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General Exalted Thread

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The_Reptile_ said:
The majority of people I've talked to in regards to Abyssals hate them with a passion, either due to crunch or fluff.
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I'm not sure if it is hate, so much as profound disappointment. Abyssals are supposed to be the reapers, the deathknights, terrifying figures that seek to bring about Creation's end by whatever means they want. Becoming an Abyssal means becoming death, letting oblivion eat your name, and deciding that you will be the last thing standing in all of existence before you draw your blade across your own throat with a laugh.

What the crunch and fluff gave us was Solars wearing black eyeshadow and acting emo. I do not hate Abyssals. I hate the Mirror keyword, which shows up on virtually every charm (not counting excellencies and Ox-bodies, because everybody gets those) that the Abyssals have, even in the Ink Monkey articles dedicated to making the Abyssals more playable or interesting. Green Sun Princes were solaroids done right, since they felt as powerful as regular Solars, but at the same time clearly weren't Solars.

Abyssals were also screwed in the metaplot, since they basically had "End creation" or "Become a Solar" as their only options. There's no carving out a kingdom in the land of the dead and marching forth at the head of army of ghosts. There's no BSing their bosses while they go faffing about the scavenger lands.

I'm not sure if this is an official rule in Exalted, but it is in a game that draws heavy influence from exalted: Exaltations are given to those that will use them, and never given to those that won't. Your Abyssal wants to be redeemed? Fine. But sitting around in your black eyeshadow and weepy music isn't going to redeem you. Striking out against the Neverborn and your Deathlord masters with every breath of your unlife and making the underworld and Creation bend to you becuae you are Exalted is.
 
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FFFuuccckkk. Oh crap, Are there any good rewrites of the Mass Combat System, or am I just going to have to abstract this Battle. I've got till next week, I would prefer not to homebrew an entire combat system and figure out charm interactions just because Army's in Exalted are Modeled as Pants:mad:.
 
Matthew G said:
FFFuuccckkk. Oh crap, Are there any good rewrites of the Mass Combat System, or am I just going to have to abstract this Battle. I've got till next week, I would prefer not to homebrew an entire combat system and figure out charm interactions just because Army's in Exalted are Modeled as Pants:mad:.
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Sorry, no Mass Combat rewrites around that I could recommend.

You may have to abstract.
 
Can anyone link/explain the whole 3e infernals are not Green Solars that can transform? I have searched for this but I never could find just where this argument took place.
 
Matthew G said:
FFFuuccckkk. Oh crap, Are there any good rewrites of the Mass Combat System, or am I just going to have to abstract this Battle. I've got till next week, I would prefer not to homebrew an entire combat system and figure out charm interactions just because Army's in Exalted are Modeled as Pants:mad:.
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Honestly, I've never really understood people's objections to this. Armies As Pants means that having an army gives you a significant advantage, while also allowing them to be mechanically-simple, since most of their stats are just the bonuses they give you. The Exalted are the important ones; their mortal followers are just part of the scenery.
 
Matthew G said:
FFFuuccckkk. Oh crap, Are there any good rewrites of the Mass Combat System, or am I just going to have to abstract this Battle. I've got till next week, I would prefer not to homebrew an entire combat system and figure out charm interactions just because Army's in Exalted are Modeled as Pants:mad:.
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Depends, you can use the Mass Combat System with the PCs and NPCs as leaders of the armies.

OR...

You can have your PCs face off against NPC champions, while the Mass Combat takes place around them as scenery. And then declare by dice rolls based on who brought what to the table + plans on which side wins while the PCs and NPCs fight it out.
 
Matthew G said:
FFFuuccckkk. Oh crap, Are there any good rewrites of the Mass Combat System, or am I just going to have to abstract this Battle. I've got till next week, I would prefer not to homebrew an entire combat system and figure out charm interactions just because Army's in Exalted are Modeled as Pants:mad:.
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If you have Masters of Jade, you can use the Creation-Ruling Mandate rules in the appendix to run Mass Combat. It works best for strategic warfare, but if you tweak the time scale and get really creative with what the actions allow you to do, you should be able to use it to run a normal battle. You'll probably need to figure out charm compatibility on the fly though.
 
