Jon Chung
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You can make anything work with enough bandaids, patches and handwaving. My point is that a properly designed approach to this would not require such.
General Exalted Thread
You can make anything work with enough bandaids, patches and handwaving. My point is that a properly designed approach to this would not require such.
Okay, seriously: How can you possibly have a mass combat system that doesn't involve blob units of one type or another? Sniping officers is about the only mass combat action I can think of that doesn't fall apart without some kind of army container. I mean, you could certainly have a less abstracted blob unit, but unless you intend to treat every soldier as a separate entity (ha ha ha no) some kind of blobbing is mandatory.
Chloe Sullivan
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Well you could have every battle be just an opposed War roll, with bonuses from army size and quality. There, no blobing.
Lack the epic feel though, so it doesn't really set the tone you want for Exalted.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
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No, he's saying that's not something handled by the mass combat system alone, because that's not a mass combat action. If you're attacking the army, you deal with a blob unit. If you're attacking officers, you roll attacks against individuals like you normally do.
Jon Chung
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To clarify, when I say "blob unit", I am referring to Exalted's specific implementation here, not the general approach of treating a cohesive unit of troops which moves and fights as a single entity as an actual single entity for purposes of handling the movement and behaviour of units vs units. This is logical and the only sane way to handle what happens when you get a couple thousand guys on each side trying to kill each other, divided into functional combat units of ten to twenty or whatever.
You can have that and not simultaneously have the bizarre effects that Exalted's versions have always had, by only applying the abstraction when we are actually playing war and moving units to attack on the general's-eye scale.
Ah, I will say that I thought you were using the more general meaning here, not the specific implementation exalted seems to love.
Or, perhaps more accurately, one of the multitude of assumptions that Exalted writers have never really managed to question. Despite the frequent statements that 3rd edition would be all about leaving no assumption unquestioned.
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So then what do you do when a White Reaper stylist goes up against a small army on his lonesome? Do you have special rules on solo-versus-unit combat, or rules for converting a PC to a very small mass combat unit? Or do you play it out on the "you and the eight guys closest to you" level and add reinforcements as soldiers drop, then have special rules on how that affects the state of the army as a whole? Not liking any of these approaches. The thing I like about 3e's battle groups is that it's very mechanically parsimonious. Making armies a lot like a single combatant causes some serious wonkiness, but it also cuts way back on the complexity, because most of what they need is already there.
As for separate casualty and morale tracks (or however you'd implement it)... it's definitely a good idea, and it'd obviously be mandatory in a system that puts more weight on the army and less on the hero units. But is it really worth the mechanical weight in Exalted? Having a morale counter is easy enough, but how do you splice a "scariness rating" onto every attack in the game without excessive wordcount? You start with damage dealt, obviously, but there are just so many modifiers you'd need to consider. Is there obvious magic? A flaring anima banner? Do they recognize this guy? Obviously you need mechanics for social actions causing morale damage, too, but how strong is it, and what are the modifiers on that?
notthepenguins
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I don't think a game with the mechanics density of Exalted 3E really has room to go "But making Mass Combat 15% more wordcount to account for morale effectively is too many wooords."
Like yes, obviously there is a tradeoff here, but 3E has already seized upon the Many Many Mechanics boat and sailed it to the continent of Holy God So Many Exceptions To Remember, so it's not really relevant in this case.
Bursting Eagerness Soul
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To those who have seen the new Artifact implementation, would you think that having an Artifact Pen that flings needles of ink would work?
Jon Chung
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Just play it out. This ensures the least amount of abstraction-transitioning weirdness. You're fighting ten guys in personal combat time. Kill them, and then the GM decides what that does to the army they are part of in mass combat zoom-out RTS time, or something similar.
Look, this is a game which is willing to waste what, fifty thousand words on dice tricks. Cut some dead wood, plenty of space created.
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There's a very real case to be made that that just makes it worse - less "there are too many mechanics already, what's one more" and more "there are too many mechanics already, another one would make it geometrically worse".
You're... advocating a GM hand-waving approach, here?
Wouldn't be too hard, just make it a light throwing weapon with the appropriate tags (Concealable, infinite ammo, can't be used at all when unattuned). Then evocations. The evocations are probably where you elucidate what the point is.
Jon Chung
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Uh, I'm advocating the GM runs NPCs, yes, that's his job. PC Solar Bob killed a bunch of guys in the vanguard. Roll for morale, unit breaks, line in disarray. Results, what does NPC General Steve do to reinforce his line, plug the breach and stop a possible rout? This isn't handwaving, this is exactly what the GM is supposed to be doing.
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azoicennead
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No.
Fuck that.
Running a regular fight is time-consuming enough, I'm not going to do so repeatedly in the middle of a larger battle in what you're saying should be an equally complex (and therefore time-consuming) system.
