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Ascensions and Transgressions by Aleph and Earthscorpion is pretty good.
General Exalted Thread
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Mm, I might be giving the wrong impression there. I'm not saying I want Exalted PCs to be in constant danger of getting their asses kicked. Most fights, the brutality will be heading in the other direction.
That's actually a big part of why I'm not keen on the idea of Fate-style take-outs for Exalted. The people you carve through should get carved up.
But like Kymme said, the current system makes the balance between easy wins and TPKs more delicate than we'd prefer. A little something to ameliorate that might be good. Just in case a Storyteller carelessly gives Heaven Thunder Hammer to a Solar NPC and a player gets to experience its explosiveness first-hand.
That's actually a big part of why I'm not keen on the idea of Fate-style take-outs for Exalted. The people you carve through should get carved up.
But like Kymme said, the current system makes the balance between easy wins and TPKs more delicate than we'd prefer. A little something to ameliorate that might be good. Just in case a Storyteller carelessly gives Heaven Thunder Hammer to a Solar NPC and a player gets to experience its explosiveness first-hand.
I'm not sure how true it is anymore, but I have had multiple STs who did hold to the "5s are bad" philosophy. The lighter end was being required to right a full paragraph of backstory for every five, another allowed a single five at chargen, another didn't allow them at all, and one gave me a rather condescending lecture about power gaming.
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Huh, even when I started in 2e, I never came across "no 5s" as any sort of expectation.
3e's default scaling costs just do so much to incentivize them, mathematically. Although that is the thing I see universally houseruled; I've never played with non-flat dot costs.
3e's default scaling costs just do so much to incentivize them, mathematically. Although that is the thing I see universally houseruled; I've never played with non-flat dot costs.
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I have run into some people who will espouse the whole "players taking 5s is bad without a Good Reason" thing still and get very defensive about it, but it does not seem like the predominant mode of thinking.
3E has the option to negate some of the damage you'd receive by taking a crippling injury instead, but only once per story. Now, those injuries aren't necessarily very meaningful - like, losing one eye doesn't really do much beyond giving the character an excuse to wear a cool eye patch - but I think they're an alright idea for ameliorating the potential lethality somewhat. An idea that'd maybe benefit from some more thought and work put into it and from the injuries having more weight to them, but conceptually solid.
Maybe also having "dramatic" injuries as well. Like, you survive and get away, but you've failed, your plans are ruined and, your enemies are strengthened? You take a physical (wound), social (lost ally), and/or mental (vendetta, intimacy, lost knowledge) injury?
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That is how it works in Essence, but the 3e system is much more literal and like, has quite a bit of charm tech anchored onto it at this point.
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That's been a major motivating factor in the "hot pursuit" and "court scale" subsystems I've been building: laying out explicit mechanics for retreating from a fight you can't win, which the PCs could then be supernaturally excellent at. Benefits for 'holding the field' after a battle, and for using chases to lead someone into an ambush, so even someone who could run them down might reasonably choose not to, purely as a matter of strategic self-preservation.
In the court-scale stuff, rules for wide-ranging patrols, rumors, omens, and the bureaucratic 'runaround' which make it reliably possible to know someone dangerously powerful is nearby before they're actually in range to attack you personally, and clearer ways to avoid or redirect such a confrontation. Luke obliterates Grand Moff Tarkin and his entire supporting battlegroup in one shot, but nobody could reasonably call that a disappointing anticlimax! The hard part was getting close enough, over the course of hours or days, while racing against Tarkin's own tracking efforts.
It's one reason that I would generally suggest that an NPC who is crashed will try to get away.
By having NPCs act like retreat is an option, it can signal to players that it is okay for them to retreat.
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I think this is a misunderstanding of what crash represents both narratively and like, mechanically. It doesn't mean "they've lost the fight and are now choosing to fight to the death", it means that they've been caught on the back foot, that they're at a disadvantage in the fiction. It's something they can recover from. And mechanically, it makes them vulnerable, but like... It's not a state you can never remove yourself from, and there's even a built in dramatic reversal mechanic for if you crash someone while you're in crash -- which is very easily done if, say, they've just taken advantage of the situation to make a decisive attack and reset to 3 initiative themselves.
I think looking to the example of the official NPC writeups in some of the more recent books makes more sense. Like, people and animals and spirits etc. Will run away or surrender or whatever if they've taken x amount of decisive damage, because that represents an actual injury, not just being put into a risky situation in a fight they're otherwise willing to have.
