notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
I see he takes after his old man.
General Exalted Thread
I don't know; combining Excalibur with Invisible Air means you can give it an anima-suppressing charm that shunts anima levels into a special pool, then have the blasting charms run off of anima levels (from the pool or your actual anima). That way you can dump eight or nine anima levels into the top-end blasts for ridiculous destruction.That would be me.
Personally, so far as Excalibur goes, I'd probably move Invisible Air to Hearthstone with Evocations, ala the Freedom Stone, and combine Avalon and Excalibur into one Artifact for granting evocations. Given the way Evocations work, putting a perfect defense in an Artifact is a lot less sketchy then in 2e.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
You could also have the range and damage for the blast separate, and allow the wielder to spend as much essence as they want to improve them. Or you could require that the wielder put all of their remaining motes into the attack, to reflect the massive mana requirements of the blast.
Well, if there was just one blasting charm in there, maybe, but why would you do that?
I'm thinking you start with two general types of charm, wind and light, with a running theme of cloaking and revealing glory. The wind charms make your sword invisible to penalize defense (fails if your anima is above dim), give you some stealth and maybe mobility, and can cloak your anima (suppressing a limited number of levels and letting you reflexively dump them into your anima if you want). The light charms increase damage and let you fire small single-target beams, but only when your anima is up. Further down the tree you get wind charms that let you spend banked anima levels, and you get bigger light effects that cost anima levels. Adamant level, you start seeing huge fuckoff beams that cost more anima levels than it's normally possible to have.
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A merit tax isn't really better? It still suffers from the efficiencies of purchases inside and outside of chargen, hurting new players. In addition, useless merits hurt players who decide to grab them because they look interesting, this to disproportionately effects new players who don't see why some options are basically traps. It also still has the problem of being a merit that does nothing except qualify you to do neat things, instead of being a merit that does something but also allows you to do neat things.
Starting the player off with 10 dots of merits helps this, but it still penalizes new players who purchase objectively less optimal merits.
Oh, I'm comparing the raw stats ("One BP is trading for six experience") instead of adjusting for assumptions ("One BP is trading for two BP worth of experience"). I think that's the source of the quibble?
I'm using the raw stats because I find it easier to do direct comparisons between conversion rates instead of comparing them to the Standard. I think that if 1 bp should be roughly equivalent to 3 exp then that needs to actually be consistent
Oh, yeah, I my figure on the analysis notes that. It's 2 bp for a point of willpower that'll cost you 8 exp otherwise. It's very efficient, twice as efficient as buying a charm. (If you buy one charm, you are 4 exp behind someone who bought 2 points of willpower. If you bought two charms, you're 8 exp behind. Both of you are behind the guy who was min-maxing his abilities to boost them to five.)
So, say, if I spent 15 BP on non-favored charms, someone else spends 10 BP on WP 10 and then five BP to get two Abilities to 5 and one to 4, someone else spent all 11 on getting five abilities to 5 and one to 4 and 4 on taking Martial Arts 4, and some dude used 12 on buying two dots of unfavored abilities and 3 on buying one dot of three favored abilities to help him be a generalist, then I've got 30 Effective EXP from my BP use (15*2 for Unfavored Charm Efficiency); Player 2 got 69 Effective EXP from his BP use (10*4 for Willpower Efficiency + 4*6 for Ability 5 Efficiency + 1*5 for Ability 4 Efficiency); Player 3 got 78 Effective Exp from his BP use (9*6 for Ability 5 Efficiency + 6*4 for Willpower Efficiency); and Player 4 got 39 from his BP use (12*2.5 for Unfavored Ability 2 Efficiency + 3*3 for Caste/Favored Ability 1 Efficiency)
As someone who bought charms, I'm now 9 exp behind someone who bought a bunch of unfavored abilities + some ability 1 dots, 39 exp behind someone who grabbed WP and Ability 5, and 48 exp behind the dedicated minmaxer. I don't actually have a way to tell that this has happened besides going and doing math with the experience table. And you're still a dummo for not massively boosting WP and abilities, as it's proportionally cheaper to do this in chargen than it is outside of chargen.
Huh, alright. I think it's a pretty shitty move on the Devs part to keep it in if it got such an overwhelmingly negative playtester reaction. It's one of the big chargen traps that hurt new players entering 2e.
