General Exalted Thread

[vicky_molokh]

You seem to be defending the general idea of an effect that allows you to have some kind of death insurance, as a theoretical concept. That's theoretically possible, sure. But, uh, not in any way resembling the implementation we see here. Dual Magnus is broken conceptually and in effect.

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The execution is flawed (to an arguable extent, ranging from 'maybe somewhat' to 'extremely', depending on whom I ask); the idea seems not to be inherently unacceptable, indeed. In fact I think we both see the reasons why the idea can be attractive. There are various implementations. FATE does it largely through Conceding the Conflict (the most direct handling of the subject); 7th Sea does it, IIRC, simply by having the default lose-all-HP-and-fail-a-roll outcome result in unconsciousness; GURPS does it through various Advantages that may or may not be purchasable, depending on setting and campaign; Ex3e did it through Dual Magnus Prana and broke loose all Malfeas as a result.

What would you see as a reasonable implementation of the idea in a Storyteller or Storyteller-derived system?

[...]

This is actually really fucking cool as a story concept. It's something that as an author you make a point of showing to have happened every step of the way or at least referenced just so you can use that Chekhov's gun, or otherwise to show just how (justly) cautious McCraftyRabbleRouser is in the face of major danger. Or even just how callous he is of his friends that he would abandon them to their deaths on an effort he knows is doomed.

This isn't what actually happens in play.

What would actually happen in play is that a campaign that started in Halta and has now shifted focus for a while in Linowan for whatever reason runs into a Wyld Hunt, gets into a fight, McCraftRabbleRouser's player makes a bad call or gets jumped and heads roll. Everyone is shocked, dismayed etc. but not too bothered because it was a known possibility, and it was good fun.

Then a pouty player looks at his character sheets and says 'hey, I have Dual Magnus Prana, I didn't actually die.'

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I'm not quite sure what the "actually happens" complaint is. Strictly the fact that all this wasn't shown in advance? I think the point of it not being shown in advance is to replicate the sort of unexpected reveal like the one done by one of the characters in Sherlock (spoiler hidden)

Spoiler

where first he jumps off a building in what looks like an ultimate self-sacrifice for the sake of saving people, but then it turns out that he's alive, and only then it becomes revealed how he faked his death.

In that order. Otherwise there would be no mystery and no sense of wonder about how he did it. This is especially important with DMP, because it would reduce DMP from a wondrous anticipation into a routine, standard operating procedure. I've played in a campaign where making copies of one's mind is a routine, standard operating procedure; it's a good fit for a rationalistic sci-fi, but a poor fit for wondrous fantasy.

Except that, you know, Archery absolutely should be able to pull that same level of devastation with a single Charm at the same level in investment. Not least of which because it's a combat ability.

It needs not be a written Charm, but that design space should be available.

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Yeah, Archery probably should have some Hail Of Arrows Over Nexus City thing. I don't think all Abilities should be equally devastating, but it feels in theme for Archery.

 

[Jon Chung]

The execution is flawed (to an arguable extent, ranging from 'maybe somewhat' to 'extremely', depending on whom I ask); the idea seems not to be inherently unacceptable, indeed. In fact I think we both see the reasons why the idea can be attractive. There are various implementations. FATE does it largely through Conceding the Conflict (the most direct handling of the subject); 7th Sea does it, IIRC, simply by having the default lose-all-HP-and-fail-a-roll outcome result in unconsciousness; GURPS does it through various Advantages that may or may not be purchasable, depending on setting and campaign; Ex3e did it through Dual Magnus Prana and broke loose all Malfeas as a result.

What would you see as a reasonable implementation of the idea in a Storyteller or Storyteller-derived system?

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Eh, we have one already: Avoidance Kata. It flawlessly saves you from the worst possible situations, so long as you hit it in time and accurately assess that the upcoming scene is one which you don't want to be in because you'll probably die. You know going into any scene that you have the option to Avoidance Kata out right away if you have to, giving you safety/peace of mind. It's workable insurance, it can be counterplayed and it's not stupid.

You could also take Dual Magnus' doombot idea straight and have an effect which allows you to create and control a doombot, which must be built ahead of time and explicitly remote-piloted by you with a control range limit. This allows you to have a sacrificial telepresence avatar to use in cases where you think death might be a possibility while also not being completely impossible to interact with and/or counterplay due to being mechanically retroactive.

