So, I went and looked at the Multiple Opponents rules, and I feel like you should be able to stunt your way out of that, instead of needing a paranoia combo? I mean, the actual wording is that one of your opponents gets the benefits of an unexpected attack the character has no room to maneuver. It explicitly points out that this could be because of being ganged up on or because of the terrain, and earlier says that someone between two tyrant lizards would be just as fully clustered as someone surrounded by five human-sized opponents. So opponents would be able to gain the benefits of an unexpected attack not just by having a bunch of mooks surrounding you, but also by two large opponents circling you or attacking you while you're dangling from a rope at the edge of a cliff. Also, it says that a character pressed in by a cluster has no room to maneuver (the condition to acquire the benefits of an unexpected attack) and a -2 to Dodge DV, unless they use a Charm or stunt to evade without giving ground.
All told, this says to me that you should be able to negate the "unable to maneuver" malus with an appropriate stunt; it seems perfectly logical to me that someone hanging from a rope should be able to kick off against the cliff and swing out of the way of an attack, and someone trapped between two Tyrant Lizards should be able to say they feel the hot breath of the one behind them wafting over them as it lunges forward to devour them, and throws themselves backwards to duck beneath its jaws, using its own immense form as temporary shelter; so I don't see why it should be impossible for an Exalt to also be able to leap into the air just as his enemies attack, their weapons clashing against each other harmlessly just beneath his feet. After all, the "unexpected attack" isn't actually an unexpected attack, it just "gains the benefits" of such; the player of the trapped character is the one who chooses which opponent they expose their back to, so they should logically still know that opponent is there, they just can't defend against them conventionally.
Yes, and the
effects of an unexpected attack are that you don't get your DVs and your perfect defenses cannot be invoked. If you want to try and quibble over this extremely questionable interpretation of the rules in order to argue that you may not need the P-combo to defend against being surrounded, okay, for the purposes of this argument let's say you don't, even if I think this is a pretty long stretch. I'm doing this in order to illustrate a point.
Here's an example of what I mean when I say the lethality of Exalted 2 is ludicrous. You are Solar Bob, who doesn't want to die. There are Dragon-Blooded trying to kill you, because according to their religion you are an existential threat to the world, worse than an
actual demon.
Dragon-Blooded Steve rolls for Re-Establish Surprise, succeeds, then swings at you with his jade grand daiklave boosted by his Melee Excellency. This does 14L Piercing base damage and requires a base strength of 3 to use, so if he touches you with a 1 success hit you take 18L Piercing damage. Superheavy plate is 12/12 soak. If you have 1 lethal soak from Stamina, you have 7 lethal soak against 18 damage and actually eat 11 dice of damage, averaging to 4.5 health levels. You are now in -2 and one more strike will outright kill you. If he gets a little bit lucky on that damage roll, you are now gibbed or in -4. If he rolls his full pool of up to 23-ish dice against 0 DV because this is a surprise attack, you will take 23 dice of damage and will absolutely be gibbed in one hit. Do you, Solar Bob, pop Reflex Sidestep Technique to make it not unexpected? Well, let's say you do.
Paranoia combo status: 1/3 complete - surprise negator.
However, your Reflex Sidestep Technique is not in a combo. Now you don't have a charm activation to use to raise your DV or otherwise avoid the attack, so he's probably going to hit you anyway since he's using an Excellency and you've used up your charm activation, with the aforementioned terrible consequences. You're screwed, right? How do you avoid this? Well, we could use a perfect soak strategy instead of a perfect dodge strategy, because perfect soaks don't have the requirement that the attack is not unexpected to be invoked, so skip Reflex Sidestep and just use Adamant Skin Technique.
However, attacks can kill us even if they deal no damage, such as if Dragon-Blooded Steve was Immaculate Wood Dragon Monk Steve with Soul Mastery, his touch is a oneshot, so that's an ineffective approach. Steve could also have coated his weapon with contact poison because Wood DBs are immune to plant toxins and/or he could be a grappler so if he touches us we're screwed, etc etc - therefore we've got to actually
not be hit. In order to do that, we need to have Reflex Sidestep Technique in a combo with whatever we use in order to
not be hit. Immediately, we note that the only two options available to us are spending ten motes on a Dodge Excellency to increase our dicepool by 10, or spending three motes on Seven Shadow Evasion to perfectly dodge the attack. Which one we use at this point should be pretty obvious, so let's throw that into our growing combo.
Paranoia combo status: 2/3 complete - surprise negator, perfect defense.
So, we can now avoid being instantly defeated, because no attack can hit us until we're out of motes, and we need to be hit in order to lose. How to defeat us? Make us run out of motes really fast. Dragon-Blooded Bob can use Ringing Anvil Onslaught and throw a lot of Grand Daiklave swings at us, making us spend a lot of motes because we need to perfectly avoid each individual hit, while he is spending not a lot. Doing this lets Bob burn a bit of his HP in order to make us use up a lot of ours, which his friends can exploit, so we don't want that to happen. The best way to defend against a flurry is to not be there, so let's throw Leaping Dodge Technique in so that we can perfect dodge the first attack and then jump away, spending a maximum of 6 motes instead of 3 motes * number of incoming attacks.
Paranoia combo status: 3/3 complete - surprise negator, perfect defense, flurry breaker.
Oh, and we want to kill Dragon-Blooded Steve, because otherwise we'll lose anyway because we'll just run out of motes constantly defending with no way to hit him back, so let's throw in our own offensive Excellency. We can spend 20 motes at the start of the fight and then invoke it for free from then on with Infinite Ability Mastery, but only if we
can actually invoke the Charm, so it's got to be in a Combo or we can't do this and defend at the same time.
Paranoia combo status: 3/3 complete + offense - surprise negator, perfect defense, flurry breaker, excellency.
From where we're standing now, what happens to poor Bob if you remove any of the components of the combo?
a) No surprise negator: well, Bob's dead, he got cut in half.
b) No perfect defense: that DB Excellency has a cap only 2 dice below Bob's, so he's gonna get hit around 40% of the time, and if he loses half his health every time he gets touched by Steve's sword, that's not a working strategy.
c) No flurry breaker: Bob loses 18+ motes per action.
d) No excellency: Bob can't effectively attack, and therefore is inevitably doomed.
Okay, so, every Exalted combatant needs a paranoia combo to not die... what happens if every combatant has a paranoia combo? Well, combat sucks to play now, right? Not much fun? Big swathes of your combat charmset being totally unusable, stuff like that?
Note: For combat characters looking for optimality, you want that perfect soak anyway so you can use your DV against stuff that doesn't end you upon just a touch, soaking only the hits that get through. This gives you the 2/7 filter, the advanced paranoia combo. It's not required like the base paranoia combo is, just helpful.
