Yzarc
The Spark of Madness
Never actually used it thought heard a lot about it. Like tons of Weapons with slight stat changes and such.
General Exalted Thread
Never actually used it thought heard a lot about it. Like tons of Weapons with slight stat changes and such.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
Perfect effects were thrown out. No guarantees, just overwhelming advantages (which would be either several stunts or one stunt costing a lot of refresh).
Animas are stunts. Basically everything is stunts. Most superpowers were rolled into martial arts styles (which are lots of stunts).
@samdamandias had pseudo-perfect stealth, what with consistently stacking to a +8 on his rolls when the skill cap was +4. That's... basically how everything was set up. No true guarantees if your opponent popped a ton of aspects at once, just an advantage.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Hmm. I always saw the abundance of Perfects as a peculiar characteristic of Exalted, one of the things that sets it apart from most other similar games. Though it makes sense that Heroic Mortals will not have access to them.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
It's a characteristic of the system, not the setting. I like a lot about the system, but I was primarily focused on getting the setting to feel right and making sure it worked with the system I'm using.
Aside from perfect defenses, stunts work well enough for my purposes to stack the deck to an extreme enough degree that it's mathematically impossible for someone to beat a character in their extreme specialties. For example, @samdamandias was consistently rolling Subterfuge at +8, which was basically impossible to beat for characters rolling at +2 or +3 unless I stacked aspects. This made his stealth functionally perfect, but technically fallible.
The party had there first chat in the middle of a bar fight, while he hid in a table plant.
samdamandias
Apprentice Plane Wizard
That was because I had one of the Wood Style stunts that said that any plant life was a valid hiding spot.
And also because I was pretty much a one-trick pony when it came to stealth. Pretty much everything I had was focused on being sneaky. Just like I'm sure if somebody from the Doggy clan* had stacked all the Command and buffing stunts they would have made any force they lead nigh-unstoppable.
*Not the real name, they effectively had 'Bloodhound' and 'Wolfpack' stunt trees, just like how Wood Style had 'Death from afar' and 'Sneaky bastard' trees
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
Well... yes and no.
The point of perfects isn't to render you immune to extras or weak opponents. Even in 2E just having a high enough DV will do that.
The point of perfects was to render you impossible to destroy to things significantly outside your weight class. It was to justify the Exalted host slaying the Primordials and noting being Wish spelled out of existence. Perfects exist so that you can survive an attack from beings whose size begins at "mountain range" and moves up from their.
Just like Ghost Eating Technique is a thing that exists partially in setting as "the Exalted can kill anything, even things that can not be killed."
samdamandias
Apprentice Plane Wizard
Will, that particular game drew heavily from Exalted, Naruto, and Legends of the Wulin. Wood being the sneaky bastard style was because Wood style grows one's Wood Chi, and by careful use of Wood Chi one can be like a tree and just sort of fade into the background.
Perfects and a bunch of other Exalted abilities exist to let Exalts face titanic beings that can redefine reality on a whim and go "U wot m8? Fite me IRL. I'll wreck u m8, I swear on me mum" and then actually do it.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
Indeed.
The ultimate goal of the Exalted combat CHarms should be to force all combat to occur on the scale of human combat; ie resolveable by individual heroic human action and the movements of armies. It should basically no sell anything above that. The Exalted Host wasn't stronger than the Primordials by any objective measure of "capable of wrecking shit" they were merely capable of forcing the Primordials to fight them on the host's terms.
Which, it turned out, the Primordials were not well prepared to do.
Then, one escaped and did come back respecced for that level of conflict and almost overthrew the entire Exalted host at the height of their power.
notthepenguins
Neither Spherical Nor Frictionless
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
To the best of my memory, this is fanon. How, exactly, Ramethus became so dangerous was never elaborated upon, and I don't even recall any canon mention of him respeccing as opposed to just preparing and planning. It was left extremely vague.
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azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
Yeah, I still like that stunt. It inspired some interesting setting developments, like menacing placement of houseplants.
That's the Tiangou Clan.
And yeah, one of them stacking all the clan stunts they could would be a very formidable commander.
(The Gates remain the most formidable for their investment, as appropriate for a Dangerous Forbidden Technique.)
But, outside perfect defenses, all of the perfect effects in Exalted tend to have a "unless contested by a perfect effect" clause that makes them... not quite perfect. The point I was making poorly was that I ditched the perfect defenses and guaranteed successes, instead just allowing specialization to create overwhelming advantages. You were invested much like a Solar picking up Easily Overlooked Presence Method, so people would only notice you if they invested like someone with Keen (Sense) Technique.
