notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
But I didn't.
General Exalted Thread
That's what I saw in the title of the google doc when I first looked at it, which yanno, is cheeky and in good fun sure but it can also make people unhappy.
Roadie
A plate full of blins and a cat nearby.
They absolutely have rights to the rules text. They don't have rights to the rules.Right, which is why I said "game text." White Wolf doesn't have creative control over the words "Exalted" or "the Exalted" in the text properly, because in-context it is merely a word. What they have the rights to, is this:
Which is a separate entity from the rules-text.
Game mechanics are not copyrightable, but the specific expresssion of them is copyrightable.
This is, for example, how Rifts can use a system that's basically a homebrew kitbash version of AD&D 2e. New names for distinctive terms, new text from scratch describing the same mechanical concepts.
- Location
- Ottawa
Yeah, they have a trademark on that word. In America, anyway. Not a lawyer, but it looks like they've got a case.
Wouldn't be so sure. Many are lawyers, including (IIRC) the one who infracted notanautomaton.
No way. A gas station explosion is totally countable damage. If you can ignore a bonfire by being really good at Resistance, you don't no-save-just-die when a gas station blows up.
Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
That's puts it in a really weird zone then. SSE will actually perfect it (since it's new "flaw" is having to charge it after each use), but it'll probably burn straight through HGD or AST if it's anywhere over 25-30 dice of damage. Unless it's perfectable as a hazard instead of an attack
25-30 dice is still well within the realm of 'defendable' in Ex3 honestly. Barring charms, you don't count 10's as two successes on decisive damage, and Heavenly Guardian Defense burns away damage at a rate of 1i per success. So, as long as you're at ~12 initiative (which is not guaranteed given that they got up to ~30 somehow) you're likely to not even take damage. A Resistance solar tanks it fairly easily too, since the Resistance tricks don't depend on your initiative, really. The tradeoff is that you really want more than just Adamant Skin Technique to do it. The fight recap thing I posted a few pages back showed pretty much this exact scenario. My boss tanked a ~28 dice decisive surprise attack and ended up taking a grand total of three damage, which didn't put her into wound penalties thanks to bonus health levels.
So, gas stations are fine so long as you either have a pile of motes or a pile of initiative to deal with it.
Also, you have to keep in mind, in 3E, it's at least moderately hard for your OPPONENT, rather than a terrain hazard like a firedust warehouse, to actually do that much damage to you without your being able to have a say about it. Building up initiative requires them to either hit you, or a convenient initiative pinata(required to be actually a 'significant enemy', which is loosely defined but the intent is clear enough). Keeping the initiative long enough to attack requires them to successfully defend from your attacks, or you'd just take the same initiative instead.
Not impossible though, there's a bunch of gimmicks to get there if you have good join battle enhancers or true multiple attack charms.
Not impossible though, there's a bunch of gimmicks to get there if you have good join battle enhancers or true multiple attack charms.
Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
The problem is that the example of an exploding gas station (or similar effect) might not happen during a combat scene, so you might not be rolled into Initiative and thus have problems using HGD. Similarly, you might not have Diamond Body Prana up to boost your soak, and so AST gets weaker. Generally, there's just a stupid non-explanation of where damage should become "uncountable". This creates the situations where you might have 50 dice of damage leveled at you by something that isn't an attack, but isn't "uncountable".
- Location
- The end of all things
So, gas stations are fine so long as you either have a pile of motes or a pile of initiative to deal with it.
Initiative costs are explicitly waved outside of combat, so you won't have any problems using HGD if you have it. If you don't... well, I suppose that 25 damage dice isn't too bad. Even without charms there's only a 1/4 chance it'll kill you—if you are uninjured and take an extreme crippling injury. If you had the foresight to buy even a single Ox-Body Technique that is reduced to a mere 3% chance. You did buy an Ox-Body, right?
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Unless an enemy inmediately attacks you afterwards.
Clearly claymore mines are the best way to kill an Exalt now.
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Walker of the Yellow Path
Ho There!
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- The Land of Memes
I'm not seeing anything that says Init costs are waived outside of combat. Page number please?
Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
It gives you the capability to parry otherwise unparryable effects. It never says that you actually do, just that you can. It's actually just incredibly vague thanks to the goddamn "natural language" that can go burn in a fucking fire.
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Scene of Destruction sidebar on page 351.
Edit - Also:
"Dad, can I get something to drink"
"I don't know, can you?"
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- Location
- The end of all things
- Location
- Virginia
There are three functions of HGD:
- Retroactively reduce the damage on a decisive attack for 4m + 1i per level of damage.
- Allow you to apply your Parry defense to an unblockable attack, for 4m.
- Totally negate uncountable recurring damage for 4m + 1wp.
That said, you could probably try to lawyer a claim that 1 only applies to actual decisive attacks and thus doesn't work for our hypothetical exploding gas station, but I wouldn't be very sympathetic.
HGD is not supposed to have a weird weakness to "large-but-not-uncountable sources of out-of-combat damage". Instead, the (in-universe-ish) reason it stops working in combat once you run out of initiative is because that represents cinematic vulnerability. It's not that your defense isn't perfect enough; it's that you are so off-balance that you don't quite manage to use it. AST is similarly vulnerable, although to your opponent having too much initiative rather than you having too little. Only SSE is a true perfect (although not spammable) because that's thematically appropriate to Dodge - it lets you be the character who manages to escape in the moment of defeat.
