Yzarc
The Spark of Madness
Not how it is worded.
So it gives 1/5 reduction to cooking and if alchemy is cooking, then it should speed it up as well.
Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy
I think the intent of the charm is the other way around. It has three effects.
Passively, whenever you create, modify, or repair something, you do so five times as fast. This is an always on effect that applies to anything you do described by those verbs. It would apply to cooking a meal, computer programming, painting a picture, or concocting an alchemical tonic. They're all the act of creating something*, so they all get accelerated.
When you create, modify or repair something complicated and mechanical, you do so ten times as fast. As above, this is an always on effect.
Optionally, you may also choose to spend essence or willpower to get an additional effect, conjuring tools from the Wicked City, removing the usual penalties of not having the right tools for the job. This is not required to get the acceleration of the first two effects; it's an additional benefit you can choose to take advantage of if you don't have the appropriate tools to hand and can spare the essence/willpower.
If you do have the required tools, for example you're cooking a meal in a well equipped kitchen, the charm just means that the food preparation and the cooking time is supernaturally accelerated five fold, and any watching chefs get very confused about how it's possible.
* Note that the charm doesn't restrict it to something physical. You should be able to use this to accelerate writing a book, or composing a piece of music, or designing an advertising campaign. Creating something intellectual should also trigger the charm.
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Alchemy is not cooking, there is a lot more occult lore involved.
Whenever you create modify or repair is too wide a remit for it IMO. Cooking is crafting because you are making a mundane thing even if it is short lived generally, stitching someone up is not really crafting, but is is close enough that you can make tools for it, alchemy has a significant magical aspect that cannot be accelerated simply by having the right (mundane) tools which is what the charm works on.
Maybe if we didn't have the PTSD fueled nightmare flaw I'd be more positively inclined towards the charm, but as it stands it feels more like dealing with trauma by putting it in a supernatural box to fester than solving it.
We almost certainly wouldn't suffer complications from it, since charms don't directly hurt their users, but it still seems suboptimal to me compared to dealing with it.
Though that's probably just part of a general bias against charms that explicitly infuse negative stuff into Molly on my part. Some (like RR) are too useful to pass up, but I prefer the ones that just touch on power without specifying we inject ourselves with narcissism, hate hard enough to warp reality, or use beholder tier internally oriented paranoia to negate surprise.
Which probably isn't the best stance to take when playing an infernal.
The charm makes constructs that transcend tools, that's in the name. It also doesn't limit itself to mundane tools. The Wicked City is a place of magitech, not just technology, so creating magical tools would seem to fit the scope.
These charms are designed to synergise with the magical item crafting charms, I believe. You're meant to use them to accelerate the creation of magical Wonders, not just mundane objects. That was certainly the intent of the original versions of these charms.
Compare this to the solar version, which has different narrative but functions very similarly. It too works to create anything. The reference to a cave and a bunch of scraps is a reference to Iron Man, and his suit and the arc reactor are blatantly magical Wonders not mundane technology. Tool Transecnding Constructs is how an Infernal does the same thing. And Tony Stark did the impossible in terms of how fast he made his suit as well.
I think the point of these charms is to make the Exalted superhumanly good alchemists and items crafters compared to mortal sorcerers.
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I get where you are coming from but I am really hesitant to grant any wide-ranging crafting remit because of how the Wonder system came out in the original EXvsWoD system. I do not want to get to the point where what you make overshadows everything else Molly can do.
The thing is, it won't. Alchemy and Enchantment are both good Sorcerous paths, and are viable and competitive options if Tool Transcending Constructs can be used with them. However; the fact that each recipe is a ritual that we need to pay XP for is a tight limit on this much they can do. Combined with the need for resources to make alchemical and enchanted items, it's something that is situationally very useful. However it's by no means oberwhelming.
For example, it takes a month of dedicated work per level to create a new ritual/recipe. Without Tool Transcending Constructs, that would never happen. It takes a five dot alchemical ritual to duplicate a three dot supernatural power, and we're never going to dedicate five months to design a novel one. Deciding to commit one month to it would be challenging enough to get voted through.
That means that virtually all of the rituals/recipes we get would be ones we get someone else to teach us. The powerful ones I'm talking about are, as I say above, five dot recipes. They take five days to make a batch of, and each dose only lasts a scene after being taken. Worse, you split the successes on the roll between how many doses you make and how long they last. Say we get six successes on the roll. That would make three doses that need to be used within three days. Then you get to the fact that these recipes are also gated behind getting access to what can be expensive or inaccessible ingredients.
That's why to be viable options Tool Transcending Constructs need to apply. We can probably justify spending the significant XP to get Alchemy to rank five and buying those five dot recipes, if we can make a batch of them in a day, or getting the much less good four dot recipes that merely add a couple of dots to an ability or attribute if we can make them in an hour. Without the bonuses from the charm it's much less viable, as making them just takes too long.
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If people want flight get it thou mind-hand manipulation not by rage recast. Occult is Key so with excellency we throw 18 dice at it against DC6 average 5+.
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For my part at least I could maybe see it making producing items faster, but I don't think the charm would support faster R&D like you suggested earlier even with a generous reading.
