It is possible to satisfactorily emulate large organizations with the use of massive amount of maths, so therefore it is possible to satisfactorily emulate large organizations without it.

Great argument mate.
...Have you ever played Civ? I'm guessing not, because seriously, this isn't massive statistical number-crunching like you seem to be presuming (and a good chunk of what there is is obviated by the preexisting combat system Exalted already has). The game mechanics are actually for the most part within an order of magnitude or two of reasonable for tabletop already. The "massive amount of maths" the game does are for the most part dedicated to... graphics processing.

Guess what part of the application isn't involved with game mechanics at all?

The math involved isn't onerous, and the level of fidelity lost by cutting down the worst bits is unlikely to be of any significant impact.
 
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Violation of Rule 3 - This is not civil. This is just being insulting.
I'm done, you guys win. Exalted is fucking shit. Long live, I don't fucking know, Fate Accelerated or some shit. I really can't compete with this level of discourse, holy shit.

Largely your fault.

I'm sympathetic to your side of this argument, but wow. Did you ever shit up this thread. Your ability to lower the tone of the conversation rivals that of Zak S.

Anyway, I'm not sure exactly what I want when it comes to Bureaucracy. But I think I'm going to sketch out a system, just to see what it looks like.
 
...Have you ever played Civ? I'm guessing not, because seriously, this isn't massive statistical number-crunching like you seem to be presuming (and a good chunk of what there is is obviated by the preexisting combat system Exalted already has). The game mechanics are actually for the most part within an order of magnitude or two of reasonable for tabletop already. The "massive amount of maths" the game does are for the most part dedicated to... graphics processing.

Guess what part of the application isn't involved with game mechanics at all?

The math involved isn't onerous, and the level of fidelity lost by cutting down the worst bits is unlikely to be of any significant impact.

I have been playing Civ for over 20 years and if you think it's close to being tabletop-reasonable then I hope to never play at your table. (And I'm a guy who makes spreadsheets for fun.)

They made a Civ board game and it was 1) massively simplified along every single dimension and 2) not very good.
 
I don't have a problem with macro bureaucracy system. I think you can make very good macro systems and very good micro systems. My problem is in their interaction, and how micro and macro scale actions impact each other. This, I feel, is where all 2e attempts at macro systems failed in my eyes.

@Shyft mentioned earlier what happens when five PCs slaughter a hundred city guards. This kind of encapsulates my issues with macro management. I have yet to find a system that satisfyingly handles the fundamental difference of scales.

Like, you're a city leader. You have influence stats, and military stats. You can take macro actions in order to wage an extended war with another city. You have prized advisors (likely developed as minor characters in their own right) determining specific bonuses or stats in certain areas.

But a character can still engage all that on a micro scale. An Exalted warrior can cut through half your garrison as an individual character fighting a mass combat unit or battle group or what have you, using her personal stats. A seductor can wrap your minister of finance and your high priest around his little finger and get them to hand out valuable information and take decisions which advantage him. Your ambassador at the neighboring prince's court might have been eaten and replaced by a Lunar. An Outcaste who has sworn loyalty to you may be giving you a potent daiklave as a gift.

It's easy to say, in a vacuum, "well you run the fight scene as a micro scene and then you factor in how many soldiers died and affect the city's Military Rating appropriately" and so on. The problem is that Exalted is a game where there is going to be constant, fast-paced back-and-forth. Can any combinatorial system handle the constant zoom in/zoom out process of heroic characters performing individual actions with massive consequences over and over? I have yet to see a system that does.

And there's the problem of the level of abstractions. With two different resolution scales you'll end up with two different resolution processes and thus, resuls. What this means is that when you undertake a Raise Manse project, you're going to have the choice to resolve it as a macro scale action where your Twilight mason is an Asset granting a +X bonus or as a micro scale action of the Twilight actually rolling out a full crafting action with the 10 Charms she's invested in it, and the two will have massively different outcomes and rules.

Or you define crafting as a "macro scale action" and the Twilight can't act on the micro scale, so her 10 Charms actually only apply to the macro-level Raise Manse project. But then you end up with that weird dissociated game with two levels; your Dawn is the Doomguy in one scene and a RTS "hero unit" in the next. I don't really like it, especially because in these situations the macro scale always ends up mattering more. This was the Creation-Ruling Mandate's problem, in which you wanted to push actions to the macro scale because you wanted the ability to throw as many modifiers on long-time rolls as possible to win without having to go through individually challenging scenes in short-time that might actually press you for motes, willpower and screen time.