Again, what makes something reasonable or not reasonable is the result of its use. What do you get if Dual Magnus is used in a game, vs what you get if Avoidance Kata is used?

 

[Hazard]

I've played in a campaign where making copies of one's mind is a routine, standard operating procedure; it's a good fit for a rationalistic sci-fi, but a poor fit for wondrous fantasy.

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The problem is that while RPGs let you play out and tell some amazing stories, there are some more that are simply not fun to play. And those stories are those that depend on being able to retcon away major plot arcs or avoid major consequences by being able to say 'wasn't there for that thing.'

Avoidance Kata avoids this by being unable to retcon such things away due to the simple fact that it's extremely short ranged. Dual Magnus Prana though? In a campaign where you want or need to fake your dead it's best for the other players if they can be part of the process, or are at minimum aware of it so it's not a massive shock to the storyline they are part of when said dead is faked.

Really, a lot of problems with DMP boils down to it being a Charm whose only drawback is that it costs Craft XP to use but has no other limits while at the same time absolutely trumping a ton of other characters and Charms. Even a single line in the Charm noting that the DoomBot can't use Solar Charms and that as such the Charm can't be invoked if any were used, including Excellencies, would go a long way to constraining the sheer amount of cheese this Charm has going for itself.

Because now the player has to weigh using magic and thus putting himself at risk against not using magic and giving players, if not characters, the hint that he's actually DoomBotting this scene.

 

[vicky_molokh]

Eh, we have one already: Avoidance Kata. It flawlessly saves you from the worst possible situations, so long as you hit it in time and accurately assess that the upcoming scene is one which you don't want to be in because you'll probably die. You know going into any scene that you have the option to Avoidance Kata out right away if you have to, giving you safety/peace of mind. It's workable insurance, it can be counterplayed and it's not stupid.

You could also take Dual Magnus' doombot idea straight and have an effect which allows you to create and control a doombot, which must be built ahead of time and explicitly remote-piloted by you with a control range limit. This allows you to have a sacrificial telepresence avatar to use in cases where you think death might be a possibility while also not being completely impossible to interact with and/or counterplay due to being mechanically retroactive.

Again, what makes something reasonable or not reasonable is the result of its use. What do you get if Dual Magnus is used in a game, vs what you get if Avoidance Kata is used?

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While I like Avoidance Kata as an early disengage ability, I actually don't consider it to be a death insurance ability at all, because whether or not death is a real threat tends to become known only several actipons deep into a combat. The point of insurance is that it triggers if you screwed up beyond repair. Like ships in EvE online - their insurance kicks in when the ship is destroyed; the clone with the mind-copy kicks in when the pilot's escape pod is destroyed. (Yes, I know the insurance costs in EvE are incorrect, that's besides the point.) Insurance is essentially "I decide to willingly pay a small percentage so that if the worst possible outcome occurs, I don't lose 100%". Avoidance Kata fails to prevent the 100% loss unless you, the player, was able to accurately measure the level of danger in a given encounter. And unlike insurances, if it turns out that the encounter wasn't all that bad after all, if you mistakenly invested motes into triggering Avoidance Kata, you haven't just lost the two motes - you lost your whole contribution to the party in the martial or social combat.

A Resistance Charm that prevents the character from dying as long as any of his circlemates are still standing and fighting would act as semi-insurance in contexts of group combats (semi in the sense that it insures only against partial party kills, not TPKs). Infernal gets something like that late in the game, right?

Also, I kinda like the telepresence idea in general. In fact, I've done stuff like that in Transhuman Space / seen it done by other characters. It fits in just fine for a character in a procedural investigation or the like. It seems totally out of theme for an epically prophetic magical crafter who's supposed to only invoke the telepresence that one day of the month/season/year when he predicted that he'll run out of motes for HGDs/SSEs/ASTs, and has done all this covertly.

DMP tries to be an insurance. Alas, in this it manages to make inapplicable several things people with different character niches can have (e.g. Awareness); I'm not sure how to fix that while retaining both the insurance functionality (as opposed to AK's early disengagement) and the more fantasy-sneaky-craftsman-prophet theme (as opposed to the sci-fi routinely-paranoid teleoperator theme). DMP had some half-hearted (quarter-hearted?) attempt by using the plausibility clause, but, eh, it's too vague for most people's tastes (okay, maybe not most, but I do agree that it's very vague).

