Do you want a deranged rewiev of the craft system?
My Brain has been itching to do it for some hours, folllowing desideres that i buried for at least two months. (I needed to do nanowrimo, and i even won! No regrets.)
I mean, feel free, but I've seen a dozen or more of those already, with completely different opinions across the board. At some point my brain just shut down and all further reviews just turned into blank noise. I need to actually play the thing to understand its merits and flaws.
So out of curiosity, have the devs ever explained why they decided to leave out any sort of bureaucracy/economics system? Or are we supposed to use Craft (Societies) for that sort of thing?
There have been several attempts at a bureaucracy/economics system in the development of Ex3, and the fact that Masters of Jade was a thing shows that if they'd wanted, they could have delivered a competent take on it.
As I recall, the final decision to leave it out of the game was a combination of two related problems - on one hand, a system that has only one of the players act on its scale, leaving everyone twiddling their thumb while they do it; on the other hand, a "zoomed out" system which massively abstracts complex personal-level actions and provides whack results.
I'm particularly sympathetic to the latter argument due to having seen first-hand what happens when a Sidereal interacts with any attempt at a macro society system in 2e.
Well, hmm. I like the thought of "imbuing" spells (that you know) to make Sorcerous Artifacts like the glasswing lance or cherub shrine, which charge up at 1m/tick with an "artificial anima banner" effect to make them big and flashy before casting the spell in question (and are generally bulky enough that learning the spell is better, plus they break if you use them somewhere where the essence blend is damaging).
I do like this as a template approach almost as a Drawback.... Drafting how I would do it based on the above!
Imbued Artifice (Artifact 3-5)
Sorcerers cannot always afford to personally cast each and every spell they know for every purpose. Instead, they turn to Artifice and other magical crafts, combining the two disciplines to create a device that effectively emulates the effect of a single spell the Sorcerer knows.
An Imbued Artifact requires a Sorcerer either as the lead artificer, or as one of the Aides attached to the project. The attached Sorcerer must also know the spell in question. Due to the constraints of harnessing an entire Emerald Circle Spell into an object, most Imbued Artifacts have a rating of 3 dots, and are about as large as a soldier's backpack, and often extremely cumbersome. Artifacts imbued with Sapphire and Adamant Circle Spells are Artifact 4 and 5 respectively, likely requiring wagons, or being stationary fixtures.
Charging an Imbued Artifact takes 1 mote/tick, and results in a display of Essence not unlike an Anima Banner. (In addition to the wielder's own if they have one). The wielder must pay for the complete cost of the spell before casting it,though multiple Essence-wielders may contribute to the cost of the spell. Targeting the artifact or the spell itself with the appropriate Countermagic dispells it as normal, but the Artifact itself cannot be disenchanted this way.
As well as that, you have Sorcery providing exotic ingredients for things you can't make otherwise - a working that distils starlight down into a shimmering liquid that you can paint onto your proto-artifact, or which which shrinks a giant redwood down into a bonsai tree that you can put in the miniature shrine to the Wood Dragon that powers your crop-boosting tractor. Or, for that matter, a sorcerous spell-forge Working that lets you handle abstract concepts to weave a cloak of dismissal from the minds of men who shun you.
You're using the word 'Working' a lot, which is cool, but kinda confusing. I do agree that Sorcery can 'provide' Exotic components. One idea was evoking the quality of 'Has not been touched by flesh'. You cast Skin of Bronze on yourself and boom, no flesh to muddy the artifact.
At the simplest, I suppose what you're implying/suggesting could be a kind of sub-class of a regular artifact/crafting system, where you build something intangible with your Understanding as a Sorcerer, and that 'Something' can be used over and over for Other Effects. (I'm thinking of this, because learning a bunch of eparate spells for this stuff seems like a detrimental XP sink. Correct me if I'm way off.)
And yeah, you should probably have direct "enchantment" or "animation" spells that let you set an inanimate object to doing a Thing - whether it be moving or providing some magical effect - that's Sorcerous-keyworded. Animation is a definite specialty of this sort of thing, I suspect - it may be a single spell that lets you set a simple object to Doing Its Job - the broom that sweeps the floor by itself, the harp that plays music on its own, etcetera.
