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General Exalted Thread

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Kaiya said:
Solar Brawl, as you note, is meant to synergize with Athletics as well as Resistance. Those three especially. There's a lot of counters to the most degenerate stuff Solar Brawl can do. Run away, strike from range, hit them REALLY REALLY HARD. Athletics and Resistance both contain means of mitigating these counters.

The Attack From Base Initiative Engine
For this one, you want to dip Athletics. Athletics has Increasing Strength Exercise. This adds to your Strength directly for 3m or 3i per dot, one dot per point of Essence you have. At Essence 1, this is Strength +1, which is +1 withering damage, yes, but also +1 raw decisive damage because that's how ISE rolls.

You want to be a Dawn. The Dawn Anima adds +Essence/2, round up, to your initiative. +1, +2, +3 at E1, E3, and E5 respectively. So, now, with an Essence 1 Solar, we have +1 raw decisive damage, +1 base initiative. When we attack, we reset to 4i, and add +1 for 5 base damage on any decisive attacks that we make. This beats Light Artifact hardness, which is 4, but loses to Medium, which is 7. Hold onto that, though!

Enter One With Violence and Striving Aftershock Method. They have Falling Hammer Strike as the core prerequisite to purchase them so they're integrated with the Onslaught Engine. One With Violence awards the lesser of (Essence or 5) as a bonus to the initiative gained from Crashing an opponent, as a free, permanent effect. Initiative break is permanently enhanced, growing in power as you do, capping at +10 for crashing someone at Essence 5. Striving Aftershock Method lets you spend 2m to gain +2 Base Initiative upon resetting after a decisive attack.

Both are Essence 2 effects, young Solars get them, though baby Solars need Supernal. So, we're up to raw decisive damage of 7 now for an Essence 1 Solar with the Dawn Anima, ISE, and Striving Aftershock when attacking from base initiative after making an initial decisive attack. We now can also freely attack opponents in medium artifact armor and many forms of megafauna.

Adamant Fists of Battle. This is a very important scenelong Charm. Add Strength to minimum damage, so +5 because you're a Solar Brawler, and double 10s on decisive attacks. This is an Essence 3 Charm, you need Supernal, Ferocious Jab, and Burning Fist Burial to qualify. Our base initiative attack is now 7 dice, double 10s on the damage roll, defeating medium artifact armor unless someone has one of the extremely rare "increase armored hardness" effects.

Increasing Strength Exercise, Thunderclap Rush Attack, Falling Hammer Strike, Ferocious Jab, Burning Fist Burial, Adamant Fists of Battlex2, One With Violence, Striving Aftershock Method. We're up to 9/15 Charms. for an E1 Solar...but 9/20 for an E2 Solar, and Adamant Fists as our only Supernal pick.

You probably want Wind-and-Stones Defense and maybe Iron Battle Focus for your basic defense options here, but it's not mandatory to pull this trick off. Call it 11 out of 15 anyways.

So the next one up is fun! Orichalcum Fists of Battle. Flashy, expensive Charm. 8m,3a, 1m per turn of upkeep, but we'll get back to that. You can generate the anima easily by maxxing JB in order to make an immediate Decisive attack with Adamantine Fists of Battle out of Join Battle. This lets you turn Adamantine Fists into a supplemental Charm so long as you damage them, saving you a precious turn of set-up. Unless you get a bizarre JB roll you'll almost certainly have more than 10 decisive dice, so just attack whoever you're certain you can hit for 6m,1wp to set up Adamantine Fists as a Scenelong Charm which enhances this attack, plus 10m on Join Battle to bring you to +2 Anima from JB, +1 from your actual attack.

I'll note, this can be a Withering attack, and it should be a withering attack if your opponent has any anti-decisive panic buttons or seems like they might that could threaten your ability to activate the scenelong effect. A decisive strike from a Solar Brawler must be avoided if at all possible because of how Heaven Thunder Hammer is triggered, it's a post-roll activation based on damage that does a huge chunk in one big burst. It's totally opportunistic, and they need to deny you the opportunity.

What you're actually doing is so so much worse, of course, but they don't know that. A Withering attack with no accuracy boost is an attempt to pressure you into spending motes. Take it on the chin, tbh, try to avoid with your defense, do the Shounen thing of exchanging basic hits while figuring each other's combat style out. A decisive is a set-up to HTH and must be evaded at all costs. Fun bit of tactical psychology at play!

So, Orichalcum Fists, though. Once you have Adamantine Fists up as a scenelong effect, next turn you activate Orichalcum Fists. You now ignore Hardness entirely for the scene and reroll 1s and and explode 10s on the damage roll for decisive attacks. It also increases base initiative by 1.