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I mean, if the overwhelming majority of the game's officially statted antagonists implode the moment a character with higher-than-the-assumed-default degree of mechanical optimization makes a threatening gesture in their direction, then taking more 5s than the system assumed you would is putting avoidable extra workload on your ST, which is like... a bit rude, so I can totally understand where that thinking is coming from.
(Of course, the correct way to handle that is to make character creation work on the V5/Essence paradigm and make those implicit assumptions explicit in the ways a character can look like at chargen, but ah well.)
There is no assumed default mechanical optimization that the enemy statblocks were designed with. Morke came from a culture of "people will just grab 3s" and wrote a sidebar going "you should feel free to take 5s", and then wrote a game system assuming people will mostly take 5s (the Solar set's prereqs are mostly 5). The game does not improve if people don't optimize, it just makes it harder to track people's capabilities. What makes antagonists disintegrate is that Solar Charms are unmanagably powerful. The system will force you to have 5s in your specialties before long, and then Solar Charms will start obliterating any opposition.
As well, Essence does have the same issue. You can have one PC wildly, wildly stronger than any other PC in Essence because their Charm picks were better. Your Charms are your power. You can win chargen in Essence easily and I'm honestly unsure how you would have gotten the impression otherwise? The only reason V5 doesn't have this problem is that it isn't handing out supernatural powers at a meaningful level, but you can still optimize to the point another PC has no meaningful chance against you by spending your picks on combat. It's just a smaller gap.
WW descendant games are, in general, very willing to give out game-shakingly powerful combat powers balanced by the existence of game-shakingly powerful powers in other categories you can't take immediately if you took the game-shakingly powerful combat powers and a bewildering array of vectors that a clever, experienced ST can attack your character with.
This also makes a clever, paranoid ST incredibly capable of wiping the floor with new players who don't understand the opposition they're going to face. In that sense, Ex3 is actually merciful, in that the band of players taking 3s and 4s will not, in fact, get stomped purely by pregen statblocks. The ST actually has to commit to the bit!
(Am I still bitter over the fact my one and only VtR game involved being told it was about politics then starting out with getting burnt to half-death by experienced vampire hunters and getting informed all our political contacts might be traitors? Maybe.)
This also makes a clever, paranoid ST incredibly capable of wiping the floor with new players who don't understand the opposition they're going to face. In that sense, Ex3 is actually merciful, in that the band of players taking 3s and 4s will not, in fact, get stomped purely by pregen statblocks. The ST actually has to commit to the bit!
(Am I still bitter over the fact my one and only VtR game involved being told it was about politics then starting out with getting burnt to half-death by experienced vampire hunters and getting informed all our political contacts might be traitors? Maybe.)
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You can, in fact, have Dex 3, (combat ability of your choice) 5, no specialty, and no Artifact weaponry, and still have access to every Charm printed for your ability of choice. If you do so, and if "being challenged in combat" is the specific play experience you're looking for, I would wager that you're probably going to have a better time than you would if you went 5/5/3 in your physical attributes and rounded your character out with a matching set of Artifacts, specialties, and 5s in all of the supplementary abilities that neatly plug in the holes of your primary combat set!
Solar Charms are powerful, yes, but I'm kind of struggling to square the circle of how all of the following design goals can be accomplished at the same time in a system built on the bones of Storyteller:
- Players should be able to feel like a Big Deal even if they have built their characters with low system mastery
- A Dawn fresh out of chargen should be able to throw down with in-setting heavyweights like Ahlat or Ma-Ha-Suchi and have a reasonable chance of coming out on top
- You should have a dizzying amount of build variety and all of those builds should be viable even if they're not necessarily all on even footing
- And, while maintaining all of the above, high-optimization, high system mastery players building their blorbos for maximum efficiency should also be able to feel challenged by officially statted opposition
Honestly, given the constraints above, "the splat that defines the absolute ceiling of power for the game line has access to effects that are too powerful" is probably among the least bad of the possible failure modes we could have?
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FaeGlade Plural
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"Low System Mastery" can simply be solved by telling players how to build their characters in order to achieve a specific result.
There is nothing wrong with telling players "if you want your character to excel in combat, put 5/5/3 into your physical attributes", or even getting more elaborate than that.
There is nothing wrong with telling players "if you want your character to excel in combat, put 5/5/3 into your physical attributes", or even getting more elaborate than that.
