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General Exalted Thread

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Aleph said:
Yup. Shadow Replacement Technique, in Stealth. Lets you hide in someone's shadow and control them.
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Bleh.

Hiding in someone's shadow? Okay, I could see that kinda-sorta-not-quite-Solaresque-but-passable-maybe*.

But control? I realize they're probably trying to emulate that one character in Naruto with "playing with shadows", but that's not a Solar thing. If you want that effect, it belongs in something like Ebon Shadow Style or a Terrestrial circle spell.

* It's still not really a "Solar" way of being stealthy. Being unnoticeable (either through superlative skill or by forcing people to not notice you), perhaps bending light around, an instinctive knowledge of where to move to stay out of view (the "I'm always in your blind spot" approach)... those feel a lot more Solar.
 
Lioness said:
I'm not sure I agree with this in context.
The dice mechanics you have an issue with are calibrated to the ability/circumstance in question and I find them a welcome change from 2e's forced symmetry with it's excellencies and post-excellencies that ignore the fact that different dice pools are used to achieve different ends.
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This means different dice pools also behave differently, which is tugging at a problem. Good rules are consistent and unchanging, relatively speaking. If I know how to resolve one Ability, I should be able to directly use that to resolve another. Having abilities behave differently with different probabilities directly screws with that consistency and constancy. I'd say that this is just as bad in game design as it is in law, except in game design the stakes are smaller and you don't have nearly as much documentation on what makes a good game.

Although, you know, you can probably analogize from how we make rulesets in real life when stakes are higher.

Not to mention the newbie trap presented by the Third Excellency as pretty much anything other than a late step DV booster or the fucking stupid way that First Excellency interacted with static values.
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This is a problem inherent to the Charms themselves being weak, not to the lack of dice tricks. Third Excellency could be fixed by getting rid of it, for example, which would probably have been better all told-which is reducing dice tricks.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
This means different dice pools also behave differently, which is tugging at a problem. Good rules are consistent and unchanging, relatively speaking. If I know how to resolve one Ability, I should be able to directly use that to resolve another. Having abilities behave differently with different probabilities directly screws with that consistency and constancy.
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You'd need more abstraction than I'd care for to make searching for a piece of information in an abandoned library and someone trying to kill your character with a knife be resolved the same way.
Either that or some kind of book searching combat.
 
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Okay, here's my attempt to fix craft: Just cut out all the xp stuff and replace it with the workings system, and fold all the subcrafts into one ability. It allows you to directly model finding interesting things like dragons fangs and broken first age artifacts and using them to make new ones, as well as making lesser components in order to create bigger artifacts. The difficulty is 5 for a good workshop, 4 for an exceptional workshop, and 3 for a manse devoted to crafting. An NA artifact needs 50 success, 5 needs 40, 4 needs 35, and so on, and you have a base of six intervals to do it. You can add intervals in the same way as with sorcery, and the intervals have a base time of one season, which can be decreased with the relevant charms. Crafting does not require xp, only time, and normal items are made with a simple Dex+Craft roll.

There, a simple, elegant craft system that isn't bloated or easy to break, and does not require that your character sit in a hole making spoons for a day before they can make a sword.
 
Lioness said:
You'd need more abstraction than I'd care for to make searching for a piece of information in an abandoned library and someone trying to kill your character with a knife be resolved the same way.
Either that or some kind of book searching combat.
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Combat in RPGs is interesting in this because a lot of RPGs have special fiddly personal combat rules and if you look at them objectively they basically have special fiddly combat rules because it's an expected thing rather than because the RPG's primary focus is on combat. Perhaps if RPGs didn't exist from wargames and thus have the expectation of a heavy combat system we'd have system emphasis in other places. Amusingly Exalted is one of the games which I would think could possibly benefit or at least lose very little from abstracting personal combat and emphasizing large-scale combat. A reverse of the current rules treatment of War and Melee, as it were.

This isn't a failing-it's just that combat is a special edge case because of RPG origins and player expectations. And yes, you're correct that at some point this hits an abstraction wall, but the same reason I don't roll d8s for Athletics and d666s for Lore applies to why different abilities having different dice tricks and thus different probability curves is aggravating. People like cross-applicable rules and doctrines. People like being able to learn one system and then be able to apply it to multiple situations.
 
Aleph said:
We might move from there into how a lot of the decisions in this shining new edition seem to be made less from the perspective of writing a good game that's easy to build on, and more from the perspective of "lets make sure we can easily churn out future supplements full of more Martial Arts Styles and Evocations so that we can keep getting money out of our fanbase".
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As I think is evident by now, I'm not the biggest fan of 3e, and I've put at least a little effort into examining why, but this I haven't noticed yet. Which decisions do you mean, and why do you look at them that way?
 
MJ12 Commando said:
Combat in RPGs is interesting in this because a lot of RPGs have special fiddly personal combat rules and if you look at them objectively they basically have special fiddly combat rules because it's an expected thing rather than because the RPG's primary focus is on combat. Perhaps if RPGs didn't exist from wargames and thus have the expectation of a heavy combat system we'd have system emphasis in other places.
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I think whatever alternate origins RPGs could have had the meat of the system would've been interacting with other people.
 
