General Exalted Thread

[notthepenguins]

If they are a parry-focused Exalt tier fighter, spend a few more motes and watch your pool

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Ah, and here we get to why it matters.

Which of my various dice tricks should I spend motes on? I have limited motes, and every single one matters; therefore I need to know which ones are better or worse, which ones become better only in conjunction with one another (most obviously, anything that modifies successes per die changes the value of adding dice, which, you know, also costs motes), and other similar things. Because each Charm costs something, and I can't evaluate whether a Charm is worth its mote cost in a given situation without actually knowing what its value is, on its own and in comparison to others and the rest of my pool.

Edit: One obvious interaction comes to mind: Excellent Strike rerolls 1s, changing your sux per die to 5/9 instead of 5/10. It also provides an autosuccess, which the game considers to be worth two dice, dice cap wise.

Except, with Excellent Strike in play, +1 success is not worth two dice. It's worse. So if you're maxing your pool out for a big attack, it might be good to know that you should ignore the autosuccesses in favor of adding dice (provided your ST lets you do that; if they don't the cost/benefit becomes even wackier).

 

[Aleph]

This tends to work out really well for me. The exact math is not really that important.

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And this is your experience as a player; wonderful for you. But KISS is a long and well-established design principle for a reason. Transparency is a long and well-established design principle for a reason. When success ratios are impossible to calculate, it means that antagonists are impossible to balance against the level of a Circle - which makes the ST curl up into a ball and cry - and it means that it's entirely possible to get screwed over in a high-stakes situation through making the wrong choice. In principle not a bad thing, but in this case you made the wrong choice not because you lacked skill (which can be gained), but because the choices were put in indistinguishable boxes and you were made to pick one at random without knowing which was the most effective.

Surely you can see that if it is possible to avoid this situation, it should be avoided, yes? There is no real way that this contributes to an enjoyable play experience. Saying "it hasn't happened to me" or "it can be avoided" doesn't change the fact that it's a cocked beartrap in the mechanics waiting to take a leg off if anyone steps on it. The only things that dice tricks seem to be contributing are more complexity and rerolling and fiddly details; all of which take up time that players would probably prefer to spend roleplaying and describing and doing. Can you actually justify why the former are more valuable than the latter, and thus deserve to be in the mechanics on their own merits? Not "they're there and it seems to work", but what would be added to another game by introducing more complexity like this?

 

[Aaron Peori]

In a more probable scenario of you standing twenty feet behind from a person with a shortbow (unless you are being perfectly honest in your representation of a Ranged surprise attack taking place at "hold a gun to your head" range, which I doubt) and a trained archer confronting them at similar range; I would say the archer. Overwhelmingly the archer. Completely and hilariously the archer. Speaking as one who has done archery; most people completely new to it are lucky to hit a stationary target twice the width of a human at all on their first few goes, let alone anywhere dangerous.

Ditto with a gun, actually. Despite what movies may tell you, most bullets don't hit anything fleshy, even with someone who has decent aim.

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In the scenario presented a successful Stealth check means you manage to achieve sufficient ambush to hit the target. If this means you walk up to point blank range and shot them in the kidney (or more likely lie in wait until they walk past you and are in point blank range) then that is what happens. How you hit is a matter of stunting and certainly having a higher Archery score means you can justify stunting from a higher range attack but by default Stealth Attacks occur at optimal ambush range; ie you shove a knife into their kidney from behind. You don't really need to be a skilled omnicompotent swordsman to do that. Many untrained humans kill other humans every day on Earth with nothing more than surprise and a sharp object.

If you think sniping at range should be harder, than you can cap ranged Stealth Attack with the ranged combat skill used. That would probably be more balanced, but I don't think its required for most Stealth Attacks which are going to happen in "knifed in a back alley" range.

 

[Dif]

Is it really that important to know the exact way the couple percentage points shift.

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In the simplest terms possible: unless you exist on that Yellow band or higher, your standard TN7-Double-10s roll is a complete coinflip in terms of your chances to do anything meaningful whatsoever. This shit genuinely matters, because otherwise what is the purpose of using randomizers and hardcoded numbers in the first place?

