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General Exalted Thread

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I think they made some mistakes in designing 3E Martial Arts (specifically, the fact that they can be comboed with each other is I think going to be really annoying in the long run) but they are far too flavorful and fun to ban altogether. Stuff like Dreaming Pearl Courtesan is cool and should exist and shouldn't be limited to one particular splat.
 
Honestly, I'm very fond of martial arts as distinct power sets as well. It's a rich concept with great potential. The idea of magic kung fu as both a concept and a mechanical thing to use is one of the more viscerally cool parts of the game.

Which is why I like Aaron's idea, because it allows for both being easier to balance, and maintaining the cool powers parts of martial arts. I mean, an Artifact will almost always have less powers than a Martial Arts charm tree, but a lot of those Martial Arts charm trees were filled with crud that can be safely discarded - remember when we used to moan about all the redundant Join Battle enhancers?
 
A fairly consistent idea I've bandied about with some of my off-site peers has been that certain 'general' effects like join-battle enhancers get the template treatment, so sure, lots of styles have them, but if you bought one, you 'count' as having one for every other martial art in the game.

It's not a fully realized idea, because even if you assume all such enhancers are mechanically identical, they don't always fit in the same charm tree location or any number of other variables.

still- templating the 'foundational' effects allows you to focus the major balancing points on the significant, 'thematic' charms. Alternatively you could just say that all foundational effects belong in the native charmsets, and that all MAs are, are special thematic charm trees that require X native charms of an ability or something.
 
I really don't think every MA needs a Join Battle enhancer, or even most. Leave that styles that actually have striking first/fast as a thematic.
 
I agree. 3E Martial Arts don't actually feel like they have a lot of cookie-cutter overlap. That's probably because 3E combat isn't stuck in the degenerate case 2E is.
 
So speaking of Martial Arts...

I've been watching the Fist of the North Star anime, and despite Kenshiro being so Suetastic and morally blind that you could make the case for him actually being a raksha noble (at least in the first season), I've been having a decent time of things.

Thus far, the main impression I got was that you could model most of the fuckery that goes on in FotNS with Charm use: that's how Kenshiro can just casually eat a nuke to the face one minute, then suffer a significant wound from a crossbow the next. Mind you, Hokuto Shinken is a broken-as-fuck CMA that no sane DM would permit, but on the whole things have been... coherent-ish.

Then Raoh happened. What the fuck was going on at the start of his fight with Kenshiro? It looked like two Exalts both flaring their anima combined with a Hegran drug trip. Also, the part where they just started flying out of nowhere.

To drag this back toward Exalted, has anyone ever heard of someone coming up with an "I kick your ass/block attacks with my anima banner" Charms before? If nothing else, that would be stunt fuel par excellence.
 
GardenerBriareus said:
So speaking of Martial Arts...

I've been watching the Fist of the North Star anime, and despite Kenshiro being so Suetastic and morally blind that you could make the case for him actually being a raksha noble (at least in the first season), I've been having a decent time of things.

Thus far, the main impression I got was that you could model most of the fuckery that goes on in FotNS with Charm use: that's how Kenshiro can just casually eat a nuke to the face one minute, then suffer a significant wound from a crossbow the next. Mind you, Hokuto Shinken is a broken-as-fuck CMA that no sane DM would permit, but on the whole things have been... coherent-ish.

Then Raoh happened. What the fuck was going on at the start of his fight with Kenshiro? It looked like two Exalts both flaring their anima combined with a Hegran drug trip. Also, the part where they just started flying out of nowhere.

To drag this back toward Exalted, has anyone ever heard of someone coming up with an "I kick your ass/block attacks with my anima banner" Charms before? If nothing else, that would be stunt fuel par excellence.
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In the Ten Thousand Dragons DB charm rewrite, they added a Charm called Dragon Aura Lash which lets you use your Anima banner as a weapon.

EDIT: Ten Thousand Dragons

DRAGON'S AURA LASH
Cost: 5m, 1wp; Mins: War 3, Essence 2; Type: Simple Keywords: Combo-OK, Elemental, Obvious, Loyalty Duration: One scene
Prerequisite Charms: Armor-Hardening Concentration

This Charm may only be invoked if the character has spent 11+ motes of peripheral essence, or if the mote expenditure for this Charm would put his anima at the 11+m level. It uses the Dragon-Blooded's anima flux to form a powerful weapon of Essence with the following base traits: Speed 5, Accuracy +2, Damage +5L, Defense +1 and Rate 3. The lash gains additional benefits depending on the Exalt's elemental aspect: Air aspects reduce its Speed rating by 1. Earth aspects add the Piercing tag to the weapon. Fire aspects add 3L to Damage. Water aspects increase its Defense rating by 2. Wood aspects add 10 yards to the weapon's range, allowing for ranged attacks to be made.

