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General Exalted Thread

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On a side note, strictly speaking the sheer alien-ness of Exalted makes it not impossible to run a large civilization without access to the ground. You just imagine a tribe of vine-breeders, who raise strange breeds of mistletoe that draw their strength from the great trees of the East and grow fruit so large that they resemble apples, their poison sapped by generation upon generation of breeding. Or something like that. -- Basically you can still have the advantages of agriculture without strictly speaking being dependent on the ground, just on some source of plant life. Hell, they could probably be tree-grafters instead, clipping branches from one tree onto another to breed consistently edible fruit.

The rest is still pretty dumb though.
 
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Hmm. In fact, now that I think about Lore - and how inadequate most of its Charm tree actually is for Lore-y characters, let's write some more actually-Lore Charms. Possibly for @Aleph and @Shyft's Inksgame.

Information Unveiling Hunch
Cost: 1m; Mins: Lore 1, Essence 1; Type: Simple (Misc action, Speed 5/-2 DV)
Keywords: Combo-OK
Duration: Instant
Prerequisite Charms: None

The first step in learning is finding things to learn from. So say the scholars of the Twilight Caste.

Upon activating this Charm, the Solar names a topic or subject she wishes to learn more about, and spends one mote. The character gets a hunch on a way to acquire the learning they require. This allows the character to bypass dramatic actions to find the location of where to acquire their information.

The Storyteller should inform the player via in-character rumour and their own knowledge. For example, asking about Sondok may produce "There's said to be a renegade Immaculate monk living up in the mountains who clashed with cults who worshipped that demon", while wanting to learn more about local folklore may tell the character "Along the way, you heard a woman shouting at her husband to go fetch her father from that bar where the old drunks hang out". That which the Solar is directed towards may not have the information they require, but they will be able in some way to bring the character closer to their goal; for example, the renegade Immaculate monk may only have partial information, but they may know of a Sondok cult that the character may steal a book of their faith from. Sufficiently abstract or esoteric information usually returns answers like "Well, they may have some records in Hell" or even "Jupiter might know".

Precedent-Perusing Precognition
Cost: 5+m, 1wp; Mins: Lore 3, Essence 2; Type: Simple (Misc action, Speed 5/-2 DV)
Keywords: Combo-OK
Duration: Instant
Prerequisite Charms: Information Unveiling Hunch

The small-minded are doomed to repeat history. The Lawgivers can read them as easily as a book.

The Solar briefly studies the actions of a character or organisation, while the character possesses up-to-date information on them. The character rolls her Wits + Lore. The difficulty for this is half the character or organisation's leader's [Manipulation + an applicable ability of the target's choice]; War might cover a general's plans, while Larceny would conceal the deception of a disguised spy. Success means the Storyteller (or the other player) must provide a one-sentence summary of the short-to-medium term plans of the target. This Charm costs five motes and one willpower to use for the first time, but increases in cost by two motes each time it is used within the same scene.

The Storyteller should convey this information to the player as an in-character tidbit based on source the character has been exposed to; for example, "His strategy appears identical to that used by Cathak Cainan at the Battle of Merus. He has reinforcements coming, likely arriving around noon, which have successfully flanked you," or "Your spies say she has been buying dresses in your favourite colour and scent similar to that of your former mistress. While she acts innocently, she plans to seduce you so you agree to the alliance".

This Charm does not tell the future and the target's plans may change based on events after this Charm is used. Plans entirely outside the scope of the Solar's knowledge and experiences, like a surprise attack by a hidden First Age superweapon or the unprecedented betrayal at the Calibration Feast are not mentioned by this Charm, which instead mentions more conventional plans of the target. The Solar is left with a nagging feeling that they are missing something, however.
 
