You say that but also I'm the most well known person on this entire forum - wait this thread has fifty five thousand posts?
General Exalted Thread
- Location
- Washington, USA
Apart from the aforementioned 'courts' mechanical framework, which is admittedly still in early conceptual stages, some friends and I have partially rebuilt the rules for the children of mortals and spirits, among many other things. If you'd care to take a look, I'd be glad to have other perspectives (that aren't "this will never work and you're a damn fool for even trying"), but please be advised it's not very polished yet. Exalted Houserules Larger philosophical goal is to avoid "awesome as an end in itself" syndrome, sort out errors in the fundamentals, document and integrate lower-level magic well enough that it's worth the effort to actually learn and use. Doesn't mean much to shake the foundations of the world if they're built on contradictory mud to begin with.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
you could be napoléon bonaparte himself returned and your exalted opinions would still be a tiny drop in the great ocean of the general exalted thread
UrsaTempest
Don't Panic!
To be fair, I don't recall Napoléon posted on this thread.
- Location
- Sweden
So, is this thread strictly for Exalted, Exalted mechanics, and Exalted homebrew, or is it fine to discuss crossovers, fanfics etc? This thread is huge, so I don't want to rifle through it. And if there is a different thread for that, link?
Strictly speaking, maybe not - but in practice, people talk about fics, actual plays, RP logs, and so on here.
- Location
- my house
I would say so. Such things have been discussed before without issue
- Location
- Sweden
In that case, I'll just post this thing I made on SB a few months ago, when I was too enthusiastic to restrain myself into actually making it something that's not just me gushing all over the page. I'll put it in a spoiler so no-one's forced to see it:
So. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba.
The Slayers would basically all be something like Heroic Mortals, right?
Anyway:
Yoriichi Tsugikuni, the child prodigy who, upon picking up a wooden sword for the very first time in his life, at seven years old, stomped a trained samurai in a sparring match. Who later invented the Breath of the Sun Style, the first of all Breath Styles, all of which gives you absolutely superhuman strength and speed, modified it when teaching other people to compensate for their individual strengths and weaknesses, creating the Breath Styles every Oni Slayer in the entire series use. Defeated the literal most powerful character in the series, the First of All Oni, Muzan Kibutsuji, in single combat without a scratch, with Muzan barely managing to escape with his life. Could literally see through people's bodies, seeing every single muscle twitch, breath, and movement, allowing him to both predict his opponents in combat and teach other people with ridiculous insight. Was born with a Demon Mark, a tattoo-like marking that manifests on ridiculously good warriors that grants the bearer even more ridiculous strength, speed and reaction time at the cost of shortening their lifespans to the point that you were basically guaranteed to die at twenty-five, or, if it manifests after twenty-five, guaranteed to die by the end of the night.
Living to his eighties anyway, never having been even scratched by any opponent in his entire life, including his last duel against one of the most powerful of all Oni while in his eighties.
(His heart failed in the middle of the fight, after easily stomping his opponent in one strike. Said strike didn't kill the Oni, and the second one would have, but, again, heart failure.)
Remaining humble and compassionate his whole life.
This guy is such Solar Exaltation fodder it's funny.
To speak of something completely different, is there a Charm that does something similar to the See-through World technique? It basically lets you see through people as though they were transparent, letting you see their muscles and organs as they move and work, which lets you to predict their movements in combat among many other things.
The Slayers would basically all be something like Heroic Mortals, right?
Anyway:
Yoriichi Tsugikuni, the child prodigy who, upon picking up a wooden sword for the very first time in his life, at seven years old, stomped a trained samurai in a sparring match. Who later invented the Breath of the Sun Style, the first of all Breath Styles, all of which gives you absolutely superhuman strength and speed, modified it when teaching other people to compensate for their individual strengths and weaknesses, creating the Breath Styles every Oni Slayer in the entire series use. Defeated the literal most powerful character in the series, the First of All Oni, Muzan Kibutsuji, in single combat without a scratch, with Muzan barely managing to escape with his life. Could literally see through people's bodies, seeing every single muscle twitch, breath, and movement, allowing him to both predict his opponents in combat and teach other people with ridiculous insight. Was born with a Demon Mark, a tattoo-like marking that manifests on ridiculously good warriors that grants the bearer even more ridiculous strength, speed and reaction time at the cost of shortening their lifespans to the point that you were basically guaranteed to die at twenty-five, or, if it manifests after twenty-five, guaranteed to die by the end of the night.
Living to his eighties anyway, never having been even scratched by any opponent in his entire life, including his last duel against one of the most powerful of all Oni while in his eighties.
(His heart failed in the middle of the fight, after easily stomping his opponent in one strike. Said strike didn't kill the Oni, and the second one would have, but, again, heart failure.)
Remaining humble and compassionate his whole life.
This guy is such Solar Exaltation fodder it's funny.
To speak of something completely different, is there a Charm that does something similar to the See-through World technique? It basically lets you see through people as though they were transparent, letting you see their muscles and organs as they move and work, which lets you to predict their movements in combat among many other things.
- Location
- my house
The see through technique would be fluff for any solar fight/defense charm, since its main use is letting you predict fighting techniques better. That said, a solar version wouldn't straight up see through things, it would analyze eye movement and muscle twitches and breathing patterns to the same effect
Frakir's brother
Goodbye.
- Location
- The Sea of Trees
A Lunar or Sidereal version might manifest like the See Through World though.
- Location
- my house
Jon Chung
=][=
Not actually true. If the original starting point is bad enough, you effectively start at negative progress and must do work to bring yourself back to the level of utility granted by a complete blank slate. You often see this in ancient software projects, for example. Purging them and starting from scratch can often be a faster and more effective way of getting functional improvements than attempting repairs. This is especially so if you're attempting to retrofit the system to do something it wasn't designed to do in the first place, since a tool that isn't even fit for its original purpose due to poor quality is unlikely to be fit for a divergent one.
In this case, I'd start from "How do I want to make a decent tabletop mini-game out of interacting with institutions? Can this be fun while preserving immersion?" rather than "There exists something in the system that touches large numbers of people being organised, let's use that to interact with institutions!".
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I have been more surprised by you recentish posts that reveal that you have opinions on Exalted all than by your opinions on Solars, tbh.
- Location
- Washington, USA
Duly noted. I'll do it my way and you do it your way, and we'll see who comes up with a usable system first - or whose head explodes last. Given your previous descriptions of a "spite meter," I feel like I've got a pretty good chance.
Jon Chung
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This isn't a competition, I don't play Exalted right now and have no reason to work on it. This is, hmm, advice that springs from information gained from prior work, let's say. The value of experience.
Put another way, in order for an interacting-with-institutions system to do better than a simple Bureaucracy dice roll which the GM assigns an arbitrary difficulty to on the fly, it has to generate value as part of the game, that is, be fun/rewarding/interesting for the player to interact with and not generate garbage output. If it is not, then the "just roll against X difficulty" option is superior in every way, as the same thing gets done for less burned table time and less cognitive overhead. The mass combat system is not fun and interesting and is infamous for generating garbage output, so why use it as your starting point? I'm pretty sure you can come up with something that satisfies this basic requirement better than it, yeah?
If your group actually likes the mass combat system this naturally doesn't apply, in which case good luck.
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- Location
- Washington, USA
I've been installing patches, making the system generate garbage output less often. Easier to use and learn, too. Long as you're dispensing sage wisdom, is there a comprehensive list of mass combat bug reports somewhere, to make sure I'm not overlooking some well-known but tricky-to-replicate issue?
Jon Chung
=][=
Well, then the follow up question would be "does this generate negative utility compared to just rolling War to skip to the end result"?
No, there isn't. Most of that would have been on the old White Wolf forum, which no longer exists. As long as you've fixed (removed) "You Wear Them" and solved the fundamental contradiction of area effects being handled purely through morale you can probably get most of the garbage output scenarios, though I imagine that's the first thing you did (however you did it), if your group actually uses the mass combat system.
Is it fun to play, though? All of these subsystems have to make war against that basic "make a roll and the GM narrates the outcome" functionality, after all. If you've managed to get it to the point where your group actually prefers interacting with that system than doing the simple roll, that's a pretty good job.
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- Location
- Washington, USA
Any and every subsystem must be bypassed or discarded when no one cares enough about the exact results to bother with it. Those so inclined hardly need precise rules for how to avoid the precise rules, Tuesday 26 December 2017 and as such are not quite my target audience - at least not for the mechanics themselves. Organization, summaries, illustrations, worked examples, etc. are also an important part of the project.
The idea that a body of troops functions at least a little bit like a logarithmically multilayered ablative exoskeleton for their commander seems inescapable, but not necessarily undesirable - consider the etymology of "captain," and for that matter the phrase "body of troops" itself. Decisions about how many escorts to bring along at any given time (with going alone being one valid answer) and what sort of army to build in the first place should have enough potential complexity and clear consequences to be meaningful, and to further reveal something about the intentions and character of those making such decisions. Attempting 'gunboat diplomacy' without a shared understanding both in and out of character about what will happen if the people with the gunboats decide to stop being diplomatic is a recipe for WWI-style tragic farce, not so much my kind of fun.
Ideally mass combat rules should be usable and enjoyable in themselves, but also feature enough predictable factors to serve as a 'scoring phase' for strategic-scale action. For example, two kingdoms with all else more or less equal, one having focused more resources on training up a corps of officers, the other on civilian industrial development. Now the first has better tactical flexibility and discipline, but relatively inferior weapons and armor, and perhaps fewer troops total since lack of mechanization means more labor is required to produce the same amount of food. When plans come to fruition and they finally meet on the field, who wins? Resolving that entire conflict with a few capricious modifiers on a single round of craps and narrative fiat won't provide a satisfactory answer to underlying questions, even seems perilously close to inventing a charm for being a good king.
I discovered a partial solution for the area effect problem lurking, overlooked, in the original text:
"Physical attacks" would seem to be a strict subset of "any magic or effect." If single-target attacks are definitionally also single-target effects, and thus subject to that rule, then they can only be used for sniping individuals, not slaughtering an entire Magnitude 2+ army in one shot - no matter the raw damage. Full implementation will have the requirement for area or multi-target effects against armies and other large targets being checked sorta like hardness, a nice tidy 'you must be this tall to ride' barrier. A sufficiently elite solo unit (assuming a lack of area attacks, or dedicated anti-army magic like White Reaper Style Exalted Houserules ) can plausibly win against a squad just by hacking away at whichever soldier is in front of them, but platoons or larger demand some tactical thinking before defeat in detail becomes possible.
In many cases, such a system is even more elegantly minimalist than your preferred roll-and-shout fallback option: given that the Bolivian army has more reserve officers (let alone individual troops) than Butch Cassidy has bullets, he cannot possibly defeat them by simple force of arms, so neither multi-step calculation nor even a single roll are necessary. This makes involvement of at least one Magnitude 2+ unit a nice tipping point, below which the mass combat context can no longer be sustained, solving the 'pet rat problem.' A team of five heroes is just barely Magnitude 2, making them disproportionately effective against less auspiciously aligned opposition, in a manner consistent with both setting history and genre tropes. Flipside of that is how internal conflict and disunity Sleepless Domain - Chapter 2 - Page 10 can leave such a group critically vulnerable. Sleepless Domain - Chapter 2 - Page 28 Measures taken to keep sworn brotherhoods cohesive will then have wider implications.
As for fun... currently it is not anything to play. The work is far from complete. At minimum the mass combat engine needs to be cleaned, properly reassembled, documented, and a test suite compiled to establish baselines for relevant metrics, fun among them. Other subsystems must also be brought up to an acceptable standard, in some cases (such as the size rules) starting by gathering a diaspora of awkward single-use implementations The Codeless Code: Case 107 Babel and filling gaps with
Jon Chung
=][=
Gonna snip that for brevity, since you're trying to philosophically justify the basic concept of You Wear Them here. You don't need to do that, because I agree with you but don't actually care about this, it would have been a reasonable way to do this in a different sort of system. The specific problem "You Wear Them" has in Exalted 2 is fundamentally interaction with the personal combat system and therefore Exalt personal actions and Charms tends to generate garbage outcomes, with the result of breaking verisimilitude, creating table arguments, etc etc.
By making your troops literally an extension of their divine general, you force your mass combat system into a tight and inescapable coupling with the normal combat system and a fun increase in the complexity of our combinatorial hell. Just to be extra-clear, the problem is not that the idea of treating soldiers as an extension of their general is bad because it is conceptually unsound, it's that treating soldiers as an extension of their general in an exception based game with a remarkably shaky and sensitive to cap-breaking personal combat system in which none of the exceptions are balanced around the assumptions of the mass combat system is bad because doing that generates nonsense output and spoils your game.
The primary thrust of this post is to explore why you seem to want to keep this tight coupling, rather than sever the two domains to reduce your workload. If the only Charms that interact with mass combat on the mass level are War Charms and explicitly labeled mass killing charms or battle sorcery and we may section off personal Exalt actions, the scope of the necessary work is vastly reduced and you may focus your efforts entirely upon mass combat, rather than having to deal with the normal combat system. This is inherently desirable, yeah?
For example, let's say we keep the general concept of "You Wear Them", but only allow a generic trooper to put on his fellow troopers, then forbid any interaction between trooper-blob scale and Exalt scale save through a special action reserved for handling mass combat unit interactions with Exalts or similar "hero units" - all mass combat actions are only in the context of other mass combat units otherwise. All we need to do then is to sort out what a battle looks like between these much-simpler entities, then rewrite the War Charms and other War-affecting exception packets to fit. In this thought experiment, War is as decoupled from normal combat as we can make it, with the only interaction being through an explicit "adapter" of sorts. Creating such a thing would be a distinctly smaller task than trying to make every Charm have an alternate War-scale writeup or somehow making the War rules accommodate all possible Charm usage edge cases, IMO.
See above question re workload. I see what you are doing (modifying the ruleset via patches or creative reinterpretation, whichever works), what I'm wondering is why are you doing it this way. It seems to me like an inefficient path to the end goal.
That's fair, but I'm still curious about the separation question! Cleaning up the minefield is admirable, but when you could get to the other side by building a paved road through clear ground, I'm left wondering why you'd want to.
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- Location
- Washington, USA
Ah, I see that I misunderstood what you meant by "you wear them." However, I cannot in good conscience accept your generic-trooper/hero-unit proposal, as it collapses into absurdity and self-contradiction for the trivial case of many exalts joined together as one unit, e.g. the classic hit squad of immaculate monks, one from each aspect. Spirits, such as task-bound demons, scarab guardians, or the Aerial Legion, also need mechanical support, as do landscape-scale behemoths. If each must use a distinct, isolated set of internal mechanics The Codeless Code: Case 119 Sushi and each pair of subsystems requires a unique adapter for when dissimilar combatants inevitably collide, you have only invented a new layer of combinatorial hell, and made the system as a whole more difficult to learn besides. The Codeless Code: Case 123 Order and Chaos
Rules for mortal soldiers alone cannot correct excess Zeal, any more than cruelly twisting the shape of the moon was sufficient to restrain the Eclipse. If the core problem is poorly designed charms implicitly allowed to meddle in contexts where they should not, like The Codeless Code: Case 140 Heartbleed or melanocytes migrating from the neural crest, the solution must also involve clearer design standards for charms, and revision or removal of pre-existing charms wherever necessary to bring them into compliance. Here, too, some small incremental progress has been made, as you can see in the scant few hundred pages of houserules, indices, and references which I previously linked. Rather than generalities, perhaps you could critique actual details thereof, point out the subtle new problems some specific change will inevitably cause?
As for why... there are problems in the world. Some natural, many more knit up by long and bitter political rivalries. With this, at least, I know how to find and grasp a few loose threads, which way to pull. Already tried various "easy" ways, never seemed to end up any closer to where I wanted to go.
- Location
- The Hub
*Hits Blunt*
Why not just duct tape Unite Morphs into Mess that is "Mass Combat, but the entire army is just another way for an Exalt to start punching you in the face."?
It might fix something, or it might just make everything worse. Butt hay, at least you probably use it as an explanation for how Sword Fu is applied to mass combat (You turn your soldiers into a bloody massive sword and hit the Behemoth with it)
Why not just duct tape Unite Morphs into Mess that is "Mass Combat, but the entire army is just another way for an Exalt to start punching you in the face."?
It might fix something, or it might just make everything worse. Butt hay, at least you probably use it as an explanation for how Sword Fu is applied to mass combat (You turn your soldiers into a bloody massive sword and hit the Behemoth with it)
- Location
- Ottawa
You know, 3e has perfectly acceptable mass combat rules.
- Location
- Earth Prime
To answer the first quote, I need the second for context.
To me, one of the greatly unsatisfying aspects of any mass combat system is when the choice to use it or not is a tactical one within the construct of "playing the game."
To illustrate by example, let's say that I am a player of a great warrior. If my character (and perhaps his party) comes across a band of 7 guards, and I find myself hoping that the ST does or does not resolve those 7 guards as a "mass combat unit" because whether they're resolved as a mass combat unit or as a group of 7 guards will have a significant impact on my character's ability to win the fight, then I feel the mass combat system has failed at its job.
Now, perhaps 7 is too small a number for you. "Of course," you might say, "with only 7 guards, the ST is foolish for even considering mass combat! After all, there are probably more than half that many PCs, anyway." That is the problem of the heap: at what point do you say, "obviously, we should be switching to Mass Combat?" Whatever number of guards that is, my example remains in place: if the difference between running it as mass combat or running it with all M guards as individuals makes or breaks whether my great warrior has a reasonable chance of winning this fight.
Even worse, if running a mass combat by specialized mass combat rules with my great general on one side, leading his century of 100 men, means he has a greater or lesser chance of winning a fight against another century of men than if it were run as a fight between 202 individuals (with 101 on a side), that, too, is a major source of dissatisfaction.
As a player OR a GM, I should never be left asking, "If I switch from combat to mass combat, am I changing how this fight will wind up playing out? Am I cheating my players, or making it too easy for them, by switching?"
This is why decoupling it is undesirable to me. PErhaps the "interface" mechanisms can make a difference, but if, by declaring the 5 squads of 10 men each to be 5 mass combat blobs and engaging the mass combat rules (instead of using normal combat rules with 50 men on the enemy side), I have made it notably harder or easier for my players of 4 PCs to win the fight, this is a problem.
- Location
- my house
Could you give an example of some charms which break this assumption and give garbage output? I don't know alot about the system but am interested in it