General Exalted Thread

[sysid_ACE]

It feels really... Chuubo's? It feels like a bleak power and then fighting the bleak. It seems only opposable/failing because it is otherwise so unopposable/powerful, as a natural consequence of its power.

That seems really out of genre for Exalted play.

 

[SerGregness]

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.

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It's not central to your point, but it's worth noting that Ex3 Sidereals is actually leaning away from Chejop Kejak being an uber badass. They're leaning more on his political power and savvy here:

Spoiler: Chejop Kejak

Kejak is a skilled martial artist and a master sorcerer, but his true genius lies in intrigue and influence.
He's spent his Exalted lifespan as a scrupulous collector of intelligence and favors both great and small
— he knows that sometimes a matter is best served by a puissant god's direct intervention, and other
times by a few words with that god's lowest clerk. He also wields considerable authority within the
Bureau as the Division of Secrets' eldest Sidereal member and the chair of the Convention on the Center.
He doles out duties and assignments both to advance the Bronze Faction's agenda and to demonstrate its
necessity to those opposed or uncommitted to it. Gold Faction idealists might receive orders that send
them delving into First Age ruins lost to Solar caprice. Young Sidereals unaligned with either faction are
given a chance to see the value of the Bronze's methods as a well-timed Wyld Hunt comes to their aid
against a demon they've been tasked with slaying.

As for the charm, I think by RAW the Storyteller wouldn't get to propose an option if an NPC used it, because it says each other player, but then specifically calls out Storyteller exceptions, so that could probably use a clarification.

 

[VagueZ]

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.

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This is almost exactly not how this works. If the ST is the sort to be that badly heavy-handed, they can just give the boss 60 HL and a spammable trans-perfect defense and attack. The only way to make this work as you have laid it out is to have the ST talk out of both sides of their mouth and say that the OSoI stylist can be offered an unconditional victory by the ST and it's not my fault that the ST also happens to be the stylist's player and also I get to select this unconditional victory.

Assuming that the ST is at least attempting to play in good faith, here is how that would actually play out:

After collecting everyone's thoughts about how the scene could play out, the ST lays them on the table for discussion. Perhaps none of them involve the PCs being injured, if they do it was the ST or a player suggesting it because it makes for a dramatic exchange where the PCs get a significant portion of what they are here to do. This is necessary because otherwise the PC can flatly veto the outcome by both RAW and clear RAI. If Chejop is our big bad for the campaign, odds are some PC has a Major or Defining Intimacy that states how much they loathe him for his villainy and won't let him get away (or just how much they hate to lose in general), so he just... can't push the "I win" button. It's not even an "I can get away" button if the Intimacy is something like "Tie (Chejop Kejak: He Must Be Tried For His Crimes)". This is the straightforward application of what can be vetoed and no interpretation beyond that.

Instead, the ST is more likely to take this to the players with something like... "I think it would be dramatic if he gets away here and uses this legendary technique to escape you once, but it's expended by him doing so. I have a really cool setpiece I'm building towards, if you'll let me run with this", which might get players to say "yeah, let's try that, then." Depending on players' patience (and willingness to allow this buildup to a better climax vs being expedient), this may also all be unacceptable, and instead of Breathing on the Black Mirror going off at all, we end up with "no option is taken, then", which means that at least Chejop and one PC (and probably most/all other characters on the field) suffer the Glimpse of Infinity that we don't know anything about yet. It has to have equal narrative weight to work, and that's something that isn't a ST-only call.

Only the ST is allowed to cede use of this to grant the stylist a stronger result than 'equivalent exchange', and there's limits on that, as well.

 

[UrsaTempest]

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.

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It can still work for NPC-on-PC, but I wager you'll need to make the consequence of losing pretty sweet on the player

 

[BossFight]

If Chejop is our big bad for the campaign, odds are some PC has a Major or Defining Intimacy that states how much they loathe him for his villainy and won't let him get away (or just how much they hate to lose in general), so he just... can't push the "I win" button. It's not even an "I can get away" button if the Intimacy is something like "Tie (Chejop Kejak: He Must Be Tried For His Crimes)".

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This feels like a very obtuse reasoning since presumably Kekjak has intimacies which would oppose being captured, killed or defeated in battle. If "Kekjak should pay for his crimes" intimacy is enough to veto him escaping or winning the fight then Kekjak's intimacies should be able to prevent the same.

