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The Rim and the Hammer (Exalted/Warhammer Quest)

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BronzeTongue said:
Kind of immediately inverts the character idea, would probably need to update his description.

It also seems unreasonable to me to complain about people building social spec characters for leadership games.

I prefer playing wizards and mad scientists too, but that's not the primary role of an executive.
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Oh come on, we're leading a tiny city-state focused on a single big piece of arcane infrastructure. Saying "yeah I make the head engineer the leader" does make sense, especially if he has decent Stewardship. I'm thinking of it like "who should be the head of my arctic research station" and not "who should be the statesman to lead the Empire".
It would also be really fucking cool.

CanYouMeme said:
I would be tempted to vote for your plan if you didn't add Fragile, because that is a FOOLISH thing to do in WHF. There are other traits that can raise learning - you don't need Genius.

If you're willing to dump Fragile and Genius, I'll go haul out my stock of 2e Exalted books and go find an alternate 2 points worth of traits for more learning for the Write-In Traits option.
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I'm hoping to develop cool magic enhancements for ourselves so we can better face melee combat. And worst case it's just a "become more easily exhausted" option, not "you die at the first injury". Starting from a lower point just means you can climb higher before the QM starts slow-capping you so you don't become better than a Bloodthirster or whatever.
And this is a CKII game, not specifically a melee combat simulator.

But if you can suggest any other +1 point option you like (and if DP okay's it), I'll remove Fragile and use that.
 
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DragonParadox said:
Ah.. those are not write in more traits, it is a vote indicating that you should choose traits from the list. Allowing you guys to make your own while it sounds fine in theory would lead to a very long and confusing back and forth to balance it.
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I'm not proposing to make up traits. I'm proposing to rip them straight from my copies of 2E Exalted books. I'll still let it go if you insist that doesn't work.
 
[X] Plan Head of the Table
-[X] Stats: Martial 17, Diplomacy 19, Stewardship 17, Intruige 16, Learning 12, Piety 12, Combat 13
-[X] Aura of Authority - Your peers have always looked to you for leadership (+2 Diplomacy; Re-roll one failed morale roll per combat as long as you can make yourself seen and heard) -1 Bonus Point
-[X] Genius - Whatever you put your mind to as a child came easily to you, too easy your father used to say, though he smiles as he did so (+3 to all stats) -2 Bonus points


The goal here being to build someone who's primarily good at the things he should be doing. If your head of state spends all day playing with your particle collider instead of being a statesman then they've got the wrong seat at the cabinet meeting.

It answers the question "why is this guy doing paperwork, organizing meetings, and planning foreign policy instead of doing something else?".
DragonParadox said:
On the other hand you are post-apocalyptic bird people who select your executive in large part by who can pull the coolest fly-overs. People of all kinds have slipped through over the years.
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I wasn't trying to say it was impossible or unreasonable necessarily, just that the description was of a short guy who used the force of his gregarious personality to make up for his lack of size.

Nothing wrong with changing that since it was just a description vote and not a suicide pact, but it'd still be silly to keep while building a dour and physically frail genius with off putting mutations.
TalonofAnathrax said:
Oh come on, we're leading a tiny city-state focused on a single big piece of arcane infrastructure. Saying "yeah I make the head engineer the leader" does make sense, especially if he has decent Stewardship. I'm thinking of it like "who should be the head of my arctic research station" and not "who should be the statesman to lead the Empire".
It would also be really fucking cool.
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Tiny city state yeah, but one in a complicated and precarious situation. Being a good leader is important for holding a leadership role.

Your build would be fun to play, and if this was a Divided Loyalties style quest as an advisor I'd definitely vote for it. It's just not the job I think we should be building to fill.

Edit: autocorrect
 
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[X] Elemental Ascension
-[X] Stats: Martial 17, Diplomacy 19, Stewardship 17, Intruige 12, Learning 12, Piety 16, Combat 13
-[X] Proud - To give ground before a foe is to disgrace yourself, your kin and the blood of Mela that flows through your veins (-1 Diplomacy -2 Intrigue) +1 Bonus point
-[X] Spirit Speaker - All your people are drawn to the sky, but you were drawn in equal measure to those spirits who are of the sky, among them you found friends and enemies, but from both you found respect (+2 Learning; +2 Piety +10 when conversing with spirits of air frost and similar concepts) -1 Bonus Point
-[X] Elemental Kinship - Those born of the Elemental Dragons, of blood or of spirit share a bond imperishable (+2 Learning +2 Diplomacy; begin with the friendship of a Thunderbird one of the rainbow hued warlike air elementals; the spirit will aid you if you have need of, particularly in battle; and its favor leaves some indelible mark on you) -3 Bonus Points

The goal of this plan is to reach the point, of merging with our elemental friend. And ascend to the celestial ranks. While along the way propping up minor spirits of the air to bolster our city.

