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General Exalted Thread

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Aleph said:
Well, the nice thing about Styles you're using behind the scenes is that you don't strictly need to write them up formally and in full - you can just decide roughly on bonuses and have a simple "it's this sort of thing" note to yourself, or indeed just have the "it's this sort of thing" and ignore bonuses entirely.

They don't have writeups, but I'm sure ES and I will be happy to do some for you if you want. Styles are like pringles; you make one or two and the next thing you know you're halfway down a 5000 word document trying to decide on a name for your "I'm Sam Vimes" Command Style.
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Heh. Noted. Well, I might as well try my hand at some of them, just to get a bit of practice in. They'll help when it comes to deciding on what various NPCs can and will do.

Tributaries of Daana'd Style (Bureaucracy)
As a hundred minor streams join together to become a mighty river, so too does a practitioner of this Style weld together many small and specialized groups into a cohesive whole. Equally useful for managing a crafts guild and an espionage network, a master of this style always has the correct tools on hand to solve any given problem.
1: +1 to coordinating projects involving multiple specialized groups
2: +1 to concealing evidence of collaboration
3: +1 difficulty to reveal connections between allied organizations

Words like Hesiash's Smoke Style (Politics)
Smoke does not sear flesh and bone like fire, but kills by filling the air until victims cannot help but breath it in. So too does a master of this Style affect social change, introducing a dozen minor points that gradually come together as part of a cohesive whole.
1: +1 when supporting the argument of another
2: +1 when strengthing Minor intimacies you Instilled.
3: +1 difficulty to tests made to discover the source of a rumour or idea.

Wood Dragon's Kiss Style (Occult)
The gifts of Sextus Jylis are many, but in the hands of the ignorant or unenlightened can easily lead to ruin. This Style deals with the identification, preparation and application of natural, Creation-derived toxins, and is a particular favourite among both assassins and doctors the world over.
1: +1 to preparing precise dosages for a known target
2: +1 to identifying the source and treatment methods of a natural toxin
3: +1 difficulty for victims to resist damage from prepared toxins

Flowering Words Style (Lore, Expression)
In Dynastic circles, how you say something can be just as important as what you say, and so poets and politicians across the Realm study this Style in order to appear sufficiently cultured. This is not a Style for carefully prepared speeches, but emphasizes the transient beauty of words spoken from the heart.
1: +1 when attempting to instill positive intimacies towards oneself.
2: +1 when attempting to convey hidden information vocally.
3: -1 MDV/Guile for targets when attempting to inspire an emotion with spoken words.
 
Maugan Ra said:
Tributaries of Daana'd Style (Bureaucracy)
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Change the bonuses and talk up the fact that this is basically "meant" for coordinating spy rings - no single group knows anything about the wider organisation and everything is segregated into cells.
Maugan Ra said:
Words like Hesiash's Smoke Style (Politics)
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Third bonus isn't really useful for changing minds - this style is about soft words and platitudes; changing minds with choking honey rather than sharp vinegar. Like dying of smoke inhalation, they don't realise the danger they're in as you work. Have it treat the target's Principles as 1 dot higher than they actually are.
Maugan Ra said:
Wood Dragon's Kiss Style (Occult)
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Specifically plant-based toxins. Second one should only be if you have experience with the toxin in question, third is too broad - switch it to +1 difficulty to identify a toxin when disguised by the similar-tasting plant-based seasoning.
Maugan Ra said:
Flowering Words Style (Lore, Expression)
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This isn't really intended as one of her spy styles - it's the one she's picked up in her old age for the poetry she writes (though it's also good at convincing people to do what she tells them to). Rephrase the third dot as "ignore 1 point of MDV when...", and have it be, hmm... not "inspire an emotion with spoken words"; that's too broad. Possibly "convince an audience to return for more" - like the flower tempting insects back for another gift of nectar, you draw people to linger over your poetry and come to listen to you talk again.

Otherwise, looks pretty good! ^_^
 
Maugan Ra said:
Wood Dragon's Kiss Style (Occult)
The gifts of Sextus Jylis are many, but in the hands of the ignorant or unenlightened can easily lead to ruin. This Style deals with the identification, preparation and application of natural, Creation-derived toxins, and is a particular favourite among both assassins and doctors the world over.
1: +1 to preparing precise dosages for a known target
2: +1 to identifying the source and treatment methods of a natural toxin
3: +1 difficulty for victims to resist damage from prepared toxins
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This should be a medicine style, not Occult. You'll never use occult to diagnose a poison, you'd use medicine.
 
Revlid said:
I understand where you're coming from, and one potential idea would be to allow for Evocations stemming from mastered Styles rather than Artifacts.

One of the core goals of Styles is to make customizing your own as quick and easy as possible, incidentally allowing a huge variety in terms of flavour without opening up a can of combination-worms. Normally, therefore, I wouldn't suggest Evocations, which come with an exact opposite set of upsides - great mechanical depth and breadth, as well as the ability to invest deeply in a single cohesive tree of powers - complete with the exact opposite set of downsides. If you're playing 3e, however, you're already expected to homebrew big Charm trees for magic weapons and fighting styles, so why not?

