It might be said that anything less than 5s in the two is a liability.
General Exalted Thread
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azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
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... And a consequence of standing with people who fight with supernatural skill.
I don't see why you expect "very slightly above average" to be a relevant level of investment when your buddy is so good at using his sword that he can create a sword from his soul, or similar feats.
If you didn't invest in combat, you should avoid combat. If this upsets you, invest in combat. If you didn't invest in combat but expect there to be combat, you should make sure you can escape. If you didn't make sure you can escape, expect to die.
If you struggle against things that are non-entities to your allies, then when they have a serious fight you should not be there. People who haven't invested in combat being bad at combat is a reasonable aspect of the system.
Well, yeah. How often do you hear about 1 guy winning against 5 guys? 10 guys?
Depends on the enemies you're dealing with. I'd shoot for a Defense of at least 4 without any boosts, and pick up charms to help. For example, Dodge lets you drain initiative by dodging attacks, and can even steal all of your attacker's initiative (and crash them), or build initiative by just standing near an enemy and not getting hit.
Oh, okay smaller than normal group. I was thinking for the archetypal circle of 5. I think a properly played melee dawn can just straight up win that fight 1v1, but considering they're new, and not able to fully use their motes I can see where you're coming from.
We'd been discussing it in the context of Fivefold Bulwark Stance and the 1m dipping swallow invocation so I had DV 8 in mind when I said that. Probably should have mentioned it though.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
You try simultaneously fighting off multiple opponents with combat experience and a willingness to kill, who, by the way, probably are going to ambush you or at least have the advantage of picking the terrain. Needing to have super-powers to pull that off is not unrealistic. At all.
That level of investment is supposed to be sound for someone who fights occasionally. Like say the aforementioned bandits. Anyone who is going to be a target for wild hunts either gets better quickly or get dead quickly. And chargen solars are not meant to represent solars at the first moment of exaltation.
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Well, it depends on which charms you grab. If it's Excellent Strike and Dipping Swallow Defense (on top of 5/5 because BP), you're probably good. If you took Durability of Oak Meditation, Spirit Strengthens the Skin, and Ox-Body Technique... well, those are all nice, but you should really take a couple more. They probably highballed it on purpose.
For basic don't-get-killedness? Nah. 3/5 or 4/4 (plus a few charms) is plenty to deal with bandits solo or keep you alive while your circlemates do the heavy lifting. The problem with 3 dex on a secondary combatant is that it's so damn expensive to buy it up later if you decide you want to move up to directly contributing.
Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
I would say that the answer for skill would be "enough to get 3-5 Charms into a tree" which usually comes to 4 or 5.
Also, anyone got thoughts on this?
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Oh, yeah, I have total faith in an experienced player's ability to stat a chargen Dawn who could win the fight, maybe even one who could do it without flaring too badly. The Ahlat-Killer Brawl build would do it trivially; if there's one lesson to be learned in the combat observations in general so far, it seems to be that you really want an Onslaught-negator.
But this was not that party. The "round two" fight against the noble was a very narrow thing, even with me pruning back his Charms and health levels in the way that's been discussed so far. "The Dawn comes roaring out and drops 20i for a kill-shot" is a huge outlier relative to their normal performance vs. enemies of that caliber.
Ah, okay. Sure, that changes the numbers.
Matsci
Grash itsh griah! Rwar arr rawrrawrarar!
Ok, I knew the whole Build Points vs XP thing was broken, but I didn't realize how broken it was.
A Starting Solar will walk out of charactergen with between ~427 to 252 xp worth of dots, depending on how well they min-max.
That's 125 XP difference. That's cocking insane.
A Starting Solar will walk out of charactergen with between ~427 to 252 xp worth of dots, depending on how well they min-max.
That's 125 XP difference. That's cocking insane.
2.5 or 3e? Someone math'd it out earlier in the thread for 3e and the difference wasn't that big.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
Probably 2.5e. Willpower cost difference is X-box Hueg.
