General Exalted Thread

[Aaron Peori]

I'm curious about this world of yours where:

a) everyone is a sorcerer, and
b) the only way to get artifacts is by crafting them yourself.

Please elaborate! It sounds fascinating. Can you go into more detail on the reasons why there aren't Dragonblooded craftsmen making Cherub Shrines for Realm officers who, shockingly, aren't sorcerers and don't or can't learn Sorcery, but don't need or want to because all they need is Infallible Messenger to communicate and coordinate with other regiments? How about those Sapphire or Adamant-scale artifacts in ancient tombs? Are they all just sort of... missing, presumed gone? There's no situation where a player might just prefer to have an Artifact than learn the spell, as a mechanical difference, because their character is a warrior rather than a sorcerer and they're only interested in that one effect?

tl,dr: much strawman, very false dichotomy, wow

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First; why would Dragonblooded craft cherub shrines when Wind Carried Words is in their Charmset?

Second; so the entire point of being an Craft master in your setting is to be the guy who gives everyone else in the party cool toys. I don't get to forge a cool sword for myself, ever, because obviously my roll in the game is to supply the Dawn with cool swords.

Third; I love how this makes anyone who takes Craft also have to be a skilled Sorcerer. Because I can't tell you how much I loved pigeonholing Twilights to be Always Sorcery All The Time The Splat before and can appreciate you forcing that on my character now.

"I can find a magic sword in a tomb" is not something I care about for how fun the game is. I want to know why my character would bother to make Weapon X for myself. Because I'm not interested in being Q to your Bond.

 

[xenondestroyer]

I'm more worried about what the hell they used before sorcery was discovered. Did they fight the Primordial war equipped only with the more mundane equipment? Did they only get artifacts of power from the whimsy of autochton works?

 

[fitzgerald]

Men of Jad provided the gear for tue most part.
Whuch was autochon took tge Solars demanding and getting Oaths of surrender from them so badly

 

[xenondestroyer]

The jadeborn couldn't have made artifacts, because sorcery was not yet available. So no, that doesn't work.

Also, Spelling, man, seriously.

 

[veekie]

... uh

if you are going to make a solid-state spell in the form of a sorcerous artifact that has the same effects

then generally, right

you need to actually know the spell

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So...D&D style enchantment rules then? And crafters need to be casters to be effective?

 

[linkhyrule5]

gm

What exactly do Principles do, and how does that effect the organization? What timescale do things resolve at?

Like, what you're describing doesn't seem to solve a lot of the core issues with an Exalted-scale bureaucracy system, which is that it still basically resolves to "guess on your own how hard an action will be, how many resources it'll require, how the internal politics might shake out, and what the repercussions will be." It makes some sense for the use case of "PCs are interacting with an external organization," where they'll need to figure out the internal politics and manipulate accordingly, but I have no idea how this system would work out for PCs who end up in charge of an organization, especially if they have a billion dice to throw at Bureaucracy.

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Principles are from Kerisgame, they're Motivation, Intimacies, and Virtues all in one. You can channel them, you need to fail a roll or spend wp to oppose them, etc.

I wasn't thinking of that level of detail. Partly because there's no point without a strong framework for what an organization is, mechanically, but mostly because I'm just not qualified - hence posting in this thread. I'll need some help from people who've actually run businesses before, I think - @MJ12 Commando and @Tempera come to mind, thanks to Cowls, and for some reason I feel like @Havocfett might have relevant experience too? - I'm spitballing, I don't know too much about IRL forumites.

 

[DayDreamer]

... uh

if you are going to make a solid-state spell in the form of a sorcerous artifact that has the same effects

then generally, right

you need to actually know the spell

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I'm not a particularly big fan of niche protection, but you're saying that, if you want to be an artifact crafter the only thing you can do is give other members of your party the ability to do the exact same things that used to make you unique and relevant to solving problems. And you need to spend XP to both learn the special techniques required to craft these artifacts in the first place and to learn the spells that you'll be giving to the rest of the party to use, while everyone else gets to spend their xp making themselves better at their chosen focus. So the end result is, you're less able to do things than everyone else period (since they'll have more XP invested in their spheres of focus) and they'll also be able to do the same things you can for free.

That doesn't sound very fun or desirable to me.