As mentioned, Necromancy seems to have all the really well-defined stuff, though there is 'Invocation of the Living Ship' under Terrestrial Circle. A ship that sails itself for 12.5 hours.
Hmm. There should really be links between Workings, Spells and Artifacts - a chain of progression of "ease of use" - and possibly some similarities between sorcerous enhancements to things and astrological blessings on people. All variants of one system, if you see what I mean.
I mean, feel free, but I've seen a dozen or more of those already, with completely different opinions across the board. At some point my brain just shut down and all further reviews just turned into blank noise. I need to actually play the thing to understand its merits and flaws.
There have been several attempts at a bureaucracy/economics system in the development of Ex3, and the fact that Masters of Jade was a thing shows that if they'd wanted, they could have delivered a competent take on it.
As I recall, the final decision to leave it out of the game was a combination of two related problems - on one hand, a system that has only one of the players act on its scale, leaving everyone twiddling their thumb while they do it; on the other hand, a "zoomed out" system which massively abstracts complex personal-level actions and provides whack results.
I'm particularly sympathetic to the latter argument due to having seen first-hand what happens when a Sidereal interacts with any attempt at a macro society system in 2e.
The second points fair, but the first doesn't really hold water they already have Craft and Sorcerous Workings which are already systems where one guy does a thing and everyone else twiddled their fingers.
Speaking for 1E and 2E, the 25 ability divide is very much baked into the Exalted universe. For example, there's a constellation for each ability, in a world where the Celestial dome was designed. This is less of a thing (so far) in 3E.
The choice of abilities informs us somewhat about the universe in that it tells us what kinds of skills are useful in this world, but I still don't agree that the specific boundaries between them are "real". Among other things, this would be trivially discoverable by scholars, but it just seems kind of dumb for them to have this objectively correct taxonomy of ability that lets them know for sure that, like, Athletics and Dodge are totally distinct things, or that "Thrown" is supposed to be coequal with "Bureaucracy".
With respect to constellations: Sidereal charms have some of the weakest connections to the underlying ability of all the ability-based charmsets. And the constellation writeups themselves* don't mention associations with abilities, and the resplendencies often key off of other abilities.
*I only have 2E, this may have been different in 1E
Also as a matter of headcanon / desired homebrew, I think it would be neat for Sidereal charms to actually be connected to colleges/constellations rather than abilities. The excellencies could then be more Infernal-like, being subject to the same thematic restrictions as destinies under the associated constellation. This would also allow Sidereal charms to stray even further from the associated abilities than they already do.
(This would be a lot less work than coming up with 25 Yozi charmsets because none of the trees would be self-contained. Also obviously you'd need to rebalance various costs.)
This seems to resemble the way the Yozi charm clouds were set up, which could work if you were willing to do a ton of homebrew.
Again: I don't think it's important to have those charms actually written up in a splatbook somewhere. I don't think it's important for the game mechanics to represent these ideas with 100% fidelity; being good mechanics qua game mechanics is more important. I just think that those charms do actually exist in-universe.
(Although the "you can qualify for a charm with specialty dots, but then can only use it within the bounds of the specialty" would be an OK rule IMO.)
All of these things trade off against the objective and well-studied awfulness of 2E mechanics. I agree with a good fraction of these complaints, but it really does seem that even with all of those problems 3E is a mechanically superior system. Even with the dice tricks. As @Fenrir666 said, low bar, but still.
I know when my group finally starts back up we're going with 3E, and I'm glad of it.
Oh I 100% empathize with that. It's exactly how I feel about Ex3. I despise the dice tricks, I despise craft, I despise charm bloat, I love rigid mechanical definitions for powers (4E D&D is my gold standard for this), etc. And I feel similar ways about e.g. SWTOR.
It's just that, if I am going to play an Exalted game, I'd still rather it be Ex3 than any other edition.
I do like this as a template approach almost as a Drawback.... Drafting how I would do it based on the above!
Imbued Artifice (Artifact 3-5)
Sorcerers cannot always afford to personally cast each and every spell they know for every purpose. Instead, they turn to Artifice and other magical crafts, combining the two disciplines to create a device that effectively emulates the effect of a single spell the Sorcerer knows.