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linkhyrule5 said:
On a side note, strictly speaking the sheer alien-ness of Exalted makes it not impossible to run a large civilization without access to the ground. You just imagine a tribe of vine-breeders, who raise strange breeds of mistletoe that draw their strength from the great trees of the East and grow fruit so large that they resemble apples, their poison sapped by generation upon generation of breeding. Or something like that. -- Basically you can still have the advantages of agriculture without strictly speaking being dependent on the ground, just on some source of plant life. Hell, they could probably be tree-grafters instead, clipping branches from one tree onto another to breed consistently edible fruit.

The rest is still pretty dumb though.
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The thing is, for a large centralised society, it's not just about growing the food.

How do you move it? You have no roads, no railways, no rivers or canals. You can't take the hundreds of tonnes of food that each mass farm produces by lorry, or cart, or boat. You have to move it all by hand, through treetops - and often it will need to go dozens or even hundreds of miles, depending on how large and centralised your society is.

How do you store it? Even with truly giant trees, you're limited in the floor space and weight that you can store, and much of the food you're producing is likely to be perishable if it's things like fruit. Yes, Halta is a northern province - but not so far north that you can refrigerate things just by keeping it outside.

How do you prepare it? You have sharply limited access to industry - no waterwheels, few windmills and little in the way of animal power. You're having to hand-prepare most of what you make instead of automating it with machinery like flour mills.

The ground isn't just a place we grow things; it's a basic function of vast parts of our unspoken assumptions - transport merely being the most obvious of them. That Halta is supposed to have a unified empire spanning one and a half million square miles - an area larger than India - goes beyond mere stupidity into blatant insult.

In summary, I repeat the eternal chorus of the Northeast: Fuck Halta.
 
@Aleph - Well, fair enough, I'm hardly a sociologist or a historian. But your original point specifically called out agriculture, so I thought I'd point out that at the very least the "sit in one place and produce very large harvests relative to what you can gather" bit is perfectly reproducible while living in trees, if you're in Exalted.
 
Aleph said:
How do you store it? Even with truly giant trees, you're limited in the floor space
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Lies. There are totally cultures in the super-far East which live on the leaves. Places large enough to hold entire villages and their fields, where they grow crops on the giant leaves and where there are no rivers, so they tap the veins of the plant to get sap.

Of course, this produces a hyper-balkanised society where the biggest societies rule over an entire branch - and the true imperialists might invade other branches - and maybe even a second tree, if they're strix-riders or bird-beastmen.
 
Aleph said:
The thing is, for a large centralised society, it's not just about growing the food.

How do you move it? You have no roads, no railways, no rivers or canals. You can't take the hundreds of tonnes of food that each mass farm produces by lorry, or cart, or boat. You have to move it all by hand, through treetops - and often it will need to go dozens or even hundreds of miles, depending on how large and centralised your society is.

How do you store it? Even with truly giant trees, you're limited in the floor space and weight that you can store, and much of the food you're producing is likely to be perishable if it's things like fruit. Yes, Halta is a northern province - but not so far north that you can refrigerate things just by keeping it outside.

How do you prepare it? You have sharply limited access to industry - no waterwheels, few windmills and little in the way of animal power. You're having to hand-prepare most of what you make instead of automating it with machinery like flour mills.

The ground isn't just a place we grow things; it's a basic function of vast parts of our unspoken assumptions - transport merely being the most obvious of them. That Halta is supposed to have a unified empire spanning one and a half million square miles - an area larger than India - goes beyond mere stupidity into blatant insult.

In summary, I repeat the eternal chorus of the Northeast: Fuck Halta.
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I mean, Halta can sit and spin, but I do remember something from the Death's Gate Cycle that is semi-germane: a planet that was so completely, utterly overgrown with plant life that its inhabitants lived and died without ever seeing the surface, instead living on giant sheets of moss/vines/dirt made of dead moss & vines between the unspeakably vast trees rooted in the long-forgotten stone of the planet itself. Aside from the necessary technological pressures of travel and commerce between inhabited sheets at different elevations, ore having to be painstakingly collected from the leaves of certain super-trees (which sucked it up from their roots) instead of mined more traditionally, and the constant noon illumination from its million billion suns, the overall living conditions were surprisingly close to that of a non-tree-based setting, complete with lakes & oceans where rainwater collected in depressions in the moss sheets.

