- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Makes sense, but why? What is the intended purpose? I mean I can make some educated guesses myself, but these are your ideas and experiences.
General Exalted Thread
Makes sense, but why? What is the intended purpose? I mean I can make some educated guesses myself, but these are your ideas and experiences.
Probably for the same reason 3e's making Excellencies free- because having to devote the Charm purchases to Excellencies is considered a rather boring purchase, and providing free Excellencies makes spreading out Charm purchases a little easier.
No double Excellency requirements. Find a useful but uncommonly purchased Charm in the skill tree to replace an Excellency in that case. It removes a useless speedbump and expands the Exalts capabilities. The most common case is Solar Lore, where Essence Lending Method is used.
1 free Ox Body per dot of Essence. This helps limit the lethality problem a little bit. Well, very little.
1 free Ox Body per dot of Essence. This helps limit the lethality problem a little bit. Well, very little.
greensun
You shall all burn beneath my light!!!
To reduce lethality, if you screw up in the base game and don't apply the right defensive charm at the right moment, you'd either die right away or go into a death spiral that'll kill you a few actions later. So adding more Health-Levels gives players a bit more lee-way with damage and the like.
As for the changing the tick based system to a modified turn based, there is a rather simple, we simply found it annoying trying to keep track of the speeds, so I changed it so I changed it.
The getting rid of none-charmed flurries was a bit of both; it reduced lethality and sped up the game as people weren't sending out 4 attacks in one go.
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- Location
- NOVA
I ran with enough that it would almost qualify as an entirely new system, but here are the big ones.
Gave all characters -0's equal to stamina to slow down the death spiral and give a margin of error to players. This did result in some charms and artifacts having to be changed.
There are no Essence 6+ charms. To solve the unstoppable Elder and NPC's have things PC's never will problems.
Rewrote the social and mass combat systems to make them more fun for players to use and in the later's case easier to resolve actions.
As part of that, changed intimacies to make certain ones stronger by tying them to a high rated virtue and reduce the number that were needed to be made at char gen. This was to put a second tier of important characteristics between motivation and intimacies.
Rewrote weapon and armor stats to make soak more relevant and more weapons choices for non-martial artists. This was originally done before the errata was released, but I continued using them afterward.
Gave out one free Excellency for each favored Attribute or Ability. This was to get rid of boring, but necessary, pre-reqs and lets players get at interesting charms sooner.
Re-wrote the Crafting rules so that it was much harder to make artifact 4's and 5's, but possible without Ess 6+ or specific Solar charms.
Make Craft one Ability. It was capped by Lore for large scale projects, Occult for artifacts, and Medicine for biological ones. This cap was in part to maintain the difficulty of high end artifacts and manses and also I felt it made sense fluff wise.
Did a large number of charm tree rewrites to work with the above changes or make some options less poor choices. None of these were ever finished due to the massive amount of work it was.
And finally a bunch of things that the errata did like getting rid of having to buy combos.
Houserules I would definitely run?
You roll your highest virtue for WP recovery, Sorcery/Necromancy initiations give that circle's counter magic, and flat xp costs outside of essence.
The reasoning is largely to make reduce Conviction's superiority over other virtues, to remove the charm tax for sorcery, and fix what I perceive to be a cluncky advancement system with a lot of exploits built into it. Someone who doesn't get WP 10 at Chargen shouldn't be out such a large amount of xp, and given the benefits involved the scaling costs for abilities/attributes/virtues gets a bit ridiculous fast. Essence stays scaling because it is one of the few things that is worth the increasing costs.
I would also probably remove the Jade MM speed reduction powers, in favor of other powers. Speed is just too important.
Stuff I've run with in the past(pre-2.5):
Benefits from Magical Materials/Hearthstones/better equipment count as from charms(including successes a la the second excellency): a somewhat effective attempt to reduce equipment stacking, though it opened up some other issues from what I remember.
Charm Activation: the second charm activation in an action has a 1wp surcharge. Martial Artists who have mastered a style waive the cost for the style who's form they have up. This was to try and address the annoyance that was the combo rules. I don't think it was terrible, but it wasn't the best option.
Magical Flurries are capped at (Rate of Weapons involved +1) or the number given by the charm, whichever is lower. The intent from this was to make Rate more important, and to reduce the sheer power of the killsticks. It also made martial artists/two weapon fighters much more impressive, as they could more easily get high numbers of attacks.
Anyone with essence can spend 2 motes per die to gain up to essence dice on an action, which counted as from charms. The idea was to make people with essence a bit better than mortals without needing an explict charm(though a charm was much better).
Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
Most of these sound like stuff that 3E has fixed pretty well.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
Currently:
- Stunts don't give mote regen, only WP.
- You regain 6 motes per action.
- Stunts give 2 dice, 2 dice + 1 success, and 2 dice + 2 successes, instead of 1/2/3 dice.
- PCs get 2 free Ox-Body Techniques (might switch to Stamina or Essence some time; still considering it).
- Most NPCs use this:
- I generally ignore charm activation constraints, mostly because in most circumstances I find them boring.
- Buying a circle of Sorcery gives you the corresponding Countermagic.
I'm also considering free Excellencies for favored abilities, and/or maybe abilities the character has charms in, but that's still up in the air.
I might also (eventually) try and fit charmsets to the streamlined Attribute/Ability system @Aleph and @EarthScorpion use, but that's probably something for when I'm really, really bored (and don't have any personal projects to work on).
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Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
Literally all of this is ripped straight from 3E. Did you implement it after the leak or do you have some prescient knowledge?
notthepenguins
Neither Spherical Nor Frictionless
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Making mote regen independent of stunts and free excellencies have been in the standard houserule set for years.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
Stunts and mote regen were post-leak, but free excellencies has been a common houserule for as long as I've been into Exalted.
Matsci
Grash itsh griah! Rwar arr rawrrawrarar!
Oh god. We are the worst at exalted. Our Full Moon lunar and Moonshadow Abyssal are trying kill a horse so the Lunar can take it's form, and get around the fact that Animals hate abyssals and the fact that neither of them are good at riding.
They are currently being losing to the horse, despite charms and excellences. A perfectly ordinary mundane horse.
They are currently being losing to the horse, despite charms and excellences. A perfectly ordinary mundane horse.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
How. A horse has a dice pool of 5 and a dv of 3. Are they just rolling that terribly?
Matsci
Grash itsh griah! Rwar arr rawrrawrarar!
Both have 3 dex and little combat skills. They did manage to kill it.
Sucal
The Devil’s Cut
- Location
- Bottom of the barrel
Save for the F***ing XP costs.
Seriously if I run a 3e game I'm just gonna throw XP out the window and give people BP instead. Minmaxing should make you good at your party role, not give you a hundred XP advantage over the rest of the circle.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Dodge, Solar Dodge, Counterattacks, and Creation-Slaying Oblivion Kick
Welcome to the essay on Solar Dodge! Today we'll cover the five Dodge Charms available to Solars, as well as counterattacks, which we missed covering during Solar Melee back at the start of this project. (I actually need to redo the melee essay… Later)
But first…
An Addendum to Awareness: Creation-Slaying Oblivion Kick
As written in Exalted 2e, Creation-Slaying Oblivion Kick is possible in the system. It is not going away and aside from houserules, nothing we can say removes the mechanical pieces that make it possible. What I think gets lost in the shuffle of repeating its name over and over again though, is understanding exactly what goes into making it work.
Now I need to state this clearly. CSOK is a metatextual criticism of a system that allows bad output. It is not an optimization or feat of awesomeness. It is not a guideline to create an awesome end boss or the Best Character Build Ever. It is at best a thought exercise of the system.
The core elements of CSOK are as follows:
Again in strictest thought-exercise terms, you ask yourself "What Awareness/Vision/Perception related actions must be made Applicable for this to work?"
Distance/Range, so a hypothetical charm that lets you see further than before, Then another for seeing through obstacles.
At the core, CSOK requires a certain subset of Awareness Actions (seeing at distance, seeing through obstacles, etc) to be valid actions, that their rolls be Applicable. So you need applicability-attaining magic to make the action legal. This magic doesn't exist to my knowledge, so it must be homebrewed.
Now, requiring implicit (or explicit) Storyteller involvement to make the appropriate custom charms or find the relevant effects does not remove the 'garbage output' problem previously mentioned. I mostly just want to remind people however, that thought experiments and actual gameplay are two different things.
Counterattacks
This isn't the first time Counterattacks have come up in the system, though I missed Solar Counterattack and Ready in Eight Directions Stance the first time through Solar Melee.
Anyway, as far as what a Counterattack is: These are as of 2nd Edition, charm-only granted effects that occur in Step 9 of Combat Resolution, and essentially create a second set of Steps 1-8 that are 'reversed', usually applied to the initial attacker.
At a system level, this 'lack' of a second step 9 is what terminates the infinite counterattack loop other than the explicit declaration that you cannot counter a counterattack.
