Except the Charm as written says 'you appear anywhere the ST deems plausible'. Not 'you appear anywhere'. It's not broken.
You are, strictly speaking, correct. It's not even broken.
To be broken, it would have to be written, and it neglected to clear that bar.
Dual-Magnus Prana doesn't shatter the game, nor does Craft. Dual-Magnus Prana doesn't screw with how the base mechanics work by fucking with your absolute panic button. None of the things I mention break how the game works. They're just things you don't like. They don't cause the horrific problems of Obsidian Shards of Infinity or let you break an important combat paradigm. They don't cause direct major problems, they just do things you don't like!
Today, January 27th, 2016, I have learned that 'people die when they are killed' is not an important combat paradigm.
Previously, I must confess, I was under the impression that it was the most fundamental of all combat paradigms.
Except the Charm isn't designed with 'this specific range limit and no other' in mind. It's designed with 'whatever the ST finds plausible based on their group' in mind. This is a valid design choice. Yes. A bad or newbie ST can misuse it.
Numerous people have addressed this before, me included. Since you disappeared from the thread rather than engage me the last time you said this, I will quote myself every time you repeat this until you address these points.
That is not a design principle I dislike.
It's not a design principle anyone dislikes, because that is not a design principle at all.
That is 'I didn't bother designing it, ST, do it to your taste' in which case why the fuck am I even buying this if you didn't do the actual job of 'making a system'. The design principle is 'make up your own system', I could do that without shelling out gobs of cash and days worth of hours to read a six-hundred-page prompt for designing my own game.
If I have the ability to make those decisions for my own table in a way that would satisfy me and all my players, I don't need the book, because I can make my own RPG off the top of my head (because that's what I'm doing to make this approach work).
Design principles have one fundamental requirement: Design has to have occurred.
In this case, it has not. The designers have said 'a thing happens, figure out the details yourselves STs'. They have inverted the proper order of things. They have performed narration, and left the game design to STs, who have inexplicably paid them for this six-hundred-page
prompt which leaves them all the work of actually designing the game.
Now, you are right in that design doesn't need to be rigid and locked-in. There is room for by-table adjudication. But there must be
guidelines for that. People are not born into the world with the knowledge of how to make a fun game already in their head. The charms tell players and GMs
nothing about the potential pitfalls, the ways to adjudicate them to make a game work in a particular way,
nothing.
Exalted 3e
does not have a GMing or Storytelling section. It has absolutely no guidelines on how to make a game happen, how to work with a story, how to handle players... I am currently reading an RPG system literally one third Ex3's size and it has a GM guidelines section and a proliferation of optional rules, indications of how they adjust the game,
probability tables so GMs can understand the probability curve of its dice... (Silhouette you may have problems and be more 90s than the actual 90s but I love you so much) For all 2e's problems, they at least gave some guidelines to GMs on how to make their games work.
Exalted 3e has
simultaneously embraced 'you must homebrew so hard' and 'the work of making the final design details of the system is on you', and
removed all support in actually doing this. The design principle you raise could work, potentially,
if Ex3 taught people how to do it. It did not. Therefore, Ex3 has failed to design, it has failed to guide STs in how to design, and it has charged them for the privilege of figuring it out themselves.
Fenrir666 said:
This is not a compelling reason to me for its removal.
It need not have its concept removed.
There can be a Charm called Dual-Magnus Prana which creates a Glorious Solar Doombot. But it will not be that Charm. Dual-Magnus Prana,
as it is in the book, does need removal.
The concept of Dual-Magnus Prana doesn't need removal, it needs
rewriting. Half the people in this thread could write a better Dual-Magnus Prana than the shit 3e gave us in the space of ten minutes. EarthScorpion just did that for God-King's Shrike.
Look, nobody thinks these charms don't have interesting, sometimes evocative concepts. They do! They call up very interesting scenes in one's head all on their own. But the way in which these concepts were executed is
trash.
If you just like the concept, you can stop. We do too.
If you like the
execution, then it's up to you to
back up why. People have explained, at great length, why they dislike the execution of these charms. 'I like it' is nice to know, but it is not an argument and it does not need to be repeated. It does not address anything that has been said at any point.
We know you like it. We know that very well. If you want to
discuss it, then it's your duty to explain
what you like about it. Not the concept, about the execution. We like the concept too, we're complaining about the execution.
Don't whine at us for disliking the execution -
explain why you like it. Perhaps if we think of it your way, we'll like it too - but we don't know
because you've never said.
Seriously, Fenrir, you do this
every Wednesday.
Please stop, or
address our points.
Well no shit about that second part. But the taste is secondary to how the lunch I ordered didn't arrive until dinnertime, wasn't what the menu said it was, and half of it was replaced by a note telling me I'd have to cook the rest myself. It may be better food than under the previous owners, but they still haven't made a good case for why I'd ever want to eat here again.
Nah.
They didn't even leave the note. Like if they'd left ingredients and a recipe? I could get behind that. If they'd left a note it'd at least be polite. But they literally just left out the food and left it to us to
notice that we'd have to cook the rest. It ain't in the book - there is
absolutely nothing about the design principles in the book.
It is Fenrir and dev quotes that are telling us this - we literally have to hunt them down so that they will tell us:
"Yeah we left that part up to you to cook. What we made wouldn't necessarily be to your taste, right?"
"Okay now how do I cook? And make it complement the existing food and maybe fine-tune it for particular tastes? You're the professional chef, you should know this, I'm literally just some guy who wanted to serve dinner to his friends."
"That's up to you!" *Runs away on a bicycle
made of your money*
God I am so glad I couldn't scrounge up the cash to back 3e.
Yes, but so are plenty more sensible interpretations. Why would you choose the most far out interpretation when it would clearly not result in having more fun? Why willfully make the Charm end up broken, when it's designed to work within the limits the ST desires for their particular game? That's what's confusing me here. You're using the 'plausible limits' thing to make the Charm less fun and less functional instead of the other way around. I'm having a hard time grasping why you'd want that.
Because he is not the only ST in the universe.
There are STs and players who will read it that way - since that is the way it is written - without, in fact, desiring it. There are STs and players who will say 'hey that's what's in the book' and run hard to that rather than adjusting for sensibility.
STs are not game design gods, Fenrir. Sometimes they can't see a problem brewing. Sometimes they just want to run the game by the rules as written rather than inventing more sensible rules themselves.
Sometimes they haven't done a detailed close reading of a
single Charm in a
two hundred page section that their player brought out on them, and only realize what's happening the moment a player's dramatic death at the hands of Mask of Winters is curtailed by his Glorious Solar Doombot and his teleportation to the Coral Archipelago.
And then their game night ends in a six-hour argument over how to interpret the rules.
And there was no malice! The player and the ST read it differently, and they never checked to make sure they had the same interpretation,
because there was no warning in the entire book that said they should consult.
I'm arguing for "stupid or not, this is the fact" because I've been accused of making a statement that is allegedly factually untrue. So I'm defending and pointing out that while it is a controversial statement about the nature of Creation (in fact I pointed to it being controversial in the very post which caused such a reaction by ES!), it is nonetheless a statement that factually exists in Exalted canon.
There is no such thing as Exalted canon.
There is only Exalted headcanon, and the texts from which it is based.
