notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
Dual Magnus prana makes you immune to death. All you have to do is spend some wxp, which is ridiculously easy to come by. This is written in the corebook.
General Exalted Thread
- Thread starter Aleph
- Start date
Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
Look, as much as I have my own problems with the guy, I'm with @Fenrir555 here. Optimization shouldn't be a mandatory part of playing an interesting game or character.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
It's not a mandatory part, it's an inevitable part.
Define optimization.
Is a surprise negator optimization? A perfect parry or dodge? Social defenses?
It's entirely plausible for characters out of chargen to lack these, but the older they get, the more implausible it gets.
As I understand it, it takes about a hundred years at a minimum to hit E5 for a Solar.
That's a hundred years of survival in a setting that is explicitly written to want you dead or subverted, and where you can only rely on your own resources.
No neutral arbitrator to appeal to; the only candidate for the job is snorting narcotics and binging on videogames.
If it's not the Empire, it's the Yozi.If not them, it's the Deathlords and Abyssals.
If not them, it's other fellow Celestials with grudges recent or carried over from Past Lives.
Or it could be your own fault ; with great power comes great fuckups after all.
Solars are Power personified by simply existing; every faction extant is going to want to turn them to their own purposes, or eliminate the threat.
As you exert more power on the setting, the pushback is on the same scale.
To expect that a character with designs on survival would invest effort in ensuring that he or she can do so only seems sensible.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
Agreed!
But not necessarily "functional at defeating another character who invests more in that area of specialty".
I find this works because I don't define 'functional' solely based on their ability to reduce monsters to 0HP.
That's for E6.
E5 can be reached at any point in a mortal lifetime.
Granted, reaching E5 is not a trivial task by any means and represents being one of the most powerful Solars of the Second Age.
pheonix89
Wants to be Seven Of Nine
- Location
- North American Plaguelands
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yes, it should (generally). But if you've spent most of your xp on crafting or sorcery or socials charms or other non-combat things and a comparable-xp Keris expy decides to shank you and gets to one on one? Well, you should be completely and utterly screwed, and if the system says you aren't it's utterly broken beyond repair. In that scenario, you're faced with an oppenent who has rendered 90% of your abilities worthless because when the magic kung fu duel starts, crafting and sorcery and social-fu all stop mattering. And that's pretty much what trying to throw SCS attack magic at a place a combat wombat Exalt likes while they are present is equivalent to.
TLDR: You have no right to invalidate other people's character concepts by being able to withstand someone hitting you in their specialty and outside of yours.
Sucal
The Devil’s Cut
- Location
- Bottom of the barrel
Theres a difference between Optimisation and saying that your Sorcerer is not going to get a chance to use an incredibly obvious spell whose charge time can be seen from miles away. Just like theres a difference between taking a surprise negater and being expected to start with every negater from creation, because your GM will try and kill you in every possible way in the first session.
In theory, every character should be able to kill another character based at the same level of XP. They won't do it however, by trying to kill the opponent in their specialty unless its also their specialty. So your sorcerer won't be able to use a tool that sucks at direct combat, to directly kill someone who specializes in direct combat. Total Annihilation isn't for killing the Dawn, its for setting the stage and blasting away/intimidating his army by blowing away the mooks and letting the important people settle things amongst the radioactive flames.
So you take advantage of your 200xp of spells and backgrounds to unleash heroic mortals whose hearts you've bound, first circle demons whose loyalty you've enforced and armies whose rulers you've intimidated into paying you tribute. Then after the Dawn has made himself look awesome by cutting through the chaff with what remains of his tiger warriors, you smile and unleash hordes of sorcerously enhanced beasts, second circle demons and perhaps a dragon blooded champion or two whose heart or loyalty you won while he was swording.
Then at the very end and he presents himself at your door, bloodied, wounded yet still unbowed you nod your head in respect...
Then move out of the way as your Unquestionable Champion takes the stage, either to cut him down or buy you enough time to escape and repeat it again at a later date.
That's how a Sorceror fights a Dawn. Even without optimization. Necromancers can do so in a similar way.
Not flinging a single spell and expecting it to work. At least unless that spell is something enhances your own infrastructure to match his.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Generally speaking, what this recent discussion has demonstrated- again- is that Exalted as game and when beheld by players, does not effectively convey they idea of a multiple step experience.
You are not allowed nor encouraged to put all your eggs in one basket. you are not allowed to, with a single stroke, End an opponent. Total Annihilation OR Rain of Doom are not spells you use to single-handedly destroy a rival power; they are important components to a grand plan.
Exalted as a game assumes you will spend scenes of effort, real-time hour planning at the table with your friends and ST about what you want to have happen and how it Will happen.
