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General Exalted Thread

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No, actually, Accelerator has basically gut-reasoned into the fact that these Charms are bad Charms.

Consider this - you, as a Dragonblooded, are spending 10-12 XP on a Charm which doesn't help your character personally at all. Instead, you are spending your XP so that you can spend your motes so that you can given characters with two or three dots in an Ability on average a grand total of one extra success a roll [1]. If their skill is lower or higher than that, it's worth half a success. It's worthless for people with 5 dots in an Ability. That means that if you buy it to help your party and your party increases their skills over time (as they tend to), it literally gets less useful as the game goes on.

It is basically a boring dice trick charm. Boring and not very good, I might add. I can put up with boredom if it was actually effective, but it isn't.

For the same 10-12XP, you could learn to function as a radio set in an Iron Age society with Wind Carried Words, or literally shoot fireballs out of your eyes with Elemental Bolt Attack or turn your sword into lightning (Dragon Graced Weapon). These Charms are way more fun, interesting, and actually make your character more varied and playable. The ability reinforcement charms are laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame both mechanically and from a playability PoV.

Maybe it might be worth it if it was a single Charm purchase that covered every single Ability, but I'd take nearly any five other Aspect Charms over five reinforcement charms.

And for 8-10 XP (less XP than the DB, I must reinforce), a Solar could get Tiger Warrior Training and give a character permanent 4s in a range of Abilities. With no mote cost commitment to sustain it.

[1] If they're a heroic mortal. If they're not, it's only worth 0.8 extra successes per roll. Such wow.
 
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Accelerator said:
Perhaps personal preference?

maybe upon seeing the words: "Bring mortals to greatness", what came to mind was mortal schmucks going from zero dots to five, instead of a doubling?
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Solar exaltation makes you better at the stuff that you were already good at.

That's the entire point.

If a scholar becomes a Solar, he becomes a revolutionary genius. If a speaker becomes a Solar, he can give "I Have a Dream" every time he steps up. If a thief becomes a Solar, he turns into Lupin the Third.

It doesn't make you good at things you don't care about. Why should it?
 
runeblue360 said:
Solar exaltation makes you better at the stuff that you were already good at.

That's the entire point.

If a scholar becomes a Solar, he becomes a revolutionary genius. If a speaker becomes a Solar, he can give "I Have a Dream" every time he steps up. If a thief becomes a Solar, he turns into Lupin the Third.

It doesn't make you good at things you don't care about. Why should it?
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Wait.

I was talking about the dragonblooded Excellency. Not Solars.
EarthScorpion said:
snip
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At last.

Someone agrees with me!
 
Elero said:
Though I don't recall the Terrestrial Training Charms being even remotely worthwhile in E2.
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They're not great.

But they're still more useful than the ability reinforcement charms.

(the solution in use in the Kerisgame hacks is that Dragonblood in particular have a Style focus compared to the generalist Solar Ability focus. So Dragonblooded Training Charms are good at training people in Styles. Realm Legions will pretty much have everyone maxed out in their main job title's Style - and they're very standardised, so everyone in a formation will have been taught the same Style. Legionaries are going to have 8-9 dice in their primary pools, which is terrifying to most armies made up of drafted farm boys given a spear and a few weeks training where the average is more like 4-5. But they can't do what Solar training Charms do, and let you train unenlightened mortals above 3 in an Ability and they're much worse at training people in Abilities generally. When the Exalted host is working together, the best use of the time of everyone is to have the Solar bulk train people up in the Abilities, and then hand them off to the Dragonblooded drill sergeants to train them in their speciality Style)

Accelerator said:
At last.

Someone agrees with me!
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No, I believe what I do because I've looked at what the Charms actually do and comparing what else 10-12 XP would buy you as a DB, rather than doing "gut feels". You could have done the same mechanical examination, and would have had a much more solid case.
 
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Terrestrial Ability Reinforcement is a boring and not amazingly useful charm on its own. You can make it interesting, but you really have to work at it, whereas something like 'I fling lightning from my hands' is much easier to weave into impressive and entertaining stunts.