Random Entity said:
As I think is evident by now, I'm not the biggest fan of 3e, and I've put at least a little effort into examining why, but this I haven't noticed yet. Which decisions do you mean, and why do you look at them that way?
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Evocations, Martial Arts and to some extent Exigents and the many other new types of Exalt are all things where enormous amounts of wordcount can be devoted to a relatively small number of shiny toys that people will want to play with. However, homebrewing your own Evocations that aren't just straight mechanical ports of Volcano Cutter with altered aesthetics is hard, and not many people will want to/be able to do it, so there will be a high demand for supplements of MOAR EVOCATIONS, etcetera. Ditto with the Martial Arts system - there are barely a dozen Styles in Core, and room for dozens more in a hypothetical Scroll of the Monk 3.0, and they can always come out with more. Similarly, the enormous Charm bloat means that they can publish extra supplements full of new Charms, most of which will also probably be dice tricks.

The enormous number of Charms, the huge Styles, the vast meandering Evocation trees, the bumper crop of new Exalt types; these all mean that you have to flip through hundreds if not thousands of effects when building characters or referencing things and deciding how to grow. They mean that the potential for hilariously broken combinations of effects that snap balance like a twig is much higher. Their sheer wordcount and tradeoff of breadth for depth means that it's not possible to give attention to many different concepts - in the wordcount that the 3e leak used for maybe a dozen Martial Arts Charm Trees, the Style system I use could fit 10 to 15 example Styles for every single Ability, giving you ways to be a long-range sniper or an artillerist or Robin Hood or a Wild West cowboy or whatever all just in Archery alone.

Thus, the system is huge and hypercomplex and confusing, intimidating or impenetrable to newbies, rife with potential for mishaps to occur and break gaming groups when someone accidentally stumbles across an utterly broken combination or finds themselves 200xp ahead of their friends and the GM doesn't know how to handle it... but it's also something that can churn out supplements and extra books full of more Charms or more Evocations or more Martial Arts styles or whatever for years. Given that, I can't help but suspect that certain choices may have been made more along the lines of "how do we ensure that the line doesn't nearly die off again and we can always put out another book that people will pay money for?" than "how do we make a good game that is easily picked up and played with, and has as few mechanical landmines as possible in it?"
 
Random Entity said:
As I think is evident by now, I'm not the biggest fan of 3e, and I've put at least a little effort into examining why, but this I haven't noticed yet. Which decisions do you mean, and why do you look at them that way?
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They added evocations, which seems designed to sell a book on them, as well as providing easy page space for future supplements. They added Getemians, Liminals, and Exigents, and the on the ask the devs thread they've mentioned that there are two other new exalt types that they haven't even mentioned yet, coming from the East and West.
 
Shyft said:
Not actually saying you're wrong, but I feel like chipping in re: 3rd Excellency.

The Third Excellency is best used on rolls that you have to pass, but don't care about how much you pass by. A difficulty 1 dex+athletics roll for example, is ideal fodder for 3rd excellency. The 3rd ex is good for staunching bleeding and resisting poisons as well.
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I take it for increasing static values; at Ability 5 (which is generally where I start my combat abilities), it's +5 dice for 4 motes, compared to +5 dice for 5 motes with First Excellency.
This becomes no longer true if you take Supreme Perfection of (Ability), because 3rd Ex only gets a 1m discount while the costs for 1st and 2nd Ex are cut in half, but that's something for future azoic to worry about. Current azoic just wants a higher PDV/DDV.

Also, is anyone willing to compile a list of all the different dice trick effects for me? I'd like to see if I can work out all the different probabilities (separate and combined).
... Ugh, I'm probably going to have to find the leak so I can take a look at the stunt system and see if I want to make use of that.

Lioness said:
I think whatever alternate origins RPGs could have had the meat of the system would've been interacting with other people.
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You mean... RPing? Please, no! It's my one weakness!
 
Fenrir666 said:
Oh my FUCKING GOD. YES! THE CHARMS ARE GOING IN DIRECTIONS YOU DON'T LIKE! TOUGH. FUCKING. SHIT. Clearly, it's not the game you were hoping for! Some of us feel like 3rd Edition delievered on everything it promised and more. Plenty of us love the new directions! You are not fucking everybody! Not everybody wants something different! If you don't like the new directions, too bad. Sucks for you. You're gonna need to do some homebrewing.
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So Exalted 3e = D&D 4e, gotcha.
 
C.o.S.a.R said:
I'm not so sure about that.
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I'd say it's the opposite. D&D4E was so controversial because it burned a gigantic number of sacred cows in its quest for mechanical balance. Exalted 3E seems to leave a lot of 2E's core stuff unexamined, which is why people are sighing about charm bloat and weird dice tricks and more and more things to keep track of, and tries to paper it over with "well it's not simulationist" which if anything makes mechanical balance even more important.

