Note that fighting a Third Circle is still on the level of fighting an overwhelmingly powerful god-being who can fuck up your shit unless you have perfect defenses. Remember that Ligier alone can be summoned and pull out his sword and throw it into the air and the sword alone will fight off entire armies and any challenges and then, if you manage to defeat just the sword then he will gracefully concede the fight rather than going all out with the city shattering nuclear hellfire.

It's easy to forget that while Malfeas is a Dyson Sphere, Ligier is a sun.

And yes, he is an acceptable final boss.

So while Jon has a point, its less of one than he thinks it is. Third Circles include stuff like a ravine that is literally infinitely deep or a being of millions of eyes whose sweat drops to the world and forms buildings made of glass. If Yozi are the map, its the campaign map and the individual Third Circles are themselves entire dungeons.
 
Peori, that comes from the same source which allows Ligier to use all of Malfeas' own powers for a scene. Do you really want to go there? In my view, that's just more bad information that should be discarded because it produces stupid outcomes.

Remember, a Third Circle demon can be summoned by Exalts - the balance factor here is "PC power". It's allowed to be deliberately overpowered for cost-to-versatility to make a point, but still needs to be considered. Sure, it's fine to make Ligier something you really should have perfect defenses to be able to take on, but let's not get too carried away here with hyping up what they do.
 
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Peori, that comes from the same source which allows Ligier to use all of Malfeas' own powers for a scene. Do you really want to go there? In my view, that's just more bad information that should be discarded because it produces stupid outcomes.

Games of Divinity, page 93: "Ligier, as a fetich, is significantly stronger than a typical demon of the Third Circle. He considers a small army of Dragon-blooded or a Circle of experienced Solar Exalted a fair match. Anything less does not concern him. His combative power can empty battlefields."

It does go on to note that he isn't as powerful as he thinks, but the fact is that "army destroying nuclear hellfire" is basically his power set. And Celestial Exalts are supposed to be able to take him on, it explicitly notes this in the text.

EDIT: There is, after all, a reason that even at the height of the First Age they still held an annual gathering of all the Solars capable of summoning Third Circles to specifically prevent them from doing just that.
 
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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.
I think that's a rather narrow vision of what Perfects can be useful for. For instance, Lock-Opening Touch isn't there to enable starting characters to open the locks on the inner sanctum of Malfeas (who's Essence 10 and surely adds it as successes in the contest of perfects). But it is there to denote that Solars embody perfection, and that the Solar Thief will not be stopped by the lock of even the most masterful human locksmith, not even Fort Knox from the year 3,000. Magical locks - maybe, but even so, only the most powerful magical beings will be able to oppose Solars in this case (remember, Solars add auto-successes equal to Essence), and even so, Solars can try again and again, for practice makes perfect, and trial and error is the path to success.

(I must admit that before @Shyft's Essays, I think about this aspect of Perfects either.)
 
Vick Wall they are referring to perfect defenses, not perfect effects.
 
yeah, you're confusing Perfect Effect with a subtype of 'Perfect Defense'. PDs are invariably Combat Tech, while Perfect Effects extend outwards into other systems.
Post I quoted said 'Perfects', not 'PDs'/'Perfect Defences', while ignoring other Perfects. Also, it was written in the wake of the recent subtopic of @azoicennead saying that Perfects are part of the system but not the setting, my reply, @Aaron Peori's reply etc. At least that's the context in which it seemed relevant, and thus the context in which I replied.
 
Post I quoted said 'Perfects', not 'PDs'/'Perfect Defences', while ignoring other Perfects. Also, it was written in the wake of the recent subtopic of @azoicennead saying that Perfects are part of the system but not the setting, my reply, @Aaron Peori's reply etc. At least that's the context in which it seemed relevant, and thus the context in which I replied.
The colloquial use of "Perfects" is almost exclusively a reference to Perfect Defenses. The further read of the post should probably have made that clear.
 
