General Exalted Thread

[Jon Chung]

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.

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If I wasn't actually interested I'd just make sarcastic comments and post ASCII image macros, so yeah, let's go with that.

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.

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Y'know, I actually agree with you here that it is a spectrum, but I feel like you're not understanding my argument, which is fundamentally about developmental resource allocation.

Let's say we have a minimum threshold of mechanical quality on our spectrum which we must reach in order to satisfy players. Mine would be set higher on the spectrum than yours, but just to be fair and balanced, let's go with something as bare-minimum as "does not produce degenerate builds along the lines of the Twilight Essence Reactor, Joy in Adversity/Lightspeed Body Dynamics reactor, Cobra Style or Obsidian Shards of Infinity, etc, etc". I think we can agree that this is a fair product quality floor, so to speak.

Because this is an exception-based system in which degeneracy can come from interacting bits, every time we make a bit, we need to check whether or not our new bit fits into any combination of bits that now exist such that a degenerate build which fails our threshold check exists. This takes time/effort (and therefore money) to do, because in order to certify our products as meeting this minimal threshold of mechanical quality, testing work needs to be performed (by the writer/developer creating the product or some other QA guy, either in parallel to the development or in some sort of iterative process, it doesn't matter). The sticking point is that making the QA guy do ten times the necessary work per production unit (assuming work scales linearly, a very generous assumption) as he would otherwise have to do if there was no such thing as charmshare is, on face value, fucking stupid.

To use a work-related analogy, it's easier to develop software for iPhones compared to Androids because iPhones have less fragmentation - you need to do less testing, less accomodation of multiple different operating system variants. If we're designing a new smartphone ecology from scratch, we should probably ensure that OS updates work like iPhone and not like Android, so developers need to do less pointless bullshit and more actual product creation.

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.

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It's not that I don't like martial arts. I think they're cool too. I read a lot of Legend of the Condor Heroes back in school, dude. But look at this from my POV: the resource price tag on charmshare is ludicrously insane, and the things people like (wuxia stylin', aesthetics, etc) aren't necessarily tied to the thing which has the massive price tag (lol charmshare), so why are we paying for charmshare?

There must be a way to get the cool stuff about wuxia fiction into the game without paying this insane price, or lowering our quality threshold floor to the point where it is meaningless and we do no QA at all in order to lower that price, yes?

Unless you like charmshare because it's charmshare, for its own sake and independently of the martial arts fiction associations it's using, for some reason.

 

[Kuciwalker]

"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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Look. There's a difference between "this is how it's always been done" and "people seem to actually like how this has been done". The latter is evidence that the practice is good. Not insurmountable evidence! But evidence.

I don't know where your count comes from, but with respect to the other proposals I've seen:

1. Kerisgame styles. I like these, but I like them more in their role of replacements for specialties (which I despise) than as a replacement for MA-as-charm-trees. And they're not actually inconsistent with the latter - there are a number of ways you could combine the systems. Since Kerisgame tries to avoid using the combat system anyway I don't see its practice as too prescriptive.
2. MA-as-artifacts. Confession: thematically, this has never really made sense to me. And as a system, it seems to amount mostly to cutting the mechanical weight of MA from 9-12 charms down to ~1 charm, or arguably 2-3 charms depending. I mean... OK? "Fix MA by making it much smaller" is a reasonable idea, but I don't think it's obviously better. The MAs I'm fond of seem to get decent value out of being a full tree - they are more interesting, evocative, and produce a more distinctive play experience for it.
3. MAs built using mix-and-match common building block charms - this doesn't really seem that much different from "delete MAs and just stunt your native combat charms". You are losing most of the stuff in MAs that is evocative, that people enjoy.

 

[Jon Chung]

Look. There's a difference between "this is how it's always been done" and "people seem to actually like how this has been done". The latter is evidence that the practice is good. Not insurmountable evidence! But evidence.

