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.
Mmm, no, I actually had occasion to talk to Holden about this back in the day and that's not it at all. The 2nd Excellency got the axe for the simple reason that adding successes flattens the probability curve out a lot. It's the same reason Infinite (Ability) Mastery got axed; aside from the power spike it allowed for, it also enforced a degree of passive competency which made many rolls a foregone conclusion, and therefore no longer interesting.
That small point aside, I am generally in the same court as
@notthepenguins on the issue of dice tricks. I used to really like the kind of thing dice tricks represented, the little mechanical space in between just adding dice and Charms that do discrete things in their own right, stuff that makes the rules kind of... stand up and dance? But when you've got more than a very few of them in a set it I find it creates great difficulty in eyeballing the expected result of a roll, badly degrading a player's ability to make informed choices about what to do.
Make no mistake, I totally agree that there's value in, say, Excellent Strike, in how it defines a facet of Solar power by negating botches... but when
@Kaiya posts about the nested interactions between four such effects (so far, this is only one splat), I
recoil. It sounds positively
nightmarish.
Fundamentally, I think futzing about with all these nested interactions between these dice cancelling those dice and this one does that because of that one, can be very engaging and beneficial - for a certain kind of game. It's perfect for CCG's like Magic: The Gathering or certain tabletop games like... Well, not like Infinity, my current love, but others, certainly. But the quality these kinds of games share is that a great part of their attraction is in engaging with the rules on their own terms; a great part of the joy comes from demonstrating mastery of the system, because the system
is the game. It's why CCG's like Magic: The Gathering are almost always player-versus-player games, usually with a lively tournament scene.
But Exalted isn't that kind of game. While it's good if the combat system in a role-playing game is engaging (assuming that RPG has a focus on combat, as Exalted does), the point of an RPG isn't to win fights, but to, well, play a role. The combat system is there to enable your character, not
define it - if that's what you wanna do then like, Burn Legend exists, I guess?
I mean, I'm in a Discord with
@Omicron where he remarked, 'this kind of TCG/Infinity-style "engaging the rules on their own term"
is what I want in Exalted combat, which I get is definitely not for everyone, but for me it keeps me making characters and doing white room fighting for the fun of it' and I totally get that - it's a similar deal to the paper doll gameplay that turns up in many RPG's where people enjoy chargen as a minigame with its own possibilities. I, personally, am currently addicted to making army lists in Infinity (please help me, I've had to make colour-coded sections for all of them in a three-page document of
links to the lists). But I also look at that and kind of feel like... what does that have to do with an RPG? I remember the days back during 2e when people would exhort others to
avoid white-room combat, when Plague of Hats spent about 800 words explaining how to turn a
fight into an
action scene by viciously gutting any resemblance to white-room combat and pushing as much as possible to involve other mechanics, and yeah, that was a coping mechanism for the awfulness of paranoia combat, totally, but it was also
good storytelling, which, well, Exalted is still running on the Storyteller system, yes?
I'm basically still kind of ruminating on
@DayDreamer's point from a while back, about how Exalted
says it wants to be about character drama and grappling with the consequences of power and a holistic world that draws on actual coherent economics and anthropology and stuff but... Looking at what it incentivises, what it emphasises at a systems design level, that kind of comes across as a fever dream.
Sigh. Anyway, I don't want this post to do nothing but throw another log on the tire fire of this argument, so,
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.
Myriad stars, that's a cool concept. Like, at heart it's basically just a teenage daredevil, but ironically it really comes alive when placed in the context of Sijan.
This place was built in the late Shogunate, or "Low Shogunate". We can infer this from the use of a crossbow rather than a more advanced weapon, generally rougher, more industrial aesthetics and a heavy use of concrete. We can also see this from the use of fairly simple walls and guard towers, rather than something more exotic like say, a lightning fence or whatever. This isn't so important now, but it becomes relevant later, especially once we're inside the compound. The skeletal automata especially, are a sign of late Shogunate design, when resources began to be too scarce, and the skeleton-automaton design became in vogue. We haven't met them yet, but in some places, you would see servitors like these dressed up in garments resembling the dead, as the Shogunate had its whole own Baroque period.
I love it. It's so very...
Manus.
This was the first session of the game. It is quite important in many ways, as it sets the general tone as one of ruin and fall, it introduces us to Laughing Cricket and his personality (fundamentally self-interested, but as we'll see later, not entirely an asshole) and it introduces us to the aesthetics that are going to show up a lot. It also sets up a recurring character (Black Mouse), although we won't be seeing him for a while after the first three sessions. It also gives us the fundamental calling card of our main character: his ominous black spear. Furthermore, this session also introduced us to this younger, more unsure Creation, with more rickety power structures, smaller populations, far less inhabited areas than the canon one, and unexplored ruins still lying everywhere, before Scavenger Lords like Laughing Cricket pick the corpses clean and Creation moves on. All in all, a very fun session.
Agreed, and a fun read as well. You sketch the area out well, and found a good balance for exploration, stealth, tone-setting and, eventually, combat. I think this is the first mortal prelude I've read in Exalted, and it captures that sought-after tone of being a small fish picking away at the margins of a grand ruin. I look forward to more.