 

[DayDreamer]

I wasn't thinking of that level of detail. Partly because there's no point without a strong framework for what an organization is, mechanically, but mostly because I'm just not qualified - hence posting in this thread. I'll need some help from people who've actually run businesses before, I think - @MJ12 Commando and @Tempera come to mind, thanks to Cowls, and for some reason I feel like @Havocfett might have relevant experience too? - I'm spitballing, I don't know too much about IRL forumites.

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If you don't have a good sense of what the nuts and bolts interactions of an organization should look and feel like, there isn't that much of a point constructing a framework. The framework's goal should be to enable that stuff, with everything that doesn't aid in that cut away.

In the example system I proposed, I was suggesting that there were a few different dynamics that the system should represent: that of a manager overseeing underlings, that of an outsider trying to tap into the resources of the organization, and that of a subordinate being tasked with a project from up on high. Since the outsider and the underling are the most likely to come up over the course of an actual game session (as opposed to afterwards), they needed to be simple to resolve, with obvious and clear tie ins to the other system.

Since Exalted is focused on a combination of meaningful consequences and clashing personalities, I wanted the manager part of the system to rest on some kind of framework where stuff like nationalizing debt (in Hamilton) or outlawing slavery would have profound implications for how an organization handled. That's where the stats part came from: they're ways to fairly simply represent more narrative impacts that don't require a business management degree or economics major to understand. And since interpersonal relationships generate more interesting stories, and PCs shouldn't be able to directly control too much, that's where the sub-managers or projects came in.

 

[Peanuckle]

I'm not a particularly big fan of niche protection, but the implication here is that, if you want to be an artifact crafter, the only thing you can do is (fairly explicitly) give other members of your party the ability to do the exact same things you can do, in addition to all the special stuff they can already do.

That doesn't sound very fun or desirable to me.

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Lemme just toss in my two cents: Maybe the artifact's creator gets special buffs for using gear he made? More power, an extra effect the artifact produces? And wearing a whole set gets you even more?

I figure the type of people who play artificers are gonna be the ones who grind Baal runs in Diablo 2 for the shiniest loot, so I'm thinking something along those lines. So yeah, you can lend your gear out to your buddies, but they'll never get as much out of it as you will. Then you can toss in multiple artifacts to re-orient your character much like 2e alchemicals could by going to a vat. The result is that your techno-sorcerer is roughly equal to his circle-mates, but can put in extra time and effort to become adaptable in ways that they can't match.

 

[Shyft]

Generally, any problem with Craft boils down to "Why do I have to run tangent quests to get my gear?"

What you want to avoid, as a designer, is hermitism- where players can sit safely in their bases and craft solutions to problems without risk. The way, I feel, to ensure that, is to say that no matter what, artificers draw attention to themselves by the demands they put on the world around them- Craft is fought not with War or Melee, but Investigation and Bureaucracy.

You look at a crafter like a secret superweapon plot.

 

[pheonix89]

@Aaron Peori
Why would you pick up crafting? Well, that Cherub shrine you're dissing charges from ambient essence. Being able to send messages to the other side of creation without touching your own mote pool is quite handy, wouldn't you agree?

And given ES's vision of the first age, I suspect that artifact crafting is what's used for crazy magic infrastructure.

 

[Jon Chung]

So...D&D style enchantment rules then? And crafters need to be casters to be effective?

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Think about it this way - in a world where science and magic are literally the same thing, you can't be an engineer without knowing sorcery, because sorcerous laws are the laws of physics.

Here's an example. Engineer Bob knows how to build a plane because he understands the rules that allow wings to generate lift, that allow combustion of fuel to generate thrust, that allow aluminium struts to be placed to withstand the strain of holding this all together, etc, etc. Put that dude in a world where he can make a virtual construct out of magic. He knows how to build planes, therefore, he can make a virtual magic construct plane - the principles are the same, except the 'magic construct' bit. Wing geometry, thrust, lift, etc. The knowledge required to make both of these things is the knowledge of "how do planes work".

Similarly, under this concept, if Sorcerer Bob knows how to take fire Essence and turn it into a burning guardian blade that cuts ranged attacks directed at him out of the air, that is also the same knowledge required to build an orichalcum-and-red-jade autonomous servitor drone that cuts attacks directed at him out of the air and runs off fire Essence batteries, with drone engineering on top. If he learned to make the drone, he knows how to cast that spell. If he learned to cast that spell and knows how to make drones, he knows how to make the drone.