An Imbued Artifact requires a Sorcerer either as the lead artificer, or as one of the Aides attached to the project. The attached Sorcerer must also know the spell in question. Due to the constraints of harnessing an entire Emerald Circle Spell into an object, most Imbued Artifacts have a rating of 3 dots, and are about as large as a soldier's backpack, and often extremely cumbersome. Artifacts imbued with Sapphire and Adamant Circle Spells are Artifact 4 and 5 respectively, likely requiring wagons, or being stationary fixtures.
Charging an Imbued Artifact takes 1 mote/tick, and results in a display of Essence not unlike an Anima Banner. (In addition to the wielder's own if they have one). The wielder must pay for the complete cost of the spell before casting it,though multiple Essence-wielders may contribute to the cost of the spell. Targeting the artifact or the spell itself with the appropriate Countermagic dispells it as normal, but the Artifact itself cannot be disenchanted this way.
Yeah! Though huh, I thought we had, but it looks like the glasswing lance never got posted.
One of the earliest products of sorcerer-engineers, a glasswing lance appears to be an overly long and somewhat inconvenient dire lance made of white jade with obsidian inlets. Despite the properties of Essence, it remains overly long and slightly off balance when used by anyone save a charging cavalryman, though its length is an aid to defence.
However, its true use is revealed when a user, who need not be attuned to it, spends a point of willpower. This creates a great mandala of black butterflies forming an monochrome kaleidoscope around the tip, akin to an Exalt's anima banner. The weapon begins to charge up its internal mote pool, at a rate of 1m/tick. An attuned user can spend additional motes to cause it to charge faster. The glasswing lance casts the spell Death of Obsidian Butterflies when it has gained 15m and once five ticks have passed since the charging process began, and empties its mote pool, requiring another wp to be spent before it can be used again in this manner.
In the Second Age, glasswing lances can still be made, and are one of the more common pieces of Essence field artillery due to their simplicity and ease of use. Typically they are mounted on horse-drawn lance-carriages or manhandled by several strong men, and the sight of the charging mandala can break an oncoming charge - and if that does not do the job, the shock from the spell will. Its short range does, however, mean that it is not uncommon for them to be captured as trophies when a general holds too long. The Realm and Lookshy alike pride them on taking the glasswing lances of their foes and recapturing any lost ones of their own.
A glasswing lance has the same statline as a Dire Lance, save that it has +1 Speed and +1 Defence. This speed increase does not apply when used by a cavalryman (or equivalent) on the charge.
The epynomous glasswings of the lance have the same statline as the spell Death of Obsidian Butterflies, save that the Glasswing Lance is aimed using Perception + Archery, and uses a fixed value of three for the "sorcerer's" Essence.
... when we were throwing these ideas around, we had a sort of chain of ease-of-use. So Workings were free - they didn't cost xp, and were basically the Sorcerous version of a Bureaucracy Project; a long and clumsy custom-designed ritual that's specified for a single event, and which you invest downtime into. What ES described here, for example?
finding the right place on the landscape to strike with your staff in a display of geomantic accupuncture to make the earth spring up and form a new canal
That would be a Working. A downtime-scale "make a canal" thing - and you could do it using Bureaucracy and labourers, yes (ditto rerouting a river, rebuilding a town, etc), but if you don't have a tonne of dudes but do happen to be a sorcerer, you can do it this way as well. It's there to reduce the need to waste xp on spells you'll use once and never again and to fill the "what do you do during your downtime" slot for sorcerers, while warrior-kings train great armies, crafters build wonders, bureaucrats optimise law codes, etcetera.
(We didn't actually get this idea from 3e - which you can tell by the way that our version is less mechanised in a lot of ways, and doesn't have things like Ambition, but is much more just a magical version of a bureaucracy project that we never got around to making mechanics for).
But maybe you want to use Sorcery to kill dudes. Or you decide that your "raise great walls of stone all around a city" Working is pretty sweet, and you want to reuse it, but don't want to spend another season setting it up and working out all the equations and geomantic values for a new city and so on. Well, in that case you can basically make it portable by streamlining and optimising it and stripping out as many context-specific variables as you can and basically making a quick, travel-sized on-the-go version that you spend xp to learn and can then use repeatedly! Or, in other words; a Spell.
