator that extends into a qualitative effect of 'Ignores visual impairment' before seguing into a secondary function that lets her see targets behind cover. I have thematic issues with this Charm but not mechanical ones. I wonder if it works on Blindness?
I feel this Charm needed explanation on it's timing and utilization, because it's a 1m Tick-long effect that has no associated roll- do you just activate it reflexively whenever you want? Is it meant to do that? Or does it require you to prepare an attack before activating it? I assume the former, but I am not certain.
Blood Without Balance
This is an interesting mechanic in that it hinges on 'Gambits' as defined by 3e. I have to bounce between sections to understand how these things work, mind, so bear with me.
What this Charm seems to do, is let you skip the Aim Actions required to make ranged decisive attacks outside a certain range band. And then if your attack is below a certain initiative, gain bonus dice to make up for it.
So- this is overall a good idea/mechanic that takes far too many steps for my preference/design ideology. Obviously that's not necessarily true of anyone but me, but It bears stating. The dice added by this Charm exist to offset the potentially low initiative of an opportunistic decisive attack- so this is what I'd call an 'agnostic' or 'mechanistic' dice manipulation. It exists to perform a function and not much of a mechanical or thematic statement.
Force Without Fire
This is a revision of 2e's Forceful Arrow, where 3e removed the Knockback keyword. For withering-attacks only, this Charm is a contextual attack based on for Short/Close range-band targets. On the one hand, limited context like this creates evocative images/limitations, but the complexity required may be a design tradeoff. The actual effect is to trade Initiative for knocking an opponent back into another range band. It also can stop 'rushes'. As I understand it, a Rush is basically tethering yourself to an opponent so that you can stay in slashing range.
Trance of Unhesitating Speed
...why did they get rid of extra-action charm templating/keywording? *sighs*. Okay, so this Charm is pretty straight forward- you split your Init pool and double 10s; I had to check and confirm that Decisive attacks normally do not double 10s. Since decisives ignore soak, the smaller pools and 'spikes' caused by exploding 10s make the comparatively smaller pools due to splitting more meaningful. Like Blood Without Balance, these double-10s are less about making a mechanical/thematic statement and more making the charm functional. Like with several other Charms, it waives the need for Aim Actions at-range.
One key mechanical/thematic advantage is that this Charm has a flat cost in and of itself, defraying that onto the idea of the Imitative pool itself. It has a good mechanical through-line for that reason.
Phantom Arrow Technique/Adamant Arrow Technique
I... don't know what to say about this one. It seems such an oddball effect. It's base rider is 1m/essence arrow. You can also 'burn' an intimacy into the attack for bonus dice? I guess it's so you can say "I shoot you with my love/hatred/perverse glee!' Which makes sense. I've had similar ideas, but this mechanization leaves me somewhat cold.
But, having said that, this is still the most meaningful dice manipulation I've seen so far!
The followup auto-expansion is much more thematically interesting in that it creates a qualitative effect (an indelible arrow) which in turn can be imbued with all sorts of meaning by player action.
Fiery Arrow Attack
It's an attack... with an arrow, that sets things on fire. It's... This is a boring but functional charm- it has a qualitative effect but it's main draw is that it can let the player launch fiery arrows without special equipment and the fire itself scales with the Solar's Essence. Also +1 autosux on Decisive Damage rolls, which is a Big Deal because Decisive does not subtract soak.
There Is No Wind
Here we have a categorical penalty negator like the vision one from earlier- with the added functionality that it waives the need for aim actions with Withering Attacks.
Accuracy Without Distance
So this Charm basically sets the 'Speed' of an Aim Action to 0, to use 2e terms, and/or makes it Reflexive so it segues neatly into the subsequent Attack. It also converts the bonus dice into automatic successes. I don't understand if this Charm waives the need for additional Aim Actions for attacking at medium+ range. I think if it were me, you'd likely go Slow Aim, Wait until your turn AWD Aim + Attack; Additionally AWD converts aiming dice into automatic non-charm successes.
The obvious statement here is that a Solar is Best at Aiming. They can do it faster than you, more effectively. I would argue that this could be done better still as a Charm, but it functions.
The Essence 5 repurchase I think evokes the 2e version I'm more familiar with, in that it lets you fire a withering attack at a crashed opponent. (I don't fully understand what that means so I can't critique it). Even if the attack 'misses', it still rolls damage- does it mean Decisive or Initiative damage, or both?
Arrow Storm Technique
This is a massive area-effect archery attack, relying on 3e's Range Bands more than concrete yard-measurement. Not an argument for/against, but worth acknowledging. Every target takes [Perception + Divided Initiative] damage.
I think this is a fair charm. I'm wondering why these multi-attack charms keep saying 'The Exalt's Initiative does not reset until every damage roll has been completed.'
Flashing Vengeance Draw
It's a Join Battle Adder that lets you make an Unblockable Attack if you're first. This makes the obvious statement of 'The Solar is the fastest draw in the Direction'.
Hunter's Swift Answer
This is essentially an 'Attack of Opportunity' mechanic. One I only find obnoxious in that such a mechanic seems poorly placed in Charms- and/or could have better been a counterattack charm with the 10 steps of combat in 2e. It's novel that it's attached to the Disengage action, so credit due there. At the very least there ought have been codification and templating for off-action Attacks like these!
Immaculate Golden Bow
I think this stands as self-evident. You make an artifact with Essence, complete with Evocations- Like i am pretty sure the default weapon gets some Evocations before you start buying more via repurchases. This charm offends me at a design level even if I appreciate the appeal of such a potentially awesome homebrew opportunity.
Like... let's assume that you get 4 evocations by default with this charm (it doesn't say either way but the corebook says a powerbow is a 3 dot artifact, which means it has Evocations). You have to brew up all 4 of those yourself with your ST- and you get them for the cost of a single charm. And then you can buy more evocations with xp. I still don't know the average spread of XP per session, was it 16 or 20 from the xp exp split? In any case either the game gives you a lot of resources to buy these things, or you hyperspecialize into homebrew madness.
Dazzling Flare Attack
This is a charm that is a combination of potentially meaningful dice manipulation with a quantitative/qualitiative effect. I say potentially, because the manipulation and tracking of a die result is not inherently meaningful without due consideration. If you roll a 10, you get +1 autosux on the 'attack' not the damage roll, just the attack. Every 10 after the first adds 1 to the raw damage. It's these if-statements and conditional logic that trip me up- not that they're hard to understand, but that there are so many of them.
