General Exalted Thread

[BossFight]

Honestly this just gives me Kim Jong'un vibes. Which... could work as a theoretical approach, I guess? It would be a very different, maybe interesting, approach to a bureaucratic system. It wouldn't be the extant exalted system, but you could probably reasonably straightforwardly create a set of charms to go with it. Actually...hmm.

Click to shrink...

I mean, that's kind of the point? Exalted has never really shied away from how messed up the "Great Man" narrative can be, and if I was going to pick anyone to be a secret Solar King in WoD it would be him.

Dragonblooded charms would of course focus on allowing these city state rulers to coordinate more effectively and work together better, ala that charm which allows them to trust each other and the one which let's them pass messages long distances

Sidereals would use the astrology system I guess? Never learned them to well

Infernals would focus on controlling the land itself to control the people and vice versa ala Dune Drowned Oasis rituals though I could see some twisted mirrors of Solar charms existing in a Malfeas tree

Lunars wouldn't have society building charms, but have ones that are really good at making people like self sufficient and anarchistic I guess? Like they can't build you a city, but can teach people how to survive without one and help them reject societies methods of control? IDK, never played then either.

 

[grommile]

My current solution, which my rules need to be modified to reflect, is to say that up to the level of a city state, you can treat an organization as a singular unit,

Click to shrink...

Even city-states seem a little too large, if independent, to be treated as singular units unless your own polity is much larger or the ruler has Organizational Magic suborning their grandees' will.

 

[BossFight]

Even city-states seem a little too large, if independent, to be treated as singular units unless your own polity is much larger or the ruler has Organizational Magic suborning their grandees' will.

Click to shrink...

At that point, the size is less a concession to realism than it is a concession to making the game enjoyable. I'm operating under the default that you want to play as the Ruler of an Empire or Country, Queen Elizabeth, Ghenghis Khan, etc. Like a a certain point you just have to draw a line at what 5 int + 5 Bureaucracy will give you.

You can play at a smaller scale, but at that point you are generally targeting sub organizations to make social attacks against larger ones.

Or to put it another way, you can, say, get the people of Paris to revolt against the king, but that's you taking an action to reduce Paris' stats. On the Nation level this could be handled by opposed project rolls to reduce Paris' might, whereas on the personal level this could be you Exalted PC going in and starting an actual revolt.


This reminds me of another thing I should make clear in the system, that the abstractions are there to speed gameplay. You can always zoom in and handle them like you would any other adventure if you wish. The benefit is that as a Solar you are almost guarenteed to succeed, the cost is you arent doing something else.

As an aside, I'm toying with having int + bureaucracy determine size of your holdings instead of total population, what do yall think?

 

[Exthalion]

For me at least, and I still need to get my rules to reflect this better, Solar Bureacracy and War charms should basically unlock the ability to control organizations and armies like a EU4 game. It allows them to be the glorious solar godking who walks into the capital and takes over the country.

Click to shrink...

This is a very minor critique, but I think the running and the taking over part do not belong together. To run something you need legitimacy, which is primarily a psychological quality. People follow because they believe they should, even if it is a street gang where every member believes you will beat them to death if they cross you.

If you walk into a city and announce you are now in charge, either you must support this with a massive army right outside the gates, copious mind control, or getting people to agree that you are in charge.

As such, social charms like Presence (convincing people that your way is better) and Socialize (fitting in, being part of the group rather than an outsider) are far more important for gaining and keeping legitimacy. Even a supernally adapt ruler performing miraculous feats of organization and administration can still lose the trust and confidence, or fear, of the people and lose their throne or their head.

 

[Segev]

I mean, that's kind of the point? Exalted has never really shied away from how messed up the "Great Man" narrative can be, and if I was going to pick anyone to be a secret Solar King in WoD it would be him.

Click to shrink...

Thing is, as much as Exalted doesn't shy away from the Great Man narrative's problems, it does so from the perspective that the Great Men in question really are that Great. The troubles, in Exalted, arise not because they're incompetent, but because they can be corrupt and because, despite their longevity, they are not eternal.