And then eventually you think... okay, so I have my Spell. I love my Spell! It's totally sweet. But it's also not very useful if I can message my underlings with Infallible Messenger but they can't message me back. So just as you originally needed a way to use Workings on the fly, quickly and without a long and involved set-up, now you want a way to let non-sorcerers use single, specific Spells without needing to go through the whole process of inducting them into Sorcery. So you can then put the effect into a Sorcerous Artifact! Just as Spells cost xp while Workings don't, so is an Artifact inferior to a Spell - it takes longer, it won't work if the ambient essence is wrong, it's bulky and hard to carry - but it once again makes the effect easier to use.
The whole thing is basically a technological tree - similar to the way that computers went from exceedingly rare government things to household presences to things you carry in your pocket - but phrased in magical terms. And it means that the downtime-scale Working system dovetails nicely with the downtime Crafting system (since you can use Workings in your crafting), and that Sorcerous Artifacts can be components in your bigger, badder and cooler creations.
Edit: As an example, one thing I have planned for Keris is that she's at some point going to "discover" a "sacred pool of the Great Mother", which if you're truly faithful to Her and are pure enough of intention and have the strength of spirit necessary to make the world bow to you, will bless you with Her divine strength when you're baptised in it. If you dare to stray into it with disloyalty in your heart, or impure thoughts clouding your mind, or if you're simply too weak and degenerate, of course, the Great Mother will kill you for your arrogance. "You" being a Lintha, here.
Or to put it another way, it's a Sorcerous Working that has two buttons. Button 2 increases a Lintha's Breeding. Button 1, since there's no such thing as a free lunch, liquifies a Lintha for Breeding potential and uses it to fuel Button 2. Keris is in complete control of which button she pushes. Curiously, the Lintha who are faithless and impure and disloyal seem to disproportionately be the ones who'd cause her problems in her neo-Lintha powerbase.
Sasi: "... they bought that?"
Keris: "I sold that."
Oh I 100% empathize with that. It's exactly how I feel about Ex3. I despise the dice tricks, I despise craft, I despise charm bloat, I love rigid mechanical definitions for powers (4E D&D is my gold standard for this), etc. And I feel similar ways about e.g. SWTOR.
It's just that, if I am going to play an Exalted game, I'd still rather it be Ex3 than any other edition.
@Kuciwalker I like the idea of College-based Sidereals, but think that it would be a pain to actually make/use. With Attribute-based and Ability-based splats, they gate your charms and they directly contribute to the relevant conpetencies. With Essence-based splats, it doesn't contribute to your competency but you only have to worry about the one stat. For College-based Sidereals, you would get the worst of both, having to keep track of an additional 25 stats that also don't help you do the actual things better.
Which is really just flabbergasting when you consider how many pages the thing actually is.
For all its faults of being a poorly-formatted 400 page monster, the 2e Core at least attempted to be Complete by pulling at least one valuable, gameable thing from every single major book of 1e, for good or ill.
Meanwhile Ex3 downright prides itself on ~Mystery~, dedicating more than half the book into Chargen powers which should be saying something about the setting but don't, leaves huge gaps in the potential storytelling material you're expected to have pre-existing books of the hated 2e to fill out, and caps it with a huge splash page of "and all these other Exalted fit in somewhere, I guess. Even we don't know who the fuck they are."
I can't imagine this thing being anyone's first book of the line, because it actively avoids giving you reasons to like it besides "this isn't the old Exalted."
One way to do Astrology based Sidereals is by basically going for thematic powers appropriate to a corresponding Maiden and certain powers in the charmtree have the effect of increasing your rating in College along with whatever other effect they have.
Of course, doing that well is something else entirely.
I dunno if I count as not liking 3e? I mean, I'm running two games of it and having a lot of fun; I'm just also houseruling both games to heck and back.
