Shattered Gale Shintai actually does lay out what happens when Adorjan makes a clone, but I suspect you're right.
I'm not entirely sure why Adorjan would create the simulacrum in the first place, though I have some vague ideas. Also, while I'm kinda leaning towards 'adopted into a royal family', if someone else has a better idea, feel free to suggest it.
And clearly she made it to have a burning motivation to become Queen, so that it would outdo all the other candidates and make itself the clear and perfect heir, with the hopes of the entire kingdom riding on it, so that on the day when it was finally crowned queen and achieved its heroic motivation to lead its country forward into a new era, she could giggle and reabsorb it and leave the country reeling and leaderless and in panic and disarray from the loss of the heir that all their hopes were riding on.
Thus does the Silent Wind teach her philosophy; that attachment brings only pain and loss.
And clearly she made it to have a burning motivation to become Queen, so that it would outdo all the other candidates and make itself the clear and perfect heir, with the hopes of the entire kingdom riding on it, so that on the day when it was finally crowned queen and achieved its heroic motivation to lead its country forward into a new era, she could giggle and reabsorb it and leave the country reeling and leaderless and in panic and disarray from the loss of the heir that all their hopes were riding on.
Thus does the Silent Wind teach her philosophy; that attachment brings only pain and loss.
You're a horrible person. I hope you know that. >.>
... Er. How heroic do you have to be to get a roll to resist that? I imagine that "heroic mortal" gives you the ability, but not the dice pools, so you'd probably need to Exalt to be able to not be absorbed...
You're a horrible person. I hope you know that. >.>
... Er. How heroic do you have to be to get a roll to resist that? I imagine that "heroic mortal" gives you the ability, but not the dice pools, so you'd probably need to Exalt to be able to not be absorbed...
By RAW you'd have to Exalt, or you cease to exist at the whim of your creator. I suppose you could attempt a hilariously high-Difficulty Willpower roll or something, if you really wanted it for your game (I suggest setting the Difficulty at the Essence of the creator ).
By RAW you'd have to Exalt, or you cease to exist at the whim of your creator. I suppose you could attempt a hilariously high-Difficulty Willpower roll or something, if you really wanted it for your game (I suggest setting the Difficulty at the Essence of the creator ).
Yeah, honestly she would probably find it hilarious. Adorjan is, after all, the one who reacted with delighted laughter when Gorol's attempt to crack the Yozi's prison open in the First Age did all of jack and shit, and Malfeas stood in stunned silence for a few seconds before raging harder than ever before or since in his imprisonment.
Of course, Adorjan finding you hilarious and adorable is still not a good place to be. Her first date with my Scourge left Keris with 3 Agg damage to the everywhere and a baby Pantheon soul following her around like a duckling made of murderwind.
Okay I saw someone saying before the current clusterfuck that Hardness was useless because everyone's going to build their initiative up to 20+ before taking decisive swing.
This is incorrect outside of a white room or a dojo where nobody uses poison, nobody tries for a quick wound penalty and there's nobody to potentially get the drop on you after putting almost everything you have into setting up your kill strike.
Charms are also a factor, we had at least one instance of them giving a character a sudden resurgence like something out of a Yugioh cartoon and I suspect we'll see more from the non-Solars whose charms are less arete and more body horror.
By RAW you'd have to Exalt, or you cease to exist at the whim of your creator. I suppose you could attempt a hilariously high-Difficulty Willpower roll or something, if you really wanted it for your game (I suggest setting the Difficulty at the Essence of the creator ).
A woman associated heavily with red and crimson, with the raw willpower and skill with leadership to run most of Creation and keep a dozen powerful Dragonblooded Houses bickering at each other instead of at her, and the ability to power a First Age geomantic weapon that should have been keyed to Solars, who mysteriously vanished one day.
Well, the last bit only fits if Adorjan decided to care enough to send someone to (successfully) kidnap her, but the rest?
And clearly she made it to have a burning motivation to become Queen, so that it would outdo all the other candidates and make itself the clear and perfect heir, with the hopes of the entire kingdom riding on it, so that on the day when it was finally crowned queen and achieved its heroic motivation to lead its country forward into a new era, she could giggle and reabsorb it and leave the country reeling and leaderless and in panic and disarray from the loss of the heir that all their hopes were riding on.
Thus does the Silent Wind teach her philosophy; that attachment brings only pain and loss.
Ok, so I've been digging through the Crafting system, trying to get a feel for it, and to try and figure out what the bare minimums you need for stuff are. Its been interesting, and like most things in Ex3, a mix of good and bad.
