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- Singapore
Did the new guys remove 2e thaumaturgy?
General Exalted Thread
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- Singapore
In your opinion, what is your baseline?
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- Gladstone, OR
3e did in fact remove/greatly depreciate thaumaturgy- it looks nothing like 2e thaumaturgy now. @Dif did a great of why 2e-style thaumaturgy is worth examining- the post on the subject...
Anyway- the problem with your question about my baseline, is that it has taken me about eight years of thinking about Exalted, playing Exalted, and talking about Exalted to even get remotely close to a grasp of balance, and I still make mistakes, have to draft things, and so on. To say nothing of what ad-hoc judgement calls get made in an actual game.
So I want to underscore a point here- the kind of decisions and judgement calls this forum makes are not the same calls you will see made at-table. The environment is just too different.
To actually answer your question though, the simplest metric I can say is this: When you are homebrewing something, look at an existing charm or effect and pull apart its phrasing. You cannot copy extant Charms or Spells, per se, but you can use them for reference. At your preference, you can use the rough scale provided by Oadenols as 'Artifact 1-5' is equal to a Solar Charm of equal Essence, or Terrestrial (1-2), Celestial (3-4) and Adamant (5). 3e has it's own scope system for a reason, after all. When I say copy, i mean you cannot bake say, Total Annihilation into a daiklave and cast it on demand- even if you are litereally just saying 'you can cast the spell through the sword exactly as written'. That's an end-run around Sorcery and should not exist.
(Having said that, demon-banishing staves should totally be viable, but EarthScorpion's anchor system is meant to take over for that too by dint of 'channel banishment through your weapon).
Exalted (like all things) rewards critical thinking, and we as a group here demand it. To be very direct, a lot of our frustration with you is your lack of critical thinking and attempts to foist it off on us. We've been trying to teach you how to do it so you don't have to keep asking us.
But on actual game design- you have to critical think and ask the question: "If I make this artifact or working, what does it impact? Does it deform the setting?" Because personally, I rule that if something is made and is not 'panoply' like an innate demon or god's nature, it can be made again. You have to be comfortable with the idea of proliferating self-driving millstones. Not that they WILL proliferate, because maybe it's too expensive for everyone, but it can happen.
A good example of the rational thinking is like how demon summoning is treated. I could summon blood apes to turn those wheels same as a working- it'd be stinky and the apes would be little more than loutish brute robots, but they'd work. what is the consequence of summoning the apes versus making a working. Cost/benefit analysis?
- Location
- Ottawa
The Ex3 corebook has reasonable guidelines for sorcerous workings.
I'm very positive on the change. As I see it, Minton and Vance aren't just better developers than Morke and Shearer; they're also better people. Pity Rich's still involved.
As for Neall, there was some kind of drama between him and the old devs. Don't know the details, although I'm told they said some very unkind things to him.
I'm very positive on the change. As I see it, Minton and Vance aren't just better developers than Morke and Shearer; they're also better people. Pity Rich's still involved.
As for Neall, there was some kind of drama between him and the old devs. Don't know the details, although I'm told they said some very unkind things to him.
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- Singapore
Don't blood apes when they don't kill things, eat marrow, stink, frighten people, call in immaculates, and also leace after a year?
And how common would sorcerers be amongst a tribe of, say, 2,000? I got an idea for nomads.
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- Gladstone, OR
You can bind demons for a year and a day as 'general servants', or you can task-bind them indefinitely. The former is flexible but limited duration. The latter can have no set end-point. So if you tell a blood ape "I want you to push this in a circle, forever', they will do so and they will do it in a loyal, blood-ape fashion. Now Demons generally don't need to eat/can't die of old age, so they're going to basically go at it with a single-minded determination and thematically oppose anyone who tries to stop their task bind.
So, the careful Sorcerer makes specific instructions like "You will spin the wheel from dawn to dusk, beginning at the sound of this whistle and ending on the sound of this bell' and so on.
As for 'how common' sorcerers are. That's hard to say. I can believe that a tribe of nomads has a sorcerer or even 2-3, if they train each other, but I don't want to say that every tribe has a sorcerer.
Sorcery is a force-multiplier. Once you have a sorcerer at your side, big problems start to become small problems, which makes you more willing to take on truly interesting challenges. Whitewall for example has a population of like 300,000(?), and it has a very high concentration of sorcerers and Essence Wielders by dint of its educational practices and so on.
Anyway, after a certain point, the question isn't 'how likely is this'. If you want your nomads to have a sorcerer, give them a sorcerer. Just be mindful of what effect that sorcerer has on everything around them.
A sorcerer is rare enough, and powerful enough that they distort the setting around themselves. A sorcerer joining your kingdom is going to give you a lot of advantages if you can put up with the strange things he gets up to. Not every kingdom has a sorcerer, but the most powerful certainly do if only to project power and defend against enemy sorcerers. A group of 2000 might, at best have one or two Sorcerers. You might have a couple sorcerers in a fair sized kingdom, but certainly not every mid-sized army is going to have one.
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- Singapore
Thanks. I was thinking of stuff like nomads, and slash and burn, and... well.
