Guys I need a favor. Can someone give me a Charm list for a Dragon Blood perfect circle specked for a fight with low level Solars? I'm familiar enough with Dragon Blood myself to it, and I don't want to give too much away to my PCs. I'm using 2.5, and the Dragon Blooded will have the support of several squads of heroic mortal level solders. PLease PM me if you're willing to help.
General Exalted Thread
samdamandias
Apprentice Plane Wizard
Boss, it really depends on if you want us to beat them or not. If you want us to need to run, War and Archery charms are the way to go, with massed fire and the mortals making liberal use of Coordinated Attack and Defend Other. Otherwise the GLORIOUS SOLAR BEATSTICK will murderize anything that gets close, and the GLORIOUS SOLAR RAILGUN will murderize anything that tries to kite away from the melee beatstick.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
I'm really more of a murder-blender than a beatstick.
Which is hilarious, because I'm relying on completely mundane flurries still.
This is why I'm doing this in PM! Can't have you lot planing behind my back!
Yes I know you guys are better then that, but I still want to throw a curveball your way.
It's about as good as any. What's your question?
Scorpion, with all respect due you...
Do you want any pepper with that salt?
Amusingly I believe nWoD 2E, for all its issues, and don't get me wrong it has plenty of them, has also abandoned scaling XP costs in their entirety. I think the new Scion/Adventure!/Aberrant/Aeon system is going to also be primarily based on nWoD rather than on the hacked Exalted system that Holden & co are using. Whether that leads to an XP/BP divide or not I'm not sure.
It's more that there's some stuff that just really sticks out simply because of how blatantly 2E they are, primarily because they're arbitrary decisions that just happen to align perfectly with 2Eisms. Why do stunts always give +2d no matter what and then give other bonuses? Because that was the assumption the game was working around in 2E. Why are stunts called '1, 2, and 3-point ones despite this no longer having any relationship to what they are? Well, because that was how they were evaluated in 2E. Why are Solar mote pools the size they are? It's how 2E did it, pretty much.
The stuff from 2E that was clearly broken (combat, social combat, mass combat, crafting) got fixes, but there's just this sense that a lot of other stuff that sort of worked but not well and was essentially arbitrary was completely unexamined.
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Huh. Sorry for not responding, it was eleven at night for me when I posted that, and went to sleep right afterwards, not expecting an answer for several hours.
Anyway, my issue is that i don't know how to phrase the opening post. I want discussion of things like average benders vs. average dragonblooded, Bumi or Iroh vs. Elders, the nations as canon against the Realm split by the Empress' disappearance, them united with an experienced Avatar against the Realm with the Empress (but no Sidereal support), and so on. I could just use that run-on sentence as my opening, but it seems like a bad one that would get me ignored.
Of all the things to call out in 3E, stunts seems like a weird choice. Now, granted, I didn't play much 2E, but stunts did not always grant two dice... or at least, not in the way you mean. They assumed level 2 stunts were the norm in 2e, which did give two dice. Those are now level 1 stunts, and are assumed to be the norm, with levels two and three being appropriately more rare. As for 'point', I dunno 'point' rolls off the tongue more easily than 'level' or something, and if you're stunting your defense it actually matches exactly so it's not like there's no correlation.
The assumption the game is working under is that you can reliably crank out 2-die stunts, because a 2-die stunt is literally just "I use the environment in my description." "I swing my daiklaive at Sir Schmuckatelli, with enough force that the grass underneath him is blown flat" is a 2-die stunt. This is the assumption that Exalted 2e made, and this assumption is why stunts give you this many bonus dice in 3e. It's an arbitrary number of dice that is this number presumably not because they intensively playtested with multiple control groups having stunts give no bonus die as default, 1 bonus, 2 bonus, 3 bonus, etc. but because it was that way in 2nd edition.
Dynamesmouse
Bzzzzzz
Is there a list of all these carryover problems in 3e?
I would argue it's not entirely arbitrary. Seems like a goldilocks situation where one dice is kind of meh, three dice are two much to be handing out on every roll, and two strikes a nice impactful balance. With higher ratings being way more limited (not only with tougher criteria, but stuff like Motivation resonance no longer being a thing) they've been freed to be twice as strong as they were last addition by just adding flat successes.
