So in other words they don't fix the lethality problem. Why would this be a good idea?
General Exalted Thread
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
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Fix?
Tell me, why does every competent firearms instructor say "You know, one bullet, even if it hits, may not be enough to disable an attacker. Even if you are perfectly accurate, perform [insert number, usually starting with 2-3] shots, then evaluate if the target is disabled, and if not, you keep shooting"?
If anything, systems like WoD and D&D are extremely generous when it comes to mortal characters who eat half a magazine's worth of machine gun fire with little to no armour. (They also tend to have an extremely narrow gap between "Disabled and mortally wounded; passed out and will die in 10-30 minutes from bleeding unless saved by surgery" and "Dead".)
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- Spain
Well yes, but in a real combat you will probably need to fire hundreds or thousands of bullets for each that hits.
Suppresive fire isn't really a thing here, and bows have the accurancy of a modern rifle.
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Did you read the conversation up to that point? Because the point of the discussion was that modeling multiple attacks as separate entities kinda breaks the game and makes things significantly more lethal than it needs to be for the purpose of the game. Yes, getting shot can easily be an instant death sentence. That makes for a spectacularly shitty game, at in the genre of WW. So why would you suggest using that as your basis?
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
If the heroes are supposed to be so cool as to survive dozens of rifle bullets or daichopper chops, then the heroes need to have traits that make it possible. That is, such extreme survivability should ideally built on top of a system that sensibly handles this sort of extreme damage.
From my experience with D20, WoD, Exalted and GURPS, I have the impression that players of the former two have an extremely non-serious irresponsible attitude towards combat even if their characters lack any superpowers to make them more survivable than regular mortal humans. The sorts of players who don't jump for cover when faced with machine gun suppressive fire or a grenade landing a couple yards from their characters.
Exalts being too squishy is not the same issue as mortals being too tough when faced with ultraviolence.
As I say, sometimes its methods run counter to its intended goals.
But yes, Exalted has always aspired to be a fast and punchy "cinematic" system ever since its "anti-D&D" days, when the premise behind "each attack has a roll" was meant to contrast D&D-style "full round attacks" being abstracted to a single roll, and give each action more weight in how combat played out. Combat was never Intended to be poured over for 3-4 hours at a time for a small, unnecessary fight, because at its heart Exalted wanted to be both a spritely kung-fu movie and a gritty "shit happens you die" take on fantasy in a Warhammer vein, but made so many compromises it ended up having to justify its legacy-code eccentricities more than fix them.
This "blow-by-blow" method of resolving combat COULD have worked too, were it not for the earlyish 2000s time it was made and the fact that in Storyteller every attack takes no less than two rolls, two trait-comparisons, and a multitude of interrupting "also this" reflexive effects including Counterattacks, which would lead to More rolls being made. Which is how they ended up with the sensible "no countering a counterattack" rule, or else everyone would get into a blow-all-my-motes attack scrum on the first initiative. And Exalted was classically working from a moderately Streamlined version of the old Storytelling systems which ALSO included variable TNs!
You see this conflict in the design of Ex3 currently as well, where dice-tricks to force you into recounting your pools multiple times, counting the enemy pool, counting your socks, are blithely tossed out as things which apparently take no time at all out of resolution, on top of two totally different methods of attack calculation, without removing any of the previous baggage of the process.
We've come a long way in RPG design over the years, and Exalted has Never been at the forefront of that movement.
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- Location
- Virginia
And I want developers to look at that and ultimately say "tough". Because I've never seen an RPG correctly balance multiattacks. Ever ever. Even D&D 4e, which I hold up as a model of developers approaching a game from the perspective of "get the squad-scale tactical wargame right first, then fit everything around that" didn't understand the value of multiattacks and off-action attacks until about halfway through its development cycle, at which point it had to shrug its shoulders and treat access to them as the fundamental unit of DPS balance.
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If all Exalts are balanced around the idea of surviving machine gun fire, you end with them trivially masacrating armies, which is it's own problem.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
This may or may not be a problem:
First, Exalted explicitly sells itself on the fact that beginning characters should be able to take on armies. Depending on whether the ability to survive a dozen daichopper chops is based around a soak-like, hardness-like and/or a extra-hitbox-like mechanic, it may or may not be subject to attrition.
Finally, this threads prides itself on exploring the realistic consequences of people with superpowers. Well, here they are.
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Sure, but it also sells Exalts as great generals and leaders of men. And frankly, the more army-killing people there are around, the less utility value an army has.
If you want to kill an army, get yourself one. (Sorcery may be an aceptable substitute, in the right circunstances).