Even video games have failed to resolve that issue - and not for lack of trying. Look at the many attempts at "stronghold system" in party-based RPGs. There've been many interesting experiments in the genre, but it's never worked out great.
 
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Largely your fault.

I'm sympathetic to your side of this argument, but wow. Did you ever shit up this thread. Your ability to lower the tone of the conversation rivals that of Zak S.

I don't know. I can't help but feel TheRPGSite, for all its flaws, is at least somewhat able to confront an argument they feel is bad without saying 'maybe this isn't about the issues that come with creating a subsystem, but really about you and your hidden malevolence' for at least two, maybe three more pages...

Should I pull an Aaron Peori here and tell you that actually, all your issues with my posts really just stem from the fact that you don't like having your notions contradicted?
 
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But then you end up with that weird dissociated game with two levels; your Dawn is the Doomguy in one scene and a RTS "hero unit" in the next.

This.

For Exalted to properly work as an strategy game, it should be built in from the start with that in mind*. Tackling an extra system over a game that works at a personal scale is going to give non-sensical output more often than not.


*(Note that i would actually prefer if it worked that way, but it never did).
 
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I have been playing Civ for over 20 years and if you think it's close to being tabletop-reasonable then I hope to never play at your table. (And I'm a guy who makes spreadsheets for fun.)

They made a Civ board game and it was 1) massively simplified along every single dimension and 2) not very good.
Through the Ages, on the other hand, is a really good Civ board game, that captures the feel of Civilization and many of the same kind of strategic decisions, in something you can play in 2-3 hours.

("Really good" is opinion there, but it's not just my opinion; TtA is two of the top ten slots at Boardgamegeek.)

Heck, for that matter, you could reflavor Agricola into an empire-builder without too much trouble. Board game technology has gotten a lot better in the last fifteen years - "complex, strategic emergent gameplay, stemming from a 10-page book" is increasingly the standard rather than the exception. RPG combat hasn't kept up.
 
Through the Ages, on the other hand, is a really good Civ board game, that captures the feel of Civilization and many of the same kind of strategic decisions, in something you can play in 2-3 hours.

("Really good" is opinion there, but it's not just my opinion; TtA is two of the top ten slots at Boardgamegeek.)

Heck, for that matter, you could reflavor Agricola into an empire-builder without too much trouble. Board game technology has gotten a lot better in the last fifteen years - "complex, strategic emergent gameplay, stemming from a 10-page book" is increasingly the standard rather than the exception. RPG combat hasn't kept up.

I agree, although I think an Agricola reflavor is kind of pushing it. But these things really don't capture well what we'd want in a TTRPG empire-building system - more specifically, they are bad fits for Exalted.

The problem with an empire-building system for Exalted is that people at least ostensibly value the game for its internal consistency between setting and rules; thus we get terms like "Usurpation-OK". However much the current developers have rejected that particular term, it's still generally considered important that Charms not obviously render the setting history impossible.

A fully mechanized empire-building system would blow that out of the water because there will always end up being some kind of Chungian white-room strategy for 100% guaranteed taking over the Realm. (See the guys who play Europa Universalis and conquer the world with a one-province minor like Ryukyu.)

In other systems that's OK because they are much more comfortable with PC uniqueness, but in Exalted this would have a lot of people up in arms.

I have been (very slowly) working on a 3e variant of Exalted Modern (well, sort of) and as part of that putting together some organization rules, and what I settled on was:
  1. Have good rules to support taking control of or influencing organizations - a more developed system for mass social influence, reflecting "factions" within a population, and (relevant to Modern) reflecting mass and social media.
  2. Under-specify actual rules for things that organizations can do - in particular, leave out mechanics for their direct interaction. If two countries go to war, that should be an actual campaign story, it should not be resolved with abstracted rolls.
  3. Organizations mostly serve as loot-bags for characters, and the major projects you would want to carry require that loot as prerequisites. So there are not two systems for Build Manse; there is just the personal-scale action, which requires certain inputs (measured as typed dots of Capital) that are most easily acquired by getting an organization to commit them. This resolves @Omicron's issue.
  4. At high-essence characters can actually provide those dots of Capital, themselves, through their own labor, thus giving the characters some more direct relevance at the macro-scale.
 