Sucal
The Devil’s Cut
- Location
- Bottom of the barrel
There wouldn't be a Mortal version of the avengers, because Mortals wouldn't be able to handle the type of threats that exist in creation, let alone those that invade it. A creation version of the Avengers would be made up of various exalts/exigents, spirit blooded or high level automaton created by genius exalted crafters. Tony stark is practically an archtypical Twilight, the Hulk is a Lunar rage monster who likely knows Infernal Monster style, Black Widow/Hawkeye are spirit bloods with good martial arts or a useful progenitor, etc etc.
Mortals only really matter in combat if they have either: a substantial advantage in numbers (100x to x), using their specialty to attack the opponents weakness (swordsmaster beating on a non fighty zenith, or supernatural back of their own.
Occult 5: Summon demonic back up dancers/ablative initiative shields.
Followers 3: Army of Bodyguards.
Retainer 5: Dragonblooded Oath-sworn
Familar 3: T FUCKING REX
etc etc.
If anything is potent enough that they can simply slaughter through those easily, then 3-5 combat charms wouldn't really make enough of a difference against it to keep you alive (admittedly followers 3 is the weakest).
FaeGlade Plural
Semper Legens
- Location
- Land of Bureaucracy
- Pronouns
- Plural/They
Ride 2 and a Horse.
With Dexterity 2, that gives you 8 combat movement dice - good enough to keep out of range of a good number of combatants. Granted, you should probably invest a bit more if you want to consistently stay out of melee range, but that's some pretty minimal investment here.
With Dexterity 2, that gives you 8 combat movement dice - good enough to keep out of range of a good number of combatants. Granted, you should probably invest a bit more if you want to consistently stay out of melee range, but that's some pretty minimal investment here.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
Player 2: Have a friend who is willing to have his character defend-other yours.
Are we cool yet?
Are we cool yet?
Sucal
The Devil’s Cut
- Location
- Bottom of the barrel
No but you've been assigned Keter duty and shall be fed to 682!
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
So hey, a pseudo-essay grew out of one of my homebrew projects.
Summary
A 2-step bureaucracy system (Begin Project Action begets the Project Action). You begin a project which gives you/the organization an interval/ time limit to gather everything you need to attempt the action. Once you have everything, the organization generates automatic successes over a new interval and applies it to the project difficulty/cumulative difficulty. Other rules and mechanics exist but fall outside of this summary.
Also intended are rules for Creating Organizations, Management, and their traits.
Mission Statements and Notes
"Build your subsystem with the intent that bad people will use it to do bad things with it." With the reasoning behind it that bad people are next to always proactive, conquering, while good folks are passive and defensive of the status quo.
So if you want a system to Enable people, it has to be a proactive system capable of Evil, not one which encourages turtling and "wait and see" kinds of things, which something can default into like Astrology or Mandate will your emphasis is primarily "everything is fine, just keep the wheels spinning."
Abstraction of Economy
Starting in Exalted 2nd Edition, the three major sources we have of 'value' in the setting is the Resources Background, the Panoply Chapter, and Wyld Shaping Technique.
The Resources background represents your yearly income, and is elaborated on quite nicely both in the Traits Chapter and the Panoply Chapter of the corebook. It gives you reasonable baselines and expectations for starters.
At it's core, Resources is an abstraction of your character's ability to Pay for Stuff. It's both a symbol of availability as well as attainability. This quality is derived from how you portray your Resources. The corebook describe it as 'shares in a shipping company, a rich ruby mine, or a horde of gold and jewels you can reliably pawn off'.
Looking at it that way, Resources is actually saying 'This is how much value you can extract from a [noun].
Noun being Person, Place or Thing, like a Banker, a Farm, or a Tool.
The Panoply chapter goes into further detail regarding the economy of Creation. other things giving examples of what people spend their Resources on, abstracted into dots. An estate for example is Resources 4.
