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General Exalted Thread

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Random Entity said:
Um... no, you couldn't? You can justify its undetectability, but that does not by any means make the fact that it is undetectable playing fair.
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No, you're right that I can't justify what makes it fair, I don't really need to. That's because what actually makes it fair is that it's a capstone craft charm that also requires sorcery and a large investment to use regardless.
 
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Deations said:
Well, you say that but there are other people who think pretty different things. :p
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hmm i think this can be addresses with a minor rewording of my previous post.
their opinion is exactly as valuable as the arguments and evidence they use to support it, and if they attack others background rather than their arguments they are in violation of debate rules.
 
Deations said:
No, you're right that I can't justify what makes it fair, I don't really need to. That's because what actually makes it fair is that it's a capstone craft charm that also requires sorcery and a large investment to use regardless.
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Which of course justifies it being better than Larceny ever can be at disguises, right?
 
Random Entity said:
Which of course justifies it being better than Larceny ever can be at disguises, right?
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Yes, because you are not disguising yourself as another person, you are literally making yourself an identical copy.

It's not like Larceny is any less powerful, Master Plan Meditation also lets you retcon details of what already happened because your character is so good at planning this shit out in advance.

On Master Plan Meditation

In each instance of altered evidence, the player is able to respond to the introduction or discovery of evidence, retroactively changing the narrative. This is not a Creation-time alteration, but rather a retroactive continuity of the Storyteller's narrative or Investigation action results by another player. Literally, as a character discovers some evidence of your crime, you can pay contingency points to alter the evidence, changing what he found (even if that means he found nothing).

Destroying evidence is different from erasing evidence; destroyed evidence may be reconstructed by various Charms. Erased evidence is treated as though your Solar carefully covered her tracks. Feel free to gloatingly describe how she outsmarted her pursuers by convincing an army of ants to right the blades of grass she walked over that day, or how she snatched up that single strand of hair before it could fall to the floor.

Distorting evidence causes it to point at another character connected to the crime scene location. The Exalt's player does not determine at whom it points; that determination is instead made by the player of the detective. If the only other character known to have visited the scene is the detective, the evidence will point to his guilt.

This Charm models the Solar's serious attention to detail and overqualification for mindgames. Each use should be depicted as the Lawgiver channeling a preternatural sense of preparedness and foresight and meditating on future plans to make her tactics flawless.
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To step away from the clusterfuck that has been the last few pages of conversation for a moment, I have a question about Battle Groups:

Now, when giving a battlegroup an Order, the battle group gets the number of successes as a dice bonus to all dice pools for actions taken during the next turn. So, does this include their defense values, since those are just unrolled dice pools?
 
Fenrir666 said:
Part of the intent of the Charm is that it, you know, might not have ever actually been made before now. It's a thing that is, in theory, possible. Not a thing that definitely exists.
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Well, that's neat. Its also not in the book. This is the sort of thing that really needs spelling out. Further, the requirements are... not strenuous by most reasonable FA elder standards. It would have been done before, especially since the Core book charms are more or less meant to give a rough idea of what someone could do, not 'this is a crazy thing an Elder combining Abilities can do'.

I like 3e and will defend it on most counts, but this is just a bad charm on a few levels. They happen, particularly at the outer edges of the system. I'm more interested in finding issues, figuring out how and why they are a problem and then figuring out how to deal with them then I am in defending them.

IMHO, Dual Magus Prana is problematic in play (how many motes does your actual body have? Have you been doing shit in the meantime. Does this mean you can double your actions? How does it interact with Occult and Awareness charms?) and quite frankly its not a charm effect, or at least not a Solar Charm effect. An Exigent of Puppets fits better, or some other such weird estotic bullshit. For Solars 'we're the best crafters ever' just make it an artifact they can make, and ignore the need for this retroactive bullshit.
 
Goddamn it. Why is every location I latch onto for my characters new to the edition? I just want to know how people would venerate gods of fire and water. And how you end up worshipping them in a coastal region in the East.
 
SerGregness said:
To step away from the clusterfuck that has been the last few pages of conversation for a moment, I have a question about Battle Groups:

Now, when giving a battlegroup an Order, the battle group gets the number of successes as a dice bonus to all dice pools for actions taken during the next turn. So, does this include their defense values, since those are just unrolled dice pools?
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No unless explicitly called out. Static values (Defense is a part of this) are their own thing you need to enhance separately. Battle Groups tend to make up for it in tons and tons of health.
 