The problem is that while RPGs let you play out and tell some amazing stories, there are some more that are simply not fun to play. And those stories are those that depend on being able to retcon away major plot arcs or avoid major consequences by being able to say 'wasn't there for that thing.'

Avoidance Kata avoids this by being unable to retcon such things away due to the simple fact that it's extremely short ranged. Dual Magnus Prana though? In a campaign where you want or need to fake your dead it's best for the other players if they can be part of the process, or are at minimum aware of it so it's not a massive shock to the storyline they are part of when said dead is faked.

Really, a lot of problems with DMP boils down to it being a Charm whose only drawback is that it costs Craft XP to use but has no other limits while at the same time absolutely trumping a ton of other characters and Charms. Even a single line in the Charm noting that the DoomBot can't use Solar Charms and that as such the Charm can't be invoked if any were used, including Excellencies, would go a long way to constraining the sheer amount of cheese this Charm has going for itself.

Because now the player has to weigh using magic and thus putting himself at risk against not using magic and giving players, if not characters, the hint that he's actually DoomBotting this scene.

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First, I don't think anyone worthy of a big name will be fooled if DMP was incompatible with Charm use. Solars do not fall easily like that.

Also, I agree that the costs at least seem to be on the low end of the spectrum. That's a problem, and it would be nice if it were fixed.

But I'm disappointed to hear that Solars, the paragons of perfection and transcendent excellence, are not supposed to try emulating a trick like the one done by that guy in the Sherlock series just because it does retcons, even though retcon-doing abilities in RPGs aren't exactly unheard of.

 

[Aleph]

I think the point of it not being shown in advance is to replicate the sort of unexpected reveal like the one done by one of the characters in Sherlock

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Except... the proposed changes do nothing to disrupt this. I mean, the two versions of the Charm are the canon one - call it Reload Button - and the proposed one where you have to actually make the thing first and say you're using it - the Telepresence Rig.

If the Solar is a PC and their Circlemates know they have the Charm on their character sheet, it comes as no surprise when used.
If the Solar is a PC and their Circlemates do not know they have the Charm on their character sheet, then it can be a surprise either way - with the Telepresence Rig, they can just say they've made a doombot etc in private notes to the ST.

If the Solar is an NPC, the Circle don't know they can do it whether it's the Reload Button or the Telepresence Rig. Yes, they can figure out the Telepresence Rig - but only if they have reason to look, since people don't tend to pop EotUS for no reason. It means that the "fantasy-sneaky-craftsman-prophet" theme is a contest - between the sneakiness of the craftsman and the perceptiveness of the people they're trying to fool. Had the Sherlock character's opponent been present for the gambit you mentioned; they might well have seen through it.

Making it impossible to blow the unexpected reveal ahead of time is exactly what we're complaining about, because a perceptive-focused Solar should be able to do so.

 

[vicky_molokh]

Except... the proposed changes do nothing to disrupt this. I mean, the two versions of the Charm are the canon one - call it Reload Button - and the proposed one where you have to actually make the thing first and say you're using it - the Telepresence Rig.

If the Solar is a PC and their Circlemates know they have the Charm on their character sheet, it comes as no surprise when used.
If the Solar is a PC and their Circlemates do not know they have the Charm on their character sheet, then it can be a surprise either way - with the Telepresence Rig, they can just say they've made a doombot etc in private notes to the ST.

If the Solar is an NPC, the Circle don't know they can do it whether it's the Reload Button or the Telepresence Rig. Yes, they can figure out the Telepresence Rig - but only if they have reason to look, since people don't tend to pop EotUS for no reason. It means that the "fantasy-sneaky-craftsman-prophet" theme is a contest - between the sneakiness of the craftsman and the perceptiveness of the people they're trying to fool. Had the Sherlock character's opponent been present for the gambit you mentioned; they might well have seen through it.

Making it impossible to blow the unexpected reveal ahead of time is exactly what we're complaining about, because a perceptive-focused Solar should be able to do so.

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As good as the Telepresence Rig is as a standalone concept of an ability, I think you underestimate how much it can influence plots, making it extremely hard for a mortal player to effectively conceal its use, particularly if it has restrictions such as "no Charm use!" on it.

