Drakeneisen
Rogue Scientist
lol Dragonfly Finds Mate shoot down your cannonball with a cannonball
General Exalted Thread
Withering Attacks directly damage Battle Groups anyway. Or at least, directly damages the Magnitude of a Battle Group, which takes both these things into account.
Just to clarify, withering attacks are not always meant to keep your opponent off balance or distract them. Often times you describe a withering attack as your character trying to kill your opponent, but missing or ringing harmlessly off their full plate or some such. Out of game you planned a withering attack, in game you planned to take his head only for him to duck and your sword to bite into the wood behind him.
The dividing line between withering and decisive attacks isn't intent, it's results.
If you search for 'Withering Attacks and Drama', the section you come to starts out with this:
"To be clear, withering and decisive attacks are a game abstraction used to model the cinematic
nature of combat between heroes in Creation. Individuals within the world of Exalted would
recognize no such distinction; setting aside feints and the like, characters absolutely intend for
most withering attacks to injure or kill their target."
If you're asking about the attack roll, you make Decisive attacks with just your raw Dex+Ability+Specialty. Your weapon's Accuracy doesn't count.
Yeah, true. What I'm really trying to get across there is that it isn't necessarily just a matter of 'you hit them or you don't'.
@100thlurker you need to come here and enlighten us about early firearms combat more
Something I'll note, muskets generally were rather large bore weapons by current standards, although the bullets weren't sized for a snug fit.
As for handling fire exchanges... You could handle Withering attacks as aiming attempts, and the actual firing as the Decisive attack, but you generally don't want to use a musket in small unit combat except at rather close range. Due to a number of factors the gun's simply too inaccurate, especially if you care about what happens if you miss.
Early firearms really show their strength in full on battle engagements, as then it doesn't really matter if you miss the guy you are aiming for; you'll probably hit the guy next to him.
As for handling fire exchanges... You could handle Withering attacks as aiming attempts, and the actual firing as the Decisive attack, but you generally don't want to use a musket in small unit combat except at rather close range. Due to a number of factors the gun's simply too inaccurate, especially if you care about what happens if you miss.
Early firearms really show their strength in full on battle engagements, as then it doesn't really matter if you miss the guy you are aiming for; you'll probably hit the guy next to him.
That's not entirely true. They're way better at armor-piercing than arrows are, no doubt about it, but it's hardly a sure thing unless you're at short range. A good breastplate could (sometimes) deflect a musket ball at medium-to-long range, as long at it didn't hit too square-on. And as long as the musket wasn't unusually heavy, which many muskets of the time were, for exactly this reason. (Stopping a musket ball is another matter, but deflecting one is easier.) Breastplates didn't stick around through the 1700s just to deal with bayonets.
The biggest advantage of early guns over bows wasn't the armor-piercing per se, it was that you could train a competent musketman in weeks, as opposed to years for a good archer. Partially, this is because of the superior armor penetration - if 80-95% of your arrows are glancing off of armor, you need to be really good at shooting fast - and partially it's because guns are just plain easier. (Crossbows were, for a time, significantly better than contemporary firearms, but the crossbows in question were actually much more mechanically complex and expensive than the primitive guns they were competing with.)
As for muskets in 3e, crossbows and firewands have the Slow tag, which makes reloading them take an extra action. Muskets would, realistically, be even slower than that, but I'm not sure it's worth worrying about that too much.
Carrnage
Human
- Location
- New Zealand
but a surprise attack assumes he can defend against it without leaving an opening, if two people are attacking from opposite sides of one person what happens?
You'd stack the Surprise Attack penalty to the opponent's defence with whatever the penalty for having two people attack you at once is.
(Which I'm currently trying to find)
Salty
Shadow Cabal Assumptor Supreme
- Location
- Sun, Moon, Talia
- Pronouns
- I/Me
Onslaught. Unless you're talking about 2e, in which case it might count as an Unexpected Attack.
Right. So that attack from stealth on someone already in combat could get a -3 or more penalty to their Defence.
Salty
Shadow Cabal Assumptor Supreme
- Location
- Sun, Moon, Talia
- Pronouns
- I/Me
Ironically, surprise attacks in both editions of Exalted actually set the target's Defenses to 0. It's why they're so incredibly powerful.
Actually, they specifically don't do that to a target who has reason to suspect an attack in 3e- it differentiates between Surprise Attacks and Ambushes.
