Surprisingly simple escape condition for a 2CD. How well known is she?
General Exalted Thread
She doesn't want to be used, though. Sometimes happenstance means that she falls through a hole in Hell while in flight and into the hands of a mortal, but passing to one who would use her to kill and maim is not something she desires. Hence, she doesn't willingly escape.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Hmm.... Well Exalted (both the beings and the game) definitely needed an effect like this.
The main thing that jumps out at me is the use of integer-speed instead of something else. It seems prone to unreasonable fiddlyness, but we'll come back to that later. First, I wanted to establish some base assumptions for my review of the charm.
- I do not fully grok your project rules save that they divide projects into intervals. I know you haven't fully written them yet, so I'm just saying I don't know where your assumptions lie.
- As of 2e, the only action that I know of that can be 'done faster' with more labor is manse construction, where it establishes it takes 100 mortal laborers to make 1 year's worth of progress. 200 people can do it in half the time, etc. What isn't clear is if this is a linear scale (100-200-300) or a multiplicative one (100-200-400-800).
- Supernatural Labor is abstracted similarly to how Mass Combat handles magnitude, where a mortal extra = 1, a supernatural being like a demon or a blood ape counts as 3, and specialized demons like hopping puppeteers count as 7+.
As per the aborted skeleton of a dramatic action system, StW is the 'queue jumper' or 'clear the table' charm. It's the charm you use to break ground faster, to cut through red tape and get something started. It attempted to articulate this clumsily with a 'Begin Project' Action with a deliberately variable interval. The genius of StW is that it divides the time the project will take to begin by the Solar's Essence - or set it to a single interval of one season, whichever is shorter.
That second clause is important because it means that arbitrarily long 'wait times' for projects are now forced into practical, on-camera timescales.
Now to the actual charm. As I'm reading it, you're basically creating a magical/semi-concurrent shift change. If a project takes 10 people, every 10 people divides the time by [Labor/10]. That... works, but I feel like it could be worded more elegantly or a different kind of formula could be used. I definitely agree that Labor is what you want to focus on though- Solars are top-down leaders with vision and can see it through.
You also point out the penalty negation for lack of space and you are actually explicitly allowing more hands than possible to work on a given task. Reasonable.
I very much approve of the 'five hours a week' clause as part of Solar/Exalted design language.
The last paragraph describes 'qualified labor', and you could easily summarize that as 'each additional labor force guided by this Charm must satisfy all relevant minimums.'
And the last clause of 'supernatural labor at cost of becoming Obvious' is a good rider.
Overall a good charm and one I'd not say to- though I again think the integer formula could be phrased more elegantly.
Really late reply: I made an attempt, but I eventually gave up the attempt as a bit crazy-making. There are... issues, particularly once Clashes enter the picture.
Example the First: Ambiguous Timing
Alice attacks Bob. Bob replies with a counterattack from Crane Style. You will need to make up explicit timing rules for when that counterattack resolves. You cannot, however, refer to this as the "counterattack step," because there are several other places during attack resolution when other counterattacks can and do resolve, depending on the Charm; you'll need, instead, multiple steps of the form, "Counterattacks with such-and-such timing resolve here."
Example the Second: Circular Charm Resolution
This one's easier to see with Craft than it is with combat, but exactly the same problem could recur in combat. Consider, for instance, First Movement of the Demiurge (for every three-of-a-kind success, set a die to 10) and Divine Inspiration Technique (for every three successes, roll an extra die). Those pretty clearly trigger off each other, as successes get you more dice get you more three-of-a-kinds get you more 10s get you more successes get you more dice, with no clear termination. Timing rules, then, need steps that read, effectively, "Continue checking for any new Charm triggers until they stop recurring."
This gets worse when you also know Flawless Handiwork Method, which lets those extra 10s from FMotD be rerolled. Normally, you deal with all rerolls before anything else triggers, and then there's a clear order of operations - but FMotD can trigger new rerolls, which presumably require you to reconsider all Charm effects over again from the beginning, including the otherwise-not-revisited reroll step. So sometimes the "look for cascading Charm triggers" step is just that - a single step - and sometimes it spins you back around to an earlier step again.
Example the Third: Timing Conflicts
Alice, Bob, and Charlie all have the same Initiative rating. All three have access to some sort of magical flurry tech which enables making exactly two attacks. Alice makes an attack on Bob, followed by an attack on Charlie. Bob makes an attack on Charlie, followed by an attack on Alice. Charlie makes an attack on Alice, followed by an attack on Bob.
In other words, each person Clashes with the other two, and no attack is unambiguously the "first." Who declares Charms in what order? Who suffers what penalties in what sequence? Can anyone be killed by an attacker, where the attacker kills them by using their second attack, but the attacker was himself killed on his own first attack? Who knows?
