Provided it got that far.
Adrian liked to spend time between rounds at the Games running around Creation's boarders.
General Exalted Thread
Provided it got that far.
Adrian liked to spend time between rounds at the Games running around Creation's boarders.
- Location
- The end of all things
No. If Balor killed Ligier he would be quite irrevocably and permanently dead. Enjoy the mess made by a headstrong idiot who thought he was invincible. I'm sure crushing the burning heart of the Primordial King would in no way strengthen Balor's legend.
Provided;
A) Balor had a spirit killer strong enough to work.
B) He survived the experience.
Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
You're assuming that Balor has permakill Charms.
Edit: Sidereal'd
- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Following on from my earlier question, let's talk splats.
White Wolf is always about the splats, and when I see a new WW book I find myself wondering whether it might do something new and interesting and maybe only have four variants of the character type, or maybe six!
For me personally I've always tilted my head a little at Exalted's splats. Personally I'm a DB player, in part because they just feel the most intuitive to me, with relatively meaningful distinctions between each type - fire and water feel a little more differentiated than dawn and zenith, I guess. At times I feel they're simultaneously too restrictive and yet also extremely broad. This is your role, the book says, but honestly we're not making much of an effort to help you play to that role. I'm not very good at WW chargen, admittedly, so my impression might be a bit ignorant.
Though it's basically a defining feature, I wonder sometimes if it's just sort of predictable. I'd like to hear some other perspectives, so to that end:
1. How do you feel about Exalted's splats in a general sense, both as a game element and storytelling device?
2. Which splats do you feel work best, and why?
3. Which splats do you think don't work, and why?
White Wolf is always about the splats, and when I see a new WW book I find myself wondering whether it might do something new and interesting and maybe only have four variants of the character type, or maybe six!
For me personally I've always tilted my head a little at Exalted's splats. Personally I'm a DB player, in part because they just feel the most intuitive to me, with relatively meaningful distinctions between each type - fire and water feel a little more differentiated than dawn and zenith, I guess. At times I feel they're simultaneously too restrictive and yet also extremely broad. This is your role, the book says, but honestly we're not making much of an effort to help you play to that role. I'm not very good at WW chargen, admittedly, so my impression might be a bit ignorant.
Though it's basically a defining feature, I wonder sometimes if it's just sort of predictable. I'd like to hear some other perspectives, so to that end:
1. How do you feel about Exalted's splats in a general sense, both as a game element and storytelling device?
2. Which splats do you feel work best, and why?
3. Which splats do you think don't work, and why?
- Location
- The end of all things
Are there any spirit killers other than the Infernal one that even have such limits?
Regardless, I feel fairly comfortable in saying that the singular being who would destroy Creation has the power to actually slay its defenders should they be careless enough to let him repeatedly stab them in the face until they die. The alternative renders him and any others like him something of a toothless joke. The Solars didn't build the Sword of Creation purely out of paranoid extravagance.
True. While extremely potent, he did seem to be more of a charismatic leader and general. Even so, he single-handedly cut down all who challenged him, including numerous Lunar Elders. Any lesser Third Circle Demon would likely fall before him. I could easily see Balor winning, but it's not a certainty. He'd better have negotiated really good terms for this hypothetical duel, though, because he won't live long otherwise.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
Totally has nothing to do with them not being spirits and thus presence or lack of spirit-killing charms being irrelevant to how dangerous things are to them, right?
(Seriously, something doesn't need a spirit-killer to be dangerous to non-spirits.)
Good question!
AFAIK, there are none in the books, but it's possible that spirits could get one, in which case the limits would be even worse.
Kylar
In Training Forever
- Location
- Canada
Personally, I like it, because it let you play with different heroic archetypes and let them have tools abbilities appropriate to that archetype. It also let me as a Storyteller setup NPCs with wildly varying power sets but with my players still having some idea what to expect out of any given NPC. ITs also somewhat interesting to see how those abilities contrast and clash at times, particularly in mixed groups.
Alchemicals are my favorite splat for a multitude of reasons: a very neat world connected to them, steampunk/robotic powerset, the whole idea of them being heroes for the people, as opposed to rulers of. It makes for a nice contrast to the other Exalt types.
Dragon Blooded, have always stood well. Their general themes of elemental super soliderdom and bonds of brotherhood have stood well, especially given the feuding nature between the different families/groups/clans of the Dragon Blooded. In a lot of ways I think they have the most story potential of any of the Exalt types, between the Realm, Lookshy, the returning Solars and Outcastes games. They have a lot of history to them in a way none of the other splats really do.