You cannot make a combat system which requires an upwards of Five individual resources to track, when one running low at an inopportune time means you are instantly brutalized and sent into a failure-death spiral, and claim "magical thinking/buy and activate more Charms" is what makes the dice turn out alright when you really need them too.

 

[Imrix]

Is it really that important to know the exact way the couple percentage points shift. Evocations and MA, fine, that might turn out to cause issues, I don't think it will, but I can't say for sure it won't, so fine. But, like...seriously? You have to know the exact percentage chance down to the decimal? You have to solve the game mathematically in order for it to be fun and functional?

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You are vastly overestimating the precision that people are asking for here.

Speaking as one who has done archery; most people completely new to it are lucky to hit a stationary target twice the width of a human at all on their first few goes, let alone anywhere dangerous.

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Can confirm, I used to shoot as well. I've got pretty good coordination and steady, precise hands from precision model painting, and for the first few days of using a bow, I thought I was doing well when I could hit a target two or three feet across at twenty or thirty yards distance.

 

[Kaiya]

Okay, those are...convincing counter-arguments.

 

[Imrix]

To take a simple example, I used to play 40k. I'm pretty shit at math, but I still learned to judge basic things like, "if I fire twenty shots worth of small arms at those hardcases, I can expect to kill maybe two or three, but if I can get a volley off at those scouts I'm more likely to wipe out the squad." This is doable because the interactions involved are for the most part simple enough to eyeball.

This becomes significantly less true the more interactions, non-obvious synergies and general bells and whistles you add to the rolls, which is a significant problem when having at least a rough idea of the likely results of actions A, B or C are a practical necessity in order to make informed decisions in the middle of play.

 

[Jon Chung]

Why do I care? Excellent Strike lets me reroll ones and gives an autosux, I'll burn 5m on an Excellency to make it more likely to hit, in general, 10m if they're a Dawn with maximized defense, and if it's a Supernal Dodger I'm basically fucked. I don't really need more than that. 15 dice with Excellent Strike is enough to hit anything that's not a parry-focused Exalt-tier fighter. If they are a parry-focused Exalt tier fighter, spend a few more motes and watch your pool, because ending a fight in a single blow versus an Exalt is generally a bad call/

This tends to work out really well for me. The exact math is not really that important.

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For fuck's sake, dude. Have you ever run a game? A critical part of populating the simulation is picking things that are appropriately threatening to throw around where your players are going to run into them and (inevitably) start fights. If the probability curves are fucked up enough that you need to have a statistics program (or be really good at doing probability in your head, which is not exactly common is it?) to work out odds, do you think you're going to make shit in the sweetspot somewhere between "oh hey, we roflstomped that with effortless ease" and "TPK" reliably?

 

[Hazard]

In RPGs you luckily usually only have a small number of combatants involved in a fight, which allows you to increase the complexity of any given combatant.

That should not be taken as advice to make something so complex that it becomes nearly impossible to gauge a result. Because even in real life people try and figure out how likely they are to succeed at something and in what manner, rather than make a wild assed guess and hope it works out.

And if you do that last in a fight, that's usually when you get stabbed and die.

 

[Jon Chung]

In RPGs you luckily usually only have a small number of combatants involved in a fight, which allows you to increase the complexity of any given combatant.

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While this is true,
1) A player only ever has to worry about one entity. A GM has to worry about multiple concurrent entities and generating entities on the fly in case something deviates from anticipated player actions.
2) This is a game which involves "PvP" - hostile entities are of the same order of being as PCs, are expected to use PC tools, etc, etc.

Do you (the general reader) think, given these constraints, that "drive up complexity for its own sake hurr we don't want it to be possible to eyeball estimates" is a good thing, as it seems the dev team does?

Obviously not, yes? Because that's only going to work if constraint 2 is not in play so we can decouple PC-complexity from GM-complexity. But Exalted, if we want PCs to be fighting other Exalts rather than cardboard cutouts of Exalts, cannot do that.

That should not be taken as advice to make something so complex that it becomes nearly impossible to gauge a result. Because even in real life people try and figure out how likely they are to succeed at something and in what manner, rather than make a wild assed guess hope it works out.