TTC makes you better at creating things; it gets fuzzy at this level, but a computer program is still an end product on its own based on exact knowledge of what you want to make it do and how you plan to accomplish it.
Something as speculative as developing completely unknown effects seems like it would more reasonably fall into the domain of a research charm.
Yeah OK, you sold me on faster creation, but not R&D, it does not fit for that thematically. 1 moths for a five dot recipe, given that that is really powerful makes sense. It's not like you have to do it all in one go.
A recipe is something just as much as a computer programme is. Literally in fact, as a computer programme is a recipe, a list of instructions for what needs to happen. A computer programme isn't a thing in itself anymore than an alchemical recipe is. Both need something else to execute them, both can be sold as finished products themselves, and both can require research and creativity to create or modify. For someone who's an expert in the Occult but not in programming the process of creating the alchemical recipe could be and end product based on what you want to make it do and how you plan to accomplish it, but designing an algorithm in a computer programme could be a completely impenetrable mystery.
If the charm can make you think and come up with novel ideas five times faster when doing software development, I don't see why it can't do the same in alchemical recipe development. A magical ritual is some ten but very similar to programming reality in many ways.
TCC does nothing for occult stuff.
Also we don't have the Hedge magic merit so Dresden magic is off the table completely.
Also we don't have the Hedge magic merit so Dresden magic is off the table completely.
Actually it would be four months for a four dot recipe, and that's the most we could do. It's impossible for us to create five dot recipes conventionally, as you need a path rating one higher than the ritual you're trying to design, and as we can't get to Elder Essence levels we can't get to six dots in the Path.
TCC applies to everything that you create, modify, or repair, whatever ability you use. It's just better for things that are technological and complicated.
And as TCC pulls tools from work a magitech hell, there's no reason why it wouldn't apply to magical crafting as well as technological crafting.
[X] Uju32
Gives a 1UP that regenerates once a story.
City still stands.
Gives a 1UP that regenerates once a story.
That forces us to spend 2 Essence minimum everytime we want to fly. 1 Essence for MHM, and another Essence for the Excellency.
Instead of just rolling against Diff 7 with Rage Recast. And if we use it to fly it removes the successes we can use for other stuff like carrying other people or throwing shit in people's faces as a combat maneuver.
Im biased towards Splintered Gale myself.
Gives you a backup life if you get killed, while being useful for other stuff outside combat.
I still want City Still Stands, mind, because its a wonderfully thematic charm, but probably after buying E3.
Even without excellency 9 dice against DC6 will hit 3 success pretty much always. And frankly flight is not really a good thing in an era with guns. Flying just means your out of cover and everybody can just go full auto on you.
I'm familiar with the idea, I work in a computer related field.
My point was that at a very broad and simplistic level a computer program could be described as instructions that perform a task for you, and a recipe as instructions that tell you how to perform a task.
The work performed when designing a program is describing exactly how a system should do work you can exhaustively describe for you, while learning a new recipe would be acquiring previously unknown information.
Obviously a good engineer learns things while working, but it isn't the goal of a particular project from a task completion standpoint.
I'd say that a good rule of thumb is that if discovery is not only a key part of the process, but a goal in it of itself, then TTC shouldn't apply.
Sure the effects of the charm might be cross compatible taken alone, but the weird concept magic behind essence doesn't care about that except when it feel like it.
I'll admit, negating the Nightmare flaw is part of the reason I was interested in it, but it is mainly the 8 extra hours a day. I don't see how the charm in and of itself is bad, given we've taken no steps to removing that flaw, and likely never will.
As such NFV just protects us from a design choice we already made, and doesn't add anything negative.
Maybe if we favored Wicked City, but that ship sailed in chargen. Optimally you need to design your build with most of your charms as favored, with just a few non for utility, otherwise you're just wasting XP.
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That does make sense from a utility POV, but TCC does not make sense thematically for design. I think it would make sense to have another charm for that with its own essence cost.
Its the Infernal counterpart of Craftsman Needs No Tools.
I'd argue you'd need both it and CCP if you were designing somehpthing magical and wanted the speedup.
But thats your determination.
Neither statement here is true.
TCC works for anything that involves creation with your hands using tools; thematically, its supposed to fill the same niche as the Solar Charm Craftsman Needs No Tools.
Sorcerer's Paths are available for purchase and have been since the early days of this quest of we want them.
We just need a tutor.
1)And then it is utterly useless for anything else.
If you are burning three successes of MHM for personal flight, they are not available for use for anything else.
2)You're making objectively wrong claims about flight.
Tell the US Army that flight is not a good thing in an era with guns and so they should discard their helicopters. Hitting a flying target moving at several hundred miles per hour is a nontrivial problem when you are shooting by eye with handheld weapons.
Rashid flies on a flying carpet in Cold Days. Ebenezar flies on a levitated boulder during Battlegrounds iirc. Kringle flies on a reindeer sleigh in Christmas Day. Nicodemus flies with his shadow as wings in Death Masks. The naagloshii transforms himself into a series of flying creatures in Turn Coat. So does Listens to Wind.
All those centuries old, magically potent denizens of the setting took the time and effort to invest points in flight.
Which contrasts everything you've said about the lack of utility of flight in-setting with the actual priorities of the actual canon Dresdenverse characters we see.