Thus making this charm absolutely useless.

 

[UrsaTempest]

This feels like a very obtuse reasoning since presumably Kekjak has intimacies which would oppose being captured, killed or defeated in battle. If "Kekjak should pay for his crimes" intimacy is enough to veto him escaping or winning the fight then Kekjak's intimacies should be able to prevent the same.

Thus making this charm absolutely useless.

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It just means you'll need to weaken or discard his intimacy first before using it!

 

[Cosar]

This feels like a very obtuse reasoning since presumably Kekjak has intimacies which would oppose being captured, killed or defeated in battle. If "Kekjak should pay for his crimes" intimacy is enough to veto him escaping or winning the fight then Kekjak's intimacies should be able to prevent the same.

Thus making this charm absolutely useless.

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Kekjak isn't being played by a player, so his intimacies don't get veto power. But, overall, the charm isn't currently written for ST use, though I could see a version that keeps the same theme but is written for them. Largely, just remove the storyteller from both giving an option when they are also deciding, at which point this charm when used by an antagonistic NPC is basically saying 'you are defeated, but you decide how and what it costs NPC X', which obviously isn't appropriate for all groups or all situation but in a high trust environment it seems fine. Like, sure, if this was used at the climax of a game to screw the party over that'd generally be shitty, but so would any of the billion other ways to force players to lose as an ST. But the PC's don't have to win every fight.

Again, I think as an ST you'd need the players to have a decent amount of trust in you, and this is absolutely a type of power that should be talked about in the pre-game to make sure people are fine with this sort of effect happening, either for NPC's or PC's.

 

[Kymme]

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?"

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Zaleramancer wrote this, which is probably what you're thinking of.

Also, Breathing on the Black Mirror is great, and I'm glad to see it returning. Even if I have my quibbles with the fact that it's a gambit now and as such requires you to play out several rounds of 3e combat before you can use it. I guess as far as 'dramatic finishing moves' go it's alright.

The use-case I've always imagined for it is when the Sidereal who knows it goes off to have their big dramatic 1v1 with their rival before the party fights the chronicle's big bad they can use this charm to use wacky fate bullshit to speed things to their conclusion so everybody isn't waiting for like two hours while the battle wraps up. That said, this version does have the fact that it involves everybody at the table as a plus. Pretty neat.

 

[Sanctaphrax]

It's not central to your point, but it's worth noting that Ex3 Sidereals is actually leaning away from Chejop Kejak being an uber badass. They're leaning more on his political power and savvy here...

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It's always been like that. He didn't even have Martial Arts favoured in 2e.

But he's still the closest thing there is to a ruler of the world, so he makes a good final boss for an example like this one. Replace him with Anys Syn if you wanna.

And it's not like he can't give a bunch of young Solars the fight of their lives.

This is almost exactly not how this works. If the ST is the sort to be that badly heavy-handed, they can just give the boss 60 HL and a spammable trans-perfect defense and attack. The only way to make this work as you have laid it out is to have the ST talk out of both sides of their mouth and say that the OSoI stylist can be offered an unconditional victory by the ST and it's not my fault that the ST also happens to be the stylist's player and also I get to select this unconditional victory.

...

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Not at all!

I was trying to be quite clear that the outcome wasn't going to be a unilateral victory for Chejop. Just that, well, he wasn't gonna die. It's safe to assume, from the Charm as written, that the user has the opportunity to survive.

But really, it doesn't matter. Even if the result of using the Charm turned out to be exactly the same as the result of not using it, it would still ruin the session. Because the problem isn't and hasn't ever been the results. Even in 2e.

When Chejop whips this out, whatever tension and momentum the scene had is just gone. There's no more fight. No more opportunity to actually do anything. There's just... narrating, and maybe trying to wheedle the storyteller into seeing things your way. Maybe having a bitter argument over exactly what the limits of the effect are. Even in a good group, this is the sort of thing that tests people's emotions. And it's not like the Charm has some kind of special mechanism for avoiding bad tables.

A button that you push to make everyone else stop playing the game just shouldn't exist.

 

[mothematics]

You don't stop playing the game, though. That is a thing that does not happen. If Bluebeard's Bride is a game (and it is, a good one), then Exalted having a scene that's partially doing the same thing isn't a scene in which it's stopped being a game.

