General Exalted Thread
So basically as I've proposed a few dozen pages ago: replace all combat mechanics with a roll-off between characters with modifiers from charms which characters would've used in the fight.
I can't remember where it is, but basically it boils down to the Yozi in question having two root charms for the most part.
Lets use Malfeas as an example;
He has his precption charm, Insigingent Embers Intution; which allows him to measure the strength of his servents and enemies in comparison to himself. Which usually means that they're nothing before the King of All Kings.
Second is the Manifistation Charms; these are how the Yozi in question appear to the world at large, and how it physically interacts with the world. For Malfeas this By Pain Reforged, which basically means that he can endure all the pain in the world, and it won't slow him down a jot. Generally these concepts are expanded upon as the charms develop, with By Pain Reforged developing into soak enhancers and counter attack charms.
Yzarc
The Spark of Madness
Here you go. Yozi building 101
- Location
- Cyberspace
Hmm... that kind of makes sense - "how I see things" and "how things see me".
I wonder if Exalted charm trees should have a similar structure now.
I wonder if Exalted charm trees should have a similar structure now.
Not really. Solars and Abyssals are based on super-human excellence taken to the extreme. It makes sense for them to have their magics to be based off of their natural abilities. The other kinds of Exalted work in the same way; Lunars are 'flexible', so they have a few very broad Exellencies and powers that aren't as powerful as a Solar's, but are more useable in different situations. Sidereals powers are based on communicating with the Loom Of Fate, so their powers are more esoteric and more than a bit unusal. The samw appliers to their execellency, which can only add (Essence) Dice, but is compenstated with their ability to lower the target number of a role to their advantage.
I'm going to expand on this because it's a good starting point, although Chung might not agree with what I say I think it's still important.
It's not just the fact that this is a results-based charm that declares a narrative result (you fail to kill someone and kill their robot double instead) that's a problem. It's that it fails to interact with the system. The system is built with the assumption that the process you use to get somewhere means things. You can deal with a problem, or interrupt someone, not simply by getting into a narrative fight with them about the results, but rather by actually taking discrete steps in-universe that create a result. If Dual Magnus Prana and other Retcon Charms actually acted like they were shortcuts to an end, versus how they currently act where the process isn't actually a discrete thing in-universe that you can interact with them, I suspect that the criticism of the charm would be far more muted and basically entirely localized to "so you can mass produce Solaroids now?"
Because Dual Magnus Prana right now isn't a Solar Charm. It's a o/nMage spell. Correspondence (or Space) 3/Matter 3: "Ha ha ha you gigantic sucker. You killed my body double." (Do notice that that Corr/Space 3 is sufficient to teleport and you can make a corpse via Matter 3).
This makes the "Solars can't bring back the dead or teleport" spiel in the front of the charm chapter super funny because the easiest way to describe Dual Magnus Prana's mechanical effects is "you teleport to safety and leave a corpse in your stead." And as a oMage player you can yell until you're blue in the face that you're not actually teleporting but I don't see it. Can I actually track your real self down and stab you to death? No?
It's Correspondence 3. I don't care if you give me a ~nwo~ explanation about how you were really always there and you had a body double. You're still teleporting. Now eat that paradox.
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Giygas
Cutest Sawk i could find. Lucario is a nice extra.
Damned Solars! Now they also retconneted themselves to be the origin of the Mages!!!
And yeah, i could probably say something more serious about the charm, but all the things about it have been already said(I am of the "Cool power, but it should be more limited and/or not a Charm" opinion myself)
And now, something completely different that will be completely ignored! Today would have been the first day in which i finally and trurly stared working on the Discordians, by reading and analyzing their War Charms, the War Charms of the Third edition's Solars and the War rules..... but my brain decided that it was time for a very strong headache(Which in the last hour has become a not so strong headaches with momentary spikes of strong headache) and thus i did nothing for all the day.(I will try to convert at least three or four of them, becuase i really want to see the Discordians played in the following edition)
Now that you know the unbelievable pain that was my day, i ask a question: thanks to my wonderful decisions about the conversion of the Discordian Charmset(Basically, given that most of their charms are distorsion of abilties, i decided to give them equal essence and ability requirements most of the time) the second edition version of their excellency(Adding ability+stunt dice die to the roll) is now underpowered for them(They are basically Celestials), at least without useless minmax(When you need the maximum essence in the normal game to be able to use a maxed abilties to learn only a few charms, having abilties with five dots shouldn't be a good use of either xp or BP).
