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General Exalted Thread

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azoicennead said:
There's a difference between cherry-picking the good bits from the books and denying that something is there.
The NPCs in the core books were written using charms from the core books, which seems like pretty clear evidence that the charms in the books aren't solely meant for PC use.
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So, do you have any evidence - aside from your dislike of the NPC write ups - that they weren't following the intended design of the system?
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The fact that some of them have Charms they don't actually qualify for?
 
I think the inportant point is to acknowledge that since the writers themselves couldn't stick to the idea that charms are pc only that it's silly to think that players basing how the game works off of what was written would.
 
Forgive me if I got this wrong, but aren't Exaltations by their very nature indestructible, irreducible, and unalterable?

If so, why did the Wyld fuck up the Lunars so bad?
 
Accelerator said:
Forgive me if I got this wrong, but aren't Exaltations by their very nature indestructible, irreducible, and unalterable?

If so, why did the Wyld fuck up the Lunars so bad?
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You've got it wrong.

They're indestructible and irreducible.

They are manifestly not unalterable, or Abyssals and Infernals would not be Things.
 
Accelerator said:
.... that seems like a design flaw.
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You kind of have to catch the fucking things first, and the one time anybody ever managed to do that was part of the Usurpation, which shall never be replicated.

Also, it was literally all of the surviving Sidereals of the First Age doing it.

But yes, it's a design flaw inasmuch as not being totally immune to absolutely everything ever is one.
 
Quick question:

When a Sidereal dons a Resplendent Destiny, do other Sidereals still see him as himself, or do they also see the alternate identity?

By this I split it into two types:

1) Do the Sidereal's Circle Mates or co-workers who know he's about to don a RD in advance still know its him after he wears it, and 2) would Sidereals who don't know him (for example, a Ronin Sidereal who just happens to have bumped into him) see the RD or the Sidereal's true identity?

EDIT: My reason for asking is because I assume a Sidereal would notice the real identity, but its just not mentioned anywhere.
 
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I have to point out that the 'add to Exaltations' thing was a late 2e addition that while a lot of people liked, still was stapled on the heels of the 'Redeem Abyssal How-To' that the Errata offered us. Or, tl;dr: Holden and Hatewheel cannot into Nuance.

Even more tl;dr: this 'improve Exaltations' dodge is the bad end of 2e where we tried to over-explain everything, leading to the bad beginning of 3e where 'it's magic, make shit up!' is the default approach.
 
Shyft said:
I have to point out that the 'add to Exaltations' thing was a late 2e addition that while a lot of people liked, still was stapled on the heels of the 'Redeem Abyssal How-To' that the Errata offered us. Or, tl;dr: Holden and Hatewheel cannot into Nuance.

Even more tl;dr: this 'improve Exaltations' dodge is the bad end of 2e where we tried to over-explain everything, leading to the bad beginning of 3e where 'it's magic, make shit up!' is the default approach.
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No, actually, I'm pretty sure the idea that the Great Curse is a tainted blessing, the Neverborn saying "You would kill us for our power? Then take it. Take it and may it bring you to the same fate it brought us and may you choke on it" was basically me, trying to change things to get rid of the ultra-bad Ink Monkeys idea that they always had Limit and it only worked because there was a weak spot there.

No, I argued, the Great Curse was the most terrible and subtle of things - a poisoned blessing, that gave things like the Solar capacity to cap-break Essence at the small, small cost of madness and entropy and fortified the mind even as it made it degrade. And the worst aspects of the Curse were not because of it twisting the Exalted - it was the Exalted twisting themselves, accepting the tainted power through their own choice and damning the consequences. And themselves.
 
EarthScorpion said:
No, actually, I'm pretty sure the idea that the Great Curse is a tainted blessing, the Neverborn saying "You would kill us for our power? Then take it. Take it and may it bring you to the same fate it brought us and may you choke on it" was basically me, trying to change things to get rid of the ultra-bad Ink Monkeys idea that they always had Limit and it only worked because there was a weak spot there.

No, I argued, the Great Curse was the most terrible and subtle of things - a poisoned blessing, that gave things like the Solar capacity to cap-break Essence at the small, small cost of madness and entropy and fortified the mind even as it made it degrade. And the worst aspects of the Curse were not because of it twisting the Exalted - it was the Exalted twisting themselves, accepting the tainted power through their own choice and damning the consequences. And themselves.
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I stand corrected in the specifics- either way, it bore noting.
 
Dark Lord Bob said:
@Jon Chung iirc you've got a quote from Jenna Moran about how the Sid charms are not meant to be used for NPCs?
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Yeah, here: rpg.net link. Basically, she didn't develop the set for PvP, so it breaks when NPCs use it and you give them half a brain. If you want to use the original 1E Sidereal Charmset, you also need to use it in the context in which it was developed, which assumes that the GM is fudging hard and will never use the hilariously broken shit in the really obvious ways it can be used.

If you don't, shit breaks, because using hilariously broken shit in really obvious ways produces really obvious results. The Creation Slaying Oblivion Kick is just the most obvious of the obvious, so to speak. Ha ha ha ha ha.