Step 9 counterattacks exist as a statement on the setting that in order to create a complex action (like an Attack) on a recovery tick, you need Magic. Immediately, the idea Counterattack Charms and no associated non-reflexive Action means that mortals cannot ever counterattack unless they learn Terrestrial Martial Arts or an appropriate spirit charm.
Now, Counterattacks do not have timing priority. If you're invoking a Counterattack, you've already been hit, as the attacker had to get past your DV in Step 5 and check against Hardness. Even if the attack does no damage in steps 7-8, you still get to activate a counterattack charm in step 9.
Once all legal counterattacks are resolved, any damage is applied in step 10 simultaneously. This means all things being equal, even a successful/deadly Counterattack does not prevent damage from being inflicted to the defender (person initiating the counterattack) in Step 10.
Wait What Just Happened - Simultaneous Actions and Countering
This is more just a funny observation, but it's entirely possible for two people to act on the same tick, attack each other, and counterattack to each other in step 9. You just can't invoke a Counterattack against another charm with the Counterattack Keyword in step 9.
A brief introduction to Solar Dodge
Thematically, Dodge is a very narrow ability. It is the human science of evasion, of being somewhere else when the attack comes. It is combat and life-saving mobility. Athletics is how you get to where you want to go, dodge is your ability to move in a way as to avoid damage.
Dodge the Ability
Honestly, Dodge as of 2nd Edition is very limited with the 5 corebook charms we were given. There is Borgstromancy here, but it is a very functional, urbane sort. You would have to really draw from the other corebook charm trees to see how high-level Dodge works.
Of note, after digging into the core rules more, is that Dodging itself is highly conditional. About as much as Parrying in fact!
To Parry, you need a readied Weapon in hand, or a charm/stunt to let you parry lethal damage with your bare hands. (Barehanded blade blocks, etc).
To most people, Dodge lacks that requirement; dodge is always on. This is actually not true.
You can only dodge when External Penalties from the environmental/terrain are -1, -2 or -3. If the penalty is -4 or greater, your Dodge DV is inapplicable. Just flat out 'You have no DDV'. Additionally/alternatively, if you lack enough physical room to maneuver (a tight hallway, rope bridge, etc), you can't apply your Dodge DV.
If you recall Graceful Crane Stance and it's statement of platforms 3 yards wide, that gives me the impression it's meant to negate "Lack of space" conditions for Dodge Penalties.
Here's the interesting thing: If you lose your DDV to penalties like this, you cannot invoke Dodge-enhancing charms, including Seven Shadow Evasion. The reason for this is that SSE can defend against attacks that are rendering your DV inapplicable. I.E. Unblockable Attacks.
Basically, if you cannot attempt an action, you cannot apply Charms to it. It just turns up as a big autofailure-null state. This is also why Unexpected Attacks defeat perfect parries and dodges, because they prevent the system from letting you even attempt the supplemental actions. Soak can never be fully denied for a similar reason- there is no non-attack conditional effect that denies your Natural Stamina Soak, so you always get it in Step 7.
Solar Dodge Charms
Shadow Over Water
Dodge 3, Essence 1
Weighing in at Dodge 3, this charm requires a 'professional' or 'career' level of investment in Dodging, which is reasonable, considering you're trying to avoid severe bodily harm. Further, Exalts always round their physical DV traits up, so odd numbered minimums work out for them in the long run.
The Reflexive charm itself costs 1m to invoke for an instant- the duration of a single roll applied against your DDV. It negates all internal and external penalties to your DV, including those from Multiple Actions (mundane flurries), Onslaught Penalties, and so on. I haven't touch on it much, but Internal (dice) and External (success) penalties are applied equally to your DV after all other calculations. So the -4 wound penalty subtracts 4 from your post-calc DV, not the calculation itself.
This charm negates all those penalties for 1 mote.
Now in context, most mortals? They have a DDV of 1. Maybe 2, before taking Actions. Flurrying drops their DDV to 0 almost immediately and puts their parry DVs at 1 or 2 before stunts. Suffice to say mortals don't do much dodging unless they really focus on it.
With this charm, a Solar can basically keep their DDV at max under any applicable condition.
Seven Shadow Evasion
Dodge 4, Essence 2
Now we have the big boy. For 3 motes, we have the cheapest Perfect Defense in the core book. It's also the cheapest, most accessible Physical Perfect Solars get access too, requiring only 2 charms.
As for what it does, it's a Perfect Dodge- no matter what you're facing, you will dodge it. It's an Instant-duration charm, so it only applies to a single roll, however. Like all 2e Perfect defenses, it suffers under prolonged battering and enduring/persistent damage effects.