Can someone give me an idea for a cool alternative, preferably leaving the stunts in and hopefully without too much overpowering?(I tried to think some alternatives, but i either get something really overpowered or really underpowered)
And yeah, i could probably say something more serious about the charm, but all the things about it have been already said(I am of the "Cool power, but it should be more limited and/or not a Charm" opinion myself)
And now, something completely different that will be completely ignored! Today would have been the first day in which i finally and trurly stared working on the Discordians, by reading and analyzing their War Charms, the War Charms of the Third edition's Solars and the War rules..... but my brain decided that it was time for a very strong headache(Which in the last hour has become a not so strong headaches with momentary spikes of strong headache) and thus i did nothing for all the day.(I will try to convert at least three or four of them, becuase i really want to see the Discordians played in the following edition)
Now that you know the unbelievable pain that was my day, i ask a question: thanks to my wonderful decisions about the conversion of the Discordian Charmset(Basically, given that most of their charms are distorsion of abilties, i decided to give them equal essence and ability requirements most of the time) the second edition version of their excellency(Adding ability+stunt dice die to the roll) is now underpowered for them(They are basically Celestials), at least without useless minmax(When you need the maximum essence in the normal game to be able to use a maxed abilties to learn only a few charms, having abilties with five dots shouldn't be a good use of either xp or BP).
Can someone give me an idea for a cool alternative, preferably leaving the stunts in and hopefully without too much overpowering?(I tried to think some alternatives, but i either get something really overpowered or really underpowered)
Walker of the Yellow Path
Ho There!
- Location
- The Land of Memes
Righteous Devil is one of the Styles from Scroll of the Monk, IIRC. A Celestial Style
And you would be right.
Yet you certainly have enough enthusiasm to write a wall of text complaining about it!
God King's Shrike isn't an auto-win like Zeal is! It summons a disaster to destroy infrastructure, it doesn't autodestroy infrastructure in and of itself. You don't think that a country can't get its own supernatural mojo going to deal with a flood or drought? A volcano eruption isn't the end of the world: it's a disaster you'd see in a typical game session for Exalts to deal with. The worst disasters listed are things like the dead erupting from a Shadowland during Calibration or a Behemoth rampaging Kaiju style in another country. For this setting? It's almost banal!
Oh, hardly flawlessly. I totally think a group of Dragonblooded can efficiently deal with things like a forest fire or an incoming tsunami. A plague? Well good thing we have Solar Medicine, my friend!
If the charm does see use in my game, it's because I want a ready-made plothook for my game. I don't know about you, but I'd think that Mask of Winters is already hurling behemoths, armies of the dead, and plagues of disaster on people by default. It's not anymore absurd than a Sorcerer using Rain of Doom or Death Ray to flatten a city, and I'd almost say it's less bad because an ST could just say 'all right, the Realm has diverted the Wyld Hunt to deal with the Behemoth your character called up. What do you do now that the Legions of the Realm are distracted by this disaster?
Two things I could have happen: the first is that the capital in question (such as the Imperial City), has enough Exalts, gods in its pocket, and divine favor to combat the disaster, letting them survive but be bruised and bloody and forced to deal with a lot of casualties, so they can't just lolnope your charm because that's lame. The second is equally good: the Solar flattens a city without the resources to deal with it. Now deal with the fallout. You have a Shadowland full of confused and angry ghosts furious that a star flattened their home. You have Sidereals scouring the loom for you because they really would not want you to do that again. Even if the charm goes off without a hitch something interesting happens rather than a simple 'a winner is you.' Wiping out a city with no infrastructure to deal with your magical mojo isn't all that different from a Third Circle Sorcerer in previous editions wiping out a city of mortals because they had no capacity to counter it!