Besides, the whole 'you need perfects because oh gods look at these mountain smashing death rays flung by swords' thing is stupid. Not least of which because you simply can't beat perfects with mountain smashing death rays, and any attempts to do so is futile.

No, if mountain smashing death rays have a purpose it's in their utility of destroying mountains and smaller, mountain like things like fortresses. They are not for fighting other Exalts. Using them to fight other Exalts is a waste of effort. Using them to fight the Yozi mano a Yozi is also a waste of effort, but from the side of it not being big enough.

For other Exalts, as other Exalts are generally rather lacking in the hardiness necessary to come even close to tanking blows like that, you want the rather more subtle 'man sized chunk of magic steel applied to the forehead approach.' And in that case perfects are mostly useful in 'not dying instantly the moment someone tries that.'
 
Yeah, I was referring to Perfect Defenses on the whole, because other utility-focused Perfects don't deform the game narrative around exclusively cosmic-scale challenges at the high end.
 
I think that's a rather narrow vision of what Perfects can be useful for. For instance, Lock-Opening Touch isn't there to enable starting characters to open the locks on the inner sanctum of Malfeas (who's Essence 10 and surely adds it as successes in the contest of perfects). But it is there to denote that Solars embody perfection, and that the Solar Thief will not be stopped by the lock of even the most masterful human locksmith, not even Fort Knox from the year 3,000. Magical locks - maybe, but even so, only the most powerful magical beings will be able to oppose Solars in this case (remember, Solars add auto-successes equal to Essence), and even so, Solars can try again and again, for practice makes perfect, and trial and error is the path to success.

(I must admit that before @Shyft's Essays, I think about this aspect of Perfects either.)

Actually at least in third Ed that last part isn't true, I think exactly for that reason. It still opens the magical lock if you fail the roll, but some unwanted occurrence happens like a trap or alarm or something gets sprung.
 
Actually at least in third Ed that last part isn't true, I think exactly for that reason. It still opens the magical lock if you fail the roll, but some unwanted occurrence happens like a trap or alarm or something gets sprung.
Well, 3e is different, indeed. There seems to exist an opinion that 3e wants to unwrite all the borgstromantic statements that were written in 2e when describing how Solars and their magic works and interacts with the world, and I think said opinion may have certain merit.
 
Well, 3e is different, indeed. There seems to exist an opinion that 3e wants to unwrite all the borgstromantic statements that were written in 2e when describing how Solars and their magic works and interacts with the world, and I think said opinion may have certain merit.

The important point to remember here, is that 3e is attempting to cater to the needs of a game before a setting. The charms are no longer setting statements, but instead bite-sized chunks of play-resolution.

The charm you described above is a perfect example of it: "I pick the lock, but I trip the alarm- Drama! Intrigue! Gameplay, delivered to me in a perfect, digestible morsel!"
 
Yeah, I was referring to Perfect Defenses on the whole, because other utility-focused Perfects don't deform the game narrative around exclusively cosmic-scale challenges at the high end.

What perfects did was effectively cap the power level, or at least they were supposed to. You could never get a better defense than Heavenly Guardian Defense/Seven Shadow Evasion and no attack could pierce them. The idea, I believe, was to force the scale to stop growing. Basically once you got to 'parry landslide' there was no point stating up attacks for anything more dangerous, because the optimal solution was always HGD.

Since Solars were also the strongest Exalts, and thus strongest playable type, by default this also was supposed to effectively cap the entire game line. "Look guys, there is no point in adding attacks for level mountain ranges as anything but story effects since HGD just works." The point was to game outward, rather than upward. To work in that range between mortals and Solars as the established levels of power.