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- Location
- Singapore
*shrugs*
Have never understood the combat system. And looking at the post above, probably never will.
Have never understood the combat system. And looking at the post above, probably never will.
~natural language~
Yes, mechanical language and discrete steps can sometimes be stilted (emphasis on can) but they do help in removing ambiguities.
The reason for doing it this way was, at least by my way of thought, to de-complicate things. Essentially, what I'm trying to say is "assign twice as many people as you need, get things going twice as fast. Assign four times as many people as you need, get things going four times as fast".
It's literally born from a comment about Brook's law, and that while it takes one woman nine months to make one baby, "nine women can't make a baby in one month". Which is why Solars can go "fuck you, no, we'll assign eight women to help her get that done and that means they'll get done in a month". That's naturally territory for Solar Charmtech - making organisations work like bad managers think they should intuitively work.
The reason for the integer thing was actually to cut down on argumentation and maths. By keeping it to integer values, it means you can avoid things like "Okay, I need 10k slaves to complete this project, but I have 17k. That means we need to divide the speed by 1.7". It's much more "Okay, do you have more than twice as many people, but less than three times as many people? Then you're going twice as fast". It avoids the need for bookeeping of exactly how many people are involved once you get into major projects.
But yeah, the wording needs polishing.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Reasonable- having looked up Brook's law, it's actually already dripping with charm design space. Not just Solar.
- Charm/magic that eliminates ramp-up time; the period it takes for someone to understand the project. Mechanically it reduces required trait minimums?
- Reduction/elimination of communication overhead- underlings maintain clear lines of communication so the leader (player) has all relevant information from a comprehensible number of sources.
- You already covered the baby/division of labor topic.
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Hmm.
Year <(x5)- Season <(x3)- Month <(x4)- Week <(x7)- Day <(x5)- Five Hours <(x5)- One Hour <(x4)- 15 Minutes.
Yeah, thought so. All the steps there are on the order of x5 ±2, and are thus roughly equivalent in scope. This nicely appeals to my sense of consistency and balance.
Year <(x5)- Season <(x3)- Month <(x4)- Week <(x7)- Day <(x5)- Five Hours <(x5)- One Hour <(x4)- 15 Minutes.
Yeah, thought so. All the steps there are on the order of x5 ±2, and are thus roughly equivalent in scope. This nicely appeals to my sense of consistency and balance.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
IF you want to go up the scale, i always default for 5 years, 25 years, 100 years, 250 years, 500 years.
Why the 250 year period? It notably breaks the trend that Aleph's identified, and even in your own sequence seems to indicate an attenuation in effectiveness. (x4, x2.5, x2.) Is this deliberate, or...?
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- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Because it reminds me of Exalted's focus on 5. It's mostly an aesthetic judgement, not a practical or mathematically reasonable approach. I also think that having an option of 250 segues more neatly into 500, 1000, etc. Not that anything conventional will really meaningfully take 1000 years for a single interval....
Like, I can think of usecases for 1000 year long intervals, especially something like Heavenly affairs or Raksha asshattery; to which at least as far as 'Begin Project' actions, Speed the Wheels laughs at. 1000 intervals for 'Building a Building' are something else... Anyway, that's my admittedly flawed reasoning.
But does this mean you can also use it to rush the maturation of children?
"It takes one family 18 years to raise a child to adulthood."
"Okay, I have 6,570 families. We're making kids spontaneously turn into adult citizens in a single day."
Who would have thought that the famous 'DB breeding camps' actually consisted of only two DBs and a giant camp full of nurses and teachers to raise the kids.
Unfortunately not, no. It's not a single project.
However, "it takes a village to teach a child", so you can probably get an entire village chipping in and have them teach their two year olds to speak like adults after a few months (project to train the toddlers in Linguistics).
Although this does make me consider that Battletech-style Iron Wombs could and should totally be a municipal-scale charm for Alchemicals. Stick DNA from all citizens in, genetically modified 'super' people come out. Raise collectively for best results.
Also I like the idea that some Autochthonian nation has basically Elementals (the supersoldier, not the supernatural critter). I figure guys who have the endurance of marathon runners and the HUGE of NFL linebackers would have some place in Exalted.
I'm down with that. After all, Autochthonia has separate Divine Ministers for "reproductive sex" and "pleasure sex", and the former falls under the Divine Minister responsible for manufacturing. So clearly removing the burden of having to gestate the conceived child from the female workers of Autochthonia and having trained professionals do it rather than these amateurs will only improve the quality of the end product. Plus, it means the women won't lose productivity, and can instead get back to what's important; factory labour.
Gotta get some Brave New Autochthonia up here.
Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
I had the thought today that there is a very appropriate greeting for the Unconquered Sun in the Gunstar Autochthonia shard:
"Fairest and fallen, greetings and defiance."