Now, as long as your DDV is applicable, SSE can be invoked. If your DDV is applicable before the attack comes, SSE works. If your DV was not applicable before an incoming attack, the charm cannot be invoked.
Reflex Sidestep Technique
Dodge 3, Essence 1
Requiring Shadow Over Water, this is the default Surprise Negator of the Solar Exalted. It exists expressly to remove the Unexpected Quality from an incoming attack. (but not the actual Unblockable or Undodgable tag, if a separate effect applies them.)
RST makes your DDV applicable to an incoming Unexpected Attack, even if that attack is automatically Unexpected. Once your DDV is applicable, you can invoke other charms like Shadow Over Water or Seven Shadow Evasion.
Leaping Dodge Method
Dodge 3, Essence 2
Leaping Dodge is a Counterattack Charm, a Reflexive Step 9 effect. You pay 3 motes, and it immediately lets you jump [Strength+Dodge]x3 yards vertical, or twice that horizontally away. We call this a Flurrybreaker, because if you can take yourself out of range of the next Step 1-5 sequence, the actions you're defending against are aborted. The first one you actually tried to counter- that's going to hit you no matter what.
Now as a Counterattack, it does ding your DV by 1, but that's a small price to pay on top fo the mote cost. Like most of Solar Dodge, it's ability minimums are priced with combos in mind, not too expensive or too cheap to include in quite a few combos.
Something to note, for Storytellers and Players both, is how you want to arbitrate Leaping Dodge and its interactions with other magic. By the strictest definition, it is a Dodge-based pseudo-Jump Action, which possibly means that it can only be enhanced by Dodge Charms in the same combo. That might not work for you or your table, so you could allow it to be supplemented by Monkey Leap and Soaring Crane Leap. By RAW though, Dodge Charms supplement Dodge Actions, and Leaping Dodge creates a Dodge-based Jump Action.
I can tell you that anything that buffs your Strength for purposes of Jump Distances or in general works just fine though.
Area of Effect Attacks
Exalted has Area of Effect attacks/hazards such as Death of Obsidian Butterflies, or being caught in some sort of super-landslide. It also has enduring or persistent attacks that are applied at a given interval- usually once per action, but some truly devastating attacks are applied per-tick or similar.
So how does DV and mobility work with those? Good question! 2nd Edition gives us some very goofy answers…. that are not actually in the core book. If they are, I haven't spotted them. Oh we have Death of Obsidian Butterflies, but it's a single attack that has a wide area of effect, and creates only a single 'attack' per character in the spell's range.
Instead, most Area Effect and Persistent Effect rules were added in via Wonders of the Lost Age. They extend out pretty logically, of course, but was definitely another issue with White Wolf's publishing policy.
Basically, a fair amount of Artifacts and Vehicles have persistent or area of effect damage effects, like the various kabooms from the Five Metal Shrike, or a Thousand Forged Dragon attempting its geomantic inversion bomb.
At the core, any given charm with a duration of Instant encompasses the span of a single roll, usually narrowed by some category. (An instant Dodge charm will cover the entirety of an Attack, not needing to worry about extra rolls created by other charms in that attack).
WoTLA gave us persistent damage effects, which weren't Environmental, so they would force responses at set interval. As long as the character was in the effect radius, they would be forced to defend against it as an ongoing, automatically successful attack. Probably one that couldn't be dodged or blocked.
On that note, most of those area-effect attacks have this funny bit of phrasing: "Cannot be dodged unless you can move outside the area of effect." Since in previous essays we've more or less established that everything happens concurrently, simultaneously, this clause implies that either you can't dodge AoE effects on the first interval they'd hurt you, or that it means these are supposed to resolve 'after' movement in some fashion. Either way it's very unclear.
I can guess that it's trying to say you should be able to use your Reflexive Move action to (somehow) get out of range. Or, more effectively use charms like Leaping Dodge Method. In the case of LDM though, by it's nature as a Counterattack, the first instance of an persistent attack has already hit you.
So that's the first part of the WotLA additions. The second part is Enduring or Persistent Damage effects. Most of them have an interval of 'once per DV refresh', meaning whenever a character acts, they have to take a reflexive defense action in addition to any other normal actions. The really deadly artifacts and magical attacks have damage intervals measured in ticks. Even things like taking damage on every tick. In those cases, you have to attempt a defined action (or use a defense charm) at each interval. This obviously gets expensive, unless you have action-long defenses.
At the core, Exalted gives us a lot of crunchy systems and exceptions because it expects us to pull them apart and make something out of them. The WoTLA 'big booms' like the Shrike's godspear and the like aren't there to fuck over players- though they do, because STs don't understand how to use them. That's a long understood problem of course.
