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General Exalted Thread

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BossFight said:
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?
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So Essence has a limit of 10 dice and 5 successes in addition to your natural capabilities. That means that no combination of charms and artifacts and whatever can add more dice than that. Your normal dice pools are not affected by this, but weapons, armour, and the like add successes to your totals, which are called out as the start of the Panoply chapter as counting .

For example, a Medium weapon adds 1 success to Attack rolls, 1 success to Damage rolls, and 1 success to Defense whenever you take the Full Defense or Defending Other actions. This means than you could only add another 4 successes to your damage roll by any means, but the damage you roll normally is unaffected.



How Much Soak?:

So the base amount of Soak is 1, which increases to 2 if you have Fortitude 3+. There's a charm called Iron Skin Concentration that can be purchased at Physique 3 and 5, each time increasing base soak by 1. The strongest armour is heavy armour, which adds 4 Soak while giving a -2 mobility penalty which requires another charm Armoured Scout's invigoration to ignore. The Artifact keyword adds another Soak and Hardness. This adds up to 2 + 2 + 5 + 9 Soak, requiring Fortitude 3+, Physique 5, at least 3 dots of Artifact, and 3 charm purchases to acquire. Since this removes 9 successes from any damage rolls against you, it's pretty good.

There's a Physique charm called Iron Kettle Body, which costs 1 mote to increase Soak by 3 (or more if you're a Solar/Lunar/Abyssal/Infernal) which should be your comparison for soak adding abilities.
 
A thing you really need to keep in mind with XS charms is that completely bypassing the mote economy is not necessarily a good thing -- you want to spend motes, because they cause you to gain anima, which gives you additional benefits. This is part of why charms with alternative activation costs (anima, health levels, banked stunts) tend to do more. A 1 mote charm you will use in combat is a net resource gain -- you get that more back on your next turn, and you gain a point of anima. The difficulty comes when you're spending multiple motes per round and start to dip lower onto your pool. This introduces interesting tactical choices and considerations, on top of the fact that gaining too much anima too fast is not always a good thing narratively.

When you're side stepping this entire like... Core pillar of the gameplay system, you have to really stop and consider it. A charm that improves your hardness and your soak would probably ordinarily be a 2 mote charm -- it's doing two things. Trying to replace that by making it completely situational based on a pre-existing condition being met is questionable because like... It's not that weird to fight NPCs that hate you, and by taking this thing at all you are obviously signalling to your ST that you want those story beats in particular.

It's good to learn how ordinary charms fiction when you're just learning how to make shit for the system, before jumping ahead to exceptions and edgecases. Consider making these things have a base effect, which gets a bit better with the negative intimacy on top? Good excuse to throw in some Resonant modes.

Here's a good example of that kind of thing -- I'm reaching for Water Dragon Style charms, but the principle works the same with artifacts:

Article:
Drowning-in-Blood Technique

Prerequisites: Close Combat 2, Complementary Ability Total 2

With a rapid barrage of strikes, the Exalt redirects bloodflow into an opponent's lungs.

Spend 1 mote on Step 1 of a decisive attack. If the attack deals damage, the opponent's wound penalties increase by one. As long as the Exalt remains conscious, this effect lasts for the rest of the scene but does not stack with itself. This Charm also redirects essence in a spirit's body — the above penalty stacks up to three times for a spirit.

Dragon-Blooded: If the enhanced attack deals damage, the opponent suffers a secondary pool of damage dice equal to the wound penalty they had before the attack, applied on Step 6. This damage pool ignores soak.

Flowing Water Defense

Prerequisites: Close Combat 3, Complementary Ability Total 4, Drowning in Blood Technique

The Exalt flows from every attack, becoming impossible to pin down or bind.

Spend 1 mote on Step 2. The Exalt's Defense increases by one, or by two against attacks that would limit or control the Exalt's movement (e.g. grapples, the Ensnare gambit). If the attacker suffers any wound penalties, increase the Exalt's Defense by one again.