Of course, many writers didn't want to do this and we ended up with the scenario you describe. Eventually someone wanted to power scale upwards and so we ended up with transperfect combat; that is not combat which can overcome perfects but combat built entirely around their existence as high level building blocks. This started in middle 1e with Sidereals, which contained our first high level combat charms (we also see here the first use of perfects as bread-and-butter effects with Impeding the Flow being the first 3m semi-perfect, ie it always worked against anything it was possible for you to parry). When 2e came around they tapped Borgstrom, the author of 1e Sidereals, as the author of the charm chapters. It is thus not surprising that she basically took the same attitude to 2e combat that she did to 1e combat, with perfects being a specific utility effect of the basic combat system and balancing everything around them.

This was probably a mistake. It compressed what should have been the high end of the game down even further, leaving less available conflict in the game between mortal and "well everyone is perfecting everything now so we're not even rolling dice at this point" than 1e had. This meant when Ink Monkeys eventually got involved they jumped straight into transperfect combat which led to all sorts of cosmic scale bullshit.

The game should be designed such that you establish a maximum power level and perfects create a ceiling for that. Once you hit the perfect range, the game ceases to be the game. Then perfects should force it back down. You can't overcome perfects with spammed perfect-or-die effects, or you shouldn't be able to anyway. You should beat it by attacking in the range of effects that is just below the perfect range so the game is forced down the the maximum scale you find utility in representing in play.
 
Actually an interesting thing happened to me in the game I run last week. My PCs were just about to hit essence 2 and I put them up against a lesser elemental dragon of water. I was a bit worried that it might be too strong for them, a new feeling this edition, but I quickly fell back on "Solars are bullshit, there's a full circle of them and one is a dawn." To my great surprise they desperately talked their way out of the ordeal.

Apparently when they saw all the stuff he had, the venom breath, the legendary size, ect. They legit thought they couldn't take him.

Then I had to come to terms with the fact that there was a creature in the book that could take a circle of just past chargen Solars. Which is crazy, there's five of them, they're Solars, and there's a core book published creature that they can't just annihilate? It definitely produced some better role playing and stuff though than just a straight up PC beat down would have.
 
Your group could probably have taken it. Action economy is a hell of a thing, and it's always easy to underestimate Solar Bullshit.

Still, having a cautious group isn't exactly bad, so good for you.
 
Your group could probably have taken it. Action economy is a hell of a thing, and it's always easy to underestimate Solar Bullshit.

Still, having a cautious group isn't exactly bad, so good for you.
Yeah, the only problem was going to be it could hit them all with its breath weapon right off the bat and get gods knows how much initiative from crashing the whole party, and then next round it makes three decisive attacks and probably kills three people.

Worth noting I have a perfect circle, so the eclipse has like 3 archery charms, the zenith has two brawl charms, the twilight's only means of attack is Brilliant Raptor...
 
Flowey the Flower: The Martial Art! Now with extra Chara!

Well, first off, let me say that this is fuckin' sweet and I approve of Undertale references!

Blossoms of Infinite Passion: This is absolutely cool and flavorful... But I'm not entirely sure how useful it is. The way the charm is written, it looks like the Blossoms are still physical objects that could presumably be disarmed, stolen, and so on. It lacks the niche something like Summoning the Loyal Steel or Glorious Solar Saber, since it doesn't have that "I am always armed, or at least capable of instantly arming myself" trick. Ultimately, why should I take this charm instead of going to the market and buying some normal weapons (or, if using the Sutra, investing in an artifact throwing weapon)?

Love of Violence Atemi: Another very cool attack - I 'm not entirely sure on the balance, though. Most abilities that inflict a penalty to defense only inflict -1, but on the other hand this is costlier.

No Escape from Pain: This could maybe use a powerup - at the moment, it's significantly worse than Tiger Style's Stalking Cat Movement Meditation, since that's scene-long and works out to medium range.

You Can't Dodge Forever: This seems... Pretty strong, to be honest. While it only works with withering attacks (which seems kinda odd to me, thematically, since this brings to mind how you kill Sans), the ability to trigger it after using your doomcombo and have it replace all the mote costs in that seems pretty fuckin' badass. Still, not quite as powerful as Iron Whirlwind Attack, so probably within reason.