Aura Lashes are not used like normal weapons. They follow the movements and indications of the wielder but they are directed by his will, not his hand. The Lash's Accuracy and PDV pools are calculated using the (Dexterity + War) of the user, and it adds the wielder's Intelligence instead of his Strength to damage. An Aura Lash may be disarmed, breaking the user's tight control of their anima, but it only takes a miscellaneous action for the character to regain control over it.

When the character invokes this Charm within (Essence x 3) yards of other Dragon-Blooded towards whom he has Loyalty, and their anima is also at the 11m+ level, he can incorporate their elemental power into this weapon. He may pay an additional 1m to include their elements' effect to the weapon. The weapon may benefit from each type of element only once
 
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Shyft said:
A fairly consistent idea I've bandied about with some of my off-site peers has been that certain 'general' effects like join-battle enhancers get the template treatment, so sure, lots of styles have them, but if you bought one, you 'count' as having one for every other martial art in the game.

It's not a fully realized idea, because even if you assume all such enhancers are mechanically identical, they don't always fit in the same charm tree location or any number of other variables.

still- templating the 'foundational' effects allows you to focus the major balancing points on the significant, 'thematic' charms. Alternatively you could just say that all foundational effects belong in the native charmsets, and that all MAs are, are special thematic charm trees that require X native charms of an ability or something.
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This has always seemed the best idea to me for if you absolutely have to have Martial Arts as a distinct Thing. Leaving just the Iconic Bits of a MA in the charmshare zone cuts down on combo hell by a lot.
 
If I were to design a system for Martial Arts that wasn't "lol everything is Styles" or "everything is @Aaron Peori's Styles" and it had to include Charms, I would probably make a bunch of basic Charms, stuff like "hit stuff", "parry stuff", "trip stuff" and the like. A basic set of Charms that any Martial Art can get access to. Then I would design a Form-Type Charm balanced against equivalent charmtech that you could assume in order to get some bonuses to your Martial Arts Charms. Each Martial Art would have a bunch of Form Weapons and some armor it could be practiced in and that would basically be it.

Sidereal Martial Arts would be esoteric Form-Type Charms that would be Native to the Sidereals, that they could activate in order to gain weird effects on their Martial Arts. So a Sidereal that practices Eight-Trigram Path could enter the Form of The Obsidian Shards of Infinity and then strike at an opponent through mirrors close to his target or move through mirrors like a fucking horror monster or something like that.

Martial Arts wouldn't be an Ability, but would instead be stuff like "Melee Martial Arts" or "Archery Martial Arts".
 
Shyft said:
still- templating the 'foundational' effects allows you to focus the major balancing points on the significant, 'thematic' charms. Alternatively you could just say that all foundational effects belong in the native charmsets, and that all MAs are, are special thematic charm trees that require X native charms of an ability or something.
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This is why I distilled Martial Arts down to Artifacts. It allows you to ignore the building block effects since those will be in the native charmset and gives you the passive bonuses of the form (by modeling it as a weapon with certain stats) and then if your artifact level is high enough to have one or two thematic special effects that give you the really distinct feel of each tree.

What I like about @EarthScorpion's sorcery variant which requires you to commit Backgrounds (including the Artifact background) to Sorcery effects is that this opens up the possibility of having those grand Martial Arts super effects that make the previous Styles really conceptually interesting as well, because now they will be balanced around being Sorcery spells which reduces the impact on Charmshare immensely.

So, for example, Dreaming Pearl Courtesan:

First off you would have its base effect of turning sashes/scarves/gowns into weapons by giving you an attack statblock comparable to an Artifact Unarmed Attack, probably a bit better than normal because you do need to have clothing for it to work.

Then add in a power or two appropriate to a three or four dot artifact weapon, say some sort of Social effect or an effect which extended your reach or one that allowed you to maintain an additional grapple by losing access to your enhanced unarmed attack.

Then you could invent a Sorcery spell for the "I turn into a giant gazelle fish squid monster with way too many eyes like somebody gave Ludwig The Holy Blade the My Little Pony Friendship is Magic makeover, behold my glory and despair" as a Celestial Circle spell.

Bam, everything you need for Dreaming Pearl without having to include dozens of Charms which redundant effects and annoying combinatorial hell.
 
