General Exalted Thread

[Jon Chung]

...that was the point I was answering above. Was this just an elaborate dodge so you could sidestep my post?

Here's the cliff notes: we're not "forcing" Joe to do shit. No more than 1e and 2e "forced" Joes to homebrew entire splats because Exalted: The Dragon-Blooded wasn't out yet.

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The problem of Exalted: the Dragon-Blooded being missing solves itself when Exalted: the Dragon-Blooded is released. Every Dragon-Blood uses the same set of Dragon-Blood Charms, on top, allowing Joe to make Dragon-Blooded without doing any game development whatsoever by simply picking shit out of the book. If you, the game developer, did their job properly. If Joe feels like he can't mock up a Dragon-Blooded antagonist splat without having the Dragon-Blooded book, he can just wait until it's out.

This is not the same kind of deal as "every red jade daiklave has its own unique charm tree you have to write yourself". You know this, what are you trying to pull here?

 

[Omicron]

Attempting to gather my thoughts re: EXP, @Leetsepeak

Okay:
3e MA is gated by a merit you spend XP on; it's taxed for some reason.
Evocations are gated by "I have an Artifact in hand"
Regular Charms are not gated at all- you buy them straight out

None of these things actually do anything to inform WHY they are the way they are. The MA merit doesn't successfully express "You seek out tutors in the supernatural styles". You aren't engaged with the setting or the idea of your charcter learning martial arts- it's a non-choice. "I want MA, so I need this merit, because the game says so."

It's not a question of "Types of XP" it's a question of "Why are all of these different, if their differences aren't that meaningful?"

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The MA Merit is purely mechanical, sure. But the Artifact in hand? That absolutely does something to inform what Evocations are. They arise from the weapon you wield. They are the powers unlocked from a legendary relic, tied into It's construction and history. They engage you with the setting.

The problem of Exalted: the Dragon-Blooded being missing solves itself when Exalted: the Dragon-Blooded is released. Every Dragon-Blood uses the same set of Dragon-Blood Charms, on top, allowing Joe to make Dragon-Blooded without doing any game development whatsoever by simply picking shit out of the book.
This is not the same kind of deal as "every red jade daiklave has its own unique charm tree". You know this, what are you trying to pull here?

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But Joe doesn't have to homebrew a new tree for every red jade daiklave. He can use published trees for sample weapons, reskin them, or just not have their Evocations feature. There's only a limited number of Artifacts that will be relevant enough to a game to deserve full stats.

 

[Jon Chung]

But Joe doesn't have to homebrew a new tree for every red jade daiklave. He can use published trees for sample weapons, reskin them, or just not have their Evocations feature. There's only a limited number of Artifacts that will be relevant enough to a game to deserve full stats.

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"Hey Joe, we just killed off the entire Wyld Hunt, fuck yeah!"
"You sure did, Bob. Good job."
"Alright guys, let's get lootin'. They all had pretty shiny stuff which might be better than what we've got, given that we were dirt farmers a month ago."
"Uh..."
"The leader had this spear which shot a laser, right? Dragon-Blooded charms don't shoot lasers (I read their book), so that was an evocation. What evocations does it have? What about the knife wielded by the annoying water guy? Actually-"
"...fuck."

 

[Omicron]

"Hey Joe, we just killed off the entire Wyld Hunt, fuck yeah!"
"You sure did, Bob. Good job."
"Alright guys, let's get lootin'. They all had pretty shiny stuff which might be better than what we've got, given that we were dirt farmers a month ago."
"Uh..."
"The leader had this spear which shot a laser, right? Dragon-Blooded charms don't shoot lasers, so that was an evocation. What evocations does it have? What about the knife wielded by the annoying water guy? Actually-"
"...fuck."

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Looting dead Dragon-Bloods has happened several times in my game already, and I only had to concern myself with designing Evocations once.

This isn't D&D. Exalts don't rifle through piles of magic loot and bedeck themselves into whatever looks shiny and had cool powers before ditching it for something else. Precisely because Evocations require investment, and so players usually avoid stretching themselves across multiple items.

 

[Jon Chung]

Looting dead Dragon-Bloods has happened several times in my game already, and I only had to concern myself with designing Evocations once.

This isn't D&D. Exalts don't rifle through piles of magic loot and bedeck themselves into whatever looks shiny and had cool powers before ditching it for something else. Precisely because Evocations require investment, and so players usually avoid stretching themselves across multiple items.

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You don't know whether you want to invest until the GM shows you the things you can buy with that investment. Like, the point at which you need to cough up a charm tree for an artifact is not when the player actually buys anything, it's when the player goes "what does this have, so that I know whether or not I want to spend my precious resources?".

 

[Leetsepeak]

Attempting to gather my thoughts re: EXP, @Leetsepeak

Okay:
3e MA is gated by a merit you spend XP on; it's taxed for some reason.
Evocations are gated by "I have an Artifact in hand"
Regular Charms are not gated at all- you buy them straight out

None of these things actually do anything to inform WHY they are the way they are. The MA merit doesn't successfully express "You seek out tutors in the supernatural styles". You aren't engaged with the setting or the idea of your charcter learning martial arts- it's a non-choice. "I want MA, so I need this merit, because the game says so."

