I feel like the apendectomy example is a bad one because there's too a gap between the setting 's expectations and player experiences. People don't know the history of internal surgery. Most players are vaguely aware that surgery was a thing that sorta-kinda happened in Ye Ancient and Medieval Times, but not that appendectormies specifically weren't a thing until very recent. From a modern perspective, reattaching anything much larger than a finger/toe or maybe a hand at the most isn't something that really happens, while these days an appendectomy without complications can be done as an outpatient surgery. Difficulty 1 is probably too low for an appendectomy, that's something like setting a simple break or suturing a surface wound, but I can understand why both players and maybe even the writers would think it's something that a skilled mortal surgeon could expect to have a good chance at.
Personally, I think it should be possible to make a player character who is bad at something.
Obviously, every Exalt is gonna be absolutely amazing at a bunch of stuff. And most of the time, the stuff you do is the stuff you're amazing at. That's how the game is built. But setting up the stunt rules, willpower system, and basic difficulty chart so that Int 1 Dex 1 Medicine 0 still lets you perform surgery reliably is a bit constraining.
The Essence approach does a decent job of addressing that, I think. Difficulties usually start at 3, and normal professional competence is usually automatic, but the door is still open for a high-stakes difficulty 2 roll if circumstances warrant.
I can definitely see a perfectly respectable line of argument that says "the difficulty rungs do matter, actually, because what if my PCs want to escape regular-ass mortal legionnaires in medium armor who have 4 dice in their combat movement pool...
It's not a line I particularly sympathize with, because you can also just choose to... not have that happen in the hypothetical scene you're running - but I can totally see a reasonable person making that argument.
You know, I actually don't think you can. The game fully expects you to fight mooks from time to time, and combat involves a bunch of opposed rolls. Including opposed movement rolls, actually.
And to be honest, I'm not completely sure how else to interpret NPC dicepools. Elite soldiers have 9 dice for their senses; obviously they're meant to be very perceptive. But using the standard difficulty chart and assuming they can all read by touch on a good day seems kinda silly. So I'm not really sure what that 9-die pool is supposed to mean, other than "use your Stealth excellency".
To get a handle on ExEss, I made an artifact. Would love to hear feedback!
Raiment of the Resplendent Warrior (Artifact 3)
Tags: Artifact Stats: Light
This armor was forged from the distilleg legend of one of the Green Sun Princes, turning the hatred of his foes into protectio System: The powers of this artifact only effect characters with a Negative Intimacy towards the wearer. For the purposes of this armor a Negative Intimacy is any intimacy with a negative connotation such as an intimacy of fear, anger, or hatred. Terrified Awe always counts as a Negative Intimacy.
Hatred as Armor: The armor gains +2 B/L Hardness and soak against the attacks of those with a minor negative intimacy towards the wearer. This increases by 4 if they have a major negative intimacy towards the wearer.
Blinded by Vengeance: The wearer makes a special Distract gambit targeting a character with a negative intimacy towards them. This gambit gains extra successes based on the type of negative intimacy the target holds, 2 for a minor intimacy or 3 for a major intimacy. If this Distract gambit is successful, it lasts until the target attacks the wearer.
The wearer may use this gambit for free during the first round of combat.
The wearer may activate this gambit in during Step 3 of a character's attack if that character has a negative intimacy towards the wearer.
A first thing to note here is that there is no bashing/lethal divide in XS, there's just the one damage type.
Anyway, so, when you make an XS artifact, there are a few layers of consideration.
First, there is concept. Like, what, in the fiction, is this thing? Part of that is material, which you haven't noted. This matters for resonance reasons -- if you're not using one of the standard magical materials, still say what the thing's made out of, and probably make a note about how resonance works in the passive effect section. For this one, you could just say it functions as orichalcum, or it's only resonant for Infernals, or it's resonant with characters who share certain traits. You'll want to give a physical description of a thing. If you want to give a more elaborate, Ex3 style backstory to it, no one's going to stop you -- you're doing this shit for free and don't need to worry about wordcounts.
Second, we've got base stats and tags. This is very easy for armour -- XS armour barely interacts with the tag system, presumably because neither does Ex3 armour. This is artifact light armour, it gives you +3 soak and +1 hardness. This gets a little more complicated with weapons, especially with parts of that section of the manuscript that are a bit of a mess and which we know have undergone substantial changes in the many months since the kickstarter version came out. Still, good idea to jot this down so you don't lose track of it.
So like, now we have the two harder parts: Passive effects and evocations.