Deations said:
I hate the very idea of getting fixated on associated/disassociated mechanics, because they're most often used in long-winded arguments to distinguish between 'roleplaying games' and 'storytelling games' or to bloviate over GNS theory. You could just as easily argue that Exalted 3E is Gamist because of its emphasis on competition, battle, and overcoming challenges, or Narrativist because the driving theme of the game is 'what happens when you give players a lot of power to abuse' or whatever. The definitions are loose, the goalposts shift depending on the personal preferences of the people arguing them, and the validity of it all isn't even agreed upon. You could argue almost everything is dissociated, when it comes down to it. In D&D, HP is dissociated (it's more of a narrative device than an exact quantification of how much health you have). In Exalted 3E, Initiative is Dissociated (it's not a number characters are aware of on an in-character level, after all!).
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So you deny that Exalted is a game which has, for 2 editions, had the 'players' acting in the role of the character, taking actions which were entirely in-character at all times with no special ability to act outside to define the narrative? And you deny that for the most part, this is how 3e treats the players, as being their characters instead of co-storytellers managing another character in a collaborative story?

At least in 3E the Devs have made it clear they've never been over-concerned with being hardcore simulationists. You'll never see 3E used to model the Primordial War or the Usurpation, and if they were inclined to make a game for that it'd be using a different system entirely. The rules are not the physics of the setting. It's a game, dang it.
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And this is redefining 'simulation' in the middle of the argument. Almost all modern games use Newtonian physics to simulate things in their physics engines. Clearly this means that modern sims like War Thunder are not actually sims because their models break down outside of the environment they're intended to handle. Nothing could be further from the truth. Part of understanding how to make a good simulation is knowing where you can cut corners and not lose fidelity (or lose the least fidelity possible for the maximum gain in simplicity). You're right that almost anything could be defined as 'simulationist' under GNS theory. That's a feature, not a bug. Almost everything attempts to simulate something. Exalted attempts to, by how it works, simulate the game world. Your obstacles are described in physical, rather than narrative terms. Your actions are physical, rather than narrative. Your results are similarly physical, rather than narrative. In Exalted there is a meaningful difference between "I move the rock by convincing others to help" and "I move the rock with my mighty thews" whereas in result-based games that's not necessarily the case.

Given that the Exalted game engine is process-based, Exalted's game engine is effectively (a simplified version of) its rules of physics. If I say jump, the engine outputs "how high" rather than "by doing this you succeed at/fail to move closer to your goal/create a complication for yourself/make yourself feel better." The latter is a result of the physical, in-universe consequence of the action the actor took, whereas in, say, FATE, the physical, in-universe action is a consequence of the narrative, out-of-universe action taken by the player. Just because it does not simulate every nuance of the physics of the Exalted world does not mean that the game engine is not a simulator. "This is outside the scope of the simulation" is a valid counterargument. It'd be an unavailing one, because this charm exists, and so do charms that let you detect disguises, but it'd be an actual counterargument. "Exalted 3E wasn't intended as simulation" is not a counterargument when someone brings up a scenario that could occur in Exalted, because the system is supposed to simulate what happens in the world of Exalted. The fact that the rules do so with relatively low resolution (a necessary consequence of being a pen and paper game) does not change that I should be able to throw in a scenario that can happen in the game and it should throw out some results that make sense in context.

The Exalted system is a heavily process-based, crunchy system. There. No 'simulationism' term used. These systems often mix poorly with metagame, results-based mechanics because they let you bypass the typical process based system and just declare a result happened, with no ability to interrupt the typical process, which creates seeming procedural unfairness. You can deal with that by allowing people to interrupt that chain, by using their own powers in a similar fashion. However, Dual Magnus Prana does not. This leads to a lot of complaints because people absolutely hate procedural unfairness.
 
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MJ12 Commando said:
So you deny that Exalted is a game which has, for 2 editions, had the 'players' acting in the role of the character, taking actions which were entirely in-character at all times with no special ability to act outside to define the narrative? And you deny that for the most part, this is how 3e treats the players, as being their characters instead of co-storytellers managing another character in a collaborative story?
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I mean 3E literally lets a player Introduce a Fact with Lore rolls, which can be retroactively declared canon provided the ST is cool with it, as with Dual Magnus Prana. The players, right there, have an ability to act outside and define the narrative. Now, I'd still say that Exalted 3E still leans heavily on the ST veto rather than let players act as equal partners, but it's still far and away the most Narrative edition we've had so far.