And for a Telepresence Rig kind of ability, I'd be absolutely in favour of making it a contest between sneakiness of the craftsman and the investigativeness of the investigators; would demand it in fact. But I think that's not the purpose of DMP: It's not about having an army of remote bots that you can operate from elsewhere. It's an insurance against losing a character through character death; its purpose is the prevention of death if it turns out you really really miscalculated the risks as a player and/or got ambushed as a character, not all the other benefits that can be gained from having a remote humanibot. The fact that it's flavoured as being remotely-controlled seems like just technobabble/thaumababble used to justify a cool ability and plot twist (cool twist for the first time it's done, anyway).

 

[Yzarc]

Forgetting the controversy of DMP, I have to ask, Should it be a charm?

I am NOT talking about what it does or how it does. I am talking about the spend xp and buy a replicate part. More specifically the ignore resources to build it part, because as far as I know, all you need to do is add the xp and get a Solar Replica.

From what I got out of it, 3E is about ability and the use of it. Yet this charm makes no mention of the actual rolls needed or anything like that.

Sure it says "With this Charm, the Solar's player may retroactively describe the process by which the Lawgiver created a perfect simulacrum of herself through an elaborate sorcerous project."

But this sounds less like a charm and more like artifact creation to me, which the replicate technically is. At best, this charm is a very specialized make X Artifact charm more than anything.

Sure there are similar charms that do similar, but they are broad enough to cover an entire classification of Artifacts rather than just one specific artifact and this is while potentially ignoring the resources needed to make it as the player may not have/no longer have/used up the resources needed to make it.

 

[Aleph]

It's an insurance against losing a character through character death

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Yes.

The thing about insurance is that you have to, you know, spend the money up front. In more than a single instalment of xp to buy the Charm. Given that you pay the cost after you die, this is rather less like insurance and rather more like "pay to resurrect your character when they die". Which is, you know. Actually the polar opposite of what insurance is.

And no, I'm fine with Charm use through it, fluffed as it being that you can't make an army of them - or rather you can, but you can only control one at a time, so no sending armies of Solarbots out to terraform the Wyld into a giant casino or anything.

Honestly, for an "insurance against death" Charm, I'd be more comfortable with something that gave you spirit-level immortality so that you respawned unless killed with a spirit-killer (which are rare, and which most people don't bother using on mortal beings because of how non-spirits usually die when they're killed).

 

[Chehrazad]

As good as the Telepresence Rig is as a standalone concept of an ability, I think you underestimate how much it can influence plots, making it extremely hard for a mortal player to effectively conceal its use, particularly if it has restrictions such as "no Charm use!" on it.

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Then perhaps make a clause that allows one to grant it up to five of your Charms as powers it can use. In that way, the thing will still be impressive, and you can make people believe you are yourself, but it will be limited to those five Charms and nothing else.

 

[vicky_molokh]

Then perhaps make a clause that allows one to grant it up to five of your Charms as powers it can use. In that way, the thing will still be impressive, and you can make people believe you are yourself, but it will be limited to those five Charms and nothing else.

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Yeah, that sounds like something closer to a balanced variant. Maybe 5 is too low in 3e (the charm prerequisite trees seem about as big as GURPS Magic spell prerequisite trees), plus the fact that a player is unlikely to be the wise prophet who can predict which Charms will be of use. Maybe make it so that Charms could be chosen retroactively and ignore prerequisites (in which case 5ish sounds much more playable).

Forgetting the controversy of DMP, I have to ask, Should it be a charm?

I am NOT talking about what it does or how it does. I am talking about the spend xp and buy a replicate part. More specifically the ignore resources to build it part, because as far as I know, all you need to do is add the xp and get a Solar Replica.

From what I got out of it, 3E is about ability and the use of it. Yet this charm makes no mention of the actual rolls needed or anything like that.

Sure it says "With this Charm, the Solar's player may retroactively describe the process by which the Lawgiver created a perfect simulacrum of herself through an elaborate sorcerous project."

But this sounds less like a charm and more like artifact creation to me, which the replicate technically is. At best, this charm is a very specialized make X Artifact charm more than anything.

Sure there are similar charms that do similar, but they are broad enough to cover an entire classification of Artifacts rather than just one specific artifact and this is while potentially ignoring the resources needed to make it as the player may not have/no longer have/used up the resources needed to make it.

