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Shards of a Broken Sun [Deprecated; see link in final post for remake]

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mastigos said:
-[X] Second Occult Excellency
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I don't think we need this, at least not urgently; we already have the First, and the two Excellencies explicitly don't "stack". (They can both be used, but only up to a common limit.)

Still withholding my vote for now, but I think I'm not much more enthused about the "throw everything into computer Charms" plan than I was into the "throw everything into Archery Charms" plan. It's certainly better, but it's still worrying.

(Speaking of which: Baughn, could Exa-kun adapt There Is No Wind from Archery to Thrown?)

Baughn said:
Emacs isn't particularly heavyweight.
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How far we have come! :p
 
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ω₁ said:
I don't think we need this, at least not urgently; we already have the First, and the two Excellencies explicitly don't "stack". (They can both be used, but only up to a common limit.)
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I know, but the 2nd excellency is reliable. And since understanding super-low-level physics falls under Occult, having a reliable understanding of such seems like a good idea before we start trying to improve the seal.
 
ω₁ said:
(Speaking of which: Baughn, could Exa-kun adapt There Is No Wind from Archery to Thrown?)
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Martial: Charms with this Keyword may also be used with or applied to the listed Abilities when the Exalt's rating in those Abilities meets the Charm's minimum Ability rating.
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There Is No Wind has Martial: Thrown. It's noted that the Essence 3+ upgrade that lets you use it to provide line-of-sight range doesn't apply, though.
 
mastigos said:
I know, but the 2nd excellency is reliable. And since understanding super-low-level physics falls under Occult, having a reliable understanding of such seems like a good idea before we start trying to improve the seal.
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Only if we're trying to score at least X successes in one roll, rather than reach X successes across multiple rolls.

Our charm slots are not so common that we can afford to sink it into a just in case, especially when First Excellency on an action we can retry, or which requires multiple checks, is more efficient.

The gains are marginal, given our already large dice pools, you'd increase reliability more by buying dice than buying successes(which are more useful when your dicepool is small).
 
azoicennead said:
There Is No Wind has Martial: Thrown. It's noted that the Essence 3+ upgrade that lets you use it to provide line-of-sight range doesn't apply, though.
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Right, but that's the bit I'm interested in. Ordinarily a Solar throwing something to the far reaches of Creation would be a feat in and of itself, never mind aiming it; but the heart-beam?

... unless the heart-beam's range is already her maximum visibility range, which... isn't entirely implausible? It is basically a native Charm, for all that it's not listed on her character sheet.

mastigos said:
I know, but the 2nd excellency is reliable. And since understanding super-low-level physics falls under Occult, having a reliable understanding of such seems like a good idea before we start trying to improve the seal.
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I think you're overestimating the probability of botching on 18 dice again.
 
It's important to remember that a sufficiently large dice pool can be converted to automatic successes. 4+(Difficulty*3) dice automatically succed at an action. Legendary scientific discoveries, if they're a Difficulty 5 (actually defined as the difficulty for a "Legendary" task) action, are automatic successes with a pool of 19.
Nearly Impossible tasks are Difficulty 4, and requires 16 dice for an automatic success.
Challenging tasks are Difficulty 3, and require 13 dice.

The difficulties are outlined on page 120 of 2e core, and the automatic successes on page 124 of 2e core. It's not supposed to apply for "dramatically critical actions", and provides a threshold of 0, but when we can bring a pool of 18 dice to bear on understanding any facet of physics we can reasonably assume that outside of vital actions we know what we're talking about (especially since Difficulty*2 dice gives a reasonable chance of success, and that's more than 3 times things supposed to be just short of impossible for mortals).
 
My take on Charm selection:

Considering the varied Charms and such, I think we definitely want a Lore Excellency (helps with the Dragon Seal, and is a prereq for the Lore Training Charms AND twice over for Wyld-Shaping). Admittedly it takes a single day to train, so getting a second one is wasteful unless we plan to quickbuy Wyld-Shaping right after. I could also see fast-training There Is No Wind for our combat ability, since it's cross-applicable to Thrown and hence the Heartbeams.

I'm personally enamored of both HAM and SFF, the first because "army of wizards" and the latter for kitbashing together a week's worth of coding in a day and getting 'safe' access to CNNT, but I also acknowledge that immediate problems take priority. They both take a good part of a week to train so HAM might be appropriate for a "reserve" quickbuy slot later (due to its quickly-scaling benefits the earlier we get it; consequently, I am in full support of saving several quickbuy slots until we need them or Hell Week is over).

Wyld-Shaping might be intensely useful as a stopgap measure, though given the timescales involved it's probably viable to save quick-learning it for just when we need it. In light of it taking up to 15 hours just to perform and all.

God-Mind Algorithms is pretty rad for maintaining the Dragon Seal programming, I support that as well.

We don't need to spend valuable capability-expanding xp and quickbuy slots on Yet Another Occult Excellency. Lore, maybe, for the sale of prerequisites, or perhaps the Third Excellency if we're drowning in xp. Not Occult.
 
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Quantumboost said:
I could also see fast-training There Is No Wind for our combat ability, since it's cross-applicable to Thrown and hence the Heartbeams.
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Still need Baughn's ruling on that one. By my reading of the Martial keyword, you'd still have to purchase the charm from the Archery tree to use it with Thrown.