The reason he might want to build the physical drone instead of putting together a virtual magic drone each time? The drone can carry its own independent fuel supply, he does not need to devote precious focus and effort to maintaining a virtual guardian drone while people are trying to kill him, he can lend it to his friends, etc. Reasons he might not? Expensive. Requires maintenance. Requires infrastructure.

I'm not a particularly big fan of niche protection, but you're saying that, if you want to be an artifact crafter the only thing you can do is give other members of your party the ability to do the exact same things that used to make you unique and relevant to solving problems. And you need to spend XP to both learn the special techniques required to craft these artifacts in the first place and to learn the spells that you'll be giving to the rest of the party to use, while everyone else gets to spend their xp making themselves better at their chosen focus. So the end result is, you're less able to do things than everyone else period (since they'll have more XP invested in their spheres of focus) and they'll also be able to do the same things you can for free.

That doesn't sound very fun or desirable to me.

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This is fine as long as 'crafter' is not in itself something that takes up tons of XP and leaves you unable to do anything else (kek).

You fight during fight scenes with your melee charms (or archery or whatever) just like everyone else does, and everyone including you is using crap you made, which matters a lot less than your melee charms because designing a game where you're playing a demigod where the magic items you're carrying matter more than your demigod powers is a bit stupid.

You do sorcery during downtime because sorcery and sorcerous crafting are the same thing and you get two for one purchase.

 

[notthepenguins]

Think about it this way - in a world where science and magic are literally the same thing, you can't be an engineer without knowing sorcery, because sorcerous laws are the laws of physics.

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This isn't really the way Sorcery has been portrayed in Exalted, though; there's a reason that Occult and Sorcery are not the same thing. You are correct that you can't be an engineer without knowing magical principles, of course, just like reaching the heights of martial arts requires you to be able to control and utilize your Essence, but that isn't one and the same as sorcery.

 

[DayDreamer]

Lemme just toss in my two cents: Maybe the artifact's creator gets special buffs for using gear he made? More power, an extra effect the artifact produces? And wearing a whole set gets you even more?

I figure the type of people who play artificers are gonna be the ones who grind Baal runs in Diablo 2 for the shiniest loot, so I'm thinking something along those lines. So yeah, you can lend your gear out to your buddies, but they'll never get as much out of it as you will. Then you can toss in multiple artifacts to re-orient your character much like 2e alchemicals could by going to a vat. The result is that your techno-sorcerer is roughly equal to his circle-mates, but can put in extra time and effort to become adaptable in ways that they can't match.

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I like playing artificers and I hate lategame Diablo. I also think that the analogy doesn't quite work: Diablo is about getting the perfect drop, while crafting generally comes from a different place (a desire to have a more modular build, a desire to have different approaches to problem-solving in game, aesthetic preferences, etc.

What you're proposing could work–an Exalted that doesn't support Solar Tony Stark being Iron Man is a disappointing Exalted (which is, among other reasons, why every version of Exalted has been disappointing), but it runs the risk of making non-crafting Sorcerers unviable, which is an issue.

The simpler solution is that Artifacts are slightly different/inferior to Sorcery, or something closer to actual D&D, where magic item effects are based on or inspired by the requisite spells, but often have different effects. Spells become something more broad, with a lot of narrative involved in how they resolve, while magical items only work for some specific function. An item made to summon an elemental can only summon a single, specific elemental, while the spell works for any. A spell that allows a character to convert skin to living metal for a few different effects makes an item that casts skin of bronze.

 

[Broken25]

Think about it this way - in a world where science and magic are literally the same thing, you can't be an engineer without knowing sorcery, because sorcerous laws are the laws of physics.

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Alternatively, in a world that works following magical principles, being a good artisan is all you need to make magical objects, since objects of superb craftmanship are inherently magical.

Man. One of the things i like of exalted is that you don't need to be a wizard to make a magic sword, just a really good blacksmith.

 

[Shyft]

Fundamentally, you all have to ask what do you want, and then once you have that answer, that critical analysis, you can start developing. If what you want is not what someone else wants, don't try to wedge their idea into yours and vice-versa.