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
So, Keris is going to be (largely accidentally) inspiring a Cult/Reputation with her attacks on House Ledaal's trade routes in An Teng, as befits her Urge of "Ruin the Dynasts who earn wealth from trade with An Teng." You know how it is; you sink a few ships, a sailor or two survives and gets to shore, and before you know it they've convinced themselves that the three-tick glimpse they got of you swimming up beneath the hull or murdering everyone on the aft deck was a full cinematic technicolour home movie that they genuinely believe is what they saw. Memory is, after all, a fallible thing, and prone to embellishment - especially if you're having frequent nightmares about it (this is why Judge's Ear Technique is much more fun if it detects intentional falsehood rather than objective truth).
Anyway, in Kerisgame the "spirit" doing all of this chaos is, obviously, actually an Infernal Exalt. But she works fine as a real spirit as well, and might introduce some amusing dynamics into any Tengese games, so I thought I'd post her here for your perusal.
(Jinn minn) Riyaah MuHiitiyah
The Wind of the Ocean is a spirit who has recently come to prominence in the Shore Lands of An Teng. Some have suggested that she is a new envoy or messenger of the Pale Mistress, while others whisper that the arrogant demands of the Realm have roused the witch-deity's ire enough that she has tasked one of her strongest servants with ruining them and their works. A few even suspect that she might be an independent spirit bent on challenging the Tengese Hag for her position in Luna's court.
Most eyewitnesses of Riyaah MuHiitiyah portray her as a Tengese girl with a curtain of liquid blood for hair and needle-toothed mouths in place of her eyes. Other accounts describe a vast green dragonfly nymph as long as a ship, which never surfaces but rends the underside of vessels with seventy seven mouths, or a hulking featureless figure that reflects the screaming faces of its victims in their final moments, or a shredding wind of fine-grained salt that chokes the life from those who breathe it. She sometimes appears to the misbegotten and speaks to them with sweet and beguiling words, though rare is the man or woman who would admit to a personal meeting.
These omens accompany the approach of the Wind of the Ocean: a strong sea wind blowing towards the shore, the swarming of dragonflies, droplets of blood flecking the sea foam at the bow or stern of a ship, and haunting music echoing up from the seabed. She frequently saves her most terrible attacks for the night of the new moon, and this has led some to believe that the tasks the Pale Mistress sets her to are perhaps not entirely authorised by Luna's edicts.
Regardless of their legitimacy, Riyaah MuHiitiyah acts on her mistress's orders by attacking the trade interests of the Dragonblooded, especially those of the Realm and House Ledaal in particular. Ships are sunk or splintered; their cargoes fouled or lost at sea. Docks and repair yards are destroyed or flooded, and accidents are unusually common among those assigned to repair them. Disease strikes around those areas that do business with them, and sometimes ill fortune will follow barges back up from the shore to strike at the sources of Dragonblooded wealth.
Some do escape her attacks. She spares children and pregnant women and washes cargoes of ungrown seeds ashore, for though she strikes at the fingers the Realm has wrapped around An Teng's throat, she cannot interrupt ongoing cycles like the turning of the seasons or the passing of mortal generations. Nor can she act when the wind blows from the land to the sea, and ships can count on safety for the first stretch of their journeys if they leave the harbour with the wind at their backs. The Golden Lord's blessings keep her away from the High Lands, but her fear of his authority wanes with distance, and only the strongest of wardings will deter her from the coasts of the Shore Lands. Leading her astray is a more effective tactic - if six barges are launched alongside a ship, each carrying a small packet of the same goods, she cannot tell the difference between them and must check each boat individually to find her prey. Finally, precious jewellery in the shape of dragonfly nymphs can sometimes distract her at the last moment if thrown into the sea as she draws near.
Anyway, in Kerisgame the "spirit" doing all of this chaos is, obviously, actually an Infernal Exalt. But she works fine as a real spirit as well, and might introduce some amusing dynamics into any Tengese games, so I thought I'd post her here for your perusal.
(Jinn minn) Riyaah MuHiitiyah
The Wind of the Ocean is a spirit who has recently come to prominence in the Shore Lands of An Teng. Some have suggested that she is a new envoy or messenger of the Pale Mistress, while others whisper that the arrogant demands of the Realm have roused the witch-deity's ire enough that she has tasked one of her strongest servants with ruining them and their works. A few even suspect that she might be an independent spirit bent on challenging the Tengese Hag for her position in Luna's court.
Most eyewitnesses of Riyaah MuHiitiyah portray her as a Tengese girl with a curtain of liquid blood for hair and needle-toothed mouths in place of her eyes. Other accounts describe a vast green dragonfly nymph as long as a ship, which never surfaces but rends the underside of vessels with seventy seven mouths, or a hulking featureless figure that reflects the screaming faces of its victims in their final moments, or a shredding wind of fine-grained salt that chokes the life from those who breathe it. She sometimes appears to the misbegotten and speaks to them with sweet and beguiling words, though rare is the man or woman who would admit to a personal meeting.