Matthew G said:
FFFuuccckkk. Oh crap, Are there any good rewrites of the Mass Combat System, or am I just going to have to abstract this Battle. I've got till next week, I would prefer not to homebrew an entire combat system and figure out charm interactions just because Army's in Exalted are Modeled as Pants:mad:.
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I'd honestly recommend trying to kludge something out of the GURPS Mass Combat rules, which do a pretty good though very abstract job.
 
Thank you people

nick012000 said:
Honestly, I've never really understood people's objections to this. Armies As Pants means that having an army gives you a significant advantage, while also allowing them to be mechanically-simple, since most of their stats are just the bonuses they give you. The Exalted are the important ones; their mortal followers are just part of the scenery.
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Because 10,000 Essence 1 Soldiers do nothing against an E5 infernal with three purchases of scar-writ saga Shield, and if a Solar rolls with 10,000 E1 mortals, the only threat is the Solar, and the current Mass combat System says those mortal are a threat.

Also If I have no items that can hit dematerialized spirits, but the army around me does they can't fight spirits, or if i have an weapon that hits dematerialized spirits, and the army around me does not, they can threaten those spirits.
 
nick012000 said:
Honestly, I've never really understood people's objections to this. Armies As Pants means that having an army gives you a significant advantage, while also allowing them to be mechanically-simple, since most of their stats are just the bonuses they give you. The Exalted are the important ones; their mortal followers are just part of the scenery.
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The issue is that the result doesn't follow from the rules. For instance, if someone is attacking you with an army of 300 people, and you have two attacks: one that does infinite damage to a single target and one that would do enough to kill 95% of the individuals in that army, and hits 60 people per use. Which should you use?

Answer: the Infinite damage one. Because apparently single target attacks are the best bet against an mass of people.
 
Question: What would be a good Exalt type for a beginner like moi? I think I might like Alchemicals and Infernals.
 
Strunkriindiisk said:
Question: What would be a good Exalt type for a beginner like moi? I think I might like Alchemicals and Infernals.
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Tough to say: Exalted isn't really that new-player friendly, but playing a splat you like can help matters. Moreover, the exact nature of the campaign that the ST is running matters a lot. If they're running a game set on the blessed Isle, anything except a Dragonblooded is IWBTG mode. As for actual suggestions, well, I'm assuming that you're talking about mechanics, because the flavor aspect is very personal, and also incredibly mutable from game to game.

Personally, assuming the campaign doesn't favor any side, I think Solars remain the best splat to be introduced to the game with(note, I have no experience with Alchemicals, and lack their book, so I'm not really familiar with them beyond some of the basics). Lunars are, interestingly, a good second, as long as you are okay with only filling certain roles. Their mechanics are robust enough in the areas that they focus on(combat). It's more the lack of options/required monobuild that people hate. Abyssals are third best, largely due to the amount of errata and holes in their sets(they're less incomplete than Lunars, but they're almost more pigeonholed).

Also, if you're running a campaign for new players, I would say that a Dragonblooded game is possibly one of the better options. You'll probably want to run it based off some homebrew, but otherwise everything I've seen makes it easier to run a DB game and slowly introduce players to some of the more hazardous parts of the rules.

Infernals and Sidereal are, at the moment, probably the worst ones to introduce people with, due to mechanical issues. Yes, Sidereals got a big patch...but it's still not perfect, and even with the patch it can be difficult to know how to build a good one(at least partially by design: sidereals are supposed to be complicated). In addition, the subsystems that Sidereals focus on are poorly done, which only makes things worse. Infernals used to be very good mechanically, but that was because they were designed with the systems limitations in mind, but with 2.5 those system limitations are no longer quite as applicable, which means that Infernals can be tricky to build.
 
Strunkriindiisk said:
Question: What would be a good Exalt type for a beginner like moi? I think I might like Alchemicals and Infernals.
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Probably Solars. What ever their flaws, they are very straightforward. Depends a bit on what you want to do though.

On Alchies, I love them to death and they're probably the best designed splat at present, BUT. They are a bit tricky to play on account of their slot mechanics for charms. Basically, you need to decide what you want ahead of time, then your likely stuck with it for a while. You also need to track what installed and not, personal motes, and arrays (get a discount for those if you can). They're fairly paperwork intensive as a result. That said, they don't have many of the traps other charmsets do, and their pretty complete utility wise.
 