A Solar God-King in WoD would be leading a comparative utopian paradise, even if it were oppressive and intolerant, because everyone in it would agree with him and be genuinely happy to be working for The Glory Of The Great Leader. So happy to do so that they achieve actual fulfillment in self-sacrifice and dedication to their tasks, even without more reward than their Great Leader chooses to give them. Further, the Great (Solar) Leader would be brilliant enough, and have a smoothly-running-enough bureaucracy with sufficient efficiency, that everyone would genuinely have sufficient to thrive on. The combination of a sense of fulfilment from simply working for the Great Leader's goals, the efficiency of the magically-run bureaucracy, and the lack of corruption (it's not corruption if the greed of the Great Leader is openly presented as him taking his due) flitting away resources from things the Great Leader intended them for would mean that there's plenty to go around, and that everyone has equal (except the Great Leader and his coterie, who have more because that signifies his greatness and grandeur, and those in his coterie are happy to be ornaments for it).

In other words, it would magically make the Great Man narrative work perfectly well, if horrifying in small ways regarding the humanity and individuality of the peasantry, at least as long as the Great (Solar Exalted) Man was running things.

Where real world issues arise due to people not feeling like working is worth it, or the corruption that steals the labor of others for themselves leading to shortages and more graft and laziness, and ineffective leadership on a large scale because the leaders are just men and not Exalted God-Kings who know all and can really manage it all personally, the Solar Exalt, being a Solar Exalt with the right Charms for it, could really make it work.

That it still falls apart eventually because his own callousness means he stops CARING for the well-being of his people, except possibly as cogs in his machine, and thus has them become more and more dissatisfied because there's only so far magically-imposed ideals can make self-sacrifice seem worthwhile (at least without the Solar RIGHT THERE imposing UMI), is the narrative of Exalted. Exalted attacks the Great Man narrative's conceptual core by allowing the Great Man to exist as Greatly as a designer wants, and then demonstrates how things eventually break down anyway because even the Greatest of Men are still...men.

 

[Squishy]

This is why the Celestial Exalted are all trash...

Any kind of bureaucracy/governance/organisation mechanic that operates anything like EU4 would probably be both immensely boring and also contribute very little to the game. I think in order for the game to be both fun and interesting you need to introduce elements of choice, risk, and strategy for the player. Merely having things to roll for is not enough. A system where the player is immediately in charge and faces no substantial challenges to that leadership is bereft of those things and will feel both barren and uninteresting.

A Great-Man, Kim Jong-Un style system would work, in my mind, precisely because time is a limited resource. Even if Kim Jong-Un is a Bureaucratic Superman, he still can't be everywhere at once. The choice, and the risk, and the strategy, comes not in what he decides he wants to win, but in what he decides not to do. You have many problems, and you can only fix some of them - thus trying to array your limited resources to maximum effect, even while being a personal superman.

Alternatively, a 'levers' style system works because it creates the implication of active forces against the player, without the GM having to actually play all of those forces behind the curtain. By changing the stances of other factions based on simple up-down modifiers, you can present the player with a changing political situation that they can both easily understand and that requires limited GM effort to maintain and operate.

One of these designs is fundamentally logistical in nature; the other is social. But a system that just lets you go "yep you're in charge now" is just weak and boring.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

This is why the Celestial Exalted are all trash...

Any kind of bureaucracy/governance/organisation mechanic that operates anything like EU4 would probably be both immensely boring and also contribute very little to the game. I think in order for the game to be both fun and interesting you need to introduce elements of choice, risk, and strategy for the player. Merely having things to roll for is not enough. A system where the player is immediately in charge and faces no substantial challenges to that leadership is bereft of those things and will feel both barren and uninteresting.

A Great-Man, Kim Jong-Un style system would work, in my mind, precisely because time is a limited resource. Even if Kim Jong-Un is a Bureaucratic Superman, he still can't be everywhere at once. The choice, and the risk, and the strategy, comes not in what he decides he wants to win, but in what he decides not to do. You have many problems, and you can only fix some of them - thus trying to array your limited resources to maximum effect, even while being a personal superman.

Alternatively, a 'levers' style system works because it creates the implication of active forces against the player, without the GM having to actually play all of those forces behind the curtain. By changing the stances of other factions based on simple up-down modifiers, you can present the player with a changing political situation that they can both easily understand and that requires limited GM effort to maintain and operate.

One of these designs is fundamentally logistical in nature; the other is social. But a system that just lets you go "yep you're in charge now" is just weak and boring.

Click to shrink...

The biggest issue IMO is that Exalted absolutely needs a 'downtime' mechanic of some sort, to quantify how many actions you can take during your downtime, but it doesn't have one. Look at a lot of the things Exalted assumes:
-Travel is slow and takes time;
-You're probably going to be running some sort of organization;
-Things take time and you are only one person, and the rest of your organization probably lacks powers beyond what you have;

It suggests that any large-scale plot-point-generator/high-level mechanics are going to be about managing the fact that you can only be in one place in one time and even with magic it's hard to travel meaningful distances quickly, and using your limited resources to put out the most important fires while delegating the rest to people you can trust to hopefully not fuck up.

 

[Chehrazad]

no exalted system should run like eu4 because at that point you've just recreated eu4 and while that may be a bad game at least eu4 has graphics and a computer to calculate for you

 

[Exthalion]

-Travel is slow and takes time;

Click to shrink...

That lasts as long as it takes the Lunars to acquire a bird form, the Twilight to invent an airship, the Sid to schlep to the nearest Yu-Shan gate, the DB to borrow Mommy's flying car, or any of the above to learn Stormwind Rider or Summoning.

I understand the appeal of time and difficulty in travel, but there are so many fairly easy to reach options to negate that problem that I don't think most games are going to dwell on them very much.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

That lasts as long as it takes the Lunars to acquire a bird form, the Twilight to invent an airship, the Sid to schlep to the nearest Yu-Shan gate, the DB to borrow Mommy's flying car, or any of the above to learn Stormwind Rider or Summoning.

I understand the appeal of time and difficulty in travel, but there are so many fairly easy to reach options to negate that problem that I don't think most games are going to dwell on them very much.

Click to shrink...

Birds, airships, and Stormwind Rider all don't actually fly very fast. If you've got a large empire, you're still going to be extremely limited in terms of where you can go and how fast you can get there, and oftentimes all of these have infrastructural and/or logistical problems, because they mean you can only bring a very limited amount of materiel with you. Travel issues are actually very important to making non-Exalted subordinates and non-artifact infrastructure matter.

And you don't need to make travel 'dangerous.' You just need to make it take time to make distance matter, because suddenly the more you're moving around in your empire, the less you can do in every part of the empire. It creates scarcity, which forces players to prioritize and make decisions.

 

[BossFight]

You have many problems, and you can only fix some of them - thus trying to array your limited resources to maximum effect, even while being a personal superman.

Click to shrink...

This is actually something my first draft attempts to fix. Namely, any given character can only do a single project (such as reforming taxes or recruiting an army) at a time, and all these projects are long term commitments. You explicitly fail at the task if the person leading it stops working it (note add for more than a week) and cannot start another project without canceling the last one. So you are forced to have other characters do many of the tasks while your solar focuses on the one you deem most important.

 

[Chehrazad]

That lasts as long as it takes the Lunars to acquire a bird form, the Twilight to invent an airship, the Sid to schlep to the nearest Yu-Shan gate, the DB to borrow Mommy's flying car, or any of the above to learn Stormwind Rider or Summoning.

I understand the appeal of time and difficulty in travel, but there are so many fairly easy to reach options to negate that problem that I don't think most games are going to dwell on them very much.

Click to shrink...

the realm has never been depicted with wide-scale fast-communication or fast-travel opportunities and neither has any other state in exalted other than the hasl- wait the haslanti airships are slow never mind

and more importantly if they were depicted as such would require significant changes to the setting, changes which to my knowledge only @EarthScorpion has actually bothered to detail and implement

 

[BossFight]

Sorry for the double post, my internet is not doing so well, and I didnt see this until I already responded. That said...

The biggest issue IMO is that Exalted absolutely needs a 'downtime' mechanic of some sort, to quantify how many actions you can take during your downtime

Click to shrink...

This was the intent behind my "only one project at a time rule". You are meant to say "for the next month I'm working on building new roads" and then you have a few fluff scenes and some training scenes to smooth things out before going on your next adventure

 

[MJ12 Commando]

the realm has never been depicted with wide-scale fast-communication or fast-travel opportunities and neither has any other state in exalted other than the hasl- wait the haslanti airships are slow never mind

and more importantly if they were depicted as such would require significant changes to the setting, changes which to my knowledge only @EarthScorpion has actually bothered to detail and implement

Click to shrink...

If you have anyone with fast travel and fast OODA loops in Exalted, they should be an exception to the norm which shows that those dudes need to be Taken Very Fucking Seriously.

For example, if you have Wyld Hunt airborne units, the core of the Wyld Hunt being basically Dragonblood BLACKWATCH with the ability to set up an airmobile force element and drop on some motherfucker at Zero Dark Thirty (actual Shogunate slang, but unfortunately in this fallen age few people realize that it refers to a specific time) makes them exceptional and out of scale with the rest of the Realm, because for the most part they literally can't do that and have to take months and months to march their legions to your doorstep.

Being able to get that concentration of force down on the ground in a few hours makes you a group Not To Be Fucked With, and when they start showing up it means you're playing in the big leagues.

 

[Squishy]

The biggest issue IMO is that Exalted absolutely needs a 'downtime' mechanic of some sort, to quantify how many actions you can take during your downtime, but it doesn't have one.

Click to shrink...

I think this is looking at things the wrong way around. I'm not a huge fan of downtime mechanics, and I think part of the reason is because downtime mechanics are like "Here's some time! Fill it with something!" which doesn't create meaningful story hooks and sometimes frustrates the players.

I think a better downtime system goes something like this: "You want to do X? That will take this much time. So many things can happen in that time...." and then feed them back a list of bad (or even just neutral, or interesting) things that have happened in that time period that act as a 'consequence' of whatever benefit they want to achieve.

 

[Exthalion]

the realm has never been depicted with wide-scale fast-communication or fast-travel opportunities and neither has any other state in exalted other than the hasl- wait the haslanti airships are slow never mind

and more importantly if they were depicted as such would require significant changes to the setting, changes which to my knowledge only @EarthScorpion has actually bothered to detail and implement

Click to shrink...

First, I was talking about personal scale travel.

I checked the 3E Realm book, and in the Communication section, it mentions that the Realm has a heliograph system used by the Imperial Postal Service which does transmit even personal message between dynasts (though such civilian traffic takes a back seat to state business. I expect that every great house also retains the services of sorcerers capable of dispatching the Infallible Messenger at need. The Stormwind Rider will take you from the Imperial City to the tip of the Pearl and Silk Peninsula in 3 days.

So no, you cannot ship your army across the Isle in a few days, but you can send a Hearth of DB. The army will take about a month to make the same trip by sea.

 

[EarthScorpion]

I think this is looking at things the wrong way around. I'm not a huge fan of downtime mechanics, and I think part of the reason is because downtime mechanics are like "Here's some time! Fill it with something!" which doesn't create meaningful story hooks and sometimes frustrates the players.

I think a better downtime system goes something like this: "You want to do X? That will take this much time. So many things can happen in that time...." and then feed them back a list of bad (or even just neutral, or interesting) things that have happened in that time period that act as a 'consequence' of whatever benefit they want to achieve.

Click to shrink...

That's kinda the system I wound up inventing.

Seasonal basis - each season, a character can take one Major action (about two man-months of effort tops) and one Minor action (takes a few man-weeks). You can trade in 1 Major for 2 Minor.

Seasonal actions can't have Excellencies spent on them (so there's an interesting risk of failure and you don't wind up with a system so utterly warped by the need to stop specialists trivially succeeding that non-specialists can't even play).

Overall tasks are measured by a number of actions that have to be completed to succeed at them. The players can suggest ways of getting the actions together - for example, when building a dam, the diplomat-trade could go "ah yes, I'll secure trade deals so we can get the stone we need" while the wilderness wanderer is like "I'll map out the area around the dam site" and the architect is like "I'll draw up plans". Between them, they've put three actions towards the goal.

People can try to thwart your actions by doing counter-actions that drain your successes. This can be offensive or defensive; a shrewd bureaucratic prince who keeps a close eye on their finances is thwarting attempts to defraud them, but he could also use the same talents to put trade tarrifs in the way of the dam that I mentioned in the way, obstructing attempts to procure the stone for it (which thwarts actions to make trade deals or hurts the building process by cutting off their supplies).

Actions are fail-interestingly by default - ie, if you fail a Major action to map out an area in preparation for building a dam there, for example, it's not just that you couldn't map the area, it's that you found that the area has heavy subsidence or the local lord tried to arrest you or the forest spirits started sabotaging you because they don't want a dam.

Because of the harsh action cap, PC time is valuable. Actions the PC can't do personally have to be carried out by subordinates, who have to be relied on. Which means that players are encouraged to "build stories" of what their actions are doing, which produces the framing narrative for events when you "zoom in" to handle the consequences of fail-interesting results (like when the PCs go to hunt down the local elemental lord who's trying to stop them flooding his land so they can control the river flow and they realise they were Miyazaki villains all along).

 

[Chehrazad]

I checked the 3E Realm book, and in the Communication section, it mentions that the Realm has a heliograph system used by the Imperial Postal Service which does transmit even personal message between dynasts (though such civilian traffic takes a back seat to state business. I expect that every great house also retains the services of sorcerers capable of dispatching the Infallible Messenger at need. The Stormwind Rider will take you from the Imperial City to the tip of the Pearl and Silk Peninsula in 3 days.

Click to shrink...

The Byzantine Empire in the 11th century could transmit a message from the frontiers of Anatolia to Constantinople in an hour and meet with a fully mustered professional army in a week through a system of strategic bonfires so I'm really not sure why a semaphore system is particularly impressive. Infallible Messenger is limited to sorcerers who even in the Realm are rare and Stormwind Rider has been mechanically broken and nonsensical since 1st edition.

 

[strange_person]

How about adapting the existing flurry mechanics to dramatic actions? If you're trying to do two full-time jobs at once, without dedicated time-warping magic, rolls for one of them are at -2 dice, and -3 for the other. Instead of DV penalties, chronic overwork could be represented by starting the scene with that many levels of fatigue when you zoom in to resolve personal-scale action. Ticks would correspond to days, traversing Cecelyne is a miscellaneous action, anything that can be done in hours or less is probably treated as reflexive. Botch your Join Court roll and it takes most of a week just to get caught up on the local gossip.

 

[BossFight]

How about adapting the existing flurry mechanics to dramatic actions? If you're trying to do two full-time jobs at once, without dedicated time-warping magic, rolls for one of them are at -2 dice, and -3 for the other. Instead of DV penalties, chronic overwork could be represented by starting the scene with that many levels of fatigue when you zoom in to resolve personal-scale action. Ticks would correspond to days, traversing Cecelyne is a miscellaneous action, anything that can be done in hours or less is probably treated as reflexive. Botch your Join Court roll and it takes most of a week just to get caught up on the local gossip.

Click to shrink...

I did something similar, with an Organization being able to flurry actions, but no single person being able to lead/work on more than one project at once, but I really like your version.

 

[strange_person]

Okay, if we're adapting the general framework of 2e mass combat, then any given Court needs a leader, and can support a number of additional special characters equal to twice it's Magnitude. Let's call them Agents, Experts, and Liaisons, corresponding to Heroes, Sorcerers, and Relays respectively.
Agents are the muscle, guard-captains and motivational speakers and assassins, they go outside and solve problems in a hands-on sort of way, and might need to step up when the leader is indisposed. Natural fit for lunars.
Experts are the brains, astrologers and architects and concubines, they do strategic planning/rear-area support and are extra difficult for outsiders to get in touch with. Natural fit for sidereals.
Liaisons do the tedious formalities. Every other Court under yours in the chain of command needs one at your court to carry official correspondence back and forth, and if your court is big enough you'll need a certain number of them - middle management - just to avoid communication failure.

 

[Sanctaphrax]

Okay, if we're adapting the general framework of 2e mass combat...

Click to shrink...

Why would anyone in their right mind ever want to do that?

The idea that some random Solar can just show up and take over a government is a very common trope in Exalted.

Click to shrink...

It's also an inevitable consequence of the abilities that Solars have. It's always been possible to conquer a government with an army, and Exalts can be one-man armies that are also superhumanly charismatic.

In short, Exalted 3E's Charms model views bureaucracy less through the lens of a psychology of organization and more almost like a kind of medicine. In this conceptualization, the organization is essentially the player's (or another specific character's) body, comprised of endless cells which can be corrupted or damaged but which appear to have no meaningful free will or self-interest and which the Exalt (or Solar, I guess) can essentially command at magical will.