Unfortunately, in this case we don't actually know what they mean by an Estate. In the old world milieu of Exalted and by the above definition of Resources, 'estate' usually meant something like landed elite. A lord's manor with attached vineyard, a local feudal industry, contracts or rights to a particular raw material and so on.
Now, we've probably seen more than a few times where values given were poorly arbitrated. Some things cost too much or cost too little, but past that, the idea of the system is fine.
Lastly we get into Wyld Shaping Technique, which is sadly a morass of poorly phrased mechanics in 2e. Summarizing it, WST allows you to create 'land' at a ratio of 1 dot of potential Resource Value per success.
If you say make Resources 1 land, you have a [plot] that we don't know how big it is (the charm doesn't say), then it's sterile, barren and doesn't have anything worth mining or harvesting. If you spend 5 successes to make Resources 5 land, that would be the same thing as striking it rich on a mine worth Resources 5.
I suppose you could spend the successes to make Resources 5 land based on sheer area, even if it was barren, but again the charm doesn't say.
Further, you can re-apply Wyld Shaping to the same land again, further improving its value with sublets of Resources 4-5 potential. There's nothing that says you can't WST as many mines that will fit upon a plot of land, as long as you can pay the successes and fend off the howling chaos.
This ties back into Resources being 'Value you can extract'. It's just that WST cuts out the need to deal with people/gods who are already living somewhere. You have to deal with raksha and unreality instead.
So that's all a big baseline, which I wanted to lay out before asking the following questions:
Firstly- What defines social, economic and political value in Creation, to players and the world/setting?
Secondly - What is Bureaucracy trying to accomplish as a subsystem that assigns values to things and Projects and weighs them against each other? Obstinately everything in Exalted is created with the intent of producing results, but what kind of results should we get out of this?
Do we want or need something that gives the most Accurate impression of pre-industrial management, something that creates Stories via the interplay between things, or just a downtime system that gives you an alternate path to pursue goals when your character is preoccupied doing other, more actiony things, or whatever combination thereof?
I don't have an answer for that second point yet.
My initial answer regarding Value comes down to my admittedly limited understanding of pre-industrial economy and some common-sense knowledge.
I think what's important is not to focus on the minutiae, and instead build on what these things mean for your games and worlds. Of what it means when a character literally owns all of the farmland outside Whitewall- and what that means for their political control.
Like, I wrote that whole list? You know what it's really going to boil down to? A framework for people to conflict over. Not necessarily fight- though believe, wars are fought over Resources like you wouldn't believe. This, at the core, is a rough assessment of reasons people want other people's stuff, what they have to get it, and what they're willing to do for it.
So these are just the notes, observations and the summary. Enjoy! Bemoan! Whatever!
Summary
A 2-step bureaucracy system (Begin Project Action begets the Project Action). You begin a project which gives you/the organization an interval/ time limit to gather everything you need to attempt the action. Once you have everything, the organization generates automatic successes over a new interval and applies it to the project difficulty/cumulative difficulty. Other rules and mechanics exist but fall outside of this summary.
Also intended are rules for Creating Organizations, Management, and their traits.
Mission Statements and Notes
"Build your subsystem with the intent that bad people will use it to do bad things with it." With the reasoning behind it that bad people are next to always proactive, conquering, while good folks are passive and defensive of the status quo.
So if you want a system to Enable people, it has to be a proactive system capable of Evil, not one which encourages turtling and "wait and see" kinds of things, which something can default into like Astrology or Mandate will your emphasis is primarily "everything is fine, just keep the wheels spinning."
Abstraction of Economy
Starting in Exalted 2nd Edition, the three major sources we have of 'value' in the setting is the Resources Background, the Panoply Chapter, and Wyld Shaping Technique.
The Resources background represents your yearly income, and is elaborated on quite nicely both in the Traits Chapter and the Panoply Chapter of the corebook. It gives you reasonable baselines and expectations for starters.