"Oh no a volcano is exploding"
"Eh, I'll just carve a trench with melee while somebody else screams at the Volcano God to cut this shit out."
It's 'summon average session plot-hook' the Charm.
I already made my feelings on God King's Shrike clear in this post, and I've had a lot to say about Dual Magnus Prana too. Take it or leave it, I guess.
I don't think anyone would, but it's not quite an auto-win scenario, here! You're summoning a bad thing, sure, but this is Creation and bad things happen just fine on their own.
I do recommend reading it, because at the very least nobody would be talking past each other.
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Walker of the Yellow Path
Ho There!
- Location
- The Land of Memes
Which Charm tree is God Kings Shrike in?
It's a capstone in Lore, it lets you summon disasters once per season and with a third circle spell's worth of motes.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
Nah, the difference here is that we do have a system for resolving physical conflicts but we do not have a system for resolving a duel of wits, so to speak. There is no system for running a Sherlock vs Moriarty conflict. The system is basically "eh, wing it". Since there is no system for it there should be no Charms for it.
Charms should only interact with the system. Charms should not either a: negate an entire system or b: presume a system exists/create one entirely for the Charm to interact with.
If Exalted had a intellectual conflict simulator as complex as the physical conflict simulator, my answer would be terrible because I'd be short changing anyone who expended resources into interacting with that system. But since Exalted (including 3e from what I have seen) lacks such a system, then don't try to create Charms which resolve it because that's silly. Just let the players succeed. If it were important enough for the game to care about failure states, they would have put in a system which explained how and why failure states occur and what those failure states are.
In other words; if the game doesn't care enough to give you rules for it, then don't bother using rules to resolve it.
I hate to keep on being that guy but >.>
Page 270, the Section on Crime and Investigation.
Also a great deal of Larceny and Investigation are basically defined by their opposition to one another, essentially simulating an elaborate Holmes vs. Moriarty conflict.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
What circle should a spell to combine a human and an animal or two animals, creating a composite creature with the best traits of both be? For balance I'd say that it cannot be cast on Exalts unless it's a control spell, and if it's cast on an Exalt it only lasts one day. It would be a ritual costing 3 wp, and require two creatures, either a human and an animal or two animals, as components. I was thinking Celestial circle personally, but I could be wrong.
Honestly that sounds like Unity of the Closed Fist, but for mortals, so I'd probably just shrug and put it in the Celestial Level.
Since Heaven's Ladder Style got cut, here's my try at what a theoretical I Don't Want No Trouble While Holding A Baby In A Ladder Table And Chair Factory Style would look like. Can't quite decide a capstone, though.
Call it: Ascent of the Rungs of Vengeance
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Scrap the "best of both" [1] and I'd put it at Emerald Circle. It's a mono-target spell which requires you to incap the target and carry out an extended sorcerous ritual on them, and produces a minion less useful than a first circle demon. It's not really that big an effect, and there's no reason Dr Moreau should be restricted to being a Celestial Exalt.
Plus, Dragonblooded sorcerers should totally be allowed to have unnatural creatures in their laboratory. How else are they meant to be decadent unethical sorcerers?
[1] Mostly because it's a lot less interesting than having to carefully design the fusion and pick the best specimens you can to try to minimise the downsides and carry out horrific eugenics experiments to select for only the most intelligent dog-tiger hybrids who have the power of the tiger, and the pack instincts and human obedience of the dog. You shouldn't have that handed to you for free - you should have to be a sorcerer-scientist!
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
Superhuman intelligence and planning ability is one of those traits it's pretty difficult to model without involving retcons of some sort.
This is, however, at least partly because those traits tend to work the exact same way when shown in fiction. The kind of feats we see explained away with "I'm so smart" are often pretty impossible no matter how smart you are, so fictional characters get to skip the process and go straight to "haha I predicted this now let me never show you how". Speaking personally, the more of the process is actually shown, the more satisfying I find such sequences, and the more genuinely intelligent a character seems.