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Every single example of an environmental hazard is something that does continuous damage, rather than one-tick-smash damage. If your GM goes, "because it's just a bunch of firedust exploding, it deals 30HL of damage rather than uncountable damage, so you die," he's being a dick. He could just say the Sun falling on your head is 80HLs, and that's obviously not at all the intent either.
That actually is in theme. The best way to kill an exalt is to do so through proxies so you don't come down with a case of death, but if you need to fight them, then you want to do it when they're injured with low resources. Starting off with a bunch of traps can accomplish both of these. Hell, even if you don't get involved personally, traps can be useful. Maybe they kill them, and if they don't there might be little to point directly at you.
- Location
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Most people don't have AST or HGD. For most people, uncountable damage is the instant-death dick-GM ruling. So I think you have the issue backwards.
I brought up the bonfire to illustrate how tough Exalts can be. Someone who doesn't fear bonfires probably doesn't fear gasoline either.
For something like an exploding gas station, I think the best ruling is something like "difficulty 5 roll to avoid 13 dice of lethal damage".
Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
Huh. I must have missed that. Thanks.
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See, this is the kind of shit which gets my back up about Ex3, the insufferable degree of inconsistent design presented as features rather than bugs, slinging around high-concept terminology which makes it sound as though someone is either completely unfamiliar with what it actually means, or is just talking out of their ass. If Initiative is waived outside of combat, why are we still counting MOTES and Willpower for the purpose of restricting Perfects too? Is one spendable resource so much more cinematic than the others it exists solely to make combat further detached from the primary system?
If hard-locking the amount of times someone could non-cinematicly block an ultra-kill-you attack was so vital to noncombat gameplay, rather than being a throwback to 1e treating invulnerability as the ultimate winning strategy, why don't they just use that single encounter-use limit they brought in to hamstring Seven Shadow Evasion instead, but without the stupid turn-counting condition? For that matter why does every single Perfect need to resolve itself in an unnecessarily awkward and fiddly way that does not actually Change the character gameplay being presented through its use?
But then again, this is the same game that has made Initiative both the most powerful trait possible, disconnected from character abilities directly, and totally forgettable the rest of the time. So maybe I am just spending my time complaining about the Emperor's shitty haircut while his junk is hanging out.
Imitative represents the amount of control the character has over the fight not mystical energy gained from hitting opponents if they aren't currently in a fight the entire concept is inapplicable and it makes sense to assume that the lack of an opponent is the same as having as much initiative as they need as there is nothing to contest their control.
Having separate limitations for different perfects provides variety to the strategy. HGD allows you to tank hits when you are doing well in the fight however doing so makes you sacrifice some of your control, but if you are on the ropes it sucks and you get overwhelmed. SSE allows you to use it whenever needed but only so often. In both cases it prevents you from using it on a whim and suggests different strategies to combat.
For example HGD costs initative to use proportional to the successes on the attack defended against which is basically the effect of being hit by a withering attack anyway. It basically converts a decisive attack into a withering one. The strategy for this is obviously save your doom decisive for when the Solar has low initiative. SSE basically lets them dodge one attack but then they can't use it again for a while the counter to it is to either make them waste it on an attack just dangerous enough to make them think they need it and follow up with a second dangerous attack during cooldown rather than one super attack or to simply make all your attacks just dangerous enough to be a threat but not enough to justify the expense of SSE.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
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Umm, in some ways you're spot-on. It seems very analogous to the way Stress and Fate Points work in FATE Core: physical stress is mostly just relevant in combats, while FP costs are more long-term as a consequence.
Initiative is like Stress: it becomes relevant when the combat scene starts, then becomes immediately irrelevant when the combat scene ends. Motes and
Which brings us to another situation where the distinction is important:
Say your characters are climbing some magical tower, trying to reach the entry that is 10 yards above the ground. They botch the roll and fall down! At which point most GMs would probably want the botch to have some sort of consequence that will stick throughout at least a part of the adventure, instead of going "You drop into Initiative Crash, but since there's nobody around who would attack you, you recover in three turns" and try again. No, the expected consequence would be either a sprained leg (one or two healthboxes), or some Motes spent to up the soak against falling damage (I'm not sure how it works in 3e and what fine nuances I might be missing; I'm talking in general terms here). In the meantime, while a sprained leg should disadvantage someone in combat, it shouldn't make them turn into pink mist easier, so it's not Initiative.
I have issues with how Initiative and Decisive Attacks seem to work, but they do seem to work as intended. (I don't agree with all of the intentions, though.)
Sucal
The Devil’s Cut
- Location
- Bottom of the barrel
Except Exalted healing.
Sprained Ankles rarely bother them for any real length of time, they simply aren't 'serious' enough to matter unless they happen in combat time (in which case the initiative loss and similar replicates that).
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
A hitbox or two took some number of hours in 2e. That seems to be about right to make a difference on, say, Conan and the Tower of the Elephant. Did regeneration become faster in 3e?
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