At Essence 1, we now reset to Initiative 3, +1 Dawn Anima, +2 Striving Aftershock, +1 Orichalcum Fists, +1 raw damage from ISE for a total of 8 damage dice. You ignore hardness, so you can't ping off people. You double 10s on the damage roll, you roll 1s away so you have more chances to roll 10s, and 10s explode, you roll them until no more 10s show up, keeping each result of 10.


12/15 Charms. Congratulations! You no longer need to make Withering attacks! You roll something like 5 health levels of damage per hit on average. 1m per turn upkeep, but just have a high accuracy pool! Strength 5, Dex 5, Stamina 5 is hard to get at chargen but you can do Strength 5, Dex 5, Stamina 3 and raise that over time.

For the last Charms, I strong recommend that one purchases two Ox-Bodies and a Charm of your choice for maximum hilarity. If you're using Advanced Chargen, Spirit Strengthens the Skin, Durability of Oak, Iron Skin Concentration, Ox-Bodyx2. Grow (Stamina) -0 health levels the first time someone seriously hits you with a Decisive and have 12 health levels before becoming incapacitated.

And this is just Supernal Brawl and E1 Resistance! Resistance further Durability-of-Oak Technique, 6m, halve all Withering damage for the whole turn, Essence-Gathering Temper, regen motes based on soaking damage, Adamant Skin, soak decisive attacks, Battle-Fury Focus, cut your wound penalties and gain +1 bonus die on attacks to save on your Excellency, Bloodthirsty Sword-Dancer Spirit, cut all wound penalties, gain another +2 bonus dice to attacks, and regen a mote extra per turn to spend on combat effects, canceling out the upkeep or Orichalcum Fists.

Athletics has Monkey-Leap, Graceful Crane, Spider-Foot, Racing Hair, Mountain-Crossing Leap for escaping and running other people down, to say nothing of Thunderbolt Attack Prana (aka "kaio-what-?!").

I might come talk about how fucked up grapples are later if anyone is interested because Solar Grapple is so fucked up.
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Great analysis, as always you remain the expert on 3e. Now how do I trick you into doing the same for solar melee
 
BossFight said:
Great analysis, as always you remain the expert on 3e. Now how do I trick you into doing the same for solar melee
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I mean, I can do the same for Solar Melee if there are no takers, it's not like this sort of thing is super esoteric knowledge that is only available to the elect few.

(But of course, if others are enthusiastic about doing the work, I'm also very happy to step back and let them take the lead - it's just, this sort of thing is time-consuming and we might get through it faster with more people.)
 
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In the broadest possible terms, I think Solar Melee is partially responsible for the reputation that built up early in Ex3 and then endured for years after as a kind of "common wisdom" that didn't really need interrogating, that the Solar Charmset is 1) full of obnoxious dice tricks, 2) has no themes and is 'generic.' Which isn't to say that either of these accusations is entirely without merit, but Solar Melee plays a particular role here. Melee is often the first combat set people will flip through the book to; it's conceptually very approachable, fits right into most of the fictional inspirations for Exalted with cool guys wielding really cool swords and shouting "EXCALIBUR!" while doing a huge golden beam attack, having a cool sword and armor feels more intuitive and safer than trying to punch people even when you're a demigod. So people go there first.

But out of the combat sets, Solar Melee is the one that's most flatly "I am the superior swordsman." It eschews most extremes in favor of making no compromises. Its attacks are efficient, accurate, and deal good damage. Its defenses waive all penalties, potentially as a scene-long effect, reduces enemy accuracy (effectively cap-breaking Defense), provides a pseudo-perfect defenses. It attacks multiple times in a turn, attacks multiple opponents at once, attacks at range, moves before attacking, counterattacks in the split second before an attack actually lands. It acts faster than other characters (but not quite as fast as TRA, though you can TRA into a Melee attack of course), and clashes reflexively. It has the dice-trickiest of dice tricks; there's a royal flush Charm that increases damage if you roll a 7, 8, 9 and 10 on your attack roll.

The core thesis of Solar Melee is found in Excellent Strike: For 3m, you add an automatic success on your attack roll and reroll all 1s until 1s cease to appear. Why 1s? Because 1 is the result that can trigger a botch, and the lowest result on the die. It is, thematically, the "most failed" die. That a Solar can excise all 1s from her roll is making a statement that she is never imperfect. Whether her attack succeeds or not, it contains no true flaw, no potential for a dramatic misshap. The level of greatest failure has been deleted, and she always punches above that floor.

