Remove ads

General Exalted Thread

Reader mode
We got a preview of some SMA styles today, and Breathing on the Black Mirror seems... shaped like the bad versions from past editions, for lack of a better term, and I'm not sure how well the new restrictions go to making it playable and fun:
Breathing on the Black Mirror

  • Cost: 20m, 2wp; Mins: Martial Arts 5, Essence 5
  • Type: Simple
  • Keywords: Perilous
  • Duration: Instant
  • Prerequisite Charms: Echoes of Infinity
Reality is a lie. Perception is a lie. The only truth is that which you choose.

The stylist rolls her Initiative at a difficulty equal to the highest number of undamaged health levels possessed by any enemy. If she succeeds, combat ends as the crossroads of possibility unfold before her. The Storyteller and each other player can each propose a plausible outcome for the battle that relates to one of the stylist's Intimacies, or another character's Intimacy that's directly relevant to the battle. Each proposed outcome must carry some meaningful consequence or cost that the stylist must accept, rather than giving an unconditional victory — except for the Storyteller, who can offer unconditional victory. Conversely, proposals in which the stylist is defeated or is unable to accomplish his goals must bring some benefit or reward commensurate to that setback.

Example outcomes include:

  • Just as the stylist seems to be on the brink of defeat, the tide is turned by the arrival of her beloved son and his reinforcements — but he'll suffer a grievous, life-threatening injury.
  • The fight ends in a draw as an even greater danger appears. The stylist and her enemies join forces against it, in accordance with her Principle of "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
  • As she pursues her foe through his fortress-manse, the stylist comes across her trusted Circlemate, whom she came her to rescue — but in the time it takes to free them, her foe will escape.
A nontrivial character's player can veto him being incapacitated, killed, or harmed in a way that has long-lasting personal consequences, like suffering a crippling injury. Likewise, courses of action opposed to a Major or Defining Intimacy can be vetoed.

Once everyone who wants to make a proposal has, the stylist's player chooses one and briefly narrates how it unfolds — or can have the player who proposed it do narrate it. This experience is indescribable for those present in the scene. As the stylist contemplate the possibilities that lie before her, they all seem to exist simultaneously. Their understanding of reality begins to crack under the strain, until the stylist finally makes her choice, and they shatter. Enemies with Resolve lower than the successes on the stylist's Initiative roll suffer the effects of Glimpse of Infinity.

If the stylist doesn't choose any of the options above, combat resumes, but her moment of indecision causes her to suffer from Glimpse of Infinity along with the affected enemies.

  • Reset: Once per story.

This isn't the first 'everyone at the table narrates an option' charm that we've seen. There's at least one other in the main set, but I haven't finished reading it all so I don't know if there's more. One of the writers hit on some charm tech they liked, clearly. :V
 
I think people are gonna really like Obsidian Shards! Imo it came out really well (and not, you know, insane like earlier versions).
 
If that Charm is any indication, then no. Because that looks awful. When you play Exalted, it's because you want to play Exalted.

The last thing a Charm should ever do is replace the game with a cutscene.
 
I'm very down for... probably the entire rest of Obsidian Shards of Infinity. It's a fun aesthetic and I feel like it's going to be a lot of fun to play with.

This version of Breathing on the Black Mirror I'm not really much happier with than last edition's. It definitely interacts with more things (initiative, enemy HLs, intimacies), but it still ends up being something that just negates a lot of the current mechanical weight.

Luckily for me and anyone else who feels the same, it's one single E5 Charm that's likely either the capstone or the next-to-capstone of a single martial art. Excising it should be absolutely trivial on the rare occasions it could come up. The rest of the preview is great stuff.
 
I prefer Lotus Labyrinth Durance.

'This is the time loop you can't escape until you love me'
 
I think charms like Breathing on the Black mirror should be rare and restricted, but I don't think it's necessarily bad to have stuff like this. Yes, it shortcuts the rest of the system, but being able to do that sometimes doesn't mean that the system is gone. Not unless you only have 1 combat per story, and if you do then I think a lot of charms that are limited with the understanding that there will be more would need to be adjusted.
 