So just allow Exalts (or other beings capable of using Evocations) to homebrew Charms appropriate to Styles they've mastered, in the same way as Evocations extend from artifacts they've bonded with. Mortals get all the benefits of regular Styles, but Exalts get to take them to new heights - functionally the same thing as Martial Arts Charms, but with no need for Mastery/Terrestrial keywords, and available in wuxia areas other than punching-people-fu. Sorcerous Initiations and their associated Merits could probably end up being lumped into these, too, as Occult Styles.
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Really you're just saying to allow Charms to grow out of Styles as if they were Trait Minimums. Legit and certainly not bad.

I wasn't in the right headspace to offer some of the solutions I've considered before, but for completeness's sake, one of the common ones is standardizing and decoupling certain 'Repeat' Effects like DV/Soak enhancers and putting them into a sort of general group of Charms. You can learn them from any Style, but you only have to learn them Once. (I haven't had any real thought on what they do mechanically other than that).

Anyway, the advantage of this rough idea is that you have a standard suite of effects to serve as a foundation for more esoteric 'Style' Charms. Things that actually Do and Say interesting things about the magic/capabilities.
 
Revlid said:
One of the core goals of Styles is to make customizing your own as quick and easy as possible, incidentally allowing a huge variety in terms of flavour without opening up a can of combination-worms.
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Building on this, most of my changes are rooted in the following:
a) My hypothetical job as a game developer/system designer is to produce a system of the highest possible quality.
b) Producing a system of the highest possible quality means creating something which has the lowest possible chance to explode in a group's faces as realistically possible, while also satisfying the other given design goals (comprehensible, quick to pick up, quick to run, evocative/interesting/flavourful, etc).
c) I fucking hate combinatorial hell. I live there enough. I don't want more of it, because combinatorial hell makes quality control impossible, or else extremely expensive in terms of development resources (time, money used to buy time, creative energy being wasted on checking every single bloody charm, hearthstone and artifact in the game for bad combinations with my latest martial arts style).

So something that's constantly in my mind when playing with tabletop rules is, how do I reduce combinatorial hell (or more generally, the amount of effort I need to spend testing/checking/etc), as much as possible? Because I cannot have both quality and combinatorial hell: the latter makes the former impossible.

This is obviously not satisfying to people who enjoy granularity and complexity for it's own sake, but I'm pretty comfortable in saying that it's extremely easy to homebrew extensions off a solid, compact, concise base compared to the difficulty required to reduce a sprawling mess of combinatorial hell to a working streamlined core.

For benefit of anyone just catching up to the discussion now: This is why martial arts (and evocations, and Eclipse charmsharing, and anything else that connects many smaller isolated sets into a single monster blob-set for testing purposes) are Anathema - every traditional Exalted martial arts style needs to be balanced against every other martial arts style and every splat's own combat charms, which is a very large set. Large sets lead to a very hot level of combinatorial hell, which is to be avoided.
 
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Aleph was right. Styles are really fun and sort of easy to Homebrew.

On my latest attempt, Tron Legacy Chakrams, since one of my players was looking for a good Chakram style to use. Still not sure on some of these, so advice would be helpful. 3 seems a bit redundant, since unexpected attacks will already hit for a ton of damage, but I don't know what to replace it with.

Tron Legacy Chakram Style (As always with these kinds of things for me, names usually come last)

Originally developed as a dueling style for a gladiator game whose rules have been lost to the sands of time, this is now the favored style of monks and performers who mix trick shots with fisticuffs. A master of this style uses the erratic movements and odd angle deflections to bait their opponents into traps, each possible action leading to certain doom. This style uses chakrams as form weapons, and cannot be practiced in medium armor or heavier.
1: +1 to ricocheting chakrams off walls, objects, and people. (Essential part of the look and feel of style. Attacks will bounce of walls because it's cool,)
2: +1 to attempts to reestablish surprise for a Chakram attack. (A classic gambit for this style is to send a Chakram at a foe. He dodges, and you follow up with fisticuffs, which he blocks. And then the Chakram bounces off the wall and hits him in the back of the head)
3: +1 damage to unexpected Chakram attacks.
 
Okay, so here's an actual critique of the Styles mechanics, both pros and cons.