That's Solar Melee: It's excellent. It's being good at everything, the balanced warrior, undefeated in eight directions, master of attack and offense. It represents this with a panoply of Charms covering all domains of battle without obvious gaps, and it represents this by being the most Yahtzee of all the combat sets, the one that cares most about what specific face your dice show up, it expects you to find the idea of rolling specific numbers for greater benefits fun in itself. But as a result, it's not thematically very deep, since it's already good at everything. It has no major weakness to watch out for, but no absolutely busted shit like Heaven Thunder Hammer that will break the normal damage resolution rules and transparency rules to just delete someone. It is completely self-sufficient; a Solar Brawler wants to be looking at Resistance and Athletics to make up for the gap in their set. But taking 15 Melee Charms is entirely viable.

And that results in Melee coming across as being thematically and aesthetically shallow. It's not really; it's depicting a special fantasy, the fantasy of the Peerless Swordsman.

By contrast, all the other combat ability sets are much more thematically focused. We already went over Brawl, but basically Archery wants you to be a sniper who loves to abuse range, takes turns charging up attacks, and fires devastating decisive attacks that explode or burn people alive or whatnot, while Thrown wants you to be a ninja who abuses misdirection and mid-flight tricks and the like, and Resistance has a kind of berserker theme, with two battle rage Charms, gaining Initiative and motes from suffering attacks, stacking extra health levels on top of your own to take inhuman amounts of punishment. These are less self-sufficient and narrower than Melee, which supports basically an entire character unto itself.
 
It's been my practical experience that a 4-Charm dip in Melee (Dipping Swallow Defense, Bulwark Stance (and its Fivefold older brother), and Hail-Shattering Practice) was enough to turn a 'Nearly dies in a dramatic 1v1 with a peer opponent' E2 Twilight into a 'Can fight three dragon-blooded to a standstill' total untouchable monster of a combatant. And only two of those Charms are Essence 2! That shit was FUCKED.
 
Kymme said:
It's been my practical experience that a 4-Charm dip in Melee (Dipping Swallow Defense, Bulwark Stance (and its Fivefold older brother), and Hail-Shattering Practice) was enough to turn a 'Nearly dies in a dramatic 1v1 with a peer opponent' E2 Twilight into a 'Can fight three dragon-blooded to a standstill' total untouchable monster of a combatant. And only two of those Charms are Essence 2! That shit was FUCKED.
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I'm curious about how you build Dragon-Blooded antagonists.
 
Gazetteer said:
I'm curious about how you build Dragon-Blooded antagonists.
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Well, I can satisfy your curiosity pretty easily, because despite that game taking place like 5+ years ago I have full stats for all of those NPCs.

Who would win?
Eight Lookshyan Dragon-blooded, supported by over a hundred soldiers and an elite fang of Gunzosha.

or...

Four Celestial Exalts and an army of blood apes.

Feel free to roast 2019 Kymme for his NPC building abilities. I think I used A Clutch of Dragons for these guys, though, so in terms of balance they're a bit out-of-whack with What Fire Has Wrought Deebs. Some might say that's to their benefit, though.
 
Kymme said:
Well, I can satisfy your curiosity pretty easily, because despite that game taking place like 5+ years ago I have full stats for all of those NPCs.

Who would win?
Eight Lookshyan Dragon-blooded, supported by over a hundred soldiers and an elite fang of Gunzosha.

or...

Four Celestial Exalts and an army of blood apes.

Feel free to roast 2019 Kymme for his NPC building abilities. I think I used A Clutch of Dragons for these guys, though, so in terms of balance they're a bit out-of-whack with What Fire Has Wrought Deebs. Some might say that's to their benefit, though.
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I'm not going to roast you, but I'm really confident that I could make three combat Dragon-Blooded who could wreck a low combat investment Solar if they fought one 3 v 1, without having to reach for homebrew or any really degenerate builds. Like, this is not a game that is kind to characters on the wrong end of the action economy, and if this really is a noodly armed Twilight with a few melee charms, I doubt that character even has the 1 dot of hardness you need to ignore anima flux.
 
It was not my intention to imply that she was particularly noodly-armed. By this point she also had Thunderbolt Attack Prana, and her control spell was Invulnerable Skin of Bronze. She was never really like... a low combat investment character? The only PCs were her and her Lunar mate, so she couldn't afford to be a pushover.

The chilling effect was just that, from my perspective, she went from a character who could be threatened (the tense, dramatic 1v1 where she nearly died, which was decided by a clash where both parties got exactly thirteen sux, was against the corebook Deathknight statblock with a bit of Solar Resistance and a counterattack Charm stapled on) to an unassailable juggernaut, with just a couple Charms. Solar Melee's defensive suite is really good, is my point.
 
The funny thing about those writeups, for me, is that they touched on a number of the points I'd bring up specifically to criticize the Solar Charmset. But the overall tone seems neutral-to-positive.

So I'm curious. Omicron, Kaiya: how do you feel about the state of affairs you're describing?
 
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