It's in the Players Guide if memory serves me correct.
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General Exalted Thread
It's in the Players Guide if memory serves me correct.
It is found in the Player's Guide. Its broken down into arts, sciences, and rituals.
The Arts were Summoning, Warding, and Astrology. Anyone with enough occult can attempt them but you could buy them with xp to get some extra dice.
The Sciences were Alchemy, Enchantment, Geomancy, and Weather Working. They had a rating and you bought them up like a trait/background/old WoD disciplines.
Rituals were rated 1 to 5 and were purchased individually. It was basically 3E thaumaturgy except you just needed an Occult score.
It was much harder to cast since it all took motes and there were various merits and sacrifices you could do to get those motes if you didn't have your own mote pool.
While I have not looked into what it would actually be like for mortals, I consider it superior to both 2E and 3E thaumaturgy.
So, almost nothing like 3E Thaumaturgy?
In the sense of being discrete rituals with a specified power level on a scale of 1 to 5 that did unusual things like lighting a fire on the end of your finger.
If you were importing 3E thaumaturgy back into 1E they would almost all be rituals.
1e Thaumaturgy is much like its 2e incarnation but much, Much more focused on Specificity and giving you everything up-front rather than piecemeal, which often creates problems when you have a broad span of options weighed down by stringent conditionals. Most of it was written as an ad-hoc means to give mortals Something beyond rolling pools, in the years before a lot of systems were codified and simplified out for ease of use, so a lot of it is very limiting but also giving way too much information and options to process at one time, even including whole other side-systems within itself. This is reflected in the pricing, in how Training in an Art is 5xp, while knowing procedures OF that Art is 1xp each. I'll touch on this more in a second.
For example on specificness, there are rules which establish that every formula and ritual known by a thaumaturge is tied to a Orientation of one of the five Directions, including the Center at the Blessed Isle, owing to particular forces, spirits or natural materials necessary for conducting the ritual which cannot carry over from one place to another very easily. Moving one region away (like East to North, South to West, any Direction to Center) increases the base Difficulty of the relevant procedure by +1 and doubles the times needed to prepare those materials for use. Two regions away, like crossing from East to West/North to South, are +2 and multiply the preparation times by five unless you're at a major city with a rich trade culture, like Nexus or Gem, in which case it falls back to merely doubled but with +1 Resources on the usual pricing. This means that you're often required to repurchase many of your procedures for a new location if its significantly distant from where you began, at 1xp for pre-knowledge. After that, Arts have Aspects the way Sciences have Formulas which are divided into schools, like ghosts or demons. You pick One aspect at a time in an Art, and must purchase all the others individually.
Secondly, the concept of the Initiate, Adept, and Master degrees of +1, +2, +3 respectively in one Art were not codified yet, and you simply bought "training" in an Art for +2d to your pool, so that's the 5xp cost I mentioned above. You could buy rituals separately outside of that, but you simply aren't knowledgeable about All its aspects. Other bonuses existed purely as player-created Specialties which had to pull triple duty of being A) Directionally-focused, as above, B) target only one Type of Aspect as the "wildcard" categories of 2e procedures like "Beckon (Demon/Elemental/Spirit)" would later be laid out in multiple Arts, and C) be compliant with the characters origin, magical practice or source of learning. So instead of a Master rank in Warding for +3 to your Occult rolls in making all forms of Wards, which you know all of them by having a rank of 3, you needed Training in Wards, bought each ward-type as a standalone feature and could take "Southern salt-wards against the Dead +3," subject to Storyteller veto if deemed too broad and encompassing.
Third, yeah, the Arts and Sciences were split up between those two definitions, with Sciences (Alchemy, Enchantment, Geomancy and Weather-working) simply needing Resources and time, but Arts (Summoning, Astrology and Warding) actually requiring motes, and both demanding set ratings of Occult dots to achieve certain effects. Which ultimately meant that even if you fulfilled all the prior requirements you could still be locked out of a procedure by having an Occult score too low to use it, even with an otherwise high pool available (such as by overlapping training bonus with specialties). Arts have Occult as a power-gate on access, but generally broader "packages" of effects available, while Sciences use it as an increasing scale of potency along with the rating and buy options individually, so I hope you don't want to play a street-corner horoscope peddler, because Astrology is an Occult 4 minimum. Art of Summoning requires a base of Occult 1, for example, and puts Beasts and Mortals at 1 dot, Demons/Elementals at 2, Ghost/Spirits at 3, with "spirits" being a general "Everything else" for gods of both standard types. These would later be broken up across the Arts of Elemental/Demon Summoning, Spirit Beckoning, and Husbandry, with individual Summon/Beckon/Banish procedures for each instead of a long list of nuances.
Meanwhile, Science of Alchemy lays out clear standards for what each Occult ranking can accomplish before giving examples of formulas which fit into those dots ratings, more akin to a small-scale Crafting section. Like an Occult 1 potion is listed as not doing much more than reducing a Medicine or Resistance Difficulty by 1 (given as an example with Blood-staunching Compress), or an Occult 5 formula permanently raising Attributes by 2 or Abilities by 3, doubling healing rates or ignoring penalties of up to -4, even before getting into transmutation of base matter (as shown by the Heavenly Transmutation Processes). There's a similar Craft-esque table of modifiers for having access to proper regents, aids or assistants, substituting ingredients and everything, which can alter your final preparation roll. Things like Internal Alchemy are handed off outright as part of this system, but has a random-roll table to see how badly you've poisoned yourself.