Is there any way we can spare the... 1 XP and 1 hour of Miki-time for her to learn her first dot of Craft (vacuum)? (Assuming she's okay with that.)

Poor Ran. I hope she's keeping busy. We should check on her, too.
 
ω₁ said:
Still need Baughn's ruling on that one. By my reading of the Martial keyword, you'd still have to purchase the charm from the Archery tree to use it with Thrown.
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What I was referring to there was its Martial (Thrown) keyword; i.e., it can be applied to remove external penalties from Thrown attacks, and thus is a Combat Charm that applies to all foreseeable attack action types from Amulet Heart.

Didn't plan on purchasing it from Thrown tree, so yeah, we'd need Ran to up her Archery for it.
 
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Quantumboost said:
What I was referring to there was its Martial (Thrown) keyword; i.e., it can be applied to remove external penalties from Thrown attacks, and thus is a Combat Charm that applies to all foreseeable attack action types from Amulet Heart.
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That doesn't provide the line-of-sight range effect, though, which is what ω₁ wants to get for Thrown attacks.
azoicennead said:
There Is No Wind has Martial: Thrown. It's noted that the Essence 3+ upgrade that lets you use it to provide line-of-sight range doesn't apply, though.
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ω₁ said:
Right, but that's the bit I'm interested in.
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If we can get that for Thrown, we definitely have line-of-sight range for all Thrown attacks (including our lasers).
 
azoicennead said:
That doesn't provide the line-of-sight range effect, though, which is what ω₁ wants to get for Thrown attacks.


If we can get that for Thrown, we definitely have line-of-sight range for all Thrown attacks (including our lasers).
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Right, but I was voicing my support for it as a Charm purchase in general, because "can ignore environmental factors to line up a perfect shot" is useful in itself. The further desires of other posters who are not me are immaterial to this.
 
al103 said:
WHUT!?
o_O
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I get a bit silly when I'm tired. Actually, it would be fair to say that I'm a high-functioning cloud-cockoolander, so take that into account if I say something strange.
mastigos said:
Just to clarify in case we're talking past eachother: I meant low-level as in lower levels of reality, the underlying magatsuhi bacteria and physics variants.
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Right, that's what I meant. It feels more like Lore than Occult, since it's hard physics, but neither one of them properly applies. I suppose it might be closer to high-level Occult in the Exaltedverse.

Since it looks like you're getting a Lore excellency either way, I don't suppose it matters.
ω₁ said:
Scroll of Errata, p.10.
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This one? I don't see it.
 
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Quantumboost said:
Right, but I was voicing my support for it as a Charm purchase in general, because "can ignore environmental factors to line up a perfect shot" is useful in itself. The further desires of other posters who are not me are immaterial to this.
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Ah. Yes, it's definitely a good charm. It's more useful if we get a Thrown version than the Archery version that we cross-apply via the Martial keyword, because that doesn't include the (incredibly useful) range upgrade. Also, it would require 1 dot of Thrown (or using Ran), rather than 2 dots of Archery (and using Ran).
 
azoicennead said:
That doesn't provide the line-of-sight range effect, though, which is what ω₁ wants to get for Thrown attacks.
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Having read through some other Charms in SoE, I suspect the answer's going to be "no". There's an Essence 6 charm in DotFA (SoE) that changes the range for a Thrown weapon to miles instead of yards.

Quantumboost said:
Didn't plan on purchasing it from Thrown tree, so yeah, we'd need Ran to up her Archery for it.
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Entirely doable, then. Although at that point, you might want to grab the Keen Sight Technique, too: Ran already has +1 Awareness, so when Chara Changed with her, we would in fact be able to play ortillery sniper. Not great for anti-army, but still useful for anti-kaiju.

Actually, just quick-learning KST might be better, since we can slow-learn TiNW in 4 days, compared to... well, okay, only 5 days for KST. But KST has the advantage that we can use it for information gathering as well, possibly even out into Amala proper.

Baughn said:
This one? I don't see it.
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No, that's a very old version. I'm going off of... this one (where it's on page 9, since that file omits the cover page).
 
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Quickshot0 said:
Luckily Heart Beam already has a lot better range then mere yards?
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Exalted defaults to measuring distance in yards.
A knife has a Range of 15 yards. This means at 1-15 yards, you take no penalty for range. At 16-30 yards, you take a -1 external penalty for range. At 31-45 yards, you take a -2 external penalty for range. It's actual max range is 45 yards.
The charm ω₁ is referring to is Torrent of Inner Light, which modifies Triple Distance Attack Technique (which triples the Range stat). At Thrown 5, Essence 4 it changes it from a x3 multiplier to a x10 multiplier. At Thrown 6, Essence 6, it changes the unit of measurement to miles. So, for 2m, it goes from the base 15/30/45 to 45/90/135 (TDAT) to 150/300/450 (ToIL) to 26400/52800/79200 (ToIL+).

Also, the range Baughn just gave is 21.872266 yards.

Baughn said:
I'm going to say its range is around twenty metres. That's about twice the maximum ever seen in the mange.
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Is that a flat range (i.e. we can use it with 20m range at no penalty, no further), its Range stat (i.e. 20m range at no penalty, 21-40m range at -1, 41-60m range at -2), or it's furthest range (i.e. you're taking the -2 penalty when attacking something 20m away)?
 
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