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General Exalted Thread

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Kinunatzs said:
What's the problem of me liking the lore more than the game mechanics?
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Okay, I'm going to drop some info for you here.

Lorewise what Exalted's mechanics and settings are trying to emulate is the kind of radical shifts in competency and power that characters in fiction undergo in order to justify the plot happening.

You've all seen this if you've ever done a versus debate or considered a crossover or what have you. Characters in a whole bunch of fiction have 'feats' which we will define as 'things they have accomplished' and can vary from 'hitting a bullseye at fifty paces' to 'jumping to the moon and blowing it up with a single punch' and so on. Generally what happens is that people tend to focus on the maximum feats, the outliers where characters managed to accomplish some ridiculous thing. However they fail to focus on the other outlier, where the character or technology dramatically underperforms based on its expected level of ability.

For every instance of Son Goku casually backhanding away a blast that can vaporize a planet we have an instance of him being punked with a single punch to the back of the head or being hurt by a tiny rock bounced off his skull. We have instances of the character leveling mountains and being taken out by a single laser and all sorts of stuff in between. The same thing happens with a lot of other characters as well. Batman sometimes fights Darkseid one on one and other times struggles with a handful of street goons in a back alley. Captain America throws down with gods and gets punked by untrained combatants. Spiderman dances around bullets and gets clobbered by a geriatric senior.

It's pretty much inevitable because the story determines the result of any conflict, not the numbers. If the story requires Goku or Superman or Captain America or One Punch Man to go down then regardless they will go down.

Exalted captures this element and mechanizes it as Charms which costs resources (motes, willpower, etc). The Charms are just Dramatically Awesome Things I Can Do and the resources are just A Measure Of How Important I Think Doing It Is Right Now.

If an Exalt has Heavenly Guardian Defense they can parry anything. Anything. That is the player declaring "this character can parry whatever I say he can parry". If something attacks the character, whether an arrow or a supernova, the Solar can say "I parry it." The cost determines how often he can do that, which translates into how important to the player (ie the person helping to tell the story) wants to make this Awesome Thing happen over that Awesome Thing later. You get to choose between absolutely parrying that arrow now or that supernova that may occur later.

The story you are telling determines how often the Solar can pull off these feats. This is why Stunts (ie, being dramatically descriptive) regenerate how often you can do Awesome Feats. If the story is better with the Solar parrying a series of supernovas, he does. If the story is better with the Solar being ganged up on in an alley and shived in the kidneys and bleeding out in the gutter from some orphans, that is what happens.

Exalted in a nutshell.
 
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Omicron said:
Speaking of, I have so much stuff to procrastinate on now that I can properly write, I need a one-off to ease me back into things. Anyone's got some Exalted stuff they'd like me to write something on?
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I don't actually have anything concrete unfortunately, but I can offer a suggestion. Like we were talking about on IRC - write up a location of some sort, somewhere inspired by Mont Saint-Michel?
 
Whatever @Omicron says about Dr. Strange, I second those statements. I watched it twice; few days ago with nerd friends and today with inquisitive clueless family. My thoughts are going towards usage of sorcery and shaping in combat, but sadly, they suck in combat so no dice.

Which reminds me, has anyone done any homebrew regarding Castes and Anima Powers? I'm working on Heaven's Reach with Infernals implemented in setting. Having the Infernals get Anima powers based on which Yozi Stellar Intelligence hotwired the Shards makes more sense that having pre-defined templates of the Solar Exalted.
 
Kinunatzs said:
So your telling me that they ether dodge an attack using their own agility/speed or use charm to dodge it? no tanking?, I know that their enemies are really powerful but the idea of not able to tank a normal attack from someone equal to them is really stupid and makes them very waste full in stamina and motes if it come to that which makes them really a Glass Cannon
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Kinunatzs said:
Hmm... is it possible for an Exalted especially a Solar to make a Passive Charm that would allow him/her to tank planet destroying attack is he/she put's her mind into creating this Charm?
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To sort of add an addendum to Aaron's post and the other responses you've gotten, passive defenses and abilities of the scale you're talking about largely work in opposition to the point that the lore is trying to make. The fact that they have to 'waste their stamina avoiding attacks from peer opponents and not just tanking them' is a feature, not a problem. The game is very up front about its theme of 'individually potent characters getting overwhelmed and defeated by their lessers'. The Exalted Host does it to the Primordials, the Dragonbloods did it to the Solars, and so on. Solars having to waste energy on active defenses isn't stupid, it's the whole point of the game being set up the way it is.