I'm going to assume most people have gone over the basic system: crafting stuff gives you craft XP of one of three flavors, that you can put towards crafting the next tier of stuff. This happens when you meet a set of objectives after you finish a project. When your project causes another character to gain or strengthen an intimacy toward you, when you gain from the end of your project (you get payed, or you get a new Merit like Allies or Contacts) or when its inline with one of your Intimacies, you get a set amount. These rewards do stack, and probably account for most of your craft xp gain through the story. That is particularly true at the silver xp level, where you can rack up it pretty fast by virtue of running a business. Gold takes longer to build up, by virtue of you being limited to three project slots at once (these don't apply to silver XP generating minor projects, and you by temp ones for a project out of silver xp) but given even the longest of these cap out at a week, so it will build up fairly fast if you can craft regularly. Well, provided your not doing a big project (oh thank god, their are actually different rules for making bigger scale stuff this time round). Controls for materials to craft with are pretty firmly in the STs hand, which given how variable such things can be is probably for the best, if a bit annoying.
Anyways, that's the mortal end of the spectrum. As an Exalt you can probably just ace past that without anything more then an Excellency, even if you are a bit unoptimized, and you'll probably only bother with excellencies for the high quality bonuses to finishing your objective. How much Craft XP is largely going to depend on how much crafting time you get (or materials, with charms) but odds are good that if you put in some effort (read, tell your ST your crafting during downtime) you'll be able to rake in enough to make the end of story bonuses look pretty small.
Where this starts getting complicates is Artifact crafting, or the big thing everyone wants to do with crafting (unless you want to make manses, that's in here to). I won't go through all the requirements, but a few thing jumped out at me. The first is your capped by your mundane crafting skills in addition to your skill in Craft (Artifacts). You want to forge a daiklave, you need to know how to forge a sword. This isn't to big a deal for Solars, who have some good charms to mitigate the XP sink problem (I'll talk about it when I get to charms) but I'm somewhat wary for what this means for Sidereal and Dragon Blooded crafters. Mortals, well mortal don't get to craft artifacts (and without magic couldn't break the difficulties even if they could). Still, the requirements are less strict then 2e, where you needed everything in 3e and three Attributes maxed out.
Speaking of, there is no longer a set Attribute for craft. I assume it runs off what fits best from your stunt. I'm a bit of a mixed mind of this. On one hand, it makes optimization tricky. On the other you can actually play a Strength based blacksmith now. Intelligence still seems like the good all round choice, though I have no idea what you would use Appearance + Craft for.
Well, moving on, you need (Artifact Rating) gxp (gold xp) to setup a slot for you to make your artifact. Then you need to spend a set time period assembling your artifact, dependent on its rating. Only after that do you roll to finish. Each roll costs 10gxp, and is made at difficulty 5. All successes go into a pool, and when that pool hits a set number you're done. But you can only make six rolls. If you don't hit the goal number of successes by that pint, your project fails and you loose all craft xp put into it. Thankfully, there is no set interval, so you can walk away from a project for a bit, level a few traits, get more gxp and come back to it when you are better.
This is the part that will trip people up, IMHO. You need to budget out what your going to need, particularly at the higher level projects, or risk burning through a great deal of craft XP for no gain. You can't count on your Excellency to carry you through like you can for other sub systems. Ergo your number one priority in crafting is to get these numbers up, and I'll go over what charms do that when I get to charms. For now, lets just look at how many successes per interval you need for a given level of artifact:
Artifact 2: 30 successes total. Over six intervals, you need an average of 5 successes. Assuming you have an optimized pool (11 dice pre-charms, and 10 from Excellencies) you can pull through on just Excellencies. Remember, the roll is made at difficulty 5, so you lose 4 successes from a successful roll. Ergo, your average Excellency backed roll will be 6 successes, not ten.
Artifact/Manse 3: 50 successes total. Over six intervals, you need an average of 9 successes, or 13 successes rolled per roll.
Artifact 4: 75 successes total. Over six intervals, you need an average of 13 successes, or 17 successes rolled per roll.
Artifact/Manse 5: 100 successes total. Over six intervals, you need an average of 17 successes, or 21 successes rolled per roll.
Yes, the later levels of successes needed strongly resemble your total dice pool. Don't worry about this to much, as the charms for this are quite good, and maybe start with a smaller project instead on an Artifact 5.
One last thing before moving on: you get gxp based on how many intervals you have left. You want to finish these as fast as possible to conserve gxp, both for the 10 you spend per roll to finish and to increase your total reward at the end. Spending 62-65gxp per crafting roll is not what you want to be doing.
Artifact/Manse N/A are similar to the above, except using white xp (wxp) which is rather more precious and hard to come by. The successes per interval are:
Artifact/Manse N/A: 200 successes total. Over six intervals, you need an average of 34 successes, or 39 successes rolled per roll.
Yeah. You actually can do this at chargen, but its a lot of charms. I also doubt your going to have the 50-60wxp you need to finish the project (10wxp per roll to finish, and your probably going to need them all). Better to make regular artifacts for a while, and have a good stock of craft xp (and building up your personal power) before taking a stab at N/A stuff.
So without further ado, to charms. Oh god, there are so many. The good news is, at least off the start most of these are superfluous. A lot of them are based around letting you craft more (either by giving you more craft xp or dropping craft xp costs). These are great, once you've gotten going. But if you can't finish your projects, then all the saved costs are going to mean jack shit. There are few I'd probably recommend to any crafter, but for now lets skip everything else and jump ahead to the Power Craft Charms (Craft is big enough its subdivided into sub categories: Efficiency, Momentum, Repairing and Reforging, and Power. They basically do what they say on the tin).
