Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
Against peer level opponents its going to be parried and sent 1000 yards away.
General Exalted Thread
Against peer level opponents its going to be parried and sent 1000 yards away.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Technically by RAW you can just aim it at the ground, or a tree. Trees can't parry.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
Defend Other to the rescue!
How're you gonna do that, when, say, I detonated it on top of the building you were in?
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
I'm an Essence 5 combat Exalt. There are ways.
Carrnage
Human
- Location
- New Zealand
Jump in front of the beam and parry it, Duh.
Frakir's brother
Goodbye.
- Location
- The Sea of Trees
So I heard the phrase "Teen Titans", and instead of thinking of the show, I instead imagined Mardukth holding Autochthon in an arm-bar saying: "Say my name, bitch!"
Edit:Although, wouldn't that setting make Autochthon a school shooter?
Edit 2: Kimberry would be that bipolar teen mom. Everybody join in!
Edit:Although, wouldn't that setting make Autochthon a school shooter?
Edit 2: Kimberry would be that bipolar teen mom. Everybody join in!
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Okay, so, in your games, all your NPCs have the perfect builds to counter anything the PCs could throw at them, then? Fuck Solar Sorcery, fuck traps, fuck anything but a straight up slugfest? I question that this is a good approach to running games.
I have trouble envisioning any game where the existence of "counter builds" is somehow a bad thing, or else you run into situations where both sides endlessly go back and forth between "I use my gimmick" "but then I use my gimmick" ad nauseam instead of actually turning the uses of gimmicks into a form of legitimate contest the player can be invested in to illustrate their character's mastery of the subject. Unless you are using the definition of Counter which means automatic binary failure against the opposing side, in which case yes, shitty game mechanics tend to result in pretty shitty player feedback.
I realize this is all pretty tangental to the ongoing "I shot you!" "Nuh uh, I'm wearing a vest!" "Well my bullets are explosive!" "Well my vest is also fireproof!" "Its an ICE explosion!" entirely theoretical mechanics argument, but it felt worth acknowledging.
I realize this is all pretty tangental to the ongoing "I shot you!" "Nuh uh, I'm wearing a vest!" "Well my bullets are explosive!" "Well my vest is also fireproof!" "Its an ICE explosion!" entirely theoretical mechanics argument, but it felt worth acknowledging.
Nah, more like...as an ST, I think making sure your antagonists are immune to your player's best tricks is mean. I think if you have a Solar Sorcerer in your group and everyone is okay with your Solar Sorcerer being the one to end this, nuking the meeting your enemies are currently having should be an acceptable way to end the conflict with those particular foes. Rather than making sure the Dusk Caste has the perfect Athletics+Awareness+Melee investment to no-sell using Solar Circle Sorcery to wipe out not only them but their entire reinforced, heavily guarded headquarters and everyone therein.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
No, but peer level direct combat opponents are not going to die to a single spell. You want to take on a Essence 5 combat monster? You don't try to hit him with a nuke, you don't confront him head on at all if you can help it. I'm not letting 32xp worth of investment defeat 200+xp worth of investment in their area of specialty.
You want to defeat the Dawn Caste? Invest as much XP as him into combat Charms.
So yes, shitty mechanics like flawless immunity leads to shitty player feedback.
At the same time though, as a player being able to go around absolutely trivializing your supposedly-equal enemies via edge-case gimmicks is fun maybe like, the first five times it happens. Because you feel as though you were clever and gamed the system. But after that, it simply becomes a parade of steamrollers, which is more like going through the motions of playing a game than actually feeling like anything worthwhile got accomplished.
Yeah I strongly, immensely, completely disagree with this approach. We'll just have to disagree on how this stuff should be handled.
Well, after they killed a dude with a freaking nuke, then its more reasonable that their enemies would try to be more ready for this in the future. Rather than immense investment in being the best stabber person also included being immune to being wiped out by a powerful sorcerer targeting you where you thought you were safe.
If an Essence 5 Solar Exalt is not specced to survive the number 1 cause of death for Solars in the Second Age ie death from ambush, what has he been doing with his XP?
Hell, how did he survive that long in the first place?
Besides, IIRC, Total Annihilation requires standing within 200 yards of your target before casting said spell.
Having your sorcerer do that against an optimized Dawn is begging for Critical Existence Failure.
This is exactly why I hate 2e so fucking much. Optimizing should never be the default assumption. By the way? Surprise Anticipation method won't save you from that. It removes the surprise tag. You still have a split second to react to your world being a split second from consisting of unblockable undodgeable unsoakable death. Not really enough, without specfic Charms, to go 'Okay I just jump up and parry it in a quarter second'
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Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
/Me scratches head
Can you unpack this? Because as it stands I'm inclined to ask 'why not', but there's a few things you could mean by this.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
Exalted isn't Pokemon. You don't fight my Dawn type with your Twilight type and use Total Annihilation because it is Super Effective.