MJ12 Commando said:
Given that the Exalted game engine is process-based, Exalted's game engine is its rules of physics. If I say jump, the engine outputs "how high" rather than "by doing this you succeed at/fail to move closer to your goal/create a complication for yourself/make yourself feel better." The latter is a result of the physical, in-universe consequence of the action the actor took, whereas in, say, FATE, the physical, in-universe action is a consequence of the narrative, out-of-universe action taken by the player.
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How do you even distinguish between an action taken in Exalted and an action taken in FATE when in both scenarios jack shit is going to happen unless the player declares 'I want to do this thing!' Everything is dependent on out of universe actions. Forgive me if I'm being slow (I probably am), but this is one of my big turn-offs when it comes to GNS theory. The line between Associated and Dissassociated seems terribly, terribly thin.

MJ12 Commando said:
The Exalted system is a heavily process-based, crunchy system. There. No 'simulationism' term used. These systems often mix poorly with metagame, results-based mechanics because they let you bypass the typical process based system and just declare a result happened, with no ability to interrupt the typical process, which creates seeming procedural unfairness. You can deal with that by allowing people to interrupt that chain, by using their own powers in a similar fashion. However, Dual Magnus Prana does not. This leads to a lot of complaints because people absolutely hate procedural unfairness.
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So again does Soul Reprisal. I'm not saying you might like Soul Reprisal, for all I know that might also be a problem! I'm just operating under the fact that the bulk of complaints are over Dual Magnus Prana rather than Soul Reprisal, and the outstanding issue seems to be that the players and the GM might be able to change the story around Rashomon style. But can you tell me why this is unfair, when so many other games go to even wilder lengths of what might be changed, while it's 3E that's restrained by GM veto? Why would a charm that lets you cheat death be unnacceptable compared to say, Immortal Malevolence Enslavement in 2E, which also let a dead PC come back to life, no tackebacks (albeit at significant personal cost).

Or the later Solar Mirror to Immortal Malevolence Enslavement, which let a Solar player come back to life once per season provided they died defending someone else.
 
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Deations said:
:jackiechan:

Sorry for not embracing the blog post screeds of Ron Edwards and Justin Alexander as my one true gospel for elfgame design
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I enjoy disassociated mechanics as much as associated ones, used properly. Each have their place.

That's an entirely different argument than the one you chose to take up, which was that any and all questions regarding disassociated/associated mechanics, GNS (a triumvirate I personally don't care for, but acknowledge the reasoning behind), or presumably any other form of RPG theory could and should be disregarded immediately, because those words (apparently) don't mean anything.

Either that or you genuinely believe that Initiative and HP are disassociated mechanics rather than abstracted ones, in which case you're not being disingenuous, you just have no idea what you're talking about.
 
Deations said:
Why would this be unnacceptable compared to say, Immortal Malevolence Enslavement in 2E, which also let a dead PC come back to life, no tackebacks (albeit at significant personal cost).
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You mean the thing which didn't work against things with spirit-killing attacks, which meant that basically the Abyssal was playing by the same rules as your dime-a-dozen gods, and which if you're fighting an Abyssal with IME and winning it is quite unlikely you don't have a spirit-killer?

You'd be seeing a fucktonne fewer complaints about the doombot Charm if when the Solar was killed by someone using a spirit-killing Charm, the severed connection to his soul which was animating the body double backlashed and killed him instantly. Because that's a thing that someone trying to murder him can plan for, and which isn't an uncounterable thing which breaks all the rules.

(You'd still get quite a lot, because it's still incredibly stupid as a thing which you can retcon in - it should have to be pre-announced and committed motes are required to animate it (gosh, kind of funny how this super-advanced artifact gets away with no committed motes) and that means that the doombot and the character are separate and if a murderer manages to track down the character... welp.)
 