At it's core, Resources is an abstraction of your character's ability to Pay for Stuff. It's both a symbol of availability as well as attainability. This quality is derived from how you portray your Resources. The corebook describe it as 'shares in a shipping company, a rich ruby mine, or a horde of gold and jewels you can reliably pawn off'.
Looking at it that way, Resources is actually saying 'This is how much value you can extract from a [noun].
Noun being Person, Place or Thing, like a Banker, a Farm, or a Tool.
The Panoply chapter goes into further detail regarding the economy of Creation. other things giving examples of what people spend their Resources on, abstracted into dots. An estate for example is Resources 4.
Unfortunately, in this case we don't actually know what they mean by an Estate. In the old world milieu of Exalted and by the above definition of Resources, 'estate' usually meant something like landed elite. A lord's manor with attached vineyard, a local feudal industry, contracts or rights to a particular raw material and so on.
Now, we've probably seen more than a few times where values given were poorly arbitrated. Some things cost too much or cost too little, but past that, the idea of the system is fine.
Lastly we get into Wyld Shaping Technique, which is sadly a morass of poorly phrased mechanics in 2e. Summarizing it, WST allows you to create 'land' at a ratio of 1 dot of potential Resource Value per success.
If you say make Resources 1 land, you have a [plot] that we don't know how big it is (the charm doesn't say), then it's sterile, barren and doesn't have anything worth mining or harvesting. If you spend 5 successes to make Resources 5 land, that would be the same thing as striking it rich on a mine worth Resources 5.
I suppose you could spend the successes to make Resources 5 land based on sheer area, even if it was barren, but again the charm doesn't say.
Further, you can re-apply Wyld Shaping to the same land again, further improving its value with sublets of Resources 4-5 potential. There's nothing that says you can't WST as many mines that will fit upon a plot of land, as long as you can pay the successes and fend off the howling chaos.
This ties back into Resources being 'Value you can extract'. It's just that WST cuts out the need to deal with people/gods who are already living somewhere. You have to deal with raksha and unreality instead.
So that's all a big baseline, which I wanted to lay out before asking the following questions:
Firstly- What defines social, economic and political value in Creation, to players and the world/setting?
Secondly - What is Bureaucracy trying to accomplish as a subsystem that assigns values to things and Projects and weighs them against each other? Obstinately everything in Exalted is created with the intent of producing results, but what kind of results should we get out of this?
Do we want or need something that gives the most Accurate impression of pre-industrial management, something that creates Stories via the interplay between things, or just a downtime system that gives you an alternate path to pursue goals when your character is preoccupied doing other, more actiony things, or whatever combination thereof?
I don't have an answer for that second point yet.
My initial answer regarding Value comes down to my admittedly limited understanding of pre-industrial economy and some common-sense knowledge.
- Farms for example need to be fairly large to generate a lot of Resources, and they might even be capped at producing 2-3 dots worth of Resources no matter how big or fertile the land is, simply because they can't amass enough product or labor to make it worthwhile. There's no system for that though either.
- A mine can range from Resources 1 to 5, depending on the material, depth of the vein, accessibility and a whole host of other variables.
- A reputable vineyard could be worth Resources 4-5 on reputation alone, even if it takes 50 years for a bottle to mature. I mean the place where the grapes are grown and the wine being bottled. The actual wine itself is probably worth Res 3-4 per bottle or more if it's aged well.
- Greater land area is valuable
- Extractable resources are valuable
- Meaningful terrain features are valuable. (Rivers, lakes, mountain passes, valleys, places that are hard to access).
- None of these are mutually exclusive- you can have something be worth a lot based on all of these qualities and others I have no idea about.
- What's cheap to extract in one market is valuable elsewhere- lumber from the distant forests are worth quite a lot in the city, and the loggers only sell at a modest markup on what is to them a very cheap product. They get a fair profit (a whole Resources dot likely), even if by the end of the timber's journey, it's worth Resources 3-4.