The far more interesting element of the Charm to me is that it's a flare, that can be used to void stealth attempts. I almost wish this were a Dragonblooded Charm (I haven't read their book), for how it 'fits' into the narrative. The Solar equivalent in my mind would've been a Holy effect, but 3e apparently dropped that in favor of something else I haven't seen or completely.
In terms of formatting, this Charm... should not have been written this way- it's reliant on Fiery Arrow Attack anyway, so it would've made more sense to just expand the text of that charm with a repurchase or similar, instead of making it a Brand New Charm. Like in context of 2e, you had to pay for each charm you added to a combo- whereas 3e does not have any kind of combo-creation system for good or ill. So splitting things up into separate Charms was as much a statement of 'you cannot seamlessly segue from one into the other, you have to train/practice to do this'.
This is not a statement of 'Bad Charm', this is 'Could have been written more efficiently with fewer words'.
Seven Omens Shot
So this Charm requires you to aim for 3 'rounds', converting the bonus dice to successes like AWD, and adds sux over DV to your intiative when rolling decisive damage. It's apparently supposed to stack with AWD, but I don't fully understand how it's supposed to work. Like, if you aim for 3 rounds, are you getting +3 dice per round, for a total of 9? If so, AWD's function here is to you aim faster in exchange for fewer successes... but how can you shorten it to 0 aim actions? Can you?
I... don't understand how this charm works. I really don't. Which means I can't really analyze how it conveys meaning.
Setting that aside, it's thematic place is fairly clear. You take a long, patient shot, aiming until you can strike that perfect blow. I'm honestly not sure if this makes a statement though, because if other splats get aim magic, then it's not really telling me anything about Solars other than 'They have to aim for 3 rounds to hit people really hard'.
Forgive this brief tangent, but I want to expand on that- in 2e, only two splats got TN manipulation, Sidereals and Infernals, and the latter only in limited ways. Because TN manipulation was also synonmous with Fate manipulation. So only fate-manipulating entities could do it. This was an important part of conveyance and thematic comparison/contrast. Conversely, if you made it so everyone could manipulate TNs, then the feat itself stops being meaningful or becomes a general 'Thing' Exalted or magical can do.
Revolving Bow Discipline
...Why was this laid out like this? Someone bap the editor with the corebook, please.
Mechanics! This is the rapid fire battering down defenses Charm. I find it interesting/telling that this has a flat cost and just says 'You keep attacking until you miss'. You don't have to pay to attack beyond any supplemental or reflexives as well. It has limitations/boilerplate so you can't abuse it on Crashed opponents, and you are rewarded with willpower for crashing foes. A reward signals something very clear- that you want to crash people, that crashing is good and you get good things for it.
Finishing Snipe
A 'Free Attack' that is giving me nam flashbacks to Shrikes, this attack of opportunity mechanic lets you make an immediate Decisive attack on a crashed character within 'range', not a specific range, just Range- crashes. It provides no other bonus. My question is this- What defines 'A simple action that would prevent her from attacking?" Like... this is so subjective. I'm sure it's supposed to mean something like 'You are not already taking a Simple Action' But... I don't know. It just feels vague.
Rain of Feathered Death
I.. what is this, I don't even. You had a perfectly good mechanic in Trance of Unhesitating Speed? The fuck is this charm trying to say....
Okay, you fire one shot, and it splits into [Dex] arrows for 3m each. You then roll each damage pool in order, subtracting damage successes from Intiative until you get to zero? But you can't do less than [Essence] damage per hit anyway?
I. What is this. I don't even.
Shadow-Seeking Arrow
Building off of Dazzling Flare Attack (and acutally reasonable as a standalone Charm), it lets you Attack of Opportunity (there it is again!) against an opponent you spot with an Awareness check. It has the Uniform Keyword, so it's Withering/Decisive-OK.
This is... I'm sure this is a cool charm to use, but it also seems like such a Stop/start mechanic. You have to track who's in stealth, if they're spotted, then resolve X attacks for total # of stealthed opponents. Like- I honestly want to see a combat run with a ninja team vs someone using this charm, I want logs, I want to see how this gets run. It's mechanistic and solid, creating a useful if fairly uninspired ability or action. "I can attack people I spot in hiding outside of initiative order."
"I get to attack more often."
Searing Sunfire Interdiction
Okay, this is a Charm that is a gambit in and of itself with it's own built in Difficulty, and you're given double 9s to make the gambit more likely to succeed. You also get to go first if you take an Aim Action beforehand, with callouts for resolving magic vs magic. (Oh Charm Rolloff, how I miss you...) If the gambit goes off, it forces the target to be delayed by a number of ticks determined by the roll. I can tell you right now that this kind of thing would not fly in a 2e game, where tick manipulation was one of those third-rail mechanics. I can't speak as to how it works in 3e.
I think this is exacerbated because... I think Ticks are just 'Where' you are in the initaitive order, and there are only so many Ticks in a given Round? Like # of Ticks in a round = # of different Initiative Values. So if you have 6 people all whit Initiative 20, there's only One Tick, but if there's 6 people with Init 4 5 6 7 8 9- that's a 6 tick round? Please correct me if I'm wrong!
In any case, you can use this Charm to force someone to give up their turn. My critique of this mechanic is that it's... context-agnostic. It's focused on quantitative manipulation of numbers and relative positioning than any meaningful impact on the game world. Oh yes it has fantastic tactical viability, but it's 'orphaned' from the rest of the play space when it focuses on things like Initiative Order. Like, what I'm trying to explain here is that this Charm is in my mind, inferior to one that knocks an opponent off a cliff. Not that it's useless, just functionally less interesting. Granted, it's advantage is that it will always work regardless of context.
Hmm, repurchases... So the first one makes it easier to pass the gambit. The 2nd one 'resets your attack'? I guess that means you get to attack again- which makes the 'cannot use on same person twice' clause reasonable. An E5 upgrade (and this is very much Supernal Fodder) lets you use it twice on the same target- and forcing the target back twice shoves them a range band away. Again, useful, but context-agnostic. At E6, you can use it as often as you want? A 2nd E6 repurchase lets you attack one person for Cost+ WP, then just Cost for ever new target.
Okay so this is the first really big Charm that I've run into. It's designed as a tactical tool around battlefield timing control. Fine in and of itself, but I look at it and feel cold. This is not a Solar Charm. This is a 'metagame' Charm. This is intended entirely to be a thing that makes less of a statement about Solars and more plays into the initiative system as a platform for having fun. Nothing about this Charm says 'Solar' to me except that it's in the midst of a Solar Charmtree.