For anyone who doesn't want to bother with a click, text below:

CHUNG: Hmm. Okay, picture a game in which the game contract includes the clause "the enemy will use all their tools as effectively as if they were also PCs, in service of their own predefined motivations, goals and personalities, rather than acting for the good of a plot". Shun the Smiling Lady doesn't work in this environment, even though the game contract explicitly allows its use! Or rather, it works entirely too well.

MORAN: That's an interesting game contract. It's not what the outline for Sidereals 1e told me to support, and would probably have made reconciling "a good set of PC tools" with "a good set of tools for mysterious fate ninja viziers" exponentially more difficult. I'd recommend adjusting the mechanisms for acquiring those tools accordingly, probably in some fashion that reinjects fate ninja mystery.

This thread is also full of lulz, for anyone who hasn't gotten their daily quota yet.
 
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Jon Chung said:
Yeah, here: rpg.net link. Basically, she didn't develop the set for PvP, so it breaks when NPCs use it and you give them half a brain. If you want to use the original 1E Sidereal Charmset, you also need to use it in the context in which it was developed, which assumes that the GM is fudging hard and will never use the hilariously broken shit in the really obvious ways it can be used.

If you don't, shit breaks, because using hilariously broken shit in really obvious ways produces really obvious results. The Creation Slaying Oblivion Kick is just the most obvious of the obvious, so to speak. Ha ha ha ha ha.

For anyone who doesn't want to bother with a click, text below:

CHUNG: Hmm. Okay, picture a game in which the game contract includes the clause "the enemy will use all their tools as effectively as if they were also PCs, in service of their own predefined motivations, goals and personalities, rather than acting for the good of a plot". Shun the Smiling Lady doesn't work in this environment, even though the game contract explicitly allows its use! Or rather, it works entirely too well.

MORAN: That's an interesting game contract. It's not what the outline for Sidereals 1e told me to support, and would probably have made reconciling "a good set of PC tools" with "a good set of tools for mysterious fate ninja viziers" exponentially more difficult. I'd recommend adjusting the mechanisms for acquiring those tools accordingly, probably in some fashion that reinjects fate ninja mystery.

This thread is also full of lulz, for anyone who hasn't gotten their daily quota yet.
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That may apply to 1e Sidereals, but the 1e corebook has things like "Typhon is a Melee specialist - he knows the Abyssal versions of most Melee Charms, as well as the Abyssal equivalents of Dipping Swallow Defense and Iron Kettle Body..." (page 314) and "Charms: All Solar Charms the Storyteller cares to give him..." (page 303, referring to Mask of Winters).
This is further supported by the Caste and Aspect books, as far as I looked, all using charms from the books.

(This is continued in 2e, where all of the effects in the writeups for Abyssals and Solars repeatedly refer to the charms in the book, and all of the effects for Terrestrials corresponded to actual charms in that book.)
 
azoicennead said:
That may apply to 1e Sidereals, but the 1e corebook has things like "Typhon is a Melee specialist - he knows the Abyssal versions of most Melee Charms, as well as the Abyssal equivalents of Dipping Swallow Defense and Iron Kettle Body..." (page 314) and "Charms: All Solar Charms the Storyteller cares to give him..." (page 303, referring to Mask of Winters).
This is further supported by the Caste and Aspect books, as far as I looked, all using charms from the books.

(This is continued in 2e, where all of the effects in the writeups for Abyssals and Solars repeatedly refer to the charms in the book, and all of the effects for Terrestrials corresponded to actual charms in that book.)
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Sure. It's obviously ideal for the GM to be able to refer to effects that he already has in his books as opposed to having to make them up on the fly, because at that point he has no reason to give White Wolf any money and he might as well write his own game, yeah? Kek.

The problem with this is, though, is that it was extremely likely that any given writer doing the writeups had no idea what the actual effectiveness of anything they put down on the sheet is and the stat blocks ended up worse than useless. Like, take the 2E Mask of Invincible Illiteracy writeup, as an example. Did that help anybody?
 
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Jon Chung said:
The problem with this is, though, is that it was extremely likely that any given writer doing the writeups had no idea what the actual effectiveness of anything they put down on the sheet is and the stat blocks ended up worse than useless. Like, take the 2E Mask of Invincible Illiteracy writeup, as an example. Did that help anybody?
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Well, it gave many of us some amusement at the fact that he couldn't read and produced some funny fan-art of him using his Abyssals to read things for him. Arguably, that's at least a little helpful.
 
Jon Chung said:
Sure. It's obviously ideal for the GM to be able to refer to effects that he already has in his books as opposed to having to make them up on the fly, because at that point he has no reason to give White Wolf any money and he might as well write his own game, yeah? Kek.

The problem with this is, though, is that it was extremely likely that any given writer doing the writeups had no idea what the actual effectiveness of anything they put down on the sheet is and the stat blocks ended up worse than useless. Like, take the 2E Mask of Invincible Illiteracy writeup, as an example. Did that help anybody?
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Regardless of the quality, that's what's in the books. If you want to go down the rabbit hole of arguing that the core rule book of a system doesn't follow or demonstrate the intent of the system, feel free, but I'm not going to be following you.
 
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