Gilded Blossoms of Determination Form: Very cool, very flavorful, but I'm not sure what exactly it's supposed to accomplish. The initiative cost for entering suggests you want to stop your enemies from getting close, while the initiative you steal from people retreating suggests you want them to keep close to you. Also, without the sutra this does nothing to help you with someone already in melee range just beating your face in, or a sniper outside your range just shooting you a bunch.

Dream-Eater's Hunger: Another pretty powerful effect: it won't get you as many motes as Ghost-Eating Technique, but it gives you willpower even without killing spirits, and you can activate it when you know you've killed an opponent rather than activating it before you attack and hoping it works. Plus, giving you blossoms is a nice bonus. I'd probably consider either increasing the cost a little or making it supplement a decisive attack rather than being able to use it after the fact.

Stolen Souls Howling: Just generally pretty nice - it's powerful, flavorful, and dangerous to both victim and user.

Torment Never Ends: I like it! Offers even greater reward for even greater risk. The condition to use it is somewhat limiting, but that can be mitigated by putting You Can't Dodge Forever once or twice on the previous attack to make sure that it works.

Dreams Never Die: This is basically a direct port of Heavenly Guardian Defense, except it trades away the ability to block Uncountable damage for explicitly saying that it nullifies additional effects of the attack instead of just damage. Useful, but nothing super exciting.

This Is My World: Another port, this time of Heaven Sword Flash, with a few differences: It loses the bonuses against minor opponents, costs slightly more, and you have to divide your initiative up rather than getting to have half initiative against every single opponent. It does, however, hit out to Short range instead of Close. That said, the ability to hit tons of opponents is slightly less appealing when you have to divide your initiative between all of them for the purposes of damage.

Hopes and Dreams Apotheosis: We Omega Flowey now! Legendary size is a nice buff, the boost to the Form is nice (although I'd still like to see the form give some generally applicable bonuses rather than just affecting enemies coming and going), the upgrades to gaining and using blossoms are nice too. I very much like the post-use effect - it basically encourages you to go on a soul stealing rampage preying on the weak, since otherwise you'll have too many dulled souls and will wind up taking WAAAAY to much agg damage. The fact that you'll likely be spending souls while rampaging and thus needing to rampage further is just icing on the cake.
 
So basically Aaron, it'd have been better if perfects were Essence 5 capstone Charms in defensive Charm trees?

Hmm. I'd say the opposite. Instead of having them be Essence 5 top tier effects have them be incredibly low Essence (say, 2) effects available in chargen. The trick would be they should be prohibitively expensive to apply against any effect which isn't an insta-kill. Perfect effects are panic buttons and should only apply to effects outside of the normal range of combat.

Obviously this requires balancing combat such that pier level combatants aren't spamming insta-kill level effects. This isn't just in the literal sense of save or die (or no save as the case may be) effects but that damage scaling has to be survivable as well. So if a standard two dot artifact weapon is pumping damage up to 10d post soak and you only have 7 HL then you aren't balancing combat effectively on the pier scale and forcing the perfect into effect more than it should be.

This requires a rigorous game built from the ground up to accommodate a certain scale of action; say anything from 1d to 20d is 'acceptable' damage and 21d+ is the realm of Perfect Defenses. You need to make certain that no combination of attributes, abilities, mutations, equipment/artifacts and charms/sorcery can easily pump damage up to 21+d, at least not without being significantly more expensive than the cost of a perfect defense.

For example, if PD costs 10m, 1wp per use than the minimum cost for getting 21+d of damage should be 20m, 2wp. This includes multiple actions (if you attack twice for 11d damage, then you damage is 22d and should be costed appropriately). Though better to just eliminate multiple attacks entirely and leave that to stunting.

This requires you to have a more robust set of combat effects than "I increase damage" or "I hit multiple times" to keep the game interesting but I don't think I have a problem with that. High end Charms would then be less about spamming ultimate death ray attacks and more about mastery of the sub 20d damage environment.
 
