Trufax. Mentally, and entirely because of the similarity of the words, Nexans sound like Texans to me.
So Haneyl mentally sounds like a Southern girl who most of the time manages to affect an RP accent [1] and is usually somewhat convincing, but when she gets worked up or emotional it really slips.
[1] Because of course the Realm sounds super-British. After all, it's an American-made game and the Realm are the villains. And you have to use those classic voice-acting decisions with Romanesque casting.
I disagree. The Realm, as a hegemonic boss dragon (it even has the dragon motif) that prides itself on its military force and power projection abilities, is in a cold war with another state because both have tons of WMDs, and is constantly facing crises from terror attacks, internal legitimacy problems, and the fact that everyone else is getting more and more powerful relative to its own existence, should be America.
This of course means that people of Lookshy have Russian accents. It fits so well!
@Giygas - random thing I picked out of that post, but at least in my case I use difficulty and penalties separately as a way of saying "these penalties can be negated, these cannot." You might, at most, be able to lower difficulties, but only penalties can be negated entirely outright.
Yes, Penalities may be negated and difficulties cannot be negated, i know.
... But, doesn't adding directly successes to a roll achieves basically the same thing that negating a Penality does? I mean, you need to roll less successes on your dice pool in both cases: in one because your difficulty is virtually decreased by the non-dice successes, in the other because the successes/dice aren't absorbed by the Penality.
I've read Godbound too, but my mind glazed over most explanations.
Thanks for the for relatively in depth explanation, and .. mmhhh, some of these things i already wanted to do as homebrew, and some others you gave me the idea to add. (Welcome Charm Trunk/Mega Charm, to the Stance System!) (Today may be the day in which i finally explain better this thing, assuming that i don't decide to go for a walk.)
I disagree. The Realm, as a hegemonic boss dragon (it even has the dragon motif) that prides itself on its military force and power projection abilities, is in a cold war with another state because both have tons of WMDs, and is constantly facing crises from terror attacks, internal legitimacy problems, and the fact that everyone else is getting more and more powerful relative to its own existence, should be America.
This of course means that people of Lookshy have Russian accents. It fits so well!
But the Realm is Imperialism, while Lookshy are the ones R2Ping all over the Scavenger Lands and who are arming themselves up with nukes to discourage the Reds Scarlets on the other side of the ocean. And we already have the data-point that Nexans are Southerners, so clearly Lookshy is also American.
But the Realm is Imperialism, while Lookshy are the ones R2Ping all over the Scavenger Lands and who are arming themselves up with nukes to discourage the Reds Scarlets on the other side of the ocean. And we already have the data-point that Nexans are Southerners, so clearly Lookshy is also American.
So from this, we can conclude that the Confederacy of Rivers' insistence that no, they really are all independent nations who just happen to be united by a larger framework should be taken with a pinch of salt. And that they're really ruled over by capitalism (Nexus), love of the military (Lookshy), and megachurches (Great Forks).
Well, let's look at the Lintha. They're a declined naval power who were once mighty, but have since fallen. They're egotistical and have a grossly inflated sense of their own importance, which leads them to do stupid self-destructive things that only harm themselves.
An obvious accent suggests itself. Unfortunately, we've already assigned the British accent. (zing) [1]
So instead, I'mma gonna say "Greek", for much the same reasons. Also, it means the pirates (and Rathan) all have sexy Greek accents, which is a distinct plus.
(This means that Kimbery may well have a soul that looks like Megara from Hercules.)
The question is then, what is the right accent for Sijan which are after all someone that offers a product that everyone exept for the Lookshyians engage in...
That's just Hell. Way too much sand, a burning sun constantly hanging in the sky, hungry swamps, oceans that are probably full of toothy creatures...It even has a class of people who aren't native to the area but do have opulent vacation homes there.
Which kinda fits into the whole 'Pirates of the Carribean' vibe The West has going, even though it is entirely inappropriate for the tech level of the base Exalted setting.
Greek is more appropriate for the timeframe. Which I guess makes An Teng Persian?
That's just Hell. Way too much sand, a burning sun constantly hanging in the sky, hungry swamps, oceans that are probably full of toothy creatures...It even has a class of people who aren't native to the area but do have opulent vacation homes there.
Nah. Hell is way too hot, filled with weird creatures that are usually poisonous, and the sun will give you skin cancer super-quick. Also, it's a jail.