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This is correct, yes.

e: Fixed

 

[Imrix]

I mean let's be honest, this isn't a new problem. We've seen this problem before with Paranoia Combat; it's why you called Exalted's lethality a 'landmine' @Jon Chung, yes? Because it was all too possible for it to wreak terrible havoc on a group through no fault of their own, simply because they didn't know about it ahead of time, because the published material did not clearly and effectively communicate (or for that matter understand) what its mechanics incentivised.

 

[Kaiya]

1) A player only ever has to worry about one entity. A GM has to worry about multiple concurrent entities and generating entities on the fly in case something deviates from anticipated player actions.
2) This is a game which involves "PvP" - hostile entities are of the same order of being as PCs, are expected to use PC tools, etc, etc.

Do you think, given these constraints, that "drive up complexity for its own sake hurr we don't want it to be possible to eyeball estimates" is a good thing? Obviously not, yes? Because that's only going to work if constraint 2 is not in play so you can decouple PC-complexity from GM-complexity. But Exalted, if you want your PCs to be fighting other Exalts rather than cardboard cutouts of Exalts, cannot do that.

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In general, no, I'm not gonna be throwing monsters on par with my players at them except as bossfights. PCs are Exalts, they're the exception, not the rule. My games don't tend to be based on challenging combat every session. I tend to think of it like...it's fun to, you know, fight and have to try, but not actually be seriously threatened every session, you know? Or even every other session. Besides, it's pretty clear that's not how the setting works. If you're fighting a PC-tier Abyssal or a Wyld Hunt or a Dawn Caste Warlord every week, that eventually ends up with all the Exalts in the world centered around the PCs.

I'd rather throw forests with hazards that are unpleasant but not super deadly (still getting the balancing of how to make nasty environments interesting down, admittedly, especially while making sure I'm not shitting on the Supernal Awareness person by not letting them detect and avoid threats while also keeping the session from being 'Supernal Awareness detects another threat that you avoid'), or have them talk down an uppity god or whatever. And then, when stuff gets serious, someone sics two sorcerous horrors on them that are an incredible bossfight and the loss of which is crippling because Exalt tier monsters really should not be that common.

And most Exalts are absolutely not PC-level strong. But even an Exalt with ten fewer Charms is scary and deadly. The oldest Essence 5 Solar shouldn't assume he can just splat this Dragonblooded without trying, or he might be in for a shock.

 

[Aleph]

In general, no, I'm not gonna be throwing monsters on par with my players at them except as bossfights.

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... yeah. See. The point Jon is making.

You don't actually know what a monster on par with your players looks like. Because the mechanics are an obscured overcomplex mess, and so you might design one that you think they'll beat easily which winds up murdering half the party because of something you didn't catch. And then your sorcerous horrors go down in three hits to a charm-combo that inflates the Zenith's damage roll past the point you even thought possible; making for a spectacular anticlimax.

Not to mention the fact that the game is not designed specifically for you, and your proposed style of play basically shits all over a Dawn who wants to fight challenging opponents on a semi-regular basis.

 

[Jon Chung]

In general, no, I'm not gonna be throwing monsters on par with my players at them except as bossfights. PCs are Exalts, they're the exception, not the rule. My games don't tend to be based on challenging combat every session. I tend to think of it like...it's fun to, you know, fight and have to try, but not actually be seriously threatened every session, you know? Or even every other session. Besides, it's pretty clear that's not how the setting works. If you're fighting a PC-tier Abyssal or a Wyld Hunt or a Dawn Caste Warlord every week, that eventually ends up with all the Exalts in the world centered around the PCs.

I'd rather throw forests with hazards that are unpleasant but not super deadly (still getting the balancing of how to make nasty environments interesting down, admittedly, especially while making sure I'm not shitting on the Supernal Awareness person by not letting them detect and avoid threats while also keeping the session from being 'Supernal Awareness detects another threat that you avoid'), or have them talk down an uppity god or whatever. And then, when stuff gets serious, someone sics two sorcerous horrors on them that are an incredible bossfight and the loss of which is crippling because Exalt tier monsters really should not be that common.

