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General Exalted Thread

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greensun said:
Yes, but your ST should whack you with the Core book. The Solaroid's are already pretty OP without adding the powers of another splat.
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I'm looking for the most insanely simple Overpowered thing I can think of without much looking or actual knowledge of the setting.

Can you get Triumphant Howl of the Devil Tiger with 'Primordial Principle Emulation'? Probably not.
 
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Legion1771 said:
I'm looking for the most insanely simple Overpowered thing I can think of without much looking or actual knowledge of the setting.

Can you get Triumphant Howl of the Devil Tiger with 'Primordial Principle Emulation'? Probably not.
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PPE is a trap. Paying double for Charms that are roughly-equivalent to Solar Charms is not going to get you good results, in general. Steer elsewhere!
 
Chloe Sullivan said:
My goal was actually to be running a ship along the lines of Serenity, Bebop, Black Lagoon, etc. Constantly doing odd jobs and occasionally playing hero to the downtrodden, while never seeming to make that big score that would let us rise out of the social gutter (or managing to lose our hard won wealth in short order). Not really in line with proper God-King thematics, but I never did really do that anyway.

This is also the character with personas, so when times get really bad, the ship pulls up to dock and I stop being captain and go to cat-burglar mode. XD
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Amusingly I had an idea for a character concept who was basically a 'failed' Inara. Trained to be a companion and actually had the skills when she bothered to use them (high socialise/Dreaming Pearl Courtesan) but much preferred hanging in trampy low class dives and getting shitfaced with soldiers. Brash, loud and pretty much the last thing one wanted in a companion (would have eventually branched out to Proper Solar Brawl or a more Crude Style if it wasn't for the MA tax)
 
Irked said:
PPE is a trap. Paying double for Charms that are roughly-equivalent to Solar Charms is not going to get you good results, in general. Steer elsewhere!
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Please point me to where Solars can get telekinesis. Or conjure flames that cause radiation poisoning. Or turn into sand, or the wind.

The point of taking PPE isn't that the charms are powerful, it's that you can get charms that don't fit Solar themes.
 
azoicennead said:
Please point me to where Solars can get telekinesis. Or conjure flames that cause radiation poisoning. Or turn into sand, or the wind.

The point of taking PPE isn't that the charms are powerful, it's that you can get charms that don't fit Solar themes.
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Yeah, but the thing is, you can still get Charms that can accomplish almost anything you do with these things, so all you're really doing is getting a different set of tools to do the same damn stuff for a higher cost. And if it's the aesthetic that's so important to you, play a fucking Infernal.
 
Giygas said:
It isn't like you can create everything with Wyld-Shaping: for example, i doubt it would be possible to create the ores necessary for Soulsteel.
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Tortured flesh of a Primordial? Sure, you can Wyldshape that.

Just realise that you are, as a side effect, torturing a Primordial. Wyldshaping isn't just 'I impose my will upon the formless chaos,' it's also 'the formless chaos plays out the story that is needed to get the result I want.'

You want the last breath of a newborn babe? Somewhere, somewhen a baby is going to die in their mother's arms after just having been born.
 
Aleph said:
And if it's the aesthetic that's so important to you, play a fucking Infernal.
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No.
If I want to play a demigod who has twisted their being so they can steal powers from the architects of the universe, I will. If you want to say I can't - or shouldn't - do that, then get off your fucking horse and quit telling people to play the game how you want them to play it. Unless they're in your game, that you're running, you can fuck right off.
 
Hazard said:
Tortured flesh of a Primordial? Sure, you can Wyldshape that.

Just realise that you are, as a side effect, torturing a Primordial. Wyldshaping isn't just 'I impose my will upon the formless chaos,' it's also 'the formless chaos plays out the story that is needed to get the result I want.'

You want the last breath of a newborn babe? Somewhere, somewhen a baby is going to die in their mother's arms after just having been born.
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Can I get a citation for this?
Because I remember nowhere it's stated or even implied in RAW.
 
azoicennead said:
Please point me to where Solars can get telekinesis. Or conjure flames that cause radiation poisoning. Or turn into sand, or the wind.
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Sorcery. Sorcerous workings now cover all your weird transformative body horror needs. If you want telekinesis, you can give yourself telekinesis. If you want tentacles, you can have them, complete with magic tentacle powers.

Stack enough Ambition 3 Solar Workings and you can probably still go full Primordial, if you feel like forever limiting yourself. Or Devil-Tiger, if that's your thing. Or perhaps something even stranger besides.
 
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azoicennead said:
No.
If I want to play a demigod who has twisted their being so they can steal powers from the architects of the universe, I will. If you want to say I can't - or shouldn't - do that, then get off your fucking horse and quit telling people to play the game how you want them to play it. Unless they're in your game, that you're running, you can fuck right off.
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Firstly, Infernals haven't "twisted their being" any more than Solars have. They had nothing to do with the alterations to their Exaltations (and they probably didn't know much, if anything, about where their powers come from when they took the bargain).