Enchantment follows a similar structure, and was the place where Fine, Exceptional and Perfect variants of Equipment were first introduced to the game, mapping to Occult 3, 4 and 5 dot enchantments, respectively. Geomancy lays out the mechanics for Good Fortune (ignoring/rerolling botches, reducing Morbidty/Virulence of Disease by 1, increasing crop yield, etc) and uses its scale to cover a larger target area. Science of Weather-working is laid out as freeform spellcasting, since often the effects are so minor or heavily dispersed they don't generally have rules associated with them, and its mostly up to the Council of Winds anyway. Worth noting here is that 1e's demand to restrict realms of magic to their users and no one else comes up here in the Sciences, because Exalt Charm bonuses are considered to override every form of basic potion effect, enchantment or blessing, and what little still works typically does so at only half-strength. Sometimes they don't even get benefits to begin with, as the procedure demands a mortal subject or caster.
The long-form explanations of these sections gives them a lot more texture than you see in the more clipped, "Charm-like" presentation in 2e, which allows a bit of nice embellishment on just How far and broad the actual results of thaumaturgy use can be in-play, like pointing out the specific attitudes of various supernaturals at being called up by some backwoods magician (elementals are argumentative and cagey until won over, in which case they become intensely loyal, Second Circle demons have often designed their own escape summons with backdoors and hidden flaws which cause protective magics to fail, etc), elaborating how Wards can be embedding into living things, with a particular reference point being cats in the East trained to sniff out and raise alarm after uncovering breath-stealing spirits and hostile magic. Alchemy has a long sidebar and several tables about resisting addiction, Enchantment spells out the absolute heights can create temporarily unbreakable weapons and armor par with any daiklave, but the daiklave will win out by being fundamentally imperishable.
Its all nice information to have around, but a lot of the mechanics to it is simply stuff we'd see better formatted and collected in 2e where it was given a uniform structure, wider initial base for its low powered function, and condensed down into a simple chart or something instead of multiple paragraphs, or broadened to encompass several similar mechanics just with the names swapped around. That said, 1e has several good sidebars discussing the nature of low-magics in Creation, like this one:
For example on specificness, there are rules which establish that every formula and ritual known by a thaumaturge is tied to a Orientation of one of the five Directions, including the Center at the Blessed Isle, owing to particular forces, spirits or natural materials necessary for conducting the ritual which cannot carry over from one place to another very easily. Moving one region away (like East to North, South to West, any Direction to Center) increases the base Difficulty of the relevant procedure by +1 and doubles the times needed to prepare those materials for use. Two regions away, like crossing from East to West/North to South, are +2 and multiply the preparation times by five unless you're at a major city with a rich trade culture, like Nexus or Gem, in which case it falls back to merely doubled but with +1 Resources on the usual pricing. This means that you're often required to repurchase many of your procedures for a new location if its significantly distant from where you began, at 1xp for pre-knowledge. After that, Arts have Aspects the way Sciences have Formulas which are divided into schools, like ghosts or demons. You pick One aspect at a time in an Art, and must purchase all the others individually.
Secondly, the concept of the Initiate, Adept, and Master degrees of +1, +2, +3 respectively in one Art were not codified yet, and you simply bought "training" in an Art for +2d to your pool, so that's the 5xp cost I mentioned above. You could buy rituals separately outside of that, but you simply aren't knowledgeable about All its aspects. Other bonuses existed purely as player-created Specialties which had to pull triple duty of being A) Directionally-focused, as above, B) target only one Type of Aspect as the "wildcard" categories of 2e procedures like "Beckon (Demon/Elemental/Spirit)" would later be laid out in multiple Arts, and C) be compliant with the characters origin, magical practice or source of learning. So instead of a Master rank in Warding for +3 to your Occult rolls in making all forms of Wards, which you know all of them by having a rank of 3, you needed Training in Wards, bought each ward-type as a standalone feature and could take "Southern salt-wards against the Dead +3," subject to Storyteller veto if deemed too broad and encompassing.
Third, yeah, the Arts and Sciences were split up between those two definitions, with Sciences (Alchemy, Enchantment, Geomancy and Weather-working) simply needing Resources and time, but Arts (Summoning, Astrology and Warding) actually requiring motes, and both demanding set ratings of Occult dots to achieve certain effects. Which ultimately meant that even if you fulfilled all the prior requirements you could still be locked out of a procedure by having an Occult score too low to use it, even with an otherwise high pool available (such as by overlapping training bonus with specialties). Arts have Occult as a power-gate on access, but generally broader "packages" of effects available, while Sciences use it as an increasing scale of potency along with the rating and buy options individually, so I hope you don't want to play a street-corner horoscope peddler, because Astrology is an Occult 4 minimum. Art of Summoning requires a base of Occult 1, for example, and puts Beasts and Mortals at 1 dot, Demons/Elementals at 2, Ghost/Spirits at 3, with "spirits" being a general "Everything else" for gods of both standard types. These would later be broken up across the Arts of Elemental/Demon Summoning, Spirit Beckoning, and Husbandry, with individual Summon/Beckon/Banish procedures for each instead of a long list of nuances.
