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General Exalted Thread

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It depends actually. Over a course of only a few miles they can actually travel that distance instantly, I think possibly even reflexively. Over long distances I think they cap out around mach 3 or so?
 
Chloe Sullivan said:
So anyone have write ups of test runs with the 3e initiative combat system?
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I didn't write anything up, but I can say that it works pretty well in practice.
I'm occasionally GMing an Exalted 3E game with my love mate and their boyfriend. The system was pretty easy to explain - attack, gain initiative, hit hard when you have more of it. They had more trouble keeping all their charm-based options straight. We just used some simple black and white tokens to track it, and exchanged them when somebody got hit.

So you hit an enemy and do 7 damage. That enemy slides 7 tokens over from their pool, and you get one extra for hitting. Then that enemy hits you, and does 3 damage. You slide 3 tokens back and the enemy gains one extra. The next enemy attacks, but it's decisive and you defend, so 2 or 3 tokens go back into his pool.
Well, we use black tokens to represent 5 Initiative and whites to represent 1 Initiative, but that just made counting easier.

The one major fight we had so far started as a two-on-one fight. Those are nasty since the cornered party won't be able to do much damage, unless they have notably superior stats. It then turned into two-on-two, and a battle group was added later. That made the fight much more balanced and interesting, since whittling down one enemy really does expose you quite a bit if you are not careful. Though that was partially because one of my players uses Snake Style, whose charms get better when you have higher Initiative than the enemy and thus worse if you don't.

As for decisive attacks, I think about four of them hit without anybody getting killed. Two landed on a Raksha noble who was still fighting very well afterwards, another one landed on a Zenith with one Ox-Body and Iron Skin Concentration. The fourth landed on a raksha-empowered mortal with just the standard 7 HLs, and she pretty much surrendered after that hit.
 
Matsci said:
That said, a lot of Archery charms simply apply to ranged attacks, and those work fine with guns. I'd also stick the Martial-ready keyword on those charms, linking them to firearms.
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In 3e, you could probably slot guns as Archery weapons with few problems. Your going to get Hollywood guns mind, with lots of shots fired and not a lot of hits, but that's more a function of how 3e's combat runs.
notthepenguins said:
The search function is your friend.
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Note those lack the incredible cheese that is WotLA artifacts. Overall, Solars are surprisingly slow, due to lacking speed multipliers (which is where the loltastic Infernal numbers come from).
Serafina said:
I'm occasionally GMing an Exalted 3E game with my love mate and their boyfriend. The system was pretty easy to explain - attack, gain initiative, hit hard when you have more of it. They had more trouble keeping all their charm-based options straight. We just used some simple black and white tokens to track it, and exchanged them when somebody got hit.
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Just a side note as someone who plays via chat, but we usually use a open edit Google Doc to track Init for online games. Works pretty well, though I recently switched over to Google's spreadsheets: automatic sorting when clicked on is a godsend for larger combats, and it makes it a bit easier if you want to dump misc information in there (Soak and Defense so your not constantly asking everyone what those are).
 
Kylar said:
Note those lack the incredible cheese that is WotLA artifacts. Overall, Solars are surprisingly slow, due to lacking speed multipliers (which is where the loltastic Infernal numbers come from).
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They have them, just not in the corebook. The fastest Solar speed is 3 miles/sec barring Sorcery and Artifacts. With Sorcery and Artifacts you can multiply that by up to 20 or 30. You won't keep it up for long.
 
Aaron Peori said:
They have them, just not in the corebook. The fastest Solar speed is 3 miles/sec barring Sorcery and Artifacts. With Sorcery and Artifacts you can multiply that by up to 20 or 30. You won't keep it up for long.
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Actually, Solars have no speed multiplying charms. It surprised me when I was putting those calcs together. Unless they're in DotFA, as I ignored that one for everyone as DotFA is terribly balanced.

Well, that's not a bad thing: speed multipliers did hilarious and dumb things to Exalted's movement system.
 
Kylar said:
Actually, Solars have no speed multiplying charms. It surprised me when I was putting those calcs together. Unless they're in DotFA, as I ignored that one for everyone as DotFA is terribly balanced.
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They're in the errata for DotFA, yes.Honestly, I just would have given the Solars an effect similar to the Lunars, who are the real speed masters of the setting. Why? Because a Lunar's max speed is yours + 1 yards/tick.
 