Or, as a lot of the vets here are fond of saying, it's not about what you can or can't do, it's about what it will cost you. You can tank planet destroying attacks, but you can't do it without cost.

Omicron said:
In itself this is a good idea. But I sort of have a paradigm of sorts for SMA, in the absence of a solid canon guideline, which more or less precludes that kind of approach. SMA covers... aspects of cosmic truth, and are half-designed, half-revealed. A style lies partly in potential within the cosmos; while a Sidereal master could design it in several different ways, once it is designed it is to some extent part of Creation, of Fate. One cannot simply rediscover it or branch it off into a variant form.

Of course, as a writer, that wouldn't preclude me from designing several takes on a style and just picking whichever I prefer for a given game. I'm just too lazy to tackle an SMA as my first writing project in three months :p

Speaking of, I have so much stuff to procrastinate on now that I can properly write, I need a one-off to ease me back into things. Anyone's got some Exalted stuff they'd like me to write something on?
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Hmm, are you interested in one of these?

-Ex3 implementation of Swaying Grass Dance style (or, Exalted Capoeira). IRL the concept of malicia, which is a sort of synthesis of cunning, street smarts, and the ability to read the opponents aggressive intentions in order to deceive them, is core to Capoeira's philosophy, so maybe some Larceny or Socialize synergies?

-An Artifact 5 suit of heavy armor which wants to devour the flesh of enemies based on the mistaken notion of the spirits trapped within that this would somehow free them if they could do it enough.

-A setting blurb or larger write-up for the area with all the huge lakes on Ex3's map south of Jiara and East of Kirighast and Urim. The geography there reminds me of what I learned in school about ancient Greece, and how the independant city-states developed as they did in part because the mountainous terrain isolated them enough to develop somewhat independently despite their proximity.
 
Something I wanted to ask you experts about; How you would rework a 3e versions for Siderals? I really like the whole feel of the Sidereals (if not the way the mechanics were practically unusable). However, I really favor 3e's initiative combat system and intimacy-based social interaction system over 2.5e's, how 3e handles raising essence, and how they handled caste design. So I wish to redesign sidereals from the ground up for 3e.

Thus I wanted some of your advice, especially for dealing with mechanics. Couple of things. First, any general advice for 3e design?

2nd, I also wanted to tell you my thoughts on what I plan to do. One, get a grasp on the idea for each Caste. I want a strong Idea on what each caste does, what their role is, before I go forward to much. Second, I wanted to get a design philosophy for sidereal charms. The sidereal excellencies reduce target number- it gets better the stronger a sidereals base dice pool, but doesn't reference it directly the way lunar, solar, or dragonblooded excellencies do. I wanted other Sidereal charms to be the same way- not improving a sidereal's abilities, but rather changing the circumstance or environment in which they are used.
 
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Dif said:
*Snip debunking*
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Okay, I though the slot thing was basically 'Get the slot, get in the vat, swap out charms.' I may have read that wrong and the problem with my idea is the cost of the Charms is larger, although I do have a small argument regarding the fact that it's mostly human-made tools being used by humans in a place with severe resource scarcity issues to make Exalt-worthy stuff, which might inflate the significance of the cost. It's still a massive undertaking, but not in the range of 'Only First Age Solars could pay for it casually.'

Dif said:
*Snip trying to make it practical*
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It's not meant to be practical for a Celestial Exalt at face value, it's meant to be a way to go around with high versatility in a low or no infrastructure area. With Evocations, it turns into 'Have, like, 20 more charm trees, you crazy asshole homebrew-minmaxer." It's specifically for low-optimization or high-Evocation games.
 