ES and I run An Teng as being Southeast Asian, which is why Keris is currently on the South China Sea further southwest in Roanapur Saata. Keris's ethnicity actually approximates Perisan - or rather, Afro-Iranian - which would probably put Persia somewhere Eastish below the Scavenger Lands.
Hmm. So what's Great Forks; land of the megachurches? Mississippi?
Sijanese Ghost Dooms Mortician To Undeath Over Embalming Disagreement
Sijanese Man Believes He Is A Zombie, Eats Man's Face Off
Sijanese Man Goes On A Bender, Passses Out, Thought Dead, Buried Alive For Two Weeks
Sijanese Woman Has Been Faking Undeath For Twenty Years To Squat Tombs And Perform Insurance Fraud
Sijanese 'Doctor' Steals Patients' Organs, Sells Them To Liminals, Officials Declare This "Not Technically Illegal Due To Loophole"
In RY 581, an Eastern noblewoman visited Sijan to request a funeral ceremony in a tradition of her people that had fallen from use; she wished for her body to be devoured by a sacred alligator, which would then carry her body to the bottom of a river, and from then on to the waters of the Underworld where her spirit would be released into the cycle of reincarnation.
Attempts at recreating the beasts of old through cross-breeding the native reptilians of the Confederacy of Rivers with plasmic beasts conjured from the Great Below (and, at a couple crucial points, a cooperative Sobeksis) proved surprisingly successful, and the noblewoman got the burial she wanted - to the horror of her family, who quickly remembered why the practice had disappeared when a giant albino alligator with ash-stained scales tore her body in half and dragged it into the river.
Unfortunately, Carmine Heron, the Sijanese mortician in charge of the funeral, had thought that this one eccentric noblewoman's funeral was the sign of a revival of the tradition as a whole, and had bred quite a number of the ghost-blooded beasts in hopes of banking on this new fad. This did not happen, and as the alligators proved both expensive to feed and surprisingly difficult to kill, he simply dumped the adolescent beasts into the Avarice river.
Nowadays, the Wraith Dragons are a common sight in the vicinity of Sijan, and occasionally in its streets. These slow, complascent beasts are not naturally aggressive, and of a curious temperament; they favor dead flesh over live prey, and outside of their rut periods a courageous soul can shoo them away from a property by loud shouting and wild gestures; nonetheless the vast bulk, swaying tails and numerous teeths of the animals makes them a frightening sight; they have a tendency to destroy any flimsy structure they come across, walking straight through slums or merchants' stalls, causing much grief to the lower classes of the city.
If a Wraith Dragon eats a human being whose souls have not yet fully departed their body, then they ingest that soul, which weighs them down; on their next visit to the waters, they are pulled to the bottom, where their ashen scales allow them to briefly swim out of Creation and into the Underworld, where they regurgitate the soul (or souls) before returning to the world of the living. Although the ghosts thus created tend to start their unlife in great confusion, the touch of a Wraith Dragon brings with it a number of small blessings, none the least is the fact that a coating of their slimy bile frightens away most feral beasts of the Underworld, and that a few teeth can usually be found embedded in the soul's corpus, which many ghostly witches and necromancers pay a good price for.
The Wraith Dragons are occasionally hunted, although this is never a safe endeavour. Their scales go into the making of talismans and workings that facilitate communication with the dead and the Underworld, and their teeth are used in spells and weapons supposed to pull the soul from a living body, or to raise the shade of a dead.
The question is then, what is the right accent for Sijan which are after all someone that offers a product that everyone exept for the Lookshyians engage in...
Noble people from Great Forks are still set at rest there if I remember it right, Thorns , undead, and Lookshy with there Eastern Orthodox Shogunate Imaculate Order are the only ones that are not going for graves from there.
Yes, Penalities may be negated and difficulties cannot be negated, i know.
... But, doesn't adding directly successes to a roll achieves basically the same thing that negating a Penality does? I mean, you need to roll less successes on your dice pool in both cases: in one because your difficulty is virtually decreased by the non-dice successes, in the other because the successes/dice aren't absorbed by the Penality.
Not quite. Think of it from the other way around: a Charm that only lets you negates penalties is weaker than one that lets you add successes, because the latter lets you perform superhuman feats while the former just lets you perform human feats regardless of conditions. Also, Charms exist that let you ignore all penalties, things like Accuracy Without Distance that just override penalties entirely. Between these, penalties are "worth less" than difficulties, which gives you another touchpoint to use to balance and lets you create powerful effects like, well, AWD without also letting Solars automatically add stupid numbers of successes and accomplish new, impossible things immediately.