I think @EarthScorpion and @Revlid and @Aleph are disappointed not because Exalted Third Edition burned sacred cows, but because it promised to start a sacred barbeque with all the announcements of huge changes! no charm bloat! less ridiculous power level wank! and decided to spray-paint all the sacred cows gold and let them wander free-range to shit on everything in sight.
 
Indeed, 4e is actually very balanced, and fun to play!

There's just... not much to the system but combat. So if you want anything from the mechanics beyond "I punch him", you're going to be disappointed.
 
I actually do hope that Exalted 3E is equivalent to D&D's 4E, because that would mean that in 2 years or so we get Exalted Fourth Edition, which has all of the good parts of Exalted 3E but manages to satisfy people who don't like Ex3E!
 
notanautomaton said:
They added evocations, which seems designed to sell a book on them, as well as providing easy page space for future supplements. They added Getemians, Liminals, and Exigents, and the on the ask the devs thread they've mentioned that there are two other new exalt types that they haven't even mentioned yet, coming from the East and West.
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Interestingly enough, if you were going to add funky dice trick charms to a game, Evocations would probably have been the best place to put them because that makes it far easier to homebrew balanced Evocations. "You get an artifact. You can gain funky dice tricks related to that artifact via Evocations" might be less exciting than having heavy armor that lets you freely facetank for people or make an automatic follow-up attack but are way easier to balance because it's more... mathematical.

"Getting +1 success on average" is a lot easier to figure out the value of in relative terms than "you can block fists with your face" or "you can flow through a gap in the door."
 
Eukie said:
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okay, so then 3ex only lets you reroll att+abil?

becaue for the sake of simplicity, I've been using it as "reroll pool" which means that you can try to find non-excellency die adders and then use 3rd ex to reroll your expanded pool. Eg, rolling att+abi+ess for Join battle thanks to a martial art charm, and then using the reroll if that rolls low, (Or att+abil+specialty+equip bonus for medicine.)
 
So, one idea I've been playing around with Exalted homebrew-wise is what I've been calling "Ex15". The idea is that it's just like Exalted (either edition, but probably 3e with all homebrew, not-dice-bloat-y Charms, and the Third Excellency reinstated), except that Excellencies have this clause: "Any pool enhanced with an Excellency cannot rise above fifteen dice before stunt bonus". The idea is to make difficulty 5 a bit more meaningful, and focus combat Essence expenditure around doing cool things instead of pumping your numbers high. Any thoughts?
 
Deations said:
Dang, mine too, for entirely different reasons.

PCs are exceptional, NPCs can generally suck it no matter how badass their backstory is.
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I would really like to play in a world where I can be awesome without everybody else having to suck in order to facilitate that.

Actually, I'm fairly sure the Dev's have had some very pointed words on just this subject, talking about how if, for example, mortals mostly suck and don't matter, then the whole setting is shit. When everybody else is a moron, being hailed as a genius is faint praise indeed.

So, I think it's reasonable to expect Exalted to shake out as a setting where the PC's are not set above their peers simply by dint of being PC's. If the game fails to live up to that sentiment, I think that's a reasonable criticism.
 
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Guys(And Ladies), i am disappointed in all of you.

Yes, you, you, you and also you! Talking about a broken charm about unfair Solars for at least eight pages, without even realizing that you have been taken for idiots and fools by causing the use of the famous Lunar charm Merkat Steal the Spotlight Prana.

Really, has anybody read the leak? Because either you all completely failed horribly your reading comprension, or you have the wrost sight ever.
God-King's Shrike isn't a Solar charm guys(And ladies). Its a Lunar one.

Really, how many of you have failed to see the clearly written true name of the charm(Its right on the right of the fake name! ): Dogstar Rumination.

A Dogstar is obviously a mythologic beast(I also linked one for the lazy lazy peoples that cannot even search it) and Ruminations is derivated by Ruminants, which is a kind of Mammals(Cows and their ilk for those who haven't even exited their house/basement).

Really peoples, for shame: you all caused a Lunar Derail.
If i were youself i would go hurl a bit.
 
Kylar said:
On craft and craft xp: I have a better example then spoons (as amusing as that one is). See, Craft (Cooking) is a thing. So what you do is you open a restraunt. Or a tea house. For extra hilarity, you do it somewhere like the Shire, where the residents have an absurd number of meals a day. This is a bit longer term then the hundreds of spoons plan, (though you could totally run a promotion with the intent of the equivalent hundreds of crafted spoons) but its ultimately far harder for ST to call shenanigans on. Well, and for the ST to go 'you have crashed the market for spoons, and thus no longer can make money off them' or things like that.

The craft system really does need a framework for bulk crafting, particularly on the rewards side. I'm also not completely adverse to the idea of removing silver xp altogether, though I'd need to sit down and look over the complications of that. At the very least, it would cut the Craft charm tree down a bit.
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Chef Doom? Doom Chef? Master Chef?

How do you even name a build like that?
 
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