I think this version of Breathing on the Black Mirror is fine.

Not only does it refresh only once per story (which is a relatively long period), but it also provides a hook into further situations to develop from because it needs to have consequences. It's not an "I Win" button; it's an emergency "I need the current combat to be over" button. None of the options have to be an instant win; they just have to be a plausible outcome.
 
Yeah I mean, it's definitely not an inconsequential detail that the user doesn't actually get to propose any of the options ("each other player...") for this version, and those options are constrained by relevant intimacies. I think I would just need to see it play out a few times to really come to a conclusion about it.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
If that Charm is any indication, then no. Because that looks awful. When you play Exalted, it's because you want to play Exalted.

The last thing a Charm should ever do is replace the game with a cutscene.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
<Fina>

IDK what Exalted you're familiar with, but there's tons of Charms that bypass or replace the normal mechanics of the game. It's a whole thing. The important part is that in doing so, they do something interesting. Breathing on the Black Mirror does something interesting - by involving intimacies and creating a new story.
 
&era System said:
<Fina>

IDK what Exalted you're familiar with, but there's tons of Charms that bypass or replace the normal mechanics of the game. It's a whole thing. The important part is that in doing so, they do something interesting. Breathing on the Black Mirror does something interesting - by involving intimacies and creating a new story.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It is less "bypass mechanics" and more "bypass the game entirely", but it still better than "win the game" from the previous version.
 
Nervaqus987 said:
Honestly, I feel there's room for both "Thaumaturgy as a learned skill" and "Thaumaturgy as an inborn ability" in Creation.

Like, I could see a list of Thaumaturgy Merits, most of which just represent the time and effort your character put into learning this or that thing. Some of them are tagged with "Innate" and you can only purchase those at charagen or after ST approved circumstances like Power Questing or Sorcerous Workings.

Something that handles both "I'm a shaman and learned how to ward away ghosts and appease spirits from the shaman before me, just as he did before me" and "That girl's always had a touch of Second Sight."


Should there be literal schools of Magic? Eh......Like, even leaving aside the canonical ones like the Heptagram or the Raiton Academy, I do feel there's plenty of room for things like that. If you want to tell me that @Omicron's Black Garda School can't exist, then I'm sorry but we just can't be friends.

Now, that said, I don't think Hogwarts should be found in Creation. Perhaps there was a time when august and admired schools of sorcery stood where masses trained and studied, but if so that time was long ago. But there should still be places of learning that you can travel to and learn from, be that as a student or by prying their dread secrets from their cold dead hands.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Thaumaturgy to me is kind of a result of three big things

In 1e we had a lot of hints of "mortal sorcerers" in early gameline, and it manifested in basically actual mortal sorcerers plus the three subsystem thign that was called thaumaturgy. This included stuff you could just do with Occult, Rituals you learned other things, and Sciences for more complciateds tuff. ANd it was kind of a clunky mess, but I think was trying to show the nuance of things in the setting.

2e kind of went and made this all the Arts but it kind of went mission-creep. Occult and thaumatrugy along wiht artifice became the main means you interated with the setting. And this kind of created a bit where like, every town ahd a medicine woman and there were academies of thaumatrugy. It also fed into the afformentioend occasionalist stuff. And it kind of mechancially ate a bunhc of aras of the mechanics, like Craft, Lore, Medicine, and Survival. This si before mechanizing things I don't think needed it (animal husbandry) and straight-up reifying shit I don't think we needed either (Varang astrology). It also kind of resulted in things like scammers and such not relaly working as real magic was so common.

3e, as per common practice, kind of over-compensated. Thaumaturgy got made hard to teach, hard to use, and generlaly focused on making sure you don't feel the optimal thing to do is make dozens of thaumaturgists and that states aren't full of them. It's basiclaly minor magic stuff and misc. supernaturla meirt,s some that can be taught. But also, some of the things that thaumaturgy did is not able to be done in the system as it is, so it feels like systems were lost.