It's not a question of "Types of XP" it's a question of "Why are all of these different, if their differences aren't that meaningful?"

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I'm not getting how they don't inform why they are the way they are, it feels like you're saying the mechanical reasons which actually do illustrate what's described in the fluff.

Like, going at it specifically:

3e MA is gated by a merit you spend XP on; it's taxed for some reason.

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MA Charms aren't instinctual, they're techniques that are developed through rigorous practice. The merit seems to represent the foundational knowledge and practices required to prepare oneself to learn and successfully internalize MA charms, meaning that your regular Exalt, no matter how excellent he is, can't just walk in, have a past-life epiphany and quote Keanu Reeves. Doesn't that tell us why? They describe it in the merit.

Evocations are gated by "I have an Artifact in hand"

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Evocation access seems to be gated by a few things, one of which being EXP.

Sometimes, instead of EXP, it's just attunement, so committing the motes so you can wield it automatically gives you some familiarity with the unique effects the weapon might have on your ability to fight.

Sometimes, it's free, but you gain the Evocation in a context specific scenario, so once you're near death, the armor saves you by activating the Evocation, and from then on, you know you can rely on it to provide that benefit when your enemy has you on the ropes.

All of this is tied to the weapon, because you're channeling your magical power whatever through its magical power whatever. You're fueling it, but the funky power in question comes from the Artifact combined with you, and the possibility that others might not be able to unlock the Evocations you did from the artifact suggest not only the artifact's unique story, but that unique story as it has to do with you, as one of its unique wielders.

All those things definitely seem to have answers for why they are the way they are, which are evident in the way they describe the relationship between Exalts and Evocations, and the variety of ways they can be mechanically unlocked.

Regular Charms are not gated at all- you buy them straight out

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They explain at the start of 3e's Charm section that Solars can intuit these abilities and extra capabilities by tapping into the arete that their Solar Exaltation provides. It's the natural expression of their Solar ability Excellence, so the only thing that gates it is your skill in the Ability in question. If you cultivate the Ability, you can cultivate unique powers that augment or bud off from your excellence with that skill. That the possibility to do this thing is intrinsic to the Solar condition seems to be providing an answer for why it works the way it does at the start of the Charm section, and in how you buy them.

None of these things actually do anything to inform WHY they are the way they are. The MA merit doesn't successfully express "You seek out tutors in the supernatural styles". You aren't engaged with the setting or the idea of your charcter learning martial arts- it's a non-choice. "I want MA, so I need this merit, because the game says so."

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What is the metric for successfully expressing the idea? I mean, it literally says that you've undergone systemic formal training, and even provides the example of how a character might have been raised as an Immaculate Monk, or studied in a dojo over the course of their adventures.

Like, I can't follow how that isn't telling you why it is the way it is. Martial Arts require a foundation of systemic formal training to learn how to use them, and that systemic formal training that underlies martial arts is represented in the Merit. I get being annoyed by the merit, but it doesn't seem like it fails to explain itself.

It's not a question of "Types of XP" it's a question of "Why are all of these different, if their differences aren't that meaningful?"

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So is the complaint that Martial Arts, Solar Charms and Evocations aren't different enough from each other? They seem to come from three different sources that work differently, so in terms of narrative they do seem to explain why these things are different in lore.

Mechanically, they all seem to use the same written format to communicate the different powers they have. I guess that's pretty similar. Is it an issue of formatting for you? Because Sorcery is differently formatted from MA Charms, Solar Charms and Evocations, do you think that it doesn't fall into the same issue that these other things seem to?

Again, this sounds like it might be an Exalted issue rather than a 3e issue if I'm parsing what's being said correctly.

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Help, my post is stuck within a quote!

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[Dif]

Surely the tension of disarming the Evocation heavy character or the injury mobility-focused character can be exciting?

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Tension implies there is a recoverable state, which "no, you cannot use the thing you homebrewed and paid XP to buy" doesn't allow for. This is basic player psychology, people rarely buy things they do not wish to use in exactly the kind of situations they plan to use it in. If the only means of creating tension for that character in such a situation is "gonna take away your Thing," then the player is going to walk away feeling like they wasted a bunch of time and effort unless the ST has explicitly sat down and hashed out the exact definitions and reaching-scope of the things which will fuck them out of their abilities.

Nothing in the corebook establishes this conversation. Nothing even hints that it should take place, or how to approach it. The entire premise is dependent on a gentlemen's agreement between the player and the ST, because for damn sure the books don't do anything but set a big block of mechanics in front of you and leave you to derive your own assumptions from that.

Secondly, the "its a supplementary thing so who cares" is not established by anything actually written either, because as has been mentioned before, these things use a separate set of XP simply so people who are Not combat-focused can buy them. That means there is going to be at least one person for whom that artifact is their entire contribution to combat at all. Furthermore, someone having the kind of setup where they have an Evocation artifact and unarmed ability enough to be worth a damn isn't something that happens unless a player is specifically driving towards that sort of situation to occur, and therefore is the exception rather than the rule. There is no "only use this if you have the shit to make yourself not useless" sidebar, not even a "be careful STs, fudging with this can rapidly swing a character's options and ability to influence the scene" note anywhere to be found.