Almost none of my beef is thematic - off the top of my head, I can't think of any part of it that is theme-based, honestly. It's almost all mechanical issues, which have already been summarized (How do clashes work with flurries? How do attacks from stealth work? How do Charm declarations in combat work? How do Charm combos from multiple Abilities, particularly MA, work? How do counterattacks work? Sure would be nice if I could find out by reading the book.), combined with intense frustration at the dev interaction. I'd probably be a lot more forgiving of either if we hadn't been waiting for three and a half years, but that's a long time to be told, "We promise, the end result will be worth everything," and then end up... like this.
It's not a bad game, on the full spectrum of RPGs. It's definitely the best edition of Exalted. It's certainly in the top half, and probably well up in the top half, of RPGs overall. But it's also a mess of vague, verbose rules with holes you could drive a yeddim through, and "But so are lots of other games!" doesn't make me feel any better about that.
The impression I've gotten indicates this is exactly the wrong way to learn it's flaws. To put this another way, the decker problem is rarely that the decker is bored. Similarly, the craft system seems designed for a dedicated crafter, not the rest of the group. Personally, I'd count making storytellers cry or run away from it to be a significant flaw by itself.
On an otherwise unrelated 3e question, what are people's feeling about the emotion 'terrified awe' counting as a positive intimacy for the purpose of other presence charms?
I mean, feel free, but I've seen a dozen or more of those already, with completely different opinions across the board. At some point my brain just shut down and all further reviews just turned into blank noise. I need to actually play the thing to understand its merits and flaws.
Eh, i am basically doing it to dissect the parts that are savable, stab into fine pieces the rest, and then do my very own system, now with more ways of getting resources that it isn't crafting isnignificant tghins. *Insert primal screams here*
If one were to watch my post history would discover some pieces of the system, but it is barely a thin skeleton now...
Nah, not really. I kinda realized that i needed to define where the hell Manses/Demesnes fit, and was thinking about cutting away some pieces from the working system, leaving it only for the big things, and fusing everything small in craft; Otherwise there are some pieces that straddle the line, like the moving forge of the example Working. Okay, i guess that it becomes alive at one point, but it does fit much better at a particurarly big artifact with something unexpected happening.
...Maybe i could include such a thing in my future system? Its look like a worthwhile thing... later, then the basis are set and it is a bit ore meaty. Wouldn't make it become the Armok 1 of subsistems.
Hey, how does manses and demesnes works in your system? Or you haven't still worked them out?
@Kuciwalker I like the idea of College-based Sidereals, but think that it would be a pain to actually make/use. With Attribute-based and Ability-based splats, they gate your charms and they directly contribute to they relevant conpetencies. With Essence-based splats, it doesn't contribute to your competency but you only have to worry about the one stat. For College-based Sidereals, you would get the worst of both, having to keep track of an additional 25 stats that also don't help you do the actual things better.
I think there are ways to do this without it being a pain. Such as:
Make colleges really really cheap. OK, you have 25 extra numbers and that may be annoying for your character sheet but, eh.
Make colleges binary, and rely on essence / charm trees for gating.
Actually I think #2 ends up working fine. A lot of the time if you want the Ability 5 charms in a tree you also want Ability 5 anyway, so I don't think #2 would end up being overpowered.
(Disclaimer: I generally prefer to play with linear costs instead of quadratic; with quadratic costs #2 is a bigger change.)
My response to both of these points is that I don't believe that in-universe the specific 25-Ability breakdown exists. That the particular way trainable skills have been divided into 25 different categories is an extra-narrative mechanical construct.
There have been several attempts at a bureaucracy/economics system in the development of Ex3, and the fact that Masters of Jade was a thing shows that if they'd wanted, they could have delivered a competent take on it.
As I recall, the final decision to leave it out of the game was a combination of two related problems - on one hand, a system that has only one of the players act on its scale, leaving everyone twiddling their thumb while they do it; on the other hand, a "zoomed out" system which massively abstracts complex personal-level actions and provides whack results.
I'm particularly sympathetic to the latter argument due to having seen first-hand what happens when a Sidereal interacts with any attempt at a macro society system in 2e.
Wasn't part of the reason also that they didn't want to reduce the complexities of ruling and administration to be reduced to something you could just throw a lot of dice at?
It doesn't really excuse having no mechanics, but I sympathize.
I'm particularly sympathetic to the latter argument due to having seen first-hand what happens when a Sidereal interacts with any attempt at a macro society system in 2e.
