- Location
- Earth Prime
To be fair, Overdrive, and probably a number of other things you've got lumped in some of these other categories, were very late additions to 2E. I won't comment on whether they were good additions or not; all I'm saying is that anybody who didn't hunt down the Scroll of Errata and pour through it to rebuild the game from the ground up probably doesn't know about those things.
Honestly, if White Wolf/Onyx Path wanted to make some money on the old books and old work, they would be well-advised to get a small team whose sole job is to integrate Scroll of Errata with the original books, and release a 2E Revised, one book at a time, probably in chapter order of Scroll of Errata.
I have, actually, found that while paranoia combos are important to avoiding accidentally splattering PCs, the paranoia combos themselves are not problematic. One of the issues that is often brought up about 2E and paranoia combos is that, once the PCs have paranoia combos, they're impossible to hit without mote attrition to zero. Leaving aside the "motes are hit points" arguments (which have their merits and demerits), I disagree with the notion that having PCs who are nearly-impossible to damage (but who have to put some effort into maintaining that nigh-invincibility) is a problem for a high fantasy/adventure game.
It's a problem if the only reason the enemies are attacking the PCs is to kill them, and the PCs have nothing they want other than to survive the enemies' attacks. If both of these things are not true, then PCs who are conditionally invincible are not a problem for running a game.
The reason for this is that the challenge need not - in fact, in most exciting combats, game or narrated in fiction, should not - stem from the risk of death. The risk of death is a false tension in most games and stories, these days. Audiences are conditioned to expect the important heroes to survive, and players know that the GM is actually on their side when it comes to not wanting to kill off PCs (in most games). Especially games like Exalted, where "the Story" is so crucial and PCs are meant to be integral to it.
Stakes are what make tension, and what make challenge. But stakes have to be believable. That is, the audience/players have to believe that they could LOSE the stakes. For that to happen, they have to believe that the GM will pull the trigger on it, that he's not worried about the game ending if things go wrong for the PCs in this encounter. Rarely is putting the PCs' lives on the line believable in this sense.
Instead, the stakes of the fight need to be something that the game could believably continue in interesting ways, regardless of whether the PCs win or lose. This doesn't mean threat of death can't be present, but it can't be the main source of tension. It's an obstacle, something to protect against and strain resources (like time taken to keep defenses up) rather than something that is actually expected to come to pass.
Examples of such believable stakes include:
- macguffin items that the PCs are trying to acquire/keep out of the hands of the enemies;
- escort missions where the escortee is the target of kidnapping or assassination and does not have the PCs' invulnerabilities;
- caravan guard duty where the attackers want to steal stuff and don't mind some light murder in the process while the PCs want to protect the people, beasts of burden, and cargo;
- caravan raiding where the PCs want to steal stuff (whether specific macguffins or just loot in general or particular supplies - e.g. beasts of burden and wagons - for their own purposes);
- interrupting a ritual or other event before it can be completed (whether the PCs are protecting/enacting the event or are the ones seeking to disrupt it)
- any sort of race against time or other groups to a goal, where the fight is slowing them down or diverting their path
- e.g. the combatants are seeking to close off a pass through some cliffs or collapse a bridge and the PCs are trying to cross or stop them before they can do it;
- preventing a thief from getting away with his goods;
- this one's an example where killing is one way to achieve it, but the thief being untouchable is just one more complication, as he has to stop and rest sometime, so not losing him in the pursuit is a possibility;
- escaping pursuit.
This is hardly an exhaustive list. But it gives some examples.
In each of these scenarios, the enemies being invincible, or the PCs being invincible, does not necessarily make the encounter "too easy." The stakes are still there.
I ran an encounter with a single Abyssal in the Underworld. He'd stolen a hoard of stuff from a Scavenger Lord and used a ritual murder of more than two dozen male prostitutes whose ghosts he recruited as minions to slip the whole four-wagon caravan he'd assembled into the Underworld via a created Shadowland.
The PCs caught up with him. He had the Abyssal perfect dodge, and used it liberally. He harried them a lot, but they outnumbered him and were able to overpower his ghostly minions (who were not exactly combatants in the first place). He kept trying to take things back by various tricks, but he just couldn't overcome their numbers and ability to physically take the wagons where they wanted them to go.
This didn't stop him from so frustrating the PCs that they STILL speak of his name with venom, but the truth is that they won the encounter with him handily. He got away with nothing, and they managed to return the hoard and get a reward and yadda yadda victory for the heroes.
But the encounters were tense in part because they couldn't actually hurt him, and he could not really hurt them. The stakes were those wagons of loot and the ghosts. But the obstacles he erected and the ways he harassed them to try to get even one wagon back were irritating and potentially efficacious if the PCs didn't successfully oppose him. (At one point, he tried to open a path into the Labyrinth right beneath their feet, since one step in makes going back out by the route he opened impossible. They managed to stop in time.)
But the point is, there was never real threat that they would die in the fight, nor really that they could kill him. But the stakes were tense, and the encounter memorable, despite this.
Exalted should always be about such encounters, even when PCs could die, because Exalted should be about stakes and consequences and how PCs' actions shape and pursue goals, not about "will they PCs live?"