- Anyone who's paid attention to the history of the Silk Road knows that markup is the bane of profit. That Resources 1 Timber becomes Resources 3-4 at the end of its journey, but if one cut out the middleman, the final cost might be much lower, but an outlandish profit for the loggers and in-house transport.
- Skilled labor is something you can extract value from. A competent glassblower is likely worth being paid Resources value consistent with whatever glasswork he can consistently create. He may not get paid his peak every year, but he can be paid for his reliable average skill.
- Finished goods are worth more than raw materials. Seems pretty obvious but still.
- Rare goods are a thing- We've always seen examples throughout the books like Firedust being Resources 1 in the South, and 2+ elsewhere.
I think what's important is not to focus on the minutiae, and instead build on what these things mean for your games and worlds. Of what it means when a character literally owns all of the farmland outside Whitewall- and what that means for their political control.
Like, I wrote that whole list? You know what it's really going to boil down to? A framework for people to conflict over. Not necessarily fight- though believe, wars are fought over Resources like you wouldn't believe. This, at the core, is a rough assessment of reasons people want other people's stuff, what they have to get it, and what they're willing to do for it.
So these are just the notes, observations and the summary. Enjoy! Bemoan! Whatever!
- Location
- Der Waffle Haus
With the obvious yadda yadda about ST approval and whatnot, I think the rules actually encourage using your other skills to benefit introducing a fact. Specifically, they call out "a character with Lore 3+ and a relevant specialty or backstory...The Storyteller should increase the difficulty and levy penalties as she sees fit; conversely, if a character specializes in a certain subject, the Storyteller may declare success without a roll. " (emphasis added)
I think it'd be pretty uncontroversial to say that your Medicine 5 gives you a specialty for introducing facts about unfamiliar contagions, or your Occult letting you introduce a spirit court etiquette fact, etc. Of course, I'm assuming that the Abilities were justified in character, if they're a result of "I got Exalted and a flood of FA memories turned me from a farmer to a physicist" I'd probably side eye and look just at your backstory.
Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
I always read that as being a Lore specialty. You would rule it as any specialty?
- Location
- Der Waffle Haus
I would, yes. Introducing a Fact is a lot less rigid than Craft, so I wouldn't necessarily require that you need to load up your sheet with Lore (whatever) just to have the chance to use the mechanic.
However, if you have an ST that bristles at that, I think that your other abilities/specialties would easily fall under the 'or backstory' part of the rule. You had to do something to justify your character having five dots in Bureaucracy after all, and that justification can cross apply to an attempt to Introduce a Fact.
Which isn't to say that Lore specialties aren't pointless, just that I don't think they're necessary. I think Lore specialties make sense for when you want to dip into things outside your backstory/other skills. Like, no matter how high your Bureaucracy is, if you're raised in the West your knowledge/ability to Introduce a Fact will be limited to the broad fundamentals of the skill and maybe the specifics of pirate accounting. But a Lore (Hundred Kingdoms) specialty would be the easy way to say you have knowledge of petty kingdom procedure, and you can justify that by saying you read a relevant scroll during the downtime.
samdamandias
Apprentice Plane Wizard
There is a difference between "I didn't invest in combat" and "I did not build a Chungian Murderblender." People with a pool of fifteen before charms should not be useless in combat, but when their allies have even higher dice pools there can be issues.
Is it fair to ask all members of the circle to carry their weight in combat? Yes. Is it fair to say that they need to achieve combat parity with a supernal Melee or Brawl Dawn? Probably not.
Having one person be so bad (or so good) at combat that it makes it unfun for the other players is something that players and STs need to handle. And I think our group is handling it well since none of us are actually bad at combat.
Actually I'm pretty sure everyone but the Hulk is a Solar. Black Widow seems like she isn't because her combat ability isn't quite as good, but then you remember she sat the literal God of Lies and Trickery down and schooled him out of his plan for the Hulk.