Strunkriindiisk said:
Question: What would be a good Exalt type for a beginner like moi? I think I might like Alchemicals and Infernals.
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Solars are the simplest Exalted to understand and play, and they're the default characters. The downside is that they require quite a bit of errata and their charms are spread across three books and a PDF. You'd also need some supplementary setting books to get the most out of them.

Alchemicals require a bit more housekeeping and they're not actually part of the main setting. However, they're isolated from a lot of the game's setting and mechanical problems, they received little enough errata that you can probably play them exactly as they are, and you only need the corebook, Manual of Exalted Power: Alchemicals and Compass of Celestial Directions: Autochthonia to play them, so there's far less material to go through.
 
Strunkriindiisk said:
Question: What would be a good Exalt type for a beginner like moi? I think I might like Alchemicals and Infernals.
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Solars. There's a reason why they're in the corebook.

The two you picked - Alchemicals and Infernals - are definitely not what I would recommend for new players. In fact, Alchemicals take second place for what a new player shouldn'T ever take, and Infernals third (both behind Sidereals).

Go Solar first, then Dragon-Blood, and after that you're either disgusted to the point of quitting with the system, or have a good enough grasp on stuff to branch out to the less human Exalted.
 
Aleph said:
... I am genuinely unsure how to answer that question.
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Aleph, you're working on making your Infernal be able to cut her eyes out on a whim and not really effectively lose any sensory input because all her other senses are super-enhanced. She is already a murderhobo who sometimes runs around in full-body strangely organic looking tainted moonsilver plate. Her powers involve Silence In Her Wake (Slash Dash), all the poisons (Contagion), and extreme parkour.

You also started doing this before you found out about Warframe.
 
I am not!

I'm not planning on super-enhancing her sense of touch at all!

Because I haven't found a Charm that lets me do so yet.
 
Aleph said:
I am not!

I'm not planning on super-enhancing her sense of touch at all!

Because I haven't found a Charm that lets me do so yet.
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You mean 'you haven't got Revlid or Scorp to write one yet'? :p

Strunkriindiisk said:
Question: What would be a good Exalt type for a beginner like moi? I think I might like Alchemicals and Infernals.
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Solars are dead simple, comparatively. They're a pretty solid starting point. Things mostly do what you'd expect them too.
 
Just for some general information: would people be interested in an early-mid shogunatw game? Possibly a Celestial Exalt focused game, though more likely a Dragonblooded game?
 
havocfett said:
...You were serious?

Dammit, now I have to resist the urge to work a Blind Infernal with all the sensory enhancements into R-Quest.
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I don't joke about the suffering Keris puts me through as a character who I have to describe things to mostly in terms of sound, and whose usual way of scouting out a house is to run up onto the roof, listen to the chimney, and then I have to work out where pretty much everyone in the house is at that point. And who usually gets bullshit-high enough rolls that she can do things like "hear that there's a hidden cellar by the air movements".
 
EarthScorpion said:
As I already noted, Invasive Exteroception Technique is a thing. :D
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... oh yeah, I forgot about that.

Hee. : 3
havocfett said:
...You were serious?

Dammit, now I have to resist the urge to work a Blind Infernal with all the sensory enhancements into R-Quest.
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Yeah, that would basically be "Keris during one of the times she's replaced her eyes with tiny mouths so she can taste things more", once I pick up a few more Charms.

By which point she prefers to read with her hair by turning the ends of it into tiny proboscis-mouths and tasting the ink on the paper, instead of actually looking at the page.
EarthScorpion said:
I don't joke about the suffering Keris puts me through as a character who I have to describe things to mostly in terms of sound, and whose usual way of scouting out a house is to run up onto the roof, listen to the chimney, and then I have to work out where pretty much everyone in the house is at that point. And who usually gets bullshit-high enough rolls that she can do things like "hear that there's a hidden cellar by the air movements".
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Look, you were the one who said I could spontaneously learn Hateful Wretched Noise. Don't blame me for taking advantage of always-on super-acute magical uber-hearing.
 
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