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I think it's made as a Charm is because its purpose is to be used for the thing which is described in the Charm, as opposed to all the other things that can be done if you can build remote-controlled and perfectly disguised bots.

Yes.

The thing about insurance is that you have to, you know, spend the money up front. In more than a single instalment of xp to buy the Charm. Given that you pay the cost after you die, this is rather less like insurance and rather more like "pay to resurrect your character when they die". Which is, you know. Actually the polar opposite of what insurance is.

And no, I'm fine with Charm use through it, fluffed as it being that you can't make an army of them - or rather you can, but you can only control one at a time, so no sending armies of Solarbots out to terraform the Wyld into a giant casino or anything.

Honestly, for an "insurance against death" Charm, I'd be more comfortable with something that gave you spirit-level immortality so that you respawned unless killed with a spirit-killer (which are rare, and which most people don't bother using on mortal beings because of how non-spirits usually die when they're killed).

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Agreed, it should have some sort of more insurance-like cost. Such as committing Motes each time you want to activate the bot (whether or not you end up getting it killed), and probably spending some maintenance on it (whether as Craft XP, equivalent Resources of material component cost, or something similar).

Of course, one could counter that one just paid the whole lifetime insurance cost by purchasing the Charm (including its prerequisites), but personally I do think the idea of having a committed mote and material mainenance costs is sensible.

Regarding an army of them: even without being able to teleoperate them simultaneously, one can still get interesting benefits by having lots of telebots spread out throughout Creation (and Malfeas, and Stygia, and Yu-Shan eventually) and controlling them one at a time.

Regarding the 'Killed by GET', I'm not sure about it. I'd probably prefer the Charm to be upgradeable, with the base version being vulnerable to GET and the upper version not. Maybe likewise make upgrades required before use of Charms becomes available/freer.

 

[Hazard]

First, I don't think anyone worthy of a big name will be fooled if DMP was incompatible with Charm use. Solars do not fall easily like that.

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Sure they will be fooled. That's part of the Charm's functioning, that noone is capable of figuring out whether or not DMP is in use. Not even through the fact that the Solar isn't using any Charms.

Maybe he's just sandbagging for a reason? Doesn't matter really. The Charm says everyone is fooled no matter what.

But I'm disappointed to hear that Solars, the paragons of perfection and transcendent excellence, are not supposed to try emulating a trick like the one done by that guy in the Sherlock series just because it does retcons, even though retcon-doing abilities in RPGs aren't exactly unheard of.

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Retroactive Continuity based abilities are takebacks. One of Exalted's primary themes is that actions have consequences. Being able to say, retroactively, that a thing wasn't a thing and fuck everything else is a breach on this principle.

You want to be able to fake a death and leave it a surprise to your fellow players? Work it out with your ST in private ahead of time. It's an unfortunate consequence of tabletop gaming with a Game Master to act as referee for game rules but they must be kept in the loop or the game just stops working.

 

[Smartphone]

Snip

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Your Welcome.

As for the change to Living Shield you put forward the problem with simply making it reflexive is that generally speaking it seems to me that if a character has this style they will not be doing a whole lot of attacking or anything other than defend other due to the DV penalty from doing so making the defend other action which seems to be the core point of this style less effective.

Meanwhile with the two shield users one can always be defend othering with no DV penalty while the other attacks with whatever weapon they are wielding along with the shield, which would be slightly better.

So to get around this problem perhaps you should have Living Shield technique eliminate or reduce DV penalties from onslaught or coordinated attacks when the Falling Petal Stylist is using a defend other action on the target they declared. This is something that the two Shield users cannot replicate and provides enough of an edge that it should balance out the increased cost of having to acquire the style in the first place.

I hope this helps.

 

[Yeangst]

No, it's not, because the problem isn't with the Charm. I'm not explaining away a mechanical flaw. I'm explaining the Charm is meant for groups that like how it handles things more loose and narratively, and the groups where it causes problems are just not the groups it is written for. It is flat out not meant to be something everyone might enjoy, it's a high-end power written with certain ways of play in mind and it won't work for everyone and it's not supposed to.

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The objection to Dual Magnus Prana isn't a mechanical one, it's a narrative one. It's inclusion in the standard charmset implies that Solars can create their own artificial, temporary, Solar Exaltations.