The Power Charms are what people would term 'excellency like', in that they revolve around making your rolls better. Despite probably being the most important craft charms, these are the last section, and peoples eyes are probably glazing over by the time they get to them. That said, this is where you make sure your project succeeds, and you aren't throwing potential down the drain. Its base charm is Flawless Handiwork Method (FHM), which is a 10s reroller. Or in other words, get successes from 10s, reroll them to see if you get more successes. It has a Craft 3 repurchase to also reroll 6s. That come out to, on average, (# of dice rolled * 0.617), so 61% of your roll. So on 21 dice (full burn excellency) it come out to 12.957 successes. You can pretty safely round that to 13, so that will probably cover an Artifact 3.
The next Charm your probably looking at is Supreme Masterwork Focus, which is Crafts Doubles Rule adder. Baseline Double 9s to roll, jumping your successes to around 74% of your roll, assuming you also enhance it with FHM. That gets you around 15.5 successes on your rolls. This does not affect Artifacts though, you need to repurchase for Double 8s to do that, jumping your success rate to 86% of your roll. That give you around 18 sux on a roll, or enough to probably cover an Artifact 4. The last repurchase also affect legendary projects, and gets you Double 7s that boosts you to 99% (ok, 98.7, but whose counting) of your roll. At that point you may as well expect your roll in successes, which will probably cover your Artifact 5 projects. The two better versions do cost craft xp: Double 8s requires a gxp, and Double 7s requires a wxp. That said, this is probably the most powerful craft charm in terms of ramping up successes. Even better, SMF's prerequisite is FHM, so that covers your baseline needs fairly well.
Beyond that, the other main tree of the charms is good for covering if your rolls don't stick to average. Experiential Conjuring of True Void and Unbroken Image Focus both activate after a roll, adding successes and dice. They cost craft xp (Unbroken Image Focus in particular can get pricy fast), but they're good for making sure your project stays on budget. Essence-Forging Kata is basically Infinite Craft Mastery, but its only really going to be useful if your firing off lots of craft rolls in rapid succession (such as a big push to finish a project). Mind-Expanding Meditation allows you raise your dice caps by up to (Craft), paying 1sxp per dice added to the cap, and a single wxp. Its probably the most generally useful of the bunch, given that it means more dice to feed into the SMF/FHM combo, helping boost the probability curve up and more solidly in your favor. First Movement of the Demiurge enhances Experiential Conjuring of True Void, and its a bit of a niche effect, given it only effects rolls made by its prerequisite. That and its mechanic is a bit of pain to use. The only reason I can think of to grab this is it leads into Divine Inspiration Technique and Holistic Miracle Understanding. Or as I call them, the dice exploders.
Going to be honest: unless your crafting N/A stuff, you don't need the die exploders. They're also kinda a pain to use, after all the other rerollers. That said, if your making N/A stuff, this is where you get the successes, and they are potent in their own right. Divine Inspiration Technique works passively: every 3 successes you roll, you add one non-charm die. If your looking at what full power SMF/FHM do to your success pool and paling a little, then you are wise. Assuming full Excellency burn with Mind-Expanding Meditation, you get 26 successes on average. That means eight non-charm dice, all subject to the same modifiers as the main roll (yes, that means the rerollers). Including the generating more none charm dice for every 3 successes. So it goes, roughly: 8 dice -> 8 success -> 2 dice -> 2sucesses. Another 10 successes to your existent 26, giving you a total of 36. Don't take that as gospel, as it spike a good bit higher with good rolls. Assuming the averages given here though, it put you 3 successes short of the 39 a roll you need for Artifact N/A.
This is where Holistic Miracle Understanding comes in. It enhances Divine Inspiration Technique: every time the dice generated by DIT come up with 3 successes, it adds 3 more dice to the next pool. This only triggers once, but it enough to prolong things. From the prior example: 8 dice -> 8 success -> 5 dice -> 5 successes -> 4 dice -> 4 successes -> 4 dice -> etc. And yes, that does look like an infinite dice loop, but probabilities used as a general rule break down a bit at lower numbers, so eventually it winds down and dies. It makes it tricky to calculate how long it will last, but it will probably push you over the 39 successes a roll you need for Artifact N/A.
Only a few charms left now. Inspiration-Renewing Vision just makes a roll not count towards the total of six rolls you can make towards finishing an artifact, effectively giving you an extra roll worth of successes. That drops the number of successes per roll you need for a N/A to 29, which makes it more manageable. You can only pull this once a story, unless you finish a crafting project with a goal number of 50+ without it (totally doable). Horizon-Unveiling Insight just plain bumps the number of rolls from 6 to 7 for everything. So you either get the 29 per roll for a N/A (less for other projects) or drop it 25 if used in conjunction with its prerequisite. I'd personally recommend getting these over the die exploders, they're a lot less of a pain to use, they both give roughly equal utility for finishing legendary projects, and the prequisites for Inspiration-Renewing Vision are better then for HMU.
