And I'm sure there are plenty of Lunars that agree with you, and some that would want to cut you for saying that.I maintain that the Thousand Streams River was bad design and ultimately worse off for the game at large, and that's a position I will maintain until I die.
General Exalted Thread
- Location
- NYC
My problem with Thousand Streams River was that it co-opted interesting 1E nations and said "surprise, they were Lunar thingies all along!"I maintain that the Thousand Streams River was bad design and ultimately worse off for the game at large, and that's a position I will maintain until I die.
If it had instead added a bunch of really creative and different new nations/organization/such to the setting, it would've been an actually decent answer to the question "what have Lunars been doing this whole time?"
- Pronouns
- she/her
I didn't hate it, my problem was that the book portrayed steering mortal societies from the shadows was portrayed as unambiguously good which severely limited its value as a setting element.
Sidereals get a whole game style out of the idea that what's best for the world in the long-term might fuck a lot of people over in the short-term, Lunars are less equipped, both to see patterns in events that mortals can't or erase evidence of the times when they were forced to take action.
Origami Clock
Right twice a day
- Location
- Brighton, UK
Lots of Lunar problems can be pretty much boiled down to they were nobodies extra-special pet project, so lost out relative to the other splats that had people willing to make newer content rather than just port new fluff onto a previously established setting.
I think Vance's adoration of them will serve them well.
On the other hand, Holden was the Sidereal fanboy and he's been sacked
I think Vance's adoration of them will serve them well.
On the other hand, Holden was the Sidereal fanboy and he's been sacked
Vance is super into Sidereals as well. He said something in the Discord chat when talking about the writing staff expanding with the new books to the effect of 'even with all the new people, I will cut someone to write sidereals.'
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The_Reptile_
Jolly Good
- Location
- THE PITS OF HELL. Also known as Connecticut.
I mean other splats being more Interesting was always a given, considering the entire point of Solars is they're the basic, straight forward ones.
Solar Charms are basic straightforward excellence. This has been their deal for a long time, and I highly doubt Vance and Minton wouldn't have made their Charms similarly. And further, Solars get to be Resonant with all magical materials, Mastery for all martial arts, have the best Sorcery, and Supernal abilities. They can customize their play experience like literally no one else. "Crappy early edition mechanics" they are not. They're just what Solars were always going to be.
Did I ever say they were weak?
Their mechanics are bad. Their charmset is bloated and boring when it isn't the mess that is Craft. Yes, dicetricks can get really powerful. If you remember you have them among the numerous other almost identical boring dicetrick charms you have, half of which were prereqs to something actually interesting.
Bureaucracy doesn't plug well into the Projects system; the evocations in Core, which are explicitly called out as being meant for Solars, are a mess; the charmtext is riddled with ambiguities; and I could go on. There are threads after pages after discord channels enumerating all that.
We have seen the DB charms, we know these Devs can make good and interesting charmsets.
"I don't like the Solar set" /= "The Solar set is bad". It wasn't designed to be what you wanted, but it does what it wanted to do well. Craft isn't a mess, Craft does exactly what it wants to do. You don't like it, fine. That doesn't make it bad design, it makes it design you don't enjoy playing.
Take it easy, Kaiya, there are issues with the Solar charmset and Vance has said several times in several places he'd be interested in going back to do an errata at some point. The major obstacle is getting the go-ahead from Onyx Path to do a lot of work on something that isn't going to get them a lot of direct return.
- Location
- Land of the Midday Sun
Being that Exalted is a game ment to be played by people, yes, a design that isn't enjoyable to play is bad design.
Yes, there are issues. I'm not saying it's perfect. I'm saying it's not uninteresting, bloated with dice tricks and a Craft that is a "mess". I like Craft. Craft does exactly what I want Craft to do. Yes, it's ambiguous sometimes, yes, there's not a bureaucracy subsystem, and yes, there are mechanics that not everyone loves. That doesn't make them the uninteresting Exalts who need to be fixed to be more like the others, nor even inferior to the Dragonblooded set, which is far from perfect.
You know what the Dragonblooded Charms make you do? They make you buy your Excellencies, pay more XP than Solars for certain things, are riddled with effects that are barely even Charms, until suddenly they're literally Fire and Stones Strike, Aura is a clunky mess as bad as anything anyone ever threw at Craft, and you take significantly more XP to go up an Essence rank than Solars, meaning you're stuck even longer with such amazing effects as "Negate one point of penalty to your defense, unless you forgo using combat Charms, in which case you negate three points" or "Negate 1 point of penalty to stealth,".
Athletics makes you constantly count your tens and some of your ones, not even all of them. Counting (essence) ones or reroll (essence) 10s is a thing the DB set loooooves to do. Or double (Strength) 10s on Decisive damage. So you get all the book keeping, and not even the power to back it up, with a smaller mote pool and more expensive Charms.
Solars are really not worse than the Dragonblooded set. Both sets have their problems, including a proliferation of dice tricks (which somehow only counts for the Solar Set)
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- Location
- Ottawa
Probably true.
If hearsay is to be trusted at all, it was produced because Craft needed a system and never playtested. Say what you will about Ex3 Craft, you can't deny that it does have rules and there are Charms for it.
EDIT: On second thought, this is unhelpfully snarky and the point I'm trying to make is completely opaque.
So, explaining:
I don't care what Craft wants to do. If its badness is necessary for it to fulfill its goals, then those goals should be changed. It's one part of a larger game and its goals need to serve the greater goals of Exalted as a whole.