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This.

For Exalted to properly work as an strategy game, it should be built in from the start with that in mind*. Tackling an extra system over a game that works at a personal scale is going to give non-sensical output more often than not.


*(Note that i would actually prefer if it worked that way, but it never did).
I'm not 100% sure, and I'm still not sure if a truly well-converting-between-scales system is possible, but here's my thought:

For material assets and mat-asset-related actions, everything should be evaluated units of productivity. Productivity is probably best abstracted into Sufficiently Trained Manhours and Materials Value.
So a Twilight Mansion-Building Brigade should be able to get an input of $L raw material (including the requisite Demesne worth $M and $N worth of rocks and stuff out of which the manse will be built), and can produce $V worth of Manse per unit of time, until the value $F (finished manse) is achieved.
Got Charms that boost the rate at which you and/or your underlings produce craftables? Cool, pay the costs and apply the multipliers as appropriate. They're supposed to slot in the same way no matter the scale. A doubling is a doubling, as long as you can maintain the effect long enough for it to be applicable (this is why I so dislike Scene-based durations; they make this question ambiguous).

Note that this post isn't pretending to be a complete solution, just an idea of how I would do it if I had to. (It's also the way GURPS Mass Combat does it where it comes to raising armies and the like. But GMC has somewhat dubious raise-and-maintain costs for many units. Fixing the numbers is needed, even if the principle is okay overall.)

Also note that while the examples I gave were listed with '$', this can actually be adapted to the Resource system. All one needs is a clear conversion rate of what each Resource Dot means and what's the step between them (doubling? quintipling? etc.).
 
I agree, although I think an Agricola reflavor is kind of pushing it. But these things really don't capture well what we'd want in a TTRPG empire-building system - more specifically, they are bad fits for Exalted.

The problem with an empire-building system for Exalted is that people at least ostensibly value the game for its internal consistency between setting and rules; thus we get terms like "Usurpation-OK". However much the current developers have rejected that particular term, it's still generally considered important that Charms not obviously render the setting history impossible.

A fully mechanized empire-building system would blow that out of the water because there will always end up being some kind of Chungian white-room strategy for 100% guaranteed taking over the Realm. (See the guys who play Europa Universalis and conquer the world with a one-province minor like Ryukyu.)
That darned Threat mechanic made that a lot harder in CK2...

I see your point, but we've (legitimately) switched objections, here, I think. The problem isn't that Civ-style management inherently has too much math to handle; table top games do, factually, handle it. If there's a remaining problem that Civ-style management is too gameable - well, that's fine, but that's a different problem, and we're at least out of "The mathematics cannae take it!"
 
That darned Threat mechanic made that a lot harder in CK2...

I see your point, but we've (legitimately) switched objections, here, I think. The problem isn't that Civ-style management inherently has too much math to handle; table top games do, factually, handle it. If there's a remaining problem that Civ-style management is too gameable - well, that's fine, but that's a different problem, and we're at least out of "The mathematics cannae take it!"

There's some relationship here. I think the idea floated was more that with sufficient mathematics, you could handle such things. That said, I am a pessimist about our ability to convincingly model societies even with arbitrarily large amounts of effort invested (I literally laughed out loud when some guy pages back linked a google search for "sociology" as an answer).
 
There's some relationship here. I think the idea floated was more that with sufficient mathematics, you could handle such things. That said, I am a pessimist about our ability to convincingly model societies even with arbitrarily large amounts of effort invested (I literally laughed out loud when some guy pages back linked a google search for "sociology" as an answer).
No argument there, but I also think we're not looking for that much heavy lifting, here - we're willing to let most of the society be handwaving, as long as the bits that we interact with directly can convincingly present a society-like facade.

My guess is that that means we're talking about a system with, say, a handful of standard actions, and lots and lots of stunting on top of them. So there's no "devalue currency" action, probably, but there's "Attack (economy)" with a currency stunt.
 
For Exalted there would be a sane way of Apparently Giygas too slow and Broken25 too fast, because he told what i wanted to say with less words and with less tripping over words.