Aaron Peori said:
They're in the errata for DotFA, yes.Honestly, I just would have given the Solars an effect similar to the Lunars, who are the real speed masters of the setting. Why? Because a Lunar's max speed is yours + 1 yards/tick.
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Lunars is an objectively terrible book, mechanically. I mean, its fun to cheese, but otherwise holy shit, why.

Really, the entire movement system needed an overhaul. Infernals and Lunars were literally an order of magnitude better then everyone else (usually two orders of magnitude at the high end), and that did weird things to combat, though it never came up much because 'I hit you and move 1000 yards away' is basically made of anti-fun for the person who isn't capable of that kind of movement, and ergo was kinda ignored. This being 2e of course, that meant replacing huge sections of the game with errata, so it never got done before moving to 3e.

Thank god for range bands and never having to deal with this shit again.
 
So, looking at the "Alternate Identies" charm in 3e (under Socialize), I find it says:

• Count the Solar's dots in Integrity or Presence, Bureaucracy or Linguistics, Ride or Sail,
Socialize, and one Dawn Caste Ability. This is the number of Ability dots the player may assign
to the persona's character sheet. The persona cannot have a Craft, Lore, Occult or a Dawn Caste
Ability rated higher than the Solar's own, and may not have a higher number of total dots spread
across Dawn Abilities than the Solar has. At least half the dots (rounded up) must go into
Eclipse or Zenith Abilities.
• Halve the Solar's total experience (round down) and grant this as bonus experience to the
persona. This experience cannot be used to change the persona's Attributes, increase her
Willpower or purchase Charms or Merits, but can be used to upgrade Abilities using favored and
non-favored prices. Where the persona shares Abilities with the Solar, it automatically knows
Charms the Solar already knows. With the exception of Craft, Lore, and Occult it may also learn
Abilities the Exalt does not herself know.
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AFAICT, this means that your can't have any Dawn abilities better than you initially, but with XP, it can eventually train up for more fightiness than you. Is this right?

Also, regarding the "cannot learn [Craft] the exalt does not know," does this just mean

A) it's craft has to be the exact same or less as you 'real' craft: eg, if you have Craft (Metalworking) 5 and Craft (Artifacts) 4, it can have Craft (Metalworking) 3, but not Craft (Cooking) 1

or

B) that you simply can't have a craft higher than your main personality has a craft. So as long as you have a craft at 5, you can have a persona with Craft (something else) 3.

Now (A) is probably the more sensible reading, but it seems dumb that my persona can't be good at flower arranging unless I am. As long as my persona doesn't have any of the magical crafts (unless my main has it too), I think it should be fine.


I wonder if having multiple personas which each learn a different martial art could be viable. It's probably not the most *effective* idea, but I like it for some reason.
 
Chloe Sullivan said:
AFAICT, this means that your can't have any Dawn abilities better than you initially, but with XP, it can eventually train up for more fightiness than you. Is this right?
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Looks to be. Mind, given the time to switch between personas (5 hours) its not going to always be as an effective a solution as learning to fight yourself, especially given the beginning caps.
Chloe Sullivan said:
Also, regarding the "cannot learn [Craft] the exalt does not know," does this just mean

A) it's craft has to be the exact same or less as you 'real' craft: eg, if you have Craft (Metalworking) 5 and Craft (Artifacts) 4, it can have Craft (Metalworking) 3, but not Craft (Cooking) 1

or

B) that you simply can't have a craft higher than your main personality has a craft. So as long as you have a craft at 5, you can have a persona with Craft (something else) 3.

Now (A) is probably the more sensible reading, but it seems dumb that my persona can't be good at flower arranging unless I am. As long as my persona doesn't have any of the magical crafts (unless my main has it too), I think it should be fine.
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(A) seems to be the correct reading. Its probably there to stop people from abusing Supreme Celestial Focus and like charms to learn more then (Essence) extra crafts with gxp. Well, that and going 'I will learn ALL THE CRAFTS via personas' and then having five variants of crafting personas solely to optimize the number of crafts you have. Not so cool.

Mind, between Supreme Celestial Focus and Arete-Shifting Prana, you'll probably be able to fake just about any Craft you need to with a few careful choices.
Chloe Sullivan said:
I wonder if having multiple personas which each learn a different martial art could be viable. It's probably not the most *effective* idea, but I like it for some reason.
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With Fugue-Empowered Other, this could be quite nasty. Hope you like Limit though.

But no, not the most effective of ideas. On the other hand, you are your own school of Martial Arts Masters, which is pretty fun, so who cares about effectiveness.
 