That said, if one followed the general 3e pattern and made them an automatic bonus ability that any DB who even slightly invested themselves in the ability received, then those boring charms instead become a decent source of options when confronted by basically any problem, as well as an interesting setting statement/incentive to recruit Dragonblooded into your service.

Granted, the actual 3e approach to DB excellencies seems to be that they add less dice, but give the easiest access to rerolls out of all the Exalted. I would like to go into more detail, but unfortunately that's not possible, because we don't actually have the DB book yet. Or any splatbooks, for that matter, even though we're fast closing in on a solid year from the corebook's release date...

*subsides, grumbling*
 
EarthScorpion said:
Consider this - you, as a Dragonblooded, are spending 10-12 XP on a Charm which doesn't help your character personally at all. Instead, you are spending your XP so that you can spend your motes so that you can given characters with two or three dots in an Ability on average a grand total of one extra success a roll. If their skill is lower or higher than that, it's worth half a success. It's worthless for people with 5 dots in an Ability. That means that if you buy it to help your party and your party increases their skills over time (as they tend to), it literally gets less useful as the game goes on.
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I will definitely concede that it gets less useful for your party as you all git gud and branch out from your starting specializations. However, I would say that it still retains some utility.

For one, not everyone will invest up to four or five dots in an Ability that isn't their character focus. Instead, most people tend to dip up to about two or three dots in order to grab the low-hanging charms. That is straight into the perfect range for this charm, so it's still decently useful for bringing everyone up to your level.

Two, you won't always be using this on peers. Part of the intended use is obviously on mortals, where having an extra die or two is much more important. A Dragonblood backed up by a squad of Melee 5 commandos is much more threatening than one with a group of "merely" Melee 3 professional soldiers.

Three, it's still ridiculously mote efficient. At Essence 5 and with the relevant ability at 5 as well, you can boost five people who are only middling at the skill up to your level for a grand total of 6 motes.

So yeah, while I definitely agree with you that it loses usefulness over time and is kind of boring, I also think that it has worth on its own. Also, I think that a lot of its power is crushed by all of the riders on the end of it, which read like the 2e usual "Dragonbloods can't ever do anything as good as 'real' Exalts" bullshit.

I actually feel like one small tweak would give it both much broader power and a much better defined role: changing the maximum number of people it can affect from (Essence) individuals to (Essence/2) Magnitude of people. Leave the cost alone, so you don't have a single guy boosting an entire army, and suddenly you have a much better tool for leading small groups than you did before. Essence 2 starting characters could boost a squad of up to 10 people, while Essence 5 masters could invest a decent chunk of their motes and be leading a scale or two of boosted people.

Edit: I just saw your thoughts on Dragonblooded training charms and I completely agree with you there and find your alternative to be much better and actually really evocative.
 
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Good news! Book delivery inches every closer!

The email I just got said:
Time to get excited: Richard Thomas is one step closer to sending out rewards for backing Deluxe Exalted 3rd Edition.

Here's the address you had in your survey response:

Philippe Saner
19 Julian Ave
Ottawa ON K1Y 0S6
CANADA

If this is the correct address, you're all set.

If this is NOT the correct address, you can fix it right here. Just be sure to make any changes in the next 48 hours!

Amount pledged
$185.00

Reward

Exalted Finding the Path (nonUS): You will receive a copy of the Deluxe Exalted Third Edition, a free copy of the EX3 PDF, you get a beautiful electronic wallpaper file featuring the Five Directions illustrations, and you or your character's name will be listed on the credits page as an Exalted. You will also receive the EX3 Cloth Map of Creation: a 2' x 3' heavy canvas material printed with the amazing fully-painted, full-color new map. This is for backers outside the US.


Estimated delivery
Dec 2013
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I'm not sure about that estimated delivery date, but still, this is encouraging.
 
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It's fine. Anyone who wanted to find that out could do so anyway.

Anyway, follow-up email says the books will be mailed two weeks to a month from now and delivered a few days or weeks after that.
 
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Although the day is almost over, I'd love to hear some fun stories! Have you had romances in your Exalted games, people? Between PCs and NPCs? PCs and PCs? NPCs and NPCs? What have been your favorites, and how do you view romance in the scheme of Exalted?
 
