I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this in comparison to Magic: The Gathering which I brought up in my last post. Magic has shown that you can, in fact, have mechanically precise powers that also serve as tiny bits of story telling.
General Exalted Thread
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this in comparison to Magic: The Gathering which I brought up in my last post. Magic has shown that you can, in fact, have mechanically precise powers that also serve as tiny bits of story telling.
Sucal
The Devil’s Cut
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Not really...
Magic the gathering can't even decide how summoning creatures works in Universe, with something like 14 different explanations (I may be making a random number up), and thats a basic premise of the setting. Then we get to the Mending..
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Definitely.
But Magic: the Gathering is a huge, expensive hobby by comparison to RPGs. They can afford wealths of design and playtesting that Exalted could never dream of, 600k$ Kickstarter or not. Playability is also by far, far MtG's first priority compared to world-building, storytelling or setting consistency. Anything else comes second to MtG's mechanics. And, really, a whole bunch of its mechanics are incredibly abstract and disconnected from its storytelling; a match of MtG is very rarely going to feel anything like a coherent narrative, and you can only vaguely correlate the card game's rules with the storyline of any given bloc.
So MtG has trade-offs, and benefits from a lot more money and manpower.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
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Oh, right. Sorry, but your counterpoint was... Not. So I kind of forgot to reply separately.
Technical language produces objectively better rulebooks. The rulebooks written with technical language are more effective at being rulebooks than the rulebooks written without. When you are writing rules, you should not intentionally avoid technical language.
Note that when I say "technical language" I mean "language where you have clearly defined terms when necessary and have consistent standards that are universally applied". It doesn't need to be opaque or arcane. Using the same level that the core book from 2e had would have been adequate. Instead, they removed the clearly defined progression from attacks that massively cut down on the amount of needed text in a way that made the time to activate effects clearer than it is in 3e.
Furthermore, using technical language for the rules will not, in any way, impact the non-rules text of a game book. It will not make the non-rules text less enjoyable to read.
So, basically, your entire post is wrong. One of the most enduringly popular games - D&D 3.5e - used technical language for almost all of its rules. It didn't make playing the game any less enjoyable, it just made the rules clearer.
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And yet, "thank god the steps are gone" is a fairly common praise of Ex3 I encounter. The clearly defined combat steps of 2e made a lot of people's skin crawl. Now, there is definitely a level of emotional investment in there; the step system is more rigorous and thus mechanically better, and its trade-offs are not on a mechanical level. But if you're dismissing "players look at this, their eyes glaze over and their interest goes down 20%" for the sake of "objective" mechanical superiority, then you don't know what the fuck you're doing.
My entire post isn't "wrong," you're just very very hung-up on this notion that the thing you don't like about a game are "objectively bad" so that you don't have to acknowledge trade-offs or opportunity costs and you can make a pithy statement about how Ex3 is bad. Unfortunately, this is silly, so you come off as not having a clue what you're talking about.
Carrnage
Human
- Location
- New Zealand
isn't this a critique of the system itself rather than the way the rules are written?
Jon Chung
=][=
That's an interesting claim. Citation plz.
Sucal
The Devil’s Cut
- Location
- Bottom of the barrel
I was considering running 3e exalted at my local gamestore when the non-backer copy is finally released. I showed a few guys that might be interested the corebook on my tablet and their eyes glazed over when they saw the sheer size of the charms section. Admittedly most of them were veteran dungeons and dragons players with memories of 3rd edition, but still.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
You know, that was my exact reaction to reading the charm chapter of E3. Odd coincidence.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
Also fair, but I don't think I'd call that a fault of technical language so much as a fault of overcomplicated mechanics. 2e's step system was godawful because it was way too granular and time-consuming to comfortably use; the problem was what was written, not how it was written.
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Yes Jon, I'm going to go scrounge through all my chat and Skype logs to find quotes by people saying this.
Or instead I could not do that. It's all anecdotal anyway; no amount of cites would convince you that this is in any way a significant trend because I don't have statistics to back it up. I frankly don't care enough to bother.
I think "are there too many Charms" is the question to end all questions that will make or break Ex3 for a lot of people, and no conclusive answer will ever be found. Or rather everyone will have their answer and hold on to it against death itself.
Sucal
The Devil’s Cut
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- Bottom of the barrel
I'd go with 'are there too many redundant charms' myself. I feel like about 80% of the charms are just variations of the same dice tricks, so they should have just gone with an excellency like solution, listing what ablities that dice trick was available in. It would have saved a crapload of word count
Carrnage
Human
- Location
- New Zealand
aren't most of the charms blander more fiddly excellencies?