But i will say it anyway, because i wanted to write it dammit.

Namely: why is Exalted even a personal scale system? Aren't you a God King, indipendently from your "class" of Sun Preacher, Moon Trickster, Fate Ninja, Dragon in Human body?

Why you should have systems to deal with non peer single opponents? If you are discovered by a normal human guard whilst infliltrating a place, killing it should be easy, so would convince it to your cause, so would knock it unconscious. (I am assuming that the hipotetical character is good at all of these things)(I am also aware the the second is harder, but hipotetical character is crazy charismatic)

But maybe doing one of these things without the right precautions would cause all the guards to attack you all in a group, and now you can find a worthy battle. Or maybe you killed all the guards, and in the future the close village that needed the guards to survive is going to be overrun by brigands. Or the guards are going to become brigands- you know, i am diverging from what i wanted to say. (Broken25 is too broken, explains better than poor kohai Giygas)

Essentially: Exalteds are heroes of myth. The setting needs certainly verisimilitude, but risking death when fighting some chumps is stupid when you are a demigod. If you risk death when fighting a lot of chumps, then it should be because you are fighting a non chumpish agglomerate of chumps. (BY chumps i mean, non powered peoples. Of course, one may make so that powered peoples of lower level are more common, so you can fight your "peer" battle more easily.)

And why shouldn't most of your actions inflict big scale changes? You are a demigod, inflicting chages to setting that would require otherwhise an organzation should be perfectly in your powers.

Also, i now want a saner 1+1 player version of exalted.

*Sighs, add things to the pile of growing homebrew.*

...Even if the saner 1+1 player version could be the basis for a saner more players version too...
 
I don't know. I can't help but feel TheRPGSite, for all its flaws, is at least somewhat able to confront an argument they feel is bad without saying 'maybe this isn't about the issues that come with creating a subsystem, but really about you and your hidden malevolence' for at least two, maybe three more pages...

This site is too. The shift away from the topic and towards the badness of your posts was caused by the exceptional badness of your posts.

Should I pull an Aaron Peori here and tell you that actually, all your issues with my posts really just stem from the fact that you don't like having your notions contradicted?

Doubt it.

Like I said, I have sympathy for your side here. I actually don't think Exalted should have an attack (economy) action or anything like that. If I was salty about having my preferences contradicted, I'd be annoyed with almost everyone here.

Namely: why is Exalted even a personal scale system?

Because that's the game Grabowski and company decided to make. Whether it was a good call or not is debatable (I think it was), but at this point the game is what it is.
 
You know what would be cool? more guidelines on spirit courts and religious rites. i had to port over the prayer rules from 2e when i ran my short lived game.

I would have expected a more developed system for gaining/managing divine favor in 3e, instead of silence.

Wasn't Holden the one who complained that exalted was getting too gonzo and he missed his peach orchard oaths?

then where are my rites of honor and blessing and propitiation, modbannit?



also, please use the edit button, there were way too many double and tripple posts.

That's actually a really good point!

Spirit courts and divine favor should really get more focus.

Though I do imagine that we'll receive a book about spirits later.
 
On a bureaucracy system I think the main criteria are:
-Usable to abstract actions into broad categories.
-Usable to advance the game
-Not get in the way of other modes of play
-Requires low to minimal investment to comprehend and utilize.
-Not inherently require spreadsheets

So the sweet spot for me, I think, is approximately where Sail and War are at mechanically. Finer grain resolution than that likely goes into an expansion book, for games which involve major empire building and the like. You just need a few things:
-What happens when you try to manipulate an organization for your benefit - Mainly getting it, or elements of it to do what you want, or not do a planned action.
-How do you gain or lose control and influence over an organization.
-How this system can interact with the various social power merits.
-What happens when organizations clash in interests, and preferably, but not compulsorily have limitations in place for why one Megacorp didn't already eat all the other organizations. This probably can occupy the same textvolume as the previous three points.

It should not at any point replace social interaction(though it's plausible, if unlikely to have a smooth transition point where you can make either Bureaucracy or Presence side easier with the appropriate roll on the other. It probably shouldn't have detailed stuff like starting new ventures, managing additional resources, etc(that's for the expansion) because that way goes to the newbie GM trap of trying to implement all the things and then just choking up.