Like, I'm going to be as direct as possible- people are playing their TTRPGs incorrectly.
What do I mean by this? I mean that people, through no fault of their own are presenting the game world, their in-game actions and their use of the mechanics in manners that actively hurt their ability to enjoy the game. We don't know why we do it, but we do it, and it ends up fucking shit up. The game books don't communicate 'how' effectively, players and STs lack vital experience managing plots, everyone tries to make the game look or feel like 'insert media thing here' and enact compromise to achieve some end.
Like, flat out- how many of us actually have any meaningful Examples of Play? @Aleph pulls out her formatted logs of Kerisgame, and we have to acknowledge that she's in a 1:1 game with a very dedicated ST who is firmly on her wavelength, as far as how they both approach the setting.
A bunch of people are only familiar with Exalted through Quests, which are more like Play By Post games than anything. I personally have never played any roleplaying game at a physical table facing people- I've only ever done IRC games, and those are much different beasts.
You are not allowed nor encouraged to put all your eggs in one basket. you are not allowed to, with a single stroke, End an opponent. Total Annihilation OR Rain of Doom are not spells you use to single-handedly destroy a rival power; they are important components to a grand plan.
Exalted as a game assumes you will spend scenes of effort, real-time hour planning at the table with your friends and ST about what you want to have happen and how it Will happen.
Like, I'm going to be as direct as possible- people are playing their TTRPGs incorrectly.
What do I mean by this? I mean that people, through no fault of their own are presenting the game world, their in-game actions and their use of the mechanics in manners that actively hurt their ability to enjoy the game. We don't know why we do it, but we do it, and it ends up fucking shit up. The game books don't communicate 'how' effectively, players and STs lack vital experience managing plots, everyone tries to make the game look or feel like 'insert media thing here' and enact compromise to achieve some end.
Like, flat out- how many of us actually have any meaningful Examples of Play? @Aleph pulls out her formatted logs of Kerisgame, and we have to acknowledge that she's in a 1:1 game with a very dedicated ST who is firmly on her wavelength, as far as how they both approach the setting.
A bunch of people are only familiar with Exalted through Quests, which are more like Play By Post games than anything. I personally have never played any roleplaying game at a physical table facing people- I've only ever done IRC games, and those are much different beasts.
Optimization, at its core, is "making your character good at their concept." I'd say that this is absolutely necessary to enjoy the game. Optimization isn't the same thing as minmaxing.
Also, I'd argue that a game which isn't intended to make optimization mandatory shouldn't have a chargen system which begs for optimization.
I've been playing at least once a week for three and a half years. Months at a time playing twice or three times a week. I've run several games. All my arguments stem from what I have found to be most fun over the last three and a half years. Not just Exalted, WoD and D&D and recently L5R and Star Wars. And frankly? I have considerably more fun when stuff like 'but Deathlords and Yozi and Primordial War' and all those other setting versimilitude justfications for various 2eisms aren't part of the experience. You know what's also more fun in actual play, and is more fun to run? Not having everyone be these hyper-rational actors who know about all the dangers they face and optimize accordingly. 2e sucks for this because of how its awful system works, and the 2.5 game I've been in all these years has such a damned good ST that he can make a fun game that works without suffering so much from the horribleness that is 2.5. I honestly, genuinely believe 2e encourages a terrible gameplay environment. So easy to die as a player, so easy for your carefully crafted villain to get grappled and executed in two actions when it was meant to be a threat to the whole circle. 2e is not very fun, for me, it's by far the worst system I've been in, how it works is stressful and unfun. But Exalted itself is so damned cool that it's worth it.
And now 3e exists, and god it's like a breath of fresh air. 3e is by far my favorite system, ever. Admittedly! My tastes tend towards the complicated. 3e is complicated in the good way, but I think most systems that can really get Exalted will be complex. At least, which get what I consider to be core to Exalted, some of which is a level of complexity and wide-arrays of combinations and potential for weird tricks to come out of nowhere.
Another thing I've found, in my three and a half years of playing and running? Perfect balance is so much less important than having fun. Setting versimilitude is nice, but it's so much less important than having a fun setting and fun powers to play with (ideally a good corebook really should give both, but one is just so, so much less important than the other) That's why I tend to be so unsympathetic to arguments about certain powers being broken or setting breaking, by the way. Yeah, the setting gets weird if you assume every Solar with a Lore focus can call asteroids on a city. My response is basically 'so...don't do that? Let it be a cool thing your player figured out, and they're the first one. They'll have tons of fun, and the book even says this is a potential explanation for the crazier powers'.