If you want to kill an army, get yourself one. (Sorcery may be an aceptable substitute, in the right circunstances).
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Or the system is written so that, rather than wasting time, the baseline characteristics of the heroes are baseline. Because half the problem with mutliple attacks/actions is that it takes so much time to run, and is generally pretty useless.
You know, if the system is well written.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
The solution to one-man army Exalts is two-fold.
First, treat 'an army' in the same way you'd define 'a swordsman'. Fighting an Icewalker horde is a very different proposition to fighting a Realm Legion or a Dragon of the Aerial Legion.
Second, allow Exalted leadership to augment the warriors under their command via supernal coordination and heroic inspiration. Fighting an Icewalker horde and fighting an Icewalker horde lead by the Bull of the North should be totally different levels of challenge, even if the Bull never so much as draws his daiklave.
First, treat 'an army' in the same way you'd define 'a swordsman'. Fighting an Icewalker horde is a very different proposition to fighting a Realm Legion or a Dragon of the Aerial Legion.
Second, allow Exalted leadership to augment the warriors under their command via supernal coordination and heroic inspiration. Fighting an Icewalker horde and fighting an Icewalker horde lead by the Bull of the North should be totally different levels of challenge, even if the Bull never so much as draws his daiklave.
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Exalted also sells itself on characters gathering followings of devotees, rebuilding lost civilizations and exploring/reshaping the world, while consequently including options for None of these things unless you buy piecemeal half-chunks of system rules laughably presented as character advancement.
Don't immediately assume that the books own rules and methods serve to carry its themes unless they are specifically presented as such, because 9 times out of 10 (and anything not written by freelancing outsiders like Jenna Moran), the White Wolf Way has been to work with what they Have (or Had), and awkwardly graft on bits which will accomplish Something, even if it makes no sense whatsoever with the source materials.
Giygas
Cutest Sawk i could find. Lucario is a nice extra.
About the current discussion: unfortunately i lack the necessary mechanic knowledge to help.
Even with my lack of knowledge, If i were in charge of anything then i would probably abstract every multiple attack as a very big attack rather than a series of ones: because really, the ORAORA of Jotaro cannot be thought of a multitude of attacks. Of course, it is a multitude of attacks, but it is only the whole attack that accomplishes something.
And multiple attacks doesn't really need to be always abstracted to very big ones: maybe you decided to launch a feint/s before your main attack/s. Such a thing would decrease your damage, but increase your chance to hit.
Also, i finally found Reign rules. I have barely started to read them, but the Wealth system is undeniably saner than the Exalted equivalent. It isn't even that different nor its differences are that strange, but it is apparently fare more functional.
Even with my lack of knowledge, If i were in charge of anything then i would probably abstract every multiple attack as a very big attack rather than a series of ones: because really, the ORAORA of Jotaro cannot be thought of a multitude of attacks. Of course, it is a multitude of attacks, but it is only the whole attack that accomplishes something.
And multiple attacks doesn't really need to be always abstracted to very big ones: maybe you decided to launch a feint/s before your main attack/s. Such a thing would decrease your damage, but increase your chance to hit.
So peoples who have learned Sign Language, and have big lungs/don't need to breath, will save the day? Gotcha.
Also, i finally found Reign rules. I have barely started to read them, but the Wealth system is undeniably saner than the Exalted equivalent. It isn't even that different nor its differences are that strange, but it is apparently fare more functional.
- Location
- NOVA
I hadn't thought of modelling rate in a similar manner as GRUPS RoF+rcl before, but that sounds like it might be a very nice way of improving resolution speed. You'd need to get rid of extra attack successes adding damage in base Exalted, which is a preferred hack of mine for a large number of reasons, or add a cascading penalty to each attack's damage.
I'd need to run the numbers and figure out a multi-attack charm rules substitution for it... Maybe just directly modifying rate and removing the penalty.
I really wish that more game had useful moral mechanics because it would help solve this problem.
An army's defeat condition shouldn't be every soldier being killed, it should be a rout. An army router solo character who runs around killing commanders to force an army to retreat is much easier to balance around than someone who can actually fight an army until they stand on top of a mountain of corpses.
I think Exalted actually goes somewhat overboard here on both ends of the spectrum. Routs are incredibly easy to trigger and hard to defend against, just receiving a ranged attack is enough to force a check. The average fight would probably involve at least one per action for all combatants. There are also very few ways to improve your chances of passing if you want to field a large army... outside of perfect effects.
A Solar commander would be spending 4m 1w per action just to keep his army together because of how frequent the rolls are. Alternatively, field units with perfect moral who never need them.