Solars work very well in their role as 'generic' heroes. Their themes and visuals work very well toward the shining hero of immense power, that may or may not be good, and their powers generally back it up. Similarly Abyssals work well as their dark mirrors, though execution has been lacking there. I admit I'm a bit of a sucker for light and dark mirror image symbolism though. I will admit that the caste distinctions are annoyingly vague at times, which is part of the reason I'm rather happy 3e tightened them up a bit so that you actually were more solidly good at something in theme for your Caste. That said, if you can get your hands on them the Caste Book series is great for getting a feel for each Caste (except Twilight. Twilight is terrible, but thankfully Twilights role as the smart guys of the group is fairly easy to grasp).
Lunars. Oh god Luanrs. They just never had the solid thematic to back them up the other splats had, and have always been a bit of mess no one knew what to do with. Which is a shame, as shapeshifters are cool.
Sidereals, mostly because I've had to deal with their 2e iteration where their mechanics never really made them terribly great at the whole hidden master thing. The fact 2e never really tried to integrate it into the setting at all didn't really help, and the fact their main playground and toys (Yu-Shan and the Loom of Fate) were not particularly well fleshed out from a perspective of playing Sidereals made playing them difficult.
Infernals, oddly for much the same reason as Lunars. There a thematic mess, thanks to Chapters 1&2 being objectively shit, and Chapter 4 not much better. Their supposed to be corrupted Solars, and yet virtually none of their mechanics really engage with this, and the ones where they do cause problems: notably Castes locked to Solar ones are extraordinarily limiting when a major draw of the splat is add-a-yozi for a powerset, and Past Lives should really be an Abyssal power (memories of the pasts long dead coming back to temporarily take you over is rather more in theme for Abyssals with their whole focus on death). further, the fact they don't really have a defined role in the setting leads them to basically be 'Solars or Abyssals, but green' most of the time.
The Charms are fun though.
Aleph
Princess of Stabbity
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Well yes. Against a Primordial, they are toothless jokes. That's rather my point. If an ishvara whose narrative that they are the one who will cast down the Primordials themselves and slay each fetich-soul in turn and undo all that the hated Shapers of Zen Mu have done marches on Creation with an army so great, so terrible, so vast that it casts even the infinite shores of the Wyld into shadow, then he either gets slaughtered by Adrian who barely notices his death-scream or walks into a crystal zone of PERFECT PYRIAN ORDER and calcifies in a couple of heartbeats.
That's the thing about raksha. That's why they hate Creation and Shape and Time so much. The Primordials rendered all their power and importance, all their grand narratives and magnificent Shaping, completely irrelevant. They went "this is linear time, no takebacks or retcons. This is the Omphalos; everything is positioned relative to here. This is Shaped reality; no mucking about with stories, if you die here you die for real. No, we don't care about your feelings, silly raksha, stop pretending you matter". They slaughtered countless trillions of raksha nobles and they did it as a game, casually, with no care or attention spent on it. Adrian murdered them in numbers too large to even conceive of and laughed. That's what raksha are, to Primordials. Toothless jokes. They made the Unconquered Sun to defend Creation because they were bored of swatting them like irritating flies.
And that's what the Exalted Host gave up when they overthrew them. They made raksha matter again, because something like Adrian with her natural anti-Shaping and casual raksha-murdering-by-the-trillion might be insurmountable for any force the Wyld can muster against it, but the Exalted Host aren't her, and are more vulnerable to a powerful enough ishvara (especially after they turn on each other as they did in the Usurpation).
Aleph
Princess of Stabbity
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Heroic mortals can always surprise you, even as an Exalt. Discounting them entirely is rarely wise, even for an Exalt, especially if they're interacting with you in an area you're not specialised in.
Why, they might do as Darling Yellow did in last night's Kerisgame, and get 4 successes on 2 dice to notice something even through early-stage cataracts, and then hit you with an 8-success "look what a faithful and dedicated priestess I would be for your cult; you should value me and my pseudo-family" social attack.
Oh, and yeah. Remember that Dragonblooded summer house way back in Part Three that I said I was totally going to come back and steal at some point?
