All my characters take Wanted: 5 and Dark Secret 5 'Actually a soul sucking demon'!
Its how the game ends up anyway!
Yeah, the high-end Secrets are inappropriate in typical (non-rim) Exalted campaigns, because the characters already have a Secret.
However, in terms of enemies, things are not so clear-cut.
Consider:
A typical bank-robber who thus theoretically has FBI as her enemy vs. a bank-robber who also killed the FBI director's wife and so now the FBI director is likely to fudge things in order to direct more assets, attention, manhours etc. at searching for
this bank-robber and killer specifically.
It's one thing to be an Anathema, and another to be the Anathema whose hunt Carjack Ketchup is personally overseeing and spending all of his free time on.
You can only benefit from one of the Expression conditions per session, meaning that it simply gives you extra options to get something that in all likelihood you would already get.
To be honest, having merits be a mixture of permanent traits and temporary conditions isn't the best idea. Maybe it would be over complicated to differentiate them in system though. As far as flaws go, I've generally been a fan of GMs have them be a mix of an obstacle and an opportunity that is it's own reward and plothook.
I did not know that Flaws occupy the same 'slot' XP-wise as some other things. That does mean that the overall impact of flaws is diminished proportionally, based on their contribution to the Expression condition.
I agree that mixing permanent merits and 'point-activated' merits can make things more complicated, and yet I've known two systems who have such a split in certain implementations, and they seem to work OK, judging by reactions. I do have to note that 'point-activated' merit-like traits are easier to balance in the sense that if I get an Ally, and then the GM proceeds to run several Stories where I can't call my Ally, then I get a point economy shift in my favour, instead of having a pre-paid-for Merit/Background lying around uselessly. And conversely, if I benefit a lot from some Merit (more than predicted at chargen), the point economy will adjust my advantage.
In general, I tend to think that pay-or-get-paid-as-you-go Merits/Flaws should be designed as part of the fundamentals of a system, not welded on as an afterthought like they were in Storyteller.
Your problem is you want extremely fine nuance in a game that renders every single musical instrument, as well as every single form of dance or acting or speech-making into a single Ability. [ . . . ] Exalted is an abstract system. It doesn't handle fiddly details well because characters are supposed to be omnicompetent.
Yes, my problem is definitely that I want nuance from game systems, even abstract ones. However, I disagree that ST/Exalted is an abstract system. It's a system with Ten Steps for combat, including a step explicitly reserved for counterattacks, and two pairs of roll-reroll steps. It has rules for crippling various specific body parts. It differentiate between
three social attributes. It differentiates between Parry MDV and Dodge MDV, and has case where you can use one but not the other. It also has specific rules for how to handle a social influence if it's a surprise for the target. It has a specific die-rolling difference between damage rolls and success rolls, even though it's supposedly based around the same X dice vs. TN7 engine.
No, Exalted is a very concrete and detailed system that just happens to have gaps in some spots (such as musical instruments).
Actually, good point. There's an assumption going unquestioned here, and that's "Your character should be rewarded for being blind in other ways".
Because, really, what a character being blind is represented as "You have a Crippling effect on your eyes, vision rolls are inapplicable". And that means you have to go and learn "hearing" specialities for Awareness, because you have to learn to try to cope with other senses and difficulties are higher with other senses so you need every edge you can get. The archetypical "blind master" in Exalted is either someone who is blind and thus is legitimately handicapped and recieves nothing in compensation, because holy shit they're blind, that sucks, your Solar doctor might want to fix that - or they're someone with Charms who is using them to negate the blindness penalty and thus it shouldn't be a flaw anyway.
In a pre-paid point-buy system, I fail to see why "holy shit they're blind" receives nothing in compensation, but "holy shit they're clumsy" (which is Dex 3-4 in a typical Exalted combat, it seems) receives the compensation in the form of being able to spend those points on e.g. Appearance by changing attribute prioritisation.
I do get the sort of blind master archetype who essentially trades away the ability to perceive colour in exchange for a 360° sonar - it's a sort of tradeoff that can at least theoretically be worth no points in either direction.