All artifacts have passive effects. Below three dot artifacts, they more or less only have passive effects. It does a thing! This should be a benefit which is worth the merit dots you paid -- this can be anything from a neat trick to a mechanic you're going to come back to in the evocations -- but it is not in of itself a charm. I notice that, for your three dot artifact armour, you're only going in for passive effects instead of evocations. It feels quite over-tuned to me. What you should really do is take a good look at the defensive charms and comparable effects elsewhere in the book, and ask yourself if a +6 to soak and hardness, for free, with no charm activation or mote cost, against anyone who has a major negative tie against you feels reasonable. It's entirely possible when you said "add 4 to this", you actually just mean it's a +4, which is still over-tuned when it comes without a cost. Defensive charms tend to be fairly mote hungry if you're going to activate them for every attack and have specific steps they activate on. This should definitely be reworked as an evocation.
Your second effect here starts out as a pretty okay passive effect. Gaining a bonus to distract gambits based on an enemy having negative intimacies for you is fine. Waving the power cost and being able to use a distract gambit in the middle of someone else's turn, for free, based simply on a character having a negative intimacy for you, very obviously should be reworked as an actual evocation and is overpowered otherwise.
You'd probably benefit from taking a closer look at the example artifacts in the manuscript to see how XS artifacts are made, as well as to the systems section earlier in the manuscript. Finding some XS homebrew stuff from people who are better at it than me would also help! I get the feeling that you're not super familiar with artifacts in the Ex3/XS paradigm.
To get a handle on ExEss, I made an artifact. Would love to hear feedback!
Raiment of the Resplendent Warrior (Artifact 3)
Tags: Artifact Stats: Light
This armor was forged from the distilleg legend of one of the Green Sun Princes, turning the hatred of his foes into protectio System: The powers of this artifact only effect characters with a Negative Intimacy towards the wearer. For the purposes of this armor a Negative Intimacy is any intimacy with a negative connotation such as an intimacy of fear, anger, or hatred. Terrified Awe always counts as a Negative Intimacy.
Hatred as Armor: The armor gains +2 B/L Hardness and soak against the attacks of those with a minor negative intimacy towards the wearer. This increases by 4 if they have a major negative intimacy towards the wearer.
Blinded by Vengeance: The wearer makes a special Distract gambit targeting a character with a negative intimacy towards them. This gambit gains extra successes based on the type of negative intimacy the target holds, 2 for a minor intimacy or 3 for a major intimacy. If this Distract gambit is successful, it lasts until the target attacks the wearer.
The wearer may use this gambit for free during the first round of combat.
The wearer may activate this gambit in during Step 3 of a character's attack if that character has a negative intimacy towards the wearer.
Something that strikes me is that it runs into the dice limit pretty hard. Characters can only have 5 successes and 10 dice added to their pools, and I believe that that applies to Soak. You gain 3 soak from Light Armour, then the 2 soak from the first stage of Hatred as Armour, and then you're maxed out, which you'd normally need Artifact Heavy Armour to do. You're basically giving the character the benefits of heavy armour without any of the costs, which is normally something you'd need to spend a charm on.
It also seems like an incredibly powerful ability, since there's a Universal charm that adds 3 soak for 1 mote per activation, while this does it for free. Also, there's no bashing/lethal split in Essence, and increasing hardness is much harder to do.
Blinded By Hatred would work better as an evocation instead of a passive ability, especially since Distract reduces the target's defence by the number of extra successes, which you are currently adding for free. Maybe a Reveal Weakness gambit might work better for your idea, especially if you restrict the benefits to people other than yourself, as the opponent is concentrating on you too much to watch out for others. Maybe grant the ability to make the gambit with social abilities?
Yes - personally, I consider Ex3's difficulty scale accidentally genre-emulating its way into a Bollywood movie to be an endearing bit of silliness that adds to the game at least as often as it ends up working against the drama of a given scene.
'Removing an appendix is difficulty 1' looks pretty hardcore, but only because the rules think it's equivalent to picking a lock, and it's just. really not, lol
Locks that are actually difficult to pick are a product of the industrial era (and really, even most industrial-era locks are pretty easy to pick because pick resistance requires tight mechanical tolerances, careful design, and more complex parts).
The double-acting lever lock and double-acting tumbler lock were invented in 1778 and 1805 respectively.
The disc detainer lock (what that fancy pick LPL and Bosnian Bill designed is used for) was invented in 1907, and is wildly popular in its country of origin (Finland) despite being somewhat niche elsewhere.
The limiting factor is that severed arms/legs generally involve a significant crushing, tearing, or shredding component, which dramatically reduces the success rate of replantation surgery.
The limiting factor is that severed arms/legs generally involve a significant crushing, tearing, or shredding component, which dramatically reduces the success rate of replantation surgery.
Of course, there's still the thing that without magic, the microsurgery techniques required to reattach nerves and blood vessels are a 20th century procedure
(And, incidentally, one of the few legitimate medical uses of deliberate bloodletting.)
Of course, there's still the thing that without magic, the microsurgery techniques required to reattach nerves and blood vessels are a 20th century procedure
So has anyone who worked on Servants of Gaia been in contact with the community sufficient that we could attempt to finish the Storyteller chapter and Appendixes?
