General Exalted Thread
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Hmm. So you're talking about full-fledged, actual scientific method of scientist, involving rigid adherence to well-developed scientific method. And not the more loose interpretation that is linked to many mad scientists like Doc Ock. I would expect that Daedalus would have the rudimentary scientist-ness required in order to learn the laws of nature that enable construction of his wings, but not a rigid scientific method.
Oh well, you do have a point if you consider the full-fledged meaning to be loaded into the term by now.
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On 3e:
Wow, I didn't expect them to implement XP-gaining methods through study/being taught. 3e has unexpected features, quite different from what I would expect from a firmly ST-derived game, particularly one that at first seemed to remain 'classical' (e.g. the nine attributes being the same).
The whole colour-coded-xp concept is likewise unexpected. Because feels like something taken from a resource management system of some strategy game, actually, despite the authors' stance apparently being against strategic resource management subsystems (e.g. no new Mandate of Heaven).
Can somebody involved in the playtest reveal the tale of how was such a state of affairs arrived at?
That might not be to helpfull if I remember the storys about them ignoring the playtester feedback right..
Right, as previously mentioned I didn't follow TAW, so some of what follows is paraphrasing how it was explained to be by @StormofCrows, but any mistakes are my own.
Exalted used to have a habit of hiring on the best unofficial charm writers to become official charm writers, see the hiring of Plague of Hats, the Demented One, and Holden himself. (Hell, two of the really terrible writers they had got hired because one of them had written her graduation thesis on Exalted and the other was her storyteller.)
Pre-TAW the best unofficial charm writers left I was aware of were @Revlid and @EarthScorpion so it was expected that one of them would be next. However, @Aleph asked them to rewrite Lunars into something she'd be interesting in playing, and that turned into a big forum project. A bunch of people really liked it, and some of them were jerks. It was apparently found by some of the minor contributors that you could piss off the official team and create forum drama by bothering the official writers about TAW, so some people kept doing so. This eventually led to Chai Tea getting into a rather mean argument with the TAW writers and lots of burned bridges and damaged egos. (I want to say some of this was from it being revealed that Chai Tea hadn't been a top choice, but was instead something like third, thus resulting in them having a chip on their shoulder.) As a result, any of the involved writers getting hired on to write future books became very unlikely.
@Eukie I had a plan in mind when I mentioned trying to be hired as an editor, and not just an exalted one. One of the complaints I've seen about Onyx Path is that the head writer on each project also acts as the editor, and having an author edit their own work is a terrible plan. While outsourcing editing to the kickstarter backers (who payed for this privilege) can almost be a replacement, it's also sounds like they only listen to obvious errors and clear mistakes. It's certainly the case the nobody else is currently willing to questions their authors. However, final review has to be a power that the new White Wolf has, so subjecting their books to a true edit pass is a value adding feature they could provide. It seems pretty clear to me that they had a minimal understanding of just how much White Wolf had outsourced everything during the CCP days, so I expect that the company is trying to understand what roles are left for it to perform and where it should go from here.
Right, the plan. So what do you expect the new heads of White Wolf would do if they got half a dozen applications of the form 'this is why you need a head editor, and this is why it should be me?' Even if they don't hire one of those people on, even if they don't hire someone else to do the job, I'm sure they'd have some awkward questions about Beast – or whatever – to ask Onyx Path. This is one of the easier ways to make the change you want to see happen. Like, there are ways to improve these RPGs you guys say you care so much for with just the power you have, so seeing people with that power just whine on Internet Forum about it all sounds to much like the people who refuse to vote.
Not involved, but given to understand that this was the best way anyone involved has ever figured out for getting players to not just buy more charms. (This is not a dig, my only alternate would be making the charms so terrible that people find other uses more appealing, which is why I found myself buying ability dots when I played a Lunar.) Well, unless you are talking about the crafting system, I have no clue about that, other than this:
(Especially in its ability to get the crafting character's player on side.)
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Uh, last I checked the editor for Ex3 was Stephen Lea Shepard, who wrote maybe some setting fluff and I'm not even sure of that.
So you mean the actual Design part of "game design." Got it.
EDIT: Actually I suppose that is a bit glib of me, but their alternative answer to this question posed last time was to turn Every form of character advancement, from dice-pools to Essence dots, into a goddamn Charm purchase.
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Kylar
In Training Forever
- Location
- Canada
Hephaestus is a blacksmith: he makes shields and swords (and sun chariots and tripods). He's a peerless blacksmith and craftsman, but in modern parlance he's closer to an engineer then a scientist: his focus is more on making things then on pushing the limits of knowledge. But his core is still a blacksmith working at his forge.