Solar Spike
Another aim-waiving Charm. (See, templating!) Okay so this is... Like Phantom Arrow's intimacy-stapling effect. Why didn't it lead off of that charm instead of Dazzling Flare attack? Anyway, Attack at range without aiming, replaces damage with Willpower * intimacy rating she is invoking to protect/uphold. This Charm reminds me of an overal trend I saw with 3e Charms in that they wanted to distribute competency across more character concepts, so you didn't have to buy a billion combat wombat charms to be effective- this is what I'd call a 'Shore Up' Charm. This is for your Socialite or non-combat spec character to bring in some muscle without violating their concept.
I think it could be worded more elegantly and boilerplate stripped out by templating/keywords, but it's functional. It makes the statement that a Solar can fight with their Willpower and Intimacies, but not much else.
Heart-Eating Incineration
...that sounds like a Lunar Charm. I'm sorry but it does. Okay, expands Solar Spike, conditional on Bonfire Anima, turns it into a living projectile image. Adds Intiative to Solar Spike's Raw Damage, and triggers Initiative Reset. It lets you regain motes if you kill the target.
...But why though? This Charm is an incoherent thematic mess. It tells me nothing meaningful or interesting about Solars other than 'They shoot their Feelings' and they can om-nom motes from things they kill; the most evocative part is that the target burns to nothing, but that's it.
Dust and Ash Sleight
... sonnova... I need to hurt something. Sure, you can make Seven Omen Shot faster- so they explicitly wanted that Charm to be slow so you'd have to buy upgrades for it to create an illusion of progress. And then instead of doing anything interesting with this, they just say buy the charm again and you can get the bonus successes back! This is what I mean by meaningless dice manipulation.
Heavens Crash Down
Okay, so this is a 'Chips are down' Charm. You're Crashed, Can't use it in Perilous or to force yourself into Perilous, and relies on you being at your -4 HL. (How often does that happen I wonder? Legit curious). This is a Limit Break, a desperation move. It makes the attack strictly better, and skips the intiative system almost entirely in favor of smashing the opponent directly. 'Clash' as I understand it is the 3e system term for attacking on the same tick/cross counter.
Streaming Arrow Stance
Another aim-waiving Charm! This is probably meant to be synergistic with the fact that most games are 3-5 PCs, so obviously this lets your archer help the melee and martial arts guys and 'compresses' the timing so you aren't stuck spending a lot of dead rounds Aiming.
Whispered Prayer of Judgement
I can't facepalm hard enough. Okay, so it keys on Aim Actions, that's good (though a bunch of Charms waive them?). But all it does is add dice. This just says that an E5 Solar (or 2 if you're Supernal) can hit Harder than normal after aiming.
Okay, so you're all probably going to take my snarky tone of 'Shyft holds a grudge'. I suppose that's fair, but I hope some people find this insightful.
Edit: In hindsight I needed a concluding paragraph:
Offhand, very little of this Charmtree looks synergistic- these are all one-off effects or short 'sub tree's that speak to small slices of 'Archery' tropes. I suppose it's fair to say that a Charm Tree ought feel like a Moveset, instead of a series of vaguely compatible effects that tend to vie for space on both my character sheet and my mind.
Like, there are 26 Charms here, not counting repurchases. A great deal of them just change some largely interchangable function of the dice or your final results. There's a glimmering of what the Solar Archer is supposed to be like here, but again 3e is not actually trying to tell us what Solars Do with their Charms.
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- Location
- Virginia
Just to address this (which was mentioned earlier, too): in Ex3 keywords are (with rare exceptions) not prescriptive. They're descriptive tags and the charm text is what controls.
- Location
- Virginia
What the heck, dude, this is exactly the same charm as it's always been. It's "you pull an artifact statline out of your shiny solar ass". You don't "get" any evocations for free, it just gives you licenses to brew some up if you want. Practically, this is just giving you license to brew your own archery charms with slightly more thematic breadth than if they were Solar archery charms.
With respect to the rest, Shyft... I really think you need to just forget 99% of your second edition combat knowledge and read Ex3 core. For example, Searing Sunfire Interdiction. If Bob has 5 init and Joe slaps him with it, rolling 7 sux (4 net) for a delay of 4+2=6 ticks (to tick -1), then Bob is pushed past tick 0 and loses his turn.
If you're not thinking about 2E I contend that this is pretty straightforwardly clear.
Ex3 core charms are not well-written. Some of them are entirely gibberish (Sledgehammer Fist Punch). Multiattacks are just a complete jumble of mechanics (Vance has fixed this in Arms and WFHW, with a very standard template for how multiattacks work). But the particular parts you struggled with aren't, I think, the usual points of confusion.
(Also really the charms are not trying to make statements nearly as hard as they are trying to just give your character a reasonably interesting widget to use in a fight.)
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
I'm sure that Interdiction makes sense if you run through it a few times like you did, but I did not understand it when I read it. The thing you outlined is clear as mud.
- Location
- London, England
That was a serious essay there @Shyft, and while I don't have time to address all of it, I think I can help add a few more points of clarification to help underline what the charms are going for.
Trance of Unhesitating Speed - The thing to note here is that it doesn't double 10s on the damage roll. Rather, a 10 on the attack roll increases the subsequent damage by one. Normally, net successes on an attack roll do not increase decisive damage; it's just a binary hit/miss. So it's a bit of extra punch and provides extra reason to do multiple attacks even against one person.
Immaculate Golden Bow - Most artifacts get a single 'effect' unlocked on attuning it, which for IGB is the extra 'power' noted at the end. You don't get free evocations normally, though sometimes picking up the first one in the tree if you meet certain criteria for free is the default power.
Anyway, IGB is literally just the 'you have your own artifact' charm.
Rain of Feathered Death - This charm is best thought of not as a 'multi-attack' charm, but as a 'reroll damage' charm. You only make one attack roll, and then you roll your initiative in damage normally. However, a standard decisive attack will automatically reset your initiative to three once you have hit, regardless of how many successes you got in the damage roll. RFD lets you reroll all your failed damage dice for 3m a pop, and should you get max damage (by getting successes on every damage dice) you can then add another (essence) dice on top, again for 3m a pop.
It's an expensive but incredibly dangerous charm, especially if you already have high initiative from previous successes.
Searing Sunfire Interdiction - This one is, broadly speaking, a teamwork charm. Using it won't deal any damage, and it means giving up your ability to directly hurt people before e4, but it can force an opponent to act after one of your allies (or at all for a given turn).