Because of this anyone who wants to engage in peer level mass combat needs to be an actual army killer to win against peer level opponents. Or just force people into duels and bypass the system entirely.
Jon Chung
=][=
Nah, this is the Exalted mass combat system, full of nonsense logic. You're a great army killer if you have great single target attacks.
Well, you could do stuff like "you have manipulated this spell in a specific manner so that it goes off at a designated time in the future rather than now" or something like that if you really want to get a "better sorcerer".
Didn't one of the writers say something like the Exalted being able to catch hails of bullets in the exact same manner that they can catch arrows?
And something about a machine gun being trivialized by Artifact weaponry and the weapons being wielded by gods/demons/raksha, just like any other mundane weapons?
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notthepenguins
Neither Spherical Nor Frictionless
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- He/She/They
They bring their genre with them, basically.
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- Spain
Indeed, but their genre doesn't include "Beat whole armies alone".
I remember several effects that could make an individual count as a Mass Combat Unit?
Huh? Both halves of Exalted's DNA are riddled with examples of single combatants completely embarassing scores of useless idiots. It's just as much a part of myth as it is media.
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- Location
- Ottawa
Oh, yeah, I forgot that HAM doesn't count as a Charm bonus. Happy to say that's been fixed in the version of the Charmset I use.
Anyway, I really wouldn't call Essence 5, max stats, and every applicable Lore Charm "conservative".
That's about what I was expecting. Far from easy, and not unfair-sounding to me.
In the Dresden Files Roleplaying Game, multi-attacks are if anything underpowered. Area attacks are much better.
Looking at the rules I think One-Roll Engine multi-attacks seem pretty fair. Never actually played it, though.
I think 3e does a decent job of this. Maybe not a perfect one, but I'd happily play man-vs-army fights in it.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Let's put it this way:
If a character is actually, genuinely twice as fast as most other characters, as in, runs twice as far in a second and performs twice as many parries and dodges and attacks and reads twice as many books in a year and solves equations twice as fast, then this trait/power is absolutely, utterly terrifying, and the system should reflect that. It should also be appropriately expensive. If it only applies to attacks, that's a bit less terrifying, and should be cheaper, but still quite expensive. No 'three Charms and you get 6 attacks!' deals, nope. If you don't envision the terror of superior speed, you should try going to an ARMA/HACA/boxing/TKD etc. match and try to make your movements twice as slow as normal. Or rather don't try it, as it wouldn't end well.
Having to resolve six attacks per character is definitely an overload. Six-attacking pranas should be reserved for really tough characters who focus very much on the speedster niche.
@Giygas: Now, if a character has a signature move that is more of a Four-Colour attack, a Death of a (literal!) Dozen Cuts, then it might be more appropriate to resolve it as a single attack, and then multiply the post-soak damage by some number (depending on the power level of the charm), as dozens of largely ineffective attacks are still nasty against poorly-defending and unarmoured mooks, but not so much against someone resistant to multi-cut attrition.
Note: The latter Dozen Cuts variant is described while taking into account the fact that the Exalted system's characters (even non-heroic mortal ones) generally have extremely persistent defences that deteriorate very slowly with the number of enemy attacks, or even not at all if they have a persistent Bulwark of some sort. In a more gritty, realistic world, a dozen weak attacks are even nastier than that because the target still needs to try parrying them, and this is extremely hard, meaning more of them should succeed.
I assume you mean the 4e variant, not the 3e one. I can tell you this: be extremely careful with the implementation. While the 3e variant was largely abandoned because it was slow, later people realized that the 4e variant produces some non-sensible results. Using Exalted Successes to denote the number of attacks that hit can likewise produce undesirable results. Or it might not. Need lots of testing, seeing how that interacts with other Charms, with mundane splitting etc.
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- The end of all things
That really screws with the balance on a lot of Lore charms.
We're talking about Solar Circle Sorcery, so E5 is a given, and frankly so is max stats if you're trying to productively cast it in combat. It uses two applicable Lore charms, one of which is an E1 no-brainer, and the other of which can be replaced by a two point stunt and actually spending Willpower. It's conservative in that I didn't assume any cooperative buffing effects or the like.
If I wanted easy, I'd have just used the Pact with an Ifrit Lord Pact or Scarred by Nightmares shaping rituals. I wanted to start with three dozen initiative to make the attack really hurt and hopefully win Join Battle so I could pelt the opposing army with lightning bolts from my flying chariot first.
I'd say it's fair, but then again I'm not facing down a full maximized Thrown Ambush alpha strike followed by 50+ damage dice of mountain-penetrating aggravated annihilation every turn.