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/facepalm

Look, you're not understanding that particular point about complexity I raised in that post, so why don't you address the one I actually directed at you?

 

[Giygas]

I do find Dice trick disasteful, and not only that: they are basically most times less or equally cost effective than an excellency!

Lets take excellent strike: for three motes, now you have an additional success (Which decreases your overall dice you can add with an excellency, as opposed as the situation in second edition) and then you can reroll ones.

What does this means for your exalted? It is quite simple! You have payed eight XP for a fifth of a Second excellency, and then something that effectively gives you another die for every ten dice in your dice pool.

Yep, you payed three motes for a fifth of a second excellency, and a tenth of a first excellency.

And Eight xp for a fifth of a second excellency, and a tenth of a first excellency.

A fifth of a second excellency, and a tenth of a first excellency.

And you have even gotten lucky! There is a essence 3 brawl 5 charm(Whoa, much strong, very essence), called River-Binding Wrath, which enhance your grapple and grapple controll rolls, requiring two motes separately for the effect on the two rolls, because why not.

By how much will your rolls be enhanced? You will be able to reroll 5s and 6s!

Yep, this is a fifth of a first excellency. Hell, less than a fifth of a first excellency, because you can only enhance two kind of rolls.

Yeah, Eight XP and Essence 3 and Brawl 5 for what is essentially a nerfed first excellency.

 

[Jon Chung]

I mean let's be honest, this isn't a new problem. We've seen this problem before with Paranoia Combat; it's why you called Exalted's lethality a 'landmine' @Jon Chung, yes? Because it was all too possible for it to wreak terrible havoc on a group through no fault of their own, simply because they didn't know about it ahead of time, because the published material did not clearly and effectively communicate (or for that matter understand) what its mechanics incentivised.

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The bit about landmines comes from this particular analogy: imagine the process of playing a campaign as walking through a particular bit of terrain, the system-map of the game. Different groups' games are different, so, people's pathways through this field will differ, no two groups will take the exact same combination of turns, whatever.

Really obvious mechanical problems are, let's say, open spike pits. You can see those coming ahead of time and divert your path to avoid them. They're blatantly obvious. Hidden mechanical problems are landmines. The critical thing about landmines is that they are invisible to casual inspection. You probably don't know the mines are there until you step on one and have your game blown up or have a map drawn for you by other unfortunates who have already been blown up. Or you spend a lot of time going over the field with a metal detector. Or you have really well-trained mine-avoidance strategies.

This is a true statement: a game with fewer landmines is a better game. Even if some people's groups manage to walk a path through the minefield which means they don't get blown up.

 

[Omicron]

The thing is that Exalted is not about peer-fighting every session. Peer fighting does happen, and occasionally with great intensity, but a large part of common challenges - especially early in the game - is about, and against, opposition that has no "dice tricks" and have nice predictable dice curves, by characters who have yet few "dice trick" Charms. The game is designed so that inexperienced players and storytellers progressively learn difficulty curves and the impact of introducing certain mechanics into them. As a Storyteller, you control the rate at which these probability-altering mechanics enter the game.

Or, to put it another way: the comparison with 2e's paranoia combat is ridiculous and overblown. 2e's issues were to the point that mishandling a mortal's stats and not buying mandatory survival Charms that were not labelled as such might result in a Solar Exalt insta-gibbed by a mortal with a hammer. Ex3's failure state in terms of encounter design is completely out of comparison, and I know it because I've lived it.

My first non-playtest game - run by someone with no previous Ex3 experience, alongside players who had no previous Ex3 experience, had the memorable "Greenmaw Death Trap" moment. The ST misjudged what would be challenging to a group of Exalts; he wanted to give us an easy fight, and built an ambush scenario with a group of combat spirits which he ran as individual opponents instead of a battle group. It was wildly misjudged and turned into a catastrophe and we all panicked.

...but nobody died. Only a single character (me) came close to death. Ex3 just doesn't do "I misjudged the challenge and now all my players are dead without having the time to realize what was happening."