Heart Eating Incineration - This is actually a massive damage boost. Like, 'I increase my damage by (willpower x3)' when attacking a defining enemy is the sort of boost that literally no other combat ability provides. Thematically it's... shockingly shonen, to be honest, since you literally get stronger the more you care about this fight.
Themes and Synergies
To me, what this charm tree is trying to convey is the idea that 'the Solar Archer controls the flow of the battle'.
It starts by removing ways in which the battle might control you - visibility, environment, cover. Then it moves on to enhancing and simplifying aim actions in a variety of ways, removing one of the main limitations on an archery based character, the need to spend rounds aiming to attack at longer range (aiming done to enable long range attacks does not provide bonus dice).
From there your charms start allowing you to control others. You knock them back, you ruin their ability to use stealth (and punish them for doing so), you engage multiple foes at once and manipulate their place in the initiative order.
Finally, you have the decisive damage enhancers. Normally the only way to improve your decisive damage is to rack up your initiative, which you do by landing attacks of your own and avoiding the attacks of your foes. Someone with a high initiative is dominating the fight, is clearly the one setting the pace, and with Solar Archery Charms your character pretty much always has that high initiative. It doesn't matter what your enemies do - you are the one in control, you are the greatest threat on the battlefield.
It's a playstyle and thematic statement that relies on 3e's initiative system to really work, so if you don't have much experience with that system it's fairly easy to miss.
Trance of Unhesitating Speed - The thing to note here is that it doesn't double 10s on the damage roll. Rather, a 10 on the attack roll increases the subsequent damage by one. Normally, net successes on an attack roll do not increase decisive damage; it's just a binary hit/miss. So it's a bit of extra punch and provides extra reason to do multiple attacks even against one person.
Immaculate Golden Bow - Most artifacts get a single 'effect' unlocked on attuning it, which for IGB is the extra 'power' noted at the end. You don't get free evocations normally, though sometimes picking up the first one in the tree if you meet certain criteria for free is the default power.
Anyway, IGB is literally just the 'you have your own artifact' charm.
Rain of Feathered Death - This charm is best thought of not as a 'multi-attack' charm, but as a 'reroll damage' charm. You only make one attack roll, and then you roll your initiative in damage normally. However, a standard decisive attack will automatically reset your initiative to three once you have hit, regardless of how many successes you got in the damage roll. RFD lets you reroll all your failed damage dice for 3m a pop, and should you get max damage (by getting successes on every damage dice) you can then add another (essence) dice on top, again for 3m a pop.
It's an expensive but incredibly dangerous charm, especially if you already have high initiative from previous successes.
Searing Sunfire Interdiction - This one is, broadly speaking, a teamwork charm. Using it won't deal any damage, and it means giving up your ability to directly hurt people before e4, but it can force an opponent to act after one of your allies (or at all for a given turn).
Heart Eating Incineration - This is actually a massive damage boost. Like, 'I increase my damage by (willpower x3)' when attacking a defining enemy is the sort of boost that literally no other combat ability provides. Thematically it's... shockingly shonen, to be honest, since you literally get stronger the more you care about this fight.
Themes and Synergies
To me, what this charm tree is trying to convey is the idea that 'the Solar Archer controls the flow of the battle'.
It starts by removing ways in which the battle might control you - visibility, environment, cover. Then it moves on to enhancing and simplifying aim actions in a variety of ways, removing one of the main limitations on an archery based character, the need to spend rounds aiming to attack at longer range (aiming done to enable long range attacks does not provide bonus dice).
From there your charms start allowing you to control others. You knock them back, you ruin their ability to use stealth (and punish them for doing so), you engage multiple foes at once and manipulate their place in the initiative order.
Finally, you have the decisive damage enhancers. Normally the only way to improve your decisive damage is to rack up your initiative, which you do by landing attacks of your own and avoiding the attacks of your foes. Someone with a high initiative is dominating the fight, is clearly the one setting the pace, and with Solar Archery Charms your character pretty much always has that high initiative. It doesn't matter what your enemies do - you are the one in control, you are the greatest threat on the battlefield.
It's a playstyle and thematic statement that relies on 3e's initiative system to really work, so if you don't have much experience with that system it's fairly easy to miss.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Sorry to break up the gripping discussion, but here is the first session of A Plain of Swords:
A Plain of Swords
First Session
So, as mentioned, A Plain of Swords is a voice game, so I can't really use logs like Kerisgame. Insted, you will receive a summary of sessions; summaries which will grow progressively more detailed as we get further in, due to my faulty memory. The following has been cross-referenced with my player, but we are ultimately both humans in the end, and a lot of flaws are likely to appear. But anyways, onwards!
So, first of all, before we begin the session, let's give the head star of the show a proper introduction, yeah? So say hello to Laughing Cricket, a man from Sijan. Laughing Cricket is a man approximately 20-24 years old, who left the life of a mortician behind him. As an impetuous young(er) man, he braved grave guardians and dived into tombs to feel alive, both in the sense of contrasting his own life with the solemn dead, and to feel the rush of breaking taboo and the admiration of his equally young peers. He likely also dodged a few curses here and there, but you do what you gotta do. Eventually, this reached a breaking point and he was exiled from Sijan, leading him to travel into the wilds beyond the city of the dead, into the Scavenger Lands in the halcyon era of the Scavenger Lord. As a Scavenger Lord, he has also taken part in a fair share of smuggling in his time, something we're going to see a lot more of in the future, because Laughing Cricket is that kind of person.
Laughing Cricket was born under a secret sign, and has deep eyes of emerald green. When one gazes into them, it seems as if they are deep as the night sky and full of tiny specks, like stars on the vault of heaven. If this wasn't obvious enough, I'm going to say it pretty obviously; Laughing Cricket is fated to one day take his place among the hosts of Heaven, as a vizier of the palace of the Incarnae. One day (in about six-seven sessions, actually), we will find him as a Sidereal.
So, first session begins, and it does so in medias res, which means that we find Laughing Cricket standing in front of a villa of all things. It is dilapidated and ruined, vines creeping over walls and ancient materials falling apart, paintings peeling off to reveal white-grey walls built with methods no longer possible. This villa has no name, but to the inhabitants of the Sword Plain, it is simply referred to as The Ruin, for it's distinctive silhouette against the horizon. It is walled off, and the stone gate has been, through some means of Exalted power or sorcery, been fused into itself, leaving it completely impossible to open; perhaps as a method of containment or protection against the horrors outside in the time of the Contagion. This villa will be the centre of play in the first session and introduce us to a lot of things.