Not quite. Think of it from the other way around: a Charm that only lets you negates penalties is weaker than one that lets you add successes, because the latter lets you perform superhuman feats while the former just lets you perform human feats regardless of conditions. Also, Charms exist that let you ignore all penalties, things like Accuracy Without Distance that just override penalties entirely. Between these, penalties are "worth less" than difficulties, which gives you another touchpoint to use to balance and lets you create powerful effects like, well, AWD without also letting Solars automatically add stupid numbers of successes and accomplish new, impossible things immediately.
I explained myself not very well: my musing were about the fact that an equal amount of successes and of penality negation are basically the same thing. I know that it is better to add succesess than to eliminate Penalities, mostly because Penalities and Difficulties does barely belong to the same game; Internal Penalities may belong with Difficulties, because they damage die rolls and not successes, but External Penalities, which detract from successes 1:1? Its basically adding an additional difficulty to the difficulty.
Either ones keeps only Difficulties and Internal Penalities, or Internal and External penalities, otherwise there is way too much overlap between Difficulties and External Penalties. For example, why i shouldn't be able to emply a penality eliminating charm to ignore the example difficulty of the Archery ability of the first edition? It is basically all what we can understood to be External Penalties: The Darkness of the Night, the Unadeguate Arrow, the Distance between the Target and the Targeted, and... okay, the smallness of the target may be thought as a difficulty, but why it isn't an External Penalty?
Really, the target is small is something completely independent from the Exalted, something external that must be overcome. And what an External Penalty is?
Copying directly from the Second Edition Definition:
External Penalties: While internal penalties make a character less capable in some fashion, external penalties are
conditions that make a task more difficult. Most often, these conditions are environmental factors of some kind, such as
slick terrain interfering with acrobatics, knee-high muck inhibiting dodges, cover protecting opponents and so on. In other cases, external penalties arise from a deliberate choice of the character. If she wishes to slice her initials into a rival's face with her sword during a duel instead of simply slashing at him, a penalty applies.
External penalties do not subtract dice from a character's pool. Instead, they subtract directly from the number of successes generated by a roll.
Chosing to aim to a little apple? If trying to slice the initials of a character on someone is an External Penality, then trying to aim to a little thing Is an external penalty too. It is a Deliberate Choice making the task more difficult, after all.
What is an internal Penalty? (We aren't talking about Internal Penalty as much, but the why of the inclusion will make sense later)
Internal Penalties: Anything that directly impairs a character's ability to perform a task is called an internal penalty.
Most often, these penalties involve some sort of adverse state within the character's own mind or body, caused by pain, fear, drugs, poisons, exhaustion, entropic magic and the like. Lacking appropriate tools also counts.
One common penalty is for acting without the proper Ability. The player of anyone who is not Exalted loses two dice from any roll based on an Ability in which she does not have any dots. Sensory deprivation is always internal regardless of source, so impaired vision qualifi es, be it a result of congenital defect, injury, darkness or fog. Internal penalties remove dice from a character's pool before a roll, effectively reducing her competence
And what is mechanically and narratively a Difficulty?
The answer is: Nothing!
DIFFICULTY AND SUCCESS
The difficulty of a task equals the number of successes required to achieve it. Many tasks have difficulty 1, succeeding
if even one die in the dice pool rolls a success. Because this is the norm, difficulty 1 is also called standard difficulty. (Rolls
without a listed diffi culty are always assumed to be difficulty 1.)
The harder the task is, the higher the diffi culty is. On average,
characters have a reasonable chance of success when they have
a number of dice in a pool at least double the required diffi culty
(so two dice for diffi culty 1, eight for diffi culty 4, etc.). A diffi
culty above 5 is possible, but such Herculean feats are usually
beyond the reach of mere mortals (who seldom have dice pools
larger than 10).
Often, the diffi culty of a task is immediately evident to the
character. In such cases, the Storyteller should provide the diffi
culty along with the required dice pool for the action. In other
situations, the diffi culty is not apparent. Perhaps the character is
under stress or has never attempted anything remotely like the
action in question before. Maybe revealing the diffi culty could
give too much away (such as alerting players to the presence of
something well-hidden by calling for a high-diffi culty [Perception
+ Awareness] roll). In these cases, the Storyteller calls for
a roll without providing the diffi culty and has the player state
the number of successes rolled. He then compares the successes
to the secret diffi culty. On hidden-diffi culty rolls where failure
could result in a character's injury or some other unpleasant fate,
cautious players can usually take a moment to "look before they
leap." Doing so requires a successful roll of (Perception + the
Ability used for the task). Obviously, common sense applies.