These omens accompany the approach of the Wind of the Ocean: a strong sea wind blowing towards the shore, the swarming of dragonflies, droplets of blood flecking the sea foam at the bow or stern of a ship, and haunting music echoing up from the seabed. She frequently saves her most terrible attacks for the night of the new moon, and this has led some to believe that the tasks the Pale Mistress sets her to are perhaps not entirely authorised by Luna's edicts.
Regardless of their legitimacy, Riyaah MuHiitiyah acts on her mistress's orders by attacking the trade interests of the Dragonblooded, especially those of the Realm and House Ledaal in particular. Ships are sunk or splintered; their cargoes fouled or lost at sea. Docks and repair yards are destroyed or flooded, and accidents are unusually common among those assigned to repair them. Disease strikes around those areas that do business with them, and sometimes ill fortune will follow barges back up from the shore to strike at the sources of Dragonblooded wealth.
Some do escape her attacks. She spares children and pregnant women and washes cargoes of ungrown seeds ashore, for though she strikes at the fingers the Realm has wrapped around An Teng's throat, she cannot interrupt ongoing cycles like the turning of the seasons or the passing of mortal generations. Nor can she act when the wind blows from the land to the sea, and ships can count on safety for the first stretch of their journeys if they leave the harbour with the wind at their backs. The Golden Lord's blessings keep her away from the High Lands, but her fear of his authority wanes with distance, and only the strongest of wardings will deter her from the coasts of the Shore Lands. Leading her astray is a more effective tactic - if six barges are launched alongside a ship, each carrying a small packet of the same goods, she cannot tell the difference between them and must check each boat individually to find her prey. Finally, precious jewellery in the shape of dragonfly nymphs can sometimes distract her at the last moment if thrown into the sea as she draws near.
Really Keris? You're going to get distracted by the shinnies?
Shiny butterflies, no less!
No, sorry, that's simply not true. As @100thlurker has brought up on several occasions, the native Americans took to early blackpowder weapons like ducks to water, using them with extreme effectiveness for skirmishing and "marksman"-like behaviour. You might only get one shot, but under the kind of foilage-rich terrain they were skirmishing in, you were only going to get one shot anyway - and a musket punches through the kind of soft cover which an arrow might be deflected by.
The "oh, muskets were only really popular because they required less skill and were easier to train people for" is a common fallback position of people who like to tout the supremacy of the longbow, but it's simply not true. The reason that block-fire tactics were used by European armies was that shock was simply more effective at winning battles than each man aiming properly - even if fewer men died than if your men aimed, the shock of an entire line firing at once broke morale faster and made your opponents run. That doesn't mean that people who specialised in aiming muskets couldn't be incredibly dangerous - it's just that aiming was less important than shock in pitched battle. We see things like weapon sights disappearing from muskets when they'd been present on earlier models for example that reason.
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I said it's what they believe, not what works.
I mean, it's just as likely that a sudden strong landward wind blew across a ship deck, someone thought he saw a flash of red in the bowspray, he chucked a bracelet he was intending to give to his missus overboard and prayed for the Wind of the Ocean not to kill the ship, and nothing else happened.
In all seriousness, though, nWoD-like Bans where a goddess like this can't attack you if the wind is blowing towards the sea instead of from it, or interrupt natural cycles, are totally sweet and more gods should have them.
The dragonfly thing is because I was originally going to have it be a serpent or something, but then it occurred to me that snakes are predictable, and that dragonflies are totally sweet near-apex predators in air and water alike, and which tend to hang around the border of the two. And attack with a sudden spear-strike from nowhere that kills their prey in one shot. And are basically Keris: The Animal.
Problems that may develop for Keris from this, incidentally:
- A group of Immaculates get sent to punch this uppity new spirit in the face and tell her to cut it out.
- The Pale Mistress hears about this supposed new subordinate of hers and goes to see what all the fuss is about.
- Iasestus, the Arbitrator of Doctrine, decides that this new spirit is working against order and hierarchy with its chaotic activities, and tells Deveh to hunt it down and kill it.
fun fun fun~
And so does a pretty shinny thing distract Keris from killing people.
If only more people knew to distract her with pretty shinny things, then more people would be alive now.
What a shame.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
How early are we talking here? They were up to flintlocks by the early 1600's when the colonisations began, weren't they?