The last two charms are Triumph-Forging Eye and Bright-Forging Prana. These are actually early charms in the tree, but I didn't know when to talk about them, as their kinda outsiders. Triumph-Forging Eye is your boilerplate 'once a week have a freebie excellency'. Which, meh. Craft is generally a down time ability, so your use for freebie excellencies are limited. Its a bit niche, as a result. Bright-Forging Prana, on the other hand, is awesome. It give you three free charms, that disregard Essence prerequites, to apply to a single project, once per story. This is great when your pushing at your one big project, since you can tweak what you need from what you haven't bought yet (and given how big Craft is, that will be a lot). It also means you don't need to buy the die exploders: you can just load them up on one project you really need done, and not have to deal with them the rest of the time.
So what does this all look like put together? Here's a run through I did with basically all the power charms:
+3 sux before any doubles = 19
Double 7s = +6 sux = 38 total
10s: 1, 6s: 0 = 1 rerolled dice
8
+1 sux before any doubles = 20
Double 7s = +2 sux = 40 total
Total Sux from roll 8
Divine Inspiration Technique: 1 non-charm die/3sux. 8/3= 2 dice
Holistic Miracle Understanding: If prior roll generated +3 sux, +3 dice
5 die pool
9 7 7 4 3
+3 sux before any doubles = 23
Double 7s = +6 sux = 46 total
10s: 0, 6s: 0 = 0 rerolled dice
Total Sux from roll 4
Divine Inspiration Technique: 1 non-charm die/3sux. 3/3= 1 dice
Holistic Miracle Understanding: If prior roll generated +3 sux, +3 dice
4 die pool
9 6 3 2
+1 sux before any doubles = 24
Double 7s = +2 sux = 48 total
10s: 0, 6s: 1 = 1 rerolled dice
3
Total Sux from roll 1
Experiential Conjuring of True Void: 6, 4m, 4s/g/wxp
+1sux (49), +6 non-charm dice
6 dice pool
9 9 9 8 6 6
+4 sux before any doubles = 28
Double 7s = +8 sux = 57 total
First Movement of the Demiurge, for every three of a kind successes (ex: three sevens, three eights, etc.), convert a failure to a ten.
9 9 9 8 6 [6]
10 9 9 9 8 6
+1 sux before any doubles = 29
Double 7s = +2 sux = 59 total
10s: 1, 6s: 1 = 2 rerolled dice
+1 sux before any doubles = 30
Double 7s = +2 sux = 61 total
9 9 9 [9] 8 5 1
First Movement of the Demiurge does not trigger agian
Total Sux from roll 1
Unbroken Image Focus (3m + 1s/g/wxp per success): Take the number of sux on the intial roll (taking this to mean before the non-charm dice insanity, so 16). Can add Essence+Sux non-charm successes to the final total. 17 in this case, costing 17s/g/wxp.
61 successes total for 22m, 1wp, 5sxp, 2wxp, 4s/g/wxp. If Unbroken Image Focus is used, 25m, 1wp, 5sxp, 2wxp, 21s/g/wxp for 78 successes
For those not wanting to parse through that, it spat out 61 successes, all said and done, or 78 if you pumped it up using 16s/g/wxp. That's a good roll, looking through the numbers, but it not unreasonably good either.
OK, I've gone on long enough, and the theory crafters aside, most of you probably just want to know 'what do I need to be good at Craft at chargen?' Flawless Handiwork Method, both repurchases, are pretty much a must, given their general utility. You probably won't need Supreme Masterwork Focus and its repurchases right off the bat, as your still building craft XP, but you will want all its repurchases once you start pushing for Artifacts 3+. Bright-Forging Prana is a good way to cover your early bases for your first big crafting project.
Aside from the 'yes this project will actually finish' of the Power tree, you want Craftsman Needs No Tools and Thousand-Forge Hands. These are your speed boosters. More speed, means more craft projects done, which means more craft xp. Its also how you get your big craft projects done in a game friendly time. Very few games will let you spend ten years on one project (the unassisted time for N/A projects!) You also want the Arete-Shifting Prana, which lets you apply your crafts to a conceptually linked Craft, letting you do things like 'I can use Craft(Cooking) to do Craft(Explosives)'. This helps early one when your short on crafts, and it links to Supreme Celestial Focus, which lets you spend gxp to buy Crafts. This is pretty critical, as far as expanding your Crafts without dropping yourself into a inescapable xp sink. Even better, if you can build up to buying Supreme Perfection of Craft (about 5 charm purchases) which gives craft xp/day (one gxp and (essence+2)sxp) based on how many Craft abilities you have rated at five, you can make a craft xp loop to keep boosting your craft ratings.
And yeah. That's it. Pretty much everything else is gravy, pick what you want based on your characters style, and just make sure your Power Craft charms keep pace with what your trying to make. Or in other words, no trying Legendary projects until you've bought most of that tree.