Another way to reduce "I have to buy all these redundant effects" is the LotW option: MA have tiers, and you get one effect from each tier. You still have to work your way up to the fancier toys, but if you already have a JB enhancer, you skip the JB enhancer at Tier 2 and pick up the Rush-enhancer instead.

'Course, LotW's "Charms" tend to fit in to about two sentences, which makes that a lot more viable.
 
grommile said:
Abdicate your duties, release a badly tuned game that an intelligent player can break over their knee seven different ways before breakfast, and use Rule Zero and forum bans to shut down all
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Err the problem isnt with people being able to exploit rules. it's unexpected or accidental interactions breaking the game.
 
Omicron said:
To be quite frank, the repeated come-back to "combinatorial hell is why Martial Arts should be discarded wholesale" has done more to convince me thatthe combinatorial hell concept was a bad bugbear to be largely dismissed, as opposed to making me agree that Martial Arts should be discarded.
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/shrug

Omicron said:
It's a pretty simple reasoning too - Martial Arts are cool, provide player and NPC options to broaden the scope of tactics, aesthetics and mechanics available to any combattant, and are a powerful motivator in getting people invested in homebrewing (the closed, thematically-consistent nature of a single MA set makes them a solid exercise in learning Charm design in a way that loose additions to a complete Exalted set aren't). They are also anime as shit.
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Let's deal with these in order.

a) Martial Arts is cool. What, specifically, is cool about them? The aesthetic trappings of a wuxia story? People talking about mystical martial concepts that can be achieved by anyone with enough training and hard work? Sure, these are cool. Mate, I'm Chinese. I grew up on Journey to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Jin Yong. You're not gonna find any arguments here about how cool martial arts fiction is. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the problem of cross-splat charms being a massive mechanical drag. Implement all the cool martial arts flavour you want to and can fit in (there is a conflict between 'achieve with hard work' and 'won the cosmic lottery' to keep in mind here), but not with charmshare.

b) Provide player and NPC options to broaden the scope of mechanics available to any combatant. Yeah, with fucking charmshare. You going to put in the necessary work to make sure this doesn't do what it has always done in the game's publication history? History also indicates that no, nobody is going to put in that work. Do this some other way, like taking the effort that would otherwise have been wasted on fighting with charmshare and spend it on cool splat mechanics, which are much less costly in development resources to produce because you don't need to go "This needs to be viable, non-breaking and costed appropriately for Solars, Abyssals, Infernals, Lunars, Sidereals, Alchemicals, Dragon-Blooded, raksha, spirits and first circle demons."

c) Get people interested in homebrewing because martial arts are closed sets and thematically consistent. You would have a point here if martial arts were actually closed, that is, they are self-contained and do not require the player performing this homebrewing to have extensive metagame knowledge. They aren't closed, you need to balance your martial art against/with every splat that can buy those charms, unless you don't actually care about your game actually working. This requires extensive metagame knowledge. You cannot learn Charm design by starting here, because to do this correctly you need to understand the meta for all splats that touch martial arts, which is, uh, all of them.

d) Anime as shit. Sure. Firing golden sun lasers from your sword is also anime as shit. Removing MA does not remove the ability to be anime as shit.

Omicron said:
When I was first exposed to the notion of "combinatorial hell" I was receptive to it but at this point I have come to the conclusion that it exists largely to make the game poorer by burning down its richer and wild aspects - the constant refrain of "give them Spirit Charms" in answer to anything that isn't an Exalted Charmset, the calls for removing MA entirely - and as a result I don't find it an argument of much value anymore.
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"I like it" is, historically speaking, not a useful response to "This is a system mechanical problem". Do you have a defense of charmshare that doesn't boil down to "I like it"?
 
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Jon Chung said:
/shrug



Let's deal with these in order.

a) Martial Arts is cool. What, specifically, is cool about them? The aesthetic trappings of a wuxia story? People talking about mystical martial concepts that can be achieved by anyone with enough training and hard work? Sure, these are cool. Mate, I'm Chinese. I grew up on Journey to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Jin Yong. You're not gonna find any arguments here about how cool martial arts fiction is. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the problem of cross-splat charms being a massive mechanical drag. Implement all the cool martial arts flavour you want to and can fit in (there is a conflict between 'achieve with hard work' and 'won the cosmic lottery' to keep in mind here), but not with charmshare.