Deations said:
I mean 3E literally lets a player Introduce a Fact with Lore rolls, which can be retroactively declared canon provided the ST is cool with it, as with Dual Magnus Prana. The players, right there, have an ability to act outside and define the narrative. Now, I'd still say that Exalted 3E still leans heavily on the ST veto rather than let players act as equal partners, but it's still far and away the most Narrative edition we've had so far.
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Yes, and these are exceptions to the typical way things work in Exalted rules, where things are determined by in-character actions from in-character traits. Are you denying that the general trend of Exalted 3rd edition is that your narrative goals, whatever they are, are worked towards by discrete, in-character processes that you decide to undertake?

How do you even distinguish between an action taken in Exalted and an action taken in FATE when in both scenarios jack shit is going to happen unless the player declares 'I want to do this thing!' Everything is dependent on out of universe actions. Forgive me if I'm being slow (I probably am), but this is one of my big turn-offs when it comes to GNS theory. The line between Associated and Dissassociated seems terribly, terribly thin.
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There is a difference between "being a storyteller for that character/actor for the character" and "being the character." FATE puts you in a role closer to #1 than Exalted does.

I am distinguishing between process and result based resolution systems here. In Exalted, my actions are all single discrete processes which exist as a thing in the game world. I swing a sword at someone. That is a specific action with specific rules that are not interchangeable with yelling loudly at that person (barring certain forms of magic) that creates specific results. In FATE or Apocalypse World, my action is attempting to create a result in the narrative directly, and then I backfill in the processes of which this result comes into play. So I could Turn Someone On (Monsterhearts) by being really good at swordfighting or by shooting my way through a bunch of aliens to rescue someone. Why not? Stranger things have happened in movies. In Exalted, this is not an action that I can (strictly speaking) do by being very good at swordfighting or by shooting hostage takers to rescue a hostage. In fact, even if I get to do so, this is not something that I declare, but rather something that is broken down into individual, quantized units of time and action. I cannot give someone an Intimacy of Lust by thrusting my Daiklaive at them (I mean this literally, not figuratively). That's the core difference and it's a very important difference.

Both have their pros and cons and many systems incorporate both to some degree (I'd be surprised of a system which doesn't incorporate any elements of either that isn't a 90s morass). But mixing them creates issues where you attempt to oppose an action declaring an intended result via an action declaring a process or vice versa.

So again does Soul Reprisal. I'm not saying you might like Soul Reprisal, for all I know that might also be a problem! I'm just operating under the fact that the bulk of complaints are over Dual Magnus Prana rather than Soul Reprisal, and the outstanding issue seems to be that the players and the GM can change the story around Rashomon style. But can you tell me why this is unfair, when so many other games go to even wilder lengths of what might be changed and it's 3E that's restrained by GM veto?
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I already pointed out why it's such a problem.

MJ12 Commando said:
These systems often mix poorly with metagame, results-based mechanics because they let you bypass the typical process based system and just declare a result happened, with no ability to interrupt the typical process, which creates seeming procedural unfairness.
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It's procedural unfairness. Even ignoring any balance or lack thereof, even assuming Dual Magnus Prana is 100% totally balanced with other 'avoid death' charms that people like more, procedural unfairness is huge. It comes up a lot in real life. Even if the result is totally fair, something that lets you just declare "that was always my body double" sticks in people's craw. I suspect that if Dual Magnus Prana was replaced with Second Coming Prana or some equivalent in Resistance, which let you get back up seven days after your death, creating an almost identical result, there would be much less of an outcry. Because it doesn't have the same procedural unfairness of "this guy gets to say I'm an incompetent rube who stabbed his body double! Fuck that guy."

That's the main problem. The other problem is that it defines collateral details, like the other person's character. It means you can't have detected the double. You can load up with all the body-double detecting charms and artifacts and you were still fooled. This looks like it's you making the other character job for the camera unwillingly. Again, it's about the optics as much, if not more, as the actual thing itself.
 
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I'd say Exalted is introducing some narrativist elements into its systems, some of which (the Lore thing allowing you to introduce rather than merely know facts) are fine, some... not so much.
 
Roadie said:
It's "not trivial", sure, but with the right collection of Charms you can get 1 free gold point per day and convert them 2:1 to white points.

So, every two months you can get a new Doombot for free.
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Hmmm... you know, really the problem is charms that just give crafting points without needing to finish projects that fulfill objectives.

*cracks knuckles*

1. Simple excision. Those charms vanish or get altered to not give craft points. Same amount of book-keeping, but it also removes the desired effect of these charms.

2. Transformation. Those charms find other ways to achieve the desired effect of "Solars can craft big-time projects frequently". Might be trickier to handle, but would likely have about the same amount of book-keeping.