Exalted does not give you any basis for building these kinds of dramatic encounters, or couching them in such a way that 30 years of GM bad decision-making on "I took the thing away and now everyone is mad at me" would even roughly inform, not even by the barest of suggestions. The question is never "is this an adversarial thing" but the fact Exalted doesn't actually TEACH any means to use its own mechanics, instead relying on "implicit understandings" to be able to use them in a functional manner, especially the dangerous ones. In the absence of experience, it leaves the entire subject to trial and error, and so most of that error is going to be fuck-you attempts whether it be by blind accident or deliberate malice.

I, or anyone else, should not have to read tea-leaves on this kind of shit.

 

[Omicron]

You don't know whether you want to invest until the GM shows you the things you can buy with that investment. Like, the point at which you need to cough up a charm tree for an artifact is not when the player actually buys anything, it's when the player goes "what does this have, so that I know whether or not I want to spend my precious resources?".

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"As you saw during the fight, that spear draws moisture out of the air with each attack until it builds up a thundercloud and strikes you with lightning."
"Yeah but I peeked behind your screen, mechanically that was just an Elemental Bolt Attack."
"Sure, that was the simplest way. If you want the Stormcloud Lance I'll write up something for it. Do you?"

Like that's not theoretical. This is pretty much how I've seen that stuff go down as both player and ST.

 

[Jon Chung]

"As you saw during the fight, that spear draws moisture out of the air with each attack until it builds up a thundercloud and strikes you with lightning."
"Yeah but I peeked behind your screen, mechanically that was just an Elemental Bolt Attack."
"Sure, that was the simplest way. If you want the Stormcloud Lance I'll write up something for it. Do you?"

Like that's not theoretical. This is pretty much how I've seen that stuff go down as both player and ST.

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And you're an experienced GM who knows how to write up the Stormcloud Lance so that it doesn't break the game. I'm an experienced GM, similarly, and if I ever have the insane desire to run Exalted 3 I will know the meta back to front before I do it. Joe here isn't. He does not know what he is doing by definition.

My point is, I don't think this situation is a good idea to make part of the standard operating procedure of the game. If artifacts were not expected to have unique charm trees, the player would not ask for one. If weapons carried by Dragon-Blooded soldiers were not expected to be artifacts, the player would not wonder what charms each of them had so that they would be able to pick the most mechanically advantageous one.

 

[Omicron]

And you're an experienced GM who knows how to write up the Stormcloud Lance so that it doesn't break the game. I'm an experienced GM, similarly, and if I ever have the insane desire to run Exalted 3 I will know the meta back to front before I do it. Joe here isn't. He does not know what he is doing by definition.

My point is, I don't think this situation is a good idea to make part of the standard operating procedure of the game. If artifacts were not expected to have unique charm trees, the player would not ask for one. If weapons carried by Dragon-Blooded soldiers were not expected to be artifacts, the player would not wonder what charms each of them had so that they would be able to pick the most mechanically advantageous one.

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I do in fact think the game could do with toning down the image of all Dragon-Bloods going around carrying Artifacts, and I've had a few NPC DBs deliberately limited to mundane weapons.

 

[Imrix]

This is simply not as big a deal as you claim it to be, and it's only gotten that much traction as a Thing because 2e was so terrible anyone short of a veteran could accidentally blow up their own table with one wrong number in one wrong statline.

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This is actually a pretty good point. Like, a game system shouldn't force an unreasonable amount of homebrew on the GM simply because writing that stuff takes effort, and the GM is already the most overworked person at the table, but much of that effort was needful because Exalted 2e was such a shoddy, unhealthy system that it would start coughing blood if you so much as sneezed in the same room as it. You had to be incredibly careful with the stuff you made, or things broke down.

But in a healthy system, there's room for people to haphazardly slap together some cool thing they thought of without doing terrible harm. It won't be balanced, but if the system is in good shape rather than the mechanical equivalent of a cancer patient just come out of chemo, then the game's balance will soak up the hit and keep on trucking. This is part of how to judge whether a game is newbie-friendly, I think; when the newbie's start making their own stuff, and when (not if) they mess it up, how much margin for error does the system contain to absorb that? To its credit, parts of Exalted 3e do seem to be hale and hearty in this fashion; the base combat engine is reasonably forgiving, at least.

Mind, I still don't particularly think Evocations are particularly well-implemented, for two reasons. Firstly, while the base combat engine is relatively robust, Charms add a heaping slab of, as Jon Chung would put it, combinatorial hell. There's a ream of dice trick Charms that interact with each other, synergising their effects in ways that are difficult to predict, so, the kind of pitfalls that Jon warns of do exist, albeit not as much as with 2e.