Exalted is a game where beating a Dawn in the arena of Dawn stuff requires another Dawn, and defeating a Twilight in the arena of Twilight stuff requires another Twilight.
You can certainly 'defeat' a Dawn by changing the arena of conflict, because Exalted again isn't Pokemon and not all conflict is a race to see who Faints first. Dawns have goals such as 'secure a city' or 'rescue my loved ones' or what have you. If you walk up to a Dawn in front of the gates of his city and try to Total Annihilation it then damn straight he's going to volleyball that thing into a nearby ravine. Instead you should do stuff like plants rumors to lead him outside the city (ie, a Night Arena thing) and then, when he's gone, you can nuke it all you want. Or maybe you Zenith him by turning the populace against him or Eclipse him by tricking him into surrendering the city to you or what have you.
But no, I don't think 'I cast a spell' is clever play that should be rewarded by bypassing significant peer opponents in their area of specialty.
It's a Solar Circle spell. It requires 15 seconds of loud chanting and fireworks on par with a 16+ totemic anima display. You're not getting a surprise attack with it.
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azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
People who think they don't optimize are hilarious.
You try to make sure your characters do things well, right? Welcome to optimization.
Sure. Firstly and probably least important is this: People don't optimize and Charms aren't a distinct in-setting thing. I think even lots of people who do heroic things IRL don't spend their time self-examining how to be a perfectly optimal person. I don't think most Exalts are gonna be the sort of person who sits down and thinks about their newfound superpowers and tests everything to get the absolute most effective result. They're gonna go the directions their personality leads them, and a lot of times this won't be super optimal. Mr. Athletics might actually be pretty shitty at parrying and dodging, going just brawl/resistance to tank stuff like crazy, but leaving gaping blindspots in his build. Nine times out of ten it doesn't matter, because he's an Atheltics/Resistance master, maybe with some brawl. Doesn't really need to be super optimized. Then he gets in a fight with someone who can keep up with him and hit him hard enough, and then he dies, and this feels way realer to me than "I am so smart and understanding of the exact nature of my superpowers that I realized I could optimize and be prepared for literally anything". Which feels really silly to me.
Secondly? A lot of players don't optimize, and fuck treating 'everyone is optimized and ready' as a default assumption and force your players to sink or swim, that shit is not fun unless you sign on for it.
Thirdly, setting where everything is optimized is boring to me. I like building enemies with deliberate holes in their builds, because they were the sort of person that wouldn't think of this as a disadvantage, or they thought their defenses were more absolute than they were, or they didn't think they'd ever be caught without their bodyguards, or whatever. People make mistakes! People make dumb choices! And Exalts are powerful enough to avoid the consequences of not thinking shit through for quite a long damned time, if they aren't killed young!
Stringing together a set of powers you find cool and want to play should produce a functional character. This is something I think should be core to any game, and it's something Third Edition actually does fairly well.
(It's worth noting, I think, that I am the player who sets out half the time to be literally unkillable.)
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This is a world where the largest Empire extant makes it a point of policy to hunt down and kill Solar Exalts.
Where death by literal teacup ninja is a thing, two Primordial-backed power blocks are looking to kill or subvert every unaligned Celestial Exalt walking Creation, and the Raksha always lurk.
And you suggest that optimization should not be the default assumption?
It's like enlisting in the military and complaining about having to meet minimum qualifications to survive.
One can plausibly claim ignorance for a newbie Solar out of chargen making suboptimal choices, and playing that accordingly.
But at Essence 5?
The idea that he hasn't optimized for survival and somehow lived that long is frankly risible.
You are shaping a 65 mote Adamant Circle spell at a distance of 200 yards from your target.
Your anima will be going full totemic and you will be chanting
Surprise is not a thing you can achieve.
Not unless you have a five dot Sorcery Capturing Cord and preloaded it.
You don't even need a perfect defense to dodge or parry TA, just a charm assisted one.
And stunts are a thing.
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notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
So you just buy Dual Magnus Prana? Because that's all you need to be literally unkillable.
Why don't you actually learn how 3e works before making wild claims, hmm? Because that's not how it works.
No. Actually, just no. Whenever I get in these arguments I argue with eight people at once and end up frustrated and miserable and being a jerk. I am going to learn from this mistake. And unwatch this thread for now, and just agree that my opinions in this thread are often wildly unpopular, and that disagreeing isn't a bad thing that must be argued to the death.
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The game should be balanced for optimized play. The ST should adjust his challenges to the players depending on their level of optimization. If your players are tossing a bunch of different ideas together you don't have to send the murdersquids at them, you can use the clown hobo enemies to keep everything fun.