 

[Aaron Peori]

Think about it this way - in a world where science and magic are literally the same thing, you can't be an engineer without knowing sorcery, because sorcerous laws are the laws of physics.

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Ah, yes. That explains why when I took a computer repair course at my local learning annex we had to spend eight years mastering quantum physics so we could understand how transistors work.

No, wait. That's the most ludicrous thing I've ever heard you say. There is a reason that science and engineering are separate fields, Jon, with entirely different types of learning. You no more need to understand the principles behind theoretical physics to build a car then I need to have learned how to balance chemical equations to make a cake.

It's entirely possible to just, you know, follow the recipe.

Do you need to know some high end physics to create new technology? Probably. Less than you would imagine, however. I mean, far from Engineer Bob needing to know how to calculate lift and drag and air density equations we are proposing that we live in a world where in order to be able to build an airplane you need to know how to fly unaided first.

That's fucking ridiculous.

This is fine as long as 'crafter' is not in itself something that takes up tons of XP and leaves you unable to do anything else (kek).

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So Craft charms should be free is what you are saying? Because, you know, it takes XP to actually have Craft, the ability? Or should we just ignore Craft and associated Charmtech entirely?

Like, let's say we have two characters. Both can afford to buy Ten Charms. Character A buys ten Melee Charms. Character B buys five Melee and three Craft and two Sorcery (including one Create Magic Sword spell). Character B is clearly inferior to character A in Melee, and the only benefit he gets (building swords) is something that Character A gets for free just by knowing him (unless character B just refuses to give Character A Magic Swords which he can produce for 0xp Because He's An Asshole or something, I suppose).

 

[linkhyrule5]

@DayDreamer: The first programmer's virtue is laziness. If your system takes that much new wordcount, it's too complex and could be better.

If I've done this right, we should be able to use the exact same mechanics characters use - raise money and change minds with Presence and Performance, master spells and find information with Occult and Lore, even wage war with, well, War. Bureaucracy rolls just buff or debuff the organization's stats. All that needs to be set are the details of difficulty and time, which is, like I said, not something I'm qualified for.

Well, I can take a crack at some rules. There should be a default time unit - a bureaucratic tick - and all times are divided by the organization's Wits. Wits of an organization... somehow built from its components statline, haven't thought that far yet. Size is much more important than it is for most characters, yu can add it as dice to almost everything but it's part of the difficulty of any roll ro affect it.

But honestly I'd rather grab a few people with relevant experience, plus one of the usual suspects for system knowledge, and take this to GoogleDocs.

(Also man, Solars are kings and Sidereals are viziers, what do you mean they won't have direct organizational control)

 

[Giygas]

Okay, the forum alerts glitched again and didn't warn me about the many post posted.
*Sighs*
And here the 2AM loom closer and closer, and i really want to sleep. Hell, i finally finalyzed a prototype of the mundane crafting rules and i wanted to post it here.

.. You know what? Answering some questions/expressing some options, and then posting a sleep warped version of the mundane crafting rules.
First things first:

The only reason that should be necessary is if they don't really have a database up. If they do, well, I'm not familiar with every system, but any actual database method getting that information is amazingly basic. Even if it's not input in the best possible manner, that's a very, very basic search method, and the information is pretty basic as well.

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Hence my rage: i am a very rusty programmer, but even i could take informations from a database.

Hell, i could even take undatabased but full of information plaintext and create a database. It wouldn't even take that much time!

About the Artifacts discussion: *Part missing due too much sleepiness. Would have contained someone talking about the fact that recreating ancient stuff is the part of the setting that the person had liked more. Maybe. The person is too sleepy to remember.*

About the Jadeborn: Earthscorpion, dude. You completely failed to not make me want to play your potential Jadeborn: they sound like Terrestial level Proto Alchemicals. I would love playing Terrestrial Level Proto Alchemicals.

About the other primordial races: good stuff. I would totaly like finding a way to free the trapped Isidoros' race, and the find a way to fix them according to the other one in existence in the desert. I am laughing at the Star Clouds basially killing themselves by making a spietiful and useless attack, and i am laughing too at the eternally tortured Lyntha.