After a few attempts, Laughing Cricket successfully scales the wall, finding a place where it has become uneven due to age and essentially sprinting up, grabbing the top and pulling himself the rest of the way. He then wall-climbs to the nearest of the wall's three lookout towers, finding the skeleton of a dead Shogunate guardsman with a metallic "repeating crossbow with capacity for up to sixty bolts. Seeing this extremely useful contraption, he pockets it and climbs into the courtyard below.
The courtyard is spread wide around the villa, a few well-rotten corpses lying here and there, scattered around. Weeds and vines have generally overtaken it, and the ruined, white-grey concrete of the buildings stands almost skeletally in comparison to the weeds and shrubbery of the plain. Among the brown-green flora, lightly rusted metallic frames of automata litter the ground, shaped like human skeletons. One of them is still half-functional, pointlessly dragging itself in circles, despite its complete lack of a jaw, more than one arm or the entire lower body. The designs of the lords of the Shogunate are resilient.
The villa itself seems to consist of three buildings; a single, large residential compound, a smaller building of no clear purpose and finally, a small shrine or something similar. Both are locked off with elegantly carved double doors made with a jade-steel alloy primarily consisting of the jade part, allowing it to preserve a large part of its magical properties; in this case making it incapable of opening for him. He experiments a bit, and eventually just takes a hand from one of the skeletons, holding it to the door and letting it open. His way unbarred, Laughing Cricket slips in unhindered.
Entering the villa, it quickly becomes evident that the inside is a lot better preserved, for better or for ill. A distant clanking sound can be quite clearly heard, coming from deeper inside and frescoes and mosaics decorate the walls. A bit nervous, Laughing Cricket makes sure to step lightly on his feet and readies the crossbow. As he proceeds, he can see through the various windows to discover exotic, overgrown garden, clearly no longer tended to. After about fifteen minutes of exploration, Laughing Cricket finds a side corridor to something that looks like an armory. He spends some time and eventually figures out that to enter, a specific spiritual ritual is necessary to enter, by which one must be cleaned, and shoes must be removed etc. Entering the armory, he discovers a number of things that can be differentiated between trinkets and panoply.
Among trinkets, he finds a time-keeper and a dragon compass that help him tell the time and find places of power. In the panoply, he equips himself with mysterious buckler of red glass that makes a ringing sound when struck, and an ominously carved spear of black brass. These are the shield Rumination, of special efficacy against creatures of the Wyld, and the Demon-Spear of Yazata Ainu, which will later become Laughing Cricket's signature weapon and calling card.
Leaving the armory and fastening the crossbow to his back, Laughing Cricket moves onwards, stopping and hiding behind a wall as the clanking sound grows louder. Looking beyond a corner, he is shocked to see one of the automata still patrolling the corridors, walking in the same quadratic pattern as it has walked for centuries. For eyes, it has a pair of embers! For a body, it has a skeletal remnant! For hands, it has long talons! However, it also seems to be deaf as a result of the ages, and some damage it has sustained, both of its "ears" seeming stuffed with something. What follows is a tense scene of sneaking by, and staying in the shadows of the corridor, always trying to stay behind it without coming close enough to touch or be touched by it.
As he finally makes it unhurt across to open the door on the other side, he immediately discovers two things: a dead man lying with shield and spear in hands, his body covered in a white jade-steel swathing of plate-and-maille and his head completely crushed, and another, much closer clanking sound, as an automaton comes closer and closer to him, suffering no fault in either ear or eye. The first battle of the game is joined.
The automaton is fast, much faster than it looks. It quickly engages with him, attempting a grapple! He wards it off with his shield hand, but his footwork is lacking against its powerful assault, and he sprains his ankle. He answers in kind, by stabbing at it, damaging its internals, but it gets behind him and grabs him, flinging him into a wall with extreme ease, the fall wounding and breaking several bones in his right shoulder. Flinging away his shield and changing his spear hand, he stabs it from below and following up with a powerful, shoulder-powered shove. This smashes it prone and impales it on the spear, while he begins hobbling away to hide behind a corner, invoking a function of The Demon-Spear of Yazata Ainu that allows it to cause general bad things to happen, due to a cursed fate in order to strengthen the spear. Seeing the automaton appear, he flings the spear into its neck, and as it leaves his hand, he can feel the dark magics crushing his hand and he slumps down, limp along the cold wall.
Tearing his own clothes, he sets his broken shoulder arm in a sling, and uses the spear as a walking stick. He takes the armour from the dead man, discovering that it naturally allows him to sustain his arm, and decides to cut his losses and get out of the villa as soon as possible, finding his (questionably chosen) companion Black Mouse waiting for him on the outside with a pair of donkeys; one for each of them.
A Plain of Swords
First Session
So, as mentioned, A Plain of Swords is a voice game, so I can't really use logs like Kerisgame. Insted, you will receive a summary of sessions; summaries which will grow progressively more detailed as we get further in, due to my faulty memory. The following has been cross-referenced with my player, but we are ultimately both humans in the end, and a lot of flaws are likely to appear. But anyways, onwards!
So, first of all, before we begin the session, let's give the head star of the show a proper introduction, yeah? So say hello to Laughing Cricket, a man from Sijan. Laughing Cricket is a man approximately 20-24 years old, who left the life of a mortician behind him. As an impetuous young(er) man, he braved grave guardians and dived into tombs to feel alive, both in the sense of contrasting his own life with the solemn dead, and to feel the rush of breaking taboo and the admiration of his equally young peers. He likely also dodged a few curses here and there, but you do what you gotta do. Eventually, this reached a breaking point and he was exiled from Sijan, leading him to travel into the wilds beyond the city of the dead, into the Scavenger Lands in the halcyon era of the Scavenger Lord. As a Scavenger Lord, he has also taken part in a fair share of smuggling in his time, something we're going to see a lot more of in the future, because Laughing Cricket is that kind of person.
Laughing Cricket was born under a secret sign, and has deep eyes of emerald green. When one gazes into them, it seems as if they are deep as the night sky and full of tiny specks, like stars on the vault of heaven. If this wasn't obvious enough, I'm going to say it pretty obviously; Laughing Cricket is fated to one day take his place among the hosts of Heaven, as a vizier of the palace of the Incarnae. One day (in about six-seven sessions, actually), we will find him as a Sidereal.