So yeah, free ideas for Eastern Wyld Zones there.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Hmm. In fact, now that I think about Lore - and how inadequate most of its Charm tree actually is for Lore-y characters, let's write some more actually-Lore Charms. Possibly for @Aleph and @Shyft's Inksgame.

Information Unveiling Hunch
Cost: 1m; Mins: Lore 1, Essence 1; Type: Simple (Misc action, Speed 5/-2 DV)
Keywords: Combo-OK
Duration: Instant
Prerequisite Charms: None

The first step in learning is finding things to learn from. So say the scholars of the Twilight Caste.

Upon activating this Charm, the Solar names a topic or subject she wishes to learn more about, and spends one mote. The character gets a hunch on a way to acquire the learning they require. This allows the character to bypass dramatic actions to find the location of where to acquire their information.

The Storyteller should inform the player via in-character rumour and their own knowledge. For example, asking about Sondok may produce "There's said to be a renegade Immaculate monk living up in the mountains who clashed with cults who worshipped that demon", while wanting to learn more about local folklore may tell the character "Along the way, you heard a woman shouting at her husband to go fetch her father from that bar where the old drunks hang out". That which the Solar is directed towards may not have the information they require, but they will be able in some way to bring the character closer to their goal; for example, the renegade Immaculate monk may only have partial information, but they may know of a Sondok cult that the character may steal a book of their faith from. Sufficiently abstract or esoteric information usually returns answers like "Well, they may have some records in Hell" or even "Jupiter might know".

Precedent-Perusing Precognition
Cost: 5+m, 1wp; Mins: Lore 3, Essence 2; Type: Simple (Misc action, Speed 5/-2 DV)
Keywords: Combo-OK
Duration: Instant
Prerequisite Charms: Information Unveiling Hunch

The small-minded are doomed to repeat history. The Lawgivers can read them as easily as a book.

The Solar briefly studies the actions of a character or organisation, while the character possesses up-to-date information on them. The character rolls her Wits + Lore. The difficulty for this is half the character or organisation's leader's [Manipulation + an applicable ability of the target's choice]; War might cover a general's plans, while Larceny would conceal the deception of a disguised spy. Success means the Storyteller (or the other player) must provide a one-sentence summary of the short-to-medium term plans of the target. This Charm costs five motes and one willpower to use for the first time, but increases in cost by two motes each time it is used within the same scene.

The Storyteller should convey this information to the player as an in-character tidbit based on source the character has been exposed to; for example, "His strategy appears identical to that used by Cathak Cainan at the Battle of Merus. He has reinforcements coming, likely arriving around noon, which have successfully flanked you," or "Your spies say she has been buying dresses in your favourite colour and scent similar to that of your former mistress. While she acts innocently, she plans to seduce you so you agree to the alliance".

This Charm does not tell the future and the target's plans may change based on events after this Charm is used. Plans entirely outside the scope of the Solar's knowledge and experiences, like a surprise attack by a hidden First Age superweapon or the unprecedented betrayal at the Calibration Feast are not mentioned by this Charm, which instead mentions more conventional plans of the target. The Solar is left with a nagging feeling that they are missing something, however.
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My main suggestion is to revise the second charm so that it interacts smoothly with Evidence Discerning Method and Understanding the Court, meaning it deals more with External Penalties than proper Difficulty. The first charm actually reminds me of an old idea my alchemical game ST had, which I basically summarized to him as 'You want Plot-Advancement, The Charm'. It was something like "I want to spend motes so the ST tells me exactly where I need to go."

Obviously this charm is not like that or intended to do that, but it reminded me of it.
 
Honestly, I kind of like Halta mostly as-is. Scale things down, but leave them larger than they should be. I'm pretty sure they've got roads grown from branches and big platforms for warehouses built between the trees, connecting the trunks like liana vines.