Characters cannot try to look ahead to fi gure out how far they
might have to look ahead (i.e., no guessing the diffi culty of basic
[Perception + Awareness] checks).
An Arbitrary Number without any meaning: thats what's difficulty!
At this point, to keep difficulty one needs to give meaning to it: either you keep Internal Penalties, and Difficulty is now trying to overcome avverse external conditions (Essentially transforming it into an External Penalty), or you keep External Penalties, and now Difficulty is being good enough at doing a thing/having the right tools/not being so much drunk to fail. (Essentially transforming it into an Internal Penalty, which is kinda iffy and i don't like it much).
Ooooorrrr, you remove difficulty, and keep both Penalties: the more successes you have after defeating both Penalties, the more you are successful.
And now Giygas doesn't know what to write, except for one thing: Stupid amounts of Successes are stupid. Like, Stupid Stupid, not Stupid Awesome.
... Welllllll, they could be cool, if only they had meaning and system support outside splattering better someone in battle.
... Good God. Reading a scant few lines of Reign ruined every Exalted system for me. So many ideas, so much EVERYTHING. Please either give me feedback on my crazy, or suppress me. I don't think i will survive with my sanity having all of my ideas ignored...
... Good God. Reading a scant few lines of Reign ruined every Exalted system for me. So many ideas, so much EVERYTHING. Please either give me feedback on my crazy, or suppress me. I don't think i will survive with my sanity having all of my ideas ignored...
I'm in a similar boat: one of my biggest issues with Exalted all the way back to 1E is how bad a job it does at meaningfully explaining what ten successes means outside of an opposed roll or some specific subsystem. The listed high end for what an Ability could do was often laughably short of what a devoted Exalt could achieve, making GMs basically need to scratch their heads and ignore the result or substantially damage the game's flow. Making it even worse, a lot of systems in every edition were primary constructed through Charms, implying that the listed effects weren't possible with just a rediculously high roll.
The end result is that Abilities like Investigation, Sail, Ride, Bureaucracy, and Survival are incredibly hard for a GM to make satisfying to use.
Reign is a good system. I approve of your approval.
So after much research, and not a bit of bias, I have come to the conclusion that the Exalted who have the best shot of creating a Magi-tech based society. Not a first age society, but perhaps at a local level they could make something around the level of the Shogunate, atre the Green Sun Princes.
There are three main hurdles to overcome as I see it, and they all tie into each other; power, infrastructure and expertise.
You need Hearthstones to fuel your various wonders, which means you need magical infrastructure in the form of Manses and the tools to create your artifacts as well as the blessings of gods, elementals or Demons, not to mention the raw materials needed to make them. And on top of that you need people other than a couple of Exalted to perform routine maintenance and create the lesser Artifacts and help you create the serious infrastructure, otherwise your Exalted would spent most of her time struggling just to keep the lights on.
Now, what to Infernals have that the other Exalted don't?
Simply put, of everyone in Creation they have the easiest access to Hell, its demons and its technology and the best Demon-Summoning spell in the entire game series.
So what am I getting at? One of the biggest problems with artifacts more advanced than Daiklave is fueling them, Hearthstones are made from Manses which are a bitch to make and defend, you lose a manse and you may well lose your war-strider. But Chalcanth and Chalcanth Reservoirs are far, far simpler to create. The Reservoirs are a 1-dot artifact, a well trained mortal could make one! And the process to create Chalcanth with a first circle demon is a 1st degree thaumaturgy ritual with a difficulty equal to the demon's essence, so stick to low essence demons and it's fairly simple.
Chalcanth has an equal amount of motes that the demon it was made from had and it losses an amount equal to twice the normal required Hearthstone, so if it needed a two dot Hearthstone, then the Chalcanth in the Reservoir would lose four motes per hour. So you obviously couldn't use them to fuel the really advanced stuff for any length of time, but it is easier to create an infrastructure to create the Reservoirs, beckon the demons (if you're feeling squimish you can use non-sapient demons like Fermin and the Passion Morays.) and dissolve them into Chalcanth than it is to build all of the dozens of manses that you'd need to support a Magi-tech society of any degree of sophistication. You could have entire factories beckoning demons, which is easier than you'd think as Passion Morays hate tin, forcing them to the vats of Vitriol and dissolved store in Cecelyne glass containers until they're needed in a Chalcanth Reservoir.