So, first session begins, and it does so in medias res, which means that we find Laughing Cricket standing in front of a villa of all things. It is dilapidated and ruined, vines creeping over walls and ancient materials falling apart, paintings peeling off to reveal white-grey walls built with methods no longer possible. This villa has no name, but to the inhabitants of the Sword Plain, it is simply referred to as The Ruin, for it's distinctive silhouette against the horizon. It is walled off, and the stone gate has been, through some means of Exalted power or sorcery, been fused into itself, leaving it completely impossible to open; perhaps as a method of containment or protection against the horrors outside in the time of the Contagion. This villa will be the centre of play in the first session and introduce us to a lot of things.
After a few attempts, Laughing Cricket successfully scales the wall, finding a place where it has become uneven due to age and essentially sprinting up, grabbing the top and pulling himself the rest of the way. He then wall-climbs to the nearest of the wall's three lookout towers, finding the skeleton of a dead Shogunate guardsman with a metallic "repeating crossbow with capacity for up to sixty bolts. Seeing this extremely useful contraption, he pockets it and climbs into the courtyard below.
The courtyard is spread wide around the villa, a few well-rotten corpses lying here and there, scattered around. Weeds and vines have generally overtaken it, and the ruined, white-grey concrete of the buildings stands almost skeletally in comparison to the weeds and shrubbery of the plain. Among the brown-green flora, lightly rusted metallic frames of automata litter the ground, shaped like human skeletons. One of them is still half-functional, pointlessly dragging itself in circles, despite its complete lack of a jaw, more than one arm or the entire lower body. The designs of the lords of the Shogunate are resilient.
Storyteller's Note said:
The villa itself seems to consist of three buildings; a single, large residential compound, a smaller building of no clear purpose and finally, a small shrine or something similar. Both are locked off with elegantly carved double doors made with a jade-steel alloy primarily consisting of the jade part, allowing it to preserve a large part of its magical properties; in this case making it incapable of opening for him. He experiments a bit, and eventually just takes a hand from one of the skeletons, holding it to the door and letting it open. His way unbarred, Laughing Cricket slips in unhindered.
Entering the villa, it quickly becomes evident that the inside is a lot better preserved, for better or for ill. A distant clanking sound can be quite clearly heard, coming from deeper inside and frescoes and mosaics decorate the walls. A bit nervous, Laughing Cricket makes sure to step lightly on his feet and readies the crossbow. As he proceeds, he can see through the various windows to discover exotic, overgrown garden, clearly no longer tended to. After about fifteen minutes of exploration, Laughing Cricket finds a side corridor to something that looks like an armory. He spends some time and eventually figures out that to enter, a specific spiritual ritual is necessary to enter, by which one must be cleaned, and shoes must be removed etc. Entering the armory, he discovers a number of things that can be differentiated between trinkets and panoply.
Among trinkets, he finds a time-keeper and a dragon compass that help him tell the time and find places of power. In the panoply, he equips himself with mysterious buckler of red glass that makes a ringing sound when struck, and an ominously carved spear of black brass. These are the shield Rumination, of special efficacy against creatures of the Wyld, and the Demon-Spear of Yazata Ainu, which will later become Laughing Cricket's signature weapon and calling card.
Leaving the armory and fastening the crossbow to his back, Laughing Cricket moves onwards, stopping and hiding behind a wall as the clanking sound grows louder. Looking beyond a corner, he is shocked to see one of the automata still patrolling the corridors, walking in the same quadratic pattern as it has walked for centuries. For eyes, it has a pair of embers! For a body, it has a skeletal remnant! For hands, it has long talons! However, it also seems to be deaf as a result of the ages, and some damage it has sustained, both of its "ears" seeming stuffed with something. What follows is a tense scene of sneaking by, and staying in the shadows of the corridor, always trying to stay behind it without coming close enough to touch or be touched by it.
As he finally makes it unhurt across to open the door on the other side, he immediately discovers two things: a dead man lying with shield and spear in hands, his body covered in a white jade-steel swathing of plate-and-maille and his head completely crushed, and another, much closer clanking sound, as an automaton comes closer and closer to him, suffering no fault in either ear or eye. The first battle of the game is joined.
The automaton is fast, much faster than it looks. It quickly engages with him, attempting a grapple! He wards it off with his shield hand, but his footwork is lacking against its powerful assault, and he sprains his ankle. He answers in kind, by stabbing at it, damaging its internals, but it gets behind him and grabs him, flinging him into a wall with extreme ease, the fall wounding and breaking several bones in his right shoulder. Flinging away his shield and changing his spear hand, he stabs it from below and following up with a powerful, shoulder-powered shove. This smashes it prone and impales it on the spear, while he begins hobbling away to hide behind a corner, invoking a function of The Demon-Spear of Yazata Ainu that allows it to cause general bad things to happen, due to a cursed fate in order to strengthen the spear. Seeing the automaton appear, he flings the spear into its neck, and as it leaves his hand, he can feel the dark magics crushing his hand and he slumps down, limp along the cold wall.
Storyteller's Note said:
Tearing his own clothes, he sets his broken shoulder arm in a sling, and uses the spear as a walking stick. He takes the armour from the dead man, discovering that it naturally allows him to sustain his arm, and decides to cut his losses and get out of the villa as soon as possible, finding his (questionably chosen) companion Black Mouse waiting for him on the outside with a pair of donkeys; one for each of them.
Storyteller's Note said:
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- Location
- Earth Prime
First off, I hope this doesn't fall afoul of the spaghetti posting rules, and if it does, I'll fix it. But the detailed analysis seems to call for specific response. I'll spoiler-block my replies to Shyft's post, though, so at least those uninterested aren't wall-of-texted.
The issue I have with it is that it's a relatively SMALL effect. On 1/10 of individual dice rolled, it matters. One average, if you roll 10 dice, your expected value is having this Charm influence one of them in that roll. It then grants you a re-roll. This is neither a guaranteed success nor a guaranteed failure. On a 7+, the re-roll is a success, and on a 10, it's two successes. So the re-roll's expected value is half a success.
What this net does is move your expected value on a die from half a success to 55% of a success. You're spending a Charm purchase and its mote cost to get an average increase of 1 success for every 20 dice you roll. (It also has the weird side-effect of very very slightly increasing your chance of botching, if 6s were the highest die you rolled.)
Rolling buckets of dice is fun. I know some people enjoy playing "Spot the die" games to pick out little advantages. But this is so small an effect that it just plain isn't worth the extra hassle of tracking it, let alone spending the XP to buy it.