Because my headcanon for Halta is that it's the experiment of an elder Lunar, who has basically browbeaten its neighbours (except Linowa) into leaving it alone while they do social engineering. But now that period is coming to a close, and the Lunar is about to put an end to the 'controlled environment' portion of the Haltan Experiment and let nature take its course. Which means Halta is about to run into heaps of trouble, because historically their borders have been defined as however much landmass they feasibly control internally, and they're about to discover that they need to do things like defend their territory from outside invasion.
 
In the paradigm where the Haltans started as refugees from a dying Far East empire, one of the reasons for Halta's whole deal with the local fae might be as a way to get access to resources they could once harvest freely from the Borderlands of the Wyld, without which their imported technology doesn't work. Vast cargo airships with impossible amounts of lift on an endless cycle around the scattered towns and outposts that make up Halta, crossbows that winch themselves with a touch, filters that convert tree sap into water and fuel, fungal growths that extract metals from the soil and turn them into ingot fruiting bodies on the leaves, the secret treatment that grants animals their second tails and second souls should they live long enough...

Halta should be much stranger looking than it's been presented as. And much more of an island nation where the sea is the forest around their settlements than an empire where they directly control everything they claim is their territory.
 
I think a good inspiration for how to portray societies with supernatural powers and/or resources in an interesting, visually spectacular and semi-realistic fashion would be Avatar: The Last Airbender.

The city of Ba Sing Se began as a bunch of people living underground using luminescent crystals as a light source, which became their chief export in their early days. Later on, they moved up to the surface and built the most massive walls in existence with no actual doors (which are a weak point in normal walls) so that only Earthbenders can get in. And they built a free trolley powered by Earthbending once the city got too big for walking to be a convenient way to get around.

The Northern Water Tribe's capital is a massive fortress of ice and hard-packed snow (both of which can be much harder and more durable than most people think), which the native Waterbenders have full control over, and the only way in is over the water, which they also control.

All of the Air Temples were nearly unreachable without access to air travel, and their massive architecture was probably made much less onerous by the fact that the builders could ride around on sky bison, who can carry very heavy loads and still fly (seriously, I think Appa's carried 1-2 dozen people at once in the series, meaning he can carry at least a ton and not worry about being too heavy to fly).

The Fire Nation was the most industrial of the four nations because every Firebender is his own industrial forge; those massive ironclad ships they controlled the world with would take absurd amounts of coal or some other fuel source just to make... or a bunch of Firebenders paid a decent wage. That's never shown to be the case, but since the sequel shows Firebenders learning to make lightning and then working in an electrical plant, I'd say it's a reasonable assumption to make.

---

Yeah, you can probably think of a million other stuff they could do with what they've got, but that's not the important part. The important part is that none of the unique features of any of these societies feels like some forced attempt to push a certain idea the writers had into this world that feels unnatural (as it seems Halta does), and neither do any of them come off as boring or overly mundane. The ways they differ from the "norm" all make them unique and visually interesting, and it feels less like some writer decided "I want this, make it happen" and more like the people looked around them and used the resources that were available to them.
 
Leingod said:
The Fire Nation was the most industrial of the four nations because every Firebender is his own industrial forge; those massive ironclad ships they controlled the world with would take absurd amounts of coal or some other fuel source just to make... or a bunch of Firebenders paid a decent wage. That's never shown to be the case, but since the sequel shows Firebenders learning to make lightning and then working in an electrical plant, I'd say it's a reasonable assumption to make.
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Eh Fire nation are definitely the expectation to this due to having antagonist unlimited logistics powers, the way they brushed off the loss of their fleet on the northern water tribe makes their logistics capabilities make WW2 Americia look absolutely tiny in comparison.
 
