General Exalted Thread
Only thirty pages?
At a time. If you take them all together, there's certainly a lot more than that.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
I mean, you can ignore pages 247~250 of the corebook or say the advice is counter-productive but saying that the game has no advice on how to categorize threat levels and deal with them via strategies is just wrong.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
My friend used to tell me "no, you don't understand, while D&D 3.5 has many problems, it takes actually effort to break the game. In exalted, it's something you do on accident."
My IRL friends are not the sort of people who pay deep attention to the fiddly mechanics, prefering the simple and straightforward. yet they broke the game accidentally and repeatedly.
Exalted was historically full of landmines. The degree to which 3e does or does not improve that is hard to gauge yet.
And yeah, despite all it's problems, D&D's CR system was a lovely tool to have when trying to not TPK.
My IRL friends are not the sort of people who pay deep attention to the fiddly mechanics, prefering the simple and straightforward. yet they broke the game accidentally and repeatedly.
Exalted was historically full of landmines. The degree to which 3e does or does not improve that is hard to gauge yet.
And yeah, despite all it's problems, D&D's CR system was a lovely tool to have when trying to not TPK.
I've been looking at one of the 1st edition books, Creatures of the Wyld. I notice that it has a note linking to creatures cut from the book (on page 3 by Brian) but is now a defunct white-wolf site (white-wolf.com/download/creature.pdf is the no-longer functional site). Is that cut material still sold anywhere? I found someone had put (some?) of it on scribd, but I've not found it anywhere else online via 15 minutes of various googling w/varied search terms.
If it's to be found somewhere, I'd love to read it; I found Creatures of the Wyld on drivethrurpg, but not the "extra" left out material that the book references in that note (on page 3). Any ideas?
If it's to be found somewhere, I'd love to read it; I found Creatures of the Wyld on drivethrurpg, but not the "extra" left out material that the book references in that note (on page 3). Any ideas?
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I can certainly see how you might get that impression. That said:
- Sasi has our errata'd Witness to Darkness, which makes her utterly terrible at being truthful and honest and open about things that matter. Like, I know for a fact that she is incredibly proud of the progress Keris has made from an illiterate street rat to a genius occultist/artisan - probably prouder than Keris, in fact, since Sasi understands exactly how impressive Keris is. She just can't easily say it.
- We never actually see any PoV other than Keris's in Kerisgame, for obvious reasons. Believe me, Sasi's inner monologue does not resemble her external façade very much. To assume it does is to miss the basic themes of Sasi as a character.
- Her feelings are at least strong enough that when Salina took over and Sasi didn't even remember who she was, she still remembered that she trusted Keris with her life. And lastly...
- Sasi is not a fighter or a combatant in any way, and is frankly probably something of a coward when it comes to Exalt-level fighting. Sasi is fully aware that Keris is the subject of at least some attention from the Silent Wind herself, with all that is implied thereby.
- And yet Sasi is still in a relationship with Keris.
D&D 3.5 is broken the moment one player makes a fighter while another player rolls a cleric.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
Having actually played D&D, i find your claim hilarious.
The game is "broken" if one person shows up with sword and board fighter and one shows up with codzilla, and only in the sense that one player vastly outstrips another. You can, in fact, still play, if the fighter doesn't mind being outshone.
But the average player in 3.5's heyday was not a 339er optimization expert. Most clerics were played as healbot clerics. Most wizards were played as blasty evokers. The standard for 3.5 prior to the rise of intensive internet forum analysis was "basically everyone is tier 4/5," becaue the tools to break the game were there but few people had the System Mastery to actually use them that way.
Compare this to random TPK's when the storyteller was actualy trying for an easy fight but didn't realize how powerful ambushes or surrouding someone were in Exalted.
I know you're a slavering WW fanboy, but WW fans dumping on D&D without actually knowing anything about D&D except by hearsay just isn't cool anymore.
But...
I played D&D way before any other rpg. It was bad enough to kill my interest in rpgs.
You can totally TPK a group without meaning to in D&D, especially as CR is entirely arbitrary and determined entirely by writers guesstimating. You still have situations where a mid-level fighter can get curbstomped by a monster with a lower CR. Party makeup makes all the difference in PF adventure paths, and in some cases even if you just use the default pregens you'll still get eaten alive by some mandatory encounters.
That's not even getting to all the bizarre rules conflicts like a Rogue not being able to sneak attack someone in a dark alley unless they have Darkvision.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
At least they fucking try to help you figure out relative danger of enemies.
The problem is they fucking fail enough times to screw over a group whose DM uses the wrong monster for the wrong party.
- Location
- New York City
I feel like I've gotten a pretty good sense of how much of a threat the QCs are in 3E from their descriptions and Essence ratings. It gives you a decent general idea without fixating on trying to distill it down to a formula that still wouldn't work well in actual play.
I'm not saying one couldn't figure out a way to do that in general, but I imagine it'd be difficult for a game that feels very context-oriented like Exalted.