Daedalus is an architect and craftsman: he makes wonders. He's probably the closest to the archetypal mad scientist your going to find in ancient myth. Except.... he's not particularly mad. He tends to be framed as a learned man, and an innovator, but madness isn't a particular part of the myth.
Now, they can be defined as mad scientists. For some settings, that even works very well. The main issue is that for most people, the term mad scientist tends to evoke images of Girl Genius-esque stuff, not bronze age tales. Its an issue of words having connotations beyond their actual definition. Which is why this annoys me so much: its not terribly hard to adjust your descriptors so they fit what the game line tends to be actually centered on.
(Of course, this is majorly not helped by huge chunks of 2e (and to be fair, parts of 1e) trying to be Stargate, which tends to obscure the fact that yes, Exalted is a thoroughly pre-modern, animistic setting. Which is where a large chunk of the 'I'm going to play a scientist' as opposed to 'I'm going to play craftsman' comes from: Creation as a pre-modern setting has been heavily hidden by things like WotLA.)
Sorry, between work and other interests this has fallen to the wayside. I might come back to it when I have spare time though, as I have a considerably better grasp on 3e rules now.
Not a play tester, but the basic idea behind the Crafting system is you need to make stuff to make more stuff. It's meant to encourage the fact most people we'd consider crafters were incredibly prolific.
It differs from things like Mandate of Heaven in that running a kingdom is something that really should be roleplayed, not reduced to dice rolls (or have context based dice rolls: making a budget is boring, so roll that, negotiations with a hostile kingdom are not so roleplay the shit out of that). Crafting, by and by large, is single character thing, so setting up a system that incentivizes a lot of Crafting (that the other players don't need to worry about) makes sense.
Now, the system has issues (its really god damn hard at a glance to understand what your character needs to make a thing, and Jesus Christ to many charms), but I do like the core idea of 'make things to make more things'.
I don't. I consider it an incredibly terrible way of accomplishing those design goals.
If you want people to be resolving such actions at the strategic level, then "crafting" should have exactly the same level and nature of mechanical implementation as "running an empire" - because "running an empire" is the Bureaucracy/Socialise strategic scale action which parallels "crafting lots of shit". The crafting system as implemented is like the incredibly lame Cthulhutech system for evolving your Tager, which included boring things like "kill X people with your limit attack" and "do X for a certain number of nights in a row" for various Tagers. It's bean-counting pettiness.
What Second Edition got right is that crafting is not interesting in its own right. Getting the resources is, sure. What you do with the made objects, sure. But what it got wrong was failing to work along those premises far enough and tying it up in extended actions and the like. All the same things apply to crafting as you said about bureaucracy. Making a sword is boring, so resolve it in one roll. Getting your hands on the magical gold and the example daiklaives so you can study them and learn how they are made is the interesting part, so it should be roleplayed.
But Third Edition does exactly the wrong thing. It insists that you spend time crafting stuff that isn't needed for the story, so the numbers get bigger until your numbers are big enough to afford the blinging thing. It is literally MMO grinding stuffed into an RPG. And they chose to do it this way, rather than building a strategic scale system which could handle people building manses, people bringing Realm-style crop rotation to areas which lack it, and people reforming the tax code in one system (so each caste has a strategic-scale thing they can do, so no one has to sit in a corner when the game shifts into a strategic scale).
My problem with this, is how mad scientist operates. This is methodology of gadgetter and modern engineer. They make a lot of sstuff on the side, thousand of little gadgets and tools to make tools. This is not how peerless smith works. They make just few works and every work they make is masterpiece, but sometimes they can reach beyond and make something imcomparable. they do not make a lot of stuff or lot of tools, it is pirely their skill, which makes wonders. This crafting style is much more in line with magitek punk, than mythic smith.
Imrix -"Legendary Blade Infusion" crafting charm
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
Basically, I still consider the best crafting charm ever made in 2e to be a little-known piece of homebrew by somebody called Riklurt back on the old WW boards way back before even 2.5e, called Legendary Blade Infusion.
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Where is that located? I'm curious.
- Location
- Virginia
I agree with everything else you wrote 100%, and mostly agree with this but would like to expand on a problem I have with it.
Not all campaigns are quite as proactive as Exalted tends to envision. In particular, the longest-running campaign I was in was primarily reactive, and in fact a little bit of a mess (because for various reasons we the players were not good at all on picking up the Storyteller's plot hints). We also accidentally ended up romping all over Creation, despite the Storyteller's original intent.