Like, there's plenty of weirdness in and among 3E's design decisions, but stunts aren't exactly the kind of thing you need double-blind studies to get right in short order.
I think that level of setting things up is sufficient, so you might try giving some detail on that the sides can do. Also, if you want to avoid that runon, make it more a list, wich each scenario being one entry.
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
... despite also being worth a quadratically increasing amount of xp every time you buy an Ability up by one dot, I suppose. Except of course the real worth of doing that is getting past the horrifying bare wasteland of Charms with prerequisites between Ability 1 and Ability 5, and getting into the enormous mushroom cap of Ability 5 Charms which are totally worth spending quadratically increasing xp to, uh, be able to spend more xp on several dozen almost-mechanically-indistinguishable number-boosters and probability-tweakers. Yes?
Yes, given how big a deal your dice cap is (which, hey, your Ability rating counts toward). it also reflects people's intuitive sense of how skill progression should work based on their experiences with real-world skill training. (Hey, I got the hang of swimming pretty quick, but man I'd have to train for years to get to the Olympics...)
I get that you and some other people who frequent this thread are not in love with the new addition, but choose better critiques please. It's not like they're hiding.
Matsci
Grash itsh griah! Rwar arr rawrrawrarar!
That's Still a linear increase in abilities, not an exponential one. And for what feels, right, that's represented by training time, not by xp costs.
Exalted is Roleplating game, after all, and while you can go on about story, the rules should also have solid mechanical base. You build a house on loose sand rather than a solid base, you should be suprised when large cracks start poping up.
Linear increase in abilities for scaling investment is pretty darn close to how it works in real life (as far as we can even quantify something like 'skill', anyway). Diminishing returns is how it is. That's what I meant by 'reflects people's experiences. So, I'm not really sure where you're going with this. It almost seems like you're saying to get rid of XP altogether and use scaling training times? As the rest of the system stands, I don't really think time alone can serve as much of a gating mechanism for advancement.
Again, not sure where you're going with this. No one (recently) was going on about story. I have no problem discussing things that are actually flawed about 3E (BP/XP divide, Martial Arts divide, Craft system, some Abilities not being worthwhile Supernal choices, etc). Now if, like Revlid mentioned earlier, it's the chargen BP and gameplay XP with linear/scaling cost divide that bugs you, then yeah, it's pretty weird and personally, I'm probably just going to houserule XP use for chargen. XP costs in a vacuum (a-la Aleph's 'insightful' post above) I think are super weird to get bent out of shape about.
greensun
You shall all burn beneath my light!!!
Okay, a bit of help here guys.
I'm working on a charm that expands on Mother-Sea Mastery's whole 'I'm stronger in water' theme with a sensory charm like Hateful-Wicked Noise that only works while you're in the water. Now I'm not sure to make it a hearing charm or a touch charm that lets you pick up even the faintest ripple, or if I should just go all out and include all the senses and you have to do repurchases to get them all.
I'm working on a charm that expands on Mother-Sea Mastery's whole 'I'm stronger in water' theme with a sensory charm like Hateful-Wicked Noise that only works while you're in the water. Now I'm not sure to make it a hearing charm or a touch charm that lets you pick up even the faintest ripple, or if I should just go all out and include all the senses and you have to do repurchases to get them all.
NonSequtur
a body
One purchase for touch/hearing and one for smell/taste. No sight.
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Use a sonar and so combine hearing and seeing? While touch smell and taste are the other one?
Bad idea. "Only in water" is too niche for a Solaroid sensory charm.
I'd probably just go for a "Sonar" Charm which is cheaper when immersed in liquid - or possibly gets more auto-successes or something. Balance against Solar hearing.
greensun
You shall all burn beneath my light!!!
Right, so it'll give you bonus dice, counting as dice added, but in water it gives you automatic success?
Or it could be something like that organ that lets sharks see electric fields(or however that thing works).
- Location
- The end of all things
Another explanation is that they simply doubled the numerical bonuses for each tier of stunt. This makes stunts more rewarding and serves to further distinguish PC and other key characters from generic NPCs.
As for why a 3 point stunt gives +2d +2 successes instead of +6d, it's probably because in 3E 2 dice is often substantially better than 1 success.