- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hey, hi, so I was actually Kaiya's GM for at least one of the games she's referring to.
@Imrix namechecked me in a recent post as someone who enjoys the Ex3 combat system as a game of its own. I love putting together fiddly combat encounters. All players moan and gnash their teeth in despair as I begin another two consecutive six-hour sessions of pure combat. I am unstoppable. This is what fun is to me.
So I have less than zero interest in constructing encounters purely for the players to take cosmetic damage and show off. They hate me for it; they weep and say, "Omi, I am playing a Solar, can't you just give me a hundred soldiers to fight so I stomp all over them and feel cool and powerful," and I look down and whisper, "the Dragon-Blooded commander enhances his Size 5 battlegroup of undead with the following War Charms..."
I'm actively trying to win the fight at all times, because there is no rule saying that if you're incapacitated you necessarily die, so I can always decide that an incapacitated PC survives in circumstances that severely penalize them. Then again, I might also not, if the fight was sufficiently dramatic and important enough as to warrant death. But with this possibility, I am freed for the burden of balancing encounters so that they look threatening but actually are risk-free.
I am free to do my best to TPK. And I have to in order to keep things interesting, because the tools I am given are shit.
The problem is that I'm running Core Ex3. Which means the players are Solars. There is no legitimate combat threat to a group of 5 Solars once they're past chargen which isn't a similarly-sized group of Solar-equivalents. The right DB can defeat the right Solar, but pit five DBs and five Solars and things will average out, resulting in a Solar win. Octavian can solo certain Solar builds with relative ease, but the action economy is the one true god and he will die to groups. You would need, like, three Octavians and a battlegroup of blood apes or something.
Also trying to run combat between two groups of equal size is a hell without exit or end. It will take 40 real-life hours. You will either die of mental exhaustion, or your players will murder you so they can be free at last.
Besides, at some point, you have to justify combat encounters. You can't have Octavian show up every week to be defeated again. There are only so many Celestials in the world for your PCs to encounter. Realistically they'll be going around fighting small armies of men led by mortals or god-blooded commanders, sorcerers with a few bound demons, the occasional undead horde. Chaff to a group of Solars. I regret that it's the case, but it is.
Therefore, Gloam City Nights, my perfect achievement in gaming. Take a city. Introduce an eldritch horror beneath it. Have almost the entire population be captured or consumed in one apocalyptic night, turned into twisted monsters. Have twelve Dragon-Bloods, each of whom is corrupted by the Thing Below and granted a unique anime power in exchange. Sprinkle with ghosts.
At last, an entire death city for me to play with. Laughter the Twilight, combat sorceress and martial artist, did in fact almost die - and not in an ""almost"" way, she had to take a major crippling injury to reduce the damage below lethal, losing an arm as a result.
But those were sadly the early days. Solars gain XP. They grow and change. Eventually came the time when I went at them with thousands of zombies led by a Dragon-Blooded commander, supported by a DB sorcerer in flight-and-kite mode, and two giant monsters with their own profile each.
It was an epic battle that took two entire sessions, and I don't think my players were even wounded by the end. They'd taken some hits sure, withering ones, but no decisive damage. Underwhelming.
The tools I were given were weak. Therefore, I needed to change the parametres of the game itself.
I split the party.
This resulted in three of my best scenes ever.
First, Velvet the Eclipse gets to fight a DB spirit-binder with his pet demon. She beats the DB, but can't beat the demon, which the player had statted himself, as she runs out of Essence. Eventually, the physical fight is decisively won by the spirit - which dies because it had an "Intimacy are poison" mechanic and Velvet had shot him with a soul-arrow full of Intimacy.
Then, a ghost - a measly ghost - possesses the servant of Laughter's girlfriend, poisons the meal on date night, backstab mid-meal, and the combined suddenness and brutality of the threat with the sense of threat coming from the villain having shaped the environment to her benefit, plus the fact that the NPC girlfriend could die there even if Laughter survived, proved to make this a rather tense encounter. Also, the fact that Laughter literally couldn't kill a ghost.
And then that very same ghost escaped and grabbed a bunch of children to lead the Night Caste into a warehouse fight where she was tossing the kids from beams to force our assassin out of stealth. The Solar could die, the children could die, the ghost still couldn't be killed. This is how you create genuine desperation. I feast on it. I am a monster. But in the end it was all for the greater good as Ein the Night Caste pulled off one of the sweetest moments in the game by killing an enemy who could not die.
It is perhaps, regretfully, a good thing that Exalted focuses on overpowered player characters. I try my best to murder them anyway, but my swords are brittle and my shields made of wood. I could not be trusted with steel. The last time I ran D&D, I rolled a displacer beast random encounter, took one look at it and went "well that is a fine moderate encounter, which will take some HP and resources but not kill anyone.
"That's lame.
"Okay so they're going to ambush the party at night while everyone is asleep..."
I don't know why people keep asking me to run stuff for them. I think I tell a good enough story that they don't realize I spend every waking moment plotting out how to kill them.
Last edited:
