It'd be relevant to all the people who had a relationship with the person you just erased, and who might want some kind of defense to let them be entirely aware of the shit your character just pulled.
General Exalted Thread
- Location
- Virginia
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
@Kuciwalker has the right of it.
Of course, this rule is just for Exalts with an Intimacy. If you have applicable Charms that would defend against such an effect, they would trump that power - just as Destiny-Manifesting Method trumps a power that says "turn your opponent into a duck," to an extent.
I want you to be able to the only one who remembers when the world was right with everything being a lie that everyone but them believes, but I don't want that to be the default state of anyone who can just throw an Excellency or spend a Willpower because it makes that effect toothless. The default resistance to BotBM is 'I dream sometimes of a woman and feel like I have known her all my life, but when I wake up it is gone and I forget her anew. Who could she have been?" And then you go on a quest.
Or you have an applicable Charm, and you get to be the One Who Remembers, loudly trying to convince your Circle who has forgotten that you are not mad.
Of course, this rule is just for Exalts with an Intimacy. If you have applicable Charms that would defend against such an effect, they would trump that power - just as Destiny-Manifesting Method trumps a power that says "turn your opponent into a duck," to an extent.
I want you to be able to the only one who remembers when the world was right with everything being a lie that everyone but them believes, but I don't want that to be the default state of anyone who can just throw an Excellency or spend a Willpower because it makes that effect toothless. The default resistance to BotBM is 'I dream sometimes of a woman and feel like I have known her all my life, but when I wake up it is gone and I forget her anew. Who could she have been?" And then you go on a quest.
Or you have an applicable Charm, and you get to be the One Who Remembers, loudly trying to convince your Circle who has forgotten that you are not mad.
I think the point is that the changing of memories and evidence should be shaping, so those effected by the changes can use Shaping Defenses. As it is, even if they succeed on their resistance, they still get hit by most of the effect.
- Location
- Virginia
As I said, neither Shaping nor Shaping Defenses are a thing anymore. Those died on the same fire as 2E-style perfects. And for good reason - the 2E system of (Shaping attacks can totally screw over a character) + (Shaping defenses perfectly resist these attacks) led to
- Everyone needs a shaping defense or they're a chump.
- Shaping attacks are useless because everyone who isn't a chump will be able to perfect them.
Now, characters that want to inflict curses, warp reality, or whatever get to do their thing without being completely shut down, and characters that invest in defending against these sorts of attacks get to mitigate but not obviate them.
This is far better than "ok now I pop IPP and it's all good". @Omicron's design produces an actual story. (Although, I certainly agree you could tweak the scope of the effect or the difficulty of resisting it.)
- Location
- NYC
The issue, as I see it, is that regardless of whether or not you remember it, nothing much is going to realistically change. The person is still dead–forever–and everyone else of significance no longer remembers them. The world has moved on, even if your character hasn't, but they can't actually change meaningfully change anything.
So, a proposal for a slightly adjusted version of the charm:
I for one am glad that we live in a world where Shaping was identified as a binary issue to be addressed, and that cooler heads prevailed to say "the problem isn't the high "Bad Shit Simply Happens" bullshit inherent to the thing which deformed the game around it, but the fact we had a LABEL for it! So now that's gone and there is no effective means to gauge or avoid getting grudgefucked by an arbitrary Shun The Smiling Lady or Glorious Solar Killsat equivalent. Problem solved."
Professional Game Design.
Professional Game Design.
- Location
- Virginia
This sounds really clever if you don't know that such effects don't really exist anymore.
Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
I was mostly using 2e terminology because I haven't looked through the 3e leak in a while and don't have it on me. And I did indeed mistake IPP for DMM. However, @beowolf has the right of it; I was thinking that the Shaping/(insert 3e equivalent term here) defense would be to mitigate the unpersoning part of the charm, not the dying.First: the effect only triggers when an attack kills someone. So, I mean, they are going to die anyway. It doesn't seem super important to let that person use their last gasp to throw up a Shaping defense.
Second: the Shaping keyword and Shaping defenses are no longer a thing. In fact 3E is deliberately trying to avoid the sort of "X no-sells Y to defend against Y no-selling Z" stuff - there is a lot less no-selling overall. IPP now just protects against environmental Wyld-like effects, but explicitly not against direct attacks or against Fate manipulation.
The Charm most relevant to defending against this sort of manipulation is Destiny-Manifesting Method, which doesn't no-sell Shaping-like effects, but merely mitigates them as necessary to permit the character to express a core concept.