It's the line between responding with "oh, hey, that was a clever plan, this guy is clever" and "so, wait, the Joker got all those explosives into the hospital how, again?" In a detective story, the mystery you can work out for yourself is more satisfying than one where a solution is pulled out of the detective's ass at the last minute. Flair can cover for a lot, of course.
So in an RPG, I find the most satisfying plans are those I actually... planned, as it were. Blowing some mana or Fate points and saying "I made a plan" is not the same thing. It's unsatisfying. Nevertheless, if my character is super strong, I get to act out them being super strong, and I don't have to be super strong myself. If my character is super smart, it's much harder to act out them being super smart, and I have to be pretty smart myself.
There are two basic things one can offer, if restricted to associated mechanics.
The first is information - rather than having a utility belt that your character can fiat into including those tools they "predicted" they'd need, your Storyteller can help you actually predict what tools they'll need, by telling you about the challenges you're going to face as your character "works them out" through investigation. Rather than being able to spend a Fate point to go "aha, I totally knew about your evil plan all along and acted like I didn't to bluff you", the Storyteller can just... have you roll to work out their plan ahead of time, and you can decide to bluff them or screw with the plan or whatever.
The second is good Storytelling - or "cushioning", if you prefer. That is to say, if an Intelligence 5 War 5 character comes up with a plan, assume it's a good one. The Storyteller can and should nudge the player if it's terminally stupid - this is an inverse of the fact that they shouldn't demand that the player of the Strength 5 Athletics 5 character do push ups - but often it's easier for him to just run it as though it were a good plan. Show off how if they'd taken the other path, they'd have run into a ton of guards. Look at that dead saboteur - if they'd not laid those traps, they would have been ambushed in the night. That troop placement was a totally great move that forced the enemy to ford a river or whatever.
It's not impossible to represent superhuman intelligence without disassociated mechanics, it's just a bit harder - and less likely to produce cinematic supersmart moments because most of the time those moments rely on the audience not knowing what's going on in the genius' brain, which is something denied to players and their characters - obviously - outside of retcon mechanics.
Note that Solar magic imitates but is not "human excellence". It is magic. A Solar can break a genuinely unbreakable code like a one-time pad by blazing "I SEE THE TRUTH OF ALL THINGS, MORTAL". As a result, you have more options for providing information and cushioning through associated mechanics without looking goofy.
Giygas
Cutest Sawk i could find. Lucario is a nice extra.
@Roadie: leave the capstone blank, it is perfect that way.
And i bring a news that can be interperpeted in a positive manner for me!
I found a cool way to keep the stunts power excellency of the discordians: fuse it with the fateful excellency of the sidereals(Which now is avaliable to all of the siderereals free, thus making them slightly better than the solars using less motes starting at essence 2 and definitively better at essence 3) using the stunt rating as a limit to decrease the Target number.(You have a one dot stunt and three dots of an ability? You get to roll 5 extra dice with an excellency, and can decrease the TN by one. With the two and three dots stunts the successes count as dice to increase the cap of the excellency, otherwise it get silly fast)
And i need to thanks your general indifference: i just decided now that this topic will contain my perfectly on topic ramblings for the rest of eternity.
And i bring a news that can be interperpeted in a positive manner for me!
I found a cool way to keep the stunts power excellency of the discordians: fuse it with the fateful excellency of the sidereals(Which now is avaliable to all of the siderereals free, thus making them slightly better than the solars using less motes starting at essence 2 and definitively better at essence 3) using the stunt rating as a limit to decrease the Target number.(You have a one dot stunt and three dots of an ability? You get to roll 5 extra dice with an excellency, and can decrease the TN by one. With the two and three dots stunts the successes count as dice to increase the cap of the excellency, otherwise it get silly fast)
And i need to thanks your general indifference: i just decided now that this topic will contain my perfectly on topic ramblings for the rest of eternity.
"Not everything is our fault! And that is unreasonable prejudice against us!"Demons, obviously.
Roadie
A plate full of blins and a cat nearby.
Why, though?