b) Provide player and NPC options to broaden the scope of mechanics available to any combatant. Yeah, with fucking charmshare. You going to put in the necessary work to make sure this doesn't do what it has always done in the game's publication history? History also indicates that no, nobody is going to put in that work. Do this some other way, like taking the effort that would otherwise have been wasted on fighting with charmshare and spend it on cool splat mechanics, which are much less costly in development resources to produce because you don't need to go "This needs to be viable, non-breaking and costed appropriately for Solars, Abyssals, Infernals, Lunars, Sidereals, Alchemicals, Dragon-Blooded, raksha, spirits and first circle demons."

c) Get people interested in homebrewing because martial arts are closed sets and thematically consistent. You would have a point here if martial arts were actually closed, that is, they are self-contained and do not require the player performing this homebrewing to have extensive metagame knowledge. They aren't closed, you need to balance your martial art against/with every splat that can buy those charms, unless you don't actually care about your game actually working. This requires extensive metagame knowledge. You cannot learn Charm design by starting here, because to do this correctly you need to understand the meta for all splats that touch martial arts, which is, uh, all of them.

d) Anime as shit. Sure. Firing golden sun lasers from your sword is also anime as shit. Removing MA does not remove the ability to be anime as shit.



"I like it" is, historically speaking, not a useful response to "This is a system mechanical problem". Do you have a defense of charmshare that doesn't boil down to "I like it"?
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Yeah, the defense you quoted.

Shit man, I'm not going to be doing this song and dance with you again. You have made an art form of turning your opponent's position into "just liking something" so that your position can be "objective criticism," which makes your argument unassailable because you've framed the entire debate in a way advantageous to you. Unfortunately, I don't have to engage you on your terms.

Every solution you propose - "spend that effort on splat mechanics," "just make it flavor," whatever (actually you don't have other suggestions), doesn't give me what I want.

It's like you can't physically compute that when you remove things in the name of game balance you are making trade-offs. Yes, you are making the game more balanced, but you are doing so by taking things away. This is not an objectively better move - it's a deliberate choice with costs and benefits.

And you can frame that as "me liking it" vs "this is a system mechanical problem" and it won't change shit. The fact that your solution empoverish the game, remove tactical and character creation depth and texture, remove certain mechanical applications of aesthetics aspects of the game, is a system mechanical problem of its own.

"I like balance better" is not, historically speaking, a useful response to "removing depth from the game is a system mechanical problem." Do you have a defense of removing Martial Arts that doesn't boil down to "I don't like them"? :V

Seriously, man, this schtick of trying to frame your position as one of cold mechanical calculus and your opponent's as mere feels may play well to the crowd but it's just dickish.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
"I like it" is ultimately the only argument worth anything.

All the other stuff we say is just dressup for that central point.
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Scenario A:

"I like X."
"This causes a shitload of problems because X means I have to do [list of really stupid things here] to make my game not break."
"I like X."
"WHAARGARBL."

We can agree this is useless, right?

Scenario B:

"I like X because of A, B and C."
"This causes a shitload of problems because X means I have to do [list of really stupid things here] to make my game not break."
"Okay, here is a way we can get A, B and C in some way which doesn't require [list of really stupid things here] to make the game not break."
"Cool."

Is this not better?

Scenario C:

"I like X because of A, B and C."
"This causes a shitload of problems because X means I have to do [list of really stupid things here] to make my game not break."
"No, you can do [simple elegant solution] and it won't break."
"Cool."

This works too, yeah?
 
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Omicron said:
Yeah, the defense you quoted.

Shit man, I'm not going to be doing this song and dance with you again. You have made an art form of turning your opponent's position into "just liking something" so that your position can be "objective criticism," which makes your argument unassailable because you've framed the entire debate in a way advantageous to you. Unfortunately, I don't have to engage you on your terms.

Every solution you propose - "spend that effort on splat mechanics," "just make it flavor," whatever (actually you don't have other suggestions), doesn't give me what I want.

It's like you can't physically compute that when you remove things in the name of game balance you are making trade-offs. Yes, you are making the game more balanced, but you are doing so by taking things away. This is not an objectively better move - it's a deliberate choice with costs and benefits.

And you can frame that as "me liking it" vs "this is a system mechanical problem" and it won't change shit. The fact that your solution empoverish the game, remove tactical and character creation depth and texture, remove certain mechanical applications of aesthetics aspects of the game, is a system mechanical problem of its own.