I'll talk more about some of my favorite crafting charms are, and what I think the stinkers of the tree are (beyond Dual Magus Prana, that one has been covered in depth) later, since this is post is long enough as is, and I need sleep. Apologies for any grammar, spelling or math errors.
See, the interesting thing with her Exalting as a Zenith is, she's realising her nature as something Yozi-spawned just as the Unconquered Sun is appearing before her.
It works in FATE because in FATE you're playing the author of a story. That's why aspects are irrelevant until invoked or compelled for example. You don't put "Hercules is swole" on every page-just when it's plot-relevant.
Storyteller like it or not is a simulationist system.
Maybe it was, once. But I absolutely guarantee to you that 3e is not written with that goal in mind; my understanding is that the lead devs intensely dislike that whole classification-scheme, and especially the idea of "use the mechanics to figure out how the setting works."
Dual Magnus Prana is a narrative charm, intended to invoke plot-level fiat. If, as an ST, you hammer it like a piece on a chessboard or a card in MTG, it'll ruin your game, because it (and Ex3) were never designed to be played that way. You're supposed to use it as appropriate to your story, and it's designed with the assumption that the players are all right with that.
It's not the only part of 3e that behaves that way, either. A better example is probably God-King's Shrike. There is no real defense against God-King's Shrike. If you tell a story about your Solar spending years building up a mighty empire, another Solar can activate God-King's Shrike, get a really good roll, and have it obliterated by a falling star with no real chance for interaction on your part. An ST who does this isn't really doing anything different than an ST who says "rocks fall, everyone dies" in any other context -- the charms are meant to be (from the ST's perspective) tools they can use to build a narrative, not an exhaustive list of everything every NPC who might learn them is capable of in literal terms.
If you give an NPC God-King's Shrike because it would be logical for them to have it, and then have them use it to obliterate the PC's stuff because it would be logical for them to do so, you aren't really playing the game the way it was intended to be played, because charms are intended as narrative elements you can build into stories of warring god-kings rather than as a spellbook of in-setting superpowers.
Dual Magnus Prana is the same way. The game isn't really designed for PVP, so you pretty much have two situations where it might come up. First, you're a PC using it to survive an attack from an NPC. The charm, in that context, allows you to invoke narrative fiat and say "it doesn't matter how good they were; it doesn't matter if they looked at me and said With my cosmic senses I can confirm that this is, in fact, the one, true Aquillion, and not a robot, clone, or simulcrum; my life or death here is a core part of the narrative and I'm therefore invoking my position as a PC to win this one automatically by fiat."
Conversely, when the ST invokes it, it is meant to be no different from them saying "this NPC is important to me, so I'm going to declare that they survive by my fiat as the narrator." Now, I think most STs, before doing that, should think carefully about whether it's really good for their narrative, and about the circumstances around it (I probably wouldn't, say, invoke it to save someone who the PCs had made a concerted effort to ensure was not a doombot or otherwise scanned with super-senses -- not unless I could think of a plausible way they swapped after the scan or something.)
These are things that you can (sometimes) do in 3e! I don't expect you to like that, obviously, but that is what Dual Magnus Prana is straight-up saying. To ding it points because it's not because it fails to adhere to what you feel are obviously the guiding design concerns of 3e isn't going to go anywhere useful, because 3e's guiding design principles are whatever the people writing the books say they are; and they wrote Dual Magnus Prana.
As I see it, 3e is designed on a principle that the story the players and the ST want to tell is paramount, not UFIO. This means that when people are using charms and rules in a way that step on the toes of another player or another important part of the story (for instance, using Dual Magnus Prana in a way that makes the Ultimate Investigator look like they screwed up), that's treated as a personal issue to be resolved among your circle, rather than a rules issue.
This is not new to Exalted. People back in 1e complained about many of the Sidereal fiat-level charms -- especially Shun the Smiling Lady -- on similar grounds. Those charms might look, on the surface, like they provide for a way to simulate the setting, but if you actually tried to use them to represent Sidereal opponents in a simulationist manner your game would start to suck very quickly. Jenna Moran's response when people complained about this was that if using the charms that way caused problems for your game, you should stop doing that.
I mean, hating the logic behind these charms is fine! I'm not sure I would have written them this way. But the way I see it, your options are basically:
1. Accept the fact that the devs are writing 3e with different design principles than the ones you prefer, and try to find a way to like it for what it is rather than hate it for what it isn't.
2. Accept the fact that 3e is being written from design principles you don't like, and give up on it.
But arguing from the premise that 3e is bound to your preferred design principles and that every individual deviation from them is a critical flaw (or arguing, implicitly, that your preferred design is universally superior) is mostly pointless. I mean, we could have discussions of various design goals and how to satisfy them, but they're going to go a bit far afield from discussing 3e Exalted; and focusing on Dual Magnus Prana as a particularly glaring deviation from your principles isn't going to go anywhere, because ultimately it's just an endless circle of "this charm fails to respect principle XYZ!" "It obviously isn't trying to respect XYZ." "It should respect XYZ!" "Well, it doesn't!" "Well, it should!" ad nauseum.