But more importantly, Exalted 3e is an extremely system-heavy game. The corebook is massive. The rules section is massive. The Charms section is massive. This is a lot of stuff to ask a new player to absorb. Which would be fine, if that was wholly sufficient*. But when you encourage players to homebrew to such an extent on top of that, it seems kind of... Unreasonable? If the rules were simple and sparse, then I wouldn't mind the effort of making things up as I go along, because the game hadn't asked much of me before that point. But if the game wants me to read 400 or so pages of mechanical framework, then homebrewing on top of that begins to look like asking too much.

Like, D&D is pretty system-heavy, with shedloads of optional material, and it's got a thriving homebrew scene. It also has an entrenched suspicion of homebrew among much of its playerbase, because you never know if it's balanced until you read it, and going over new stuff is adding more work to an already hefty reading list.

* It's not sufficient, there's a whole bunch of adjudication the system asks of you just to use the base system, and the lack of a Storytelling section to help with that is a damning condemnation in my eyes, but that's besides the point here.

EDIT: @Leetsepeak, click the symbol in the top right of the edit menu, the piece of paper with a spanner overlaid on it, called "Use BBcode Editor". That'll let you untangle the quote marks directly.

 

[Imrix]

The merit seems to represent the foundational knowledge and practices required to prepare oneself to learn and successfully internalize MA charms, meaning that your regular Exalt, no matter how excellent he is, can't just walk in, have a past-life epiphany and quote Keanu Reeves.

...

Like, I can't follow how that isn't telling you why it is the way it is. Martial Arts require a foundation of systemic formal training to learn how to use them, and that systemic formal training that underlies martial arts is represented in the Merit. I get being annoyed by the merit, but it doesn't seem like it fails to explain itself.

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To illustrate the problem with this; why should martial arts require systemic formal training when, say, Melee does not? Pale Wolf (our saviour) has posted quite insightfully about this before, in particular this segment;

There is a limited subset of things you can do in a fight that won't get you horribly killed. A martial art is simply a codified list of a certain number of those things, organized in a way that seemed logical to the people who came up with that list.

Self-trained street fighters either never get any good, they die horribly, or they pick up enough of the 'ways to not die horribly' to assemble a martial art out of. This is in fact how martial arts get founded.

If you have a combat skill at a half-decent level you are a martial artist. What kind of martial artist you are is the interesting matter. This elitism about where and how you learned it is incoherent and moronic - and I am an actual martial artist.

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So, in sum, if a regular Exalt can walk in, have a past-life epiphany (or just teach themselves through painful trial and error, or wherever the player decides their knowledge comes from) and come out as a fencing master, or an invincible zweihander princess, then yeah, they can totally work out some kung fu for themselves. Their martial art will be an idiosyncratic, ad-hoc affair, but that doesn't make it any less a martial art.

 

[Jon Chung]

I do in fact think the game could do with toning down the image of all Dragon-Bloods going around carrying Artifacts, and I've had a few NPC DBs deliberately limited to mundane weapons.

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Sure, you can do it that way. Or, without the existence of Evocations and the associated expectation that "artifacts have charm trees", "each artifact has a unique charm tree" and "I might wanna buy them because that could make my combat monster better at killing", this would similarly not be a problem. Because sans those expectations, red jade daiklaves can be identical and have no special homebrew-required work attached to them.

Instead of "artifacts have charm trees", you could, say, do "only the most puissant artifacts, awakened relics of ancient days have charm trees". This instantly frees you from having to come up with charm trees for any of the two dozen artifact weapons you just looted.

 

[Omicron]

I think you make fair points, @Imrix, but at that point it's super late and I've reached my tolerance for how much I could write on my phone in one go. So I'm going to bow out here.

 

[Leetsepeak]

Tension implies there is a recoverable state, which "no, you cannot use the thing you homebrewed and paid XP to buy" doesn't allow for. This is basic player psychology, people rarely buy things they do not wish to use in exactly the kind of situations they plan to use it in. If the only means of creating tension for that character in such a situation is "gonna take away your Thing," then the player is going to walk away feeling like they wasted a bunch of time and effort unless the ST has explicitly sat down and hashed out the exact definitions and reaching-scope of the things which will fuck them out of their abilities.

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I'm confused how we got here from someone disarming your character. Disarm is a gambit, and all it means is that you have to move one range band and do a ready/weapon action to get it back. Are you discussing a scenario in which the character loses access to the weapon entirely for an extended period of time? I definitely appreciate your point in that situation.

I feel like we're not giving players enough credit if you hand them powers to buy and point them to the rules for Evocations which spell out on page 612 that, unless otherwise specific, you can only use the Evocations of your artifact weapon while you're wielding it.

The Disarm gambit unequips your weapon and tosses it a range band away. Do they need to say you can't use your Evocations when you've been disarmed if it already says it in the Evocation section on page 612?

Nothing in the corebook establishes this conversation

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. Nothing even hints that it should take place, or how to approach it. The entire premise is dependent on a gentlemen's agreement between the player and the ST, because for damn sure the books don't do anything but set a big block of mechanics in front of you and leave you to derive your own assumptions from that.