Yoink~
Why, they might do as Darling Yellow did in last night's Kerisgame, and get 4 successes on 2 dice to notice something even through early-stage cataracts, and then hit you with an 8-success "look what a faithful and dedicated priestess I would be for your cult; you should value me and my pseudo-family" social attack.
Oh, and yeah. Remember that Dragonblooded summer house way back in Part Three that I said I was totally going to come back and steal at some point?
Yoink~
greensun
You shall all burn beneath my light!!!
I am supposed to be studying Aleph! Stop doing this to me!Heroic mortals can always surprise you, even as an Exalt. Discounting them entirely is rarely wise, even for an Exalt, especially if they're interacting with you in an area you're not specialised in.
Why, they might do as Darling Yellow did in last night's Kerisgame, and get 4 successes on 2 dice to notice something even through early-stage cataracts, and then hit you with an 8-success "look what a faithful and dedicated priestess I would be for your cult; you should value me and my pseudo-family" social attack.
Oh, and yeah. Remember that Dragonblooded summer house way back in Part Three that I said I was totally going to come back and steal at some point?
Yoink~
- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
To this day my proudest moment in an Exalted game was when my Dragon-blood's totally mortal bodyguard NPC, this one armed woman with a grand daiklave, took part in an utterly ridiculous dual attack one hit kill on the boss with @Exhack's Dawn. They hit it with a crazy x-strike limit break, posed dramatically and it exploded.
Prior to this she was pretty consistently the most badass character (in part because we were variously a pile of pop stars, mechanics, and a boyscout), but it was a great moment. Even Exalted bow to the power of the dice!
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
Uhm, a mortal wielding a grand daiklaive one handed? wouldn't she need like 18 STR to do that?
- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
She was technically one armed. Her concept was 'female Guts' so she had a fake arm, which out ST allowed to serve as an arm for the purposes of wielding the daiklave. Lawyered.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
1: They're okay except for the ones that aren't
2: Dragon Blooded is usually the best, I actually liked 2nd edition lunars but I found its rules pretty confusing. Abyssals was solid but kind of made no impression on me. Sidereals is fine but they somehow need to figure a way to balance them against everyone else.
3: Infernals takes blood and tits to an uncomfortable level. I don't like the lunar book's rules much.
Sucal
The Devil’s Cut
- Location
- Bottom of the barrel
I was more refering to the whole 'unattuned daiklaives are little more then 300-400 pound chunks of metal without an edge' thing.
- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I love dot based systems
Obviously mechanically she was weaker than the character she was supposed to be protecting, but in my heart of hearts she was the strongest and the coolest. Mortals rule.
Jon Chung
=][=
Eh. Could be better, could be worse.
a) Solars, for the generally great idea of setting the limit of personal power in a game about wielding power and the repercussions of its use early and obviously, right in the corebook. Now, this didn't actually work out that way in the course of Exalted's publication history, but it was a good try.
Also, the bit I mentioned earlier about subversions works best here, because of all the cultural baggage we the players tend to have attached to their particular set of aesthetics and the implied (but not in fact used) narrative those aesthetics usually show up with.
This also applies to the other Solaroids, but I tend to lump them in as Solars. They more or less do the same thing with different trappings, whatever. I see this as the default mode of play: pick a grand ambition and go try and realize it, pitting your personal power as a (crazy) god-king against the thousand-year might of the Realm and all the other entrenched power players. Perfect for sandbox play and perfect for large-scale geopolitical stuff.
b) Dragon-Blooded, because there's a reason we like grand dynastic stories about empires and the rise and fall of great houses. Even if the Celestial Exalted were wholly removed from the game, it would work with just the Dragon-Blooded. Their Chinese/Roman aesthetic trappings also work pretty well. Does well with character drama and the geopolitical game from the perspective of the side with a strong stake in the setting's status quo. Ambitions with a smaller scale.
a) Sidereals. Because that book started the stupid nonsense about moronic exponential power scaling, single-handedly introducing the White Wolf Elder Problem to a game which had, up till then, survived perfectly well without it. The egregious use of "uh, this power doesn't work at all in NPC hands because it was never designed to be, I guess you just need to invoke GM fiat, please try to ignore the fact that they're set up as one of the main antagonists of the main player splat, ehehehe" didn't help.
b) Lunars. Nobody seemed to know what to do with them as a player splat, because they were originally not supposed to be and therefore don't really have a place in setting history. Their book was also dumb. "Differentiate yourself by choosing different weapons", really?