Also, I would absolutely expect sewing someone's freshly cut arm back on to be easier than an appendoctomy, because it doesn't involve, and if you feel I've been glossing over how irrelevant the difficulty is, then I definitely feel you've been glossing over this, cutting someone open as a way of helping them.
The first successful hand replantation happened in 1964 (warning: gore), more than two centuries after the first successful appendectomy. Replanting an entire arm in an adult hasn't been done at all to date, as far as I know. Your intuition about the relative difficulty of these two procedures is simply wrong here. Egregiously so! Which wouldn't really be a problem - there is literally no shame whatsoever in not knowing things! -, except you're dinging TTRPG designers for not knowing enough about medicine to properly assess the difficulty of an appendectomy in the same breath as you confidently assert that a miracle surgery that has, to my knowledge, never been performed successfully in real life on an adult patient should, in fact, be easier than a procedure that had an effective success rate of 99.79% in the time period between 1990 and 2010.
I'm not pointing this out to dunk on you for not possessing advanced medical knowledge, but to reassert that no, actually, an appendectomy would definitely be difficulty 3 in Essence.
The rest of your stuff about getting into the weeds of specific difficulty gates? I basically just chalk that up to @EarthScorpion's earlier point, that the Ex3 difficulty scale is bad because among other things it's not written with the expectation of being used by characters with excellencies, so once you have more than 10 dice, none of its difficulty benchmarks matter. That makes it unfit as an aid to running the game, so I dismiss it as a point of comparison for how the game should be run. I'm not judging the difficulty of an appendoctomy in light of snatching a jewel from a nest of snakes being difficulty 3, because snatching a jewel from a nest of snakes being difficulty 3 is bad design. It should be higher, enough that the difficulty rating actually matters to an Exalt enough to feel like a heroic challenge.
Getting into the weeds of specific difficulty gates matters! You cannot maintain that setting the difficulty of major surgery at difficulty 1 is an illustrative example of what's wrong with Ex3's difficulty scale while agreeing with the idea that XS presents a major improvement on that front, when the difference between the two difficulty scales would end up mattering in determining the success or failure of an action in a game only one time out of forty at most!
Now, admittedly, there's a major fudge at play here on my part. The two ecosystems are different enough that the example doesn't map cleanly. The equivalent of a guy with a base pool of 6 dice and an excellency would be a guy with a base pool of 7 dice* and no excellency**. However, the guy in XS with 7 dice and no excellency has access to a very important thing his Ex3 counterpart doesn't: teamwork rules. Specifically, teamwork rules that explicitly say "you're entitled to use whatever Ability you want, as long as it makes sense", allowing a character with, say, high Awareness to pitch in and say something like "I'll use my super-senses to measure the inflamed area in the patient's body by touching their midsection and perceiving the heat differentials on the surface of their skin, then I'll draw a helpful diagram to guide you so you won't have to go in blind! I have 11 dice, *roll roll* 5 successes, you get +5 dice on your attempt". These do not count against the dice limit, and, to my knowledge, there is no rule that limits how many of your fellow PCs may pitch in with helpful - or "helpful" - ideas that just coincidentally happen to let them use their highest Ability, which they probably also have an excellency in. Suffice to say, you must have very unimaginative fellow players or a very strict ST to not be able to end up with at least +5 dice from various teamwork assists. To reiterate: +5 dice is a very conservative estimate here! It was largely chosen for the pleasing symmetry of ending up with 7 dice base + 2 stunt + 5 teamwork = 14 total, producing the exact same probabilities as the equivalent example in Ex3.
*because they get to use their highest attribute no matter what
**because excellencies have to be bought and you only get four Charms to start with, and if you only have 3 dots in Sagacity, you're unlikely to have spent a quarter of your budget on grabbing an excellency in that
The Ex3 difficulty scale operates on vibes and aesthetics: if a task is something you can imagine a competent and well-trained, but otherwise normal human being regularly perform, it's difficulty 1; if it's something you'd need to be the hero of an early 20th century pulp in the vein of Conan or the Gray Mouser to be able to do reliably, it's difficulty 3; if it's something you'd need to be the protagonist of a wuxia epic in the vein of Hero or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in order to reliably accomplish, it's difficulty 5; if there are distractions or complications, add +1 to the difficulty. This is a perfectly solid and respectable basis for a difficulty scale in a game like Exalted! Literally the only problem it has is that it tops out at roughly the Ninja Scroll power level, while Exalts are expected to blow way past that. It's incomplete.
What's not a problem with it is putting an appendectomy at difficulty 1. "Appendectomy at difficulty 1" is basically a fudge: it's the game telling you that difficulty 1 is the baseline for what the average 21st century person with no specific domain knowledge would probably consider to be a perfectly ordinary medical procedure, or, in broader terms, what the intended audience can be expected to envision as "a thing a normal, if well-trained person can regularly accomplish". The game could totally operate on a model instead that says "difficulty 1 is the baseline of what a normal, if well-trained person could regularly accomplish if they lived in a Bronze Age world of myth that operates on very different natural laws than ours", but is it really worth asking everyone at the table to mentally pause the game to consider "what could a normal, if well-trained person living in a Bronze Age world of myth that operates on very different natural laws than ours regularly accomplish" every single time a difficulty is assigned?