Flow Like Blood
Dodge 5, Essence 3
The effective Capstone of Core Solar Dodge- Flow Like Blood is sort of the matched pair to Fivefold Bulwark Stance. They're both scenelongs, cost the same and have nearly the same trait minimums. They're focused on solving different problems though.
FLB, at the core, is a charm that is intended to protect the Solar from being surrounded, and coordinated attacks. I haven't touched on coordinated attacks much, but they basically let attackers inflict an extremely enhanced DV penalty on the defender. We're talking -3 or -4 points of DV per attacker.
Even for a Solar with a DDV of 7 or 8, dropping that by half is a lot.
Flow Like Blood negates that penalty outright, so you could walk into a flawlessly coordinated group of Dragonblooded Archers, and they would not get any fancy benefits of their Coordinated Attack actions.
The other aspect of FLB is that it prevents the Solar from suffering the 'You can be blindsided' effect'. Blindsiding is a personal shorthand of mine for 'if you're surrounded by 5 guys in open terrain (or 3 guys in closed terrain) and can't put your back to the wall, you have to show your back to one of them. The guy you show your back to gets a free Unexpected Attack, with all that implies.
So FLB prevents THAT from getting you, which is a pretty awesome deal.
For good or ill though, FLB suffers from the same problem most defensive charms do- they're reactive and passive effects. People look at Fivefold Bulwark Stance as superior because it reduces DV penalties on actions by 1, making it easier to take actions. FLB approaches things differently by removing enemy tactical concerns- you're denying the enemy certain strategic and tactical avenues, thus making it easier for you to focus on important things like looking awesome in a fight.
Basically, Actions happen constantly, everyone's thinking about taking actions, doing stuff. It's a very positive, virtuous cycle of player psychology. Unfortunately, the players and storytellers of the game don't use tactical positioning mechanics like 'No Room/surrounding/Etc' penalties and so on, so Flow Like Blood rarely gets utilized to the fullest extent.
And that about wraps it up for Solar Dodge! Next up is Larceny, and oh is the Borgstromancy thick there!
Welcome to the essay on Solar Dodge! Today we'll cover the five Dodge Charms available to Solars, as well as counterattacks, which we missed covering during Solar Melee back at the start of this project. (I actually need to redo the melee essay… Later)
But first…
An Addendum to Awareness: Creation-Slaying Oblivion Kick
As written in Exalted 2e, Creation-Slaying Oblivion Kick is possible in the system. It is not going away and aside from houserules, nothing we can say removes the mechanical pieces that make it possible. What I think gets lost in the shuffle of repeating its name over and over again though, is understanding exactly what goes into making it work.
Now I need to state this clearly. CSOK is a metatextual criticism of a system that allows bad output. It is not an optimization or feat of awesomeness. It is not a guideline to create an awesome end boss or the Best Character Build Ever. It is at best a thought exercise of the system.
The core elements of CSOK are as follows:
- Essence7+ for the appropriate Charms, which include-
- Charcoal March of Spiders Form
- Grandmother Spider Mastery
- Pattern Spider Touch
- The ability to perceive the maximum amount of individual humans across the entirety of Creation. This means you need a number of effects to make your Martial Arts Action applicable across the following conditions-
- Vision to see to all corners of Creation
- Ability to see through solid obstructions which includes rock, walls, trees, etc.
Again in strictest thought-exercise terms, you ask yourself "What Awareness/Vision/Perception related actions must be made Applicable for this to work?"
Distance/Range, so a hypothetical charm that lets you see further than before, Then another for seeing through obstacles.
At the core, CSOK requires a certain subset of Awareness Actions (seeing at distance, seeing through obstacles, etc) to be valid actions, that their rolls be Applicable. So you need applicability-attaining magic to make the action legal. This magic doesn't exist to my knowledge, so it must be homebrewed.
Now, requiring implicit (or explicit) Storyteller involvement to make the appropriate custom charms or find the relevant effects does not remove the 'garbage output' problem previously mentioned. I mostly just want to remind people however, that thought experiments and actual gameplay are two different things.
Counterattacks
This isn't the first time Counterattacks have come up in the system, though I missed Solar Counterattack and Ready in Eight Directions Stance the first time through Solar Melee.
Anyway, as far as what a Counterattack is: These are as of 2nd Edition, charm-only granted effects that occur in Step 9 of Combat Resolution, and essentially create a second set of Steps 1-8 that are 'reversed', usually applied to the initial attacker.