Yeah, but you have to double-purchase the Evocation for Innate, meaning it's, like, 16 exp (or 8 BP) to get it generally applicable for a single charm, and you generally have to invest pretty heavily in the tree to get Innate available at all. Like, for Black Wind you can get 3/8-9 charms as Innate, and that's only if you progress all the way to Adamant Circle (Otherwise it's just 1/3-7, depending how much you fill up the Sapphire Circle once you unlock it). Brilliant Sentinel gets 1/3-4, and then only once you hit Adamant with it. Dawn Fangs is the best about it, you get 2/3 when you hit Sapphire Circle and then 4/8-9 when you hit Adamant, but the sheer cost of actually making those Innate hurts you.
At 8 exp a purchase (Double purchase to grab Innate once it's available) we are talking....32 exp to get a single innate charm for Black Wind, 40 for 2/3 on Dawn Fangs (This is basically OK, but the 16 extra spent exp on Innate is painful), and 32 for a single on Brilliant Sentinel.
Innate's a good idea, but scarcity and the repurchase means that it fails. As it is you have to invest 24 experience to actually unlock the keyword, and then sink a bunch more to get anything out of it.
I think incentivizing specialization is better done with charms that let you do neat stuff rather than dice-adders, or doing it outside of charms with, like, a style system that works like specializations and gives you straightforward bonuses for fighting in a given way. The second way is nice because it also lets you incentivize mortals to do actions in a given way (Crafting armor only because they're more efficient at it or w/e). What this system has done is fill the trees (Which are enormously top-heavy) with 'I guess I have to take this' charms that just let you add more successes (Either directly or indirectly), don't let you do anything new, and are often hard to math out (Making probability curves and practical utility a total pain to figure out).
The E3E devs explicitly condemned min-maxing, unless I've missed something.
But this still encourages min-maxing. Which the E3E devs are against. In addition the conversion efficiencies are not explicit, you have to go and compare the BP and Exp tables to figure them out (Which a player may not realize they need to do), and will not be obvious to new players.
If it's deliberate, it's done badly. If it's not deliberate, it's counter to their goals.
It's not an obvious trap, lots of new players won't notice it due to the separation of the Experience and BP tables and the setup of the chargen chapter. In addition, informing new players that "This is the right way to do it" is not a bad thing, it's basic advice to give new players a step up so they can perform at-par.
I think you're underestimating new players a little. They may not think to cross-reference the BP and experience tables, but they will notice that one BP for an ability dot is cheap, and four for a charm is a significant investment. And when they're picking their starting charms, they're very likely to say "Wow, look at this E1A5 charm I want. I'd better go back and raise that ability; it's only 2 BP". And even if they miss both of those, they're almost certainly going to notice where it comes right out and says that charms give the lowest return on investment.
If nothing else, it's certainly a lot more obvious than "having 11 dice in your pool gives you a huge advantage over the guy with only 9".
And hey, guess what? They also give new players that advice! Check this out:
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But I'm not even talking about "the right way to do it" in terms of mechanical efficiency, here. I'm talking about "a proper solar is a master of whatever arts he chooses to study". Solars shouldn't be walking around with a bunch of 2s and 3s, not because they're weaker that way (although they certainly are), but because, as a matter of setting flavor, they're supposed to go for depth before breadth. But just coming right out and telling people how their characters should be is... problematic. Doing so indirectly with unsubtle mechanical incentives is much less prone to making players say "no, screw you, I'm doing it differently".
As for encouraging min-maxing, do you really think anything they do could make players stop? I can easily imagine the devs saying to themselves "boy, I wish players would stop min-maxing, but since they won't, I might as well make sure that thematic characters are more optimal".
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
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They could not put 61% (454/737 charms) of the charms at (Ability) 5 minimums, so the vast majority of ways to expand what you can do don't require 5 dots in an Ability.
That'd be a start.
Generally speaking, the people who are interested in Martial Arts for the character is going to take Martial Arts at Chargen. It doesn't really take a genius to figure out that multiple attack abilities are frigging redundant, except perhaps the people who wrote 2E Dawns.
Sure. We know why it's flawed. I know why it's flawed. The Devs have been told, time and again, why it's flawed. They just like it better with a bp/xp split, don't ask me why.