That's a perfect recipe for spending multiple sessions on one extremely long battle where most of the time is spent on successive solo-fights, which is what you do when you want your players to stop wanting to play.
notthepenguins
Neither Spherical Nor Frictionless
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It wouldn't make it geometrically worse, though. You write one set of rules, once, for covering how scary various things are and you're golden. You no longer need to write special rules for each zombie/construct army, or special Charm effects for dealing with morale'd vs un-morale'd units.
Jon Chung
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Only if you're assuming the system designer is retarded. Why would we do that?
For example, we could have the concept of a moment of opportunity per long turn, where any PC units present in a battle play out their personal combat actions, which the next long turn accomodates. It's reasonably easy to do something like this, L5R did it two decades ago.
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azoicennead
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Combat being time-consuming is, in my experience, basically a universal trait of tabletop games.
Yes, you write your rules once. And then you have to consider how your new mechanic interacts with every other system. The more systems you already had, the more interactions there are to worry about - hence, geometric growth in complexity.
Jon Chung
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I find it highly amusing how you seem to think writing a single unified modular mechanic for morale creates a larger complexity penalty than building one model of morale into the core assumption of the system and writing ad-hoc exceptions for each non-human, non-morale case.
Oh, it doesn't, of course. What the current system does is simpler, though: it basically handwaves morale, rolling it into health. There is a single exception, Perfect Morale, which is extremely simple. The results can be stupid, but there's basically no mechanical weight at all.
I'm thinking the problem is that Exalted is a game about large scale consequences, armies, and geopolitical maneuvering without:
1. An actual system to adjudicate geopolitical maneuvering;
2. A combat system which considers maneuvering armies around to be an adjunct to Manly Shounen one-on-one fights (which leads to people going "Why doesn't this suggestion support boss fights," which I'm sure you remember from when you were talking about Elder Bullshit) when the game treats armies like an actual important thing, even for elder Exalted;
If I was doing Exalted from the ground up, I'd gut the personal combat system with a jagged knife. Mass combat becomes the primary system, one on one duels and kung fu fights become a secondary thing to handle. Similarly, I want a system to know if I can persuade crowds and change policy more than I need to know whether or not I convince one specific person, except insofar as that one specific person might hook into my geopolitical goals.
Eukie
Powered by furious Canadian redheads
Do you have a minute to talk about our lord and saviour, GURPS? :3
I was actually thinking about Burning Empires, and how it handled individual combat, which FATAL & Friends sums up very well:
Traveller from SA said:
That's right, in BE most one-on-one fights are just one roll, winner gets to accomplish their goal. Because the consequences matter more than the actual one on one fight, as they should.
The problem with this is that you clearly have it in your head that this is the One True Way to play Exalted. It isn't. That's what you want out of Exalted, and it's what you think of when you look at the setting, and there's nothing wrong with that; it's a great setting for it. But when it comes to the actual, published game you want it to be something it isn't (and isn't seriously trying to be), and then you bitch when it goes and does what it wants to do instead. It isn't terribly productive.
azoicennead
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I agree with one of those things.
That might be what your vision of Exalted is about, but armies are basically scenery in my vision of Exalted, and geopolitical maneuvering doesn't even have a proper system (and doesn't interest me).
Yes, you can run tons of shit in Exalted. You could theoretically run a martial arts tournament, Dragonball-style. You could run an Exalted harem comedy. Yet the default game space is one where you're supposed to become huge empire-building geopolitical players and where armies actually matter, given how much detail is spent on who has what armies, how easily they can deploy them, and why. Saying "this would be harmful to my vision of Exalted" does not counter "the default game space of Exalted is one where according to the fluff and ST advice, large scale combat is and should be the norm because of its heavy focus on political intrigue and maneuvering and empire-building." Third Edition doesn't have an actual ST advice section in its book from what I'm seeing, but 2E directly states what Vanilla Exalted is:
2nd Edition said:
Default setting: Fighting armies, geopolitics, nation-building.
The default game space is one where the current ruleset is actively detrimental, because it pushes people to think that empires are some sort of mass held together by single load bearing bosses who you beat in single duels and you can solve any problem by punching the bad guys in the face and the only people who ever matter are adventurers and others of their ilk-something, let's remind you, that Exalted was explicitly repudiating. All games have a One True Way that they're supposed to be played, as the designer intends.
The idea that "there's no such thing as badwrongfun" isn't saying that there's no one true way and your vision of what a game's about is equally valid-it's saying that there is nothing morally wrong about playing a game in a way the designers did not intend. That does not mean that "the mechanics do not actually support the default style of gameplay at all" is an illegitimate criticism, and saying "well in my Creation" doesn't inure the designers from criticism. I am not saying you are wrong for playing Exalted in whatever way you like. I am saying that Exalted's ruleset fails to support its intended scale and scope of playing to a ridiculous degree and would be best served being refocused on that intended scope and scale.