Kylar said:
Looks to be. Mind, given the time to switch between personas (5 hours) its not going to always be as an effective a solution as learning to fight yourself, especially given the beginning caps.
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But you could have Main (general survival and maybe some face-punching), and then Assassin persona (all the stealth and stabbing).

Kylar said:
(A) seems to be the correct reading. Its probably there to stop people from abusing Supreme Celestial Focus and like charms to learn more then (Essence) extra crafts with gxp. Well, that and going 'I will learn ALL THE CRAFTS via personas' and then having five variants of crafting personas solely to optimize the number of crafts you have. Not so cool.

Mind, between Supreme Celestial Focus and Arete-Shifting Prana, you'll probably be able to fake just about any Craft you need to with a few careful choices.
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I probably need to go actually read all the craft charms, because I'm not sure why that's so bad. Does having a lot of different crafts offer any big advantages over having a few key ones and (Artifacts)?


Kylar said:
With Fugue-Empowered Other, this could be quite nasty. Hope you like Limit though.

But no, not the most effective of ideas. On the other hand, you are your own school of Martial Arts Masters, which is pretty fun, so who cares about effectiveness.
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Riding the limit train sounds like a terrible idea.

And yeah, I just like the idea of the personas all picking martial arts styles that fit their thematics. The Socialite would go for Pearlescent Dream Courtesan because it's perfect for when a upper-crust party goes wrong, the Thief would want Ebon Shadow, the Doctor - would have to wait and see if they redo Victorious Concession/Compassion style.

It just occurred to me: what if your persona learns Black Claw? Technically it's the persona with the tie of love, but I suspect the GM will find a way to force it to your main soon enough. :p
 
Black Claw's unremovable Intimacy probably counts as an effect you can't escape via Personas. Other mentioned examples in the Sidebar are Eclipse Oaths, curses and Corrupted Words (itself a curse). So it's not clear-cut, but a GM could easily rule that way since the Intimacy is clearly magical and states that "it can not be completely removed or have its context altered by any means, mundane or magical".
 
Chloe Sullivan said:
I probably need to go actually read all the craft charms, because I'm not sure why that's so bad. Does having a lot of different crafts offer any big advantages over having a few key ones and (Artifacts)?
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Not beyond allowing you to craft more things with your Artifacts skill. Its just some people really want to be omni-dispinlary crafters (despite most likely only ever using 3 or so majorly), and might see Persona's as an XP expedient route to that. I'm a fairly big believer in 'if you want to be good at something, invest in that ability' so nipping that potential avenue of ST headaches in the bud is a good thing in my book.

That said, Craft really could use something to cut down on it's XP sink nature. Something that isn't Exegesis of the Distilled Form, because that's a horrible trap of a charm. Just boosting the number of Crafts Supreme Celestial Focus lets you train to (Essence*2) would do a good deal to help. I mean, when you have 5 crafts by E2, your probably fine for just about anything in your area of specialty.
Chloe Sullivan said:
It just occurred to me: what if your persona learns Black Claw? Technically it's the persona with the tie of love, but I suspect the GM will find a way to force it to your main soon enough. :p
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Heh. That's one way to bypass that trick :p. Though it probably only works when you don't know Black Claw, as learning even one charm would restore it.
 
Thanks for the info, folks.

Does 3e have magic for changing sex? Secret Identity of the other gender is harder to track back to you. (and no, disguise charms aren't good enough when the persona is at least partly based in Inara Serra.)
 
Changing sex should be doable via Sorcerous Workings.
Doing it once would probably be a Ambition 2 Terrestrial Working.
Having the ability to do it several times would be an Ambition 2 Celestial Working ("grant a supernatural power to one's self or another").

Other than that, learn a Neomahs Seductive Shapechange, which can explicitly alter sex and has the mechanical advantage of raising Apperance by 2 for Seduction-purposes (including above 5).
Of course, you either have to be Eclipse-caste for that, or utilize the Occult-charm Gloaming Eye Understanding. It needs Occult 5, Essence 3 and has three prerequisite charms, and you need to commit 3 motes per learned Eclipse-keyword charm (but you don't have to spend experience).
 
Is there something/someone in Creation that can break perfect defenses or can even the lowliest Exalted defend against LITERALLY any attack? Assuming of course, that they have perfect defenses.
 
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Legion1771 said:
Is there something in Creation that can break perfect defenses or can even the lowliest Exalted defend against LITERALLY any attack?
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No there isn't anything in Creation that can penetrate a perfect defense. Yes, this means they can defend against literally ANY attack.

That doesn't mean they can defend against EVERY attack though.
 
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