But the people trying to poison the well by saying the playtesters unanimously agree with everything in the book are being shitty. You can dislike some aspects while liking a thing overall!
You're assuming that the sole goal of climbing up the Evocation tree is to get innate in the first place. It's really not! The point of innate is that you can mix and match evocations from one weapon with evocations from other weapons WITHOUT having to keep the motes comitted to keep it going. And the way Regular XP is divided from Solar XP, a player who invests both pools in evocations will still rocket up faster than the people who are spending their regular XP on native Solar charms and placing their Solar XP in 'miscellaneous' as a category.
It's almost like people might also want the actual evocations present before the keyword is ever unlocked!
We have the latter. They're called specializations.
You grossly overestimate how many of the success adder charms are in the tree in the first place, and you deeply underestimate their usefulness. Excellent Strike, on paper is an incredibly boring charm. But by letting you reroll ones, you can ignore any defense charm that retroactively subtracts your successes by the amount of ones in your attack roll.
The problem with 2E Charm Design is that you never needed much of anything beyond the first few charms in a tree. Like why would you even need more than a single dot of linguistics, when the very first charm lets you ignore pretty much any attempt at bad guys trying to get into your head? Why bother with more than the very first integrity charm, which instantly made you safe from all Shaping Effects (and even safer than the Lunars, who had tattoos for this shit).
What the rerolling charms do is give you a bonus to a specific set of skills that let you go above and beyond others without resorting to 'haha, fuck you, I win!' The branch of Athletics dealing with Feats of Strength gives you a better chance at succeeding at lifting something or breaking objects or bursting through walls, without making it an insta-win or requiring an even bigger pile of dice than 2E Demanded.
Any chance for a source?
There's a section that flat out states you're better off bumping up your ability scores at chargen, and that Merits are better off purchased at chargen so you can have everything your concept requires.
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They do tell you to buy up your caste/favored abilities as high as you can, as that's what you'll be buying most of your charms in. In addition,you get 5 xp by default on the end of every session, that can be spent on anything. You also get up to an additional 4 xp every session as a roleplaying bonus and for accomplishing goals/furthering your intimacies. The xp in the latter pool can be spent on anything except charms. A person who wants to invest both pools into ability points, or MA styles/charms, or merits or what have you will have a way to get to those very quickly, while someone focusing on their charms alone won't get nearly as much benefit from the second pool. At the very least, getting your abilities high enough to qualify for charms after chargen isn't all that much of a hurdle.
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Would it? Min-maxers would put 5 dots in all their important abilities anyway, just to get their dicepools bigger. And everyone else... well, maybe they could get all the charms they wanted with (Ability) 4, but they'd still be down a die, which is significantly more important than it sounds at first blush. Forcing everyone to buy their main abilities up to 5 actually helps close the gap between min-maxers and everyone else.
And even if you resolved that, players would still find some other way to min-max.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
There's a dawn brawl/thrown build that can kill almost everything instantly, though it's a glass cannon. There's also getting a gorrila familiar or two, and just killing everything with that. That's all the hacks I've seen so far, though I'm sure that there are more.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
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You misunderstand.
I'm not saying that would prevent min-maxing.
It would make min-maxing not almost a requirement.
I am a min-maxer. You're not going to stop me from min-maxing.
You can, however, build the game in such a way that I don't need to min-max to pick up any interesting charms in an ability.
I was on /tg/ too, you know! The first build isn't really anything outstanding if your opponent has Onslaught Negators (though it's a solid build regardless) and Gorillas tear up mortals by default, not Exalts.
That's what Solar Survival is for!
That sounds like a hilarious use of Love begets Love.
It sounds like you, @Aleph, should be asking if you even want her to pay child support?
I would also note that she might consider the mind-rape charms needed for you to get your Po to do what you want a suitable payment.
And what I'm saying is that by making that minimal level of min-maxing almost a requirement, they also make it irrelevant. Does it really still count as min-maxing when every single player does it? Do you expect players to say "Gee, I wish I could take a noble stand against min-maxing by leaving Melee at 3 dots, but I just wouldn't be able to get any interesting charms"?