Claudia, the Lambskin Hyena
Demon of the Second Circle
Wisdom Soul of the Street of Golden Lanterns

Beware Claudia, demon lord and patron of witches of Hell whose hunger can never be slaked! Beware Claudia, the hyena who wears the skin of her prey! Beware Claudia, who offers her favour to the foolish and then devours them! Her laughter makes cobblestones shake and her breath makes brass grow over gold. Her irises are the golden light of her greater self, and when she looks on something she sees its worth in the markets of Hell.

In her base form, Claudia has the form of a great spotted hyena the size of a horse, or a wild woman of the South-East bedecked in tattoos that resemble her animalistic coat. When roused to ire she fights with her teeth or with her favoured bone-headed spear - and uses either in both her forms. The Lambskin Hyena favours dabblers in the forbidden arts and those who indulge in vices forbidden by society, and offers them the means to pursue their tastes further. Alas, she comes to own those who accept her gifts.

Once they have given her everything they have for another taste of power, she takes their body as her final payment and eats them up. She spits out their skin, which she tans and wears if when wishes to assume their form. She does this not because of malice, but because as she sees the world knowledge granted freely is worthless. If someone is not prepared to sacrifice or pay for her gifts, they do not truly desire it.

She can grant a petitioner one of her prepared skins, which allow them to assume the form of another. Mortals who would dabble with her and can pay her for the loan of her power received her bite which leaves a prominent scar and from that point on her demon-blood flows in their veins. The payment of an eye or a hand grants even more power, but lets her see what they see and compel actions from them. It is a secret known to few that gods can benefit from her investments, and that there are several mid-ranking figures in the Bureau of Heaven whose tales of maiming injuries from a wicked demon are only technically true.

Demonologists call on Claudia for a taste of her power, or - if they are more cunning - to go to their foes and offer them her gifts instead. Some have taken her as a lover, allured by her hyena-like aspect that she possesses even in human form. Alas, her understanding of the world is one of creditor and debtor, and actions taken with no expectation of repayment whatsoever repulse her, driving her away and giving her Limit. Claudia can escape from Hell when the blood of a lamb and the blood of a hyena pool together on dry earth - as many Southern shepherds have discovered over the years.
 
A quick question before I run away to work, @EarthScorpion.

The Yozis have no truck with the Underworld and the creatures that are of it - quite understandably, seeing their siblings reduced to such a state (and knowing how easily they could have joined them) is repulsive to them.

What, then, do cultists of theirs do if they should die and rise again? What would the Princes(ses) of Hell do about creatures of the Underworld making offerings in their names, and would these ex-worshipers have any particular impression or opinion of their new status beyond whatever their individual cultures of origin prescribe?
 
GardenerBriareus said:
What, then, do cultists of theirs do if they should die and rise again? What would the Princes(ses) of Hell do about creatures of the Underworld making offerings in their names, and would these ex-worshipers have any particular impression or opinion of their new status beyond whatever their individual cultures of origin prescribe?
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Well, I mean, the worshippers are ignorant saps anyway so they'll probably keep on being ignorant saps who happen to be Dead, especially if they have a Fetter related to being a Yozi cult.

The demons, on the other hand, will probably either just keep on accepting the worship and ignoring them otherwise, or possibly try to trick the ghosts into going to Hell so they can capture these free-floating human hun souls and use them for things like "making new humans in Hell" and "using them as crafting ingredients".
 
So. Let's talk downtime.

Recent IRC conversations with @Shyft and @Golden Lark has raised that according to them, my experience of Exalted - and RPGs in general - is basically really atypical in regards to how downtime gets treated. Like, massively so.