Kind of to me the big thing is probably best is abandoning "thaumaturgy" as a single thing. Basically at best soemthing like 1e thaumaturgy, but honeslty to me you have a system trying to do too much in 2e, which was too botuse in 1e, and which does to little in 3e to feel worth it.

Like, for me the basic list of things are:
- What can anyone with Occult, Lore, Craft, Medicine, and Survival do that is supernatural to us on Earth but is not like, that weird in Creation. This would be some of the god-interaction stuff, having knoweldge of how demons and elementals operate, use of iron for fighting fairies, or salt lines for keeping off ghosts. Shit like that. This doesn't need systmes besides maybe Venture stuff.

- Things that are more advanced than base Ability that have a mechanical impact on the setting. It should be something that you can't just mass produce, or which makes things difficult. THis honesty need not even be a single system. Wards, exorcism, geomancy, etc. are in this area. Something that we kind of assume is "beyond' the basic dots in Ability mechancially. Geomancy is kind of already covered by crafting (love it or hate it) but I think things like enchantments, charms, and such shoudl be such that it takes skill to make good ones, but not skill to make ones folks think are good. But this is a style thing. I think there hsould be room for charlatans, but still rela ones.


- Some effects probably should be gated-off as rare. Some of what thaumaturgy is is in this and fits with above. I don't have a problem with astrology not having a mechancial impact...unless you are an actual fortune-teller. To me there's something appealing of the story of an internatinaolly famous astrologer who is just kind of a good showman, while one of her servants reads tea leaves in teh back room. I think this is what hte current system for thaumaturgy kind of hits at, but I think ditching the preerequiste Merit and jsut having it be misc. weird magic abilities fits. Kind of as a side note, while "thaumaturgy" is "magic science" for fantasy folks, what it is is actually more this category.

But yeah, all and all that's kind of how I think on it. It does need more. I just don't think it need be one thing more. It's kind of like Sidereal astrology now being like half a dozen sub systems. I think both 2e and 3e took teh wrong route in making thaumaturgy a single thing and something like 1e's take is probably at least would be a better start. Chehr's WOD/CofD-looting mentioend above I think isa good start for that.
 
Breathing on the Black Mirror feels to me like a cooperative writing charm. You and your friends all decide "okay, we're not going to roll all this out, but let's see where this fight will go". Then you decide on a few different potential outcomes and pick whatever's most interesting.

Gotta say I like the idea. Combat can be a bit of a slog in 3e. It's exciting at times (especially in 1v1s) but it can also drag on with nobody doing any real damage for multiple rounds. Additionally it's a great way to get the entire table involved and I personally find my writing improves when I've got somebody to bounce ideas off of.
 
GardenerBriareus said:
My main attachment to the idea is how it creates interesting room for little reminders that Creation isn't just Bronze Age Fantasy Earth. The mention of how, while it's quite uncommon, it's still possible that a brickmaker could open his kiln and find a heap of sand and imperfectly fired brick-pieces, because the Essence interactions governing the transformation from clay to brick went very, very wrong. In the campaign we ran, @QafianSage and I established that because it's composed of Air Essence, mundane lightning is actually chillingly cold, and the heat lightning which can cause brushfires is a distinct phenomenon born from the buildup of as-yet-unexpressed Fire Essence eventually finding a path of least resistance to manifest within the strictures of the Loom.

Likewise, my take would be that the reason why the human body's components don't have least gods is because the human body itself is a single spiritual structure (with various sub-structures inside it, like organs and muscle groups) - a companion to the po-soul and hun-soul in the same way that the po-soul and hun-soul are companions to one another. The RL ideas of microbiomes and microbial life are generally only found within a Primordial or Wyldish context, and that is a specific result of how, just as the spontaneous manifestation of the Maidens surprised the Primordial tribe, many other things about their Creation turned out differently than they might have assumed or intended. Creation was a truly sublime act of genesis, a making of something which would then make and make and make itself unprompted, changing and growing and adapting eternally.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I just want to say that I find the idea of lightning being cold because of air essence really cool, and a perfect example of why (for me) it's so important that Exalted provide players with enough knowledge about how the world works as to develop a working model of the world (like the Aristotelian model or how we are taught classical physics works).