Now, if you were playing a mortal campaign, and someone came in with 5 dexterity and 5 melee, then yeah, you could call him a min-maxer. Mortals usually aren't supposed to push the limits of what's possible that hard. And you know what? Mortals have no favored abilities, and raising unfavored abilities from 3 dots to 5 at a cost of 4 BP doesn't get you a huge XP advantage (but it's still worth it from a min-maxing perspective). Plus, with no charms to worry about buying, they don't have that incentive to start with 5s in everything either. Solars, by contrast, are supposed to push the limits of what's possible, whether they're min-maxing or not - and they're the ones who are basically forced to do so.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
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What's so terrible about minmaxing anyway?
If you're a dude who suddenly started glowing and had scary dude trying to kill you because of it, and you also had the ability to learn and develop supernaturally fast....
WHY the flying fluck *wouldn't* you have Dex 5 Dodge 5 ASAP?
Seriously. People living in a dangrous wolrd, with a dangerous lifestyle, are going to focus pretty heavily on having vital skills necessary for 1) surviving and 2) doing their "job."
So yeah, a mortal hunter may only have Dex 3/Archery 3/Spec- bows, but if he Exalts, why wouldn't he jump to 5/5 very quickly since those skills keep him fed and let him discourage enemies from pursuing him?
If you're a dude who suddenly started glowing and had scary dude trying to kill you because of it, and you also had the ability to learn and develop supernaturally fast....
WHY the flying fluck *wouldn't* you have Dex 5 Dodge 5 ASAP?
Seriously. People living in a dangrous wolrd, with a dangerous lifestyle, are going to focus pretty heavily on having vital skills necessary for 1) surviving and 2) doing their "job."
So yeah, a mortal hunter may only have Dex 3/Archery 3/Spec- bows, but if he Exalts, why wouldn't he jump to 5/5 very quickly since those skills keep him fed and let him discourage enemies from pursuing him?
It doesn't try to trick you. At the very least if you're a new player, you know that the better choice is increasing abilities rather than spending it on more charms.
Salty
Shadow Cabal Assumptor Supreme
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Which doesn't excuse a mismatch between the values. Sure, you can add the information to let people know about the mismatch, or you could just not have a mismatch.
I don't know either! They really wanted to have that mismatch though, because it was supposed to give players a feeling of working their way up in a skill by making it a climb and blahblahblah. At least the book flat out tells you 'this is the right thing to do.'
earthboy
(verified ape)
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Not the guy you're responding to, but IMHO that sort of thing is bad when it reduces variety of viable characters.
In other words, if everyone is required to have an answer to some specific combat situations, my preference is to silo that off in a place that the player can't miss by accident.
If you're expected to always spend your resources on something, why not just make that thing the baseline for all characters?
The example's poor anyway. The point he should have been making is that Solars are supposed to have high levels of skill in their areas of expertise compared to almost anyone else, and the structure of the Charm trees encourages this. This is not a bad thing, especially as the book takes pains to point it out.
Every game encourages minmaxing. It's unavoidable. What they've done here is say "Okay, solars are supposed to be total badasses, so a certain level of optimization doesn't even count as min-maxing; it's just playing the game right. And we'll encourage people to build their characters up to that minimum standard, both in writing and with some hard-to-ignore mechanical incentives."
I think you're missing the point slightly. No one is complaining about how every character needs Dodge 5, because that simply isn't the case. (It could certainly be argued that every character needs some combat skills, but that's because Creation is a dangerous place, not for any mechanical reasons.) The complaint is that every character who wants a meaningful investment in dodge is basically forced to buy it up to 5. And the counterargument is that, hey, Solars are supposed to be that badass; a Solar who puts serious effort into dodging should have Dodge 5.
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If that is min-maxing, then they clearly want you to "min-max" your ability scores. I think they would call it "being a proper Solar." It's not my favorite thing, but least the book is relatively transparent about it now, and the worst excesses are removed.
Getting you to max important abilities is the entire reason for the BP-XP disparity, at least as far as Solars are concerned. Other splats might have different incentives, although historically this was only really true for Alchemicals, with their lack of favored abilities and absurdly cheap charms giving them very different builds than literally everyone else.
As far as min-maxing attributes goes, the character creation section had this little gem:
I can't really read this any other way then as saying don't be afraid to take the optimal 5/5/1 5/3/1 5/1/1 attribute spread, or something fairly close. With Solar XP this spread can be normalized after only a couple of sessions, ignoring training times, and without impacting your charm progression.Exalted 3E said: