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General Exalted Thread

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Lisafication said:
Breathing on the Black Mirror generally requires you beat up major enemies first anyway given the difficulty level being based on enemy HP, and if you wanna waste a once-per-story E5 charm on some mooks that seems entirely up to you :V
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If I've gone to the trouble of fighting a big time enemy then I damn well want the satisfaction of flirting with finishing them off myself! Honestly, it's like eating all your salad and then handing the burger to the dog. Yeah it gets eaten either way, but I want to enjoy the flavour. 😔
 
Manic Dogma said:
In fairness, "why would I buy a martial arts charm with the express purpose of skipping doing martial arts" is a fair question imo. Doing Martial Arts is literally what I'm here for! :V
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Listen my friend if I make it all the way to the end of Obsidian Shards of Infinity then skipping the finale of a battle to enter a crazy awesome psychodrama where I see a multitude of future pathways and pick the one I like the most is definitely doing the martial arts I came for. If I didn't want absolutely buck wild reality warping power that causes everyone at the table to have a debate about fate and destiny and the future for like 10 minutes I'd take Citrine Poxes.

(But also in my games I'd probably houserule Breathing on the Black Mirror to be something you can activate before the battle even starts, cuz I'm a freak like that.)
 
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Kaiya said:
I have no idea what the hell the person who wrote Of Things Desired and Feared was thinking, but holy shit why would you write a Charm whose whole purpose is to not play the game.

Really, Sidereal Lore needs way more effects for getting benefits because you know the future in general, rather than the psuedo-social ability and also a "Instead of playing this session, describe how I win!" Charm.
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It seems to be a persistent trap for authors.

I've seen the "this Charm / subsystem automagically solves a story, isn't that cool" -> "hang on a minute, this actually sucks" cycle play out, like, four times in Exalted. And somehow the people who pointed out how much it sucked, last time, often go on to do the same thing when they get their turn at the wheel.

The same people who went into great detail about how bad the gameplay on 2e's Taboo-Inflicting Diatribe was went on to write Dual Magnus Prana.

So who knows, maybe in 2028 you'll write Low Crime Rate Prana for Alchemical Patropoli.
 
Trying to do things better than a prophecy says you can is very epic though? Imagine using it on the big bad, so the qm can name a terrible fate to befall everyone as a cost, so now there's the added drama of even if they defeat the big bad, can they do it in a way that's worth it?
 
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Kaiya said:
...then why have a Charm for that? If you make a Charm for a completely normal part of play experience, you're making it so that no one else but PCs who have that power can do it.

Also, people sometimes disagree on what is interesting, and my core concern is players who use this to skip anything they don't want to deal with. Though, at least this Charm comes with a player veto in it, so if something like that happens, you can just have the whole session be a fight between the person trying to use the Charm and the person who doesn't want to skip the events they're trying to skip, instead of being about the montage of skipping them.

And, to a somewhat lesser but still there concern: as written, this Charm lets you do Workings and the like without spending XP, or needing to be initiated into the Circle, which could also be a problem if the player only cares about direct consequences to the character.
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Yeah, I don't really vibe with this either. At least the SMA we were talking about requires that you punch someone a few times, this is just PBTA logic creeping into a crunchy game it has no business being in; if the appeal of a crunchy game is that all the moving parts can lead to novel scenarios and usage of abilities, this contradicts that by either being the best charm to use in any given scenario with a lenient GM or the worst if the GM gets tired of its use/was never into it in the first place and responds with "Your death" as the condition for every possible scenario.
 
SunnySprings said:
Yeah, I don't really vibe with this either. At least the SMA we were talking about requires that you punch someone a few times, this is just PBTA logic creeping into a crunchy game it has no business being in; if the appeal of a crunchy game is that all the moving parts can lead to novel scenarios and usage of abilities, this contradicts that by either being the best charm to use in any given scenario with a lenient GM or the worst if the GM gets tired of its use/was never into it in the first place and responds with "Your death" as the condition for every possible scenario.
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3e failed the task of being particularly suitable for adversarial storytelling the second the corebook was released with charms such as God-King's Shrike and Dual Magnus Prana, if charmtech is enough to prevent it from being suitable. Ain't no point in throwing more effort down that well.
 
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Lisafication said:
3e failed the task of being particularly suitable for adversarial storytelling the second the corebook was released with charms such as God-King's Shrike and Dual Magnus Prana, if charmtech is enough to prevent it from being suitable. Ain't no point in throwing more effort down that well.
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Damn I guess if we have two bad charms in core, the devs can just make any shit charm they want.
 
I don't buy for a moment that 'PBTA logic,' whatever that means, is incompatible with Exalted's crunch. My experience has shown me that powers and mechanics that truncate scenes (in ways that are satisfying and don't override the enjoyment of the rest of the table) enable you to have *more scenes* in a given session, so that *more things* can happen. Oftentimes powers like this can be a godsend for pacing in a session, since they help cut through the prospect of an hour long debate about something or other and just put the various parties around the table on the same page. It's good, actually, for players to be empowered to ask their ST questions about the game and get honest, useful answers.

Might as well start taking design cues from games that are fun to play and to run.
 
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Kymme said:
I don't buy for a moment that 'PBTA logic,' whatever that means, is incompatible with Exalted's crunch. My experience has shown me that powers and mechanics that truncate scenes (in ways that are satisfying and don't override the enjoyment of the rest of the table) enable you to have *more scenes* in a given session, so that *more things* can happen. Oftentimes powers like this can be a godsend for pacing in a session, since they help cut through the prospect of an hour long debate about something or other and just put the various parties around the table on the same page. It's good, actually, for players to be empowered to ask their ST questions about the game and get honest, useful answers.

Might as well start taking design cues from games that are fun to play and to run.
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I like the hour long debates, it shows that the players actually care about what's going on in the game enough to give effort into determining how things go in the future. If I wanted to rush them, I can just toss in unexpected events that force them to make urgent decisions.

Also, are you interpreting me saying PBTA logic as a dig at PBTA? It's not, I've had fun with Blades in the Dark.
 
I didn't think you were making a dig, but I do think that there's a false dichotomy at play here. Can't elucidate it though - gotta sleep and come back to this in a while.
 
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Kymme said:
I didn't think you were making a dig, but I do think that there's a false dichotomy at play here. Can't elucidate it though - gotta sleep and come back to this in a while.
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No worries, just wanted to make it clear that I think its a good system, I just find that attempts to fuse it with crunch go awry. Dungeon World is some of the goofiest shit I've played because of the addition of D&D-isms to the PBTA framework.
 
SunnySprings said:
Damn I guess if we have two bad charms in core, the devs can just make any shit charm they want.
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You presented a false dichotomy of the lenient GM and the tired GM creating a scenario where it's either the best charm or useless with no in-between, so I'm not exactly surprised you deliberately misread my post with the wording of 'charms like' or the specification that this is only a problem if individual charmtech is enough to dissuade you.

I'm not surprised, but it does mean I'm going to bed.
 
SunnySprings said:
I like the hour long debates, it shows that the players actually care about what's going on in the game enough to give effort into determining how things go in the future. If I wanted to rush them, I can just toss in unexpected events that force them to make urgent decisions.

Also, are you interpreting me saying PBTA logic as a dig at PBTA? It's not, I've had fun with Blades in the Dark.
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If you like the hour long debates, wouldn't you also be cool with a power that shows your players what a phyrric victory would look like, so that they can go into their hour long debates with the additional information from a cool prophecy?
 
SunnySprings said:
Yeah, I don't really vibe with this either. At least the SMA we were talking about requires that you punch someone a few times, this is just PBTA logic creeping into a crunchy game it has no business being in; if the appeal of a crunchy game is that all the moving parts can lead to novel scenarios and usage of abilities, this contradicts that by either being the best charm to use in any given scenario with a lenient GM or the worst if the GM gets tired of its use/was never into it in the first place and responds with "Your death" as the condition for every possible scenario.
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The text of the charm suggests that it "often" won't be the best option or outcome, and the fact that a user needs to spend a full scene in meditation further limits when and how it can be used. It honestly most reminds me of a mechanic that exists in a Sherlock Holmes board game, in which the players are notionally the Baker Street Irregulars; the ability to go ask Sherlock for help. He is able to give leads, and they might be useful, but they're never the best.

If I were insane enough to run an Exalted game, I imagine I would use this charm similarly. Yes, it can "fast foward" stuff that people want to skip, but it can also provide leads or clues on something better and more interesting, particularly because of its fate shenanigans nature.
 
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wrecksalot said:
If you like the hour long debates, wouldn't you also be cool with a power that shows your players what a phyrric victory would look like, so that they can go into their hour long debates with the additional information from a cool prophecy?
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I suppose I'd be more fine with it if it were limited in that it can't do Crafting or Workings for you even if you have the pre-reqs for those.
 
Young Pyromancer said:
What's your favorite wacky concept that you've never got to play?
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No caste Lunar bunny-girl runaway daughter of a god who tormented her with nightmares as punishment until she initiated into sorcery through them and thus attracted Luna's gaze. She leads a Creepy Circus, is obsessed with fear and uses sorcery to build a cult of terror because she honestly believes that fear is the key to enlightenment. In IRL terms she would be a goth and a horror movie fanatic, in Creation terms she's straight up the kind of Lunar Anathema the Immaculates warn about and is 100% a very bad person.
 
Horror movies don't turn people into creepy clowns.

They just help creepy clowns get creative
 
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I can only hope that some brave 3e dev implements the rally mechanic from Bloodborne (in which you gain back health you lost by beating the shit out of your enemies) as an Abyssal charm
 
Creating the sort of Anathema the Immaculate Faith warns about is always fun. You get to go Pure Evil just for the fun of it and see what comes out the other side.

I have a go-to Moonshadow who is an irredeemable hedonistic mass murdering necromancer. Naturally my party decided she was the sympathetic woobie and tried to tug at her heartstrings and convince her Death isn't actually all that cool.

For the record, they initially found her humming a sweet lullaby to the corpse of her most recent victim, a friend of one of the PCs.

And they wanted to talk to this quote unquote "person".
 
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