Click to shrink...

I agree, and am significantly more bothered by this state of affairs than you are.

In the real world, some people are good at managing organizations and other people are not. Bureaucracy Charms should take that difference to magical extremes. Unfortunately, the current approach seems to be to abstract that difference away while giving some random organization-themed magical powers to certain characters.

I don't know how sound this is, but I feel the sorcerous workings mechanics could be expanded upon to be a general purpose 'projects' engine, which bureaucracy could be apart of. Maybe even crafting if you really wanted to double down on it.

Click to shrink...

That sounds terrible. I've talked in the past about why it's a bad idea for crafting, but I think it would be even worse for bureaucracy.

The details you'd abstract out in such a system are, in fact, the things you should be focusing on.

Thing is, as much as Exalted doesn't shy away from the Great Man narrative's problems, it does so from the perspective that the Great Men in question really are that Great. The troubles, in Exalted, arise not because they're incompetent, but because they can be corrupt and because, despite their longevity, they are not eternal.

Click to shrink...

I think you're misunderstanding what the Great Man theory is about. It's about what decides the course of history, not about where problems come from.

A story in which a Great Man's failings destroy the lives of millions isn't showing a problem with the Great Man theory; it's actually supporting it to the hilt.

A story in which a Great Man's failings are largely unimportant, as are his virtues, would show the problems with the theory. As would a story where the Great Man is merely the product of his background.

 

[Exthalion]

The Byzantine Empire in the 11th century could transmit a message from the frontiers of Anatolia to Constantinople in an hour and meet with a fully mustered professional army in a week through a system of strategic bonfires so I'm really not sure why a semaphore system is particularly impressive. Infallible Messenger is limited to sorcerers who even in the Realm are rare and Stormwind Rider has been mechanically broken and nonsensical since 1st edition.

Click to shrink...

Yes, but the Realm system is apparently elaborate enough that it can accommodate, in addition to important government messages, the private correspondence of rich people. Thus while it may not be faster than the Byzantine system, it has far more bandwidth. It would thus be more comparable to the early telegraph. (the French semaphore system coexisted with the early telegraph before eventually being replaced) I admit I am not an expert, but a brief online perusal suggested the Byzantine system had only 12 possible messages it could send.

Sorcerers are rare in the Realm which only means there are hundreds of them, and almost certainly at least one from every house in every major population center. I am reasonably sure that if it is important enough that House leadership will be able to bite the bullet and ask them to send a message.

As for Stormwind Rider, there are Agata and Huraka (among others) who, if not quite so fast, are still OCPs as far as strategic mobility for the uppermost echelon of rich, powerful, and important people as far as deploying small teams of individually powerful people at speed.

I've talked in the past about why it's a bad idea for crafting, but I think it would be even worse for bureaucracy.

The details you'd abstract out in such a system are, in fact, the things you should be focusing on.

Click to shrink...

Do you happen to have a link to that or know a few keywords I can use to search for that discussion?

 

[Exthalion]

Double Post

 

[BossFight]

Hey, so I did another pass of the rules, call it draft 1.5, and I'd do more but I'm just so tired from work. The core rules are still the same, but tweaked to reflect the feedback.

Still roll Attribute + Ability, with Attribute determined by the Org and Ability by the project leader but...
1. Clarified how charms work with the system
2. Made Bureocracy the Wealth Ability

Changed the Example characters in the first paragraph

Added several sidebars clarifying what the system is meant to model and why

Changed the example projects

Added Several Sections on intended modes of play at the end.

Still need to finish balancing the attributes against each other. Wealth in particular is giving me a lot of trouble, since I want to balance that against Resources, but resources goes
Yourself
Your Family
Farm
Country Estate
Nation

Which is just a weird way to balance that.

Now I need to go wait off this headache

Exalted Specific Organization Rules

Organization Rules! King Arthur. Joan of Arc. Tokugawa Ieyasu. These are the kind of people that Exalted is meant to emulate. But so are Peterthe Great, Queen Elizabeth and Justian the first. Kings and Queens and leaders who achieved great things and went down in history. Currently however, ther...

docs.google.com