(I also suspect that you have not seen the last of the narrative-editing charms. Some people said above that they like the fact that Sidereal charms look like narrative editing, but are not; the thing is, if Solars have prophetic charms that say "I foresaw this and prepared for it", I suspect that Sidereals will have a lot more of them -- in fact, my vague recollection is that some of the "this isn't really narrative editing, it's just a cheat" stuff was inserted into Sidereals in the change to 2e. Obviously they have some cheats, but they're probably going to have a bunch of charms that straight-up say "you actually foresaw this situation and prepared for it.")
(I also suspect that you have not seen the last of the narrative-editing charms. Some people said above that they like the fact that Sidereal charms look like narrative editing, but are not; the thing is, if Solars have prophetic charms that say "I foresaw this and prepared for it", I suspect that Sidereals will have a lot more of them -- in fact, my vague recollection is that some of the "this isn't really narrative editing, it's just a cheat" stuff was inserted into Sidereals in the change to 2e. Obviously they have some cheats, but they're probably going to have a bunch of charms that straight-up say "you actually foresaw this situation and prepared for it.")
A good example of this is Avoidance Kata. In 1e, its text simply says "it turns out - at least as far as anyone can prove - that the Exalted anticipated the situation prophetically and was somewhere else, of the Storyteller's choosing, all along." The clause "as far as anyone can prove" casts doubt on what is actually happening, but without answering it conclusively. By contrast, the 2e text of the Charm explicitely says that the Sidereal teleports to a random location while throwing a mind-wipe effect at everyone who knew he was there.
I don't think there's much doubt on which side Ex3 will hue to when it comes time to write the Charm. (Obligatory disclaimer that the sample Antagonists' Charms do not necessarily reflect what they will look like when their respective books are published.)
As I see it, 3e is designed on a principle that the story the players and the ST want to tell is paramount, not UFIO. This means that when people are using charms and rules in a way that step on the toes of another player or another important part of the story (for instance, using Dual Magnus Prana in a way that makes the Ultimate Investigator look like they screwed up), that's treated as a personal issue to be resolved among your circle, rather than a rules issue.
Y'know, if a system boils down to "wing it" and "whatever the GM decides happens happens, screw the system", a system which is apparently built around the idea that any/all mechanical issues are narratively handwaved out of existence based on whatever would fit the GM's plot at the time regardless of game balance, internal consistency or setting logic... having a massive, overgrown edifice of a rules-heavy, complex system with more interacting bits than D&D is kind of pointless.
Why learn it? What's the player payoff for buying in?
-
e: As far as I can tell, this logic can be used to justify the existence of just about anything in terms of mechanical failure or setting-breaking effects. Let's try a few old favourites on for size.
"It's OK if someone can use the Creation-Slaying Oblivion Kick to literally kick everything living in Creation to death in one action by RAW, because the game is built with the assumption that principle that the story the players and the ST want to tell is paramount, and that if someone actually does that, it's a personal issue to be resolved among your circle, rather than a rules issue."
"It's OK if someone can use Obsidian Shards of Infinity Style to become completely invincible, able to perfect defend against all attacks forever for no cost and to destroy you (yes, you, your PC and their little dog too) with a completely undefendable fuck-you Charm, because the game is built with the assumption that principle that the story the players and the ST want to tell is paramount, and that if this happens, it's a personal issue to be resolved among your circle, rather than a rules issue."
"It's OK if Zeal can one-shot you through all your perfect defenses and all the Deathlords have it. They don't have it and they wouldn't use it even if they did, because the game is built with the assumption that principle that the story the players and the ST want to tell is paramount, and that if anyone ever takes Zeal, it's a personal issue to be resolved among your circle, rather than a rules issue."
"It's OK if every game devolves into paranoia mote attrition combat eventually, because people aren't supposed to actually care about the system's output. The game is built with the assumption that principle that the story the players and the ST want to tell is paramount..."
"It's OK if critical setting events such as the Usurpation or the Primordial War could never actually have happened because the Solar Exalted had metagame precognition effects. The game is built with the assumption that principle that the story the players and the ST want to tell is paramount..."
"It's OK if social combat incentivizes beheading your conversation partner the moment you realize you can't beat their dicepools because..."
Et cetera, et cetera? This is an omnipotent excuse, apparently. I haven't even read the leak and this is giving me the worst possible impression ever, dude. Why would you do this to the poor GM?
Y'know, if a system boils down to "wing it" and "whatever the GM decides happens happens, screw the system", a system which is apparently built around the idea that any/all mechanical issues are narratively handwaved out of existence based on whatever would fit the GM's plot at the time regardless of game balance, internal consistency or setting logic... having a massive, overgrown edifice of a rules-heavy, complex system with more interacting bits than D&D is kind of pointless.
Why learn it? What's the player payoff for buying in?