[X] BronzeTongue
 
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BronzeTongue said:
[X] Plan Head of the Table
-[X] Stats: Martial 17, Diplomacy 19, Stewardship 17, Intruige 16, Learning 12, Piety 12, Combat 13
-[X] Aura of Authority - Your peers have always looked to you for leadership (+2 Diplomacy; Re-roll one failed morale roll per combat as long as you can make yourself seen and heard) -1 Bonus Point
-[X] Genius - Whatever you put your mind to as a child came easily to you, too easy your father used to say, though he smiles as he did so (+3 to all stats) -2 Bonus points


The goal here being to build someone who's primarily good at the things he should be doing. If your head of state spends all day playing with your particle collider instead of being a statesman then they've got the wrong seat at the cabinet meeting.

It answers the question "why is this guy doing paperwork, organizing meetings, and planning foreign policy instead of doing something else?".

I wasn't trying to say it was impossible or unreasonable necessarily, just that the description was of a short guy who used the force of his gregarious personality to make up for his lack of size.

Nothing wrong with changing that since it was just a description vote and not a suicide pact, but it'd still be silly to keep while building a dour and physically frail genius with off putting mutations.

Tiny city state yeah, but one in a complicated and precarious situation. Being a good leader is important for holding a leadership role.

Your build would be fun to play, and if this was a Divided Loyalties style quest as an advisor I'd definitely vote for it. It's just not the job I think we should be building to fill.

Edit: autocorrect
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True, the description would have to change. On the balance I should probably have made the description this vote not the last one since traits impact it
 
@DragonParadox @TalonofAnathrax Okay, here's a selection of +1 pointers I'd be okay with, along with short hand descriptions and proposed equivalents separated by backslashes. If you still don't want any of them, I'll drop it entirely and vote:

Odd Scent (Manual of Exalted Powers - Lunars p.207) Character permanently smells weird, suffers -2 to all social rolls when smell is a factor / -1 Diplomacy, -1 Intrigue (In the case of our character, he constantly smells like an incoming blizzard)

Disturbing Voice (Manual of Exalted Powers - Lunars p.207) Character permanently smells weird, suffers -2 to all social rolls when speaking / -2 Intrigue (character speaks as if a chorus of winds were behind his words, making other folk suspicious)

Mood Swings (Exalted Core, p. 288) Manic depressive - roll Conviction at -2 to initiate new plans when depressive, must roll Temperance -2 to avoid wild shit like brawls and stuff when manic / Each turn, roll a dice to determine manic or depressive; manic is +2/-2 to Martial and Combat / Stewardship and Learning. Depressive is the reverse. (Our character is as flighty as the wind, with a mind to match)

Ugly (Exalted Core, p. 289) You Ugly! Reduce Appearance by 2 dots, can't raise above 3 which is vaguely...simple-attractive? / -5-10 penalty to social rolls where Appearance is a factor, requires major esoteric work to overcome (Our character has a visage that was...inexpertly...hewn from a granite mountainside.)

Hungry (Compass of Celestial Directions - The Wyld p. 146) Requires 25% more food, gets hit by starvation quicker / In situations where QM deems not enough food is available, Character takes rapidly-stacking -1 penalties to all rolls (Lightning burns in his veins. It must be sated.)

I have several more, but I'll cut it off here as a sampler to see what you think.
 
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@BronzeTongue, I want to avoid the "I am an overall competent genius, good at everything, very personale, who can try cool stuff too" generic CKII character.
My plan has baseline competence in all stats (no huge disability, etc) but definitely still has a main focus on SCIENCE and on administration. Seems like fun.
 
TalonofAnathrax said:
@BronzeTongue, I want to avoid the "I am an overall competent genius, good at everything, very personale, who can try cool stuff too" generic CKII character.
My plan has baseline competence in all stats (no huge disability, etc) but definitely still has a main focus on SCIENCE and on administration. Seems like fun.
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This sort of builds are min-maxed nonsense that don't establish a core specialty.

My plan has a clear focus on the social skills needed to be a leader, with the intent being to fill the gaps by leveraging those skills to find people who are really good at specific non-leadership areas.

Your build does look like it has fun planes to go, but no more than mine would. It's just that what you're proposing would be perfect for our learning or piety advisor instead of our executive officer.
 
CanYouMeme said:
@DragonParadox @TalonofAnathrax Okay, here's a selection of +1 pointers I'd be okay with, along with short hand descriptions and proposed equivalents separated by backslashes. If you still don't want any of them, I'll drop it entirely and vote:

Odd Scent (Manual of Exalted Powers - Lunars p.207) Character permanently smells weird, suffers -2 to all social rolls when smell is a factor / -1 Diplomacy, -1 Intrigue (In the case of our character, he constantly smells like an incoming blizzard)

Disturbing Voice (Manual of Exalted Powers - Lunars p.207) Character permanently smells weird, suffers -2 to all social rolls when speaking / -2 Intrigue (character speaks as if a chorus of winds were behind his words, making other folk suspicious)

Mood Swings (Exalted Core, p. 288) Manic depressive - roll Conviction at -2 to initiate new plans when depressive, must roll Temperance -2 to avoid wild shit like brawls and stuff when manic / Each turn, roll a dice to determine manic or depressive; manic is +2/-2 to Martial and Combat / Stewardship and Learning. Depressive is the reverse. (Our character is as flighty as the wind, with a mind to match)

Ugly (Exalted Core, p. 289) You Ugly! Reduce Appearance by 2 dots, can't raise above 3 which is vaguely...simple-attractive? / -5-10 penalty to social rolls where Appearance is a factor, requires major esoteric work to overcome (Our character has a visage that was...inexpertly...hewn from a granite mountainside.)