It doesn't solve your power demands, but it certainly takes a lot of the pressure off of you and frees up your Hearthstones for use on more important stuff without disrupting the day to day runnings of your city. Like a WMD to keep those filthy filthy Immaculates off of your back!
So, that is one hurdle reduced (not eliminated, try to use a Chalcanth Reservoir for something that needs a 5-dot Hearthstone and feel the regret, they're for small stuff that none-the-less requires juice.) On to the others, expertise! For a Solar Tier Exalted this is easy, summon the right demons and use your training charms to make your mortal(ish) followers smart and skilled enough to be useful, this was never going to be as hard to solve as far as power is. What you've got going for you is easy access to the likes of Ligier and the other Demon-Princes. Ligier would gladly support your city if you promised to make him the prime deity of the cities cult, providing him with prayer in exchange for resources, training and a really big sword in bad situations.
This ties into Infrastructure as well; with some work your city is literally ten days away from Malfeas, their technology, their demons and their resources; that includes tools and raw materials that can make Artifacts. Sure you city or small nation will be tainted by Hell, but do your people care if their streetlights are green, their shrines are to demon lords far away in the boiling depths of hell or if their conveniences of are fuelled by the suffering of potentially sapient beings? No, all they care about is being warm in the winter, having a full belly, their children safe and educated.
And the fact that the last time the Raksha showed up they were driven off by soldiers armed and armoured in black Malfean Iron and their glowing emerald lord.
Now, none of this isn't something that another Exalted couldn't do. It is quite easy to imagine an enterprising young Twilight courting Ligier for his crafting abilities in exchange for prayer from his city, but they simply aren't going to have an easy time of it like the Green Sun Princes are, for one thing the Demons actually like them. Beyond that they have an entire branch of Charms that is made to make lesser demons easier to control, so even if you don't summon all of them you should be able to control them well enough if you're careful.
Of course things aren't exactly peachy, beckoning demons is risky business, especially if you get the more powerful ones who can fuel your infrastructure for longer. Breakouts are going to happen. Not to mention that the Demon Princes aren't all that nice, even Ligier isn't exactly what you'd call a kind man, trying to keep the maddened whims of a chained Titan-soul from ruining everything is going to be trying at times.
I'm in a similar boat: one of my biggest issues with Exalted all the way back to 1E is how bad a job it does at meaningfully explaining what ten successes means outside of an opposed roll or some specific subsystem. The listed high end for what an Ability could do was often laughably short of what a devoted Exalt could achieve, making GMs basically need to scratch their heads and ignore the result or substantially damage the game's flow. Making it even worse, a lot of systems in every edition were primary constructed through Charms, implying that the listed effects weren't possible with just a rediculously high roll.
The end result is that Abilities like Investigation, Sail, Ride, Bureaucracy, and Survival are incredibly hard for a GM to make satisfying to use.
Reign is a good system. I approve of your approval.
Of course, i read like only between a dozen and two dozen pages and they gave me pretty much ALL THE IDEAS on how to try to fix Exalted. (I am much more familiar with Exalted than Reign, and i happen to like some parts of it too. I also need to read ORExalted, to see what to crib from it.)
About the Abilities: yeah, most of the abilities of Exalted needs a success:avarange effect table. And also a system to interact with. Many of them would probably gain much by modifying some of Reign's systems (Bureacracy and co wold love the main company system of reign. Even if i perhaps i am a bit too hasty to do such a declaration, having still to read it.), but others would need other things.
Depends, are you fucking over Raksha? Then they may leave you alone. It all comes down to if keeping you around is worth the demons and mutated people.
Ultimately, complexity of mechanics should be a tradeoff between appropriateness to concept (not necessarily the same as simulation accuracy), ease of balance, and ease of understanding. Keeping a third kind of penalty has absolutely nothing to do the first, it's about the second - it's useful to have, essentially, a category for "difficulties we don't care about" - difficulties that are allowed to be ignored with sufficient magic.
I ran into this when designing Wards for oMage - I ended up using external penalties for one kind and difficulties for another, because it was very important that it not be trivially easy to negate the penalty from certain kinds of Wards in order to preserve the setting.
As far as internal vs. external penalties... probably the same deal, though I don't know that you need two different stages of "hard to get rid of penalties."