And "ambush by combat spirits modelled as individual opponents against a group of E1 Solars" is, like, the prototypical example of an encounter scenario that shouldn't happen at random and which only does when your ST comes in with 2e expectations of your Exalts being able to roll over non-Exalts. It's not a "natural" failure state in the way "mortal with a hammer" was in 2e.

 

[Kaiya]

1) A player only ever has to worry about one entity. A GM has to worry about multiple concurrent entities and generating entities on the fly in case something deviates from anticipated player actions.
2) This is a game which involves "PvP" - hostile entities are of the same order of being as PCs, are expected to use PC tools, etc, etc.

Do you think, given these constraints, that "drive up complexity for its own sake hurr we don't want it to be possible to eyeball estimates" is a good thing? Obviously not, yes? Because that's only going to work if constraint 2 is not in play so you can decouple PC-complexity from GM-complexity. But Exalted, if you want your PCs to be fighting other Exalts rather than cardboard cutouts of Exalts, cannot do that.

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I don't think driving up complexity for its own sake is a good thing, no. I think doing anything like that for its own sake is a bad idea. I suspect there were other reasons for them, but hey, maybe Holden and Morke only wanted to make mathematically solving combat hard, I dunno.
What I'm saying is just...I don't think its quite as bad as you think. Yeah, maybe shit's more complex than it needs to be, but everything I've done in Ex3 so far, including the time I was certain I'd TPK'd the party, it turned out to be a lot harder to kill even three Exalts, two of which are not heavily combat focused, than I'd think.

Like...two combat monster Solars, a parry-master Meleeist and a damage-master Brawler with expanded Solar Chargen, on par with my PCs in terms of XP, using artifacts, versus a mildly-invested Twilight, a sort-of invested Dawn, and then one Dawn who was about as strong as the meleeist enemy.

The party, who I was certain was about to die, took both monsters out with no casualties, despite none of them being particularly invested in surviving. It's actually pretty hard to kill even not-super invested Exalts. I think most of you are overestimating how easy it is to kill your players in practice, basically.

I don't think dice tricks are a super good idea, but I do think everyone here is being, I dunno, too pessimistic about them? I see a lot of you authoritatively talking about how much 3E sucks or how bad it's likely going to be, but like...you haven't played it. You haven't seen how it interacts with actual players thrown into the mix, which is a pretty important factor!

 

[Jon Chung]

I don't think driving up complexity for its own sake is a good thing, no. I think doing anything like that for its own sake is a bad idea. I suspect there were other reasons for them, but hey, maybe Holden and Morke only wanted to make mathematically solving combat hard, I dunno.
What I'm saying is just...I don't think its quite as bad as you think. Yeah, maybe shit's more complex than it needs to be, but everything I've done in Ex3 so far, including the time I was certain I'd TPK'd the party, it turned out to be a lot harder to kill even three Exalts, two of which are not heavily combat focused, than I'd think.

Like...two combat monster Solars, a parry-master Meleeist and a damage-master Brawler with expanded Solar Chargen, on par with my PCs in terms of XP, using artifacts, versus a mildly-invested Twilight, a sort-of invested Dawn, and then one Dawn who was about as strong as the meleeist enemy.

The party, who I was certain was about to die, took both monsters out with no casualties, despite none of them being particularly invested in surviving. It's actually pretty hard to kill even not-super invested Exalts. I think most of you are overestimating how easy it is to kill your players in practice, basically.

I don't think dice tricks are a super good idea, but I do think everyone here is being, I dunno, too pessimistic about them? I see a lot of you authoritatively talking about how much 3E sucks or how bad it's likely going to be, but like...you haven't played it. You haven't seen how it interacts with actual players thrown into the mix, which is a pretty important factor!

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Put it this way, you seem to be forgetting that the first thing 3E needs to do is convince me that investing my time (to learn a doorstopper book sized game system) and money (because books cost money) is a good idea. Because statements like "we deliberately obfuscated the probability curves" are, uh, very good at convincing me not to.

So yes, of course I haven't played it. I don't want to, y'know. The disincentives are working.

 

[Kaiya]

Put it this way, you seem to be forgetting that the first thing 3E needs to do is convince me that investing my time (to learn a doorstopper book sized game system) and money (because books cost money) is a good idea. Because statements like "we deliberately obfuscated the probability curves" are, uh, very good at convincing me not to.