I can't think of a single game I've ever played in where "chapters" weren't often separated by days to weeks (and sometimes months) of in-game downtime. Kerisgame of course frequently has long gaps between sessions when Keris spends the time engaging in piracy or doing simple missions that don't need to be rolled. The Dragonblooded game I played in at uni was on a seasonal basis where we'd often have two or three months between sessions when the party would just do their own things as young Dragonblooded running a satrapy. The Alchemical game I ran had as a fundamental idea that the party only got together for big things, so most of the time they had their own jobs before they got together to hunt down a rogue machine god or something. We can look outside Exalted - the Dark Heresy game I ran at uni gave the players plenty of time to heal and carry out investigations between missions, while the SotC game I was in at uni was structured like a TV series so between "episodes" the characters all had their own thing to do. I got started with RPGs with the nWoD, where you can't throw too much at players in a short period because they'll wind up WP-tapped and injured and need weeks of downtime just to recover after a serious fight.

Hell, even get into Quests, and Panopticon Quest has considerable amounts of downtime between acts.

But talking to @Shyft, he's basically never had regular games where downtime is part of the assumed flow of play. And that just seems wrong to me - and more than that, like the GM in question is doing something wrong because how do the PCs have time to heal, regen WP, and get training time done? How do they travel between places without downtime of days? How do they get longer scale actions done?

So at least from my PoV and when I talk about Exalted, I am fundamentally coming from a position that getting days to weeks of downtime is routine, and actions taking seasons to complete is standard once you get some power and influence and start having to do things like "raise an army" or "set up trading routes to Chiaroscuro so you can start importing their glass". When I say "the base unit of time for strategic scale activities is probably a season" and "inventing a new TCS spell from scratch probably requires 4 man-seasons of effort", I am working off the assumption that this means that if you want to invent a new spell from first principles, you won't be able to do it immediately, but it's entirely achievable in normal play because you use your season-scale actions between sessions to get it done.

Likewise, my revamped structure for the Infernals All-Thing where Infernals are high-flying corporate contractors who get assigned an area of operations in Creation and basically have to each year demonstrate that they're putting enough time in - while also taking side-missions from Third Circles and getting their own things done - is based around the idea that a normal Infernals game is going to be a multi-year thing where players will actively seek to use the end-of-year Calibration review to their own best advantage and even as go as far as to do "Oscar Bait" things late in the year so they can win political advantage and favour from the Third Circles at the All-Thing. With multi-player groups, they have plenty of time to go off and do their own thing and get together to do jobs for the All-Thing, the Unquestionable, or their own collective projects. I will go as far as to say the structure doesn't really work optimally unless you're periodically seeing the All-Thing and trying to one-up your rivals by showing off how you set the Realm's Second Fleet on fire or unleashed a pack of giant mutated acid-breathing tyrant lizards in Great Forks.

And yet apparently despite all my experiences, a fair amount of downtime between "episodes" and in the flow of games isn't the baseline. And that confuses me that people manage it, but okay.

Still, regardless, that is the context which must be understood when considering where my changes are coming from. My changes do not take into consideration games where you'll fight twelve different Celestials over the course of a fortnight. I do not balance for hectic, combat-heavy games where characters are constantly getting in life-threatening fights. Even when players start a war, I expect a war to take months of campaigning moving slow armies ten miles a day, where there's plenty of downtime between battles.

Basically, I balance and systemise around the assumption that Exalted should be run more like Total War games than Diablo once you're into regular play. Especially once players have holdings and land and loyal forces, they'll spend time up at the strategic scale, researching sorcery, raising armies, spying on their foes and roaming the land preaching to the peasants. Then when major threats appear, they'll zoom down to the tactical scale and then have a kung-fu brawl against Immaculate monks in a teahouse - and then a few more months will pass as the characters raise their armies to march on the Immaculate monastery and wipe out the Realm's holdings in the area for that affront.
 
For context, nothing that @EarthScorpion is assuming in his typical game flow is wrong; it's all the expected way the game was made to be played.

It's just, in the experience of @Shyft and myself, and the majority of players we know, most STs are as eager to move on with their stories and setpieces as players are to get their next charm.

One other element that differs from the norm is that ES also runs the standard, recommended 4-ish XP per session. This is also an outlier to my own and Shyft's experience; people do not want to wait two sessions to buy a favored charm or three to buy a non-favored charm. Hell, Siddies and Lunars have it even worse, especially when they only get a session every week or two.

Players and STs are always eager to keep up a 'serial TV series' pace of one scenario after another, week after week; even though those very TV shows they are modelling things after usually imply days or weeks downtime between episodes themselves!
 