 

[Broken25]

There are various implementations. FATE does it largely through Conceding the Conflict

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I will point out that even in FATE, when you use your narrative powers to change the plot, you have to do so in a manner that makes sense. You can't expend a Fate point to declare that you were a Doombot if the enemy has transhuman awareness. You have to give another explanation.

If you use actual in-setting powers to mimic narrative devices, you have to be very careful or you end producing non-sensical results.

 

[Irked]

Third Edition also doesn't really care about the weird edge cases that might happen from certain Charms or certain kinds of players, because one of the ideas behind it is that you will never, ever be able to stop all of those things from happening, and that it's better to try to make it as good as you can with how its intended to work, and if some edge cases happen where games fall apart or people get in arguments, well, that was going to happen no matter what.

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Okay. But I don't think it's fair to characterize many of these issues as "weird edge cases."

"I don't know how we declare attacker/defender Charms" is... kind of core, you know? "I don't know how Crane Style works, because I don't have rules for counterattacks," is a pretty fundamental issue. "I don't know what happens when you attack from stealth" is the kind of thing that completely changes how a character build works.

My beef with 3e is less that it failed to anticipate bizarre, arcane edge cases that no one could have foreseen, and more that it fails to have a solid resolution system for how game packets interact with each other. This isn't just exception-based design, where you have a core ruleset and then a bunch of specific modifiers to it; there is, in a number of fairly important areas, no core rule. That the game also has a bunch of arcane edge cases falls, in part, out of the fact that the engine at the heart already has some big gaps. And that... wasn't inevitable.

(Some of which just baffle me. The thing where the game doesn't actually tell you how to declare Charms in combat.. somebody had to catch that in playtesting, right? Somebody had to. It's literally impossible to roll out a fight with Charms without knowing that information. So how...?)

 

[Dif]

(Some of which just baffle me. The thing where the game doesn't actually tell you how to declare Charms in combat.. somebody had to catch that in playtesting, right? Somebody had to. It's literally impossible to roll out a fight with Charms without knowing that information. So how...?)

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Jokes aside, at the risk of retreading an earlier comment I made several pages ago, but this is because nothing about Ex3 seems to suggest that it was Ever intended to be new-player friendly and anything more than a vanity project by the current writers to get Their Exalted put into print, rather than rebuilding and repackaging the working pieces of the old versions.

It walks back all the rules-clarity and design innovations made by 2e, leaves open enormous gaps in setting material intended to be filled by prior book ownership (and what is spelled out often requires knowledge of the prior editions/Ink Monkeys works to make sense of, or sidelines existing material for The New Thing, like the Wyld Hunt sidebar which only briefly touches on Solar and Lunar Anathema before launching into a shill for the upcoming Exigents book, or the faux-mesoamerican beastman nation which renders the Dragon Kings a thematically-redundant footnote, etc), demands a kind of hyper-aggressive willingness to dig through over a third of the book to create a character, and places so many things on the shoulders of the players and ST to have a working, highly-performing group beforehand to handle the burdens of houseruling, extensive homebrewing and troubleshooting the entire thing with minimal guidance for doing so... it just goes On and On.

This isn't a book for getting fresh faced people Excited about being able to play Exalted, and I don't think it was ever intended to achieve that goal because they never wanted too. Its meant entirely and exclusively for people who are lapsed 2e players who want "anything but 2e" and are willing to buy-in for their specific Ink Monkeys brand, and will self-justify out any flaws they find based on that and "happy to have something" sunk-cost from the Kickstarter.

 

[Nervaqus987]

. (Note: This is fairly common for old retired Dragonblooded, while the Coils of the Dragon are designed to be Practice Free many Dragonblooded learn more than one Style in their lifetime and develop a Practices rating because of this; as a result of letting themselves 'get out of shape' this means they are less dangerous in combat than their advanced years, and Essence, would indicate... unless they are gearing up for war and go to the temple for a brief sabbatical that is.)

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Or being Uncle Iroh and getting buff in jail before breaking out and wrecking faces.

Anything that lets old Dragonblooded be Uncle Iroh is awesome.

But seriously, this is an awesome concept.

Side note, this may be because I'm getting into Xianxia style novels,* but wouldn't Martial Arts as Artifacts add to your Soak(and maybe Hardness)? Body Hardening training is comparatively common in martial arts, to say nothing of a setting like Exalted where you would expect "Get buff enough to turn aside blades with your abs" would be a viable goal for training.