Do the shit that is fun. Let your players have their crazy powers, and if you don't want anyone else to have the same, then they don't. If you really can't stand the idea, homebrew it all away and find a group of like-minded people on the internet to run for. Skype's great for that!
Games work best with flexible STs and flexible players. The most fun I've ever had is in a crazy high-power Modern game where our van is a dragon and the setting has been altered like crazy by the ST into a conspiracy/superheroes setting where all the Infernals are super-villain expies and one of the players is retired Dragonblooded Captain America. My own game includes a super-artifact that can make unlimited soulsteel as a side-effect (I am not recommending everyone do this, just pointing out that crazy shit doesn't ruin games unless you let them). What matters is that everyone is having fun, not that the setting makes perfect sense or no powers that can be abused exist.
Talk to your ST and your fellow players. Make sure everyone knows their limits. Try to always be considerate. If you do those things, you can even have fun in a system as crappy as baseline Second Edition Exalted.
EDIT: Wow, this post diverged wildly from my original point. But that's okay, it wasn't a fun point to make, so I'll leave it lost.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Huh. Well. That's... Not actually what I was bringing up by 'Examples of Play'. I wasn't even propping up the whole 'hyper-rationalist' angle.
What I meant was, when people sit down at a table to run their games, they do not have the tools or experience to run them effectively. Choices are made for them by game culture that affect the format of the session.
Like, as an example- 90% of all actions I ever run in my games are handled on-camera. I actually don't like doing this- but it's habit now, so I have to stick with it.
I rarely get to handle actions as 'players and I discuss what they want, we don't worry about in-character dialogue'. The advantage of this kind of 'off camera' scene is that it's faster than roleplaying at a 1:1 angle.
Another example is- how often has anyone tried to hit the same notes with a scene or session as a cool action sequence they saw in a movie once? I know I have! I also know that nine times out of ten, it's nigh impossible to get it to 'go off' the way you want it to, so the thing falls flat. It's not even a question of railroading, but of 'how do you analyze an action sequence you see in another media, convert it into a game experience?
That is what I'm talking about, the biases and miscues that persist in players and STs about how the game is staged, in the same sense of staging a production or film.
What I meant was, when people sit down at a table to run their games, they do not have the tools or experience to run them effectively. Choices are made for them by game culture that affect the format of the session.
Like, as an example- 90% of all actions I ever run in my games are handled on-camera. I actually don't like doing this- but it's habit now, so I have to stick with it.
I rarely get to handle actions as 'players and I discuss what they want, we don't worry about in-character dialogue'. The advantage of this kind of 'off camera' scene is that it's faster than roleplaying at a 1:1 angle.
Another example is- how often has anyone tried to hit the same notes with a scene or session as a cool action sequence they saw in a movie once? I know I have! I also know that nine times out of ten, it's nigh impossible to get it to 'go off' the way you want it to, so the thing falls flat. It's not even a question of railroading, but of 'how do you analyze an action sequence you see in another media, convert it into a game experience?
That is what I'm talking about, the biases and miscues that persist in players and STs about how the game is staged, in the same sense of staging a production or film.
Carrnage
Human
- Location
- New Zealand
what is it exactly that you're referring to as "incorrect play"?
Nah, I get that, I sort of went off on a gigantic tangeant. I apologize, I should have unquoted you once I realized how far off I veered. I understand what you mean, though. I highly suggest maybe making a Skype chat for your players, and talking to them during the week, maybe? Ask them to come to you for one-on-ones if they have ideas to chat about? It's how pretty much every game I've ever been in does it, and it's just great. Very helpful to be talking OOC a lot. Also sometimes we get together and spend an hour thinking up terrible names for the Unconquered Sun and making related awful puns until the ST starts deducting experience points!
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
But nooooo, if you just 'do not do that', you commit the sin of putting fun and campaign-appropriateness over designing a clockwork game world that won't break if run by a computer like Dwarf Fortress! Just like Moran did with her Carjack comment!
On a more serious note, I agree that game design and campaign design should be approached in such a way as to leave the players and GM happy about playing.
Those two combined seem to (a) have a resemblance to the "Yozi apocalypse plots consuming all other plots" being inevitable and (b) a sign that perhaps the chargen system is the source of the problem. Or perhaps 'chargen' is too narrow a word, and the whole game engine is a more proper scale/scope of the issue. Like, everyone seems to agree that the (pre-3e, and maybe 3e) game system is not well-written and loves to hate it, but that's not quite what I mean. It's more about always being One Perfect Away From Having a Charsheet Torn Up and another chargen. Maybe for some people that's fun. For me it's more of a source of anxiety, and spending XP on stuff I don't want to, because the alternative is a risk of 'start over' or maybe 'start over but not really start over due to being disappointed about losing a character one wanted to play in this campaign'.