Because a working model let's you extrapolate new information from given facts which let's you fill in the blank spaces "in the map" far better than a blank canvas ever could. "Everything is a combination of five flavors of essence" let's me make educated guesses about how natural phenomena works. It's magic, don't worry about it means I either don't come up with cool expectations or I default to irl physics.

In many ways, it's similar to how a good location write-up works. A blank continent gives me no reason to go there, but if you talk about how a city is a haven for pirates and thieves then suddenly I'm thinking about what sort of stories and NPCs I can set there
 
I mean every village having a medicine man/wise woman who knows occult tricks and might have an apprentice is the type of thing you'd want from a functional Thaumaturgy system.

Not to mention the type of thing that's the basis of a PC in its own right.
 
mantovani said:
It is less "bypass mechanics" and more "bypass the game entirely", but it still better than "win the game" from the previous version.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It's bypassing part of the normal combat system, but it's still part of the game. You you still have characters and you're still doing and deciding things. You're just moving on from combat after using a powerful magical effect that won you the fight, which is fine for Exalted. Having this be easily accessible for many characters and repeatable would be bad for the Exalted, but as a capstone charm that is very limited it's fine.

The big issue I forsee is that as an ST this charm would be tricky(but not impossible) to use, and could certainly be abused in a number of ways by bad ST's, though I think to some extent that's always going to be something that exists.
 
Sucal said:
I mean every village having a medicine man/wise woman who knows occult tricks and might have an apprentice is the type of thing you'd want from a functional Thaumaturgy system.

Not to mention the type of thing that's the basis of a PC in its own right.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I mean, we also see shades of this in Adversaries of the Righteous. There's a lot of non-sorcerer mortal characters, and many of them...have magic. Not Thaumaturgy, magic. We've got Ashana Ikatu's serpent soul, which she seems to have developed through training, Isabet Maken's slave-creating geomancy, Firamar Majen's jade cyborg parts, all the God-Blooded, the Artifact Evocations the mortals can draw out, Lintha Gool Giagia's symbiotes...it's clear that the writers of Adversaries do not actually like Thaumaturgy all that much either, given how much "mortal magic" is Charms. Weak ones, but "strange, one-off Charms" seems way better for "mysterious gifts of magic" than whatever Thaumaturgy was meant to establish.
 
Breathing on the Black Mirror seems great to me. Its important to remember that it is an Essence 5 charm. As someone who has played in a 3E Solars game to E5 I can confirm that the option to end a combat at that power level with a creative writing exercise is fantastic because they can get pretty grindy.

I might provide a veto for the ST to use so nobody can skip the climactic battle of a campaign, but I strongly suspect that any game of Exalted that actually makes it to E5 has a strong enough social contract at the table to stop that from happening unless everyone agrees that it would be cool.
 
Cosar said:
I think charms like Breathing on the Black mirror should be rare and restricted, but I don't think it's necessarily bad to have stuff like this. Yes, it shortcuts the rest of the system, but being able to do that sometimes doesn't mean that the system is gone. Not unless you only have 1 combat per story, and if you do then I think a lot of charms that are limited with the understanding that there will be more would need to be adjusted.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I vaguely remember someone bringing up a similar idea for how to model direct interaction with one of the Yozis?

Something where the ST and the player are kind of picking options from a menu, answering questions like "you get what you wanted from the exchange - what did the Yozi receive in turn?"
 
Drakeneisen said:
Breathing on the Black Mirror seems great to me. Its important to remember that it is an Essence 5 charm. As someone who has played in a 3E Solars game to E5 I can confirm that the option to end a combat at that power level with a creative writing exercise is fantastic because they can get pretty grindy.