About the history of the Jadeborn: maybe only a little portion of the Exalted of the first age attacked the peoples of Adamant, then the rest of the exalted slapped the teamkilling ones into submission, and they worked for the most of the high first age to fix them? So you can have dimished Peoples of Adamant, but then you can still use the whole Dragonblooded making more damage to them and mountain folks being grateful/vassal like to the Solars.

Anyway, is anyone here interested in helping me write up a bureaucracy system? I'm going to need one for my oMage game anyway. (That does mean it'll have to be somewhat edition-neutral, but honestly the bureaucracy system should be be splat-independent, just with easy hooks for Charms or Spheres.)

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First thing first: there is any other system that you think you could use? Even from another RPG?

Because it is infinitely easier to adapt something, than the create it from scrath. (Giygas is pretty sure this is obvious, but he is pretty tired and tired peoples don't give non obvious help.)

About what i would want from exalted: i would write more, but essentially i would like to have a system with less Successes/Dice Creep, and more extrernal/Internal/Whatever Penalities, and charms to smash them into bits.

The avarange Difficulty 5 action shuold be both a legendary action made in optimal circumstances, and an easy one made in very dfficult circumstances: the exalted would be able to do the legendary action in difficult circumstances not by throwing all the dice/Having all the successes, but by smashing with their magical might the penalties making the thing more difficult than what it should have been.

Some thing would aplly to combat, with more abilities that inconveniences combattant without either killing them, or being a glorified Success/Dice Adder/Bipasser. Like Etrian Odyssey(In which hitting with an alterated status effect is a great boon even against a boss), but less lethal for everyone.

I am pretty sure i would have something else to put here, but my brain is kinda leeking from the braincaase, and thus i am becoming kinda inchoerent. (ONe of the things i wanted to write about, was the fact that i realized my "Solution" for the elder power levels (You can only have a limited amount of high essence charms) meshed extremely with other two things i wanted to homebrew (One making artifacts and martial arts the same thing: a modifier/expander of some of the powers of the exalted, only expressed in different manner; the other dividing charms in two categories: charms capable of being used everytime, and charms being capable of being used only in the correct "Stance". Incidentally, both homebrew mesh really well.))

Better wrap it up:

Basically, i wanted to add to the previous craft homebrew a scale from 0 to 5 to define the combined finesse and scale of the thing being created, with every dot increasing the time it takes to complete a "Roll" of the "Project".

Finesse and Scale would sum togheter: trying to create something titanic (Maybe stoneghe as example) but rough would simply max the scale to five(Taking a lot of time), but trying to create something more fine (Like the coliseum/any church) would increase finesse, that would mean that more than one "Project" would be required to finish the strucutre/Item.

Equipment and other things would decrease the amount of rolls/intervals/duration of the intervals to make then things... and here my mind stops.

Blagh.

Hey, i need to ask one only things from you: can someone panic and in my place? I had a rant ready, because i realized that the part of the subsistem i wanted to add would have played fine with my maybe incoming system, but i am too tired to panic and or rant.

Pretty please?

Okay, nnow to bed. Night11!!

 

[Imrix]

Alternatively, in a world that works following magical principles, being a good artisan is all you need to make magical objects, since objects of superb craftmanship are inherently magical.

Man. One of the things i like of exalted is that you don't need to be a wizard to make a magic sword, just a really good blacksmith.

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This, basically. I generally agree with EarthScorpion's vision of setting and system, but making Artifacts an expression of Sorcery seems completely backasswards to me, and furthermore damages elements of the game that I hold a deep and abiding affection for.

If effects like Wood Dragon's claw must be viewed as in conflict with artifact weapons (an example I take for the sake of the argument; this is not a position I hold), then my preferred solution would be to delete Wood Dragon's Claw from the game and keep the artifacts a distinct thing.

 

[Jon Chung]

Ah, yes. That explains why when I took a computer repair course at my local learning annex we had to spend eight years mastering quantum physics so we could understand how transistors work.

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If you're designing CPUs, you had better know how logic gates and transistors work, or you're going to fail miserably. If you're designing a plane, you had better know how wings and engines work, or you're going to fail miserably. The hobbyist swapping out the CPU in his new gaming machine or the mechanic changing out ailerons on the fighter jet is not the engineer I am talking about. You know perfectly well what I mean here, don't get pointlessly pedantic.

So Craft charms should be free is what you are saying? Because, you know,m it takes Xp to actually have Craft, the ability? Or should we just ignore Craft and associated Charmtech entirely?