Hungry (Compass of Celestial Directions - The Wyld p. 146) Requires 25% more food, gets hit by starvation quicker / In situations where QM deems not enough food is available, Character takes rapidly-stacking -1 penalties to all rolls (Lightning burns in his veins. It must be sated.)

I have several more, but I'll cut it off here as a sampler to see what you think.
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Mood swings would make the character very hard to run since this is not just mechanics and Ugly is really not... possible for one of the Children of the Air unless you get some kind of mutation. Those slightly insane Twilights did good work. Hungry could be compensated by packing a lot of food so I think that one is also not workable.

The others look good though -2 Diplo -1 Intrigue for the scent, no reason to complicate it and -2 intrigue for disturbing voice.
 
Vote for me if you want a fun technocrat, very smart but maybe not super personable.
Vote for BronzeTongue if you want a generally competent, smooth leader-type.

DP, I will edit my plan to include Scent instead of Fragile. Do you want to pick the wording for it ?
 
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TalonofAnathrax said:
Vote for me if you want a fun technocrat, very smart but maybe not super personable. If this were Frostpunk, he would be a Head of Engineering ruling over an infrastructure-dependant settlement.
Vote for BronzeTongue if you want a generally competent, smooth leader-type.

DP, I will edit my plan to include Scent instead of Fragile. Do you want to pick the wording for it ?
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My plan is for a specialist in leadership without a crippling weakness in a particular area, that isn't the same as a generalist.

Also, for my part at least I'd suggest posting a v2 of your plan instead of editing, since so many people have already voted and may care about the difference.
 
TalonofAnathrax said:
Vote for me if you want a fun technocrat, very smart but maybe not super personable.
Vote for BronzeTongue if you want a generally competent, smooth leader-type.

DP, I will edit my plan to include Scent instead of Fragile. Do you want to pick the wording for it ?
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You can just leave it as is, if anything small like working needs tweaking I'll do it when I put up the character.
 
Thank you both kindly.

I actually did have an idea for ugly being a "He fucked up an experiment when he was first learning Sorcery" consequence, but Talon already picked an alternative so no need for it now.
 
CanYouMeme said:
Thank you both kindly.

I actually did have an idea for ugly being a "He fucked up an experiment when he was first learning Sorcery" consequence, but Talon already picked an alternative so no need for it now.
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The thing is you are Exalted, it is not impossible to scar them permanently, but it is very hard and then I would have to come up with what Gust was doing to get him in that position.
 
TalonofAnathrax said:
[X] Plan Thaumaturgic SCIENCE
-[X] Martial 13, Diplomacy 16, Stewardship 17, Intrigue 12, Learning 19, Piety 12, Combat 17
-[X] Genius - Whatever you put your mind to as a child came easily to you, too easy your father used to say, though he smiles as he did so (+3 to all stats) -2 Bonus points
-[X] Thaumatuirgic Engineer - You worked with some of the most advanced and most dangerous relics in Sezakan (+5 Learning -1 Martial; Stewardship and Intrigue; +15 in understanding Wyld Effects) -2 Bonus points
-[X] Relic Finder Lore - A former Relic Finder, you have delved into lore chance-found that others may count lost, perhaps well lost (+6 Learning Allows access to the fundamentals of a forbidden lore thanks to your experience delving into First Age Ruins) -3 Bonus Points
-[X] Dour - You are keenly aware of how much your people have lost and fear that you will never again rise to those wonderous heights (-3 Diplomacy +1 Learning; cannot be taken with Gregarious) +1 Bonus point
-[X] Proud - To give ground before a foe is to disgrace yourself, your kin and the blood of Mela that flows through your veins (-1 Diplomacy -2 Intrigue) +1 Bonus point
-[X] Cloudy Gaze - Your eyes are an unnerving white as though frozen over. Though your sight is unaffected others find it distinctly disquieting (-3 Diplomacy) +1 Bonus Point
-[X] Odd Scent - Character permanently smells like an incoming blizzard (-2 Diplomacy, -1 Intrigue) Gain +1 Bonus Point
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With your new changes our head of government would be operating at 10 diplo, which will make a lot of our primary job difficult.

To a degree we can work around this stuff, but we're going to be remarkably worse at our actual duties than we are at anything else.

Which would become a detriment when we have to be the one doing something because of our position, and can't outsource to a specialist.
 
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