I know some people, you included, have had fun with Craft as it stands. But people have enjoyed every system you can imagine, so that's really no argument at all.
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Craft makes you play someone wholly devoted to Craft if you want to get N/A artifacts, and it's system incentivizes you to think of ways you can hook making stuff into social influence and interpersonal interactions. It does this pretty well, though, yes, it requires a good bit of bookkeeping, and that sucks for people who don't like bookkeeping. If you wanna reliably pull off artifact 4, IIRC the investment is about 6-8 Charms and being willing to actually play someone who is regularly making cool things to deal with the world around them. Make a gift for a circlemate, craft a crown for the local king, make a fine blade for the warrior you're trying to help, there's tons of ways to keep your craft XP up by making things. It's really not a mess, it just doesn't let you go off-screen and throw out a 4-dot artifact, it wants you to play someone that Crafting actually matters to. This isn't bad, it's just not what everyone wanted.
It frustrates me a lot because I love Craft, there's a ton of potential in it for the people who like it, but this thread lacks those people/they keep silent because of how overwhelmingly uncharitable people are to the potential the Crafting system has for games and characters. I have more than one Crafter and I love that the system lets me actually play someone who feels more like an artist, whose mechanics make me feel like I'm seeing the world through the eyes of someone for whom every problem can be addressed or at least aided by an act of creation.
I take this being completely brushed off as a mess of a system that needs correcting a bit personally, I suppose, which I shouldn't. But it is very frustrating to see over and over and over again that everything good about the system doesn't exist because some people don't like bookkeeping or feel it wouldn't work for their tables.
That's all well and good, but is at best tangential to the topic at hand. I realize that Exthalion said 'uninteresting and unenjoyable' and while I actually agree with you vis a vis Solars being interesting, I very much do not enjoy having to parse whatever the fuck Sledgehammer Fist Punch is supposed to do by RAW, or the athletics charms for distance running still referring to range bands. Some room for interpretation is good but even us Ex3 fans knows there's a relatively-small-but-not-insignificant amount of stuff that doesn't work (not to mention evidence that certain charmsets that made it to print seem to be from entirely different stages in the draft process i.e. lore being the only charmset that constantly reminds you how supernal works). That's what I took Exthalion to mean when he was referring to 'crappy early edition mechanics'. I may be giving too much benefit of a doubt here, but I don't think going hard in the other direction is likely to be very constructive.
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ugh. @Exthalion if this is right I apologize, I seem to be getting worse by the day. I'll just shut the hell up now, I think I've made enough of an ass of myself to last awhile.
- Pronouns
- she/her
I think the main thing that hurts the core is the lack of a Storyteller's section.
Not that there aren't Solar charms that need a second look but as I noted previously there's a few here and there that weren't part of the playtest and imo it shows that the people testing them had a better idea of developer intentions than most of us.
Not that there aren't Solar charms that need a second look but as I noted previously there's a few here and there that weren't part of the playtest and imo it shows that the people testing them had a better idea of developer intentions than most of us.
- Location
- Ottawa
Not so.
As you may or may not remember, my central complaint about Craft is that it's mostly useless outside of Artifact creation. Not only does it let you
it heavily encourages you to do so. It's all Artifacts, all the time, and if you run the numbers you'll see that once you've invested you can easily sit in a cave and make however many artifacts your materials allow. Basic and major projects become completely unnecessary after a while.
There's a sort of slight of hand going on; the writing surrounding the system heavily implies that you should be doing the kind of thing you talk about, and if you don't really look closely it's easy to believe it. But if you look at the system itself it's simply untrue.
A good Craft system would make Craft useful, rather than tossing you mostly-symbolic bonuses for shoehorning it in when it's not.
My impression is that there are just very few of those people.
For obvious reasons I've seen a lot of Craft discourse, and generally the argument is between "it's offensively bad" and "I'm not offended". And even "I'm not offended" seems to show up primarily as a response to criticism. Where genuinely popular ideas like Evocations produce positive discussion on their own, Craft only seems to get praised in response to attacks upon it.
Dragonblooded are in the exact same boat re: Craft and Bureaucracy. The issues that (some) people have with them are the core systems, not really the Charmsets in and of themselves. And Dragonblooded also use roughly as many Dice Trick effects too, with a few reroll this or that effects in each charm tree similar to Solars. The thing that the Dragonblooded charmset has over the Solar one is that the language is less ambiguous, but in and of itself it's not like the Dragonblooded were in any way a massive conceptual leap from the Solar charmset.
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mothematics
How wide is the concept of "you"?
- Location
- the bottom of a coffee cup
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I like how this is literally the game design equivalent of r/softwaregorn. Like if someone coded something analogous to this there would just be hysterical shrieking from whatever programmer next had to deal with it.
I maintain that the Thousand Streams River was bad design and ultimately worse off for the game at large, and that's a position I will maintain until I die.
Yes, I know. I have been told this every single time in the last five years that I have expressed anything other than the most abject of scorn for the Thousand Streams River. But at this point I don't give a crap. At least TSR Lunars managed to make some players at my tables vaguely interested in playing them - but nobody is expecting to want to play a 3E Lunar.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Well, that sounds like their mistake because 3e Lunars are cool and good. I mean ultimately, the Thousand Streams River was an attempt at fixing something that was bad. In this it succeeded, make no mistake. It was better - and so was 2e Lunars as a whole - than 1e, and far so.
But something can be good, while still being bad. Those are, strange as it sounds, not diametrical opposites.
But something can be good, while still being bad. Those are, strange as it sounds, not diametrical opposites.