Jon Chung
=][=
Emphasis mine. Then don't make those claims, man. You're trying to support an argument off anecdotes and expecting people to just buy it. Is mechanical rigor a turnoff? You say it is from anecdotes, I say it isn't, also from anecdotes - the circles I game with are very much in favour of increased rigor, because the last thing we want to do with our limited free time is bitch about semantics. This is not significant. Neither of us have any statistics, there have been no studies performed, no focus group tests, whatever.
I don't talk about the entire RPG-purchasing demographic based on generalizing from my personal anecdotes because I know I can't back it up. Would it not be easier to just not make the claim? You also must know you can't back it up.
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I make the claims a discussion deserves, dude. I'm not going to contest your anecdotes, because it's all either of us is ever going to have - "well in my circles people are that way." Which is fine, really. If you believe that "mechanical rigor" is never a turn-off based on your own experience all I can do is shrug and say I don't agree. I won't back up my claims with cites because you, on this forum, in this thread, are quite bluntly not worth the effort of digging up individual conversations from weeks- or months-old chat logs.
Well, all I can do is that and point to you that you're doing that thing where you turn a specific point made by your opponent into a general case so as to more easily counter it because the general case is easier to defend, again. I was specifically talking about 2e's combat step resolution, not "mechanical rigor" in general. I did make a broader point earlier on about how "technical/legislative best practices" had trade-off, but even that is not the same thing.
Jon Chung
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"I know people who dislike the combat step resolution" doesn't need a citation, dude. "Players read combat step resolution and lose interest by 20%" does. Where is this from? What backs up this claim? What measurement are you using? If you want it admitted as a fact and acknowledged, you can't just toss that out and expect it to stand up for itself.
I could say "Players read massive list of dice trick charms and lose interest by 20%, ignoring this is doing it wrong", but given that I can't back that up, I refrain from doing so - you or anyone else I'm arguing with can crush that argument simply by asking me where I got that from.
Oh, please. The entire conversation thread is about the worth of technical writing best practices as applied to game rules.
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samdamandias
Apprentice Plane Wizard
"Trying to do this at the table will make the DM slap you upside the head with the DMG", yes. (Some things are constant between systems.)
"Oh gods why would you do that?" yes. (The infamous DC80 Escape Artist check comes to mind.) I've not actually seen anything from 2/2.5 that does that, but some things from 3E come to mind under different interpretations.
"I don't have system mastery and want to know how to do X" yes. In part, that's what this thread is for, for Exalted
In fact, the only thing I can think of that was ambiguous was the Locate City Nuke, because Locate City specified an area of circle instead of radius, and was the only spell to do so, and never got errata.
Or, if the reason for TN modifiers is truthfully intended to be what sets apart "I have a lot of dice in Melee" from "I am specifically trained and focused to excel in Melee in ways others do not" you could sidestep all this incremental Charm purchase speedbump bullshit anyway and fold it all into something like Favored/Caste abilities anyway, the way they ALREADY DID with Excellencies.
There has not been a single justification yet which does not say, to some degree or another, that they haven't deliberately decided on the worst methods to approach their mechanical goals. Every time this gets doubled down on, the only "defense" ventured involves arguing whether there are ironclad rules for making rules or if games are even important enough to bother giving a shit about in the first place.
Its turtles all the way down. Ex3 cannot fail, it can only be failed.
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What Magic's success and resources allow is for them to do what they do a half dozen times a year (four sets, plus extra products like commander and Archenemy and so on), with full color art, global distribution, quality control, and so on. Their ability to deliver mechanically precise, and narratively evocative cards (which I'll get into more in a second) does not depend on the scale at which they operate.
What?
I mean, yes as much as that's true in the sense that in an ordered list one of those must be first priority, Magic absolutely focuses on giving cards that tell stories. You have your basic work horses like your Lightning Bolt's and your Mana Leaks (though notice, that each even the 'boring' workhorses have bits of flavor to them) which are sort of analogous to an Excellency, but for each one of those you have at least as many that are evocative like the ones I'm about to list. Admittedly, the last time I was playing a lot was back in the Innistrad block, but you cannot possibly be serious that these cards don't tell stories:
And even if it's true that the Innistrad block was one of their most successful in terms of merging story and cards, it's not uniquely successful among Magic sets. The Theros block was also a story focused block, and was basically one giant homage to Greek mythology:
And Oath of the Gatewatch, which will be coming out soon, is not an abnormally story-focused set (except in as much as they've gotten better at it over time) and has these gems. Note the two-card story interaction. This is not uncommon amongst cards in recent sets.
And I really don't think you can see this series of cards and claim that 'they only vaguely correlate to the storyline of the block'.