One of my current projects right now is a Martial Art Style inspired by the Undertale protagonist's ability to perform a truly spectacular Pacifist Run.
Please, NO SPOILERS for Undertale. This game is best played without ANY spoilers at all, and it costs only $10 on Steam.
Unfortunately, it's probably inevitable that this Style will be unpopular: people have a tendency to want to take the easy way out, and the justifications they create for themselves make it rather painful for someone to stand in their way.
With regards to putting offensive ability into this Style - why not keep using Undertale's mechanics? With its unity of "physical damage" and "will to live/Determination".
Step 1, unfortunately, is to make a social combat system that works from the ground up - one which avoids Chung's points about how engaging in social combat is functionally suicide unless you're specced for it or otherwise willing to bleed willpower. Some way of taking social damage would probably go a long way in this regard - maybe keep track of a number of "Intimacy alteration points," and the next time you hit downtime (sleep, time to think, travel, whatever) you have to change that many dots of Intimacies? And then you still have to fix "lethality" but it's a start.
Step 2, then, can tie into that: the Style lets you cause wound penalties with social damage without actually doing damage, and when they hit "Incapacitated" they get a big hit to their MDVs or something.
... Something like that, anyway. The intended result is something like, well, the alleged final boss (not the real one.) You pound them into the ground, and then talk at them, and then (assuming no jerkass Old Friends decide to intervene) Spare them anyway; and at the end of the day they're battered and bruised but ultimately unharmed.
The most obvious failure state for this style that comes to mind is that something that enables and enhances normal social actions in combat, as opposed to creating specific ones, risks making social characters way, way too potent in combat. Needing to take a single martial art to leverage your full social suite on enemies, possibly with bonuses, while being stabbed in the face, is way too much; "just stab him" is supposed to be an effective counter to social-fu, after all.
No? There's a difference between "whenever anyone tries talking to you, stab them in the face" (the result of a borked social system), and "if someone with magical talking powers starts trying to convince you to do/believe something awful, the best solution is stabbing them in the face" (the result of a combatant encountering a social focused character).
Social effects need to be slower and less impressive in their changes than combat effects for combat to be a worthwhile endeavor; if I can end every fight by talking my enemies into friendship or neutrality, then combat is an objectively worse choice, because social has usurped its function as well as that of non-violent social interaction.
Yeah, Exalted is really the wrong setting to try to play the Undertale protagonist. See, what happens in Exalted, when you meet a real killer, as someone with no combat prowess?
Generally, you die, unless you're good at running away.
EDIT: Elaborating. In Undertale, all of the enemies have those little triggers to shut down combat, because most of them aren't really invested in wanting to kill you. But, in Creation, many of your enemies are. The real killers outnumber the confused misunderstood monsters. The warriors who need you to die for the greater good are gonna be far harder to talk down, even more for the fact that they know their enemies can be magically persuasive, and don't really want to talk to them.
Creation is a far harsher place than the Underground.
No? There's a difference between "whenever anyone tries talking to you, stab them in the face" (the result of a borked social system), and "if someone with magical talking powers starts trying to convince you, the best solution is stabbing them in the face" (the result of a combatant encountering a social focused character).
Social effects need to be slower and less impressive in their changes than combat effects for combat to be a worthwhile endeavor; if I can end every fight by talking my enemies into friendship or neutrality, then combat is an objectively worse choice, because social has usurped its function as well as that of non-violent social interaction.
No? There's a difference between "whenever anyone tries talking to you, stab them in the face" (the result of a borked social system), and "if someone with magical talking powers starts trying to convince you to do/believe something awful, the best solution is stabbing them in the face" (the result of a combatant encountering a social focused character).
Social effects need to be slower and less impressive in their changes than combat effects for combat to be a worthwhile endeavor; if I can end every fight by talking my enemies into friendship or neutrality, then combat is an objectively worse choice, because social has usurped its function as well as that of non-violent social interaction.
To me, that's working as intended, though. Killing is always going to be the easier choice; changing someone's mind should be much harder than killing them. I'd want a social system that was much less "lethal" than the normal combat system, so that you can only make little bits of progress at a time.
So social should be a high-investment high-reward path, basically.