 

[Sanctaphrax]

If that phrasing bothers you, you can replace it with "a button you push to make all other abilities irrelevant and replace all of the game's normal rules with those of a very very different game shouldn't exist".

That aside, I suspect we're heading down the same road that we went down with the Usurpation terminology and the doomed Sidereal-ocracy. That seemed to bother people, so...this might be a good time for someone to bring up something else.

I'm not a mod and even if I was one I wouldn't try to veto this argument, but I want to make clear: if we don't want to have this fight, we don't have to. Replying to every "that sounds terrible" with "here's why it's actually good" guarantees that the thread will consist mostly of arguments about the weakest and most controversial parts of the book. So you should do that if, and only if, that's actually what you want.

 

[WyldCard4]

I'm curious, having been away from Exalted for a short forever because Third Edition was going so very slowly, was the Dragon-Blood book any good and how does it compare to fanwork Dragon-Blood Charms that were being done shortly after Third Edition came out? Also, the forum seems conflicted on if I should post this here or the Exalted Questions thread, as the other thread hasn't had a post in more than a year.

 

[Chehrazad]

Just ignore the Exalted Questions Thread. The purpose it had is long since fulfilled, and this thread can go back to fulfilling its purpose as the primary repository of Exalted discussion and question-asking.

 

[Kaiya]

You don't stop playing the game, though. That is a thing that does not happen. If Bluebeard's Bride is a game (and it is, a good one), then Exalted having a scene that's partially doing the same thing isn't a scene in which it's stopped being a game.

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I mean, I'm like, the Ultimately Pro 3e person, and I would not allow Breathing on the Black Mirror as it stands to be used in any game of mine. I'd definitely be super upset if I was in a game and another player declared that the session was over, and we're all gonna figure out how it ended, instead of actually playing through it.

And that is how it reads to me. It ends the session, and starts a planning session for the next one. It's a minor issue, overall, especially if the rest of the Style is more like the other sample SMA Charms, but as a sample capstone, it's pretty ominous.

 

[FaeGlade Plural]

I mean, I'm like, the Ultimately Pro 3e person, and I would not allow Breathing on the Black Mirror as it stands to be used in any game of mine. I'd definitely be super upset if I was in a game and another player declared that the session was over, and we're all gonna figure out how it ended, instead of actually playing through it.

And that is how it reads to me. It ends the session, and starts a planning session for the next one. It's a minor issue, overall, especially if the rest of the Style is more like the other sample SMA Charms, but as a sample capstone, it's pretty ominous.

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It doesn't end the session.
It ends the Scene.
Since it shouldn't take long to resolve the charm - at least compared to playing out the combat - you can just continue the session with another scene or two.

What Breathing on the Black Mirror does boils down to

• everyone's scene-long charms end
• everyone has a chance to get to another location, and do other things they can do during scene transitions
• the martial artists either accomplishes something at a cost/consequence
• or the martial artist suffers a setback in exchange for a benefit for reward.

Take @Sanctaphrax Chejop Kejak example above. So you've cornered him and beaten all his allies. He uses Breathing on the Black Mirror. This ends the scene. And then

• Chejop Kejak loses much more easily than the players expected, and they notice that he's really just a tired old man trying to do his job (=he loses, but imposes an intimacy that'll make it easier to deal with the PCs in the future)
• Chejop Kejak gets captured, but it turns out the players didn't just assault his allies, but also innocent employees of other bureaus of heavens, and he spins that into an ironclad defense!
• At the last minute, a host of the armies of heaven arrives to defend Chejok Kejak and manage to drive the players off. But now he owes a great debt, and can't do that again next time
• Saturn wanders in and everyone has to deal amicably with her rather than fighting in front of her, including Chejop Kejak.

None of those stop the game. They transform the game. Maybe from a fight into courtroom drama - but who says you can't also have a fight there, or afterwards? And others just pause the fight for now, and you can go after him again next time, with altered circumstances of some sort.

The charm can only be used once per story, after all. Chejop can't use it again next time.

 

[Kaiya]

It doesn't end the session.
It ends the Scene.
Since it shouldn't take long to resolve the charm - at least compared to playing out the combat - you can just continue the session with another scene or two.

What Breathing on the Black Mirror does boils down to

• everyone's scene-long charms end
• everyone has a chance to get to another location, and do other things they can do during scene transitions
• the martial artists either accomplishes something at a cost/consequence
• or the martial artist suffers a setback in exchange for a benefit for reward.