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They tell you that you can't use the weapon's magical powers when you're not holding the magical weapon. (Sidenote, I just want to reiterate that I am asking all of these questions from a place of complete sincerity.)

What do you think would better cover this? A sidebar on taking away Artifacts with evocations permanently or in the long term? That would be a decent place to discuss compensation for EXP too, like Spirit-Tied Pet has.

Secondly, the "its a supplementary thing so who cares" is not established by anything actually written either, because as has been mentioned before, these things use a separate set of XP simply so people who are Not combat-focused can buy them. That means there is going to be at least one person for whom that artifact is their entire contribution to combat at all. There is no "only use this if you have the shit to make yourself not useless" sidebar, not even a "be careful STs, fudging with this can rapidly swing a character's options and ability to influence the scene" note anywhere to be found.

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I think my point was misunderstood. I just meant that unless you've had an artifact for a long time and purchased many Evocations for it, that your investment in the artifact's evocations will always be less than your investment in everything else. Since Evocations in practice in the examples we're given don't seem to actually take the place of offensive/defensive charms but supplement them, it seems like, in practice, that will be less of an issue than we're making it out to be here, especially since they give explicit advice to purchase combat charms so your character doesn't die.

Furthermore, someone having the kind of setup where they have an Evocation artifact and unarmed ability enough to be worth a damn isn't something that happens unless a player is specifically driving towards that sort of situation to occur, and therefore is the exception rather than the rule.

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A little confused here. Is there any reason to suspect that the Solar using the Artifact Smashfist doesn't have any Brawl charms and invested all of his combat Charms in his Evocations? This feels like we're being uncharitable to players again. Players that pick up artifact weapons in the first place tend to be invested in the Ability they're using with that weapon in the first place. The guy with the Red Jade Daiklave almost definitely has at least a few dots in Melee and a few Melee Charms, especially because in all likelihood he can't even pick up more than 1-2 Evocations at Essence 1 in the first place, because the rest of them are Essence 2+. He has 15 Charms...

I looked it up just now, no Artifact in the corebook has more than 2 Essence 1 Charms. If you only get 5 Combat Charms, You'll have at least 3 native combat charms forming the majority.

This seems a lot like getting angry about the Twilight who puts no dots in any Abilities important in combat, then saying the game failed him when he gets his shit kicked in.

There is no "only use this if you have the shit to make yourself not useless" sidebar, not even a "be careful STs, fudging with this can rapidly swing a character's options and ability to influence the scene" note anywhere to be found.

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While on the one hand, the idea that explicitly stating you can only use Evocations with the artifact in question unless otherwise stated combined with stuff like Disarm telling you that you lose your weapon and need to go pick it up presents one of those implicit rules interaction situations that is really self-evident, I totally sympathize on this. It'd be nice if there was some discussion of this sort of thing. I imagine we might get something like that in Arms of the Chosen, which should be helpful for spelling it out for novice STs. I wouldn't call it reading tea leaves, but I can totally see how a bunch of people might be surprised to find the character who bought a bunch of Evocations is a lot less effective when the weapon is at short-range away from him, kinda like how you might not anticipate that one QC or another in the right circumstances can really hurt players.

Exalted does not give you any basis for building these kinds of dramatic encounters, or couching them in such a way that 30 years of GM bad decision-making on "I took the thing away and now everyone is mad at me" would even roughly inform, not even by the barest of suggestions. The question is never "is this an adversarial thing" but the fact Exalted doesn't actually TEACH any means to use its own mechanics, instead relying on "implicit understandings" to be able to use them in a functional manner, especially the dangerous ones. In the absence of experience, it leaves the entire subject to trial and error, and so most of that error is going to be fuck-you attempts whether it be by blind accident or deliberate malice.

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The lack of a Storytelling section rears its ugly head again. I can understand their wordcount constraints, but a lack of advice really rankles, doesn't it? I remember there was a Story or two that I ran when I first picked up Exalted that was very frustrating for me, because every challenge I made got steamrolled. I'm used to more street level type systems, and wished there was more advice for how to run stories for Exalts. @Shyft posting about narrative aggro and the sort of iterative process of consequences for Exalted is pure gold, and I really wish I'd spotted something like it in the book somewhere.

 

[azoicennead]

Surely the tension of disarming the Evocation heavy character or the injury mobility-focused character can be exciting?

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In general, I tend to find having my character's main shtick totally and intentionally shut down highly dissatisfying, frustrating, and frequently boring.
Especially when it's done in such a way that it could easily become permanent.

Actually, Evocations are more expensive than (favored) Charms, but can be purchased with a different type of xp so that they do not cut into your investment in your most versatile and powerful set (native Charms). Some Evocations, however, don't cost xp at all and are unlocked by a milestone system.

That your weapon can be taken away is a deliberate vulnerability, as it enriches gameplay. It is also possible to invest in resources to counter this vulnerability.

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Wait, so in addition to possibly paying for the artifact, I have to pay more for worse abilities, and then I have to pay to stop my GM from taking them away?
The fuck kind of logic is that?