Talkkno said:
Eh Fire nation are definitely the expectation to this due to having antagonist unlimited logistics powers, the way they brushed off the loss of their fleet on the northern water tribe makes their logistics capabilities make WW2 Americia look absolutely tiny in comparison.
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True, they definitely have more of those things than they should, but at least it makes sense why they're the ones who have ironclad ships powered by coal and zeppelins and no one else does; they have a unique resource that allows them to make and power these things much more easily.

And at least it's a technology that is legitimately difficult to discover and make widely available. Unlike, you know, crossbows (and I say this as someone who actually likes the Haslanti), those things that were invented in Warring States China, i.e. hundreds of years before Jesus's birth.

I'm not claiming that Avatar has a great sense of logistics, after all.
 
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Leingod said:
True, they definitely have more of those things than they should, but at least it makes sense why they're the ones who have ironclad ships powered by coal and zeppelins and no one else does; they have a unique resource that allows them to make and power these things much more easily.

And at least it's a technology that is legitimately difficult to discover and make widely available. Unlike, you know, crossbows (and I say this as someone who actually likes the Haslanti), those things that were invented in Warring States China, i.e. hundreds of years before Jesus's birth.

I'm not claiming that Avatar has a great sense of logistics, after all.
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Come to think of it, looking at the firebenders....

Can one use earth and water and airbenders to operate mills and such?
 
samdamandias said:
On a differnt note, does anyone esle think that the blank spaces on the map could be arranged better? The most detailed bits should be around the Blessed Isle and Nexus, and fade away towards the edges as opposed to having "here be dragons" between detailed parts.
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*raises hand*

EarthScorpion said:
*snip*
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These feel more like Investigation Charms to me, to be honest, though I'm all for making actually Lore-y Lore Charms. While you're at it, could I trouble you to come up with actually Occult-y, non-Sorcery Occult Charms?
 
Leingod said:
I think a good inspiration for how to portray societies with supernatural powers and/or resources in an interesting, visually spectacular and semi-realistic fashion would be Avatar: The Last Airbender.

The city of Ba Sing Se began as a bunch of people living underground using luminescent crystals as a light source, which became their chief export in their early days. Later on, they moved up to the surface and built the most massive walls in existence with no actual doors (which are a weak point in normal walls) so that only Earthbenders can get in. And they built a free trolley powered by Earthbending once the city got too big for walking to be a convenient way to get around.

The Northern Water Tribe's capital is a massive fortress of ice and hard-packed snow (both of which can be much harder and more durable than most people think), which the native Waterbenders have full control over, and the only way in is over the water, which they also control.

All of the Air Temples were nearly unreachable without access to air travel, and their massive architecture was probably made much less onerous by the fact that the builders could ride around on sky bison, who can carry very heavy loads and still fly (seriously, I think Appa's carried 1-2 dozen people at once in the series, meaning he can carry at least a ton and not worry about being too heavy to fly).

The Fire Nation was the most industrial of the four nations because every Firebender is his own industrial forge; those massive ironclad ships they controlled the world with would take absurd amounts of coal or some other fuel source just to make... or a bunch of Firebenders paid a decent wage. That's never shown to be the case, but since the sequel shows Firebenders learning to make lightning and then working in an electrical plant, I'd say it's a reasonable assumption to make.

---

Yeah, you can probably think of a million other stuff they could do with what they've got, but that's not the important part. The important part is that none of the unique features of any of these societies feels like some forced attempt to push a certain idea the writers had into this world that feels unnatural (as it seems Halta does), and neither do any of them come off as boring or overly mundane. The ways they differ from the "norm" all make them unique and visually interesting, and it feels less like some writer decided "I want this, make it happen" and more like the people looked around them and used the resources that were available to them.
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This. Honestly AT LA is a good resource for exalted in general. It does a very good job of making the characters, peoples and cultures seem real despite the fantastic elements.
 
Talkkno said:
Eh Fire nation are definitely the expectation to this due to having antagonist unlimited logistics powers, the way they brushed off the loss of their fleet on the northern water tribe makes their logistics capabilities make WW2 Americia look absolutely tiny in comparison.
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Did I miss something where they manage to easily conquer the North later on? The loss of their fleet wasn't war ending, but it's notable that the oceans didn't seem as contested in later seasons.
 