So yes, of course I haven't played it. I don't want to, y'know. The disincentives are working.

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Yeah, but then...why are you authoritatively speaking about how awful it is? You go on and on about its flaws, but haven't even bothered to look for the merits?

 

[landcollector]

You go on and on about its flaws, but haven't even bothered to look for the merits?

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Likely because, for him, the flaws drastically overshadow what merits may be present. I'm rather "meh" towards 3e myself.

 

[Jon Chung]

Yeah, but then...why are you authoritatively speaking about how awful it is? You go on and on about its flaws, but haven't even bothered to look for the merits?

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Do you think I'm very motivated to go out of my way, acquire the material and study it in order to look for its good points? This doesn't seem like a very effective use of resources, don't you think?

Regardless. I don't need to have read the thing to tell you that combinatorial hell is a terrible thing and obfuscated probability curves are a GM nightmare. If I see that this particular game embraces combinatorial hell like a long-lost lover and that the development philosophy deliberately screwed the probability curves, I am a) going to talk about combinatorial hell and probability problems and b) not buy the game.

 

[Kaiya]

Do you think I'm very motivated to go out of my way, acquire the material and study it in order to look for its good points? This doesn't seem like a very effective use of resources, don't you think?

Regardless. I don't need to have read the thing to tell you that combinatorial hell is a terrible thing and obfuscated probability curves are a GM nightmare. If I see that this particular game embraces combinatorial hell like a long-lost lover and that the development philosophy deliberately screwed the probability curves, I am a) going to talk about combinatorial hell and probability problems and b) not buy the game.

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Fair enough, I suppose.

 

[Aleph]

Yeah, but then...why are you authoritatively speaking about how awful it is? You go on and on about its flaws, but haven't even bothered to look for the merits?

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And you still haven't justified why I should. The flaws and dice tricks are not free to ignore. They are actually a disincentive on their own, even if they don't lead to landmine conflict. Because they are complicated and require a lot of work to learn and are boring to roll and reroll and note down 1s and rereroll ad nauseam. It is boring to use a cookie clicker craft subsystem where you track half a dozen kinds of xp and make thousands of swords before you're allowed to do something magical.

Justify to me why 3e is worth that; why and how the dice tricks and other crap make it so much better that it is worth putting in the time and effort required to learn the system and then why it is worth putting up with the finicky boring rolling, and you might have a case. So far, I have been more than adequately convinced by your own arguments of "enormous investment cost to learn, high running cost to use" and the best you can give me on the opposite side of the scales is "it's not as lethal as the utterly fucked failstate of 2e, and it manages to function despite its flawed systems".

That is not exactly a gripping portrayal of why I should spend money on this thing.

 

[Omicron]

And you still haven't justified why I should. The flaws and dice tricks are not free to ignore. They are actually a disincentive on their own, even if they don't lead to landmine conflict. Because they are complicated and require a lot of work to learn and are boring to roll and reroll and note down 1s and rereroll ad nauseam. It is boring to use a cookie clicker craft subsystem where you track half a dozen kinds of xp and make thousands of swords before you're allowed to do something magical.

Justify to me why 3e is worth that; why and how the dice tricks and other crap make it so much better that it is worth putting in the time and effort required to learn the system and then why it is worth putting up with the finicky boring rolling, and you might have a case. So far, I have been more than adequately convinced by your own arguments of "enormous investment cost to learn, high running cost to use" and the best you can give me on the opposite side of the scales is "it's not as lethal as the utterly fucked failstate of 2e, and it manages to function despite its flawed systems".

That is not exactly a gripping portrayal of why I should spend money on this thing.

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Well I personally consider it to "function because of successful systems" which is part of the problem here I think; @Fenrir666 isn't going to convince you of squat because things which are failures and flaws to you are merits to him, unless he's been secretely hating the systems for which he's running one game and two characters right now. And frankly that would be perfectly fine, tastes in games are different, were it not for the fact that 40% of this thread is about talking about how and why Ex3 mathematically and objectively sucks.