"Fairest and fallen, greetings and defiance."
Salty
Shadow Cabal Assumptor Supreme
- Location
- Sun, Moon, Talia
- Pronouns
- I/Me
Stolen straight from the Young Wizards.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
Alright @EarthScorpion @Aleph @anyone else who's interested.
I've been working on a Fate Exalted (If you want to talk about how fate is literally cancer, please spoiler it and mark it as such) hack for a bit, and I was wondering if I could get your opinion on something. I'm using the Enlightenment hack, but I'm doing the charms from the ground up. I'm trying to set how powerful each level's charms should be. So far I'm starting with each level giving E+1 shifts as base, but I've been having trouble with what sort of non-shift stuff is appropriate for each level. Please don't say something along the lines of 'just look at what charms can do already,' as I'm trying to avoid referencing preexisting charms as much as possible.
E1: Normal stunts
E2: Genre stuff; improbable balancing, healing easily, fighitng more guys than you should be able to, ect.
E3: Minor supernatural stuff.
E4: ???
E5: ???
E6: Major supernatural stuff; Balance on anything, make artifacts easily (with materials), work without tools.
E7: ???
E8: ???
E9: Extreme supernatural; leap over mountains, parry anything, ect.
E10: Setting altering stuff. Destroy a city, alter a nation, and so on.
So what should be at the other levels? Feel free to recommend that I alter the preexisting benchmarks as part of your response.
@ManusDomine
I think this is part of the problem we ran into last year when doing charm-writing; we didn't adequately define what each Enlightenment level should be capable of doing.
I've been working on a Fate Exalted (If you want to talk about how fate is literally cancer, please spoiler it and mark it as such) hack for a bit, and I was wondering if I could get your opinion on something. I'm using the Enlightenment hack, but I'm doing the charms from the ground up. I'm trying to set how powerful each level's charms should be. So far I'm starting with each level giving E+1 shifts as base, but I've been having trouble with what sort of non-shift stuff is appropriate for each level. Please don't say something along the lines of 'just look at what charms can do already,' as I'm trying to avoid referencing preexisting charms as much as possible.
E1: Normal stunts
E2: Genre stuff; improbable balancing, healing easily, fighitng more guys than you should be able to, ect.
E3: Minor supernatural stuff.
E4: ???
E5: ???
E6: Major supernatural stuff; Balance on anything, make artifacts easily (with materials), work without tools.
E7: ???
E8: ???
E9: Extreme supernatural; leap over mountains, parry anything, ect.
E10: Setting altering stuff. Destroy a city, alter a nation, and so on.
So what should be at the other levels? Feel free to recommend that I alter the preexisting benchmarks as part of your response.
@ManusDomine
I think this is part of the problem we ran into last year when doing charm-writing; we didn't adequately define what each Enlightenment level should be capable of doing.
Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
Well yes, that's the idea my dude. I wasn't trying to say I came up with it, just that it was interestingly appropriate.
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- Location
- Classified
That's Volivat from 3e. Nomads drained an almost entirely underwater First Age city, discovered a process to create children with up to ten fathers, several generations of eugenics later, you get a city-state of supermen that the greatest of which are capable of competing with the sorcerers of Ysyr and Dragonbloods of Prasad.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
When I first read Volivat, my picture of the Children of Ten Fathers was pretty boring. I imagined them as supermen, mortals-beyond-mortals embodying the best traits of all their lineage. Inhumanly athletic and good-looking people with borderline-supernatural skills.
Then someone on the OPP boards said he pictured them as Steven Universe fusions, and I saw the error of my ways.
Volivat: home to Opal and Sardonyx and Alexandrite. Accept no substitute.
Lealope
Not yet invincible
- Pronouns
- She/Her
If you want capabilities to match with Essence, just copy the Nobilis scale for Aspect. Ditch the 10 levels of gradient on the powerstat and instead just have it go up to 7 with each level corresponding to the equivalent level of Aspect.
EDIT: Have a couple of Charms at lower levels than they should be; these would be the protagonism preserving Charms. At E6, have perfect effects for Solars and the ability to add an arbitrary number of successes to certain tasks for Lunars. The second seems overpowered but they don't expand capabilities so it's basically a pseudo-perfect that gets trumped by actual perfects.
Otherwise, Solars shouldn't be able to destroy a city outright without Sorcery. Infernals should only be able to do it through Shintai, if that.
A8 would be out of conventional reach and would represent one-off feats of legend i.e. rumours that Merela choked out a Primordial.
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I kinda get what you mean (no city-killing super slash charm), but an Eclipse should be able to crash a city's economy and render it irrelevant, a Twilight should be able to make a McGuffin to blow it up, and a Dawn should be able to lead an army of Tiger Warriors to kill every man, woman, and child in the city.