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Yes. Toss Craft as far as we are able to do so, fold it into other stuff whenever it is possible to do so. It's the worst decker problem in the game, so let's murder it. Collapse the kudzu down into a small and compact form which doesn't require fully dedicating your entire character build to something you can only use in downtime, by yourself, sitting in a corner.

Like, let's say we have two character. Both can afford to buy Ten Charms. Character A buys ten Melee Charms. Character B buys five Melee and three Craft and two Sorcery (including one Create Magic Sword spell). Character B is clearly inferior to character A in Melee, and the only benefit he gets (building swords) is something that Character A gets for free just by knowing him (unless character B just refuses to give Character A Magic Swords which he can produce for 0xp Because He's An Asshole or something, I suppose).

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a) Yes, if Character B buys 50/50 Fighting Stuff, he is worse than Character A (100% Fighting Stuff) at fighting. He has half the number of fighting-related charms. Is there a reason he shouldn't be worse? A's got a big fat zero for downtime usefulness in exchange.

b) We don't need to cost spells like charms, man.

c) B can either cast Summon Flaming Sword before combat like he casts Invulnerable Skin of Bronze, or find the resources required to build a fire-sword lightsaber hilt if he doesn't want to put up with the hassle. If the A+B partnership helps him get enough crap to build a bunch of lightsabers, why would he not give one to A?

 

[DayDreamer]

@DayDreamer: The first programmer's virtue is laziness. If your system takes that much new wordcount, it's too complex and could be better.

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I am a programmer. Laziness isn't a virtue in programing, elegance is: you want to capture some experience (in a game, generally depth) as best as possible with as little complexity as possible. Complexity has only a loose correlation with word count: there are massively complex system that can be described in under a page, and annoyingly simple ones that take five (see Legends of the Wulin for examples of both in the same book).

The overall point here is that, well, you can't be talking about how it could be better without a more clear articulation of what it is that you want. I'm pretty sure that, for what I said I was optimizing for, this is pretty close to as efficient as it gets.

If I've done this right, we should be able to use the exact same mechanics characters use - raise money and change minds with Presence and Performance, master spells and find information with Occult and Lore, even wage war with, well, War. Bureaucracy rolls just buff or debuff the organization's stats. All that needs to be set are the details of difficulty and time, which is, like I said, not something I'm qualified for.

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There are a whole set of potential problems here, stemming back to the core question of what you want. Should organizations really have a distinction between Melee, Brawl, Ranged and Thrown? Does War represent their strategic skill or their armies? How do funds work, how does this system promote the interesting choices that make managing an organization compelling? How would you represent choosing between centralizing and decentralizing power, or nationalizing debt? What are the levers that Solar Conan has over his kingdom, and how, mechanically, can you represent the anger of his conquered nobility?

(Also man, Solars are kings and Sidereals are viziers, what do you mean they won't have direct organizational control)

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Because (larger) organizations are big, complex machines with tons of layers separating the leader from the actual everyday workers, and if Exalted (and especially WoD) is trying to emulate the real world, leaders mostly interact with their staff by passing directives down to their VPs/direct subordinates and make high level strategy decisions, which are often poorly implemented or performed less-than-optimally by their staff.

 

[Aaron Peori]

If you're designing CPUs, you had better know how logic gates and transistors work, or you're going to fail miserably. If you're designing a plane, you had better know how wings and engines work, or you're going to fail miserably. The hobbyist swapping out the CPU in his new gaming machine or the mechanic changing out ailerons on the fighter jet is not the engineer I am talking about. You know perfectly well what I mean here, don't get pointlessly pedantic.

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But I don't want to design a CPU from scratch. I just want to, you know, build a magic sword. Of which there are many examples lying around for me to crib notes off of without me having to reinvent physics from scratch.

Also, again, your analogy is flawed because the analogy isn't "I need to know how to design transistor and logic gates" its, "I can't design a computer until I am able to do everything the computer can do as well as the computer could do it." Like, this isn't "I have to understand airplanes to build one" its "I have to be able to fly to build one."

That's probably why you truncated my argument and its actual conclusion so you could lambast me for not understanding things when I pointed out that the idea was fucking stupid in great depth.