Either way I didn't mean the Avengers as in Creation's mightiest heroes, I meant it as a team of strong and unique story characters. A more accurate example might be, I dunno, a collaboration of people from A Song of Ice and Fire? Like if Jamie Lannister (in his prime), Barristan Selmy, Jaqen H'Ghar (faceless assassin), Oberyn Martell, The Mountain, Kahl Drogo, and Grey Worm all got together and fought a single Solar. They're the kind of people that you don't stick in a battlegroup.
Barristan Selmy wasn't an exalt, like he didn't cut stone blocks in half with his sword or anything like that, but he was such a badass that he fought ten on one odds against ambushing assassins and won. Which the system as it's presented now actually totally allows for. If you've got a heroic (mortal) samurai who gets jumped by a battlegroup of assassins he definitely stands a good chance of kicking all of their asses.
If a bunch of non-extra heroic mortals aren't supposed to be a decent challenge for a Solar, then there's another and far larger problem. Because without Bulkwark, or a lot of xp and a big investment in all things combat, that all star Game of Thrones lineup up there is definitely going to pose a threat to a Solar. Mostly because seven random mortals with identity concealing helmets get pushed together into a battlegroup and can all get killed with a single attack, but those guys are all unique and important enough to attack individually
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azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
Right. But there's a difference between combat parity with a Supernal Brawl Dawn Caste and parity with a mortal soldier. I'm saying the latter isn't acceptable for a character participating in combat, unless they want to die. With 3e's combat system, it also endangers their allies, which makes it even less acceptable.
Our group handles it well because Candles hits and parries but doesn't do much damage. Serpent and Silent deal significantly more damage, but aren't as reliable on hitting. So an opponent with a DV and soak that can reasonably deal with your attacks can be expected to do the same against Candles, assuming roughly equal resource expenditure.
If you throw in things like objectives other than stabbing everyone and measures taken to neutralize Candles (who is likely going to be publicly outed as a Dawn caste soon), it becomes a more balanced group.
You keep saying that it's a problem, but you haven't backed that claim up at all. I'm pretty sure that mortal combatants - even heroic mortal combatants who are all unique and important enough to attack individually - being largely irrelevant to Solar murderblenders is the game working as intended. Yes, they all have names and faces and important backstories and everything - but they're still mortal, and mortals, by design, can't really deal with high-level supernatural opposition. It's totally unfair, but Creation is supposed to be totally unfair.
Well the problem then is that those seven mortal heroes are going to either tank your DV and make you hurt, or make you spend a ton of essence. Or grab bulwark, making bulwark a kind of combat required charm to do things that all solar warriors are supposed to be able to do. Unless you've got bulwark those seven heroes are not going to get chewed up by your murderblender, not without spending an unholy amount of your essence pool anyway. Onslaught penalties are stupid good and mortals shouldn't get to benefit from them.
I'd prefer it to be the other way around though. Being able to stand toe to toe against seven of the greatest human warriors ever at the same time is totally unfair, anyone else but a celestial exalt wouldn't be able to stand against two of them.
Maybe it's just because I'm coming off of second edition, where my dawn could solo five immaculate grandmasters without any risk to himself*, but it just feels like it kills too much tension. Nothing can possibly touch you unless it's got an anima banner. You could drink a muscle relaxant poison, be suffering from the plague, be blind and have your arms and legs shackled and bound, but unless the guys trying to stab you has charm boosted attacks he can swing at you all fight and never hit you. Even with dipping swallow that can happen, but you have to spend essence more than once to do it, and you might theoretically run out.
*This only being made possible by scene long charms, like fivefold bulwark stance.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Honestly this whole circular argument about mortals vs Exalts has nothing to do with balance or mechanics, and rather your differing opinions in the aesthetics of the game.
Camp A wants mortals to be a threat across more of the game than they currently are.