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My own was my Dawn Caste, after getting the whole 'Infernals are demons in human form' talk from a Cult of the Illuminated member, asking "So... exactly what the Immaculate Order views me as, then?"
Not every day you get to shut up a Sidereal.
Sucal
The Devil’s Cut
- Location
- Bottom of the barrel
I love dot based systems
Obviously mechanically she was weaker than the character she was supposed to be protecting, but in my heart of hearts she was the strongest and the coolest. Mortals rule.
Oh its not the dot based system (almost any other artifact weapon would have still worked perfectly) its just that Daiklaives have stupid pseudo rules baggage attached to them, in order to make people use their motes rather then just wielding it through strength alone! Personally I'd prefer it possible for mortal to wield any artifact weapons they get, with attunement providing the actual magical abilities (rather then just being really sharp/resistant) and making it impossible to steal rather then anything else.
Mostly because the idea of a common bandit wielding Excalibur without any knowledge of its actual properties amuses me. Something about the whole 'diamond in the rough' thing, allows for more interesting stories involving blades being handed down for generations with their true purpose/abilities lost to time (something thats really hard to do when Joe Blow Daddy can't even work through a proper stance)
I feel like that'd be possible to work into a unique property of a particular artifact, mind.
FaeGlade Plural
Semper Legens
- Location
- Land of Bureaucracy
- Pronouns
- Plural/They
Or you just treat unattuned artifact weapons as normal weapons, albeit more durable of course.
You can do a few interesting things with that.
You could find out that your Previous Incarnation Grave has been plundered - by bandits, who just took the valuables and sold them. They kept the ordinary-looking, durable sword, so go, hunt them down. You can already do that with the sword being in the hand of a Dragonblood or such, but it's a variation.
The Daiklave was in your families possession over many generations. After your Exaltation, you unlock its special powers. You can add twists based on where your family got the weapon - previous incarnation, Sidereal, Dragonblood ancestry, an ancient pact that'll come to haunt you?
Of course, you have to consider what unattuned artifact weapons look like in this case.
If they look like Daiklaves normally do - giant slabs of magical materials - then you ruin several plot possibilities.
So either artifact weapons in general look like ordinary weapons until they're attuned - or they always look like ordinary (if well-crafted) weapons. The latter can be a compromise, with some being obviously magical and some looking ordinary.
You can do a few interesting things with that.
You could find out that your Previous Incarnation Grave has been plundered - by bandits, who just took the valuables and sold them. They kept the ordinary-looking, durable sword, so go, hunt them down. You can already do that with the sword being in the hand of a Dragonblood or such, but it's a variation.
The Daiklave was in your families possession over many generations. After your Exaltation, you unlock its special powers. You can add twists based on where your family got the weapon - previous incarnation, Sidereal, Dragonblood ancestry, an ancient pact that'll come to haunt you?
Of course, you have to consider what unattuned artifact weapons look like in this case.
If they look like Daiklaves normally do - giant slabs of magical materials - then you ruin several plot possibilities.
So either artifact weapons in general look like ordinary weapons until they're attuned - or they always look like ordinary (if well-crafted) weapons. The latter can be a compromise, with some being obviously magical and some looking ordinary.
Yeah, all of that stuff is 100% gone in Kerisgame. Artifact weapons are not oversized, which means anyone who gets a jade-steel daiklaive can use it (a lot of Scavenger Lands 'daiklaives' are former bits of industrial equipment, like the reaper daiklaives which got the name because they're made of bits of threshing machines). Which means that the petty warlords and princes of this fallen era have blades with long and storied histories - and these histories are a product of what they've been used for, rather than "who crafted them". It doesn't matter that a sword began life as a ploughshare if it was wielded by the founder of a nation and has been carried by his descendants and the ones who usurped him ever since.
I strongly dislike the "crafter" archetype as implemented, though, so that might have something to do with it. My end goal is to implement things such that nation-ruling, sorcerous research and workings, and great projects all exist on the same timescale and use similar mechanics - and the sorcerer and the crafter are reliant on either having a patron or their own backing nation or grouping so no one can just go sit out in the forest and go and rebuild the First Age by sitting around and rolling dice. If you want to forge jade-steel blades, you're going to need to build manse-foundaries, set up infrastructure, and become a political player just by your very existence. To parody Clausewitz, sorcerously raising islands and building golem armies is an extension of politics by other means.
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