When the game system essentially provides two possible challenge modes, one being 'it was only mote attrition, no long-term consequences at all' and the other being 'a possibility of sudden death that cannot be mitigated in any way', there will be issues with that. If anything, I think Exalted campaigns have a certain need to get game-mechanical transplants out of FATE Core, namely the Conceding mechanic and the Success At A Cost mechanic, both of which enable underscoring consequences while avoiding all-or-nothing fine-or-chargen-a-new-char dichotomies. It's no wonder that our GM houseruled us the right to use a "nobody could survive that . . . but you did" point (normally non-replenishable, starting with a single point per character, only awarded/replenished for feats that are impressive even for Solars).
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- Location
- Gladstone, OR
I gave a couple examples in the post just before yours- but how about another: Exalted (Any edition, really) assumes you will be spending anywhere from one to several scenes of effort to do something. If your players and storytellers don't know how to handle this assumption, the gameplay falls flat.
Like- we were discussing earlier about how a warrior-general Dawn and a Solar Sorcerer- when they get into battles, what it should look like as opposed to what people assume is meant to be an equal battle? Like, people come into the game assuming you should be able to Total Anihhilation an equal opponent and expect it to 'work'.
But it doesn't, by design. Instead the spell is a part of a larger effort on the Sorcerer's part.
Another more meta-textual example is my experience with IRC games: I have once tried to play a game via VoIP. Immediately, it was articulated as Third Person Present Tense or First Person Present Tense- "I want to do this."
Like- when I'm writing stunts for IRC games, it looks like this:
"Lotus danced back, drawing her sword and showing a meteor-trail of light dance down the edge in a split second as she cut through the bamboo stalks. Her slash cleaved the grove down, casting them outward in a great crushing wave!
But when I tried to play the same character in voice, it was: "Uh. I... slice through the bamboo stalks, throwing them forward in a big wave to knock the demon over!"
Neither of these are truly bad stunts, but the format changes based on the game platform.
Oh god man I feel you so hard on those stunts. I can't play in person, I can't do it. I just cannot talk like I can write, at all.
And on the spell thing...I'll be honest, I really didn't mean the Sorcery thing should always work, more often than note that'dve failed against my major NPCs. But it's like...even if the Dawn could possibly have the powers to survive it, if your players gets this awesome idea for how to set it up and strike at a moment of distraction where the Dawn can't parry the incoming orb or know to start running until it's pretty much too late, why not just...let them? They really want to use their cool spell, they spent time and effort. You can bring horrible stuff in later, there's time for that, consequences are reasonable for lighting off a nuke in a city.
The mindset I'm arguing against is that it shouldn't ever happen, that's why I was getting a bit too intense. I dislike the idea that Second Edition has of the whole paranoia combat suite being a thing in setting, rather than an absolute failure of the rules. I went a bit extreme with the example, I don't think Exalted Sorcery would usually work in that scenario. But it could, and I don't think merely surviving that long as a Dawn guarantees your immunity or ability to simply parry it away rather than just escaping the blast that nuked your fortress. But yeah, most of the time, what I would usually do to kill a Dawn is wear them down with demon attacks and then slam them with a Second Circle or two. With me as a Sorcerer-General with War investment.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
At the risk of belaboring a point, what you're dealing with is Suspension of Disbelief.
The fact is that some people believe, not unreasonably, the in-setting understanding of Creation by its inhabitants influences their behavior. That sounds really awkwardly phrased, but that's logical arguments for you.
"How'd they survive til now?" needs a good answer for quite a few people, because if you/your players happen to run into the one guy who had this gaping obvious weak point and expended no extra effort to find it- that cheapens the experience.
Does Exalted 2nd edition (the books) expect this of it's characters? I don't think so, but it does attempt to convey something like it with its ill-implemented hazard ratings.
Like, it's a matter of Degrees. I believe that the Wyld Hunt should maintain archives of knowledge dealing with Solar and Lunar Anathema. They should be able to recognize the traits and tricks these beings use against them. It's why in 1e and other sources, the Wyld Hunt consistently stuffs wax in the ears of their mortal auxilaries, so the Solars can't just convince the army to fight for them. This is good.
Declaring, due to a systemic exploit, that the best Wyld Hunt is five guys wtih sledgehammers is a failing of the rules.
Do players in the fanbase expect it at their tables? Yes. Is their table your table? No.
The TL;DR here is this: Going on about what level of SoD a given game or table demands is a question of the fanbase more than the game itself- though it can be used as a critique of the mechanics itself; clinch rules, unexpected, etc.