Meanwhile, Science of Alchemy lays out clear standards for what each Occult ranking can accomplish before giving examples of formulas which fit into those dots ratings, more akin to a small-scale Crafting section. Like an Occult 1 potion is listed as not doing much more than reducing a Medicine or Resistance Difficulty by 1 (given as an example with Blood-staunching Compress), or an Occult 5 formula permanently raising Attributes by 2 or Abilities by 3, doubling healing rates or ignoring penalties of up to -4, even before getting into transmutation of base matter (as shown by the Heavenly Transmutation Processes). There's a similar Craft-esque table of modifiers for having access to proper regents, aids or assistants, substituting ingredients and everything, which can alter your final preparation roll. Things like Internal Alchemy are handed off outright as part of this system, but has a random-roll table to see how badly you've poisoned yourself.
Enchantment follows a similar structure, and was the place where Fine, Exceptional and Perfect variants of Equipment were first introduced to the game, mapping to Occult 3, 4 and 5 dot enchantments, respectively. Geomancy lays out the mechanics for Good Fortune (ignoring/rerolling botches, reducing Morbidty/Virulence of Disease by 1, increasing crop yield, etc) and uses its scale to cover a larger target area. Science of Weather-working is laid out as freeform spellcasting, since often the effects are so minor or heavily dispersed they don't generally have rules associated with them, and its mostly up to the Council of Winds anyway. Worth noting here is that 1e's demand to restrict realms of magic to their users and no one else comes up here in the Sciences, because Exalt Charm bonuses are considered to override every form of basic potion effect, enchantment or blessing, and what little still works typically does so at only half-strength. Sometimes they don't even get benefits to begin with, as the procedure demands a mortal subject or caster.
The long-form explanations of these sections gives them a lot more texture than you see in the more clipped, "Charm-like" presentation in 2e, which allows a bit of nice embellishment on just How far and broad the actual results of thaumaturgy use can be in-play, like pointing out the specific attitudes of various supernaturals at being called up by some backwoods magician (elementals are argumentative and cagey until won over, in which case they become intensely loyal, Second Circle demons have often designed their own escape summons with backdoors and hidden flaws which cause protective magics to fail, etc), elaborating how Wards can be embedding into living things, with a particular reference point being cats in the East trained to sniff out and raise alarm after uncovering breath-stealing spirits and hostile magic. Alchemy has a long sidebar and several tables about resisting addiction, Enchantment spells out the absolute heights can create temporarily unbreakable weapons and armor par with any daiklave, but the daiklave will win out by being fundamentally imperishable.
Its all nice information to have around, but a lot of the mechanics to it is simply stuff we'd see better formatted and collected in 2e where it was given a uniform structure, wider initial base for its low powered function, and condensed down into a simple chart or something instead of multiple paragraphs, or broadened to encompass several similar mechanics just with the names swapped around. That said, 1e has several good sidebars discussing the nature of low-magics in Creation, like this one:
And this is how you do Thaumaturgy correctly.
Not "every single ritual is a unique miracle that nobody is capable of comprehending, neener-neener".
- Location
- Ekaterinburg, Russia
You mean compared to 2e, or you mean in 2e, was it any use?
Honestly, I only know the second one. Thaumaturgy for all that it's a flavor range of abilities, actually had a decent range of effects any Exalt would appreciate - so long as no countermagic is in play. Especially since those same effects were rather difficult if not outright impossible to replicate in other ways.
Alchemist could make a batch of potions that boost your social really well, a few combat-related boosters as well. For mortals, it also gave them the ability to fight as heroics, or even better (IIRC there was a potion that allowed to bypass Valor or Morale checks - always nice). Not to mention explosives, napalm or poison gases.
A Warder can actually make an invisible labyrinth that can and will force the enemies to expend motes, willpower AND health for every step taken. Or just imprison them outright.
A Warder working with a practitioner of Husbandry may actually force an Exalt to brute force all those barriers to chip away at them.
A team of Exorcists working in concert can actually lockdown a powerful demon/spirit by forcing them to make too many actions to rebuff their attempts of rebuke. Sure, this team is automatically locked from acting anyway, but it's still an appreciable difference for actual teams with soldiers AND Exorcists working in tandem.
An Astrologer (or better yet, a Prognosticator from Autochtonia) can lower difficulty of a roll, and IIRC add dice/successes to actions.
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I'd say it would depend on the ritual, and also on the type of Exalt. 2e thaumaturgy has a bunch of stuff that is universally useful, but also has a bunch of stuff that can be done in a superior fashion with Charms or Sorcery/Necromancy. Some of the more obscure rituals can be pretty neat, and are hard if not impossible to replicate with other methods.
And speaking of Autochtonia; prosthetics that are higher-quality than what we have now.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
The thing about Thaumaturgy is that most games don't know how to handle time, which means that anything that isn't resolved on-camera in 'banter' or 'combat timing' is hard to learn as players and storytellers.
But the more important thng is that while yes, Thaum should be more meaningful to PCs, its' real 'use' is that you're meant to offload the cost of thaumaturgy onto your Backgrounds- get a team of thaumaturges to refine your magical materials for you- hell, have demons do it if you can bind them.