At a system level, this 'lack' of a second step 9 is what terminates the infinite counterattack loop other than the explicit declaration that you cannot counter a counterattack.
Step 9 counterattacks exist as a statement on the setting that in order to create a complex action (like an Attack) on a recovery tick, you need Magic. Immediately, the idea Counterattack Charms and no associated non-reflexive Action means that mortals cannot ever counterattack unless they learn Terrestrial Martial Arts or an appropriate spirit charm.
Now, Counterattacks do not have timing priority. If you're invoking a Counterattack, you've already been hit, as the attacker had to get past your DV in Step 5 and check against Hardness. Even if the attack does no damage in steps 7-8, you still get to activate a counterattack charm in step 9.
Once all legal counterattacks are resolved, any damage is applied in step 10 simultaneously. This means all things being equal, even a successful/deadly Counterattack does not prevent damage from being inflicted to the defender (person initiating the counterattack) in Step 10.
Wait What Just Happened - Simultaneous Actions and Countering
This is more just a funny observation, but it's entirely possible for two people to act on the same tick, attack each other, and counterattack to each other in step 9. You just can't invoke a Counterattack against another charm with the Counterattack Keyword in step 9.
A brief introduction to Solar Dodge
Thematically, Dodge is a very narrow ability. It is the human science of evasion, of being somewhere else when the attack comes. It is combat and life-saving mobility. Athletics is how you get to where you want to go, dodge is your ability to move in a way as to avoid damage.
Dodge the Ability
Honestly, Dodge as of 2nd Edition is very limited with the 5 corebook charms we were given. There is Borgstromancy here, but it is a very functional, urbane sort. You would have to really draw from the other corebook charm trees to see how high-level Dodge works.
Of note, after digging into the core rules more, is that Dodging itself is highly conditional. About as much as Parrying in fact!
To Parry, you need a readied Weapon in hand, or a charm/stunt to let you parry lethal damage with your bare hands. (Barehanded blade blocks, etc).
To most people, Dodge lacks that requirement; dodge is always on. This is actually not true.
You can only dodge when External Penalties from the environmental/terrain are -1, -2 or -3. If the penalty is -4 or greater, your Dodge DV is inapplicable. Just flat out 'You have no DDV'. Additionally/alternatively, if you lack enough physical room to maneuver (a tight hallway, rope bridge, etc), you can't apply your Dodge DV.
If you recall Graceful Crane Stance and it's statement of platforms 3 yards wide, that gives me the impression it's meant to negate "Lack of space" conditions for Dodge Penalties.
Here's the interesting thing: If you lose your DDV to penalties like this, you cannot invoke Dodge-enhancing charms, including Seven Shadow Evasion. The reason for this is that SSE can defend against attacks that are rendering your DV inapplicable. I.E. Unblockable Attacks.
Basically, if you cannot attempt an action, you cannot apply Charms to it. It just turns up as a big autofailure-null state. This is also why Unexpected Attacks defeat perfect parries and dodges, because they prevent the system from letting you even attempt the supplemental actions. Soak can never be fully denied for a similar reason- there is no non-attack conditional effect that denies your Natural Stamina Soak, so you always get it in Step 7.
Solar Dodge Charms
Shadow Over Water
Dodge 3, Essence 1
Weighing in at Dodge 3, this charm requires a 'professional' or 'career' level of investment in Dodging, which is reasonable, considering you're trying to avoid severe bodily harm. Further, Exalts always round their physical DV traits up, so odd numbered minimums work out for them in the long run.
The Reflexive charm itself costs 1m to invoke for an instant- the duration of a single roll applied against your DDV. It negates all internal and external penalties to your DV, including those from Multiple Actions (mundane flurries), Onslaught Penalties, and so on. I haven't touch on it much, but Internal (dice) and External (success) penalties are applied equally to your DV after all other calculations. So the -4 wound penalty subtracts 4 from your post-calc DV, not the calculation itself.
This charm negates all those penalties for 1 mote.
Now in context, most mortals? They have a DDV of 1. Maybe 2, before taking Actions. Flurrying drops their DDV to 0 almost immediately and puts their parry DVs at 1 or 2 before stunts. Suffice to say mortals don't do much dodging unless they really focus on it.
With this charm, a Solar can basically keep their DDV at max under any applicable condition.
Seven Shadow Evasion
Dodge 4, Essence 2
Now we have the big boy. For 3 motes, we have the cheapest Perfect Defense in the core book. It's also the cheapest, most accessible Physical Perfect Solars get access too, requiring only 2 charms.