Jon Chung
=][=
Why not just let them?
Because the tools the target is using are the same tools your players are using, and however much one wants to divorce the stuff on the character sheet from what's going on "on-camera", the two are intimately related. For example, if your Twilight sorcerer himself (much less your combat monster...) could survive being shot at with a strategic weapon and knows this intimately, if he fires a strategic weapon at the enemy Dawn and the enemy Dawn doesn't, even though the capacity to do it is so easy that even your mostly noncombatant sorcerer can do it, that doesn't come off as cool. Instead, it comes off as jobbing: the GM is making the enemy act like a drooling retarded moron in order to let you win.
This is not a nice feeling! You do not, generally, want it to happen. It takes all the "fuck yeah, we won!" satisfaction out of winning fights when it is demonstrated obviously and blatantly that you are not, in fact, fighting a deadly opponent, you're actually stabbin' target dummies who will happily lie down and die just to make you look cool.
In order for a movie or a book or whatever to work, it has to sell the enemy as genuinely threatening, deadly and competent even if you know ahead of time that due to genre conventions, that guy is probably going down when the movie ends... or else there's just no interest, despite this. You can't get into it, you can't suspend your disbelief and the experience falls flat. The same principle applies to games.
This is unavoidable as long as the stuff the players can do in the game system and the stuff they can do in the game setting are at all linked. Someone has a power written on their sheet that says "hell yes I can survive strategic weapons". They've used that power to survive strategic weapons. "I can parry nuclear explosions and it fucking costs me all of four motes hahahahahaha" is something they know, in-character, they can do: they've done it and it cost them four motes.
Do you think they'll think your villian is jobbing when a) they know he has that because he's just like them, b) they've used it themselves just last session and c) he up and decides not to in order to make them look cool?
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My experiences and preferences in gaming differs wildly from yours. We value different things, and find different things to break our suspension of disbelief. You and I will not ever end up agreeing, I do not think, so I'd really rather not get into this again. It's just arguing how we experience the game differently and each insisting our way is right because that's how it feels.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You know, while I personally tend to prefer if PCs and NPCs work with the same "rules" is they are the same kind of being, and so would see "this villain doesn't have a perfect defense in a game where all PCs have them" as jobbing... You realize this is not universal, right? I've known players who would dislike the idea of the villain playing by the same rules instead of their own specific, NPC-antagonist-dedicated rules that are designed to fulfill that NPC's role in the story. Heck, there's a dedicated audience for RPGs in which a character who is supposedly the same warrior as you in the story operates on completely different mechanical principles under the hood because he's designed to take a certain place in encounter design.
Of course generally these NPC-specific rules aren't made in such a way that you can kill them more easily and look more badass than you should. Quite often it's the opposite; NPCs have arbitrarily higher amounts of health because your group is supposed to whale on something for a bunch of rounds instead of it being over in one alpha strike.
There are also, bluntly, players who like it when they get to look cool at the expense of all plausibility. We don't like them and we look down on them in RPG communities because we fancy ourselves 'good' players who aren't there just for a cheap power trip, but power trip is a huge appeal of RPGs, and people who do like it when your opponent arbitrarily doesn't have a perfect so you can get an easy kill move and look badass are legion. I don't think you should cater to them especially, but they're an audience! They pay for stuff!
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- Location
- NOVA
If the scene required the party to all take part in the distraction or build up to it, I might let it go through as a finishing blow for the conflict that's already been won. Something like the Night sneaking in to poison the enemy Dawn with a special toxin that the Zenith and Eclipse spent a session negotiating from a nearby Terrestrial god of serpents.
The main reason I'd be hesitant is that, in addition to the verisimilitude reasons, a lot of players are very bad about accepting that something that worked once might fail the next time. It's especially bad if the target is particularly powerful, like they are in this example. There aren't many individuals in the setting who would be more potent than a Solar.
Once this worked once they'd see it as a hammer they can use in any other situation and will get annoyed when it doesn't, even if it would make sense for their enemies to have countermeasures in place. As a GM I don't want to have to keep escalating the threats to make it make this tactic failing make sense to a group of players who expect their creative idea to be the solution to all of their problems.
I've played with some groups which could deal with this, but they were few and far between.
In general I'd be up front with my expectations for a group, if I didn't think a group would have fun with my GM style and that talking it out wouldn't solve it, I just wouldn't run for them. I think most groups though could handle it, if I am being open and talking to them and everyone has clear expectations and lines of communication.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
This may surprise you, but a lot of players don't have, or don't feel like they have, that kind of choice. Many of us are in a situation of taking whatever groups and games we can get.