This sort of thing in particular, and a reactionary story in general, can make playing a crafter extremely difficult. Unless the party agrees on going on what basically looks like a sidequest, you are locked out of the thing-you-want-to-do. I do agree that this is realistic. But I think that there's some virtue in building a way for crafty characters to get to do the "make a cool artifact" thing without interfering so heavily with the rest of the party.
You need a system to gate their productivity by splat, essence, and screentime, in order to avoid the "sit in a cave and poop out daiklaves" problem, but once that is solved I think it's worth sacrificing a little bit of realism in service of letting a player do the fun thing they made their character to do.
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This is basically the crux of the matter.
I don't want characters people define exclusively as "crafters". In fact, I want to actively discourage it. I want it outright in the open that the classic crafter is what you do in strategic scale play, at the same time as the sorcerer is carrying out a sorcerous working to bind a horde of demons to carve out a new canal in the landscape and the judge-king is being all Solomon and passing laws over a province and the general is building up their army and training it and the spymaster is sitting behind a network of spies, running the criminal underground in your kingdom. At the tactical scale, your "crafter" better have something else to do. Likewise, your swordy-stabby-person better find something else to do when the game shifts to more strategic play, although that's a more natural evolution because it's... well, exactly what Keris is doing when she's realising that she has to actually learn how to organise things and get followers and stuff, because she needs more people and more hands in more places to do things. In my experience, it's a lot easier to get lower-scale players to realise they need to think bigger and start doing things like raising armies and becoming feared scavenger-lords controlling areas of land.
And the same clear delineation also means that a ST who's ignoring player investment in the strategic-scale things is bad, whether they're ignoring the bureaucrat's, the sorcerer's, or the crafter's. Because by investing in the skills and the Charms and the Styles for strategic-timeline actions, you're telling the GM that that's what you're interested in and if you don't get offered that, that's something which needs to be resolved via OOC talking.
Now, yes, you can make things at the tactical scale. But you're not going to be making great wonders at the tactical scale. No, what you're going to be doing is showing up at a damaged First Age damn and stopping it from collapsing thus wiping out an entire river valley, or you're going to be making your fine china works to be the cover story for why the party is in disguise travelling to a satrapy to scout it out for later invasion. You need to be there with your craft skills to demonstrate that you're the one who's making them and so the party's offer is apparently genuine. Or you're going to be using your skills to recognise the opposite, that the manufactured goods are too good quality and recommend to your local satrap that they act with more suspicion around these traders, because their goods are too good for what that area makes. Or you're going to be generating plot for the party because you need a certain resource to build them the manse which can forge jade-steel, and the entire party has a big interest in being able to make their own jadesteel so - ta da! Plot hook!
But at the heart of it, when crafting wonders is defined as a strategic-scale activity of the same level as "the sorcerer is laying a working on the land to make the swamps into farmland" and "the bureaucrat is organising work gangs to build a road network", then players who want to focus on that can walk into a game and explicitly say "I want a focus on nation-building and seasonal play", and if the GM doesn't want that, they can tell them that outright and expectations can be set OOC and there doesn't have to be drama about "we spend all our time on the move, none of us can use any of our seasonal-length skills".
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Jon Chung
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My view has always been that the primary issue with artifact crafting in Exalted is due to the model of artifacts used traditionally in the game being remarkably close to D&D magic items. Stuff which grants you really useful magic buff effects, which improve your combat numbers in an extremely efficient way. Stuff which grants you powers and abilities you can't access as a normal part of your character builds which also do not cost permanent character-building resources.
As long as this model is what artifact items in the game look like, there will always be a systemic incentive to get loads of magic bling, because magic bling is useful, and a non blinged out character is noncompetitive with someone who's a walking Christmas tree of carefully selected magic items. Given this fact, if your system allows you to hide in a cave and build magic bling until you're encrusted in Codpieces of Attribute Buffing +10, you're going to have a metagame problem whatever the crafting system process looks like.
As long as this model is what artifact items in the game look like, there will always be a systemic incentive to get loads of magic bling, because magic bling is useful, and a non blinged out character is noncompetitive with someone who's a walking Christmas tree of carefully selected magic items. Given this fact, if your system allows you to hide in a cave and build magic bling until you're encrusted in Codpieces of Attribute Buffing +10, you're going to have a metagame problem whatever the crafting system process looks like.
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Yeah, 3E artifacts aren't like that. There are two sets of weapon statlines, Light, Medium, Heavy, and then Mundane and Artifact. Artifact is somewhat better, but not really enough to offset the increased cost. The power of the artifact is in its Evocations, that's what you're paying more for. Volcano Cutter isn't an amazing sword because it does more damage than any other Reaver Daiklave, it actually doesn't. Volcano Cutter is amazing because the Evocations, the bond between hero and weapon, can be expressed in the form of immensely powerful army-shattering Charms, assuming you forge a strong enough bond with the weapon (I.e. have it long enough to meet the Essence requirements and buy the Evocations.)