I don't know where your count comes from, but with respect to the other proposals I've seen:

1. Kerisgame styles. I like these, but I like them more in their role of replacements for specialties (which I despise) than as a replacement for MA-as-charm-trees. And they're not actually inconsistent with the latter - there are a number of ways you could combine the systems. Since Kerisgame tries to avoid using the combat system anyway I don't see its practice as too prescriptive.
2. MA-as-artifacts. Confession: thematically, this has never really made sense to me. And as a system, it seems to amount mostly to cutting the mechanical weight of MA from 9-12 charms down to ~1 charm, or arguably 2-3 charms depending. I mean... OK? "Fix MA by making it much smaller" is a reasonable idea, but I don't think it's obviously better. The MAs I'm fond of seem to get decent value out of being a full tree - they are more interesting, evocative, and produce a more distinctive play experience for it.
3. MAs built using mix-and-match common building block charms - this doesn't really seem that much different from "delete MAs and just stunt your native combat charms". You are losing most of the stuff in MAs that is evocative, that people enjoy.

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You'd need to sacrifice charmshare across splats to do it, but one approach that I've seen discussed which hasn't been brought up yet would be to eliminate Ability trees instead of martial arts, and make each splat's native Charmset a collection of martial arts style trees grouped under the thematics of the splat in question. This would satisfy the people who really like the thematically-arranged power trees that MAs tend to look like, without having to pay charmshare's ludicrous price tag.

The Sidereal 1E constellation ability trees almost do this already, in fact, as most of them are not particularly tied to their Ability, are all thematically unified around some conceptual thing and are finite in size.

 

[Chehrazad]

MAs built using mix-and-match common building block charms - this doesn't really seem that much different from "delete MAs and just stunt your native combat charms". You are losing most of the stuff in MAs that is evocative, that people enjoy.

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Which is also why I:

1. Mentioned that this was my alternative if I couldn't use kerisgame styles or @Aaron Peori's homebrew.
2. Never marketed it as the One True Solution.
3. Don't like it myself.

I think it's badly done, kind of stupid, really pointless and a waste of effort to write, but I like it better than having to do a writeup of each, individual Martial Art I want to include, which is preferable to me, since I design my homebrew with the intention of having it used at my table and not with the internet in mind, this is not an issue for me.

 

[fitzgerald]

Champions / HERO System got there first

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Can I mention how much I'd love to swap to HEROs action system with Speed.

 

[Imrix]

I think it's very telling here that @Jon Chung has been discussing about how to implement martial arts (including ideas such as 'scrap all special mechanical powers, just make them jumped-up specialties', and 'reimagine them as artifacts, keeping the most evocative powers), and @Omicron is the one who is at once reframing that as,

Do you have a defense of removing Martial Arts that doesn't boil down to "I don't like them"?

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while at the same time putting him down for,

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.

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I mean, I get that the former quote may well be a joke, but all indications are to me that the misunderstanding/reframing of Chung's position is in earnest. I've only seen Omicron acknowledge Chung's ideas in terms of removing things, rather than reimagining them.

 

[Irked]

I mean, I get that the former quote may well be a joke, but all indications are to me that the misunderstanding/reframing of Chung's position is in earnest. I've only seen Omicron acknowledge Chung's ideas in terms of removing things, rather than reimagining them.

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Prrrrretty sure it's a joke/snarky mirroring, yes. I'm not sure the distinction you're drawing matters much, at least to Omicron's argument. Like, there would still be a thing called "Martial Arts," sure, but if it's the implementation that people are attached to, reimagining to a totally different implementation is a removal of the thing they like.

It seems like everybody understands everybody else's position, here, and we just have different values for "How nice is it to have MAs-as-they-currently-appear?" and "How much work is it to make MAs-as-they-currently appear without exploding the system?"

 

[Chehrazad]

To be honest, we've had this discussion a hundred times before with no actual results, so I don't see why we are so eager to leap into it again.

 

[Walker of the Yellow Path]

To be honest, we've had this discussion a hundred times before with no actual results, so I don't see why we are so eager to leap into it again.

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Their is comfort in familiarity

 

[Sanctaphrax]

Historically, some Martial Arts have been balanced and some have not been. But the broken ones usually aren't broken because of combinatorial issues; usually, they're just broken in and of themselves. Making Obsidian Shards of Infinity into a set of Sidereal native Charms wouldn't improve it at all.

I really don't think the sharability of martial arts is as big a balance challenge as it's being made out to be. If it was, we'd see more otherwise-fair Styles rendered broken through combinatorics.

It's also worthless because it's nothing but a vague subjective opinion without even any reasons listed.

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Not so. Every pro-or-anti-MA-system post boils down to "I like it" or "I don't like it" but that doesn't make them all worthless.

Scenario A...B...C:

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I don't think those scenarios are particularly applicable to this conversation.

 

[Carrnage]

Not so. Every pro-or-anti-MA-system post boils down to "I like it" or "I don't like it" but that doesn't make them all worthless.

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So how does pointing out how combinatorial systems have exponential QA costs pertain to liking or not liking?

 

[Jon Chung]

I really don't think the sharability of martial arts is as big a balance challenge as it's being made out to be. If it was, we'd see more otherwise-fair Styles rendered broken through combinatorics.

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The classic example is Joy in Adversity Stance on a double-persistent Solar in 1E. Sidereals couldn't do that efficiently (ignoring, for the moment, the broken bit with Serenity Castes and their anima power) because they were built around tiny little mote pools and high commitment costs, which meant that for them to put up Blade of the Battle Maiden, Defense of Shining Joy, Perfection of the Visionary Warrior and a Martial Arts Form left them with a pool small enough that it can be overwhelmed by sheer volume even if they had a 3m automatic parry in Impeding the Flow and [Essence] motes back on every successful rolled defense.

A Solar stacks Flow Like Blood and Fivefold Bulwark Stance for cheaper, and has a big enough mote pool that the commitment isn't a problem to start with, which gave them insane efficiency when Joy in Adversity is used in conjunction with their Power Combat soak-based defenses. The result was something approaching the defensive immortality of a TER. Something that was arguably workable if used only in its native context (its own fat splat, Sidereals) flat out didn't work outside the context (Solars using CMA with Solar Charms).

Can we agree that this is not ideal? I think in this context, Joy in Adversity Stance should have been a Sidereal Charm. It would free RSB from having to worry about testing Solars using Violet Bier of Sorrows Charms and free everyone else of the negative effect of Solars using Violet Bier of Sorrows Charms because she didn't actually do that testing.

Water Dragon Style and 2E Lunars is another good example, where Instinctive Dexterity Unity and Water Dragon Form cap out the Lunar Fury dice adder limit as a scenelong effect (which Lunars are not supposed to be able to do) and Bottomless Depths Defense is remarkably spammable on someone who can regenerate aggravated damage.

Not so. Every pro-or-anti-MA-system post boils down to "I like it" or "I don't like it" but that doesn't make them all worthless.

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"I don't like it because [reasons]" and "I like it" are not the same kind of thing.

I don't think those scenarios are particularly applicable to this conversation.

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Really? I keep seeing A.

 

[Imrix]

The classic example is Joy in Adversity Stance on a double-persistent Solar in 1E. Sidereals couldn't do that efficiently (ignoring, for the moment, the broken bit with Serenity Castes and their anima power) because they were built around tiny little mote pools and high commitment costs, which meant that for them to put up Blade of the Battle Maiden, Defense of Shining Joy, Perfection of the Visionary Warrior and a Martial Arts Form left them with a pool small enough that it can be overwhelmed by sheer volume even if they had a 3m automatic parry in Impeding the Flow and [Essence] motes back on every successful rolled defense.

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Wasn't there an infamous immortality build involving Laughing Wounds Style, a hearthstone to ignore Bashing damage, and I think some Infernal Charmtech to downgrade all damage to Bashing?

 

[Jon Chung]

Wasn't there an infamous immortality build involving Laughing Wounds Style, a hearthstone to ignore Bashing damage, and I think some Infernal Charmtech to downgrade all damage to Bashing?

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Yes. Didn't even need to be an Infernal, the hearthstone effect and the style itself was enough.

I'm willing to bet beer money that the author of the style didn't know that hearthstone existed when he wrote it and didn't bother looking. This is gonna keep happening (we all know it will), because nobody does testing. So we should try to keep this in mind when attempting to ensure our stay in combinatorial hell is at a survivable temperature.

 

[azoicennead]

That's not what he was saying in the post you quoted.