Click to shrink...

I've been running this game since the second leak in 2015, and I have no confidence that this could be resolved as fast as you're suggesting. Maybe in the best possible case scenario, it gets resolved faster than combat, but that doesn't solve my core issue with it: I don't want one player to get to go "Nope. Everything changes, fight over, me time now". I want to actually play the game, not have the game interrupted so we can figure out how we're playing when the game resumes instead of what we were already actually doing.

At the very least, it ends the session we were already having and makes it about one specific player. I'm not okay with using a power like that, I'm not okay with other players having it, and I'm not okay running for it. When the manuscript is finished coming out and I start running Sidereals, well, at least it's E5 so I have a fuckton of time to rewrite it from the ground up before anyone is in a position to take it.

 

[sysid_ACE]

Do people think this Charm ends combat? Like, the effect of the charm can't be a new complication that adds to things and then the fight resumes where it is, right?

A friend and I are having a major disagreement about that.

 

[UrsaTempest]

Yeah, it's specifically stated combat ends after it's activated.

Anyway easier to just read it yourself I guess, it's public

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/sidereals-charting-fates-course-for-exalted-third-edition/posts/3683438

 

[Queshire]

I've seen other games use such metanarative aspects like this, though they're often baked into the core gameplay.

Considering that you have to A) have access to Sidereal Martial Arts B) learn the particular style it's from C) can only be usee once a story and D) you're not getting out of it without taking a licking I'd say it has enough restrictions on it.

The effect should be big enough that you can't just quickly deal with it and go back to what you were doing though since otherwise what's the point of a character using it in the first place?

 

[sysid_ACE]

Yeah, it's specifically stated combat ends after it's activated.

Anyway easier to just read it yourself I guess, it's public

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The text of the Charm has been posted in thread already, but thank you.

My friend's argument is something like:
- Any Charm that has this effect would by necessity suspend the combat system of Exalted—it is starting a roundtable discussion after all.
- The charm also says that combat is resumed if an outcome is not picked, lending credence to "combat ends" being a temporary suspension.
- The only other word given is that what might have been previously called "shards" in 2e are called "outcomes" here. Outcome is not a word that presents finality.
∴ An outcome caused by this charm may resume combat under different terms.

Her example is Mnemon ascending the stairs and saying "finally shown your face, have you, Kejak?" and the fight escalates. In the scenario where the storyteller uses this Charm at an unsatisfying time, she argues that many players would propose things like this on purpose as a counterweight to the Charm's unreasonableness.

My only counter is to point at the three examples given (they all end the combat) and my strong intution that the way she speaks is not how the charm works.

 

[UrsaTempest]

Yeah, I just talked to her

Anyway, while the combat end, technically nothing preventing for the new scene after that to be, well, more combat. This is obviously true if you pick resolution that result in more combat, eg if 'bigger foe' appear, presumably you'll both fight bigger foe!

 

[Queshire]

Time to find a new group then. Avoiding the spirit of the charm due to some rules lawyering is asshole behavior.

 

[sysid_ACE]

Time to find a new group then. Avoiding the spirit of the charm so some rules lawyering is asshole behavior.

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????

Games have rules for the purpose of having unambiguous states which roleplaying then happens from. The nature of rules is that people will have different interpretations of those unambiguous states. Arguing about such is almost inherent to playing a heavily crunchy TTRPG, as they (the RPGs) are not usually bulletproof. As long as things do not get rude or violent, or hold up play excessively, that is fine.

 

[Queshire]

Sorry, on my phone so I missed a few words.

"Choosing the best out of a bunch of bad futures" is right up a Sidereal's wheelhouse and while I'm not sure if trying to make it fit mechanics like they did is the best option I don't think they way they did things is the worst option either.

 

[Kaiya]

Sorry, on my phone so I missed a few words.

"Choosing the best out of a bunch of bad futures" is right up a Sidereal's wheelhouse and while I'm not sure if trying to make it fit mechanics like they did is the best option I don't think they way they did things is the worst option either.

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The problem I have with the Charm is that it is most useful and most likely to be used right when we're about to have a kung-fu duel with Ligier in order to make sure we don't just lose outright.

I'm not okay with this, as a player or a GM. I don't want mechanics for just skipping past campaign bosses to exist, no matter the restrictions. It'd ruin the game for me both playing and running it.