Secondly, I don't know if you've noticed this, but you're posting your opinions on a public discussion forum. While your snappish defensiveness against criticism is commendable, I'm not sure why you're bothering to ask open questions on a publicly available thread if you a) have already decided what you're going to do and b) don't expect or want them to be answered, argued with or engaged with.
 
azoicennead said:
No.
If I want to play a demigod who has twisted their being so they can steal powers from the architects of the universe, I will. If you want to say I can't - or shouldn't - do that, then get off your fucking horse and quit telling people to play the game how you want them to play it. Unless they're in your game, that you're running, you can fuck right off.
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PPE and Queen k'Tula are interesting enough, true. Actually, Queen k'Tula was one of the more memorable (in a good way) parts of DotFA. It's an interesting story and not wholly outside what you'd expect from a high end Solar.

The problem is PPE is 100% Elder Bullshit Shenanigans. Its not a generally reflective of Solar themes in general or Occult in particular: stealing other beings power and incorporating into themselves is primarily a Lunar schtick. That not to say that a Solar that put enough time and effort into it should find it impossible, but its the sort of thing that the culmination of a massive degree of personal work, and not be a general 'Solars can do this' thing that chucking it into the general charmset implies it is. If anything, it should be like Deus's 'people believe I am in the right' unnamed charm: just tacked onto Queen k'Tula's writeup (assuming she ever got one), because its something that uniquely defines her.

Really, this was part of the problem with the Elder Charms: they took things that should be very nearly unique tricks made by crazy people with lots of time on their hands, and tossed them into the general charmset as 'thing you can do', further incentivizing the mad scramble for E6+. Which had rather a lot of problems associated with it, so far as what Exalted was presenting itself as.

In short, you want Primodial bullshit, accept it should probably be a lot of work, or play an Infernal, at least within the bounds of the general game system. What you do at your table is up to you, of course, but the general game system should be encouraging you to play a Solar, not a Solar + shinnies you want from another splat. Their in another splat for a reason.
 
azoicennead said:
Please point me to where Solars can get telekinesis. Or conjure flames that cause radiation poisoning. Or turn into sand, or the wind.

The point of taking PPE isn't that the charms are powerful, it's that you can get charms that don't fit Solar themes.
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Right, exactly: its advantage is theme-breaking, not power. But the thing that @Legion1771 said he was looking for - specifically - was power. Given that goal, PPE is a trap: if you don't know Exalted's setting or mechanics, "Gain the abilities of the Primordial Makers of All!" sounds like a path to ultimate power, when the actual path to ultimate power is something like, "Untouchable dice pools, regenerating motes, and layered defenses," i.e., core Solar Charms and/or unpatched other material.
 
Anasurimbor said:
Sorcery. Sorcerous workings now cover all your weird transformative body horror needs. If you want telekinesis, you can give yourself telekinesis. If you want tentacles, you can have them, complete with magic tentacle powers.

Stack enough Ambition 3 Solar Workings and you can probably still go full Primordial, if you feel like forever limiting yourself. Or Devil-Tiger, if that's your thing. Or perhaps something even stranger besides.
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You're citing 3e mechanics in a discussion explicitly about 2e mechanics.

Aleph said:
Firstly, Infernals haven't "twisted their being" any more than Solars have. They had nothing to do with the alterations to their Exaltations (and they probably didn't know much, if anything, about where their powers come from when they took the bargain).
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PPE, however, quite explicitly involves twisting your being.

Secondly, I don't know if you've noticed this, but you're posting your opinions on a public discussion forum. While your snappish defensiveness against criticism is commendable, I'm not sure why you're bothering to ask open questions on a publicly available thread if you a) have already decided what you're going to do and b) don't expect or want them to be answered, argued with or engaged with.
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I didn't defend myself against your actual answer to my question. I responded harshly to you telling people how to play the game.

Irked said:
Right, exactly: its advantage is theme-breaking, not power. But the thing that @Legion1771 said he was looking for - specifically - was power. Given that goal, PPE is a trap: if you don't know Exalted's setting or mechanics, "Gain the abilities of the Primordial Makers of All!" sounds like a path to ultimate power, when the actual path to ultimate power is something like, "Untouchable dice pools, regenerating motes, and layered defenses," i.e., core Solar Charms and/or unpatched other material.
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And I was correcting someone about what the point of PPE is. I didn't say anything to Legion.
 
landcollector said:
You'd have to remove part of the Eclipse Caste's Anima effect then.
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Yes. Good. Do exactly that. The Eclipse anima is, was and always will be bullshit.

You want to play a Solar, play a Solar. You want to play an Infernal, play an Infernal. You want to play a spirit, play a spirit.

You want to know what drives stories and conflict? Limits. Solars are supposed to be the most powerful Exalt, not the omnipotent Exalts.