"I like balance better" is not, historically speaking, a useful response to "removing depth from the game is a system mechanical problem." Do you have a defense of removing Martial Arts that doesn't boil down to "I don't like them"? :V

Seriously, man, this schtick of trying to frame your position as one of cold mechanical calculus and your opponent's as mere feels may play well to the crowd but it's just dickish.
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Do you think "This needs to be viable, non-breaking and costed appropriately for Solars, Abyssals, Infernals, Lunars, Sidereals, Alchemicals, Dragon-Blooded, raksha, spirits and first circle demons!" is a reasonable thing to ask your game developer or GM to do? If so, why?
 
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Jon Chung said:
Do you think "This needs to be viable, non-breaking and costed appropriately for Solars, Abyssals, Infernals, Lunars, Sidereals, Alchemicals, Dragon-Blooded, raksha, spirits and first circle demons." is a reasonable thing to ask your game developer or GM to do? If so, why?
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Do I? That's a good question! Are you actually interested in hearing an answer or are you just trying to get a soundbite?

It's all right, I'm going to assume the former.

So, here's how it works. "Viable, non-breaking and costed appropriately for Solars, Abyssals, Infernals, Lunars, Sidereals, Alchemicals, Dragon-Blooded, raksha, spirits and first circle demons" is not actually a binary - it's a spectrum. Things can be more or less viable, more or less non-breaking, more or less appropriately costed.

The further you are to the wrong side of the spectrum, the worse the product is on these specific factors. The closer you are to the right side of the spectrum, the more effort-intensive your product is.

But, uh, here's the thing. You get something out of this. There is an actual product which adds richness to the gameplay, provides player enjoyment and so on.

So, you strike the balance. You assess how much work you can expand, and you move the slider on the best spot you can get on that spectrum.

That does indeed mean that your product will not be entirely "viable, non-breaking and costed etc." Some stuff will be too expensive for a Solar, some stuff will be overpowered in the hands of a Dragon-Blood. This may have a negative impact on the game. You do in fact want your product to be as balanced for cross-splat compatibility as it can be given the effort you can allocate.

As long as the benefits surpass these drawbacks, the end product is fine. Some people will complain that if you have this one Charm interact with this other Charm it will cause an unbalanced interaction, but as long as enough people have an improved experience from it it's omelette and broken eggs.

Stuff you can do to move the slider closer to the right end of the spectrum:
1) Have Charms grant special benefits to the most powerful (or MA-focused) Exalted splats.
2) Restrict the full power of certain Charms to the least powerful (or least MA-focused) splats.
3) Don't give MA access to first circle demons as a general rule.
4) Restrict MA access to spirits of the right category or power.

Ex3 is doing at least the first two, I don't know about the others. Those are ways in which you can improve the unbalance inherent to cross-splat access to martial arts.

And honestly, I get not liking martial arts. If they do nothing for you then they represent a net loss to the game, from your point of view. The important thing is to keep in mind that the game is trying to reach a certain audience, and that audience has historically been highly receptive to martial arts as implemented, so... It's not bad design.
 
Jon Chung said:
"I like it" is, historically speaking, not a useful response to "This is a system mechanical problem". Do you have a defense of charmshare that doesn't boil down to "I like it"?
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You could go the other way and give everyone generic charms, therefore eliminating the Martial Arts problem! Now there's no combinatorial hell because power levels are balanced by innate perks of your Exaltation type and your mote pools, rather than the specific mechanical effects of your charms and all charms will/should be balanced assuming access to 100% of the charms in existence.

I call it the Mutants and Masterminds solution. :V
 
Omicron said:
that audience has historically been highly receptive to martial arts as implemented, so... It's not bad design.
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"This is how we've always done it, and it's not bad" is a really weak defense of... Anything, really. Actually, it's only a defense in that you're not outright condemning it.

Especially when you're basically refusing to comment on the... Three? Four? alternatives that have been suggested since this round of the MA discussion started.
All of which are vastly less work and easier to balance than canon MA.

Stuff doesn't need to be bad for there to be improvement.
 
Why stop there? Just give every single Character just a single stat, called 'Power' ranging from 1 to 10. In a conflict, the one with more power wins, Solars start at Power 5. There. No combinatorial Hell. Perfect balance, no power-gaming.
 
azoicennead said:
"This is how we've always done it, and it's not bad" is a really weak defense of... Anything, really. Actually, it's only a defense in that you're not outright condemning it.

Especially when you're basically refusing to comment on the... Three? Four? alternatives that have been suggested since this round of the MA discussion started.
All of which are vastly less work and easier to balance than canon MA.

Stuff doesn't need to be bad for there to be improvement.
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That's not what he was saying in the post you quoted.
 
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