General Exalted Thread
Tiger-Warrior Training Technique: "You will be the finest soldiers creation has ever seen! You will be the ultimate weapons in battle at my hand! You will know neither fear or pain, and strike terror into the hearts of Gods!"
Lessons of the Winter Wolf: "I will make you indefatigable! You will fight for three days and three nights without a drop of water or food in your stomachs! I will teach you the tenacity of bears and tyrant lizards!"
Hardened Killer Training Style: "I will keep sending zombies at you until you die or make it to morning, either way works for me. We will repeat this until performance is acceptable."
It shows a certain difference in approach, yes.
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Morale-Boosting Meal is a fun one. Just make your Circle/Hearth some food (or organize a party with catering) and you give them a nice buff for eating your cooking.
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So the reason I would go with the Infernal's as the evil CEO's and whatnot rather than corporate sponsored superheroes/ celebrities is two-fold. Though I will admit both are also just personal preference.
The first is that it minimizes the role of Hell and the Yozi's allowing the story to remain both human-centric and less cosmologically complex. It lets you focus on the boots on the ground as it were.
The second is that the Infernal's charms are just really well suited towards creating terrifying dystopian hellscapes. Cecelyne lets you create enough food to feed a city, while turning the surrounding landscape into a baren wasteland where nothing grows (and thus you are the only provider of the soylent green fed to the poor and struggling masses). SWHLIHN gives you powers to talk through, see through and control screens and cameras. Malfeas lets you build terryfiing nightmare cityscapes. Oramus means even your dreams aren't safe. Ceceylne (again ) lets you create manses by using prayer slave labor (imagine a row of AI computers linked together in the basement of some corporation, praying to the Infernal leader a thousand times a day. ) etc. Their charms naturally create the world you are looking for in a cyberpunk/dystopian settings.
But like I said, these are just my preferences.
Critian Caceorte
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Archer!Sidereals at it again with their shenanigans, this time turning arrows into mini-Daiklaves, and I love it.
Roadie
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I really feel like most of what they're actually using flurries, Steps, and counterattacks for here could fit without a lot of trouble into a much simpler model of a few generic actions-per-turn slots you can spend on things in whatever combination and a limited number of reactions per round, and that would prevent the way the current mechanics end up with a bunch of "this Charm doesn't count against the Charm-per-step limits" clauses.
For a more specific idea of what I mean, take a look at Loyal Guardian Approach and the number of mechanics it implicitly relies on, then look at one of the defend-an-ally actions in Pathfinder 2e:
No need for explicit Steps as long as you have clear triggers, no need for limited-number-of-special-things-per-turn rules because you're hard capped on reactions (the swooshy icon) and on basic actions anyway, etc.
For a more specific idea of what I mean, take a look at Loyal Guardian Approach and the number of mechanics it implicitly relies on, then look at one of the defend-an-ally actions in Pathfinder 2e:
No need for explicit Steps as long as you have clear triggers, no need for limited-number-of-special-things-per-turn rules because you're hard capped on reactions (the swooshy icon) and on basic actions anyway, etc.
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Honestly, I've been doing some work porting Exalted over to 3.5 for that very reason
Roadie
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3.x is really not a good system to use as a basis for anything, outside of using it as a general inspiration for tight mechanical templating and good use of keywords (which it mostly does pretty well). The math is just too jank past level 12 or so to reliably use as a general-purpose game system.
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It's a system that was made in direct response to late AD&D tacked-on mechanic, as a way to bring those same mechanics under a single roll system (d20+numbers roll over). It's made to play D&D, not as a general system.
About the one d20 system that was actually good was Star Wars SAGA Edition, and it had heavy customization to make it work.
Though in theroy you can make some sort of Exalted d20. It's just that you have to redo all the math from the ground up. Also having a class-based Exalted just feels wrong.
Roadie
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Ah, here's a really good example of the kind of thing I'm thinking about: Glorious Exalted Bolt.
Why is this even directly interacting with the Step system, rather than just being "an action that makes an attack" and letting that resolve as an attack, without needing to directly reference the details in the Charm? It seems like the only answer is that they just didn't feel like coming up with the semantics of doing that.
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Maybe they didn't want people using an Excellency with it.
Roadie
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Making Step 1 stuff into just "an action" covers that by default. If the [Whatever] Excellency is just "an action" (rather than a Step 1 invocation) and has text that amounts to "use any basic action with +X to the roll" (where "basic action" covers any action that's not Charm-provided), and other Step 1 things are all just "an action", you automatically can't use them together... and now you probably don't even need a "Step 1" as an explicit part of action resolution.
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Sure, but calling it Step 1 reminds you of the order of resolution really specifically. This is what you do at the beggining of your turn, explicitly. Plain language is good until your system gets just complicated enough that it introduces ambiguity where you don't want it.