Been there with Pathfinder's Kingmaker. It's nice, but it goes haywire pretty fast if your GM doesn't actually know how to deal with it but thinks he does.
 
I don't have a problem with macro bureaucracy system. I think you can make very good macro systems and very good micro systems. My problem is in their interaction, and how micro and macro scale actions impact each other. This, I feel, is where all 2e attempts at macro systems failed in my eyes.

@Shyft mentioned earlier what happens when five PCs slaughter a hundred city guards. This kind of encapsulates my issues with macro management. I have yet to find a system that satisfyingly handles the fundamental difference of scales.

Like, you're a city leader. You have influence stats, and military stats. You can take macro actions in order to wage an extended war with another city. You have prized advisors (likely developed as minor characters in their own right) determining specific bonuses or stats in certain areas.

But a character can still engage all that on a micro scale. An Exalted warrior can cut through half your garrison as an individual character fighting a mass combat unit or battle group or what have you, using her personal stats. A seductor can wrap your minister of finance and your high priest around his little finger and get them to hand out valuable information and take decisions which advantage him. Your ambassador at the neighboring prince's court might have been eaten and replaced by a Lunar. An Outcaste who has sworn loyalty to you may be giving you a potent daiklave as a gift.

It's easy to say, in a vacuum, "well you run the fight scene as a micro scene and then you factor in how many soldiers died and affect the city's Military Rating appropriately" and so on. The problem is that Exalted is a game where there is going to be constant, fast-paced back-and-forth. Can any combinatorial system handle the constant zoom in/zoom out process of heroic characters performing individual actions with massive consequences over and over? I have yet to see a system that does.

And there's the problem of the level of abstractions. With two different resolution scales you'll end up with two different resolution processes and thus, resuls. What this means is that when you undertake a Raise Manse project, you're going to have the choice to resolve it as a macro scale action where your Twilight mason is an Asset granting a +X bonus or as a micro scale action of the Twilight actually rolling out a full crafting action with the 10 Charms she's invested in it, and the two will have massively different outcomes and rules.

Or you define crafting as a "macro scale action" and the Twilight can't act on the micro scale, so her 10 Charms actually only apply to the macro-level Raise Manse project. But then you end up with that weird dissociated game with two levels; your Dawn is the Doomguy in one scene and a RTS "hero unit" in the next. I don't really like it, especially because in these situations the macro scale always ends up mattering more. This was the Creation-Ruling Mandate's problem, in which you wanted to push actions to the macro scale because you wanted the ability to throw as many modifiers on long-time rolls as possible to win without having to go through individually challenging scenes in short-time that might actually press you for motes, willpower and screen time.

Even video games have failed to resolve that issue - and not for lack of trying. Look at the many attempts at "stronghold system" in party-based RPGs. There've been many interesting experiments in the genre, but it's never worked out great.
Here's an issue though: we already have something like the "it can produce very different results depending on how you manage it" in 3E,in the form of battle groups. If you resolve a fight against five roughly identical foes of an equivalent power level, it can produce massively different outcomes than a fight against a single battlegroup composed of said five foes. There are instances where a GM could legitimately treat a group of enemies as either, because all of them have somewhat unique powersets but fall within largely the same category.

It doesn't end up being that much of a problem, because choosing how to resolve this situation (as a battlegroup of five guys) is one of the ways that the table can decide how important that given fight is. Similarly, you could have a "if it is important and involves the PCs acting directly, resolve it as a scene and then parse the results back through the following reasonable guidelines" sidebar to any management subsystem.

I also think you're substantially overstating how frequently PCs are likely to be engaged in massive disruptive actions on the scale of a moderate to large organization, and how hard it'll be to parse that if there are reasonable guidelines. From my own games where we've tried to do city management or engage with that kind of thing, we would be talking about a few significant actions per session on a busy session, all of which could likely be managed by "oh, deal 1 damage to their military stat because we just killed an army, it'll come back when they recruit new dudes."

Manse Raising is already a macro scale action, just with a separate macro scale system (the craft system). There are already macro scale charms in Craft, and charms that can be used on both macro and micro levels. This isn't a problem: if a character is supposed to be some kind of amazing organizer, you would expect that to mostly show up in their ability to organize things in downtime, but you would also expect them to have more than a few tricks that can help out in a specific scene.