As for what it does, it's a Perfect Dodge- no matter what you're facing, you will dodge it. It's an Instant-duration charm, so it only applies to a single roll, however. Like all 2e Perfect defenses, it suffers under prolonged battering and enduring/persistent damage effects.
Now, as long as your DDV is applicable, SSE can be invoked. If your DDV is applicable before the attack comes, SSE works. If your DV was not applicable before an incoming attack, the charm cannot be invoked.
Reflex Sidestep Technique
Dodge 3, Essence 1
Requiring Shadow Over Water, this is the default Surprise Negator of the Solar Exalted. It exists expressly to remove the Unexpected Quality from an incoming attack. (but not the actual Unblockable or Undodgable tag, if a separate effect applies them.)
RST makes your DDV applicable to an incoming Unexpected Attack, even if that attack is automatically Unexpected. Once your DDV is applicable, you can invoke other charms like Shadow Over Water or Seven Shadow Evasion.
Leaping Dodge Method
Dodge 3, Essence 2
Leaping Dodge is a Counterattack Charm, a Reflexive Step 9 effect. You pay 3 motes, and it immediately lets you jump [Strength+Dodge]x3 yards vertical, or twice that horizontally away. We call this a Flurrybreaker, because if you can take yourself out of range of the next Step 1-5 sequence, the actions you're defending against are aborted. The first one you actually tried to counter- that's going to hit you no matter what.
Now as a Counterattack, it does ding your DV by 1, but that's a small price to pay on top fo the mote cost. Like most of Solar Dodge, it's ability minimums are priced with combos in mind, not too expensive or too cheap to include in quite a few combos.
Something to note, for Storytellers and Players both, is how you want to arbitrate Leaping Dodge and its interactions with other magic. By the strictest definition, it is a Dodge-based pseudo-Jump Action, which possibly means that it can only be enhanced by Dodge Charms in the same combo. That might not work for you or your table, so you could allow it to be supplemented by Monkey Leap and Soaring Crane Leap. By RAW though, Dodge Charms supplement Dodge Actions, and Leaping Dodge creates a Dodge-based Jump Action.
I can tell you that anything that buffs your Strength for purposes of Jump Distances or in general works just fine though.
Area of Effect Attacks
Exalted has Area of Effect attacks/hazards such as Death of Obsidian Butterflies, or being caught in some sort of super-landslide. It also has enduring or persistent attacks that are applied at a given interval- usually once per action, but some truly devastating attacks are applied per-tick or similar.
So how does DV and mobility work with those? Good question! 2nd Edition gives us some very goofy answers…. that are not actually in the core book. If they are, I haven't spotted them. Oh we have Death of Obsidian Butterflies, but it's a single attack that has a wide area of effect, and creates only a single 'attack' per character in the spell's range.
Instead, most Area Effect and Persistent Effect rules were added in via Wonders of the Lost Age. They extend out pretty logically, of course, but was definitely another issue with White Wolf's publishing policy.
Basically, a fair amount of Artifacts and Vehicles have persistent or area of effect damage effects, like the various kabooms from the Five Metal Shrike, or a Thousand Forged Dragon attempting its geomantic inversion bomb.
At the core, any given charm with a duration of Instant encompasses the span of a single roll, usually narrowed by some category. (An instant Dodge charm will cover the entirety of an Attack, not needing to worry about extra rolls created by other charms in that attack).
WoTLA gave us persistent damage effects, which weren't Environmental, so they would force responses at set interval. As long as the character was in the effect radius, they would be forced to defend against it as an ongoing, automatically successful attack. Probably one that couldn't be dodged or blocked.
On that note, most of those area-effect attacks have this funny bit of phrasing: "Cannot be dodged unless you can move outside the area of effect." Since in previous essays we've more or less established that everything happens concurrently, simultaneously, this clause implies that either you can't dodge AoE effects on the first interval they'd hurt you, or that it means these are supposed to resolve 'after' movement in some fashion. Either way it's very unclear.
I can guess that it's trying to say you should be able to use your Reflexive Move action to (somehow) get out of range. Or, more effectively use charms like Leaping Dodge Method. In the case of LDM though, by it's nature as a Counterattack, the first instance of an persistent attack has already hit you.
So that's the first part of the WotLA additions. The second part is Enduring or Persistent Damage effects. Most of them have an interval of 'once per DV refresh', meaning whenever a character acts, they have to take a reflexive defense action in addition to any other normal actions. The really deadly artifacts and magical attacks have damage intervals measured in ticks. Even things like taking damage on every tick. In those cases, you have to attempt a defined action (or use a defense charm) at each interval. This obviously gets expensive, unless you have action-long defenses.