Yes, if we took Bronze Age medicine seriously, that difficulty 1 should be a difficulty 3 instead. (And if we took our secondary world seriously, we'd probably say something like 'actually, in Creation, nobody in their right mind would consider cutting someone open and rooting around in their abdominal cavity for tainted flesh like a man-eating demonic pig to be a viable way to treat appendicitis when they can just use acupuncture to divert and dissipate the dangerous buildup of fire essence in the patient's body, which is a much more convenient solution to the same problem'.) However, as it has been amply demonstrated, this would make a difference only once in every 40 cases on the low end of the power scale (at the slightly higher end, it would be about once in every 67 cases, the proof of which is an exercise left to the reader).
"I am willing to accept my system producing a wrong output in the player's favor once in every 40-60 times if it means sparing users the effort of having to think about how different the lives of Bronze Age people are from what they consider to be their normal every single time they assign a difficulty to a roll" is a perfectly reasonable tradeoff to make for a game designer, and it's deeply weird to me to see people vehemently argue otherwise. (Which is not to say that the alternative isn't also a perfectly reasonable approach, depending on one's goals; just that the vehemence with which the original approach is decried is strange.)
It's worth noting that while it didn't exist in Early Antiquity (4000-1000 BC), internal surgery (specifically: lithotomy) did exist in classical antiquity and is one of things a Ancient Greek physician, not trained in the craft, was expected to forbear from doing.
Personally, I think it should be possible to make a player character who is bad at something.
Obviously, every Exalt is gonna be absolutely amazing at a bunch of stuff. And most of the time, the stuff you do is the stuff you're amazing at. That's how the game is built. But setting up the stunt rules, willpower system, and basic difficulty chart so that Int 1 Dex 1 Medicine 0 still lets you perform surgery reliably is a bit constraining.
The Essence approach does a decent job of addressing that, I think. Difficulties usually start at 3, and normal professional competence is usually automatic, but the door is still open for a high-stakes difficulty 2 roll if circumstances warrant.
I fully agree with this sentiment, but I also... don't think Essence meaningfully solves this problem? Like, at all?
A Sagacity 5 character may be someone who literally lived their entire life in a library with no human contact, having no access to any books about anatomy, surgery, or medicine. They roll to perform surgery with 11 dice (Attribute 4 + Ability 5 + Stunt 2), succeeding against difficulty 3 99.64% of the time.
Similarly, a Sagacity 1 character may be someone who managed to become literate in the previous story; the only subject they ever formally studied in their life was shogunate-era poetry under the tutelage of the party's Eclipse in a doomed attempt to seem more refined. They roll to perform surgery with 7 dice (Attribute 4 + Ability 1 + Stunt 2), succeeding against difficulty 3 69.44% of the time.
In Ex3, the butter-fingered dumbass with zero medical knowledge rolls to perform surgery with 3 dice (Attribute 1 + Ability 0 + Stunt 2), succeeding against difficulty 1 78.40% of the time - they're less than 10% more likely to successfully perform surgery than the wilting flower who started reading Shogunate-era poetry last week, and about 20% less likely to do so than the person who has never seen a human body other than their own or learned about medical procedures in their entire life.
In my book, all three of these results are about equally nonsensical. Essence fixes some problems (instead of literally everyone being able to perform surgery, now only some people are unreasonably likely to successfully perform surgery - unless you can get three equally clueless dumbasses into a room, in which case the teamwork rules mean the king of fools gets to roll with about 12 dice on average and all bets are off), but introduces newer, more exciting ways to get results that are completely ridiculous.
However, if a player desires to be bad at something that they feel the rules are erroneously making them good at (like the Sagacity 5 bookworm in the above example), they also have the option of just... roleplaying their character as being bad at something? Like, you can just decide to say "yeah my character can't do surgery, hey GM, can I auto-fail this roll?". Which is kind of a cop-out (shouldn't the system be able to produce this outcome on its own instead of expecting the player's sense of restraint to do its job?), but it's a cop-out the bunched-up skills of XS will probably make you use if you are serious about wanting your character to be bad at things and don't imagine your character as some sort of omnidisciplinary genius. Which makes me think of XS as more of a sidegrade when it comes to the problem of not being able to make characters who are bad at things, rather than a straight-up improvement.
I don't really know much about Essence, but "broad skills and broader attributes make people randomly good at things they shouldn't know anything about" sounds like a separate problem from "the skill floor is extremely high".
Essence still has Attribute 1 Ability 0 characters, right? And Third Edition certainly has Dexterity 5 calligraphers randomly doing spectacular acrobatics.
Essence still has Attribute 1 Ability 0 characters, right? And Third Edition certainly has Dexterity 5 calligraphers randomly doing spectacular acrobatics.
Technically, the lowest you can get is Attribute 2 Ability 0, but you are also always explicitly allowed to use your highest Attribute for whatever roll as long as you can justify it. So a PC rolling to perform surgery who isn't actively working to shoot themselves in the foot will always say "I use my prodigous intellect to plan this operation out in detail" (Force) / "I use my excellent hand-eye coordination to perform surgery with the grace of an angel" (Finesse) / "I am being extremely careful and methodical as I extract the appendix" (Fortitude) and have a minimum of 6 dice (Attribute 4 + Ability 0 + Stunt 2) to work with.
The first successful hand replantation happened in 1964 (warning: gore), more than two centuries after the first successful appendectomy. Replanting an entire arm in an adult hasn't been done at all to date, as far as I know. Your intuition about the relative difficulty of these two procedures is simply wrong here. Egregiously so! Which wouldn't really be a problem - there is literally no shame whatsoever in not knowing things! -, except you're dinging TTRPG designers for not knowing enough about medicine to properly assess the difficulty of an appendectomy in the same breath as you confidently assert that a miracle surgery that has, to my knowledge, never been performed successfully in real life on an adult patient should, in fact, be easier than a procedure that had an effective success rate of 99.79% in the time period between 1990 and 2010.
I'm not pointing this out to dunk on you for not possessing advanced medical knowledge, but to reassert that no, actually, an appendectomy would definitely be difficulty 3 in Essence.
No, actually, this is something where I'm running even more off the vibes-and-narrative model of difficulty than you, apparently, because I'm entirely aware that reattaching someone's arm isn't a thing we do even today, but it's also something that turns up in fiction every now and then and gets handwaved as a genre conceit. As a result of that, its vibe has more grounding in the possible than surgery - dramatically speaking, if a character has to have surgery performed on them, it reads as more serious simply because it involves more medical trappings.
You can reattach a limb with the aesthetic of first aid, if you've got some heroic handwaves like magic thread or healing magic, and have that be a statement of wondrous magic without necessarily implying great medical knowledge. Surgery necessarily involves like, putting an unconscious patient on a table and getting extra tools out for someone who knows what they're doing. It naturally reads as more serious.
Getting into the weeds of specific difficulty gates matters! You cannot maintain that setting the difficulty of major surgery at difficulty 1 is an illustrative example of what's wrong with Ex3's difficulty scale while agreeing with the idea that XS presents a major improvement on that front, when the difference between the two difficulty scales would end up mattering in determining the success or failure of an action in a game only one time out of forty at most!
a) I haven't really been talking about whether or not XS represents a major improvement or not, I've just been dunking on Ex3's flaws. Is XS' scale better? Worse? Iunno, I'm not getting into that, it's orthagonal to my point.
b) Yes, the weeds of specific difficulty gates matter, but my point is that the specific difficulty gates of Ex3 are badly designed and therefore should not be used as benchmarks for what other difficulty gates should be. Saying that an appendoctomy can't be harder than difficulty 1-2 because breaking a wyld-born horse is difficulty 3 and obviously harder has no substance for me, because the answer is simply that both benchmarks are wrong; the whole scale is not fit for purpose because, among other things, it wants to compress everything into a 1-5 range in a game with dice pools that commonly trivialise that.
What's not a problem with it is putting an appendectomy at difficulty 1. "Appendectomy at difficulty 1" is basically a fudge: it's the game telling you that difficulty 1 is the baseline for what the average 21st century person with no specific domain knowledge would probably consider to be a perfectly ordinary medical procedure, or, in broader terms, what the intended audience can be expected to envision as "a thing a normal, if well-trained person can regularly accomplish".
Yeah, and on its own vibe-and-aesthetics wavelength, that's bullshit. I would not, as a 21st century layman, expect an appendoctomy to be an 'ordinary medical procedure'. It's surgery! That automatically makes it harder than the norm. Surgeons are, both in reality and in the dramatic milieu of medical fiction, the top guns of healthcare. They scan as elite. There's a reason that all the super-elite doctoring professions that authors use to establish that a given doctor character is The Hottest Shit Ever are variations of surgeon - brain surgeon, heart surgeon, etc. Surgery is hard. It is a cut above the norm. Dramatic rules for adjudicating difficulty should treat it as a cut above the norm, if they want people to take them seriously.
'A perfectly ordinary medical procedure' is, as I have said again and again, stuff like diagnosing and treating a disease, cleaning and bandaging a gnarly cut from an axe, fixing a bad break with the bone poking out, that arrow scene from Xena, etc. Not surgery.
A first thing to note here is that there is no bashing/lethal divide in XS, there's just the one damage type.
Anyway, so, when you make an XS artifact, there are a few layers of consideration.
First, there is concept. Like, what, in the fiction, is this thing? Part of that is material, which you haven't noted. This matters for resonance reasons -- if you're not using one of the standard magical materials, still say what the thing's made out of, and probably make a note about how resonance works in the passive effect section. For this one, you could just say it functions as orichalcum, or it's only resonant for Infernals, or it's resonant with characters who share certain traits. You'll want to give a physical description of a thing. If you want to give a more elaborate, Ex3 style backstory to it, no one's going to stop you -- you're doing this shit for free and don't need to worry about wordcounts.
Second, we've got base stats and tags. This is very easy for armour -- XS armour barely interacts with the tag system, presumably because neither does Ex3 armour. This is artifact light armour, it gives you +3 soak and +1 hardness. This gets a little more complicated with weapons, especially with parts of that section of the manuscript that are a bit of a mess and which we know have undergone substantial changes in the many months since the kickstarter version came out. Still, good idea to jot this down so you don't lose track of it.
So like, now we have the two harder parts: Passive effects and evocations.
All artifacts have passive effects. Below three dot artifacts, they more or less only have passive effects. It does a thing! This should be a benefit which is worth the merit dots you paid -- this can be anything from a neat trick to a mechanic you're going to come back to in the evocations -- but it is not in of itself a charm. I notice that, for your three dot artifact armour, you're only going in for passive effects instead of evocations. It feels quite over-tuned to me. What you should really do is take a good look at the defensive charms and comparable effects elsewhere in the book, and ask yourself if a +6 to soak and hardness, for free, with no charm activation or mote cost, against anyone who has a major negative tie against you feels reasonable. It's entirely possible when you said "add 4 to this", you actually just mean it's a +4, which is still over-tuned when it comes without a cost. Defensive charms tend to be fairly mote hungry if you're going to activate them for every attack and have specific steps they activate on. This should definitely be reworked as an evocation.
Your second effect here starts out as a pretty okay passive effect. Gaining a bonus to distract gambits based on an enemy having negative intimacies for you is fine. Waving the power cost and being able to use a distract gambit in the middle of someone else's turn, for free, based simply on a character having a negative intimacy for you, very obviously should be reworked as an actual evocation and is overpowered otherwise.
You'd probably benefit from taking a closer look at the example artifacts in the manuscript to see how XS artifacts are made, as well as to the systems section earlier in the manuscript. Finding some XS homebrew stuff from people who are better at it than me would also help! I get the feeling that you're not super familiar with artifacts in the Ex3/XS paradigm.
Something that strikes me is that it runs into the dice limit pretty hard. Characters can only have 5 successes and 10 dice added to their pools, and I believe that that applies to Soak. You gain 3 soak from Light Armour, then the 2 soak from the first stage of Hatred as Armour, and then you're maxed out, which you'd normally need Artifact Heavy Armour to do. You're basically giving the character the benefits of heavy armour without any of the costs, which is normally something you'd need to spend a charm on.
It also seems like an incredibly powerful ability, since there's a Universal charm that adds 3 soak for 1 mote per activation, while this does it for free. Also, there's no bashing/lethal split in Essence, and increasing hardness is much harder to do.
Blinded By Hatred would work better as an evocation instead of a passive ability, especially since Distract reduces the target's defence by the number of extra successes, which you are currently adding for free. Maybe a Reveal Weakness gambit might work better for your idea, especially if you restrict the benefits to people other than yourself, as the opponent is concentrating on you too much to watch out for others. Maybe grant the ability to make the gambit with social abilities?
So first of all, thank you both for the feedback, its really helpful. If you are both willing, I'd like to dig into the specifics of the feedback and my reasoning for the choices I've made so that I can determine not just the what but the why of your feedback. This artifact was made to help me learn the system after all so digging into where I've failed and where my assumptions didn't match up with actual play will be very helpful.
With that said, let's get started.
First off, Hatred as Armor.
The feedback for Hatred as Armor seems to fall into two broad categories, the strength of the effect, and its cost.
The strength, full cop, was a shot in the dark. There aren't a lot of example armors to use and I don't have any play experience to tell me what a "reasonable" amount of soak is. I was aiming for twice as good as heavy plate here, strong but not unreasonably so given the difficulty of getting that soak. Which might be completely unreasonable. 8 Soak might be super strong. That said, what is a reasonable amount of Soak in this system?
As for the cost? I stand by that. Both of you have mentioned that it adds Soak at no cost but I don't think that's true. Getting that Soak cost requires quite a bit of set-up in the form of making your enemies develop a negative intimacy towards you. This armor does nothing against random assasins sent to slay you, nothing against Dragon-blooded killing you out of duty instead of personal hate, etc. And my reading of Ess is that creating Intimacies is actually super hard. At a minimum it would take two prior scenes with the target to setup a Major Intimacy against your target before you get the full benefits of this armor against them, and during any of these scenes the target could accept a hard bargain or outright refuse your social influence. That's a lot of potential meetings with an enemy before your armor starts being good against them. (Note that this also applies to Blinded by Vengeance).