Most of the games I've played in have been expanded, decompressed 'heel toe' style affairs. A lot of this is down to inexperience with Exalted or assumptions based on other games.

But essentially, we often end one week and pick up immediately where we left off the next week. It's worth noting that all of my exalted experience is via IRC chat, which is VERY SLOW compared to at-table play, which often covers twice as many scenes and/or has a much snappier format. More gets DONE, which relieves the need to buy more Charms to feel like you're Progressing.

Pulling this out specifically though-
EarthScorpion said:
But talking to @Shyft, he's basically never had regular games where downtime is part of the assumed flow of play. And that just seems wrong to me - and more than that, like the GM in question is doing something wrong because how do the PCs have time to heal, regen WP, and get training time done? How do they travel between places without downtime of days? How do they get longer scale actions done?
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The short answer is 'We don't get to do those things'. If you're injured and it wasn't a 'right into next session' sequence, the ST just handwaved healing times. Same for training, crafting and so on. Downtime for most of my game experience was boring, because it wasn't action. For a lot of people it was a toothless tax on their enjoyment.

I played in a lot of games where people did not care about what time said about Creation or the people that lived there. Instead they were focusing on as @Golden Lark said- a more TV serial style approach.

The first crafter I ever played, back in 2007, basically was in a game that told me right after it ended 'Shyft, I don't care enough to let you craft.'

The other thing is this- most games I played were assumed to be ensemble 'On Camera All the Time' affairs. Splitting the party, even off camera was verboten. The 'classic' model of Exalted is actually more like what @EarthScorpion described for his Alchemicals game, which I would call 'Teamup Comic' play.

Basically, Exalted was written with the idea that the PCs would have their own name comic books... and the actual sessions were their regular Avengers teamups as far as pacing goes. Most of my early STs didn't get that, didn't care, or so on.

Also mentioned is that most of those early games were before we learned of the lethality problem in that particular microcosm, and our actual understanding of the game mechanics was less than it was now. So a lot of early games were focused on Celestial v Celestial play because obviously Solars should fight Solaroids, right?

Related to that IRC conversation, I posed the question of how many Wyld Hunts I have encountered in my gaming career out of 12+ games. The answer is one, in my very first game. It killed my character because the ST erred in favor of simulationism instead of player primacy. Plus he already had nerfed my conviction flaw'd PD to Valor, so I physically HAD to rush back into anima flux and die.

The hunt is a core setting conceit that often gets ignored. Same with Limit and Health and Training/Travel Time. You must be aware of this when homebrewing or analyzing Exalted.
 
EarthScorpion said:
...Infernals are high-flying corporate contractors...
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Actually this raises a question; in your version of Exalted, are GSPs actually an original idea of the Demon Princes or has there been precedents in the form of similiar ideas in the past? It seems to me that if they can capture 50 exaltation shards and repurpose them to create highly puissant agents in service of Hell, it can't be more difficult to capture a bunch of high-breeding dynasts and using them to create a line of indoctrinated Dragonblooded (or some new types of Terrestrials based on DBs) servants loyal to the demon lords and princes that raised them?
 
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Alasnuyo said:
Actually this raises a question; in your version of Exalted, are GSPs actually an original idea of the Demon Princes or has there been precedents in the form of similiar ideas in the past? It seems to me that if they can capture 50 exaltation shards and repurpose them to create highly puissant agents in service of Hell, it can't be more difficult to capture a bunch of high-breeding dynasts and using them to create a line of indoctrinated Dragonblooded (or some new types of Terrestrials based on DBs) servants loyal to the demon lords and princes that raised them?
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That runs into the whole issue of 'breeding up your own Terrestrial Legion' and why Solars can't do the same. Also it reduces the Dragonblooded from Exalted into mooks, and that's even worse for what it does and implies for the setting at large. We had enough of that nonsense in 2Ed thank you very much.