Pros:
  • It's legitimately simple and easy to implement, improving the cost/benefit of Specialties as a concept with clearly defined design space.
  • It has minimal ST overhead and prevents combination hell. Arbitration is immediately digestible and easy to understand. "Are you invoking your style's conditions in your stunt? Awesome. Get your bonus."
  • It has a straight forward system that, due to its simplicity and elegant design, allows for easy homebrew.
  • It was carefully expanded upon in order to extend upwards through several levels of gameplay and setting conceits (mortals up to Exalts and possibly beyond).
  • Styles are meant to be recognizable traits in-setting.
Cons:
  • Unless I have missed it somewhere, Styles are purely Quantitative, based on Dice; Everything is +X to or in Y Context. Qualitative, by contrast, are phrases like 'you may parry lethal or ranged damage without a stunt'.
    • Caveat: This may have been declared Charm design space only, but it was never stated as such.
  • Styles offer an illusion of a broader approach. It seemingly makes tactics more viable, but rarely offers truly outstanding differences. It convinces a player to act in a specific manner, but the rewards for that manner are meager at best.
  • It's primary utility becomes increasingly less useful as more dice are added to the pool. +2 dice for a mortal is notable. +2-3 for an Exalt is less notable. Especially in context of Excellencies.*
  • Styles are presented in such a way as to discourage further expansion. Players can make new styles all they want, but are not yet encouraged to progress beyond those mechanics. **
  • Styles fall victim to what is best described as memetic tunnel vision: Their names and concepts are repeated until they become take beyond archetypes or useful shorthand, into 'facts' and concrete terms. They reduce active thought and consideration due to their nature, in the same vein as quotable soundbites. They can be remembered easily with a quip, but Styles run the risk of becoming the quip.
* We must acknowledge that the primary testing platform for Styles is Kerisgame, which uses a different Essence regeneration system among other houserules. To fully address this, we need to know the average pools a given character will have availible, as well as common Excellency-alikes. I will however 100% acknowledge that of all Exalted, Dragonblooded get the most benefit out of Styles, due to their dice caps.

** Part of this is due to the fact that such mechanics simply have not been written, such as the implication of Dragonblooded Training Magic, but the environment (this thread) is often hostile to creativity, in favor of ease of use.

Styles themselves are a Basic Math solution to a Conceptual problem, which in my mind is best articulated as this: Charms were originally envisioned as a deck of TCG cards, and you were allowed to build your own as you saw fit. unlike most healthy TCG (competitive) gameplay environments, cards were almost never phased out, nor were restrictions leveled on their potential combinations at a systemic level. Example being, you weren't restricted to a single damage-adder charm per combo, even if you had 10 damage adder charms available.

Edit: Had a hanging thought that was not important.
 
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Shyft said:
Unless I have missed it somewhere, Styles are purely Quantitative, based on Dice; Everything is +X to or in Y Context. Qualitative, by contrast, are phrases like 'you may parry lethal or ranged damage without a stunt'.
  • Caveat: This may have been declared Charm design space only, but it was never stated as such.
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I know, right? Although that is more a problem of skills in general. Like, is obvious to me that someone with Medicine 4 can do things that someone with medicine 1 cannot, is not just a three dice difference, but that isn't really supported by the rules, you have to apply common sense each time.
 
Shyft said:
Styles themselves are a Basic Math solution to a Conceptual problem, which in my mind is best articulated as this: Charms were originally envisioned as a deck of TCG cards, and you were allowed to build your own as you saw fit. unlike most healthy TCG (competitive) gameplay environments, cards were almost never phased out, nor were restrictions leveled on their potential combinations at a systemic level. Example being, you weren't restricted to a single damage-adder charm per combo, even if you had 10 damage adder charms available.
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This is my main problem with Styles. I don't like dice adders. Like, I actively find them distasteful. And that's all Styles are, shitty restricted Excellencies that, further, are entirely predicated on the ability of the player to stunt successfully. In effect, they have turned stunts from a happy bonus into a dire necessity. As much as we here say that stunting is easy it is, in fact, not for all players. I play with at least two people who find stunting a chore and often fail to do it in even the most minimal levels.

In effect, Style to me are just FATE Aspects but worse. They give the illusion of tactical roleplay when all they are is merely a test of players ability to include the thematics of the Style in every action they pull off.

Sure, @EarthScorpion and @Aleph can pull them off but they hardly count as the lowest common denominator of players.

If I were to have my way with an Exalted rewrite I would remove all dice adders in every form. You get a fixed dicepool based on your traits and Charms would be things that add qualitative differences to actions. This would mean far less Charms (both in an absolute sense and in the sense of the number the players have) but I wouldn't mind that at all.
 
Shyft said:
Unless I have missed it somewhere, Styles are purely Quantitative, based on Dice; Everything is +X to or in Y Context. Qualitative, by contrast, are phrases like 'you may parry lethal or ranged damage without a stunt'.
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This is my biggest problem with Styles. Like, what's even the point of knowing kung fu if I can't do stuff like this?

 
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Sucal said:
That just seems like a stunted attack using a pressure point style or similar.
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A stunted attack to make someone's heart explode? That seems kinda outside the boundaries of a Style as I understand them. I don't see them as being able to represent the effects of specific techniques like these mechanically.
 
If we're doing an impromptu poll, I've got a negative impression of Styles. I don't see what they add to justify their fiddly-ness.

They look like they might be fun to write and to read, but not so fun to play with.
 
runeblue360 said:
A stunted attack to make someone's heart explode? That seems kinda outside the boundaries of a Style as I understand them. I don't see them as being able to represent the effects of specific techniques like these mechanically.
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Really?

Because I can see the stunt being used through the style and through native solar charms to enhance the damage of the attack.

It won't likely work very often on a peer opponent, but then Bill wasn't a peer opponent in that movie.

Hell, in 3e terms it could be the decisive attack after you've built up a lot of initiative through withering.
 
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