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Yes, but similarly, I also think there's nothing wrong with designing a game around the principle that your blorbo shouldn't need to be both absolutely jacked and impossibly graceful in order to excel in combat? (I'm working with a definition of "excel" here that means "capable of triumphing against officially-statted opposition presented as a credible combat threat", not "the guy with Physical secondary and a 3/3/3 spread should be literally as effective at fighting as the girl who dumped all her BPs into flexing a 5/5/5 straight out of chargen").
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The failure mode is that a Solar with Dex 3, no actual specialty, and Strength 5 can rip Ahlat limb from limb with Essence 1 and 2 effects without trying very hard at all.
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No, it's not rude to design a character so that they function in a way that makes sense with the incentives the system is giving you, and you should not play with any ST who talks like it is. If an ST got angry with me for putting 5s in my character's attributes because they don't want to have to modify undertuned QCs the way everyone running 3e has to sometimes, then I would be very tempted to just find another game. It takes 5 in character months to bring an attribute from 4 dots to 5 after character creation, which is just a truly unwieldy amount of downtime compared to almost anything else.
There is a pretty vast gulf between ruthless optimisation that snaps the entire game in half and not deliberately setting yourself up to have a character who struggles to meet prerequisites or make rolls against decently designed peer opponents.
FaeGlade Plural
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Well then it's gonna be very difficult to balance things for the characters whom their players want to be both absolutely jacked and impossibly graceful. Which, y'know, is not gonna be a rarity in any game where you can do that (because games are often about wish fulfillment), never mind in a game like Exalted where being exceptional is part of the advertised point of playing.
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I, uhh, need you to break this down for me a bit more because I'm having serious doubts that this is actually a thing that happens reliably, especially the "without trying very hard at all" part. I mean, if your "let's murder Ahlat" engine requires you to dedicate like 12-20 Charms and most of your motes and WP to this goal, then yeah, you could say that technically you "did it with Essence 1 and 2 effects, without trying very hard at all" in the sense that maybe the outcome wasn't really in doubt and you-as-the-player could have made an even more powerful character instead of the one you actually made, but. Um. Dedicating all or nearly all of the extremely generous 15-Charm allotment you get straight out of chargen to this one specific purpose definitely does count as "trying pretty hard" by any sane definition of the term, in my book.
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From my perspective, like, I don't actually care about Solars that much, I don't really play them, I don't really run for them. This is not because I hate them and want to make it my entire personality or whatever, this is just because their narratives and mechanics don't really interest me very much.
But when we get onto this general subject, I think about how the more recent material, the more recent charmsets, were very obviously not designed by people who think everyone is going to be afraid to take more than a 3 in everything or that most STs are going to call them rude for doing so. Like, with Sidereals, when you look at their ability prerequisites, and at how many of their charms use calculations like [+ attribute/2], and at their excellencies (your dice limit doesn't go up with your ability rating, but you need 3 dots for target number 6 and 5 dots for target number 5), this is obviously not an Exalt type designed this way?
I'm not going to harp on all the shortcomings of the corebook, because the entire subject is very well trodden ground, but I don't feel like artificially introducing more ways that it meshes poorly with newer, better written material is to the game's benefit.
But when we get onto this general subject, I think about how the more recent material, the more recent charmsets, were very obviously not designed by people who think everyone is going to be afraid to take more than a 3 in everything or that most STs are going to call them rude for doing so. Like, with Sidereals, when you look at their ability prerequisites, and at how many of their charms use calculations like [+ attribute/2], and at their excellencies (your dice limit doesn't go up with your ability rating, but you need 3 dots for target number 6 and 5 dots for target number 5), this is obviously not an Exalt type designed this way?
I'm not going to harp on all the shortcomings of the corebook, because the entire subject is very well trodden ground, but I don't feel like artificially introducing more ways that it meshes poorly with newer, better written material is to the game's benefit.
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I agree that you should avoid playing with a ST who gets angry at you for putting 5s in your character's attributes, or in stats that are not strictly necessary to bring your character concept to life. At the same time, I also think that if the book tells a player explicitly (by describing ratings of 3 and 4 in terms like "above average", "the level of a highly skilled expert", "exceptional", "the vizier whose lies have ensnared the entire court in their web of intrigue might only have Manipulation 3") and implicitly (by statting up the overwhelming majority of opponents in such a way that characters with dice pools in the 7-9 range are perfectly capable of handling them without much issue) that it is fine to leave their stats in the 3-4 range for the entirety of their character's career, and that having a 5 marks them as a truly exceptional figure, and then the player puts a 5 into something, they shouldn't act surprised that this will result in them being really good at that thing, to the extent of being able to style on dudes who are less good at that thing?