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What makes the math jank? I've always heard it does a pretty good job of modeling the real world.
This article goes into it, but basically given the examples given in the books, the skill checks match what we expect to see in the real world. You just have to remember that level 5 is peak human ability.
Roadie
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Part of my point here is that everything presented so far isn't actually complicated enough to need the Step system. Every reference to Steps I've looked at so far in the universal charms chapter could easily be refactored into just making something an action and so innately being mutually exclusive with other actions (Step 1 usage) or consistent plain text triggers like "when you're targeted by an attack" (Step 2) or "when you hit with an attack" (Step 3) or "when hit by an attack" (Step 4).
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I think the only 3.x inspired thing I've liked is FantasyCraft. D&D 3.5/Pathfinder 1e are very clunky and fall into the "fighters need to be simple, wizards need to be complex" trap that a lot of fantasy stuff has.
On the topic of Exalted, I feel like they could stand to give more modes to the Exalted outside of Creation, especially the poor Liminals, who seem to not be well-liked by the developers as a concept.
On the topic of Exalted, I feel like they could stand to give more modes to the Exalted outside of Creation, especially the poor Liminals, who seem to not be well-liked by the developers as a concept.
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I don't know about clunky, but the simple martials stuff is easily handled by picking one of the million other official and 3rd party classes which fulfill the same niche but give more options and complexity. I suggest looking at Spheres of Power and the Akashic stuff
Roadie
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There's a reason I mentioned level 12 as my benchmark there for the math breaking down. Past that point everything is all over the place because the writers of 3.0 never actually did in-depth testing of high levels, never had any consistent plans on how to make expected success rates on attacks and saves work, and never had any sort of consistent idea of how to deal with high-level skill bonuses.
For some practical examples, take a look at actual plays of Pathfinder 1e adventure paths at high level, which generally involve some combination of PCs getting steamrolled repeatedly, PCs steamrolling all opposition easily, DMs having to do huge amounts of improvisation and customization to avoid either or both of the first two, or DMs just literally giving up on the rules and using the DM screen to pretend they're using coherent rules when actually they're just inventing all details of an encounter on the fly to suit the PCs.
This is part of why I mentioned Pathfinder 2e, which along with its very well-done system for allowing some but not unlimited action combinatorials, is built from the ground up on consistent math about expected success rates by level, which makes it actually mostly practical to use the high end of the system as written without the game immediately exploding because the group made characters that punch way under or way over their weight class.
To harp on PF2e again, it actually runs slightly in the opposite direction: spellcasters have to track spells per day but their gameplay tends to be "fire off one spell each turn and that's it", while at the high end non-spellcasters run on combo engines where you're juggling the effects of three to six actions per round plus per-encounter effects you need to decide when to use.
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Could you provide specifics on how the math breaks down past 12?
And what Pathfinder changed to make the math better in 2e? Cause I've never had problems with the math past level 12 and I haven't heard about any changes that 2e did
Roadie
A plate full of blins and a cat nearby.
Here's a simple example:
We have Rod Fighter, a level 20 fighter. Rod decided to cover his weaknesses, so has 10 in Int, Wis, and Cha and split his remaining ability score point buy between Str, Dex, and Con. As he leveled up he split his feats between offensive and defensive ones, giving him good saves and reasonable amounts of offense.
Next to him, we have Todd Barbarian, a level 20 barbarian. Todd decided to be really, really strong, and so he just put everything into Strength and into abilities that benefit Power Attacking with a greataxe.
Put them both in a level 20 encounter, and Rod is going to putter around doing some damage that's not going to be nearly enough to actually meaningfully contribute... while Todd, on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, is going to just delete an enemy off the map every turn. Actually, if Todd was lucky enough to come across Bloodstorm Blade and decide to use it, he's going to delete multiple enemies off the map every turn. Of course, if an enemy wizard happens to dominate him (which is more likely than not with his Wisdom of 5), he's going to end up promptly deleting the party off the map instead.
The short version is that in a lot of ways it's a completely different system that happens to share basic aesthetics and the "roll d20, add bonuses, try to beat a DC" core mechanic. They came up with the math by level first (as in, they started with explicit tables for expected DCs, AC, save bonuses, enemy high/low attack bonuses, etc, by level), then went back and worked out the bonus progressions PCs and monsters get based on that.
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I mean, this doesn't seem like an issue? Specialists will win in any system?
Also, any chance Pathfinder released those tables? I would love more insight into their math.
Also, in case you didn't see it I posted the discussion over into the DND thread since I think we're veering offtopic. If you could, please respond to this post in that thread.
Roadie
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Neall mentioned over on RPGnet that he expects the final product to have a lot more modes, and Liminals only having two (2) might be a versioning error. Though Solaroids, and Solars in particular, are still supposed to have the most modes.