Like, bluntly, they're 5m for the pair of them, and both charms are reflexive. Just talk to your GM and go "yo, can we just call them effectively Indefinite because, seriously, I can literally stunt back the cost in two actions, I'm making a note on my character sheet to say that I have them active all the time so just have the 5m committed permanently".
I'm pretty sure in practice it's more like 5-10 motes down in the pool, all the time. Because IME it's not possible to
constantly pull off 6 motes worth of stunts in every Scene, particularly in a fast-paced campaign. I'm saying this because I'm examining whether I'll be able to keep some scenelong charms up 25/7 with stunts, and my impression so far is that pulling 2-3 Stunts each and every Scene can put a strain on the game's pacing. Not always, but during the more intense investigation and travel sequences with common Scene transitions.
I actually kinda hate Scenes as a concept, because they force metagame considerations on character actions, e.g. I once had to put up I(A)M in advance, and I accidentally almost put it up at the very end of Scene A only to have it turn off thirty seconds later. (Luckily, the GM was willing to retcon the activation time to immediately post-Scene-transition.)
For what it's worth, 3E has Flaws too, and actually explicitly addresses the "Blind Swordsman" archetype.
The listed Flaws are all personal drawbacks - Addiction, Amputee, Blind, Deaf, Derangement, Mute, Sterile and Wyld Mutant.
Having a Flaw doesn't grant you any mechanical advantage, or any extra points for your character to build stuff with.
Instead, if your Flaw significantly impedes you, it can earn you "Expression bonus" SolarXP. However, that bonus can be earned in other way as well (interacting with your Intimacies), and you can only gain it once per session.
And it's interesting to note that they explicitly say that if you are not actually impeded by the flaw - such as a blind swordsman using Awareness Charms to get around that flaw - then you don't gain those SolarXP either. It also notes that there's still situations where those won't help - such as colour perception.
The same would go for circumventing other flaws - if you're sterile and use a Neomah to still have a child, no bonus. If you're Mute but use Poetic Expression Style, you'll get that bonus once you go outside the limits of that charm.
This seems like a good way to handle flaws - there's very little incentive to take them for the sake of extra BP or such, and you'll either circumvent them (in which case it only makes the character more interesting, but not weaker) or you won't, in which case it's still interesting.
This is something that I've found an interesting and complicated question in systems with get-paid-as-you-go handling of flaws (nWoD and FATE Core). Specifically, the line between being impeded and overcoming it, and simply overcoming the impediment and thus not being impeded.
A blinded swordsman having to deal with the -2 External Penalty (or -4 internal)
or having to spend 20XP on learning Keen Hearing and Touch and 3m per Scene (to halve the penalty)
is suffering for his flaw: he's forced to spend 20XP on stuff that a seeing swordsman would spend on quicker getting to a Perfect Defense or something, he's constantly 3-6 motes down his pool, and is still at -1 External or -2 Internal in combat and other situations. But if that doesn't count even as a triggered flaw each session where any of the above impediments occur, then it means people are strongly discouraged from taking flaws like that.
People build parts of their lives around their flaws. E.g. me being bad at understanding how people think influenced what sort of things I tried to study and the sphere of work I ended up in, and it is why I tend to regularly ask questions whose answers might seem obvious to others. It also screws up team coordination in MOBAs if the team I'm in also happens to contain a member who tends to say tactically significant things ironically.
For something less obvious, I have a rather dulled sense of smell, which also influences my daily life: being unable to figure out non-strong scents without being quite close and conscious effort, I tend to do things such as opening windows based on a routine schedule as opposed to the state of the air in the room, which causes some raised eyebrows e.g. from people who try to keep windows closed in Winter unless it's definitely necessary to open them. In GURPS, that would be a -1 Quirk (the smallest possible flaw cost, perhaps comparable about 1/10 to 1/5 of a Freebie Point in Storyteller); in oWoD, it would be below the system's resolution; in nWoD/Ex3, I'm not sure how it would be handled - probably a Flaw that only rarely gives XP, because the GM wouldn't count most of its phenomena as impediments.
It also makes it really easy to make up new flaws. You don't have to figure out how many points they're worth, you simply have to declare the flaw and what it does - then, if it matters, you get the XP.
Definitely a big plus. As long as the 'does it count as impeding the character today' question is easy to answer (above).