I might provide a veto for the ST to use so nobody can skip the climactic battle of a campaign, but I strongly suspect that any game of Exalted that actually makes it to E5 has a strong enough social contract at the table to stop that from happening unless everyone agrees that it would be cool.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Breathing on the Black Mirror should be fine even for a Climactic Battle - after all, it does not guarantee that you incapacitate your opponents, nor even necessarily that you win. So if you use it during a Climatic Battle, the result would likely be that whatever opponent you faced is still around to oppose you - resulting in Climactic Battle 2: Electric Boogaloo. You have shifted into a new scene, a new context for the fight, possibly with some of the stakes shifted and at a new locale, but it's likely still the same fight.

Say you have finally tracked down the Adversary who has managed to steal from the Bureau of Fate all this time, and you have cornered them without their own allies.
You use Breathing on the Black Mirror to end combat - consider that "end combat" and impose cost and consequences is what the charm does. We have three examples for with that could be, so let us adapt one:
As you battle through the Manse in which you have them cornered, they distract you by threatening to destroy all the records they have pilfered from the Bureau of Fate. As they start doing so, threads of fatestart to unravel. You manage to stop that, but they vanish.

Relocate the fight into a new locale - say, the Bureau of Fate where they now attempt an act of sabotage, or a mirror dimension of unwoven fate-threads as a result of their reckless act. And give the adversary some new twist to their motivation - you just undid all they worked for, so now they are reckless and more dangerous. Oh, and valuable records you were meant to save got partially destroyd, so that's a cost for you.
The relocation should be a new scene, so you can take a breather, but that's not an issue.

Provided Storyteller and players can adapt, the charm seems perfectly fine.
 
Honestly, the more I think about the charm the less I like it. Partially because there is no counterplay (one charm to a peer exalt feels cheap) partially because there is no scaling in what the "consequence".

I think it would work a lot better if the user picked the result but the target picked the consequence (or vice versa) to incentive one being proportional to the other.
 
I mean there's already a Veto option built into the charm if it affects a player
 
So I know that we're getting the other Bureau martial arts, and that they'll likely be in the 1-2 supplements that will come out for Sidereals, but I hope they give us descriptions and weapon/armour restrictions for them during the campaign.
 
When judging a controversial Charm, especially at high Essence, I think it's best to think about how it'll feel when an NPC uses it on you.

This is SMA, after all. Most of the people using it are final-boss-type characters, the Elder Sidereals who pull the strings of a hundred heroes and a thousand villains.

Imagine it's the final battle of your campaign. You're facing Chejop Kejak in Yu-Shan. His bodyguards and minions, his students and summons and constructs, lie broken and beaten and banished. But the man himself is stronger and more terrible than ever; he's been withering the hell out of you while you've been killing his mooks. The four of your brace yourselves as he prepares to unleash his ultimate technique, and...oh, he pushed the button.

Alright guys, time to narrate the story of how you failed to kill Chejop Kejak. I need a submission from each of you. And of course I, as the Storyteller, get to submit a proposal for my own consideration.

Sucks, eh?

No decent ST would do that. And the strongest condemnation of a Charm I can come up with is "don't worry, it's so unfun that it won't actually get used".

The problems are of a similar kind when a PC uses it, but they're so much worse in the hands of an NPC.

Amidatelion said:
I think this version of Breathing on the Black Mirror is fine.

Not only does it refresh only once per story (which is a relatively long period), but it also provides a hook into further situations to develop from because it needs to have consequences. It's not an "I Win" button; it's an emergency "I need the current combat to be over" button. None of the options have to be an instant win; they just have to be a plausible outcome.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Given the amount of Initiative it requires, it can't really be used in emergencies either.

It's really more of an "avoid playing the game" button. Not too surprising that some (most?) of the praise for it is coming from an angle of "high-essence combat is too grindy, good to have a way to avoid playing it".

Drakeneisen said:
I might provide a veto for the ST to use so nobody can skip the climactic battle of a campaign, but I strongly suspect that any game of Exalted that actually makes it to E5 has a strong enough social contract at the table to stop that from happening unless everyone agrees that it would be cool.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Isn't that exactly where it's supposed to be used?

Thing has climax written all over it. Last edition it was explicit that you couldn't use it anywhere else.

And it's not safe to assume that everyone's playing the normal way, from E1 up. Or that NPCs don't matter.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top