Of course, if you find a victim you care enough to kill who already is a lonely, isolated, depressed shell of a man, this Charm works, too.
This actually is not good design, in my opinion. It's not that it's useless, but it's a stunt encoded as a high-level Charm. I say it's a stunt because it's a very specific effect with a very clear narrative that it's capping off. It's not a general action depicting excellence or themes of any particular Exalt; it's really something that a more robustly-designed system (and, I suspect, the actual system Ex3 has in place for social manipulation) would support without a Charm: you're driving somebody to suicide with written social attacks, essentially.
Charms help, but you don't need - and shouldn't need - a specific Charm for this very specific action. The generally-applicable social system supports it, and measly dice-adders could potentially achieve this end, if the victim is THAT isolated and without Intimacies. Charm concepts that would further support this would be ones which can make what 2E would have termed "unacceptable orders" into viable ones, or Charms which make a social influence hard-or-impossible to resist without burning away an Intimacy as a defense.
I won't claim there are tons of these Charms, nor even that they're unique to 3e (there were some I felt similarly about in 2e, especially in the Sidereal trees), but this is bad Charm design.
Like the "re-roll 6s" concept, I think the writers got too enamored of cool-feeling (to them) toying with the intricacies of their game mechanics, but feared it being too unbalancing or didn't appreciate the minimal effect it really would have outside a few rare circumstances. It doesn't really make the Solar Archer that much more dangerous than a mortal one.
I actually don't mind expanding Solar dice-manipulation to do things like say, "Double successes on 9s." That speaks to Solar themes without actually getting into fate-manipulation. It just says Solars are super-good more often. I don't mind re-rolls, as long as they're reasonably meaningful. Re-rolling 1s is almost as bad as re-rolling 6s, though, since 1s only matter if you rolled no other successes.
(Though, as noted, this interacts with other Charms which make enemy 1s more meaningful. I am not sure where I stand on this; I like the interaction and counteraction, but at the same time, this only really makes you better in marginal situations against specific other builds that actually have Charms that make your 1s meaningful. It's almost the same design space that 2E deliberately dodged by saying "defense wins." It's "Well, if you have that specific technique, I have this one to specifically counter your specific technique!" It's the kind of thing that spawned Rust Monsters when a DM got tired of his fighter having too low (i.e. good) an AC. But...it DOES encourage interaction. I just wish it was more based on core mechanics than the "new" sub-game built out of Charms on top of the mechanics.)
I like complex systems, but sometimes, they get to the point where the complexity isn't serving anything but sinking XP in dodging it. ShadowRun has similar problems.
Then, you could have Charms which expand the range where desperation moves can happen, either by letting them be pulled out when you're not-that-wounded, or letting you "catch" yourself before you rocked through the "danger zone" where you're still alive enough to pull it off.
I kind-of get this one: "The supernal archer is just that deadly when aiming" is a valid thing. Though I think interacting with the initiative/withering/decisive subsystem would be a better way to represent that.
It's not an easy task, writing Charms that are both meaningfully new and interesting (rather than yet another dice manipulator for hopefully more than marginal effect), and yet aren't just stunts you thought up with a very specific scene in mind.
What a Charm that says "reroll 6s" does is make the 6 now an important die point.
The issue I have with it is that it's a relatively SMALL effect. On 1/10 of individual dice rolled, it matters. One average, if you roll 10 dice, your expected value is having this Charm influence one of them in that roll. It then grants you a re-roll. This is neither a guaranteed success nor a guaranteed failure. On a 7+, the re-roll is a success, and on a 10, it's two successes. So the re-roll's expected value is half a success.
What this net does is move your expected value on a die from half a success to 55% of a success. You're spending a Charm purchase and its mote cost to get an average increase of 1 success for every 20 dice you roll. (It also has the weird side-effect of very very slightly increasing your chance of botching, if 6s were the highest die you rolled.)
Rolling buckets of dice is fun. I know some people enjoy playing "Spot the die" games to pick out little advantages. But this is so small an effect that it just plain isn't worth the extra hassle of tracking it, let alone spending the XP to buy it.
This really is a Charm that is written to tell a specific story. Its use is as the capstone to a campaign of social isolation and gaslighting. The idea is that you use your other supreme social skills to strip him of everything he cares about, until he's a lonely, isolated, depressed shell of a man. This Charm then lets you kill him.
Of course, if you find a victim you care enough to kill who already is a lonely, isolated, depressed shell of a man, this Charm works, too.
This actually is not good design, in my opinion. It's not that it's useless, but it's a stunt encoded as a high-level Charm. I say it's a stunt because it's a very specific effect with a very clear narrative that it's capping off. It's not a general action depicting excellence or themes of any particular Exalt; it's really something that a more robustly-designed system (and, I suspect, the actual system Ex3 has in place for social manipulation) would support without a Charm: you're driving somebody to suicide with written social attacks, essentially.
Charms help, but you don't need - and shouldn't need - a specific Charm for this very specific action. The generally-applicable social system supports it, and measly dice-adders could potentially achieve this end, if the victim is THAT isolated and without Intimacies. Charm concepts that would further support this would be ones which can make what 2E would have termed "unacceptable orders" into viable ones, or Charms which make a social influence hard-or-impossible to resist without burning away an Intimacy as a defense.
I won't claim there are tons of these Charms, nor even that they're unique to 3e (there were some I felt similarly about in 2e, especially in the Sidereal trees), but this is bad Charm design.
I can agree with this. Dice manipulation can be fun. But it is prevalent enough, and low-impact enough, that it starts to feel "same-y" and tedious.
I could be wrong, but I think this has to do with permitting multiple Decisive attacks: by not resetting initiative until every damage roll is completed, you get to use your full initiative pool for damage on EVERY attack. This is pretty deadly, actually. Either tons and tons of decisive damage, or multiple gambits pounding home at once followed by a full-strength decisive attack.
This is more-or-less exactly the kind of eye-glazing "what, exactly, is this meant to do?" Charm-writing I've been griping about in my perhaps-misplaced complaint about too many dice-manipulators.
Like the "re-roll 6s" concept, I think the writers got too enamored of cool-feeling (to them) toying with the intricacies of their game mechanics, but feared it being too unbalancing or didn't appreciate the minimal effect it really would have outside a few rare circumstances. It doesn't really make the Solar Archer that much more dangerous than a mortal one.
I really liked that about 2E. I liked the statements that made.