'Musket' describes a rather long line of muzzle loading smoothbore guns, and by the time native Americans got their hands on imported weapons the gun had been part of the European arsenal for more than a century or two. That said, you've got a good point, in highly overgrown places where you are going to only get one shot at close enough range you aren't going to miss it's very useful to be able to guarantee a kill.
I'm disappointed that the core grappling rules don't include a clause for when a third character gets involved with the purpose of grappling the character who is already being manhandled.
Like, two guys teaming up on the third, with each holding an arm to ensure that they succeed in opening the third guy up so that a fourth guy can punch him in face. Because the group of three can't always be sure that guy 1 or 3 would be capable of holding guy 2 alone, so stacking the deck is safer.
Grappling a clinched target is already easier insofar as the victim's Defense is penalized by -2 (not including an onslaught penalty for grappling in the same round as the first guy), but you figure the control roll should also be penalized somehow. The victim's general -1 penalty to attacks seems too little, but I'm not sure the -3 penalty for attacks with a two-handed weapon is right, either. Plus, doesn't it make sense that your success might increase the first grappler's number of control rounds?
As far as interactions, the second grappler obviously shouldn't be able to unilaterally drag, throw or slam the victim; unless he's strong enough to manhandle the first grappler as well, the two of them need to work together.
By coordinating, they might be able to throw or slam together; maybe the weaker one donates all of his control rounds to the stronger one for this purpose.
Working together, two grapplers might be able to totally Restrain the victim at only half the usual cost of control rounds. By moving in concert, they could also drag the victim around, making move actions. If they're both attempting to Disengage or Rush a fourth character, however, their teamwork could be broken by one failing to keep up with the other.
Two savaging attacks don't need special rules, nor any particular form of coordination.
If one of them is restraining the victim while the other one savages, THAT might need special rules to represent how much more helpless the victim is to prevent his neck from being snapped.
Of course, Dragon-Blooded Brawl Charms would be ALL OVER this issue.
Such Charms would ideally allow the Dragon-Blooded to enhance his efforts as the second grappler, or to best direct the efforts of the second grappler (who might be a simple mortal conscript aiding the Prince of the Earth to slay the vile Anathema). Or, if not directing his ally on how to act, then simply knowing how to best benefit from even the most amateurish flailing around that his ally might contribute.
I definitely hope to see a Terrestrial Brawl Charm that provides special benefits for coordinating two savage attacks, especially when they're on the same tick.
Like, two guys teaming up on the third, with each holding an arm to ensure that they succeed in opening the third guy up so that a fourth guy can punch him in face. Because the group of three can't always be sure that guy 1 or 3 would be capable of holding guy 2 alone, so stacking the deck is safer.
Grappling a clinched target is already easier insofar as the victim's Defense is penalized by -2 (not including an onslaught penalty for grappling in the same round as the first guy), but you figure the control roll should also be penalized somehow. The victim's general -1 penalty to attacks seems too little, but I'm not sure the -3 penalty for attacks with a two-handed weapon is right, either. Plus, doesn't it make sense that your success might increase the first grappler's number of control rounds?
As far as interactions, the second grappler obviously shouldn't be able to unilaterally drag, throw or slam the victim; unless he's strong enough to manhandle the first grappler as well, the two of them need to work together.
By coordinating, they might be able to throw or slam together; maybe the weaker one donates all of his control rounds to the stronger one for this purpose.
Working together, two grapplers might be able to totally Restrain the victim at only half the usual cost of control rounds. By moving in concert, they could also drag the victim around, making move actions. If they're both attempting to Disengage or Rush a fourth character, however, their teamwork could be broken by one failing to keep up with the other.
Two savaging attacks don't need special rules, nor any particular form of coordination.
If one of them is restraining the victim while the other one savages, THAT might need special rules to represent how much more helpless the victim is to prevent his neck from being snapped.
Of course, Dragon-Blooded Brawl Charms would be ALL OVER this issue.
Such Charms would ideally allow the Dragon-Blooded to enhance his efforts as the second grappler, or to best direct the efforts of the second grappler (who might be a simple mortal conscript aiding the Prince of the Earth to slay the vile Anathema). Or, if not directing his ally on how to act, then simply knowing how to best benefit from even the most amateurish flailing around that his ally might contribute.
I definitely hope to see a Terrestrial Brawl Charm that provides special benefits for coordinating two savage attacks, especially when they're on the same tick.
Last edited:
- Location
- SMS Odette II
Good lord, why has this thread been popping up so many alerts for me?
We want you to talk about fightan lurker!