Dragon-Blooded: The Dragon-Blood may use this Charm on Step 1 of any attempt to escape physical constraint. This adds automatic successes equal to Finesse.
Source: Exalted Essence Kickstarter Backer Manuscript


What I'm getting at with this comparison is that Water Dragon Style has a gimmick where it works better against enemies with wound penalties, which its first charm, Drowning-in-Blood Technique, inflicts. Rather than make the subsequent charms not do anything against targets without a wound penalty, instead they have a base effect that gets better when the wound penalty is in play. You can see how that works out in Flowing Water Defense. Just the first example that came to mind!
 
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Indivisible said:
So Essence has a limit of 10 dice and 5 successes in addition to your natural capabilities. That means that no combination of charms and artifacts and whatever can add more dice than that. Your normal dice pools are not affected by this, but weapons, armour, and the like add successes to your totals, which are called out as the start of the Panoply chapter as counting .

For example, a Medium weapon adds 1 success to Attack rolls, 1 success to Damage rolls, and 1 success to Defense whenever you take the Full Defense or Defending Other actions. This means than you could only add another 4 successes to your damage roll by any means, but the damage you roll normally is unaffected.



How Much Soak?:

So the base amount of Soak is 1, which increases to 2 if you have Fortitude 3+. There's a charm called Iron Skin Concentration that can be purchased at Physique 3 and 5, each time increasing base soak by 1. The strongest armour is heavy armour, which adds 4 Soak while giving a -2 mobility penalty which requires another charm Armoured Scout's invigoration to ignore. The Artifact keyword adds another Soak and Hardness. This adds up to 2 + 2 + 5 + 9 Soak, requiring Fortitude 3+, Physique 5, at least 3 dots of Artifact, and 3 charm purchases to acquire. Since this removes 9 successes from any damage rolls against you, it's pretty good.

There's a Physique charm called Iron Kettle Body, which costs 1 mote to increase Soak by 3 (or more if you're a Solar/Lunar/Abyssal/Infernal) which should be your comparison for soak adding abilities.
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Wow, this is honestly super helpful. Seeing it all laid out there really drives home how small the soak pools are in Essence! Where is the 3 dots of artifact coming from? I see you've bought heavy armor with the artifact keyword, but can't you just get 1dot artifact heavy armor?

Also, on the first part are you sure things like "using a weapon" counts towards the dice caps? That seems really weird to me.
 
Gazetteer said:
When you're side stepping this entire like... Core pillar of the gameplay system, you have to really stop and consider it. A charm that improves your hardness and your soak would probably ordinarily be a 2 mote charm -- it's doing two things. Trying to replace that by making it completely situational based on a pre-existing condition being met is questionable because like... It's not that weird to fight NPCs that hate you, and by taking this thing at all you are obviously signalling to your ST that you want those story beats in particular.
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So, I feel like I have to be missing something about how equipment works here, because everyone keep comparing getting soak to *charms* that add soak and not just... Armor you buy? Does essence not assume that people are using the regular weapons and armor?

(The rest of the stuff I'm still digesting, but it's very useful and informative. The breath of war and anima gain do indeed change combat it ways I wasn't thinking about until you pointed it)

Edit:
Now I'm even *more* confused. I went to check because the idea that equipment counted towards your dice limit seemed ludicrous to me. Heavy armor giving 4 soak when the most you can possibly add is 10 means that regular legion soldiers soak almost as good as Exalts.

So I reread the section on bonuses which says

"When to Assign a Bonus or a Penalty:
Exalted characters have access to incredible power via their Charms. Why would anyone need to worry about equipment or the environment? The bonus and penalty rules allow Storytellers to add a level of texture to the outcome of rolls outside of adjusting difficulty. If a character attempts something under unusual or pressing circumstances, the Storyteller can apply a penalty instead. This is usually from the environment, or some other external cause of trouble, such as thick fog, a heavy thunderstorm, intoxication, and so on. Bonuses exist to give characters a little boost for something that might be outside the usual realm of Charm benefits. Charms magically enhance a character's ability to do things or grant them the power to perform superhuman feats. The bonus dice from wearing fancy clothing, having a good idea, or appealing to a Storyteller character's aesthetics feels good and might make the difference between success and failure"

Which implies that bonuses are *seperate* from charms and only cover equipment, envirent and other "mundane" effects.

Then under the rules for adding bonuses is where we get the dice cap rules stating:

""Any combination of bonuses cannot exceed 10 extra dice added to the pool. In the case of successes, these cannot exceed five. The limit on dice is separate from the limit on successes, so a character can potentially have 10 bonus dice and five bonus successes."

This is explicitly describing the *previous* section on bonuses.

So is there another dice cap somewhere or does ExEss not actually give a dice cap for charms?
 
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BossFight said:
Wow, this is honestly super helpful. Seeing it all laid out there really drives home how small the soak pools are in Essence! Where is the 3 dots of artifact coming from? I see you've bought heavy armor with the artifact keyword, but can't you just get 1dot artifact heavy armor?
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No, explicitly not. Both third edition and Essence have a minimum artifact rating for weapons and armor of three dots.

Third edition core, pages 593-594: "All of the artifact weapons listed here are, at minimum, 3-dot Artifacts." 599: "All artifact armor listed here are 3-dot artifacts at minimum."

Exalted Essence backer draft, pg 400: "Typically weapons and armor, these masterpieces of the magical materials are always Secondary or Primary. Players may choose to transform any mundane weapon or armor into its artifact equivalent by granting it the Artifact tag. This is a secondary Artifact, or Artifact 3. They should give it a unique name and detail a sentence or two of its history."

This is for several reasons. First, because the artifact's basic stat line is legitimately enough better than their mundane counterparts that it is worth it. Second, to make it be a more serious investment of character points: no one should go "oh, I have one dot left over, guess I'll pick up a legendary item out of history that is a unique miracle in its powers"; by setting a minimum bar it feels more impressive. Third, it's granting access to a new type of power, with a lot of evocations in published material being sort of orthogonal to normal character charms in what they can do.

For Essence in particular, the way that an artifact weapon/armor is created is by picking an artifact rating of 3-5, detailing the item's history and theme a bit, and granting a specific power to the wielder (typically a passive or reflexive thing), without third edition's occasional "you unlock x Evocation for attuning this artifact". Artifacts also get one Evocation for a 3-dot artifact, and one more for each dot higher, which are unlocked in a linear chain. These Evocations are roughly equivalent to Charms (and are purchased with some of the same advancement resources), though as mentioned they're often covering a little different ground.

For what you've created, specifically, I think you may not know what Hardness does in Essence. It's a minimum amount of Power (Essence's equivalent to Initiative) that must be wagered to even try to make a decisive attack. It's rare for Hardness-increasing things to not have a cap (typically not an explicit cap, just a general inability of most effects that boost it to be stacked indefinitely), because Power is capped at 10 (that's the most you can have at one time), so Hardness 11 or higher requires some method of lowering the enemy's Hardness so you can ever hurt them: something like Abyssals' Void Avatar Embodiment is an Essence 5 Charm that adds +3 Hardness for the scene as one of its major benefits. A +4 passive Hardness available at character creation for someone really, really detesting the wearer is thus phenomenally good: it might put you over 10. A tweaked version of this power should be the "base power" for the armor. Blinded by Vengeance should be its Evocation. Typically, defensive Charms activate on either step 2 or step 4, which I think is what you're going for, but a counterattack would be a step 8 Charm. Skipping past that and just focusing on its use, this free Distract Gambit is used to lower the target's Defense for the rest of the round, which has a huge force multiplier effect in Essence, where PCs can choose their own order of actions every round. Trigger right away, lower enemy's defense by a good amount, all of your allies generate bonus Power on their withering attacks this turn, and much of the time some of them will be ready to launch a powerful decisive attack on turn 2, just... almost free, since rather than having to build up Power and then launch the Distract gambit, you get the benefit immediately. I don't think this is a good power to have like this. The closest power in the book already that comes to mind is Alchemic Power Reserve, a Getimian Charm that explicitly can't be used to grant Power on the first round of battle, because if you could get it right away it damages the action economy.

This idea could work, but it needs a pretty thorough redrafting before I could use it.
 
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VagueZ said:
No, explicitly not. Both third edition and Essence have a minimum artifact rating for weapons and armor of three dots.

Third edition core, pages 593-594: "All of the artifact weapons listed here are, at minimum, 3-dot Artifacts." 599: "All artifact armor listed here are 3-dot artifacts at minimum."

Exalted Essence backer draft, pg 400: "Typically weapons and armor, these masterpieces of the magical materials are always Secondary or Primary. Players may choose to transform any mundane weapon or armor into its artifact equivalent by granting it the Artifact tag. This is a secondary Artifact, or Artifact 3. They should give it a unique name and detail a sentence or two of its history."

This is for several reasons. First, because the artifact's basic stat line is legitimately enough better than their mundane counterparts that it is worth it. Second, to make it be a more serious investment of character points: no one should go "oh, I have one dot left over, guess I'll pick up a legendary item out of history that is a unique miracle in its powers"; by setting a minimum bar it feels more impressive. Third, it's granting access to a new type of power, with a lot of evocations in published material being sort of orthogonal to normal character charms in what they can do.

For Essence in particular, the way that an artifact weapon/armor is created is by picking an artifact rating of 3-5, detailing the item's history and theme a bit, and granting a specific power to the wielder (typically a passive or reflexive thing), without third edition's occasional "you unlock x Evocation for attuning this artifact". Artifacts also get one Evocation for a 3-dot artifact, and one more for each dot higher, which are unlocked in a linear chain. These Evocations are roughly equivalent to Charms (and are purchased with some of the same advancement resources), though as mentioned they're often covering a little different ground.

For what you've created, specifically, I think you may not know what Hardness does in Essence. It's a minimum amount of Power (Essence's equivalent to Initiative) that must be wagered to even try to make a decisive attack. It's rare for Hardness-increasing things to not have a cap (typically not an explicit cap, just a general inability of most effects that boost it to be stacked indefinitely), because Power is capped at 10 (that's the most you can have at one time), so Hardness 11 or higher requires some method of lowering the enemy's Hardness so you can ever hurt them: something like Abyssals' Void Avatar Embodiment is an Essence 5 Charm that adds +3 Hardness for the scene as one of its major benefits. A +4 passive Hardness available at character creation for someone really, really detesting the wearer is thus phenomenally good: it might put you over 10. A tweaked version of this power should be the "base power" for the armor. Blinded by Vengeance should be its Evocation. Typically, defensive Charms activate on either step 2 or step 4, which I think is what you're going for, but a counterattack would be a step 8 Charm. Skipping past that and just focusing on its use, this free Distract Gambit is used to lower the target's Defense for the rest of the round, which has a huge force multiplier effect in Essence, where PCs can choose their own order of actions every round. Trigger right away, lower enemy's defense by a good amount, all of your allies generate bonus Power on their withering attacks this turn, and much of the time some of them will be ready to launch a powerful decisive attack on turn 2, just... almost free, since rather than having to build up Power and then launch the Distract gambit, you get the benefit immediately. I don't think this is a good power to have like this. The closest power in the book already that comes to mind is Alchemic Power Reserve, a Getimian Charm that explicitly can't be used to grant Power on the first round of battle, because if you could get it right away it damages the action economy.

This idea could work, but it needs a pretty thorough redrafting before I could use it.
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This is very helpful, thank you for this. I didn't realize just adding the artifact tag to a regular weapon was that big a difference. Still getting used to the smaller dice pools of Essence
 
BossFight said:
Wow, this is honestly super helpful. Seeing it all laid out there really drives home how small the soak pools are in Essence! Where is the 3 dots of artifact coming from? I see you've bought heavy armor with the artifact keyword, but can't you just get 1dot artifact heavy armor?

Also, on the first part are you sure things like "using a weapon" counts towards the dice caps? That seems really weird to me.
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Yep. The second paragraph of the Panoply chapter is:

The following tables list standard statistics for weapons and armor found in this book. Successes
added from equipment count towards the standard success limit of five. Weapon equipment
successes apply only to attack actions.
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Merits come in Primary (5 dots), Secondary (3-4 dots), and Tertiary (1-2 dots) ratings. It's explicit in the Panoply chapter that you need to use at least a Secondary merit to get an artifact weapon or armour.

Typically weapons and armor, these masterpieces of the magical materials are always Secondary
or Primary. Players may choose to transform any mundane weapon or armor into its artifact
equivalent by granting it the Artifact tag. This is a secondary Artifact, or Artifact 3. They should
give it a unique name and detail a sentence or two of its history. There's no need to define its
Evocations immediately — those can be added later as the Essence of wielder and artifact grow
used to one another
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Gazetteer said:
and by taking this thing at all you are obviously signalling to your ST that you want those story beats in particular.
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This is an important point that's worth stressing, yeah. One of the hidden things about game design is that 'limitations' like 'this effect only works against X' are often not much of a limitation at all in practice, both because you as a player can act in a way to seek conflicts with X, but also because it signals to your GM that this character is built for stories about clashing with X. It's one of the problem with 'flaw' systems that designers have realised over the years; any kind of 'nemesis' or 'grudge mark' flaw that says a character or a group out there is out to get you... Is actually an advantage, when you get down to it.

The ST is gonna throw you into confrontations of some sort, and time limits on a session mean that there's only so many confrontations they can throw at you, there's only so much temporal and dramatic budget in a session or a story arc. Taking a flaw like that allows you to weight the odds for what kind of enemies you can expect to face and build your character to suit, because it signals that this character 'should' be facing these kinds of problems. Never mind whatever advantages you bought with the points that flaw gave you.

If I take a flaw of, say, 'I foiled the schemes of a Necromancer acting on behalf of the First and Forsaken Lion by destroying his prized necrotect creation, and now he hungers for revenge' then I can expect more of the goons and threats and obstacles of the story to involve necromancy, ghosts, and necrotect creatures. So the ST is going to bring up that necromancer as an opponent and throw necrotect creatures into the mix, dramatically because there's no sense in leaving a plothook unused (especially when a player has signaled their interest in it), and mechanically because I got points for this, so I'd better face some trouble for it. Except, now I know that ahead of time and can specialise my build and my behaviour to be extra effective at dealing with that - I'm already benefiting, even before we get into whatever I spent the extra design points on.

(This, by the by, is probably why merit/flaw systems have been steadily becoming less frequent in RPG's that I've seen)

In a like manner, @BossFight, your artifact treats 'this effect only works/works better against people who hate you' as a flaw, but aside from it being easier than you think to make people hate you in Exalted Essence, what this also does is encourage the ST to create and deploy opposition that has a personal grudge against the character wearing this armour, exactly the kind of fights it's presently balanced to be stronger than normal in.
 
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Anyone got a sheet for Florivet, the Whim of the Wind, Demon of the Second Circle?

I've just been told about this character and I am instantly interested in learning more about him
 
Shane_357 said:
I think Oramus might have a good reaction. He definitely hasn't seen that before.
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Eh, it can be hard to tell how Yozi will react to things, even within their own themes. The Ebon Dragon imbued all living things with the capacity to betray him and he still gets salty about it. The Dragon of Is/Not/Maybe might be pissed if someone did something he couldn't imagine. Then again, he might just consider them even later to the party than Cytherea.
 
Imrix said:
This is an important point that's worth stressing, yeah. One of the hidden things about game design is that 'limitations' like 'this effect only works against X' are often not much of a limitation at all in practice, both because you as a player can act in a way to seek conflicts with X, but also because it signals to your GM that this character is built for stories about clashing with X. It's one of the problem with 'flaw' systems that designers have realised over the years; any kind of 'nemesis' or 'grudge mark' flaw that says a character or a group out there is out to get you... Is actually an advantage, when you get down to it.

The ST is gonna throw you into confrontations of some sort, and time limits on a session mean that there's only so many confrontations they can throw at you, there's only so much temporal and dramatic budget in a session or a story arc. Taking a flaw like that allows you to weight the odds for what kind of enemies you can expect to face and build your character to suit, because it signals that this character 'should' be facing these kinds of problems. Never mind whatever advantages you bought with the points that flaw gave you.

If I take a flaw of, say, 'I foiled the schemes of a Necromancer acting on behalf of the First and Forsaken Lion by destroying his prized necrotect creation, and now he hungers for revenge' then I can expect more of the goons and threats and obstacles of the story to involve necromancy, ghosts, and necrotect creatures. So the ST is going to bring up that necromancer as an opponent and throw necrotect creatures into the mix, dramatically because there's no sense in leaving a plothook unused (especially when a player has signaled their interest in it), and mechanically because I got points for this, so I'd better face some trouble for it. Except, now I know that ahead of time and can specialise my build and my behaviour to be extra effective at dealing with that - I'm already benefiting, even before we get into whatever I spent the extra design points on.

(This, by the by, is probably why merit/flaw systems have been steadily becoming less frequent in RPG's that I've seen)

In a like manner, @BossFight, your artifact treats 'this effect only works/works better against people who hate you' as a flaw, but aside from it being easier than you think to make people hate you in Exalted Essence, what this also does is encourage the ST to create and deploy opposition that has a personal grudge against the character wearing this armour, exactly the kind of fights it's presently balanced to be stronger than normal in.
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I mean, more power to your games but that's not necessarily true.

Because this isn't a weakness. It's a gameplay loop. "Do X, gain Y". And you're right, it does signal to the ST you want to fight people with negative intimacies, just like learning a charm which adds damage to decisive attacks signals you want to hit with a big decisive attack.

And sure, if you're a good ST sometimes you'll throw an enemy with low hardness but mountains of health at the player so they can *really* enjoy their decisive attack. But if that's all you throw at the player then you're not not a good ST. Because getting the easy victory every combat isn't fun. Sometimes fun is dealing with a situation which your character *isn't* built for

It's the same with this armor. If the ST only ever throws enemies with negative intimacies at the player then they're not a good ST, because they are denying the player the chance to practicely engage in the gameplay loop they purchased
 
BossFight said:
Now I'm even *more* confused. I went to check because the idea that equipment counted towards your dice limit seemed ludicrous to me. Heavy armor giving 4 soak when the most you can possibly add is 10 means that regular legion soldiers soak almost as good as Exalts.
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It's worth noting that this comparison has little bearing to Exalted Essence in actual-play. A mortal soldier is probably going to be one of the following.

-A trivial character subject to one roll resolution (soak never comes into play).
-An extra participating in a larger fight (soak is a factor, but any damage taken incapacitates them).
-Part of a battle group (their soak rating now represents an infantry formation, not one person in armour).
 
BossFight said:
This is very helpful, thank you for this. I didn't realize just adding the artifact tag to a regular weapon was that big a difference. Still getting used to the smaller dice pools of Essence
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Also, something I want to make clear that you should take into account when doing anything that touches on Soak in XS is that once you get soak to 5 or so, combat becomes pretty grindy - and each extra point of soak only makes it more so.

Why? Because soak cancels out decisive successes, which means each point of soak is worth about 2 damage dice. 5 soak = the 10 dice you get from spending 10 power. And Power caps at 10. Which means for higher soak, you need 10 Power and need to get lucky on your to-hit roll to get enough dice to bust through the soak. Sure, if you have a party, things like "Reveal Weakness" stacking work, but for solo fights, a high soak enemy can turn a fight into a grind of "build power to 10, to try for a decisive, to hope you got enough damage past the soak to get a few health levels off, and then repeat".

NPC monsters you give high soak to that you intend a PC to fight alone should have low defence and not too much health, because the only way PCs are getting through big soak numbers without specialist charms is by spending 10 Power when they got a bunch of threshold successes on their decisive to-hit roll.

EDIT: Actually, hmm, could be interesting to use the Elden Ring Crystallian design for a creature, where it has high soak and high hardness, but once you do 2-3 levels of damage, it 'shatters' and its soak and hardness drop sharply.
 
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The standard soldier antagonist from the book has 5 health levels, 3 defence, 2 hardness, and 3 soak. While you can choose to more or less build antagonists with the same equipment that a PC would use, you don't actually have to -- they do not literally have medium armour, they just have 3 soak. Unlike an Exalt, their only tool for raising their defences is the Formation Fighting quality, which means that they passively boost their allies' soak.

Bearing in mind that Exalted NPCs in this system are not Exalted PCs, and are not comparable one to one with them, they still have pretty significant advantages. All Exalts are significant characters, they have access to the NPC version of Excellency, and they get charms and supernatural qualities and anima powers. We can in fact see this in action -- the book's default Young Dynast stat block uses the soldier as its base. It changes around what they're good at, boosts some of their numbers slightly (+1 to defence and hardness, +1 to secondary pool) and gives them an artifact weapon, but the biggest thing they get is just access to Exalt charms and anima powers and that standard excellency dice adder.