I think that the assumption the core was built on was that by putting a 5 into something, you implicitly enter a contract with your ST that you are okay with being known as the Peerless Whateverer (Brawler? Courtier? Sail... er?), and while that might be a source of recurring conflict (by signing up to be The Peerless Duelist, you also implicitly signal that you'd like your character to regularly partake in narratively significant duels, after all!), the dramatic question behind that conflict is probably going to be "by how much do I win?", rather than "am I going to win?".
Yes. I don't view this as a bad thing - I think Exalted should support a player's desire to be so good at something that they simply don't have a realistic chance of losing a conflict in that particular arena, because as you have pointed out, games are often about wish fulfillment, and "being the best ever" is a very reasonable kind of wish fulfillment to expect from the game that advertises itself as being about world-shaking demigods.
I think that it's a very reasonable thing to say, as a player, that "my Invincible Sword Princess fantasy feels hollow and unearned if I outclass opponents to the extent that it feels like they're unable to offer meaningful opposition", but it is equally reasonable for another player to say that "my Invincible Sword Princess fantasy comes to a screeching halt and gets smeared across a brick wall when it turns out that the character I lovingly made and thought was The Invincible Sword Princess was Actually Very Vincible All Along". Both of these are potential failure modes of a game system built to serve a core fantasy built upon a deeply understandable player expectation ("Oh Glowing Demigod Game, please give me wish-fulfillment"), but I think that one of these failure modes is actually a more serious issue than the other, and it is better for a designer to focus on avoiding the latter than on avoiding the former. Moreover, this has pretty much been the stance the game line took ever since 1E, as the age-old Grabowski quote can attest:
"Yeah, in theory, Ahlat should operate in that scale but would he really be all that useful if he did? If you know that that scale exists, dressing [opponents] up to fight in it is easy. If you don't know that scale exists, you probably aren't interested in discovering it" is one of those insights that live in my head rent free, and like, yes, Ex3 is a significantly more complex game to the extent that "dressing opponents up to fight in that scale" is actually not that easy at all, but-
When I think of the "median Exalted player", my mind just immediately jumps to those dudes who did the one podcast that existed around the time immediately after the core dropped, whose take on the combat engine was that Ex3 enforces a relentless "tyranny of system mastery" on the player and he simply can't cope with the mental load of having 30 Charms in Brawl. The median player is most likely a generic someone with a probably rather stressful and demanding job who can barely even remember all of their Charms on a good day, much less form intricate murder combos to OHKO Ahlat straight out of chargen. I don't think it's a misstep for the game to stat up opponents with the expectation in mind that this is the sort of person who is going to form the majority of the playerbase, even if, if we're being honest, by this point - almost a decade into the lifecycle of the game - that sort of player most likely ditched the system years ago.
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I don't think it's even a little bit controversial in the wider fan community that the corebook's sample difficulties as well as many of its QCs are wildly undertuned and like, not really coherent with the design of the system, and it's very tiresome to pretend that they are. Like, we have the corebook we have, and part of STing is understanding that you need to work around its problems in some places and with them in others. Especially if you're running for one of the better designed later splats.
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To some extent, every complex system is always going to have system-mastery-related balance problems. But there are definitely things Exalted could do that would help.
One of them would be less random scaling. If a Charm adds (Strength) instead of +5, it opens up opportunities for people to be unexpectedly weak. If it adds (Strength) instead of +3, it opens up opportunities for people to be unexpectedly strong. This sort of thing serves to magnify the gap between the optimized and the not.
It's also just more stuff to keep track of, which has always been an issue in this game. Obviously stat-based scaling has its place, but we probably don't need or want as much as we have.
One of them would be less random scaling. If a Charm adds (Strength) instead of +5, it opens up opportunities for people to be unexpectedly weak. If it adds (Strength) instead of +3, it opens up opportunities for people to be unexpectedly strong. This sort of thing serves to magnify the gap between the optimized and the not.
It's also just more stuff to keep track of, which has always been an issue in this game. Obviously stat-based scaling has its place, but we probably don't need or want as much as we have.