Now, this could be wrong. It might be that Intimacies are actually really easy to make and so this is OP, but that is why I am laying out my reasoning. This is a perfect chance for me to get a better understanding of the Intimacy system.
Blinded by Vengeance:
The main feedback from this seems to be it is overpowered, but from the feedback this sounds like it might be more of a case of my wording being unclear then the actual effect being OP. So some points of clarification, and if this is still OP I would appreciate feedback to the effect:
1. Blinded by Vengeance only lets you do the Distract gambit for free on the first round. Subsequent actions do still require you spend two power.
2. The distract gambit does not apply if the target is making an attack against the wearer. The intent here is it incentivizes the opponent to attack the wearer in order to drop the effect and because that attack doesn't suffer from the distract gambit.
3. I don't think that soak added by armor counts to the dice limit? That would only make sense if damage added by damage also added to the dice limit, which doesn't make sense to me.
All that being said, I am thinking about changing this power anyway, given that Physique already has a charm which lets you make a target attack you instead of your ally during step 3 of their attack. Any ideas for something that could replace this affect?
I would not, as a 21st century layman, expect an appendoctomy to be an 'ordinary medical procedure'. It's surgery! That automatically makes it harder than the norm.
Appendectomies are interesting, because there's the competing cultural memes of "this is invasive surgery, therefore hard" and "this is a procedure that dramatic fiction tells us able-bodied randos can be talked through performing in less than ideal conditions, so it can't be that hard".
And then there's medical drama memes, when talking about non-elite surgical work, like "don't worry about the surgeon, he's just a butcher; the anaesthetist can kill you."
And while an experienced brain or heart surgeon is (with good reason) treated as a rock star because they operate on organs where even tiny mistakes can be a massive problem, a freshly minted orthopedic or gastrointestinal surgeon is often treated in media as only one step up the ladder (if that) from a family GP
No, actually, this is something where I'm running even more off the vibes-and-narrative model of difficulty than you, apparently, because I'm entirely aware that reattaching someone's arm isn't a thing we do even today, but it's also something that turns up in fiction every now and then and gets handwaved as a genre conceit. As a result of that, its vibe has more grounding in the possible than surgery - dramatically speaking, if a character has to have surgery performed on them, it reads as more serious simply because it involves more medical trappings.
Funnily enough, this is the exact same argument the Ex3 devs used to justify magitech artifacts being way more difficult to make than "regular" ones with the same functionality. I can respect that.
As for the cost? I stand by that. Both of you have mentioned that it adds Soak at no cost but I don't think that's true. Getting that Soak cost requires quite a bit of set-up in the form of making your enemies develop a negative intimacy towards you. This armor does nothing against random assasins sent to slay you, nothing against Dragon-blooded killing you out of duty instead of personal hate, etc. And my reading of Ess is that creating Intimacies is actually super hard. At a minimum it would take two prior scenes with the target to setup a Major Intimacy against your target before you get the full benefits of this armor against them, and during any of these scenes the target could accept a hard bargain or outright refuse your social influence. That's a lot of potential meetings with an enemy before your armor starts being good against them. (Note that this also applies to Blinded by Vengeance).
So like, this is not really accurate! When you make an effect that says it applies to characters with negative intimacies for your character, unless you specify otherwise, this does include things like a monk having a major intimacy of Anathema: Disgust and Pity. It is generally understood that effects like this can key off of ties for a group you are part of. It is also really not that hard for an NPC to get a negative intimacy toward you -- they might start off that way for backstory reasons or just from the way they come into the story, they might gain those intimacies for you over time, onscreen or off, depending on what you do. It's not even half as difficult as you're making it out to be to deliberately give an enemy a negative intimacy toward you -- you can read intentions to find out one of a character's virtues and attach an intimacy to it fairly trivially with the social system. You are correct in that you need two scenes to strengthen that tie to Major, but this is like... not something that you should look at as replacing the actual things the system uses to cost effects.
Your actual biggest problem here is that you're not engaging with the way XS artifacts are actually designed, and so you're just not going to learn very much about the system. You're ignoring that artifacts put effects like what you seem to be reaching for into evocations, and so you're also ignoring things like charm costing, the way opportunity interacts with the step system, the way spending motes interacts with anima. This is not a super complex system compared to any other official Exalted product, and I think it's very easy to make basic homebrew for, but it's still got shit going on under the hood that you seem to be deliberately avoiding, and there's a limit to how much useful feedback you're going to get if you keep approaching things this way.
Bruh yall think way to hard about this. When a player asks me if they suddenly want to do surgery on someone. I ask myself some questions. How quickly do they want to do this? Are they in a safe or dangerous area? Do they have tools on hand?
And I just throw out a number that feels right and they excellency that shit anyways. I don't really care how difficult it truly is parallel to irl stuff. I care how dramatic doing that particular action is. There is no point in failing someone at it in a safe environment where they can work. But its dramatic if they manage to fail in a dangerous situation where people are hunting them. Its also very cool if the manage it while the worst scenario is happening.