The solution seems to be, well, having a big block of bolded text at the top of the section saying "whatever you do, ensure that the PCs are always active in important scenes. The goal of this system is to allow for PC actions to have reasonable consequences at the scale appropriate for their stature, not to supplant them actually making those actions in the first place."
 
I'm just always amazed by how people say empire building and trade system focused games are impossible when Settlers of Catan is one of the most popular board games I know of.
 

My experience does not bear this out. Maybe someday, with time and effort, it can reach its level.

I'm just always amazed by how people say empire building and trade system focused games are impossible when Settlers of Catan is one of the most popular board games I know of.

But Settlers of Catan does not have an in-game avatar that lets you take potentially infinite actions, most of which occur outside the scope of the rules Settlers has laid out.
 
Stop: THIS IS NOT WHAT WE WANT
this is not what we want Everyone involved in this argument really needs to calm down, and step back. @Deations , @notanautomaton, @C.o.S.a.R, @Aaron Peori, @Sanctaphrax, you have each gotten 25 points for dragging this thread down to Ad Hominem insults, pointless insult posts, accusations of bad faith and lying, and derailing & disrupting the thread for pages. I limited it to one infraction apiece, though most of you had far more than one post that was over the line of civil conversation. Do not repeat this.

Before anyone asks, this was examined, and no, it is not 'an admission of trolling'. This refers to the derail argument in general.


@Quantumboost & @azoicennead, your posts were edging the line. Cool off.

Everyone else, take a breath, and try not to mistake poor communication skills and misunderstanding for 'bad faith' and general derp.

Thread Reopened.
 
I don't have a problem with macro bureaucracy system. I think you can make very good macro systems and very good micro systems. My problem is in their interaction, and how micro and macro scale actions impact each other. This, I feel, is where all 2e attempts at macro systems failed in my eyes.

I think, in a way, the more cinematic intent of 3E actually helps here. You could explicitly split the population into plot-important characters and non-plot-important ones. The macro system then becomes the micro system, because talking a thousand guys into voting BigMcLargeHuge for autocrat becomes effectively the same thing as talking Hank Slabchest into withdrawing his nomination. Like, Exalted 3E has a mass combat system. It works okay from all accounts. It also exists on the exact same scale as personal conflict, because it's basically personal stuff. This is an advantage REIGN doesn't have, for example, and thus can't use, because its tone isn't one where a hero is immune to random peasant with a scythe rolling 2 10s on their d2 fight pool and decapitating said hero.

I think the core mistake is seeing a bureaucracy system as a 'minigame' instead of a "there should be a meaningful way to quantify with, interact with, and deal with large groups." I think the result might not be particularly realistic, but it would probably hold together enough to be a viable thing to use on the tabletop.
 
where a hero is immune to random peasant with a scythe rolling 2 10s on their d2 fight pool and decapitating said hero.
Just for the record, and unrelated to the post directly, but typical mortals don't get the two-for-10s rule, because of not being Heroic.

I bring this up not because I want to get all pedantic about the Bureaucracy point being made previous, but more that I see it all over the place that people don't generally tend to realize just how Big of an impact lacking the 10s rule really is for "mundane folks." Not only does it cap their competence by locking them out of rolling more successes than they have dice in their pool, but this also means that the chances of getting higher results Rapidly drop off into straight-up gambling territory.

Like, check this out:

I've posted variations of this diagram before, but the critical points of note here are the 4d pool (Average stats, Attrib-2/Abil-2), and the extreme swing of attempting to exceed common DV ranges. Now granted, a perfectly normal mortal will never be facing any non-magical foe with a DV greater than 4 at best, but the prospects are still extremely grim and unlikely.

To an extent, this is part of why I don't consider "battle groups" to be much of an innovation when combat-geared mortals quickly become incapable of defeating even a moderately-specced Exalt anyway without harshly tipping the scales, and the only reason large masses of them were a threat at any point during 2e was due to the overt-bullshit nature of Coordinated Attack and Onslaught penalties, so facing several actions from Any source (let alone several flurries) was effectively ignoring your DV. Making mortals into a viable threat shouldn't hinge on the same rule that makes rocket-tag possible for everyone else anyway, or lumping them up into a disposable blob.
 
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