3. Virtualization. The charms are altered so that the resulting points can only be used for finishing rolls or making a temporary slot. Adds some book-keeping, on the downside. On the upside, it does more or less remove the problem - if you want to get experience or doombots you have to finish projects successfully.

Ah... I'd missed theory-crafting to try and polish or fix charm trees - I haven't done that for at least a year or two. This could be fun to play with while I wait for the game to come out. "Removing retcon charm effects without losing the ability to model what they're attempting to model" is an interesting challenge.

Now, doombot itself - I that you do either need to have situations where the replacement wouldn't work (ie, the opponent has, say, Eyes of the Unconquered Sun up). It runs the danger of a Storyteller saying "nope, that's not going to work"... but then, shouldn't that be a risk of something like this?

A slight variation is that the charm can either be declared at the moment *if* there's nothing that would have prevented or detected it present in the scene (for example, characters that *would* detect it keeping quiet about it) or can be declared at the start of a scene *or* stunted to switch out with the double during the scene. Or just the last one, for that matter.

For an example of the latter, let's take a grand gala with dancing and such. A solar crafter suspects an assassination attempt is incoming and the player uses this charm to declare there's a robot double available. The solar then "gets some fresh air" and the double returns - or some way of making the switch. The assassination goes off and the Solar is safe. Otherwise, the scene ends and the double is still available for later (at perhaps a crafting discount to represent maintenance of the thing).

Thinking more about it, I think I'd houserule it like this (assuming it's not one of the charms being cut). It has to be declared before the deadly moment and the Solar will need to describe a stunt on how they manage to switch with the fake. A stealthy one might be able to pull off "I duck around a pillar and the robot ducks out the other way", for example.
 
Revlid said:
I enjoy disassociated mechanics as much as associated ones, used properly. Each have their place.

That's an entirely different argument than the one you chose to take up, which was that any and all questions regarding disassociated/associated mechanics, GNS (a triumvirate I personally don't care for, but acknowledge the reasoning behind), or presumably any other form of RPG theory could and should be disregarded immediately, because those words (apparently) don't mean anything.
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I believe that GNS Theory is flawed, at the very least.

Revlid said:
Either that or you genuinely believe that Initiative and HP are disassociated mechanics rather than abstracted ones, in which case you're not being disingenuous, you just have no idea what you're talking about.
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Mostly I'm just going off the 25 page thread on ENWorld where people were arguing whether HP and Armor Class were dissociated or not: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...-quot-The-Feeling-of-Dissociation-as-a-Player

To be clear, I don't really care if HP or Initiative are associated/dissociated, I'm just arguing that you can twist anything into one category or another if you are so inclined. For the most part when people do seem to talk about it, it's all about 'what causes this disocciation feel in me' rather than any objective metric.

EarthScorpion said:
You mean the thing which didn't work against things with spirit-killing attacks, which meant that basically the Abyssal was playing by the same rules as your dime-a-dozen gods, and which if you're fighting an Abyssal with IME and winning it is quite unlikely you don't have a spirit-killer?
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It's literally the same stuff the Deathlords had to keep on resurrecting in the tombs of their patrons, and it's a fact that Ghost-Eating Attack did jack shit on the Deathlords.
 
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Deations said:
It's literally the same stuff the Deathlords had to keep on resurrecting in the tombs of their patrons, and it's a fact that Ghost-Eating Attack did jack shit on the Deathlords.
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How adorable. You didn't even read what it literally says in the charm and decided to spout out your head canon instead.

In exchange, she exists entirely outside Fate as a
direct agent of the Neverborn and gains limited immortality.

Unless slain with an attack that can permanently destroy
spirits, any lesser demise does not actually kill her. Instead,
her body dissolves into tarry smoke that hisses one final retort.
Following these parting comments, her Exaltation instantly
returns to its Monstrance in the temple-tomb, leaving all
possessions behind at the site of her death. Her body requires
a day to regenerate within its cage, after which she awakens
screaming in agony and with one less dot of Essence
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You see, words mean things. GET and GET-equivalents permanently destroy spirits. Therefore IME doesn't work against them.

Try actually grounding your argument in evidence next time, dear boy.
 
I find it rather hilarious that, if losing against an opponent with GET, suicide may be the optimal course of action.
 
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