The major advantage an Exalt has over a mortal is Dice, which can make a ritual create a very powerful result, like an enchantment that lasts several years as opposed to a season or two, but that sort of entitled 'Me Mine I must Use My Max Pools!' psychology is honestly negative on the larger game.
But the more important thng is that while yes, Thaum should be more meaningful to PCs, its' real 'use' is that you're meant to offload the cost of thaumaturgy onto your Backgrounds- get a team of thaumaturges to refine your magical materials for you- hell, have demons do it if you can bind them.
The major advantage an Exalt has over a mortal is Dice, which can make a ritual create a very powerful result, like an enchantment that lasts several years as opposed to a season or two, but that sort of entitled 'Me Mine I must Use My Max Pools!' psychology is honestly negative on the larger game.
- Location
- Singapore
I did not know of this. Where was this. Oadenol's codex?
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I believe this was still part of the discussion of 1E Thaumaturgy. Because I don't remember seeing them either in 2E.
This is why I think Fragged Empire, which turned downtime into an explicit consumable resource, has a good mechanical backing for that sort of larger-scale play, and Exalted should have implemented something like it to make backgrounds, bureaucracy, and empires much more meaningful.
Oadenol's Codex.
Art of Alchemy, pg 130-132
Look for Philter of Desire.
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- Location
- Gladstone, OR
"Me, Mine, I" as in the feeling or philosophy that You, the On-Camera Player character has to do everything, that the optimization monkey in our brains cannot accept an obvious 'second best' solution. Players are often encouraged to act entitled by the rules and mechanics of the game, (any game) which empower them to act within specific modes of play. For freer-form games like Exalted, that entitlement is huge.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Here we go, Session 28 of Sunlit Sands! Big props again to @Aleph as usual, and we're on the second session of the Coxati arc!
Session 28 log
Session 28 log
In hindsight I don't think we spent enough time pre-session discussing what was happening, as we picked up mid-scene from last week. At the same time, I actually am used to that sort of play, so it was fine. I also think I did not get enough sleep, so that did impair me a little more than I expected. Sadly there was nothing quite as awesome as HALT GOATS, but it was still a fun session.
To recap, Inks had just entered the court of Saudari Etiyadi Fire-in-Earth. Saudari is her title, Etiyadi is her given name, and Fire-in-Earth is her 'patronym'. Note that Etiyadi has a bitchin' throne room with flowing magma attraction. Note also that the apparently mortal courtiers can do court-things there too without issue.
One of the main challenges of Sunlit Sands is keeping track of consistent rulings and approaches. Identifying characterization and maintaining it is tough sometimes when rules change session to session- this kind of flexibility is understandable though, and not necessarily a bad thing.
Like, fundamentally, Exalted does not exhaustively list out everything you CAN do, but it does try to give a representative sampling. Compound this with Aleph's own personal experiences and homebrew culture, and we get independent interpretations of the rules.
For example, Aleph really likes making me roll Appearance in general and specifically in this session- not that I'm against that. It's Inks's highest social attribute, but it lacks any objective mechanical reference, so we have to make up and maintain precedent on the fly.
That leads into the first major detour of the session, in which Aleph posits her new understanding and implentation of the three Social Attributes.
Charisma is personal interaction with other people through the medium of what you are doing and how you're acting.
Manipulation is environmental interaction with other people through the medium of setpieces and equipment around them.
Appearance/Awe is general interaction with other people through the medium of presentation and bearing.
An extension of this that we did not touch on was the primary social Abilities and their design spaces- as Aleph is used to a compressed 6/15 trait system as opposed to the 9/25 I prefer.
Presence = single target
Performance = group target
Socialize = throttle ability.
Now, neither of us stopped to actually initiate the following scene using social combat or mass social combat rules. Aleph for example almost never tells me another character's MDV, which is something I am honestly very leery of- I am used to much more system transparency, where difficulties and DVs are plainly known unless hidden. There do exist rules to determine hidden difficulties, but they're rarely invoked as most games of Exalted are already overburdend on rules.
I'm sort of tangenting from my overall reaction to this scene and the session as a whole, which is good. I thuroughly enjoyed Etiyadi as a character, though I had a fairly obvious gigglefit behind the scenes when Aleph described her as an imperious haughty woman with twin ponytails. On the one hand, I was iffy, as 'Tsundere' hews closely to memetic humor I generally dislike, and interest, as I do like tsunderes, in general.
The scene in question was one largely of saving or maintaining face, in that Etiyadi was less concerned about the specifics of Inks's nature or actions and more the broader impact. Until I diagnosed her with Mastery of Small Manners, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to dig myself out of the demonologist whole. Props on Aleph for making me feel the squeeze of Inks's own reptuation, but at the same time, this is still not at all 'hardball' Exalted.
Like, if she wanted to be tougher on me, in gameplay terms, she could have had Etiyadi demand some kind of Reassurance or mechanical challenge that Inks's demon-binding ways were safe or otherwise prevent her from invoking demon resources. Not that Inks brought any. Of course, the counterpoint to this is that any 'challenge' like this eats up screen and session time, which must be managed carefully.
The main thing here is that 'Hard No' or outright refusal to engage with a player is.. It's something that should feel Possible, but actually doing it is the deathknell of a game. The point of the game is to Play, for the challenges to be surmountable within the context of the rules and shared experience. This is actually why 'story' or 'cleverness' based challenges are actually the worst kind for tabletop RPGs, as they're incredibly subjective and contingent on the storyteller knowing Exactly what they're doing or their players being extremely intutive.
So in practical terms... Let's extrapolate Inks's demonologist status. On paper, she could easily be attacked on-sight for her practices. Let's assume that's the highest the scale can go. In practice, what should happen is that if Inks presents herself to an anti-demon court or individual, they could ATTACK, but attacking is not the same as 'narration says you die for being a demonologist'. The former allows play/counterplay, the latter Ends Stories.
Narratively, Etiyadi has to say something in response to Inks's demonology, but practical gameplay should hew towards 'Player finding solutions/validating their character sheets'.
This segues into the idea of basic storytelling advice like 'fail forward' and 'No But, Yes And'.
Before I move back to social/mass social observation, we advance the scene. Inks spent a fair amount of time and motes vamping for the court and establishing her reputation as 'Gem's Painted Lady', and in turn attempting to endear herself to princess and court to a fair amount of success. Aleph was pleased I wasn't breaking out ridiculous piles of successes this session.
But, I was burning through a lot of motes, so Inks showed her caste mark to regain 2m/action... which as Aleph later pointed out, activated her carefully planned 'trap card', and introduced us to the first major god of Sunlit Sands. Alakananda doesn't count, as she is an Elemental.
Tekutali emerged from the magma feature in no small amount of grandeur, and I think Aleph did a good job of underscoring his divinity both in description and how Pipera reacted. I as a player was not exactly afraid- that lack of sleep kinda threw me harder, but I still tried to maintain character.
The interesting thing that Aleph tried to tutorialize here is that in her Creation, objective 'metatextual' understanding of Exalted's lore and metaphysics are uncommon. Local interpretation, isolated mythology and spirits have imperfect memory or experience.
Imagine the idea of a whole nation believing the Unconquered Sun is a woman? Most games I've ever been in wouldn't even care to try- they have enough trouble trying to get people to not treat the UCS like Optimus Prime Best Dad, or gleefuly indulging that. Tying back to the earlier sessions, people should be allowed to be Entertainingly Wrong.
Now the further wrinkle is that Tekutali may as well be right, or more right than he realizes, even if the particulars have suffered historic drift. Creation functions, and its underpinnings work regardless of a specific, authorial viewpoint like Sidereals or our reading of the game books.
In this scene, as I was working on trying to succeed, I managed to play into Etiyadi and Tekutali's main intimacies or interests. Like I said earlier, Etiyadi was trying to maintain face, not actually put the screws to Inks, and as a god, Tekutali wanted flattery, which Inks provided.
Through the challenges of this scene, Inks secured at least the foundations of a trade agreement (and more), as well as possibly an 'in' with a powerful god.
Back to social mechanics- the scene above did not invoke Join Debate or anything of that sort, nor did it involve Mass Social rules, for good or ill.
For context, Social Combat is 'Me vs You vs Other', same as regular combat, though it is contextualized in Long Ticks, or Minutes. Which seems somewhat outrageous, except that the point of Social Combat is not quippy banter, but long, diplomatic talk and oratory. Think 'oral tradition' as opposed to 'Modern comedic quippery'.
Now, I think one thing I'd have to internalize is that Aleph allows or intends the use of MDV modifiers to stack, which I actually am pretty sure is not true. MDV modifiers are supposed to be 'use highest', with Intimacies being the lowest at +/- 1, Virtues at 2, and Motivation at 3, and then the relative appearance modifier.
You're only supposed to use one of those four, as far as I know. If Aleph allows stacking, then that's a whole new ballgame and I'm not 100% sure either way. Part of why Appearance is the godstat is because it is mechanically the easiest, most consistent way to secure a huge MDV advantage, and there are very few ways to diagnose another character's Motivation or intimacies. Better to say that the game hasn't instructed people on how to show that in course of play.
In any case, On paper a social combat sequence is resolved with ticks and actions, but seeing as we have onlyr eally ever had two people debating, we've never needed tick timing. That may change or it might not. And again, we haven't really been using 'Social Combat' anyway for good or ill.
Now Mass Social is a 'bolt on' beast. Same rolls and actions but at-scale. The major difference is that your abilities in mass combat (any kind) are capped by [Socialize], so even the best 1:1 salesperson would be awful leading a court if they were socialize 0 or 1.
For context, Inks is now Socialize 3, so she'd roll Attr X + 3d before stunts and charms.
The other major mechanic is Relative Magntiude- as all courts are mass units. On paper, the 'home' court always has the advantage, compared to an incoming court and courtier.
Now the way the court mechanics work is that you can lead any number of units, but you can only benefit from a unit that is physically present in your scene. This relies on a certain 'common sense' rule. You can easily fit a magnitude 1 court into a throne room, of say 5 people, but not a 10,000 strong population without some heavy effort.
Every point of magnitude one side has over the other grants an automatic success to both a social action and MDV, which is a huge gain in this context. The 2e Solar Charm 'Mastery of Small Manners' actually exists to allow a solo character to entreat with small courts just like the one we saw here in Coxati.
So in theory, Etiyadi could have invoked her court of Magnitude X, however many people she had in attendance, and made my life as a player that much more challenging to overcome her empowered pools- by the same token though, if she lacked Socialize dots, her immedate power would have been greatly curtailed as well.
The Solar Charm 'Gathering the Congregation' like Mastery of Small Manners, exists to mitigate this problem- a Solar can approach any court and rapidly spin up to a superior position or at least equal.
The second half of the session covered more of the local Coxati region- and I should point out that Etiyadi's lands are not the sole representation- there are at least three other such lords in the area if not more, and their culture is very feudal. Aleph mostly spent the time seeding the aesthetic texture of the region and informing Inks of the curious, magical textiles that Coxati is famous for, which I hope to follow up on.
And yes, the session concludes with a 'friendly meeting'. I'm not going to apologize.
With that, Sunlit Sands 28! Feel free to ask questions, seek clarification, and so on.
To recap, Inks had just entered the court of Saudari Etiyadi Fire-in-Earth. Saudari is her title, Etiyadi is her given name, and Fire-in-Earth is her 'patronym'. Note that Etiyadi has a bitchin' throne room with flowing magma attraction. Note also that the apparently mortal courtiers can do court-things there too without issue.
One of the main challenges of Sunlit Sands is keeping track of consistent rulings and approaches. Identifying characterization and maintaining it is tough sometimes when rules change session to session- this kind of flexibility is understandable though, and not necessarily a bad thing.
Like, fundamentally, Exalted does not exhaustively list out everything you CAN do, but it does try to give a representative sampling. Compound this with Aleph's own personal experiences and homebrew culture, and we get independent interpretations of the rules.
For example, Aleph really likes making me roll Appearance in general and specifically in this session- not that I'm against that. It's Inks's highest social attribute, but it lacks any objective mechanical reference, so we have to make up and maintain precedent on the fly.
That leads into the first major detour of the session, in which Aleph posits her new understanding and implentation of the three Social Attributes.
Charisma is personal interaction with other people through the medium of what you are doing and how you're acting.
Manipulation is environmental interaction with other people through the medium of setpieces and equipment around them.
Appearance/Awe is general interaction with other people through the medium of presentation and bearing.
An extension of this that we did not touch on was the primary social Abilities and their design spaces- as Aleph is used to a compressed 6/15 trait system as opposed to the 9/25 I prefer.
Presence = single target
Performance = group target
Socialize = throttle ability.
Now, neither of us stopped to actually initiate the following scene using social combat or mass social combat rules. Aleph for example almost never tells me another character's MDV, which is something I am honestly very leery of- I am used to much more system transparency, where difficulties and DVs are plainly known unless hidden. There do exist rules to determine hidden difficulties, but they're rarely invoked as most games of Exalted are already overburdend on rules.
I'm sort of tangenting from my overall reaction to this scene and the session as a whole, which is good. I thuroughly enjoyed Etiyadi as a character, though I had a fairly obvious gigglefit behind the scenes when Aleph described her as an imperious haughty woman with twin ponytails. On the one hand, I was iffy, as 'Tsundere' hews closely to memetic humor I generally dislike, and interest, as I do like tsunderes, in general.
The scene in question was one largely of saving or maintaining face, in that Etiyadi was less concerned about the specifics of Inks's nature or actions and more the broader impact. Until I diagnosed her with Mastery of Small Manners, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to dig myself out of the demonologist whole. Props on Aleph for making me feel the squeeze of Inks's own reptuation, but at the same time, this is still not at all 'hardball' Exalted.
Like, if she wanted to be tougher on me, in gameplay terms, she could have had Etiyadi demand some kind of Reassurance or mechanical challenge that Inks's demon-binding ways were safe or otherwise prevent her from invoking demon resources. Not that Inks brought any. Of course, the counterpoint to this is that any 'challenge' like this eats up screen and session time, which must be managed carefully.
The main thing here is that 'Hard No' or outright refusal to engage with a player is.. It's something that should feel Possible, but actually doing it is the deathknell of a game. The point of the game is to Play, for the challenges to be surmountable within the context of the rules and shared experience. This is actually why 'story' or 'cleverness' based challenges are actually the worst kind for tabletop RPGs, as they're incredibly subjective and contingent on the storyteller knowing Exactly what they're doing or their players being extremely intutive.
So in practical terms... Let's extrapolate Inks's demonologist status. On paper, she could easily be attacked on-sight for her practices. Let's assume that's the highest the scale can go. In practice, what should happen is that if Inks presents herself to an anti-demon court or individual, they could ATTACK, but attacking is not the same as 'narration says you die for being a demonologist'. The former allows play/counterplay, the latter Ends Stories.
Narratively, Etiyadi has to say something in response to Inks's demonology, but practical gameplay should hew towards 'Player finding solutions/validating their character sheets'.
This segues into the idea of basic storytelling advice like 'fail forward' and 'No But, Yes And'.
Before I move back to social/mass social observation, we advance the scene. Inks spent a fair amount of time and motes vamping for the court and establishing her reputation as 'Gem's Painted Lady', and in turn attempting to endear herself to princess and court to a fair amount of success. Aleph was pleased I wasn't breaking out ridiculous piles of successes this session.