 

[Kaiya]

Wait, so in addition to possibly paying for the artifact, I have to pay more for worse abilities, and then I have to pay to stop my GM from taking them away?
The fuck kind of logic is that?

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Heartbreak, my Night Caste Ein's dagger, is not as powerful as his Stealth Charms. However. The Evocations of the paranoid starmetal dagger give me powers that I couldn't have otherwise. Automatically knowing the secrets of people I wound, for instance. Or utterly destroying one of their intimacies as I cut it from their hearts. Equally, were I to use the Blue Jade Sword Raiden that I wrote, I would be able to call down lightning strikes on distance enemies, and weild the power of the storm. Sure, it's not as damaging as Solar Brawl, or as widely competent as Solar Melee. But I can summon storms to destroy my enemies, and the storms are still quite powerful. These things are worth having to me more than a few extra Melee Charms!

 

[Irked]

Honestly, that part was sort of surprising. The training charms have their own Sanctity of Merits, after a fashion, but absent a very very easy fix, stuff like Evocations, Spirit-Training Pet and WST are black holes of exp which can be lost and theoretically never recovered.

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That's the part that bugs me about the current system. If my familiar dies, I get the XP back. If my Working stops mattering, I get the XP back. Okay, fine, sure.

If I fail a WST roll, the XP is forfeited. If I lose my weapon, the Evocation XP is just gone. Wait, what?

Unless I invested in Lore, in which case I may not have actually spent any Evocation XP. Unlike if I bought a Martial Art, in which case I can't lose the XP, but I also can't get a discount.

It feels like there should be a unifying logic for how all of the "Put Solar XP in, get rewards out" things work, and instead, each seems to work on its own logic. This is bothersome. Not game-breaking, probably, but bothersome.

(That said, Solar XP does succeed at the goal of getting players to spend XP on not-Solar-Charms - though it's interesting that, so far, my players have invested it almost entirely in Attributes and Abilities, rather than any other non-Solar Charms. Some of that may be down to unfamiliarity with sorcery, MA, Evocations, etc., but I'm not sure all of it is.)

 

[Sanctaphrax]

Not really, because you have influence over when you roll these things. If you have Presence 5, Performance 0, then you can focus your persuasive efforts on finding lynchpin individuals to talk to, and avoid situations that would call on Performance. Likewise, if you have Performance 5, Presence 0, you can focus your efforts on stirring up crowds and engaging with institutions, avoiding individuals.

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It's not just an assumption, though - in my actual-play experience with a number of groups, this is pretty reliably true. You probably can't sweet-talk the GM into rolling Charisma + Melee to convert the crowd by the sheer magnificence of your daiklave, but choosing to cast an interaction as Presence vs. Performance really is a pretty trivial exchange, in my experience.

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Amusingly, the primary example for Presence in 3e is a speech to rally a crowd. Even though Oratory is still a Performance category. Not even the people writing the game can draw a line between Presence and Performance.

I wonder how many of these problems are problems that are actually unique to Storyteller though, or if the problems are more fundamental than that. Like, it sounds like Storyteller certainly isn't helping, but won't this sort of thing always be an issue where any attempt at gradiating player ability comes into play? EDIT: What I mean is that is the only way to handle this by giving people a Physical Dicepool, a Mental Dicepool and a Social dicepool? Or will the problem then simply become people trying to push for their highest of the three to be the most relevant solution all the time? Is that actually a problem or just a method of expression? If the latter, is the problem that Performance and Presence overlap too much?

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"People specialize until they face diminishing returns" is a thing in most games. It's not always a problem. But Exalted makes it problematic in a few ways. The excessive overlap of a few traits, the preposterous level of power you can get by specializing deeply, and the incredible uselessness you can achieve through poor optimization all aggravate the issue.

EDIT: Unrelated, but man oh man do I feel bad about accidentally referencing cut fluff from the leak on the OPP forums. I didn't want to bring up any bad feelings, and I bought my copy of Exalted 3rd Edition, I just wanted all the lore I could get my hands on, and maybe a few extra QCs.

Is it just verboten to discuss any of the cut stuff that isn't how glad we are that Evocations got cut down and made more individually meaningful

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The devs, like many artists, absolutely hate it when people infringe upon their control over their work. So the leak basically made them claw out their own eyes. The OPP forums tend to march to their beat.

You didn't really do anything wrong. You just stepped on a widely-held pet peeve.

I know it's rough terrain but I'm honestly, sincerely not trying to start any debate, I'm just curious about what people's most positive takeaway is from Lunars: What do you guys individually like about them? Is there any one piece or thing that has been done with them anywhere that clinched a desire to play a Lunar or use one in your game? Could be as simple as a sentence in a book or as complex as a bunch of charms working together to make something happen or any other weird stuff.

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I'm honestly not a big Lunar fan. But I like the idea of outsider/shaman/monster-Exalts, and I really like shapeshifting powers. So depending on the direction they go, I could become a big Lunar fan.