At the core, Exalted gives us a lot of crunchy systems and exceptions because it expects us to pull them apart and make something out of them. The WoTLA 'big booms' like the Shrike's godspear and the like aren't there to fuck over players- though they do, because STs don't understand how to use them. That's a long understood problem of course.
Flow Like Blood
Dodge 5, Essence 3
The effective Capstone of Core Solar Dodge- Flow Like Blood is sort of the matched pair to Fivefold Bulwark Stance. They're both scenelongs, cost the same and have nearly the same trait minimums. They're focused on solving different problems though.
FLB, at the core, is a charm that is intended to protect the Solar from being surrounded, and coordinated attacks. I haven't touched on coordinated attacks much, but they basically let attackers inflict an extremely enhanced DV penalty on the defender. We're talking -3 or -4 points of DV per attacker.
Even for a Solar with a DDV of 7 or 8, dropping that by half is a lot.
Flow Like Blood negates that penalty outright, so you could walk into a flawlessly coordinated group of Dragonblooded Archers, and they would not get any fancy benefits of their Coordinated Attack actions.
The other aspect of FLB is that it prevents the Solar from suffering the 'You can be blindsided' effect'. Blindsiding is a personal shorthand of mine for 'if you're surrounded by 5 guys in open terrain (or 3 guys in closed terrain) and can't put your back to the wall, you have to show your back to one of them. The guy you show your back to gets a free Unexpected Attack, with all that implies.
So FLB prevents THAT from getting you, which is a pretty awesome deal.
For good or ill though, FLB suffers from the same problem most defensive charms do- they're reactive and passive effects. People look at Fivefold Bulwark Stance as superior because it reduces DV penalties on actions by 1, making it easier to take actions. FLB approaches things differently by removing enemy tactical concerns- you're denying the enemy certain strategic and tactical avenues, thus making it easier for you to focus on important things like looking awesome in a fight.
Basically, Actions happen constantly, everyone's thinking about taking actions, doing stuff. It's a very positive, virtuous cycle of player psychology. Unfortunately, the players and storytellers of the game don't use tactical positioning mechanics like 'No Room/surrounding/Etc' penalties and so on, so Flow Like Blood rarely gets utilized to the fullest extent.
And that about wraps it up for Solar Dodge! Next up is Larceny, and oh is the Borgstromancy thick there!
greensun
You shall all burn beneath my light!!!
What is borgstromancy? I've seen I've thrown around a lot.
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Your rules and mechanics shall be added to our own.
Resistance is futile.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
R Sean Borgstrom is one of the pen names of Jenna Moran, the author of the Charm system for 2e and some of the better parts of 1e as well as the setting details for Weapons of the Gods and the game Nobilis.
Jenna Moran is a computer programmer by training and a mathematician, she is also a surrealist storyteller. Look up Hitherby Dragons for her blog that contains her short fiction to get an idea of how her writing works.
Borgstromancy is a term coined to describe Jenna Moran's technique for writing rules and setting details. In effect she use literal metaphors. That is, what most games would see as flavour text she uses as literal game mechanics. If a Moran written Charm says that you plant a seed and over five days it grows into a tree and spirits leave you gifts which you can use to predict future events that is exactly what it does. This also means that she buries a lot of methods of how you play in the way the rules are written, since all her flavour text and rules are to be taken literally. Thus how she presents the way the Charms work determines how you are supposed to interpret the game. If she, for example, sets the cost for a perfect defence Charm at less than the motes you recover from a two-die stunt she is saying "this effect is trivial to produce and you should be using it all the time", without actually saying that.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Aaron summarized it pretty brilliantly, but throwing in my 2 cents. Borgstromancy is the idea of writing fluff-that-is-crunch, and crunch-that-is-fluff. Of making something like a -2 die penalty a meaningful statement on the setting. I've been writing all of these essays to help parse the implicit or explicit factors that went into Solar Charms, which most people accept have Borgstromantic aspects, but are really subtle.
Honestly, I suspect some Infernals Charms could have done with a little bit of this (Hateful
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Why not go the other way and get rid of BP instead? Damn near every other rpg I've ever heard of has some sort of scaling xp going on so I don't get why Exalted gets so much hate for it.
Walker of the Yellow Path
Ho There!
- Location
- The Land of Memes
I think its because its scaling XP for a linear bonus, whereas for example DnD has scaling XP for a scaling bonus.
In both games, it's generally assumed that everyone with the same amount of XP is going to be on the same level, but it is much easier to mess up in Exalted and create two characters on incredibly different levels of power than it is to do in DnD.