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Actually... Yeah, it is.
I just left out "and people like it".
I mean, I cut the quote poorly to show that, but:

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,

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The audience has historically liked the current implementation - or, as I worded it, "this is how we've always done it [and people like it]"

so... It's not bad design.

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And here we have the "and it's not bad" part.

 

[Sanctaphrax]

The Insatiable Slave Stamina + Gem of Adamant Skin combo, of course, would work just the same if ISS was a native Charm.

So how does pointing out how combinatorial systems have exponential QA costs pertain to liking or not liking?

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Let's be real here, the QA cost isn't actually increasing much. If they "need" more testing, nobody cares, they're not doing it. It'd be more honest to say that combinatorial systes have more balance problems than to say they cost more to do QA work on.

Anyway, it's the next bit that's about not liking. The part where they say they dislike paying the price of those problems for the things they get.

The classic example is Joy in Adversity Stance on a double-persistent Solar in 1E. Sidereals couldn't do that efficiently (ignoring, for the moment, the broken bit with Serenity Castes and their anima power) because they were built around tiny little mote pools and high commitment costs, which meant that for them to put up Blade of the Battle Maiden, Defense of Shining Joy, Perfection of the Visionary Warrior and a Martial Arts Form left them with a pool small enough that it can be overwhelmed by sheer volume even if they had a 3m automatic parry in Impeding the Flow and [Essence] motes back on every successful rolled defense.

A Solar stacks Flow Like Blood and Fivefold Bulwark Stance for cheaper, and has a big enough mote pool that the commitment isn't a problem to start with, which gave them insane efficiency when used in conjunction with their Power Combat soak-based defenses. The result was something approaching the defensive immortality of a TER. Something that was arguably workable if used only in its native context (its own fat splat, Sidereals) flat out didn't work outside the context (Solars using CMA with Solar Charms).

Can we agree that this is not ideal?

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Sure.

I'm not saying combinatorial problems never show up. Just that they're not the terrible scourge you make them out to be. Most of Exalted's degeneracy requires no combinatorial nonsense at all.

"I don't like it because [reasons]" and "I like it" are not the same kind of thing.

...

Really? I keep seeing A.

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I'm seeing reasons on both sides. You quoted some of Omicron's, so I know you saw them too.

 

[Jon Chung]

The Insatiable Slave Stamina + Gem of Adamant Skin combo, of course, would work just the same if ISS was a native Charm.

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And if hearthstones didn't have arbitrary Charmlike powers, it would not have shown up, eh?

Sure.

I'm not saying combinatorial problems never show up. Just that they're not the terrible scourge you make them out to be. Most of Exalted's degeneracy requires no combinatorial nonsense at all.

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If we are attempting to reduce degeneracy, cutting charmshare removes a) either a whole lot of work if you're testing properly or b) the inevitable problems that will occur if you don't. This seems like an entirely reasonable and straightforward statement. What do we gain from it which is worth the cost to us of either a whole lot of work to prevent degeneracy or inevitable degeneracy?

I'm seeing reasons on both sides. You quoted some of Omicron's, so I know you saw them too.

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All of his reasons address things that are not charmshare. I'm sure you've noticed that I'm talking about charmshare specifically, right? Like, the other half of my argument is that you can get cool kung fu aesthetics and shit in your game without using charmshare.

 

[horngeek]

Actually... Yeah, it is.
I just left out "and people like it".
I mean, I cut the quote poorly to show that, but:

The audience has historically liked the current implementation - or, as I worded it, "this is how we've always done it [and people like it]"

And here we have the "and it's not bad" part.

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He didn't give 'this is how we've always done it' as the reason on its own, which is what your post effectively implied. Omicron's actual point was that if a significant proportion of your playerbase like a system, maybe you shouldn't go throwing it out wholesale, hmm?

 

[Sanctaphrax]

And if hearthstones didn't have arbitrary Charmlike powers, it would not have shown up, eh?

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I think we all agree about the problems with hearthstones. It's a separate issue from charmshare, though.

Really, the hearthstone issue is like charmshare without the benefits.

If we are attempting to reduce degeneracy, cutting charmshare removes a) either a whole lot of work if you're testing properly or b) the inevitable problems that will occur if you don't. This seems like an entirely reasonable and straightforward statement. What do we gain from it which is worth the cost to us of either a whole lot of work to prevent degeneracy or inevitable degeneracy?