Maybe I'm demonstrating my lack of experience with CCGs and the like, but how does the balance or mechanisms of a CCG in any meaningful way reflect the reality of what might happen in a game of tabletop? CCGs seem to have very beautifully clearcut resolution mechanics because they're card games and don't have the baggage of being roleplaying games or juggling some kind of story.

Is it just a math thing?

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Exalted is pretty damn close to being a CCG, at least in combat.

The principles of balance are pretty similar across types of game, but even so you don't usually hear CCG comparisons in games which aren't imitating CCGs.

 

[DayDreamer]

I do in fact think the game could do with toning down the image of all Dragon-Bloods going around carrying Artifacts, and I've had a few NPC DBs deliberately limited to mundane weapons.

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That's a problem, since the Dragonblooded splash page (p44), one of the main sources a newbie GM is going to be drawing from when designing some DB enemies, features these descriptions of what being a DB is about:

An Ancient Arsenal

As the rulers of the world by right of conquest, the Dragon-Blooded hold the lion's share of all surviving First Age weapons: their greatest ships mount implosion bows and lightning ballistae on the bows; their most elite soldiers go into battle clad in ancient Dragon Armor; in the event of absolute calamity, the Realm and the Seventh Legion may even awaken and deploy their scant handful of unstoppable warstriders.

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Inheritors of Evocations

The ancient Solars cultivated their soldiers for mastery of miraculous arms and armor, and modern Dragon-Blooded are the beneficiaries of these regimens. Most Terrestrials carry heirloom artifacts, and—with great effort—may build deeper bonds of rapport with their storied daiklaves and invincible jade armor than any other Exalts, save the Solars themselves. A rare few, including the Scarlet Empress, have even learned to draw forth secrets intended exclusively for the Solars alone.

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Literally half of the "what makes these guys special" paragraphs focus on their Artifacts. It's not exactly unreasonable that Bob the new GM sees this and says that his DBs are going to have 1 Artifact per person, minimum, and then run into issues when the PCs ask to loot the bodies.

 

[Leetsepeak]

To illustrate the problem with this; why should martial arts require systemic formal training when, say, Melee does not? Pale Wolf (our saviour) has posted quite insightfully about this before, in particular this segment;
So, in sum, if a regular Exalt can walk in, have a past-life epiphany (or just teach themselves through painful trial and error, or wherever the player decides their knowledge comes from) and come out as a fencing master, or an invincible zweihander princess, then yeah, they can totally work out some kung fu for themselves. Their martial art will be an idiosyncratic, ad-hoc affair, but that doesn't make it any less a martial art.

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That is a great point! I remember having a conversation about this awhile back, because my first way of parsing Brawl and the various Martial Arts was that Brawl was unrefined raw ability and experience and the MAs were not. Fortunately, I realized that didn't really seem to make sense, so I tried to look at it again to try to figure out what the difference might be.

When I go into the book, it's worth stating that I'm trying my best to see what the heck they were going for, and I think the suggestion of the Martial Artist merit is of something beyond the concept of a lower case martial art, because it's getting into the realm of beginning to practice funky magical Martial Arts. Maybe the merit is more than just learning how to not die, but also about concentrating that funky chi equivalent you've got going on, and unlocking all your chakras so your Dragon-Blooded can shoot magical phantasmal venom out of his pinky, and so on? You probably don't have to learn any of that to learn a codified system of how-to-not-die-with-sword, while those philosophical/mystical components are probably integral for the practice of the Mystical Martial Art and for unlocking the power of the Charms.

I suspect it's the kind of thing that would get explained in a book about Martial Arts, though I'm sure they'd probably have to hunt down a new name to avoid those Monk Scroll associations.

The martial art of the Solar using Brawl is different from the Solar using Snake Style not because Brawl is totally unfocused and chaotic, but because the martial art of Brawl is just a martial art being potentially juiced up by Solar awesomness, while part of the magical power of the capital letter Martial Arts seems to lie in the fighting style itself, and an Exalt is just using their ability to manipulate Essence to access that mystical power of the Martial Art, which is why its an external thing that they can all access with varying degrees of success, versus Brawl Charms being something else.

While I'm not really arguing in the first place, just trying to think through why they might be different, this is the impression I got from reading Ex3. When I read the Scroll of the Monk, I cringed, but didn't really get a good sense of what MAs were like metaphysically in the last edition, so I'm not certain if this is a change or just complete balderdash I'm pulling from my bum.

If nothing else, I think it's readily apparent to everyone that there's something innately magical about Snake Style or White Reaper that your Judo training represented by Brawl doesn't have, hence Brawl's Charms for Solars or Dragon-Blooded have to do with what they bring to the mundane martial arts, while in the case of the funky Mystical Martial Arts, there's something inherently magical about them that the ability to utilize their own Essence allows Exalts to tap into, with varying degrees of efficacy.

 

[Irked]

Literally half of the "what makes these guys special" paragraphs focus on their Artifacts. It's not exactly unreasonable that Bob the new GM sees this and says that his DBs are going to have 1 Artifact per person, minimum, and then run into issues when the PCs ask to loot the bodies.