Or would you consider stuff like that to be represented in the boosted Defense rating?



*Xianxia also has you get all sorts of other benefits from learning martial arts, but I'd put stuff like that as more Charms/Sorcery/General Magic Bullshit than anything.

 

[vicky_molokh]

I will point out that even in FATE, when you use your narrative powers to change the plot, you have to do so in a manner that makes sense. You can't expend a Fate point to declare that you were a Doombot if the enemy has transhuman awareness. You have to give another explanation.

If you use actual in-setting powers to mimic narrative devices, you have to be very careful or you end producing non-sensical results.

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The objection to Dual Magnus Prana isn't a mechanical one, it's a narrative one. It's inclusion in the standard charmset implies that Solars can create their own artificial, temporary, Solar Exaltations.

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Yeah, that's a thing. Dual Magnus Prana reads (to me) like a Charm that is meant to provide a narrative/dramatic/storytelling statement: the Solar master crafter can craft his way out of death's maw! The justification used for that doesn't seem to carry any other mechanical benefits defined, because it's meant to be just magi/technobabble (or at least it reads that way to me). Which is why I don't see the ability to build Solar Robots as a narrative statement - precisely because the Charm only enables building them retroactively and for the purpose of dodging a death, not proactively nor for dodging something other than death. The fact that they have this justification actually seems to tie the player's and/or GM's hands in some ways. Because if you try to apply a rational approach to it, you'll get unexplored consequences and/or be unable to use it at times. Which is what happens when you try to think hard about a storytelling device.

It's kinda annoying in some ways. But, as I said, one does not try to calculate the physical implications of Þor lowering the world ocean level by drinking from a horn connected to the sea. 3e seems to embrace the mythic approach even more so than the previous editions. The idea is alien to me, but at least I can appreciate it as something that can entertain a certain audience better than a more technical and realistic system would.

Jokes aside, at the risk of retreading an earlier comment I made several pages ago, but this is because nothing about Ex3 seems to suggest that it was Ever intended to be new-player friendly and anything more than a vanity project by the current writers to get Their Exalted put into print, rather than rebuilding and repackaging the working pieces of the old versions.

It walks back all the rules-clarity and design innovations made by 2e, leaves open enormous gaps in setting material intended to be filled by prior book ownership (and what is spelled out often requires knowledge of the prior editions/Ink Monkeys works to make sense of, or sidelines existing material for The New Thing, like the Wyld Hunt sidebar which only briefly touches on Solar and Lunar Anathema before launching into a shill for the upcoming Exigents book, or the faux-mesoamerican beastman nation which renders the Dragon Kings a thematically-redundant footnote, etc), demands a kind of hyper-aggressive willingness to dig through over a third of the book to create a character, and places so many things on the shoulders of the players and ST to have a working, highly-performing group beforehand to handle the burdens of houseruling, extensive homebrewing and troubleshooting the entire thing with minimal guidance for doing so... it just goes On and On.

This isn't a book for getting fresh faced people Excited about being able to play Exalted, and I don't think it was ever intended to achieve that goal because they never wanted too. Its meant entirely and exclusively for people who are lapsed 2e players who want "anything but 2e" and are willing to buy-in for their specific Ink Monkeys brand, and will self-justify out any flaws they find based on that and "happy to have something" sunk-cost from the Kickstarter.

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I guess you're right in that it's a book aimed at the audience that already wants to play Exalted. Though if I were one of the people who played and actually likes 3e, I would probably be offended by te last part of the last sentence.

But I also find it interesting that a lot of it seems to reflect the current state/problems of 2e and 2½e:

• It seems to have difficulty attracting new faces - it happens, but even people here seem to admit that the atmosphere can be unwelcoming (for complicated reasons).
• There's a certain pressure to go through books of a previous edition, forum/blog posts and author quotes scattered throughout the web etc. in order to have a, let's call it true understanding, of the system and setting.
• Something that apparently Ink Monkeys use too (or at least some of you said so): "this is a rewrite of Exalted into what it should be, minus what it was but shouldn't be".
• There's a need of a very mechanically savvy group and/or a group that has no issues with bending logic in order to make a good story, in order for a campaign not to break down. (Seem to be in a group that matches the latter more than the former.)
• I'm not sure, but there does seem to be a bit of a sunk cost at hand too.