The Illusion keyword also no longer existsbut otherwise the rest is reasonably idiomatic to 3E.
On the subject of spending willpower to burn through the memory-changing, I think people are underestimating how costly it is and overestimating how willing people are to spend it. (See the latest argument with vicky for what I consider the expert opinion on that.) For anyone who isn't throwing 2-3 level stunts around regularly or otherwise regenning willpower at a fairly consistent rate, 2-3 wp is a fairly hefty cost for a scene of remembering a person. Especially considering that, for most relevant characters, that is somewhere between 1/3 and 2/3 of their total willpower. Remember that Heroic characters are the exception, not the rule. Also, the total cost for breaking the memory-altering could be literally twice or three times a character's total pool.
Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
Except for, you know, those examples listed in DMM. Which include, but aren't limited to: someone fucking with the Loom, SWLIHN turning you into crystal, and other examples of what you are claiming don't exist. Just because they aren't currently PC charms, doesn't mean that they're gone.
Given that the city state destroying charm still appears to exist, and we're directly discussing a charm that's a different but more powerful version of Shun the Smiling Lady I'm going to say that this is pretty disingenuous.
notthepenguins
Neither Spherical Nor Frictionless
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
And let's not forget about Phoenix Renewal Tactic, which exists explicitly to provide a defense against "a warping, shaping, or twisting attack with no clear defense."
It's pretty absurd to claim that such effects no longer exist when there is still direct charmtech needed to counter them.
It's pretty absurd to claim that such effects no longer exist when there is still direct charmtech needed to counter them.
The problem with the Shaping keyword was that it should have been called the Deprotagonizing keyword, honestly. Like, that was the entire point. "You can't deprogatonize Exalts. They might die, but they will fall like heroes, not die like scenery."
notthepenguins
Neither Spherical Nor Frictionless
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Okay so I don't think I've properly complained about Phoenix Renewal Tactic, and it is a baffling fucking Charm. Integrity in general is pretty baffling, from "how the fuck did you think Destiny-Manifesting Method was the best way to do this, and why is its sidebar so aggressively uninformative" to "how does Body-Restoring Benison even work if you don't have Mind-Cleansing Meditation," but Phoenix Renewal Tactic is an entirely different level of strange.
For starters, it functions to defend against "a warping, shaping, or twisting attack against which there is no clear defense." And no, this is not further elaborated upon. God knows what I'd think this thing did if I didn't already know that it's just Shaping-while-aggressively-avoiding-keywords-or-definitions.
But its real weirdness are its mechanics; it's an opposed temporary Willpower roll against the attacker. You get Double 9s, they don't. On this first roll, every die that does not become a success is "treated as temporary Willpower spent by both parties" (incidentally, this means that on average you will both spend more temporary willpower than you possess, assuming equivalent pool sizes). After that, you roll another (Essence) dice with Double 9s, and add all those successes. If you succeed, it discounts Spirit-Maintaining Maneuver and then immunizes you against all unrolled effects for (Essence) days.
A number of questions come to mind:
For starters, it functions to defend against "a warping, shaping, or twisting attack against which there is no clear defense." And no, this is not further elaborated upon. God knows what I'd think this thing did if I didn't already know that it's just Shaping-while-aggressively-avoiding-keywords-or-definitions.
But its real weirdness are its mechanics; it's an opposed temporary Willpower roll against the attacker. You get Double 9s, they don't. On this first roll, every die that does not become a success is "treated as temporary Willpower spent by both parties" (incidentally, this means that on average you will both spend more temporary willpower than you possess, assuming equivalent pool sizes). After that, you roll another (Essence) dice with Double 9s, and add all those successes. If you succeed, it discounts Spirit-Maintaining Maneuver and then immunizes you against all unrolled effects for (Essence) days.
A number of questions come to mind:
- What the hell does it work on?
- Does this even do anything if the "warping, shaping, or twisting attack against which there is no clear defense" is a rolled effect?
- Why does it automatically discount Spirit-Maintaining Maneuver? If someone tries to warp me into a doorknob why does this make me more able to resist mind magic?
- What are "unrolled effects" anyway? How broadly are we supposed to be defining this term? It doesn't specify that it only works on "warping, shaping, or twisting" effects, just... unrolled. There are all sorts of unrolled things that affect you. What does this mean?
- Why is "willpower tap both parties" a desirable resolution consequence?
- Why is it even down to RNG? DMM and IPP aren't rolled; why is PRT down to a dice roll?
- Why are there effects with no clear defense in the first place?