Camp B doesn't want mortals to be a threat across more of the game.
That's basically it. Replace 'Mortal's with Dragonblooded, Spirits, Raksha, etc, as you like. You're all arguing around the idea that X should or shouldn't be possible in Exalted, that it doesn't fit your aesthetic. Some of you want a lower power setting, others don't.
What you're all really grappling with, is the fact that Exalted has implicitly tiered gameplay. Once you attain a given tier of charm-based competence, what could have been threatening is now Not threatening. It's no longer a gameplay challenge. It's the same psychology that makes people really like Infernal Charms over non-infernal charms, because they tell you a game to play.
I mean in the sense that they put restrictions and limitations on your character and expect you to play through them.
Contrast this with Solars at least in 2e, who are intended to actually simplify the game mechanics in their favor, quite often. The 'Game' of the Solar Exalted isn't in being clever and defeating the 100 strong mortal army. (though if you're caught out without the right tools that definitely can be a challenge!) Instead, the game for Solars is the aftermath of defeating that army. That puts a lot of burden on the storytellers though, which is why it probably doesn't come up as much especially in these discussions- people forget the Storyteller's involvement past a single engagement.
Anyway, back to tiered gameplay: What you all really want is for variable 'sides' of any gameplay encounter to level up with tactics that diversify and make everything meaningful at all levels, but NOT in an arms-race sense.
We go to the Five-Fold Bulwark Stance Dawn for example. You have FFBS, you're now immune to DV penalties or however it works in 3e. The point is, You have a huge advantage. Your opponents at all levels have almost no recourse against you. THAT is the systemic failure.
So a solution then, is not to make DV-negating magic, but to change the gameplay of 'at the point in the game in which you have DV that cannot be penalized, other actions and tactics become availible, or are emphasized more'.
If the Dawn is unassailable, give the players mechanics and goals that interact with the unassailable without being an arms race of 'You don't get your DV'.
Camp A wants mortals to be a threat across more of the game than they currently are.
Camp B doesn't want mortals to be a threat across more of the game.
That's basically it. Replace 'Mortal's with Dragonblooded, Spirits, Raksha, etc, as you like. You're all arguing around the idea that X should or shouldn't be possible in Exalted, that it doesn't fit your aesthetic. Some of you want a lower power setting, others don't.
What you're all really grappling with, is the fact that Exalted has implicitly tiered gameplay. Once you attain a given tier of charm-based competence, what could have been threatening is now Not threatening. It's no longer a gameplay challenge. It's the same psychology that makes people really like Infernal Charms over non-infernal charms, because they tell you a game to play.
I mean in the sense that they put restrictions and limitations on your character and expect you to play through them.
Contrast this with Solars at least in 2e, who are intended to actually simplify the game mechanics in their favor, quite often. The 'Game' of the Solar Exalted isn't in being clever and defeating the 100 strong mortal army. (though if you're caught out without the right tools that definitely can be a challenge!) Instead, the game for Solars is the aftermath of defeating that army. That puts a lot of burden on the storytellers though, which is why it probably doesn't come up as much especially in these discussions- people forget the Storyteller's involvement past a single engagement.
Anyway, back to tiered gameplay: What you all really want is for variable 'sides' of any gameplay encounter to level up with tactics that diversify and make everything meaningful at all levels, but NOT in an arms-race sense.
We go to the Five-Fold Bulwark Stance Dawn for example. You have FFBS, you're now immune to DV penalties or however it works in 3e. The point is, You have a huge advantage. Your opponents at all levels have almost no recourse against you. THAT is the systemic failure.
So a solution then, is not to make DV-negating magic, but to change the gameplay of 'at the point in the game in which you have DV that cannot be penalized, other actions and tactics become availible, or are emphasized more'.
If the Dawn is unassailable, give the players mechanics and goals that interact with the unassailable without being an arms race of 'You don't get your DV'.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
... What.