The Wood and Metal styles drew inspiration from the Codex Alera series, so Wood was stealth/sniping. Air was acrobatics and flight, Fire was going to off-shoot into emotional manipulation, Water into empathy and communication, and Earth had infrastructure.
(The lost fourth child of the ancient emperor founded an order of infrastructure ninjas to keep shit running in spite of his siblings breaking things; they use the Earth style.)
Fair enough.
My point still stands that they didn't really fit into what I was building, which is more inspired by Exalted than an attempt at a full port of the system and setting. If the heroes of the setting don't have to fight mountain ranges, you don't need something that can stop a punch from a mountain.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Well, Exalted does have tiers of perfection, yes. But it's still perfect when not confronted by supernatural opposition. E.g. Larceny lets you open a lock, any lock, any level of complication, as long as it's not magical; Judge's Ear Technique lets you defend against lies and make perfect judgements about truth and lies, so long as no magic is involved; Graceful Crane Stance lets you keep your balance on anything (even many things that shouldn't hold your weight); Sagacious Reading of Intent lets you remain unswayed by any argument so long as the intention behind it is hostile to you or your Motivation; Survival lets you find food in five minutes in the wilderness, whether it's a dense jungle or the lifeless uninhabitable desert of
I think the existence of such charms makes a statement of the things the Solars can do in the setting. And the fact that they're stuff like perfect find food as opposed to do not need to eat is part of the Exalted flavour and what sets it apart from other games.
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Lealope
Not yet invincible
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Would you mind telling me a little bit more about this?
It's detailed in Dreams of the First Age. At some point during the First Age, a primordial who fled came back and waged a one primordial war against the Exalted Host. It took some time before he was defeated, with the implication that it was a hard fought battle that was similar to a guerrilla campaign. That's all that's canon.
Roughly 108 years to track him down and deal with him, IIRC.
Indeed, it was also explicitly noted that multiple veteran Exalts of the Primordial War (which to me implies Elder Essence Ratings) got ganked.
I'd actually go even further than that. Taking down a Primordial shouldn't be a combat, it should be an adventure. Like destroying the One Ring or something. It should totally TOTALLY involve a ton of combat, but you don't just fight something like She Who Live In Her Name by sticking a daiklave in her.
You happen to do that as well, sometimes, but it's way more than that. Taking down a Primordial should involve a bunch of celestial exalted plumbing the depths of forgotten caves, battling their sub-souls, making risky alliances between implacable foes, desperately searching through forgotten knowledge in the desperate hope of crafting a weapon capable of exposing their inner being. Stuff like that. It feels anti-climactic to just battle them out in a pitched fight.
In fact I would hope that if you just lined up all the exalted and all the primordials in a gigantic field and said "Okay fight to the death." the primordials would school them. Their victory in the actual war shouldn't feel inevitable, it should feel like they were one minute from midnight on the doomsday clock, but right at the eleventh hour they just barely managed to do what should have been impossible, through teamwork, skill and great effort.
Jon Chung
=][=
This is the model I use to avoid inflation/stupidity with high essence bullshit:
a) The Primordial is the game level map. It is too big to interact with you directly. It can only directly impose environmental conditions and large-scale effects, which are the sort of things Exalted Charms should find very easy to ignore.
b) The Third Circle Demons are the equivalent of area bosses. Killing the fetich with Ghost-Eating Technique is a win, the Primordial itself is never directly engaged: you cannot kill a Dyson Sphere with a sword, but if it has a human-scaled heart you can stab to death, that is a non-problem.
c) The Second Circles and First Circles are their officers and soldiers, against which you will wage total war against within the hostile alien environment of the Primordial.
a) The Primordial is the game level map. It is too big to interact with you directly. It can only directly impose environmental conditions and large-scale effects, which are the sort of things Exalted Charms should find very easy to ignore.
b) The Third Circle Demons are the equivalent of area bosses. Killing the fetich with Ghost-Eating Technique is a win, the Primordial itself is never directly engaged: you cannot kill a Dyson Sphere with a sword, but if it has a human-scaled heart you can stab to death, that is a non-problem.
c) The Second Circles and First Circles are their officers and soldiers, against which you will wage total war against within the hostile alien environment of the Primordial.