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A useful idea I stole from... someone, I forget who... is that, shortly after my players clobbered a Wyld Hunt, stealing their artifacts and taking one of them hostage, a very discreet Realm representative showed up and offered the players a small stack of jade coins for their return. The coins weren't worth much in terms of actual jade content, but they were stand-ins for a Realm "honor currency": when a Realm house needs to buy back something that's beyond value, they offer the coins as a promise of favors that are similarly beyond value.

That does a couple of nice things. One, it encourages the players to take prisoners, because dead DBs fetch no ransoms - which means a greater likelihood recurring antagonists! Two, it solves the "We built a fence out of daiklaves" problem that players are prone to running into after murdering a Wyld Hunt or two; in the current context, this also makes it less likely they're going to want to see a fully fledged Evocation tree.

Three, if the players ever decide to do something stupid, they have a way to get out of (at least some) trouble with the Realm. Or they can do something really stupid and use the coins to start trouble with the Realm.

So far, this has worked pretty well!

 

[Leetsepeak]

A useful idea I stole from... someone, I forget who... is that, shortly after my players clobbered a Wyld Hunt, stealing their artifacts and taking one of them hostage, a very discreet Realm representative showed up and offered the players a small stack of jade coins for their return. The coins weren't worth much in terms of actual jade content, but they were stand-ins for a Realm "honor currency": when a Realm house needs to buy back something that's beyond value, they offer the coins as a promise of favors that are similarly beyond value.

That does a couple of nice things. One, it encourages the players to take prisoners, because dead DBs fetch no ransoms - which means a greater likelihood recurring antagonists! Two, it solves the "We built a fence out of daiklaves" problem that players are prone to running into after murdering a Wyld Hunt or two; in the current context, this also makes it less likely they're going to want to see a fully fledged Evocation tree.

Three, if the players ever decide to do something stupid, they have a way to get out of (at least some) trouble with the Realm. Or they can do something really stupid and use the coins to start trouble with the Realm.

So far, this has worked pretty well!

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Really neat idea with some great flavor. Dynastic heirlooms are the new hostage in a world where your family and the opposition are both so deadly that a Dragon-Blooded hostage is likely to end in tragedy. I'm totally gonna steal this.

But I think that might be too literal a read of the setting. Has anyone ever had characters take an Exalt hostage? How'd they make it happen?

 

[DayDreamer]

A useful idea I stole from... someone, I forget who... is that, shortly after my players clobbered a Wyld Hunt, stealing their artifacts and taking one of them hostage, a very discreet Realm representative showed up and offered the players a small stack of jade coins for their return. The coins weren't worth much in terms of actual jade content, but they were stand-ins for a Realm "honor currency": when a Realm house needs to buy back something that's beyond value, they offer the coins as a promise of favors that are similarly beyond value.

That does a couple of nice things. One, it encourages the players to take prisoners, because dead DBs fetch no ransoms - which means a greater likelihood recurring antagonists! Two, it solves the "We built a fence out of daiklaves" problem that players are prone to running into after murdering a Wyld Hunt or two; in the current context, this also makes it less likely they're going to want to see a fully fledged Evocation tree.

Three, if the players ever decide to do something stupid, they have a way to get out of (at least some) trouble with the Realm. Or they can do something really stupid and use the coins to start trouble with the Realm.

So far, this has worked pretty well!

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That's a good, clever idea. The issue is that it doesn't necessarily relieve GM's from the burden of writing up evocations. One of my PCs would absolutely insist on knowing what they were trading away: what could this Artifacts do, do any of them mesh well with a PC's fighting style, etc. Then, the GM either needs to say "no, I won't tell you" which is basically railroading them into accepting the offer, or sigh and write up the first Evocation for each of those Artifacts along with a vague description of what might be available down the line.

 

[Dif]

I'm confused how we got here from someone disarming your character.

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We got here because disarming a character of a weapon is simply a loss of stats, while disarming someone of Evocations is crippling or curtailing their niche which they paid resources for. They did not buy that artifact in the hopes it would be used as the lynchpin for a "can I play my character" contest, they purchased it in order to Use it. The ST going "you cannot use your thing you paid for" was never part of the consideration here, nor anything but "I want an artifact which does things."

A little confused here. Is there any reason to suspect that the Solar using the Artifact Smashfist doesn't have any Brawl charms and invested all of his combat Charms in his Evocations? This feels like we're being uncharitable to players again.

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Rules are not supposed too be charitable. They exist to outline the method of play and how things are supposed to interact with eachother so the players can largely forget about them and focus on the actions being taken and the end-results, not the minutiae. You cannot build a game atop "use your best judgement" without outlining what that judgement entails.

So yes, when you create a power that increases combat potential, you work from the baseline of Negative Competency, and that it will be a characters Only source of combat potential, entirely on the basis the rules allow it to occur. If it exists to make combat characters Better, then you present it like that, and adjust it accordingly. When you do not Explain these "implicit understandings," and ritually beat the drum of "buy whatever you like, it doesn't matter!" then people are going to take that to mean they Can take whatever they like, however they want, and especially in ways that the mechanics were not designed to support.