It is absolutely, unequivocally, emphatically possible to have bite-sized little bits of power that are both mechanically precise, and narratively evocative. This isn't about resources. Exalted 3e has been in the works for well over three years at this point. They had the time to have done it this way, if they had the inclination. I used to read Mark Rosewater's articles on the Wizards of the Coast Magic site, and if I remember right, the typical Magic set has ~8 people work on it between designers and developers over the course of about a year. So, let's call it 8 person-years give or take. 3e had Morke, Holden, Grabowski as the main developers (as credited in the book itself) over the course of over three years. So, >9 person-years of work. They had the resources.
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...Why is there no "cringe" rating? Ouch, talk about missing the joke.
We used to have a Picard facepalm.
Jon Chung
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"But if you're dismissing "players look at this, their eyes glaze over and their interest goes down 20%" for the sake of "objective" mechanical superiority, then you don't know what the fuck you're doing. "
Apparently, that is not intended to be taken seriously. Right. Why would anyone assume it was a joke? "You don't know what the fuck you're doing" is, normally, not a joke, hmmm?
I had an thought and ran with it. It is system of power increase(read more succes) in the more easy to undestand manner, for my thought experiment of Exalted-like game.
Dice: Standard (up to 5( + (up to 5 spread), without dice adders and reroll mechanics, with exception of capstone charms.
Power should increase in two ways.
First one is universal decrease of target number for your favored abilities(caste+ few chosen+ very expensively bought ones), which goes down as your power stat increases, so gaining success gets easier as you are more powerful.
Example: Normal target number is 9, but I am at power stat 4 so my target number for favored abilities is 7.
Second is universal excellency in form of success buyer(to keep it simple) for everyone supernatural, which begins as very expensive in motes but can be used for anything and then generico charms in the charm trees serve as a method to cheapen excellency when used for given ability.
example-numbers for illustration: Excellency costs 8 motes, but I have 3 cheapening charms in the beracraucy tree, Procastination method(-1), Art of delegation(-1) and Resonance of filled paperwork(-2) which makes one succes cost 4 motes.
Different splats would then differ in position of these cheapeners in the charm tree , so they would gain them at different speed and powerlevels.
Comments, thoughts?
Dice: Standard (up to 5( + (up to 5 spread), without dice adders and reroll mechanics, with exception of capstone charms.
Power should increase in two ways.
First one is universal decrease of target number for your favored abilities(caste+ few chosen+ very expensively bought ones), which goes down as your power stat increases, so gaining success gets easier as you are more powerful.
Example: Normal target number is 9, but I am at power stat 4 so my target number for favored abilities is 7.
Second is universal excellency in form of success buyer(to keep it simple) for everyone supernatural, which begins as very expensive in motes but can be used for anything and then generico charms in the charm trees serve as a method to cheapen excellency when used for given ability.
example-numbers for illustration: Excellency costs 8 motes, but I have 3 cheapening charms in the beracraucy tree, Procastination method(-1), Art of delegation(-1) and Resonance of filled paperwork(-2) which makes one succes cost 4 motes.
Different splats would then differ in position of these cheapeners in the charm tree , so they would gain them at different speed and powerlevels.
Comments, thoughts?
azoicennead
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... "made a lot of people's skin crawl"? Really?
Regardless, removing a functional system that clearly told you when effects were activated so they worked properly (and that saved word count by allowing reference while writing effects) is fine as long as you provide a system that fulfills the same need, since it's still a need.
It's not pretty, but it works pretty good. Charms that reference it have clearly defined times when they're meant to be activated.
So, uh, where is the point that counters "technical language produces objectively better rules"?
I'm not saying anything about readability. It's the job of the people editing to find the right balance between technical language and readable. But finding the balance requires not avoiding technical language. This is what editors are for.
(Look! I explained how to fix it!)
I'm not saying things not written in technical language are "objectively bad". I'm saying rules written in technical language are going to be better at doing their job than rules that aren't, because the point of technical language is to be clear and unambiguous - like rules are supposed to be. I'm saying intentionally avoiding technical language (because they think it can only produce dry, unreadable text or whatever) will result in the rules being more ambiguous.
And, again, I'm not saying they have to totally adhere to every rule of technical writing. But just, y'know, using some parts of technical writing to do the thing it was literally made to do would produce a ruleset that is clearer, less ambiguous, and as a result probably better at being a ruleset.
I mean... Sure, people might be a little less interested as they read the rules. That's probably because they went from reading fluff (e.g. description of part of the setting or what people experience in-universe when an ability is used) to reading rules text. Rules don't catch the interest of most people. That's what the fluff is for.