Jon Chung
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That's a valid way to solve the magic bling effect, but also produces a combinatorial hell problem for balance (or rather, does not eliminate the combinatorial hell problem that already existed, and makes it worse by explicitly bringing in the cognitive baggage of Charmsets), so I don't think that's a great solution.
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Have you read it? Have you played with it? I have, on both counts. It works quite well. I'm running a game where two of the players make extensive use of Evocations, and the game has been going quite smoothly.
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notthepenguins
Neither Spherical Nor Frictionless
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Well...
Volcano Cutter does actually increase your initiative gain on attacks when you don't roll a 1, as well as its general statline. Additionally, when you use it you just get an evocation for free. So, you know, it still falls under 'strictly superior to normal artifacts.'
Also, +1 accuracy, +3 damage, and +2/3/4 Overwhelming is absolutely worth the attunement costs of artifact weaponry on its own.
Dude... don't argue with Chung about what causes combinatorial hell. You will lose.
- Location
- Virginia
I agree with all of this. I've actually be lurking in this thread for a long time, and have seen the arguments where you expanded on this at length - for example, why Solar Tony Stark just cannot make First Age power armor in a cave. I think from a setting perspective your arguments are correct. And I think it's also right that the kind of mismatch between player character expectations and Storyteller plotting I described is an error that ought to be corrected.
But.
Having read your homebrew and having read Kerisgame, you are deep into the 99th percentile of Storytellers. Not all of us are so lucky. I think there's merit in designing the system to have more graceful failure modes in the case of poor ST/player coordination.
(This is not to say that 3E crafting system achieves this! Not at all; I think it needs to DIAF. But I would like some way of crafting minor magical doohickeys without diverting the party or acting at the strategic level.)
I agree, which is why I mentioned that there needs to be a gating system in terms of splat, essence, and screentime. IMO the best system for this is to just charge XP for artifacts, with the XP refunded if the artifact is lost or for whatever reason becomes irrelevant, or the cost waived if the magic bling is sufficiently inconsequential.
In more general terms, I'm a big fan of 3E's Sorcerous Workings system because it provides an excellent framework for gating on all three of those considerations, plus the requirement of Means provides useful ST-guidance for how to actually implement "you must do sidequests to acquire coupons before you can make your thingy".
I can't think of a better way to do it, though. Can you? I mean, "magic swords of legendary power exist" isn't really negotiable, so magic bling is always going to be super-desirable.
Jon Chung
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That's absolutely negotiable: you can simply do something like "the legendary power involved is all in the wielder rather than the tool, and the tool is just a really good tool, which gets a name and exaggerated boasts made about it because of the association with the guy using it".
For example, Cloud Strife's Buster Sword is iconic, named and impossible to extricate from his image, but it also doesn't do anything that swords don't already do. This model could be used instead of the one which assigns Charm-like abilities to objects, which requires you to balance said Charm-like abilities against all potential users' Charmsets - to continue on with the example of Cloud Strife, Omnislash is Cloud's ability, not the sword's.
Whatever you need to do in order to not have to balance charms or charm-equivalent abilities against multiple different splats is worth doing. It's already a headache to handle testing in exception-based systems, courting more problems is unnecessary.
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- Location
- Virginia
I also think the Evocation system has problems, but for what it's worth since the leak they've changed it so that published Evocations are explicitly splat-linked. The ones in the core book are either Solar-only, or in a few cases allow one additional splat like DBs, Lunars or Sidereals.
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Speaking of which, here's Kerisgame part 41! In a swanky new doc, kicking things off with some character assassination and social sabotage that seems to have shifted Testolagh's opinion of her from thinly-veiled hostility to grudging respect. Also in which she shows off her demons a bit more, and Echo is overjoyed at being proven right in that bribing people with ribbons totally does work, hah!
She's going to be insufferable now, I hope you realise that.
... well, more so.
But that's tantamount to getting rid of artifacts entirely, which causes some pretty serious problems with the setting, particularly where scavenging from ancient ruins is concerned. And "artifacts exist but cap out at +1" isn't much better. If legendary artifacts are legendary only by association with their wielders, and kind of meh in and of themselves, then what's all the fuss over the lost wonders of the First Age (and more specifically the ones that the Shogunate was unable to maintain)? Why does the Realm make a point of controlling most of the world's Jade if Jade equipment is kind of take-it-or-leave-it? I guess you could say "noncombat artifacts are good but artifact weapons and armor aren't worth much", but that doesn't seem very plausible.
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