I actually don't mind expanding Solar dice-manipulation to do things like say, "Double successes on 9s." That speaks to Solar themes without actually getting into fate-manipulation. It just says Solars are super-good more often. I don't mind re-rolls, as long as they're reasonably meaningful. Re-rolling 1s is almost as bad as re-rolling 6s, though, since 1s only matter if you rolled no other successes.
(Though, as noted, this interacts with other Charms which make enemy 1s more meaningful. I am not sure where I stand on this; I like the interaction and counteraction, but at the same time, this only really makes you better in marginal situations against specific other builds that actually have Charms that make your 1s meaningful. It's almost the same design space that 2E deliberately dodged by saying "defense wins." It's "Well, if you have that specific technique, I have this one to specifically counter your specific technique!" It's the kind of thing that spawned Rust Monsters when a DM got tired of his fighter having too low (i.e. good) an AC. But...it DOES encourage interaction. I just wish it was more based on core mechanics than the "new" sub-game built out of Charms on top of the mechanics.)
This is actually part of my problem with the whole Craft subsystem, too. On the one hand, all the playing-with-the-system is cool. But on the other, it starts to lose sight of the RP the G is modeling.
White Wolf has had a long history of problems with Air-Breathing Mermaid Merits. This isn't QUITE the same thing, but it's close: "We're introducing this nuisance mechanic so that we can make people pay for the privilege of getting rid of it."
I like complex systems, but sometimes, they get to the point where the complexity isn't serving anything but sinking XP in dodging it. ShadowRun has similar problems.
This one, like the Linguistics Charm mentioned earlier, is a Charm designed to speak to a specific story. It's a little more forgivable: "The hero has a desperate move when he's almost dead!" is far more generally-seen than "the target of this letter is being manipulated into committing suicide because he has nothing left to live for." But it's still way too niche. Designing desperation mechanics into the core combat system would have been a better use of their efforts, especially since that kind of heroic rebound is genre-appropriate all around.
Then, you could have Charms which expand the range where desperation moves can happen, either by letting them be pulled out when you're not-that-wounded, or letting you "catch" yourself before you rocked through the "danger zone" where you're still alive enough to pull it off.
Does it stack with the "free" Excellencies? I'm wondering if this is meant to equate to the E5 Charms in the Excellency trees in 2E that let you commit motes so you always had the Excellency dice.
I kind-of get this one: "The supernal archer is just that deadly when aiming" is a valid thing. Though I think interacting with the initiative/withering/decisive subsystem would be a better way to represent that.
Synergies tend to arise when you are building a tool set, rather than a suite of specific stunts. In their defense, the dice-manipulators are more likely to synergize with each other and any other Charm than the "specific trick" Charms are, because they interact with the underlying subsystems that the "specific trick" Charms utilize to determine how well they work. But there's a lot more that can be done in that regard.
It's not an easy task, writing Charms that are both meaningfully new and interesting (rather than yet another dice manipulator for hopefully more than marginal effect), and yet aren't just stunts you thought up with a very specific scene in mind.
Reroll sixes alone isn't great. Reroll 5s, 6s, and add an automatic success is.
Which is what the actual dice tricks are like. +20% to dice rolled, and an autosux is quite worth three motes. "Make ones not count to Charms that prey on them" is a strong effect on its own, and Excellent strike also adds an automatic success.
but, hey, keep trying to present the Charmset as way worse than it is because you have a grudge against it and don't feel like arguing honestly, it's not like this behavior has driven people away from the game-oh wait it literally has.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
To be honest, while I've come to sympathize with this line of argument more over time, I also do feel there's some very real merit in complaining about a lack of streamlining, templating and some degree of unnecessary complexity (although then one would then ask, what is the necessary level of complexity?). That said, I don't think it's a good critique when holding up previous editions of Exalted, especially when Exalted 2nd edition had tonnes of exceptions to its own prescriptive rules, and for example, the Holy keyword that was brought up did... not really do anything other than tell you a Charm didn't play well with Creatures of Darkness.
An actual series of dice tricks from Solar Melee:
Excellent Strike: +1 automatic success, reroll ones, +10% total dice, deny enemies your 1s to take advantage of.
Rising Sun Slash: When you roll a full Melee Excellency and 7,8,9,10 all show up on the roll, you can choose to pay a mote and gain a non-Charm automatic success, +Essence non-Charm dice. The option to situationally gain cap-breaking dice and a cap-breaking success that directly added to things like Hungry Tiger Technique.
Hail-Shattering Practice: For every 1 and 2 in the opponent's roll, remove one of their successes, up to your Essence. Triggered when you see their roll.
Foe-Cleaving Focus: For every 10 on the roll enhanced by Rising Sun Slash, get +1 motes. Costless and permanent.
And that's all of them. Literally all of them. @Segev what was that about upteen Melee Charm dice tricks? Hmm? Wanna explain how "four" turns into "like, 13 you guyz"?
Wanna explain why all these Charms are totally awful and indistinguishable? Why you couldn't tolerate four Charms doing things you don't like?
Wanna challenge me on how there's totally so many more in the rest of the set? I've got the book right here. I'm happy to count up the dice tricks per tree.
Excellent Strike: +1 automatic success, reroll ones, +10% total dice, deny enemies your 1s to take advantage of.
Rising Sun Slash: When you roll a full Melee Excellency and 7,8,9,10 all show up on the roll, you can choose to pay a mote and gain a non-Charm automatic success, +Essence non-Charm dice. The option to situationally gain cap-breaking dice and a cap-breaking success that directly added to things like Hungry Tiger Technique.
Hail-Shattering Practice: For every 1 and 2 in the opponent's roll, remove one of their successes, up to your Essence. Triggered when you see their roll.
Foe-Cleaving Focus: For every 10 on the roll enhanced by Rising Sun Slash, get +1 motes. Costless and permanent.
And that's all of them. Literally all of them. @Segev what was that about upteen Melee Charm dice tricks? Hmm? Wanna explain how "four" turns into "like, 13 you guyz"?
Wanna explain why all these Charms are totally awful and indistinguishable? Why you couldn't tolerate four Charms doing things you don't like?
Wanna challenge me on how there's totally so many more in the rest of the set? I've got the book right here. I'm happy to count up the dice tricks per tree.
- Location
- Land of the Midday Sun
You know, I would call these charms (and a lot of the dice tricks in 3E) out not because they're objectively bad design, experimenting with dice mechanics in your system isn't a bad thing, but because they slow down play.
That's almost the full sum of why I don't like dice tricks in dicepool systems: they slow down play.