But, I was burning through a lot of motes, so Inks showed her caste mark to regain 2m/action... which as Aleph later pointed out, activated her carefully planned 'trap card', and introduced us to the first major god of Sunlit Sands. Alakananda doesn't count, as she is an Elemental.
Tekutali emerged from the magma feature in no small amount of grandeur, and I think Aleph did a good job of underscoring his divinity both in description and how Pipera reacted. I as a player was not exactly afraid- that lack of sleep kinda threw me harder, but I still tried to maintain character.
The interesting thing that Aleph tried to tutorialize here is that in her Creation, objective 'metatextual' understanding of Exalted's lore and metaphysics are uncommon. Local interpretation, isolated mythology and spirits have imperfect memory or experience.
Imagine the idea of a whole nation believing the Unconquered Sun is a woman? Most games I've ever been in wouldn't even care to try- they have enough trouble trying to get people to not treat the UCS like Optimus Prime Best Dad, or gleefuly indulging that. Tying back to the earlier sessions, people should be allowed to be Entertainingly Wrong.
Now the further wrinkle is that Tekutali may as well be right, or more right than he realizes, even if the particulars have suffered historic drift. Creation functions, and its underpinnings work regardless of a specific, authorial viewpoint like Sidereals or our reading of the game books.
In this scene, as I was working on trying to succeed, I managed to play into Etiyadi and Tekutali's main intimacies or interests. Like I said earlier, Etiyadi was trying to maintain face, not actually put the screws to Inks, and as a god, Tekutali wanted flattery, which Inks provided.
Through the challenges of this scene, Inks secured at least the foundations of a trade agreement (and more), as well as possibly an 'in' with a powerful god.
Back to social mechanics- the scene above did not invoke Join Debate or anything of that sort, nor did it involve Mass Social rules, for good or ill.
For context, Social Combat is 'Me vs You vs Other', same as regular combat, though it is contextualized in Long Ticks, or Minutes. Which seems somewhat outrageous, except that the point of Social Combat is not quippy banter, but long, diplomatic talk and oratory. Think 'oral tradition' as opposed to 'Modern comedic quippery'.
Now, I think one thing I'd have to internalize is that Aleph allows or intends the use of MDV modifiers to stack, which I actually am pretty sure is not true. MDV modifiers are supposed to be 'use highest', with Intimacies being the lowest at +/- 1, Virtues at 2, and Motivation at 3, and then the relative appearance modifier.
You're only supposed to use one of those four, as far as I know. If Aleph allows stacking, then that's a whole new ballgame and I'm not 100% sure either way. Part of why Appearance is the godstat is because it is mechanically the easiest, most consistent way to secure a huge MDV advantage, and there are very few ways to diagnose another character's Motivation or intimacies. Better to say that the game hasn't instructed people on how to show that in course of play.
In any case, On paper a social combat sequence is resolved with ticks and actions, but seeing as we have onlyr eally ever had two people debating, we've never needed tick timing. That may change or it might not. And again, we haven't really been using 'Social Combat' anyway for good or ill.
Now Mass Social is a 'bolt on' beast. Same rolls and actions but at-scale. The major difference is that your abilities in mass combat (any kind) are capped by [Socialize], so even the best 1:1 salesperson would be awful leading a court if they were socialize 0 or 1.
For context, Inks is now Socialize 3, so she'd roll Attr X + 3d before stunts and charms.
The other major mechanic is Relative Magntiude- as all courts are mass units. On paper, the 'home' court always has the advantage, compared to an incoming court and courtier.
Now the way the court mechanics work is that you can lead any number of units, but you can only benefit from a unit that is physically present in your scene. This relies on a certain 'common sense' rule. You can easily fit a magnitude 1 court into a throne room, of say 5 people, but not a 10,000 strong population without some heavy effort.
Every point of magnitude one side has over the other grants an automatic success to both a social action and MDV, which is a huge gain in this context. The 2e Solar Charm 'Mastery of Small Manners' actually exists to allow a solo character to entreat with small courts just like the one we saw here in Coxati.
So in theory, Etiyadi could have invoked her court of Magnitude X, however many people she had in attendance, and made my life as a player that much more challenging to overcome her empowered pools- by the same token though, if she lacked Socialize dots, her immedate power would have been greatly curtailed as well.
The Solar Charm 'Gathering the Congregation' like Mastery of Small Manners, exists to mitigate this problem- a Solar can approach any court and rapidly spin up to a superior position or at least equal.
The second half of the session covered more of the local Coxati region- and I should point out that Etiyadi's lands are not the sole representation- there are at least three other such lords in the area if not more, and their culture is very feudal. Aleph mostly spent the time seeding the aesthetic texture of the region and informing Inks of the curious, magical textiles that Coxati is famous for, which I hope to follow up on.
And yes, the session concludes with a 'friendly meeting'. I'm not going to apologize.
With that, Sunlit Sands 28! Feel free to ask questions, seek clarification, and so on.
Yay, another update!
The hostility towards demons isn't that surprising, given the execution scene last update with the cultists.