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Salty
Shadow Cabal Assumptor Supreme
- Location
- Sun, Moon, Talia
- Pronouns
- I/Me
Because as far as I can tell, it's basically a "Fuck your stupid DM fiat" Charm.
Incidentally, this makes it basically useless, because the proper response to stupid DM fiat is leaning across the table and applying palms directly to the face.
Incidentally, this makes it basically useless, because the proper response to stupid DM fiat is leaning across the table and applying palms directly to the face.
- Location
- NYC
I would argue that's a problem of implementation, not concept. Keywords, if implemented well, are extremely helpful shorthand that allows for more interesting and clear exception-based mechanics. The problem with Shaping effects was that pretty much all of them were ultimately Save-or-Die effects that your normal "lolnope" defenses. There are plenty of was you could implement them that wouldn't do that.
notthepenguins
Neither Spherical Nor Frictionless
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
It doesn't even do that if the GM just has the NPC need to make a difficulty 1 roll to generate the effect!
Alternatively, the GM just says that it works. Because if they're actually being terrible and just want and effect to bypass abilities, that's what happens. Even in second edition, if they want a shaping attack to go through IPP, then they just say fuck you it goes through IPP.
The idea that Perfect effects somehow work to prevent bad GM'ing is pure fantasy as far as I can see.
- Location
- Virginia
DMM doesn't list any of those things?
If you look at the actual example antagonists, especially the ones you would expect to have these sorts of attacks (like the Fair Folk Lorelei or some of the 2CDs) none of the actual effects are like this. They all permit defenses and require the antagonists to actually work for it. For example, Sigreth can bind a character to fulfull a wager, but the character has to have actually made the wager and lost a game (and even this is resistable). A Lorelei can inflict a derangement if it manages to kiss you, but it still has to succeed at an opposed roll. One ghost has a curse that prevents willpower regen and grants a minor derangement; it has to succeed on a roll to do this, and it's difficulty 3 to fix the curse. Nephwracks can trap a character in living nightmares... for a scene, that ends on damage, costs 20 initiative, requires a roll, and provides a way to "snap out of it".
The closest thing we actually see to one of these deprotagonizing effects is the Corrupted Words spell, which also requires a roll and can be distorted.
The city-state destroying charm is stupid but is hardly something that would be affected by a Shaping defense.
And the charm that we are discussing now is both 1. homebrew and 2. not "simply happens", it has a mechanism to mitigate it.
notthepenguins
Neither Spherical Nor Frictionless
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
I assume he was referencing IPP, which does (though it's a demon prince, not SWL).
So... Phoenix Renewal Tactic is a completely pointless Charm? Going "the developers put in a Charm to solve a problem that doesn't occur" is a defense, I guess, but it's not a very compelling one.
- Location
- NYC
You do realize that shaping effects didn't all instantly kill you in 2E, right? Some of them did pretty much exactly what you're describing. Some of them even (if memory serves) had separate rolls to resist. The point here was that 3E still has things that are pretty explicitly shaping effects, and even a charm that defends against shaping effects. It just doesn't note them as shaping effects.
Salty
Shadow Cabal Assumptor Supreme
- Location
- Sun, Moon, Talia
- Pronouns
- I/Me
Hence my presumptive labeling of it as an attempt at a preemptive counter to bad DM bullshit.
It's really the only explanation that makes sense.
City State destroying charm is a "bad stuff stimply happens charm", so again, you're really not being honest here. Similarly, in a discussion about a homebrew charm and how problematic it is, saying that it's homebrew isn't exactly a defense. At least, not a one that actually deals with the complaint: it's more of a deflection because you don't appear to wish to actually answer the complaint raised.
As for the fact that it is not "simply happens" that's true of most things. Shun the Similing lady doesn't simply happen, and has means to mitigate it. The issue is that the means are pathetically weak, and the effect is ridiculously strong. Which is the case here, almost exactly.
Quantumboost
Now with 50% more dots in Dimensional Science
- Location
- Ensemble Space
To play devil's advocate a bit, there is something to be said for making it easier for those who don't have RPG instincts finely honed over a lifetime of ascetic training to identify when bad GMing is happening. Especially for someone who's the GM in question and has only half a clue what they're doing.
I can much more easily see someone genuinely honestly thinking "maybe requiring an activation roll on a Charm that does X would be a good idea" out of sheer naivete, and thereby accidentally screwing over the Charm, than genuinely honestly thinking "maybe I should let this facemurder effect bypass arbitrary defenses".
notthepenguins
Neither Spherical Nor Frictionless
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Well that's the sort of thing that should really be covered in the Storytelling chapte- ohhhhhh.