So hey, I'm looking for two people to act as a co-mods for a RP that I'm planning to make.

It's about a female First Age Solar - who is young by the way - awakened in the Second Age by a Dragon-Blooded, who did it accidentally. The RP is all about Empire Builder, so I need help with creating an empire sheets, along with character sheet for that.

We'll be using 2.5 edition, so none of those three new Exalt from the Third Edition.
 
So after a long snarl of scheduling issues as well as getting a new laptop, I am back to logging Sunlit Sands! Today I'm posting on Session #4, and we just finished session #7 today.

Session #4 Log

Here we go with yet another live session!

This was a much more intimate session,focused on a handful of characters and not as many city-shaking events as previous. Mostly because it only covers roughly three days.

[09:58] On the 'first day', Inks is tired. Sooo tired, and Maji is suitable Rajah-esque for convenient inclusion. It hasn't come up much, but Maji actually has the Metal Body mutation, which partially justifies his use as spell anchor for Skin of Bronze.

[10:05] Through here, I invoke the 'remembering details' rules such as they are- not that I really need them, Sulieman is easy to remember, but habits are hard to break. (And a botch would've been hilarious if kinda sad).

[10:08] Since Sulieman won't arrive for another day and a half, I figure it'd be a good idea to get moving on things. StW is terrifying. Entire schedules and timetables shuffle at the Solar's whim!

[10:14] For all my desires to play a brassy, loud Solar, I am actually surprisingly mechanically conservative. Some of this is due to my past experience with STs who don't 'reason things out' the way Aleph does here. I'm used to having to break things down for people who have a different level of system mastery.

Here, Aleph made it clear that Inks is in a position of strength and gave a comprehensible, actionable reason why- she litereally did something, designed something that requires her skills and input. This is much more useful to me as a player than 'You win because you're Exalted/Solar' etc.

So having understood that, it was almost a formality to arrange for fair stakes on all sides. Inks isn't out to gouge people and as she said in-character, if someone isn't on her level, she's going to uplift them until they are.

[10:49] I was considering sending Maji to bring Sulieman back to the townhouse, buuut I decided against it.

[11:06] Aleph is very good at identifying when someone is digging their own hole. Probably from experience playing Keris.

[11:41] And here's the payoff- yes Inks, you are unfortunately now even more Waifu in the eyes of dear Husbando.

More seriously, there's all kinds of possible relationships and I'm not so squeamish a roleplayer as to not see how one goes. Right now though, Inks's pride would not let her settle down as anything less than an equal partner- and Sulieman's interest in her is primarily visual/attraction; they've barely known each other two days at this point, and Elsa's still right here.

By the same token, Inks is a Solar and what most people would consider 'crippling expenses', she considers 'Fair' and offers to repair the ships good as new. Because she can. (And it means she has more time to build up a proper amount of money to pay Sulieman back with, with interest.)

And then about thirty minutes later, the session concluded. While it was short, we got a fair amount moving and opportunities are presenting themselves. Three Jewels Bank and House Bhalasus are going to be great ways of getting into bigger business- and I forgot to mention that the equitable arrangement achieved earlier was a Resources 3 salary as top consultant, and Backing 3 in [Something]. Aleph didn't exactly explain what just yet. (Backing is a hard background to arbitrate without discussion).

So now Inks has TWO Resources 3 streams. It's also worth noting that we're prototyping a 10-dot Resources system, as Aleph says "Inks needs an economic system as granular as standard combat." Now, I personally dislike 10-dot background systems, but mostly for aesthetic reasons; I much prefer stuff like Resources to Salary or whatnot, but I am aware that model doesn't work Here.