Edit: Wait I actually noticed what yall are talking about. Miracle 'The text skimmer' grow strikes again.
It's worth noting that while it didn't exist in Early Antiquity (4000-1000 BC), internal surgery (specifically: lithotomy) did exist in classical antiquity and is one of things a Ancient Greek physician, not trained in the craft, was expected to forbear from doing.
So like, this is not really accurate! When you make an effect that says it applies to characters with negative intimacies for your character, unless you specify otherwise, this does include things like a monk having a major intimacy of Anathema: Disgust and Pity. It is generally understood that effects like this can key off of ties for a group you are part of. It is also really not that hard for an NPC to get a negative intimacy toward you -- they might start off that way for backstory reasons or just from the way they come into the story, they might gain those intimacies for you over time, onscreen or off, depending on what you do. It's not even half as difficult as you're making it out to be to deliberately give an enemy a negative intimacy toward you -- you can read intentions to find out one of a character's virtues and attach an intimacy to it fairly trivially with the social system. You are correct in that you need two scenes to strengthen that tie to Major, but this is like... not something that you should look at as replacing the actual things the system uses to cost effects.
Your actual biggest problem here is that you're not engaging with the way XS artifacts are actually designed, and so you're just not going to learn very much about the system. You're ignoring that artifacts put effects like what you seem to be reaching for into evocations, and so you're also ignoring things like charm costing, the way opportunity interacts with the step system, the way spending motes interacts with anima. This is not a super complex system compared to any other official Exalted product, and I think it's very easy to make basic homebrew for, but it's still got shit going on under the hood that you seem to be deliberately avoiding, and there's a limit to how much useful feedback you're going to get if you keep approaching things this way.
So, first of all I'd like to apolgize. I seem to have given you the impression that I'm ignoring certain parts of your advice. The reason, I imagine, is because I only responded to certain parts of it. So for that I apologize. The reason I am focusing on certain parts of your critique over others is because certain parts, it seems to me, demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the "meta" on my part and so I am trying to dig into the reasoning behind certain critiques to understand where my misunderstanding is. For example, I'm digging into Soak because I feel this is an opportunity to understand what a "reasonable" amount of soak is. Ij contrast I'm ignoring hardness because I looked in the books to double-check my numbers after your comment, saw no armor added hardness and went "well, guess this armor shouldn't add hardness".
So please don't take me not responding to a particular part of your critique as me not valuing or listening to it.
Now, to actually dig into the specifics:
As to regards to the negative intimacy: You're right. Getting a minor negative Intimacy is easy. But like, all that gets you is regular heavy armor (just focusing on the soak, we'll get to other stuff later). +2 to soak brings light armor up to non-magical heavy armor which just... That's not an artifact that's something you buy on the street. *And* that comes with the counterplay of an exalted or regular for removing there intimacy (let go of your hatred Luke) in order to depower the artifact. It isn't until you get a major negative intimacy where the armor's soak actually starts being better then normal armor, and those are much harder to come by. If a player is putting in effort to prepare for the confrontation by cultivating a major negative intimacy then soak that's *twice as good as regular armor* feels fine as stats go? Especially since there is built in counterplay which can remove the armor's effects.
As for the second clause, I agree as written it should probably be a charm, how does this look:
---
When the wearer makes a distract gambit against a character with a negative intimacy towards them, that gambit lasts until they next declare an attack against the wearer. The wearer may make this gambit during step 3 of an opponent's attack *if* the wearer is within range of the target. The target may choose to switch the target of the attack to the wearer in response to this action.
---
This, I think, works better because it's *doing* a lot less. Extending the duration of an action feels comparable to a passive bonus to me. That gives use two powers, a soak bonus and an action extender. Strong for an artifact 3 but requiring prep and allowing counterplay
I've been thinking about Linowa a bit lately, kinda as a side track to rewriting some Hislanti League stuff. Has anyone ever fixed them?
I did some research on trees and the pros and cons between deciduous vs evergreen. The main things I found out, for brevity, were that evergreens grow slow and are poor soil loving, while deciduous are faster growing and require richer soils. [Haltan] Redwood are a bit different, being very fast growing and having access to [in the real world] rich soils, rather out competing based on flood resistance.
So, I was thinking maybe the war is partly the gods but also partly vying over access to the Golden Leaf Canal to shape the land to their cultures and the conditions to grow the trees to which they are suited. If [Haltan] Redwoods require huge amounts of water like in our world, then they could only exist near the rivers and the Golden Leaf Canal. This makes Halta and their mammoth trees a much more regional thing, rather than something that stretches thousands of miles east. It makes Halta far more invested and perhaps, if more situated on the canal, explaining their primarily defensive war stance. I don't want to talk anyones ear off on my notes thus far, I was just hoping to find some perspectives on people who may have already tackled the issue.