Azunth said:
Something I wanted to ask you experts about; How you would rework a 3e versions for Siderals? I really like the whole feel of the Sidereals (if not the way the mechanics were practically unusable). However, I really favor 3e's initiative combat system and intimacy-based social interaction system over 2.5e's, how 3e handles raising essence, and how they handled caste design. So I wish to redesign sidereals from the ground up for 3e.

Thus I wanted some of your advice, especially for dealing with mechanics. Couple of things. First, any general advice for 3e design?

2nd, I also wanted to tell you my thoughts on what I plan to do. One, get a grasp on the idea for each Caste. I want a strong Idea on what each caste does, what their role is, before I go forward to much. Second, I wanted to get a design philosophy for sidereal charms. The sidereal excellencies reduce target number- it gets better the stronger a sidereals base dice pool, but doesn't reference it directly the way lunar, solar, or dragonblooded excellencies do. I wanted other Sidereal charms to be the same way- not improving a siderals abilities, make making their abilities vastly more effective when used.
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Sidereal charms in a 3e design philosophy fascinate me, though I lack a lot of the basic mechanical understanding of the newer structure to really grok how they might work.

One thing they really should do is integrate the astrology stuff more closely with the actual charms, though. Having it as an entire separate mechanical system just makes the whole thing aggravating to deal with and easy to ignore, which isn't exactly ideal.

In terms of basic dice tricks, I'm kind of fond of the idea of handing most of that kind of thing off to destinies, come to think of it. The Solar can double-9s on any performance roll involving oratory, but a Sidereal needs to set up a destiny that they can exploit to get the same benefit - a resplendent destiny of a skilled orator, perhaps.

The overall effect should be that the Sidereal can get a lot of probability-manipulating effects stacking on top of each other, but that they go away if he loses control of the situation or an enemy works out what he's after and kicks over the metaphorical game board.
 
Kuciwalker said:
I spent way too long staring at this and trying to figure out what Dr. Strangelove has to do with Obsidian Shards of Infinity.
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Well, if you have Obsidian Shards of Infinity in your game, you have embarked on a cycle of mutually assured destruction which leads to the ST riding the bomb down as it falls, leading to the total annihilation of all fun and possibly multiple friendships.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
Well, if you have Obsidian Shards of Infinity in your game, you have embarked on a cycle of mutually assured destruction which leads to the ST riding the bomb down as it falls, leading to the total annihilation of all fun and possibly multiple friendships.
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On the plus side, you're effectively invincible! You can't beat a one mote perfect defense/flurry breaker, after all.
 
Omicron said:
Dr Strange is flawed. The narrative is relatively basic, the character archetypes are either classic or clichés depending on how charitable you are, it has the most boring cosmic evil from beyond time imagineable, it overuses and misplaces humour at inappropriate time, it has a boring villain (although a great actor). It does enjoy a stellar cast, a fresh take or twist on several of its more classic aspects, a clever final confrontation.

On these factors it wouldn't be bad. It would be, like, Ant-Man level, maybe inferior.

But holy shit its visuals and sheer style are by far and away the best the MCU has ever had. This movie actually delivers on what Inception's trailers promised. People fight inside Escher paintings. Streets weave and unfold and collapse. Thin air shatters like glass. A man is kicked and space folds so that he falls hundreds of meters in a dozen yards. "I will trap this girl in the Sahara" is a functional fighting tactic.

It just blew my face off. Recommended.
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on a scale of 1 to goldfish how good is it as a source of inspiration for Sidereals?
 
Carrnage said:
on a scale of 1 to goldfish how good is it as a source of inspiration for Sidereals?
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There is one scene in which a dude is harnessing magical power from a dimension of evil to destroy a sanctum of power, so another character traps everyone in that scene inside a mirror dimension in which actions cannot affect the real world; except the first dude reacts by asserting control over that dimension, and immediately breaks down its geometry into nonsensical patterns to separate and confuse his opponents. He then proceeds to fight with a shard of transparent reality in the form of a blade.
 