I'm not saying one couldn't figure out a way to do that in general, but I imagine it'd be difficult for a game that feels very context-oriented like Exalted.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
That's half the GM's fault. Something like CR will never be perfect, because there's too much variance in party composition, so unless you can guarantee coverage of specific things with every theoretical combination, you can only give an idea, based on your own understanding of the system.
I just think that, in order to make monster CR meaningful, make the math behind it transparent like D&D 4E did. A fifth level scrapper should have this much HP, this much AC, and do this much damage. You still get things where flavor abilities and skills might be way out of proportion for the party's level, like a few infamous monsters, but it was nowhere near the issues 3.5 had, where the CR is just as likely to mislead a GM as it is to help them.
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I have friends in a Pathfinder game. One is totally new to PnP. She plays a Wizard that takes lots of fireballs. That's not what is broken; is when you sit down and go over the mechanics that you figure out how to break the system
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
Poor guidelines is still better than no guidelines. Thats's been the opinion of every DM I know who has run both D&D and WW.
I've never met anyone who uses the pregens in any game ever. The only time I've seen party comp problems is when everyone wants to play DPS, and well, if you try to use the Dungeons and Dragons engine to run Double Dragon, it's your own damn fault what happens.
These are all perfectly obvious problems though. Party comp issues are highlt visible and straightforward.
People are complaining not about exalted not being balanced, they're complaining about the plethora of deadly landmines.
D&D's proverbial IED's are generaly either visible or buried deep enough you have to actually go look for them. Exalted's are the kind you stumble over and are shocked to find your leg disintegrated.
That's not rules, that's your DM being a jerk.
Sneak attack does get negated by the target being visually obscured in older versions of D&D, but in that case everyone should have miss chances on every attack.
- Location
- NYC
Sure. CRs are ballparks, often based on unspoken assumptions about an "average" party composition and some vague sense of the terrain and circumstances of the fight. Some monsters are going to be better at ganking the soft squishy mage backline and will do a lot better versus mostly mage parties. Some monsters have a lot of tricks that shut down tanks and are going to do very well against mostly brawny parties. Some monsters have some kind of easily defeatable gimmick that lets lower level characters beat them easily with the right preparation.
The thing is, from my personal experience, I've very rarely had any games where a CR appropriate encounter felt truly unfair or unbeatable as opposed to just being unlucky or difficult, and relatively few encounters that felt like total stomps on our part. Sometimes a GM would be shocked by how much of a threat a given monster was to the party, or disappointed at how easily we beat the monster, but that was generally due to stuff on our end: we were well or poorly spec'd to fight it, and did well or poorly as a consequence.
Now, I'm honestly not sure why you're bringing up Pathfinder, a game by entirely different developers with their own methods and standards for designing encounters. You brought up 3.5 here, not OGL games more generally.
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Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
Again, please stop spreading falsehoods. Pgs 147~150 exist.
Pathfinder is basically 3.5 with a minimum of houserules. Its got all the same problems, is intended to do the same things, and Paizo was making 3.5 adventures for years before Pathfinder.
Speaking from my personal experience, a game that makes a party's Rogue and Enchanter useless because the GM wanted to run a tomb-robbing adventure is fucking up somewhere!
Edit: @Chloe Sullivan, by a direct reading of 3.5's rules on dim light or darkness conferring concealment, and sneak attacks not being applicable to concealed creatures, if you want to ever play as Thief's Garret, you better hope the wizard can magic you some Night Vision goggles
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Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
That's small enough that the average ST has a good chance of missing it entirely.
This is not @azoicennead being dishonest so much as you being pedantic. CR is integrated into every stablock and pretty plain to understand. The Exalted guidelines don't even bother to examine much beyond dicepools, and are by multiples of 5 rather than by actual breakpoints derived from the mechanics.
There is a massive gulf of difference there.
Sucal
The Devil’s Cut
- Location
- Bottom of the barrel
So Exalted then
Because I've seen that happen (poor Night/Twilights)
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
CR was sometimes off, because of lack of playtesting, but the system itself was not nonfunctional.
While Its is true that PF is just a shittier repackaged 3.5, it is also true that you brought it up.
If you know that it's going to be a game full of undead, it's your own damn fault for picking a character that relies on attack modes that do not work on undead.
If you don't know, it's the DM's fault for not telling you.
Picking a different focus/class is easy. This is not a landmine unless your DM is deliberately trying to make it one, and blaming D&D mechanics for your DMs being jerks is dumb. Please stop doing that.
Any Exalt type that favors a combat ability can make a meaningful contribution to a combat encounter. A Night Caste isn't fucked over by having their charms auto fail against the undead.
edit @Chloe Sullivan: the problem is not a GM being a jerk, the problem is the GM being new and not understanding potential issues that the book doesn't explain to them.
Like a GM running Exalted 2.5, for example.
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