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Degeneracy is too strong a word, I think. None of Ex3's problems reach a level I'd be prepared to call degenerate, except for Craft, and Craft doesn't even have charmshare.

Anyway, what we gain are the MA styles themselves. Putting substantial mechanical weight behind your choice of fighting style makes that choice more interesting and more exciting. Writing out trees of fighting-style-specific Charms for each splat would be even more problematic and work-intensive than the general MA trees.

The mechanical importance of MA styles emphasizes the setting importance of MA styles, and gives players strong reason to care about sifus and schools and such. These setting elements, in addition to just being good in themselves, let different splats meet in a way that's actually pretty unusual for Exalted.

And they're pretty handy for statting up NPCs.

Also they're fun to read and boon for homebrewers, but that's secondary.

All of his reasons address things that are not charmshare. I'm sure you've noticed that I'm talking about charmshare specifically, right?

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I think you may want to read his post again.

 

[Carrnage]

Let's be real here, the QA cost isn't actually increasing much. If they "need" more testing, nobody cares, they're not doing it. It'd be more honest to say that combinatorial systes have more balance problems than to say they cost more to do QA work on.

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I don't think you understand. Charms have to be checked for how they combo with other charms, with with every charm that can be used cross splat you multiply the amount of combos you have to check in every splat.

with non sharing charms you only have to check within a single splat.

 

[Jon Chung]

I think we all agree about the problems with hearthstones. It's a separate issue from charmshare, though.

Really, the hearthstone issue is like charmshare without the benefits.

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Kek.

Degeneracy is too strong a word, I think. None of Ex3's problems reach a level I'd be prepared to call degenerate, except for Craft, and Craft doesn't even have charmshare.

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I haven't even read 3E, it's got no pull with me. Ignoring this for the moment, since I am not talking about 3E specifically but Exalted-in-general.

Anyway, what we gain are the MA styles themselves. Putting substantial mechanical weight behind your choice of fighting style makes that choice more interesting and more exciting. Writing out trees of fighting-style-specific Charms for each splat would be even more problematic and work-intensive than the general MA trees.

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Let's break this up again.

a) Putting substantial mechanical weight behind your choice of fighting style makes that choice more interesting and more exciting.

In what way does this require charmshare?

b) Writing out trees of fighting-style-specific Charms for each splat would be even more problematic and work-intensive than the general MA trees.

What support do you have for this assertion? Like, each Ability-based splat already has four fighting-style-specific charm trees in their Archery, Thrown, Brawl and Melee sets, yeah?

Let's say we remove the four Solar Ability combat trees and replace them with four MA-like trees (complete with Form Charms) we'll call Single Point Shining in the Void Style (mostly Melee, iaijutsu theme), Silent Mist on Water Style (mostly Thrown, ninja theme), Boundless Radiant Judgement Style (mostly Archery, divine archer theme) and Irrepressible Champion Style (mostly Brawl, Greek hero theme). In expansion material, we add Iron Whirlwind Style (mostly Melee, spam-attacker theme) and Righteous Devil Style (mostly short-ranged Archery with a little Melee, gunslinger theme).

Here we have fighting-style thematically specific Charms tied to the Solar splat, definitionally without charmshare, and each tree can be balanced only against Solar Charms, saving us all that tedious work of having to check whether our shit breaks when we use any of them on a Lunar (or Infernal, or DB, or etc etc).

c) The mechanical importance of MA styles emphasizes the setting importance of MA styles, and gives players strong reason to care about sifus and schools and such. These setting elements, in addition to just being good in themselves, let different splats meet in a way that's actually pretty unusual for Exalted.

Given that a) and b) can be satisfied without charmshare and this is the only thing that requires it, does this justify all of charmshare's headaches all by itself?

d) And they're pretty handy for statting up NPCs.

Only if they're balanced, otherwise you don't know what will happen when you run your NPCs.

I think you may want to read his post again.

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/shrug

 

[azoicennead]

He didn't give 'this is how we've always done it' as the reason on its own, which is what your post effectively implied. Omicron's actual point was that if a significant proportion of your playerbase like a system, maybe you shouldn't go throwing it out wholesale, hmm?