And Queen K'Tula should be an utter failure, a cautionary tale told to young Solars to point out how Solars are capable of being fuck ups on a massive scale, not a target for emulation.
 
Aaron Peori said:
Yes. Good. Do exactly that. The Eclipse anima is, was and always will be bullshit.

You want to play a Solar, play a Solar. You want to play an Infernal, play an Infernal. You want to play a spirit, play a spirit.

You want to know what drives stories and conflict? Limits. Solars are supposed to be the most powerful Exalt, not the omnipotent Exalts.

And Queen K'Tula should be an utter failure, a cautionary tale told to young Solars to point out how Solars are capable of being fuck ups on a massive scale, not a target for emulation.
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Look, I understand that for you this is about thematics and would make everything neater and less messy and more aesthetically pleasing.

But azoicennead does have a point about how it comes off as telling other people how to play their game.

And you have to keep in mind that often games are restricted to one splat even when the player doesn't necessarily like that splat's themes. I'm not fond of "radiant god king" as a aesthetic; I prefer to play support characters in almost every game. Part of my liking for eclipses in 2e, is that I could raid another splat for actual ally buffs, of which there, IMO, really aren't enough of in all of Exalted, period (Sure I had an ally buffing solar war charm, but it required my allies to actually invest in Virtues - which uhm... maybe it's better they didn't). Meditation on War or Dragon Blade Benificence are the thematics I like - but I didn't have the option to play not-a-solar. Not that I ever picked up those charms, but the potential to do so was nice.

(Also, if you want every splat to stay neatly in theme, you should also be tossing out martial arts and sorcery spells.)
 
Chloe Sullivan said:
Look, I understand that for you this is about thematics and would make everything neater and less messy and more aesthetically pleasing.
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For me, it's partly a balance consideration (balancing every Charm against not just every other in-splat Charm, but every other splat in the game to check for broken synergies is way, way too much work), but also that Exalted Charmtheft at the moment is paradoxically both too easy and too hard.

Too hard because by giving it as an explicit power of Eclipsealikes the game communicates that this is a thing only for them; there's no room for, say, a Dawn to meditate upon and master the battlemagic of a foe, or for a Twilight to wrest the arcane secrets of spirits from them through study and experimentation, or for a Day Caste Abyssal to murder his way through an Elemental Court, vampirically consuming wisps of soul-stuff until he can express their native magics. If you want to be a Solar who masters strange and foreign magics, you have to be an Eclipse.

Too easy, because if you are an Eclipse, doing so is a matter of finding a tutor and paying some extra XP. Whoop de doo. Where's the esotoric training, the cryptic lessons to wrap your head around a foreign worldview, the painstaking meditations to contort your essence flows into something alien to your sense of self? Yes, you can theoretically require that as flavour for the standard training mechanics, but the very fact that it's using the standard training mechanics imbues it with a sense of the humdrum.

Learning foreign Charms should be something open to all Exalted, but only through sufficient story and roleplaying, to pay due respect to the idea that this is something strange and difficult.
 
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Imrix said:
For me, it's partly a balance consideration (balancing every Charm against not just every other in-splat Charm, but every other splat in the game to check for broken synergies is way, way too much work), but it's also that Exalted Charmtheft at the moment is paradoxically both too easy and too hard.

Too hard because by giving it as an explicit power of Eclipsealikes the game communicates that this is a thing only for them; there's no room for, say, a Dawn to meditate upon the battlemagic of his foe, or for a Twilight to wrest the arcane secrets of spirits from them through study and experimentation. If you want to be Solar who masters strange and foreign magics, you have to be an Eclipse.

Too easy, because if you are an Eclipse, doing so is a matter of finding a tutor and paying some extra XP. Whoop de doo. Where's the esotoric training, the cryptic lessons to wrap your head around a foreign worldview, the painstaking meditations to contort your essence flows into something alien to your sense of self? Yes, you can theoretically require that as part of the standard training time, but the very fact that it is the standard training imbues it with a sense of the humdrum.

Learning foreign Charms should be something open to all Exalted, but only through sufficient story and roleplaying to pay due respect to the idea that this is something strange and difficult.
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Personally, I consider balancing 2e Exalted a lost cause.

Maybe it's my D&D 3.5 experience talking, but I don't see game balance as really achievable from the developers side for any game as large and complex as D&D or Exalted. Game balance basically only works out as a gentle(wo)man's agreement between Players and GM. With large numbers of spells/charms/merits/whatevers, written by multiple devs, players determined to find loopholes will eventually succeed. Perfectly balancing such a large complex system is not really possible, and IMHO, not really worthwhile. Most players want a fun game and are willing to fix/patch over/ignore any broken mechanics if they come up.

TL;DR: People determined to powergame will usually find a way no matter what you do, from the dev side.
 
Okay, but... That's a whole other argument that connects to only a minor part of what I wrote.
 
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