The spoiled princess scene was a nice touch, and her covering her eyes when her father/grandfather popped in was by far the highlight of the scene for me. I'm surprised you didn't recognize who Tekutali Fire-In-Earth was obviously referring to.
Not sure if @Aleph would want me to spoil the surprise, or if you would want me to.
And it is a little surprising that your flame duck Vahti drew no reaction from both the godblood Etiyadi and her volcano god ancestor.
Interesting how they're weaving magic into clothes.
A bit of thaumaturgy, or a blessing from the volcano god? Remains to be seen
If the volcano-god is active, he might have some insight on if someone has been leaving Infernal-natured essence tokens around this area as well.
No comment at friendly meeting
Jon Chung
=][=
Until you change your POV and start viewing minions as action multiplication powers.
Salty
Shadow Cabal Assumptor Supreme
- Location
- Sun, Moon, Talia
- Pronouns
- I/Me
At which point any DM with 3.5 experience raps you on the knuckles and forbids summoning.
Aleph
Princess of Stabbity
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Okay then... in order, then.
First off, my trap card, mwaa haa. Yes, this was a scripted event wherein, should Inks start burning her anima banner while inside the mountain, old Tekutali would feel the strength of the sun's rays and come to see why they were shining in the wrong place. This was partly because I've noticed @Shyft doesn't really worry much about husbanding strength over the course of an encounter - he tends to max spend on every roll that matters, which means a lot of high success rolls but also pretty poor stamina should an encounter drag on longer than he expects. This trap card; as a second social encounter immediately after the first, was a reminder of the weaknesses of this playstyle, though it didn't wind up requiring that many more high-effort social rolls.
MDVs and system transparency. Yeah, okay, I'll take responsibility for this one. One of the reasons, I'll freely admit, is that I never know exactly how Inks will engage with a new character, and Exalted chargen is hard. A full Attribute/Ability/Style spread for an NPC is a notable investment for someone who might only show up for a couple of sessions, and leads to a lot of dithering in making it to boot. This is why I prefer dicepools, since I can much more easily calibrate that to "I want this person to be a skilled expert; okay, I'll just slap him down in the 6-8 dice range and give him a tool bonus in his workshop".
But in the case of MDV - as a calculated value - this is trickier, and so I'm often left going "okay, um, she's probably WP 8 or 9, and she'd have, I dunno, Integrity... ???" in a bit of a scramble when social rolloff happens. This isn't so much of an issue when I've had enough prep-time, but in this case it was something I'd forgotten to do for Etiyadi. Negligence on my part. I'll try to do better in future.
Pretty happy with the new Cha/ManApp breakdown. I can remember and stick to this. Social combat as a defined mechanical thing with Roll Join Debate and mass rules still feels weird to me, and I tend to prefer modelling interaction through roleplaying and narrative - which eats game time, as @Shyft rightly points out, but it feels more natural to my mind. I can't promise improvements on this score, though I'll have another look over the Mass Social Combat rules and how/when they're meant to be invoked.
Concerning demonology, I will be squeezing Inks harder about this in future - Gem is permissive because Rankar really only cares about what makes him richer and keeps him Despot, and Etiyadi is vain and has a high opinion of herself and spurns demons mostly because they offend her spiritual senses and it reinforces her opinion of herself as a beautiful divine-blooded princess who deserves admiration and praise in looks, word and deed. As Inks moves further into Coxati territory she'll find lords who aren't so easily mollified, though I do take @Shyft's point about refusal-to-engage. Inks may be attacked, but she'll never just be flat-out told she's dead.
(She may want to use this opportunity to find out a bit more about what cultural assumptions, Entertainingly Wrong ideas and lordly personalities she'll be walking into, though. As pillow talk, perhaps. : P)
The sun goddess stuff, I think I will get into in the postmortem of a later session. There's more to investigate there, and Tekutali's tale will reveal some of it.
If I'm going to be honest, Shyft wasn't the only one who was a little tired this session (as shown by me oversleeping by two and a half hours this morning despite going to bed at an ordinary time). Inks didn't invoke Maji or Vahti in the meeting, so I assumed Pipera was the only one she'd taken in with her and forgot about the other two.Yay, another update!
The hostility towards demons isn't that surprising, given the execution scene last update with the cultists.
The spoiled princess scene was a nice touch, and her covering her eyes when her father/grandfather popped in was by far the highlight of the scene for me. I'm surprised you didn't recognize who Tekutali Fire-In-Earth was obviously referring to.
Not sure if @Aleph would want me to spoil the surprise, or if you would want me to.
And it is a little surprising that your flame duck Vahti drew no reaction from both the godblood Etiyadi and her volcano god ancestor.
Interesting how they're weaving magic into clothes.
A bit of thaumaturgy, or a blessing from the volcano god? Remains to be seen
If the volcano-god is active, he might have some insight on if someone has been leaving Infernal-natured essence tokens around this area as well.
No comment at friendly meeting
(And yes, Etiyadi has been the subject of far too many hours-long recitals about her father's glorious past and how things were better in the old days when gods got proper worship and standards have fallen and how he pulled himself up by his bootstraps from the god of a single mountain village to the lord of a volcano range etc etc etc etc etc. This is the downside to having the attention of an old god who thinks highly of himself and is willing to drop a little of the formality for his daughter.)