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Why?
Because people like it? Several people have decried that as a defense - and disliking it as a criticism. You have no idea if people would like the current system more than the proposed systems.
Because it's how it's always been done? Well, sure, it might not be broken, but if there's room to do better... Why not do that?

Plus, how the hell are you supposed to improve things without changing them?

 

[Sanctaphrax]

I don't think you understand. Charms have to be checked for how they combo with other charms, with with every charm that can be used cross splat you multiply the amount of combos you have to check in every splat.

with non sharing charms you only have to check within a single splat.

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You might want to reread the text you quoted. I literally said that combinatorial systems (okay, systes, I can't spel) will have more balance problems for the exact reason that they interact with so many things.

I just think that describing this as a factor increasing QA costs is wrong when QA costs are almost fixed. If the game "needs" more than it's getting, tough, it's not getting more.

I haven't even read 3E, it's got no pull with me. Ignoring this for the moment, since I am not talking about 3E specifically but Exalted-in-general.

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If you haven't read it, then you may just have to trust me when I say that it has Charmshare without outright degeneracy.

Wouldn't go so far as to call it well-balanced, though.

Let's break this up again.

a) Putting substantial mechanical weight behind your choice of fighting style makes that choice more interesting and more exciting.

In what way does this require charmshare?

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See b).

b) Writing out trees of fighting-style-specific Charms for each splat would be even more problematic and work-intensive than the general MA trees.

What support do you have for this assertion? Like, each Ability-based splat already has four fighting-style-specific charm trees in their Archery, Thrown, Brawl and Melee sets, yeah?

Let's say we remove the four Solar Ability combat trees and replace them with four MA-like trees (complete with Form Charms) we'll call Single Point Shining in the Void Style (mostly Melee, iaijutsu theme), Silent Mist on Water Style (mostly Thrown, ninja theme), Boundless Radiant Judgement Style (mostly Archery, divine archer theme) and Irrepressible Champion Style (mostly Brawl, Greek hero theme). In expansion material, we add Iron Whirlwind Style (mostly Melee, spam-attacker theme) and Righteous Devil Style (mostly short-ranged Archery with a little Melee, gunslinger theme).

Here we have fighting-style thematically specific Charms tied to the Solar splat, definitionally without charmshare, and each tree can be balanced only against Solar Charms, saving us all that tedious work of having to check whether our shit breaks when we use any of them on a Lunar (or Infernal, or DB, or etc etc).

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So, you do that. Then you do the same for Lunars, Sidereals, Terrestrials, Infernals, Abyssals, Alchemicals, and Fair Folk. You've written 48 styles, and each character can choose between 6.

If you wrote 3 splat-specific styles per splat, and made the rest MA-like, each character could choose between 27.

 

[azoicennead]

I just think that describing this as a factor increasing QA costs is wrong when QA costs are almost fixed. If the game "needs" more than it's getting, tough, it's not getting more.

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So... You're saying that charmshare making the lack of QA a worse problem shouldn't be a point to mention?
Do you not worry about going further in debt because you'll still be paying the same amount off at a time?

 

[Jon Chung]

So, you do that. Then you do the same for Lunars, Sidereals, Terrestrials, Infernals, Abyssals, Alchemicals, and Fair Folk. You've written 48 styles, and each character can choose between 6.

If you wrote 3 splat-specific styles per splat, and made the rest MA-like, each character could choose between 27.

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And each style I write for cross-splat needs as much work (if I don't want any degeneracy) as writing one style for each splat I'm checking against for degeneracy. Like, say I write that Iron Whirlwind Style. I do one balance pass, for Solar Charms, and call it a day.

How much work does it take me to make that one style balanced, viable and non-breaking for Abyssals, Infernals, Sidereals, Lunars, Dragon-Blooded, Alchemicals, spirits, raksha and first-circle demons on top?

Enough work that if I don't do that, I can use the saved resources to make specifically Abyssal-themed, Sidereal-themed and DB-themed styles, perhaps? Superior ones, too, since I don't have to give a single fuck about other splats when I'm designing them. Sounds good to me.