Now, it has been found by more than one person that the book's standard antagonists are on the weak side; they're designed to be usable against non-combat-optimised characters, so if someone goes in with someone extremely fighty, they can fall short. But it's really not the case that the game's small dice caps mean there's no distinction between mortals and Exalts, here.
 
Is there any good homebrew similar to an Infernal's Devil-Tiger route except for Abyssal Exalted instead? Specifically, I'm not looking for "Devil-Tiger but Abyssal flavored" but instead something unique to the Abyssal Exalted as a means of apotheosis.
 
I don't think there's anything comparable. I'm not sure what would even fit the bill, to be honest - Whispers, maybe, or an Occult tree tied to ascending with Void Circle Necromancy?
 
Crawling Chaos said:
Is there any good homebrew similar to an Infernal's Devil-Tiger route except for Abyssal Exalted instead? Specifically, I'm not looking for "Devil-Tiger but Abyssal flavored" but instead something unique to the Abyssal Exalted as a means of apotheosis.
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Root it in Lordship. The 'truth' of the Neverborn is that all things must sink into the Void, so have the heresy path of the Abyssals be averting that. Essentially an Abyssal making themselves a sort of Fisher King figure for a territory in the Underworld or shadowland. They reject the will of the Neverborn and the path of the redemption to the Solar and instead crown themselves with alabaster thorns and wield scepters of ivory. Dead and undying.
 
I could also see something more overtly undead; the Abyssal Exalted are technically still alive, and for them apotheosis could involve suicide.

You could become an uber-ghost like a Deathlord, a one-of-a-kind monster like a hekatonkhire, or the progenitor of all true vampires / mummies / liches / whatever.

Would probably be extremely double-edged, with the (former) Abyssal losing things that can never be replaced. I think that would be fitting; straighforward super-Exalts probably shouldn't exist.

But as far as I know nothing like this has actually been written.
 
mothematics said:
I don't think there's anything comparable. I'm not sure what would even fit the bill, to be honest - Whispers, maybe, or an Occult tree tied to ascending with Void Circle Necromancy?
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An Occult tree connected with Necromancy seems like it could have potential.

Shane_357 said:
Root it in Lordship. The 'truth' of the Neverborn is that all things must sink into the Void, so have the heresy path of the Abyssals be averting that. Essentially an Abyssal making themselves a sort of Fisher King figure for a territory in the Underworld or shadowland. They reject the will of the Neverborn and the path of the redemption to the Solar and instead crown themselves with alabaster thorns and wield scepters of ivory. Dead and undying.
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That does seem like a potential route an Abyssal could follow. I think there are even a few different spins you could put on it such as turning yourself into a legion of the damned similar to say Alucard. Personally, I've always hated the whole option of an Abyssal Exaltation being able to be cleansed back into a Solar Exaltation. Similar to an Infernal there should be no possibility of reverting the transformation the Exaltation has undergone for better or worse. Therefore giving an Abyssal Exalted their own optional "apotheosis" for them to pursue only seems fitting.

Sanctaphrax said:
I could also see something more overtly undead; the Abyssal Exalted are technically still alive, and for them apotheosis could involve suicide.

You could become an uber-ghost like a Deathlord, a one-of-a-kind monster like a hekatonkhire, or the progenitor of all true vampires / mummies / liches / whatever.

Would probably be extremely double-edged, with the (former) Abyssal losing things that can never be replaced. I think that would be fitting; straighforward super-Exalts probably shouldn't exist.

But as far as I know nothing like this has actually been written.
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True, it should probably be a trade-off similar to how being a Devil-Tiger or an Alchemical turning into a city has advantages and disadvantages of its own.

I could also see something more overtly undead; the Abyssal Exalted are technically still alive, and for them apotheosis could involve suicide.
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I always did think they didn't go far enough with Abyssals. Rather than just being "technically still alive" they should be undead abominations sustained by their exaltation itself in a mockery of life after having given themselves to Oblivion. It'd help provide a sharper dividing line between Infernals, Solars, and Abyssals imo.
 
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