Mechanics can help get players engaged with the system and can impose a degree of unified structure on the collaborative story you're telling; the fact that the rules sometimes explicitly let you invoke fiat-level actions doesn't make them any less useful for this. (Unless you inherently hate the idea of players using powers that invoke narrative fiat, of course, in which case it's not the right system for you.)
For charms specifically, they also serve to make general statements about the kinds of things the Exalted can do, to give players a general framework for how difficult these feats are, and to generally tie them into mechanics so you can easily adjudicate some of the most common interactions without having to resort to narrative fiat. You'll notice that the charms that rely heavily on fiat (or on the ST "using them right") tend to be high-tier charms with restrictions on their use; God-King's Shrike is 1 / season, while Dual Magnus Prana costs 30 wxp and only comes up when you die. I agree that something that resolved common attacks through fiat would somewhat defeat the purpose of having mechanics for combat; but I don't agree that having charms intended to represent rare, pivotal narrative events involve a degree of fiat necessarily invalidates the rest of the system.
Even those narrative-fiat charms, though, still serve a dual purpose in giving players a general glimpse into what the Exalted can do and what the setting is like. You're not supposed to be able look at Dual Magnus Prana and say "all right this is a power Solars get at level 16, so I can anticipate that 10% of the Solars in the Usurpation must have had it"; the game's mechanics (including its charms) are designed to let you run games of wandering adventurers in the twilight of the Second Age, and provide only a very loose reflection of things outside that scope.
But you are supposed to be able to look at Dual Magnus Prana and say "all right, this is the kind of epic feat that highly-talented Solars can sometimes do, and this is a rough indicator of how difficult and costly it should be relative to other powers." I wouldn't be surprised if, during the Usurpation, the Dragon-Blooded found that one of the Solars they'd killed was actually a robot duplicate! Then they tracked down the real guy (maybe cutting through a few more robot duplicates in the way) and eventually killed him for real. A few Solars did survive for a while, after all, and the ability to go "no, wait, that wasn't me, I'm actually over here!" is much less useful when you're fighting massive armies of people who know you very very well and therefore know most of the places you might be hiding.
This partially answers your other questions; for one thing, the Creation-Slaying Oblivion Kick, Zeal, and OSOI are bad because, even taken as general statements of a capabilities, they make bad statements about the people who have them -- "kill everyone in the world in one kick" or "murder other Celestials automatically, bypassing all defenses with no warning" or "completely ignore all virtually all attacks for an entire fight" are not supposed to be epic feats available to SMA or Solars at all. When the books end up saying something that is obviously silly or which doesn't fit the design of the setting, then that's totally a problem.
The other reason is because Zeal, OSoI, and mote-attrition do, generally, undermine the ability of mechanics to impose any sort of useful unified structure or to get players engaged with the system. They break the game in the sense of making it fail to work at emulating the wandering adventurers in the twilight of the Second Age it was designed for.
But I don't understand why you see Dual Magnus Prana as a problem akin to those. The ST doesn't have to "fix" it the way they had to fix the other things you mentioned. They have to decide whether they want an NPC to have it and use it, yeah, but that's the kind of decision an ST has to make constantly anyway, in the same way that they use fiat to decide how strong NPCs are, how many of them you fight, what happens to stuff offscreen and so on. Bad decisions for any of those things can cause just as many problems as an ST spamming Dual Magnus Prana or God-King's Shrike in a careless manner.
(Unless you misunderstand what I'm saying? I'm not saying the ST should use fiat to prevent players from using Dual Magnus Prana; I'm saying the ST should use their own judgment in having NPCs use Dual Magnus Prana -- which they have to do anyway, since they're not actually tracking wxp for NPCs or anything like that.)
Or is your concern that a player who has the charm could accumulate a huge amount of wxp and become nearly impossible to kill? I can answer that in another post if you want, but it's a somewhat different argument than the stuff about the way the charm operates on narrative fiat, so I should save it for another post rather than this already-long one.
Just to clarify for @Deations - my distaste isn't over whether or not you agree with a given set of gaming theories or not. It's over the way you're not honestly engaging with arguments (supposedly ) predicated on those theories.
An "associated" mechanic is one that represents - through whatever layers of abstraction or simplification - events within the actual game world. A "disassociated" mechanic is one that does not. Initiative is an associated mechanic, because - though an abstraction - it represents control over the flow of a fight, and is (generally) affected by things that would affect that control. Something like Dual Magnus Prana is a disassociated mechanic because it does not represent what is actually happening within the game world - it is a convenience for skipping to the end result, and alters the apparent "history" of the game without actually doing so in-universe.
If someone argues that Dual Magnus Prana is inherently bad because it is a hard disassociated mechanic in a system that has historically been almost entirely comprised of associated mechanics with only occasional "soft" disassociations like "scene" durations, then there are things you can say in response.
You can, for example, argue that Exalted was only ever so associated-centric as a relic of the ST-system on which it was built, and that as Ex3 has moved further away from that, it's perfectly appropriate to start examining the other assumptions of the system. You can argue that the expectations of Exalted have shifted more toward that sort of "narrative" play, where building a group story is more important than suffering the vagaries of chance. You can argue that it's incredibly difficult to represent genuinely superhuman mental capabilities of the sort seen in popular fiction like Sherlock or Death Note without resorting to disassociated mechanics like retcons.