Yes. Toss Craft as far as we are able to do so, fold it into other stuff whenever it is possible to do so. It's the worst decker problem in the game, so let's murder it. Collapse the kudzu down into a small and compact form which doesn't require fully dedicating your entire character build to something you can only use in downtime, by yourself, sitting in a corner.

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Well, you are honest at least. I think you'll find many Exalted players do not want to throw away on of the most iconic mythological powers, however. Some people want to be good crafters.

a) Yes, if Character B buys 50/50 Fighting Stuff, he is worse than Character A (100% Fighting Stuff) at fighting. He has half the number of fighting-related charms. Is there a reason he shouldn't be worse? A's got a big fat zero for downtime usefulness in exchange.

b) We don't need to cost spells like charms, man.

c) B can either cast Summon Flaming Sword before combat like he casts Invulnerable Skin of Bronze, or find the resources required to build a fire-sword lightsaber hilt if he doesn't want to put up with the hassle. If the A+B partnership helps him get enough crap to build a bunch of lightsabers, why would he not give one to A?

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a) and c) Because I want to build a guy who is good at building magic swords and be useful at it for purposes other than being A's glorified quartermaster?

b) Replace "two spells" with "two Charms worth of XP in spells" or whatever. Unless spells are free (in which case, wtf?) in your universe?

 

[DayDreamer]

a) Yes, if Character B buys 50/50 Fighting Stuff, he is worse than Character A (100% Fighting Stuff) at fighting. He has half the number of fighting-related charms. Is there a reason he shouldn't be worse? A's got a big fat zero for downtime usefulness in exchange.

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A can totally do stuff in downtime. He can run a kingdom (Conan-style, with no administration skills) or go on some solo adventure that he negotiates with the GM, or anything else that makes sense in the context of the story. Hell, depending on the rules for how long Crafting takes and how long downtime is, B might be able to do that stuff too, spending every day hearing petitions before retiring to the forge in the evening.

 

[Jon Chung]

But I don't want to design a CPU from scratch. I just want to, you know, build a magic sword. Of which there are many examples lying around for me to crib notes off of without me having to reinvent physics from scratch.

Also, again, your analogy is flawed because the analogy isn't "I need to know how to design transistor and logic gates" its, "I can't design a computer until I am able to do everything the computer can do as well as the computer could do it." Like, this isn't "I have to understand airplanes to build one" its "I have to be able to fly to build one."

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Uh, no. "I have to be able to fly to build a plane" is not what I said.

Let's try again. If we posit that the same principles that allow a plane to fly allow a flight spell to fly, if you understand how a plane flies, you understand how a flight spell flies, because the mechanics of flight are the same in both cases and the important thing to get here is the mechanics of flight.

If we say that this is true, then, this is an easy way to justify cramming magitechnological invention/crafting and sorcery together in such a way that I can try to eliminate the decker problem where all the craft character does (and can do, because all his XP is tied up in crafting) is sit in a cave building shit by himself, by allowing his XP to pull double duty - he makes himself a better engineer by being a better sorcerer, and 'better sorcerer' XP can be used in places other than his cave.

That's probably why you truncated my argument and its actual conclusion so you could lambast me for not understanding things when I pointed out that the idea was fucking stupid in great depth.

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Peori, do you want to start something? Really?

Well, you are honest at least. I think you'll find many Exalted players do not want to throw away on of the most iconic mythological powers, however. Some people want to be good crafters.

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Craft has never worked as a standalone focus in three editions of this damn game. I think it has never worked because people keep trying to make it a viable singular standalone focus, all by itself, such that "I build stuff" requires as much character-building focus as "I am Invincible Sword Princess".

This doesn't seem to work, so why not try something different?

a) and c) Because I want to build a guy who is good at building magic swords and be useful at it for purposes other than being A's glorified quartermaster?

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You're a dude who makes magic swords. Your buddy is a lot better at swording than you. You are unified in purpose and intent, sharing a singular goal. Why would you not give him the sword? Do you not want to win?

b) Replace "two spells" with "two Charms worth of XP in spells" or whatever. Unless spells are free (in which case, wtf?) in your universe?

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No, spells aren't free, that would be dumb. The thing is, B has a bunch of noncombat things he can do and A does not, yes? Why should B's noncombat investment allow him to match A's combat investment?