Armed with two sets of Resources 3, Inks can start really scaling up!
 
ichypa said:
These feel more like Investigation Charms to me, to be honest, though I'm all for making actually Lore-y Lore Charms. While you're at it, could I trouble you to come up with actually Occult-y, non-Sorcery Occult Charms?
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When it comes down to it, Lore (especially the most useful definition of Lore, "Lore is the Humanities") needs active things to do. The inability to give it active things is why the 2e corebook charms are mostly esoteric Essence things that aren't really very much in scope for Lore and are much more occult-y [1]. Charms which therefore leverage "I have a broad education and I know many things" to things like "I always know of rumours that can lead me to useful information" and "I can tell what people are going to do next because history repeats itself" are within Lore's scope.

Other Lore charms I think within scope are "I write the history books so I can control how an event is interpreted by those who hear of it second hand" and "I can censor information by not mentioning it". Oh, and of course, "Of course I know how to sword-fight! I've read books, you know!" to grant yourself temporary speciality dots that count as dice granted by Charms.

As for Occult - probably not. See, the environment I'm writing these fundamentally for is one where most of the "know social stuff about spirits" stuff has been taken out of Occult [2], and Craft and Medicine have been merged in, for "Occult is the sciences and the hidden way the world works". As a result, the scope of what I consider to be Occult is radically different and not directly comparable. When you build a house, you're applying occult principles - as you also are when you feed someone certain leaves to numb pain or forge a sword.

[1] Or Wyld Shaping Technique, which really should be Adamant Circle Sorcery.

[2] It mostly lives now in a mix of Lore and Politics, depending on how you apply it.
 
EarthScorpion said:
When it comes down to it, Lore (especially the most useful definition of Lore, "Lore is the Humanities") needs active things to do. The inability to give it active things is why the 2e corebook charms are mostly esoteric Essence things that aren't really very much in scope for Lore and are much more occult-y [1].
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Thus Ex3's "introducing a fact", which is portable to 2E without any problem. It's essentially a generalized form of stunting:

One of the basic functions of Lore in Exalted is to allow the player to spice up narrative drama, forward the plot, or become the object of positive Intimacies by demonstrating valuable knowledge. Once per scene, a character with Lore 3+ and a relevant specialty or backstory can attempt to "know" something useful about Creation's history, geography, cultures, etc.

The player states a fact they would like to introduce. If it is a fact the Storyteller deems admissible, roll the character's (Intelligence + Lore) against a difficulty set by the Storyteller. Note that the context of this roll is important. A character with Lore 5 may have a background in the subject being discussed, or their Lore 5 may apply little or not at all. (See the description of the Lore skill on p. 153). The Storyteller should increase the difficulty and levy penalties as they see fit; conversely, if a character specializes in a certain subject, the Storyteller may declare success without a roll. In any case, if the roll succeeds, the character may introduce her fact as knowledge she knows or uncovers in the scene, allowing the plot to progress, and perhaps leaving those around her in awe of her acumen.
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Kuciwalker said:
Thus Ex3's "introducing a fact", which is portable to 2E without any problem. It's essentially a generalized form of stunting:
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I would argue that that is too broad to live only in Lore and ought to just be an Ability-agnostic system. If it is (Int+relevant ability) that also helps solve the problem of needing a relevant background too; your Melee/Craft/Linguistics/etc is the background of knowledge that you need.
 
A lot of people seem to have that opinion but I think it's a bit better to make this a uniquely Lore thing. Sure, Survival can let you know about some plant or whatever, but as a game mechanic it's neat to give this as a special reward to characters who have actually invested in Lore. And, even if you give this mechanic to other abilities, it's still good to restrict the Charms for it to Lore.
 
Kuciwalker said:
A lot of people seem to have that opinion but I think it's a bit better to make this a uniquely Lore thing. Sure, Survival can let you know about some plant or whatever, but as a game mechanic it's neat to give this as a special reward to characters who have actually invested in Lore. And, even if you give this mechanic to other abilities, it's still good to restrict the Charms for it to Lore.
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Do you have a reason for this?
 
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