More over, from a Doylist perspective, the reason that there hasn't been a concentrated campaign by Hell to get their own Terrestrial Gens is due to there being no real alliance within Hell able to provide the resources to set it up, that by the time a Terrestrial Exalts they probably want very little to do with demons (unless very arrogant/stupid/desperate), trying to raise them from an impressionable age runs into the potential issue of obliterating their chances of Exalting (and just not being very good with children to begin with), sabotage from other factions in Hell and Yu-Shan quietly putting the kibosh on any potential schemes like this.

In contrast, those 50 Solar Exaltations was a once in an eternity stroke of luck that the Yozi and Third Circles took full advantage of.
 
My experience tends to vary, but my experience in Exalted (as both a GM and a player) was that there was lots of down-time between periods of activity; my players may have spent half a dozen sessions exploring a dungeon, but that came after a few in-game months of down-time, and as a player once the first adventure finished we had another several months before we went back out into the world.

My experience in other systems varies more; I'm pretty sure my character in the D&D 4e campaign I was in went from "just another soldier" to "let's make the god-killer our king" in a couple months, but in the last D&D 3.5e game I was in we had nearly a year of travel time (which, admittedly, isn't quite down-time, and my character actually spent the second half of it in a coma when she wasn't spontaneously combusting).

Shyft said:
Related to that IRC conversation, I posed the question of how many Wyld Hunts I have encountered in my gaming career out of 12+ games. The answer is one, in my very first game. It killed my character because the ST erred in favor of simulationism instead of player primacy. Plus he already had nerfed my conviction flaw'd PD to Valor, so I physically HAD to rush back into anima flux and die.
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I actually threw a Wyld Hunt at my players! Despite it being pretty excessive for handling most circles, it actually ended up being nowhere near enough, because in between the reports that an Imperial Legion had fallen under the sway of a circle of Anathema and the Hunt actually arriving, I poked my players into actually interacting with the world, so they had formed an alliance with the Metagalapans (and I think maybe a couple minor states in the Hundred Kingdoms?), recruited a less experienced circle of Solaroids (4 Solars, 1 Abyssal), and allied with an Infernal warlord.

It didn't go well.

Noctum said:
That runs into the whole issue of 'breeding up your own Terrestrial Legion' and why Solars can't do the same. Also it reduces the Dragonblooded from Exalted into mooks, and that's even worse for what it does and implies for the setting at large.
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... The suggestion is basically "Gens Malfeas".
 
Alasnuyo said:
Actually this raises a question; in your version of Exalted, are GSPs actually an original idea of the Demon Princes or has there been precedents in the form of similiar ideas in the past? It seems to me that if they can capture 50 exaltation shards and repurpose them to create highly puissant agents in service of Hell, it can't be more difficult to capture a bunch of high-breeding dynasts and using them to create a line of indoctrinated Dragonblooded (or some new types of Terrestrials based on DBs) servants loyal to the demon lords and princes that raised them?
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Oh, no doubt it's been tried.

But Terrestrials don't breed well in Hell. There's no ambient elemental essence, there's no access to the Well of Souls, and Hell is really not a human-friendly environment - humans can survive there, but mostly by contaminating themselves with demonic things that make them less human and less Exaltation-OK.

So what happens in practice is that you get remote Gens of infernalist Dragonblooded living in Creation and worshipping evil demons from outside of reality. And sacrificing strangers who come to their remote village. And probably inbreeding. And playing banjos.

(and now you have a plot)
 
Rather than trying to get a bunch of high breeding DBs and trying to breed an army in Hell, I suspect a much better way of getting some loyal DB underlings under a GSP is to basically find a small group of DBs and ally with them/corrupt and tempt them with Infernal knowledge and resources. Remember that there's organised groups of DBs beside Lookshy and the Realm.

Find one such group and offer them help with their 'the Realm is moving in' problem, or their 'nearby Solar warlord conquering our lands' problem or even their 'our leader is getting old and she's desperate for ways to extend her life, no matter how despicable' problem. And sure, they won't be completely fanatically loyal to you the same way you might get if you raise them from birth and did everything correct, but they're still useful, you've not invested twenty years or so on a breeding program and OOCly, the DBs maintain their agency as an independent actor, even if they make pacts with the Infernal or some 3CD. Maybe they're planning to betray Hell or telling themselves they're just using one Anathema against another.
 
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