 

[Estro]

It seems to have difficulty attracting new faces - it happens, but even people here seem to admit that the atmosphere can be unwelcoming (for complicated reasons).

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As some one who is trying to get into Exalted, this is very much true. The only other game system I've tried to get into (Eclipse Phase) is alot more welcoming. The current debate about Solar Doombots is a great example, as I have only the vaguest idea what's going, and that's mostly due to my knowledge of what the feth a doombot is.

 

[The Laurent]

As some one who is trying to get into Exalted, this is very much true. The only other game system I've tried to get into (Eclipse Phase) is alot more welcoming. The current debate about Solar Doombots is a great example, as I have only the vaguest idea what's going, and that's mostly due to my knowledge of what the feth a doombot is.

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Join the WoD side. We have mechanics that are only *halfway* fucked, vampires, werewolves, cookies and gritty magic.

 

[The Sandman]

I think the biggest problem is that the book took three extra years to get to us and still had these glaring flaws.

If it had the same delays but we got a product with just a few minor niggling complaints amid excellence, we'd grumble but acquiesce. If we got a playable while still deeply flawed product, but it had come out three years ago, we'd be irritated but at least pleased to have something better than 2e.

Instead, we got a product that took all that extra time and pissed it away on coming up with stupid dice tricks and insulting players who just didn't get their creative vision, without making even a cursory attempt at fixing any of the problems we see in the final draft.

This is flatly unacceptable.

 

[Estro]

Join the WoD side. We have mechanics that are only *halfway* fucked, vampires, werewolves, cookies and gritty magic.

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Is this halfway fucked by exalted standards, or EP standards (which is generally not bad, once you have a character. If you don't, prepared to spend a couple hours on far too complex maths and looking up seven bazillion pieces of gear)?

 

[Crawling Chaos]

Join the WoD side. We have mechanics that are only *halfway* fucked, vampires, werewolves, cookies and gritty magic.

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You also have the Technocracy which balances it out.

 

[Carrnage]

This would be valid if it was an associated mechanic-you build a duplicate, as an artifact, who can pretend to be you but weaker (because presumably you're not going to be building Solar exaltations) which can be detected and noticed. As it stands as a disassociated mechanic, Dual Magnus Prana is... well, the best way I've found to describe it is basically "Things Iteration X does."[1] Now, Iteration X is pretty awesome, but Solars shouldn't be throwing around high-level oMage technomagic. Especially because, as I understand it, if you survive the ambush horribly maimed, Dual Magnus Prana doesn't kick in and negate your wounds. In fact, you can't activate it to say "that was actually a Terminator" unless you die.

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I prefer the approach of the player can use the duplicate independantly but they have to split either charms or essence levels between copies and themself.

 

[The Laurent]

Is this halfway fucked by exalted standards, or EP standards (which is generally not bad, once you have a character. If you don't, prepared to spend a couple hours on far too complex maths and looking up seven bazillion pieces of gear)?

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Character creation is actually not that bad. It's just that occasionally there's a few wonky things that need to be hit in the head to be made to go away. Like the Granny thing, where you would use optional rules to not have it so that grandma's best weaponry bet is a claymore sword.

Besides that, the only real fucked things are *comparatively minor*/subjectiveish.

The Conditions system, Beats, and the new Integrity mechanics, and you can actually ignore all of those and do 1e and just steal 2e's XP system and modify it if you don't like them.

But there's no, like, major explosives hidden in the book ready to destroy you.

I'm mostly talking about nWoD here. I know that oVamp committed, like, the greatest sin ever by having its Celerity power do multiple actions.

Which is why it doesn't in nWoD. But yeah, overall I'd say while there are stupid parts[1], you can completely and totally play it mechanically without many problems, and those you do encounter can be solved by the ST saying, "That's stupid, change the -1 modifier into -2" or other small "No, you don't have to rebuild the entire crafting mechanics and the Charmset by hand in order to play it" sorts of fixes.

[1] Fuck the reductive Derangements system, it's sorta psychologically BS and mean.

Edit: If need be, I could move this post to the WW thread to continue my attempt to sell you on WoD. Also, another advantage of WoD: It has ongoing books that are being made and released at least not particularly disgustingly late, instead of having a corebook that hasn't even been published yet.

Though, in more Exalted news, there's apparently a collection of Exalted 3e stories that came out, so there's that.