You can't argue that it's not a disassociated mechanic, because that just reveals that you don't know or care what the words you're using mean.
I'm entirely unconvinced by @Aquillion's argument, which seems to be that the sort of props generally exclusive to poor GMs cannot be judged as actual mechanics, even when they are formalized as actual mechanics. It strikes me that a GM who wants to drop rocks can already do so - and indeed, the Ex3 text opens with multiple iterations of the Golden Rule to emphasize this. Writing up "rocks fall" as a purchasable power therefore strikes me as a questionable way to present an already well-made point, if this was in fact the intent.
I'm entirely unconvinced by @Aquillion's argument, which seems to be that the sort of props generally exclusive to poor GMs cannot be judged as actual mechanics, even when they are formalized as actual mechanics. It strikes me that a GM who wants to drop rocks can already do so - and indeed, the Ex3 text opens with multiple iterations of the Golden Rule to emphasize this. Writing up "rocks fall" as a purchasable power therefore strikes me as a questionable way to present an already well-made point, if this was in fact the intent.
Obviously the ST can just make rocks fall or cause NPCs to magically survive even without a charm; the purpose of these charms is to establish rules under which particularly cool invocations of those can be available to PCs.
I don't see how PCs using fiat-level powers on NPCs can be a problem. The NPC whose perceptive power gets trumped by Dual Magnus Prana or whose city gets smashed by God-King's Shrike isn't a real person; nor is the narrative fundamentally about him. Therefore there's no reason to worry about charms treating him 'fairly', provided the overarching statement they make about the Exalt using them is still good. (And provided they don't eg. make someone so powerful as to drown out the rest of the story; but both these charms have significant limitations on them to prevent that. God-King's Shrike is 1 / season, and if you have virtually unlimited wxp to use Dual Magnus Prana without worrying about the cost then your game has probably progressed past the power-progression that the rules are meant to cover anyway, since at that point you can churn out unlimited N/A artifacts.)
God-King's Shrike and Dual Magnus Prana are powers that, I think, aren't likely to cause any problems when used by PCs against NPCs. They could cause problems if used carelessly against PCs; but I don't feel that the purpose of the game's mechanics is (or can be) to protect you from poor STs.
Obviously the ST can just make rocks fall or cause NPCs to magically survive even without a charm; the purpose of these charms is to establish rules under which particularly cool invocations of those can be available to PCs.
I don't see how PCs using fiat-level powers on NPCs can be a problem. The NPC whose perceptive power gets trumped by Dual Magnus Prana or whose city gets smashed by God-King's Shrike isn't a real person; nor is the narrative fundamentally about him. Therefore there's no reason to worry about charms treating him 'fairly', provided the overarching statement they make about the Exalt using them is still good. (And provided they don't eg. make someone so powerful as to drown out the rest of the story; but both these charms have significant limitations on them to prevent that. God-King's Shrike is 1 / season, and if you have virtually unlimited wxp to use Dual Magnus Prana without worrying about the cost then your game has probably progressed past the power-progression that the rules are meant to cover anyway, since at that point you can churn out unlimited N/A artifacts.)
God-King's Shrike and Dual Magnus Prana are powers that, I think, aren't likely to cause any problems when used by PCs against NPCs. They could cause problems if used carelessly against PCs; but I don't feel that the purpose of the game's mechanics is (or can be) to protect you from poor STs.
Uh, speaking as a PC, if I try to drop DMP in front of an NPC who's used AESS in the past scene, or indeed if any of my co-players do so, my brain is going to slam on the brakes and go "uh, no, bullshit". I mean, with that sort of logic - "it doesn't matter if you can trivially render a character's powers impotent without them even getting a resist roll" - where the hell is the challenge? You might as well give PCs an automatic I Win button, if you're letting them invalidate any attempt at NPC resistance like that.
Personally, it's the retcon "I was never here all along" bit I hate the most, because it has nothing whatsofuckingever to do with Crafting. Not only does it decapitate all sense of planning ahead and pulling off a clever scheme in favour of a boring "gotcha, I declare I had this totally awesome plan that was really clever, honest", but it also has no reason to even exist in that Ability.
Mortals, well mortal don't get to craft artifacts (and without magic couldn't break the difficulties even if they could). Still, the requirements are less strict then 2e, where you needed everything in 3e and three Attributes maxed out.
Technically, mortal sorcerers can attempt to create artifacts. "Attempt" being the key word, of course; they still need to average 9 successes with no excellency to make a 2-dot artifact. This isn't actually impossible - with 5+5+1, 2 stunt dice, 1 die from superior tools, one success from spending willpower, and one from somehow pulling off a level 2 stunt on every single roll, they can just barely squeak it in, on average. Additional bonuses from sorcerous workings and the like (which, as the character is already a sorcerer, are probably on the table) can make it more practical and/or reliable.
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