Games of Divinity, page 93: "Ligier, as a fetich, is significantly stronger than a typical demon of the Third Circle. He considers a small army of Dragon-blooded or a Circle of experienced Solar Exalted a fair match. Anything less does not concern him. His combative power can empty battlefields."

It does go on to note that he isn't as powerful as he thinks, but the fact is that "army destroying nuclear hellfire" is basically his power set. And Celestial Exalts are supposed to be able to take him on, it explicitly notes this in the text.

EDIT: There is, after all, a reason that even at the height of the First Age they still held an annual gathering of all the Solars capable of summoning Third Circles to specifically prevent them from doing just that.

That's reasonable, if the intention here is "you really should be an Exalt to fight a Third Circle, and for a fetich you either have perfect whatever or die". That's not particularly terrible as mechanical consequences go.

What I dislike is not perfect defenses, but the utter stupidity of the high-essence charmset in SMA and late 2E.
 
Question time; do the Mist-Demons count as dematerialised all the time ('cause they're fog) or can mortal stab them with a spear that isn't enchanted?

Another thing; does anyone know some source or homebrew that has some intresting information on the ancient Lintha. Not so much the crunch, but the fluff is more important right now. I want to get a bigger picture of just how far the current generation of Lintha have fallen.
 
Certainly at least one of the elements they've lost is their art and craft and beauty stuff - there are entire branches of Lintha magic that they just don't have anymore, because making beautiful things and expressing themselves has been lost to their modern-day savagery. And I don't mean crafting as in artifact-crafting; it would have been largely artistic stuff; of no practical use (which is why it was lost) but representative of the prettier side to their culture that valued things that weren't bloodstained.
 
Another thing; does anyone know some source or homebrew that has some intresting information on the ancient Lintha. Not so much the crunch, but the fluff is more important right now. I want to get a bigger picture of just how far the current generation of Lintha have fallen.
Honestly, my view is that there shouldn't be any modern-day Lintha.

Sure, there's a big inbred family of demon-worshiping pirates that call themselves Lintha, and many of them are demon-blooded or water-touched or bear the deformations characteristic of the ocean of Hell. Their bloodline, however, bears no more of the Lintha divinity than your average coast-dwelling fisherwoman, and any powers they lay claim to are the result of their demonic partners, not the inheritance of ancient favour. Their blood is as pure as saltwater, and even their culture is a desperate half-conceived mashup of distorted mutant traditions, the alien recollections of ancient spirit patrons, and the misinterpretations of time-worn salt-washed tablets of lore.

Perhaps, somewhere on a barnacle-peak in Bluehaven, there lies a howdah lined with stolen silk and shielded against the sun by curtains of thick rubbery leather. In it sits a skinless, deformed thing, brittle legs locked into the lotus position. Its eyes are bulging and blind. Its tongue is stubby and coarse. One arm bends back on itself. It cannot feed without aid, and there is a hole in its side that will not heal but bubbles grotesquely when it breathes. It is the final product of a great pyramid of inbreeding and genetic distillation, the purest living Lintha in all Creation. It is an object of devoted worship and tender awe, on an island where brutal cruelty starts with sunrise and ends while the moon is high.

And if you were to squeeze it like a lemon, perhaps one small teacup of blood would carry the ancient heritage of the Lintha.
 
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Question time; do the Mist-Demons count as dematerialised all the time ('cause they're fog) or can mortal stab them with a spear that isn't enchanted?

Another thing; does anyone know some source or homebrew that has some intresting information on the ancient Lintha. Not so much the crunch, but the fluff is more important right now. I want to get a bigger picture of just how far the current generation of Lintha have fallen.

Well, in case you haven't seen them, here's my fast Lintha rules which mean they're using Spirit Charms and aren't as dumb as the Blood and Salt ones who use Solar Charms.
 
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