Then how did a Solar fetich-kill Adrian?
Sucal
The Devil’s Cut
- Location
- Bottom of the barrel
Ghost-Eating Technique
Maybe you misunderstood. Under the model he proposed, fighting through the Primordial and using GET on its Fetich is how you kill it. So, then, how would a Solar permanently kill just the fetich, and turn Adrian to Adorjan?
- Location
- The end of all things
Ghost-Regurgitation Technique?
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Permakilling a Primordial into a Neverborn - as opposed to just fetich-killing it into reforming - requires killing all its other Third Circles first. The Solar who fetich-deathed Adrian skipped all those level bosses to go kill the final boss and get rid of her early, since it was more important to neutralise her fast than to do it right.
Salty
Shadow Cabal Assumptor Supreme
- Location
- Sun, Moon, Talia
- Pronouns
- I/Me
The process described is how you fetch-kill a Primordial. The requirements to actually kill one of them have never been elaborated upon and are a really, really horrible idea.
Since that's how you get Neverborn.
Sucal
The Devil’s Cut
- Location
- Bottom of the barrel
Hey, to be fair the Neverborn were safely sealed away until a certain circle of dumbasses decided to wake them up.
Even the only five are awake.
Ultimately, I think one of the biggest problems which has crippled Exalted since day one is that, while mechanical options like Perfects serve as a cool reminder of what the Exalted once needed to overcome the Primordials, the way they exist in the game currently is still as "Old and Powerful, yet Ultimately Irrelevant Technology" in the same sense that Warstriders do. The Primordial War was already fought and finished. It happened already, and while you personally missed the boat, now the purpose of the Exalted should be going out there and finding something else to focus these tools towards.
So this kind of leaves Perfects in a sort of weird state. One where they're certainly useful to have within a given context, but neither the setting or system has made a good enough niche-replacement for the same kind of "unwrite you from reality" situations/conflicts where having one is a viable gameplay element and not simply a combat safety net or chargen bling, but without actually going in and re-implementing "unwrite you from reality" powers in the attempt.
But its a whole lot easier to do so, really. Especially when you need a cheap and simple force multiplier for "this bad guy is the Real Shit."
Which means that writers and STs alike, for lack of good alternatives, are continually forced to reinvent the 'Primordial War' niche of "shit you need Perfects for" on increasingly smaller scales to try and GIVE them new relevance for still existing (leading to subsequent obnoxiously powerful disintegration beams, soul-punches, etc). There's such a hard pushback against moving past the Primordial War model as the defining mechanical precedent for determining large-scale dramatic conflicts, and the idea that "Exalt vs Exalt combat is all about slinging mountains at eachother until someone gets bored," which is something which in retrospect has only been more harmful for the game than beneficial.
Which is why some of the worst stuff in the whole gameline has been an endless treadmill of taking the Yozis or the Neverborn and trying to spin them into "the new Primordial War" despite their toothless natures, or inflating Deathlords, Elder Exalted or even the Raksha up into the same comparable realm of "don't fuck with" power in order to replace the Primordials within that niche.
So this kind of leaves Perfects in a sort of weird state. One where they're certainly useful to have within a given context, but neither the setting or system has made a good enough niche-replacement for the same kind of "unwrite you from reality" situations/conflicts where having one is a viable gameplay element and not simply a combat safety net or chargen bling, but without actually going in and re-implementing "unwrite you from reality" powers in the attempt.
But its a whole lot easier to do so, really. Especially when you need a cheap and simple force multiplier for "this bad guy is the Real Shit."
Which means that writers and STs alike, for lack of good alternatives, are continually forced to reinvent the 'Primordial War' niche of "shit you need Perfects for" on increasingly smaller scales to try and GIVE them new relevance for still existing (leading to subsequent obnoxiously powerful disintegration beams, soul-punches, etc). There's such a hard pushback against moving past the Primordial War model as the defining mechanical precedent for determining large-scale dramatic conflicts, and the idea that "Exalt vs Exalt combat is all about slinging mountains at eachother until someone gets bored," which is something which in retrospect has only been more harmful for the game than beneficial.
Which is why some of the worst stuff in the whole gameline has been an endless treadmill of taking the Yozis or the Neverborn and trying to spin them into "the new Primordial War" despite their toothless natures, or inflating Deathlords, Elder Exalted or even the Raksha up into the same comparable realm of "don't fuck with" power in order to replace the Primordials within that niche.