Omicron said:
There is one scene in which a dude is harnessing magical power from a dimension of evil to destroy a sanctum of power, so another character traps everyone in that scene inside a mirror dimension in which actions cannot affect the real world; except the first dude reacts by asserting control over that dimension, and immediately breaks down its geometry into nonsensical patterns to separate and confuse his opponents. He then proceeds to fight with a shard of transparent reality in the form of a blade.
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So, a day at the sparring grounds for Sidereals? Or is that more a Fey thing?
#HasNeverActuallySeenMovieOrReadRulebook
 
So since its still Halloween here, I think its about time for some more plasmic beasts for seasonal spookiness!
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Scalps:
As one might expect from the name, Scalps are plasmics manifested as long masses of inky-black hair measuring from six to ten feet long, which snake languidly through the many still waterways of the underworld. Sometimes surfacing long enough to give the impression of a drowned body drifting down current, these whispers of vanity lost to age possess wickedly-sharp beaks to dissuade close investigation, like bent metal scissors at the center of its corpus. Generally non-violent unless disturbed, groups of the creatures, collectively called 'tangles,' will part around careful swimmers and slow boats, though even the sturdiest hull shows at least one long, scrawling mark from such an encounter.

The true curiosity of the beast lies in how it must stay on the move, as any fluid touched by the creature slowly curdles to aged blood over time. When migratory throngs of scalps clog narrow rivers and estuaries their slow passage dims waters red for miles, which is the most common method for finding such creatures. Lesser plasmics and hungry ghosts follow in the wake of these migrations, and though subsistence is possible on the resulting blood, those with a preference find the lack of essence within it unpalatable for consumption or effective in ritual use.

Trouble arises when one of these plasmics is beckoned or escapes into the waters of Creation, where it can befoul small lakes or springs, irreparably sour wells and spread sickness and disease. Charlatans and saboteurs typically employ scalps in containment amulets or prepared bones, to render casks of stored water or wine undrinkable, if not presented as evidence of supernatural displeasure using staged "omens" to introduce the creature before the contents is revealed. More than one threshold king has been plagued by rumors of unnatural appetites before being ousted, finally executed by revolutionaries when the royal wineries were emptied and found to be housing a vast and inexplicable quantity of human blood among the barrels.


Skinflints:
Like barnacles growing across the pillars of a dockside, resonant items from the living left in the underworld may cluster over centuries with remnants of feelings or memories which could not congeal into a ghost or a plasmic beast. Of these, so-called 'skinflints' are drawn to material wealth like coins, jewelry, expensive pottery or artworks, recognizable as little more than a fragment of tooth or fingernail embedded in the treasure at hand. Unthinkingly possessive, skinflints react when a living being handles or inspects the object it has adhered too, reaching out and narrowly slicing the trespasser when a finger or bit of flesh draws near. These small cuts typically go painless and unseen at first, leading to confusion about how one could achieve a simple papercut from the likes of a beautiful vase or painting frame.

Skinflints are not dangerous on their own, but the blood drawn thanks to disturbing the creatures has dire implications for would-be treasure hunters, as many types of beast, undead and plasmic alike, are capable of scenting living blood and will seek it out with an unstoppable fervor. For this reason many cultures across Creation widely forbid taking gifts of ghostly charity, out of fear for what may come along with the gift unexpectedly.


Sloughs:
Despite being somewhat small and mewling, when these salamander-like plasmics claim a location to themselves, those who reside nearby immediately become aware of the fact, however indirectly. Birds and small animals flee from it, and even other sloughs cannot abide the presence of another, leading to solitary sloughs wandering far and wide in the attempt to find uncontested territory. The creature is generally known for shedding its pale, spongy corpus at regular intervals, as the meek shreds of anxiety which comprise it push uncomfortably outwards, bubbling to the surface across its body until a seam forcibly bursts and allows the slough freedom to emerge out from within itself.

Both the living and dead can feel these projected convulsions from a distance, as a gradual prickling under the skin and in the hair like unseen insects from up to ten yards away, which rises in severity to an almost intolerable crawling itch as the victim draws closer or the plasmic beast spasmodically pulls away from the last of its husk. The thin membrane left behind pervades the area with a lingering sense of unease before it disperses, leaving any witnesses in baffled expectation for the awful sensations to return, and tending not to wait around should it do so. If forced to stay and endure the shedding of a slough, most livestock and herbivores simply go mad with confusion, while carnivores lash out violently.

With the chance to feel anything once more, even active discomfort, the common practice among wealthy ghosts is to keep a slough pinned through the tail and suspended in a cage from which it cannot escape, so it is forever trapped within the loose scraps of its own corpus. Set high atop the centermost fixture in the room to cast its struggling outward to all guests in attendance, the mindful host shares the experience the same as one would warm an enclosed space with a heated brazier. Similar practice is used in Creation, but by underhanded savants intent on seizing houses or plots of land, by rendering them nigh-uninhabitable. Secreting an imprisoned slough away within the walls of a house or beneath the floorboards, the unsuspecting occupants are either driven out and away from the grounds, or slowly insane and paranoid from the relentless and unseen assault upon their bodies.
 
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Revlid said:
That is seriously impressive.

I love the traditional art style you've chosen, and you've pulled it off excellently while really capturing the characters involved.

I can only offer friendship and writing in return – let me know if there's anything you want written up, be it Exalted or otherwise.
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You can also offer threadmarks now :V

Anyway I went ahead and threadmarked it, and also the other piece of Punsovi artwork from back in Feb of 2015. If you have any other artwork @Jen just ping me, @Revlid, or whoever else has perms and it'll get threadmarked because I am obsessive compulsive about threadmarks.
 
Jemnite said:
You can also offer threadmarks now :V

Anyway I went ahead and threadmarked it, and also the other piece of Punsovi artwork from back in Feb of 2015. If you have any other artwork @Jen just ping me, @Revlid, or whoever else has perms and it'll get threadmarked because I am obsessive compulsive about threadmarks.
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Goddamnit we are meant to be cutting down on threadmark bloat, not adding to it

Bring balance to the index, not cast it into darkness

you were the chosen one
 
Revlid said:
Goddamnit we are meant to be cutting down on threadmark bloat, not adding to it
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Look we have to get all the homebrew threadmarked first, and then we organized the threadmarks into subcategories like in the WoD thread where we sort all the demons under one subcategory and such, and ghosts under another, artifacts writeups and such.

The porblem is that this thread is so long and so filled with content that a threadmark system will be bloated no matter what we do to organize it. And if we don't threadmark all the demon writeups or art or whatever it gets lost in 1270+ pages of stuff- which no one wants to go trawl through to get what they want.

It's an unavoidable sideffect of megathreads so everyone just has to suck it up for a few months while I trawl backwards through 1270+ pages of content to threadmark everything before I can get it all organized.
 
Jemnite said:
Look we have to get all the homebrew threadmarked first, and then we organized the threadmarks into subcategories like in the WoD thread where we sort all the demons under one subcategory and such, and ghosts under another, artifacts writeups and such.

The porblem is that this thread is so long and so filled with content that a threadmark system will be bloated no matter what we do to organize it. And if we don't threadmark all the demon writeups or art or whatever it gets lost in 1270+ pages of stuff- which no one wants to go trawl through to get what they want.

It's an unavoidable sideffect of megathreads so everyone just has to suck it up for a few months while I trawl backwards through 1270+ pages of content to threadmark everything before I can get it all organized.
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See, my take on this issue is that this is maaainly the fault of like half a dozen people. And by "fault", I'm referring to the creation of interesting content, but whatever, they can suck it up.

So just bully them all into making compilation posts, we threadmark those, and then it's on them to update the compilation. Done.

It worked on Omicron, Dif, and Shyft, now we just need to start throwing rotten fruit at EarthScorpion and we're like 80% of the way there.
 
Revlid said:
See, my take on this issue is that this is maaainly the fault of like half a dozen people. And by "fault", I'm referring to the creation of interesting content, but whatever, they can suck it up.

So just bully them all into making compilation posts, we threadmark those, and then it's on them to update the compilation. Done.

It worked on Omicron, Dif, and Shyft, now we just need to start throwing rotten fruit at EarthScorpion and we're like 80% of the way there.
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I had literally no threadmark before I made my compilation post and didn't ask for one because I keep forgetting this system even exists >.>

My threadmark was then promptly drowned in half a dozen of essays by Dif
 
Morphic Tide said:
Depends on what made it, what kind of celestial wine and what the Artifact is. If the Artifact is a rigged up Alchemical Charm, then basically anything goes, because a 5 dot Artifact based on Alchemical charms is an Essence 5 Alchemical Charm.
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Remember what I told you about charmshare? I'm not sure you do, so let's just do this all over again.

Jon Chung said:
Do you not know why charmshare is a bad idea and combinatorial hell is a thing that exists?

Let's take a look at Example QA Monkey Bob, a minion assigned to the process of vetting mechanics for Exalted for some unspecified but terrible sins. In front of Bob, there is one piece of paper, upon which is written a Charm.

"Well, this is easy!", thinks Bob. "This seems fine on its own, so now I'll just see what other bits of the system this one thing is connected to, things that people can use to build things with in conjunction with this bit I have here in my hand."

Bob reaches out, tugs on the metaphorical strings, and receives all the things that can be used in combination with the thing he's trying to test, and the things that can be used in combination with them, and so on and so forth, producing a rather impressive pile. In order to make sure that no combination of things including the thing he's holding can break the game, Bob needs to check them all for potentially bad results like Twilight Essence Reactors or Creation-Slaying Oblivion Kicks or whatever other broken shit one can bring to mind. So either Bob's going to have to do a lot of reference work or hold the entire metagame in his working memory at the same time. Not looking so easy for Bob now, is it?

This is exponentially more annoying and wasteful the larger the pile is. Which is why we keep the size of the pile Bob has to deal with as small as possible and do not suggest insanity like combining different Charmsets.
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If Oadenol's Codex tells you to do something monumentally retarded, and you know this is monumentally retarded because it is telling you to functionally mix charmsets and that is definitionally so, you go "Oadenol, you're fucking with me, this is monumentally retarded" and throw out the rules that tell you to mix charmsets.
 
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Jemnite said:
Look we have to get all the homebrew threadmarked first, and then we organized the threadmarks into subcategories like in the WoD thread where we sort all the demons under one subcategory and such, and ghosts under another, artifacts writeups and such.

The porblem is that this thread is so long and so filled with content that a threadmark system will be bloated no matter what we do to organize it. And if we don't threadmark all the demon writeups or art or whatever it gets lost in 1270+ pages of stuff- which no one wants to go trawl through to get what they want.

It's an unavoidable sideffect of megathreads so everyone just has to suck it up for a few months while I trawl backwards through 1270+ pages of content to threadmark everything before I can get it all organized.
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Revlid said:
See, my take on this issue is that this is maaainly the fault of like half a dozen people. And by "fault", I'm referring to the creation of interesting content, but whatever, they can suck it up.

So just bully them all into making compilation posts, we threadmark those, and then it's on them to update the compilation. Done.

It worked on Omicron, Dif, and Shyft, now we just need to start throwing rotten fruit at EarthScorpion and we're like 80% of the way there.
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Revlid has the right of it IMO; threadmark bloat is hell, particularly on mobile.
 
Revlid said:
See, my take on this issue is that this is maaainly the fault of like half a dozen people. And by "fault", I'm referring to the creation of interesting content, but whatever, they can suck it up.

So just bully them all into making compilation posts, we threadmark those, and then it's on them to update the compilation. Done.

It worked on Omicron, Dif, and Shyft, now we just need to start throwing rotten fruit at EarthScorpion and we're like 80% of the way there.
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speaking of, only one of your yozi charmtrees is indexed.
 
This thread has thirty-eight threadmarks. Of those, seventeen are homebrew by ES, and one more is an analysis post that's basically a roadmap for homebrew.

/me throws rotten beets at ES
 
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