One thing i like about 3e is the Sorcerous motes. You can cast sorcery every day, multiple times, with no ill effect. Let's say that a sorcerer can summon up magnitude 3 amounts of water. That basically means you just watered a shitton of animals and people. Add in summoning the harvest, and, well.... let's just say that with a few sorcerers, a tribe can literally live in the middle of the deep south, forever, with no oasis or such, subsisting on the grass and crops and summoned by the sorcerer. Which brings to mind raising the earth's bones. A group of nomads might literally make treks between different fortresses as they make a circle in the deep desert, forever sustained by summoned water and crops. Summoning the harvest works inly once a year, but that is no problem if you always change places. So it's possible that they could literally have a new crop every single week, just by living as nomads.
Its really really interesting, just to think how sorcery can solve so many problems of living.
One thing i like about 3e is the Sorcerous motes. You can cast sorcery every day, multiple times, with no ill effect. Let's say that a sorcerer can summon up magnitude 3 amounts of water. That basically means you just watered a shitton of animals and people. Add in summoning the harvest, and, well.... let's just say that with a few sorcerers, a tribe can literally live in the middle of the deep south, forever, with no oasis or such, subsisting on the grass and crops and summoned by the sorcerer. Which brings to mind raising the earth's bones. A group of nomads might literally make treks between different fortresses as they make a circle in the deep desert, forever sustained by summoned water and crops. Summoning the harvest works inly once a year, but that is no problem if you always change places. So it's possible that they could literally have a new crop every single week, just by living as nomads.
Its really really interesting, just to think how sorcery can solve so many problems of living.
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- United States
IN the example of the magically moving millstone, what is essentially happening is you are creating a watermill that doesn't need water. You are removing the need for a river to allow the mundane structure to function. In the end... that's just not that ambitious of a working. One of the examples of an ambition 1 terrestrial working is binding a being capable of performing mundane household chores to a task and removing the need for an actual being to perform the work knocks it up to ambition 2.
Look, Accelerator, do you actually have the 3e book? Like, a good 90-something percent of your questions are explicitly answered by just reading the text. For instance, it says that an ambition 1 working of the appropriate circle is considered a 'simple' feat of magic, similar in power to a spell of that circle.
And then when the sorcerer responsible for sustaining your desert village is approaching death, without a successor, stress happens. And stress is one of the key ingredients of a plot.
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- Singapore
Yeah.
Like he's sick, and the guild has the medicine. Do you beg, borrow or steal? Or do you try and get divine existence, knowing the god wishes to enslave you all.
Or maybe you need a replacement sorcerer, and you try to find a patron. Maybe an ifrit lord. Maybe an earth elemental. Or maybe that beautiful lady with fine legs.
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- Singapore
Yes i do
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Furthermore if you use EmeraldScorpion's Anchor system you get to have the sorcerer's staff carved from the heartwood of a wood elemental, the tip of which is a chalice containing water blessed by an oasis-god. You can have an entire story based around placating the raging horde of nomads by tracking down a stolen staff, or a pilgrimage to the sanctum of the oasis-god to bargain for another draught of water after the sorcerer's foolish apprentice spills what is held by the staff.
Graypairofsocks
What is Grammar?
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- earth
I think we should pick the last one.
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- United States
Why is this hypothetical collection of nomads allowing their survival to be chained to the whims of one sorcerer to such a degree? Why would a group of nomads be willing to pack up and move from one place to another place 60+ times a year, when a 'normal' nomadic society would be more likely to have a much more seasonal range?
Graypairofsocks
What is Grammar?
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- earth
So I was reading that post and it mentioned one thaumaturgical rite called "Five Days Foresight", which asks a demon about the future.
That reminded me of something I thought of a while back which basically allows you to determine if a specific event occurs in the future.
You need:
A necromancer/sorcerer who knows "White Bone Emissary", "Written upon the Water" or some other message sending thing.
A demon that isn't likely to be summoned.
A person who can summon that type of demon.
The messenger watches the demon. You summon the demon if specific event occurs. If the messenger sees the demon walk off in the trance, it knows that you summoned it 5 days in the future. The messenger then sends the message telling you that a specific event occurred.
The issue with this is that I don't think you can really rule out anyone else summoning the demon, and you can only send a specific message.
Jon Chung
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Yet again, anything that allows you to do this is a side effect of bad mechanics. The lag between the message sent in Hell and you receiving it outside Hell should be the standard five days. If it is not, that is a bug: you are not supposed to be able to send information into the past.
Generally speaking, the things I don't like about 3E ("natural language" ruleset, maximalism to the max, dice tricks, combinatorial hell, "the GM will handle it for free" balancing) would be impossible for them to fix without rewriting the corebook, which they aren't going to be allowed to do, so what they do is unfortunately pretty irrelevant. Those problems won't be solved until the next edition, assuming there ever is one.
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Graypairofsocks
What is Grammar?
- Location
- earth
You also don't think that specific thaumaturgy thing should exist?
Jon Chung
=][=
No method of time travel should exist. You cannot time travel in Exalted. Sending information into the past to change the present is a form of time travel. If it allows you to time travel, you know it shouldn't be there, like how if something lets you attack through perfect defense charms you know it shouldn't be there.
Graypairofsocks
What is Grammar?
- Location
- earth
Then I must have forgot about that.
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- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I have a great deal of respect for Vance, and I've been informed that Neall Price is turning Liminals into less Frankenstein's Monster and more Hollow "NO VOICE TO CRY SUFFERING" Knight which I most definitely approve of!
"terminated and replaced" gives such a hilarious image
Like the new devs are T-1000s who killed Holden and Morke and stole their clothes
Because only Skynet understands how to make Exalted 3rd Edition books anymore