Whew. Hiatuses are a thing, aren't they?
But we're back, with two newly posted sessions of Sunlit Sands!
I hope to get back into the habit of doing postmortems with this resent surge of play, but a lot of the chapters I've missed I'll probably do on-request or as needed. So it might not be in chronological order anymore. (Threadmarks tho...)
Anyway, I can tell you that the running theme of the current arc is 'Shyft does not handle Hiatuses well'. This isn't anyone's fault. I'm either playing a game with a stable schedule and continuity, or I'm not playing games at all- so the idea of a game that goes 'on pause' and then comes back is strange and uncharted territory for me.
So as a summary for those of you who still follow the thread-
Newly Exalted Night; Five-Days Jinx fled Gem after going on a wild impetuous caper against the nobility of Gem and generally being a petty shitheel to the entire world. Inks hared off after her because A. She stole the shrine belonging to her bath-god, and B: stole the magical drum that House Gion acquired decades ago. The drum that belongs to Tekutali, a local volcano god. A drum that by my reckoning can
make volcanoes erupt.
One thing led to another and we were sent on a whirlwind tour of the Anam Way and the Bloody Sands, where Inks was introduced to the various cultures and distinct practices of the seasonal and semi-nomadic settlements that eke out a living in the mildly wyld-tainted region. There we learned of a new threat rising in the Eastern sands, a Dragon Reborn who was going to rally the clans like Piercing Sun did to pillage the soft settled people of the hills and mountains.
Eventually we reached him, killed him, and also managed to encounter Jinx and reclaim our stuff. Then the hiatus paused progress for quite a while.
When the story resumed, we began with
Session 111, which was a tone setter that ended up paying off in a lot of really uncomfortable ways for me in subsequent sessions.
See, the expectation I had, was that Aleph as ST would deploy a kind of 'soft reset'. A way to ease us both back into playing with a shallower power curve as we regained familiarity with our characters and each other. What I would later realize, is that Aleph was far more adept and adapted to the hiatus model, so behind the scenes, the plots that I thought resolved with the Dragon Reborn were in fact still active and immediately relevant.
The beat-to-beat events of session 111 don't need much commentary- focusing more on characterization and some future planning like the handling of Bridgetown, Chujitsusuna, the Ahumudami Clanand so on. Aleph was *particularly mean* to me, tempting me with a Furnace Rhino action setpiece first thing, and honestly I think it was a missed opportunity. Exalted in my experience has a reputation of being a very devolved, Player-vs-Player style experience, in the sense that most of the time opposition are built with PCs splats and tools. So you're fighting Exalts or 'fighting' Exalts, in whatever form.
Environmental or 'natural' challenges like the Furnace Rhinos are in my opinion much more interesting and nuanced than 'Random fight against a random solaroid'. Even so, the pacing and 'realistic' grasp of time we use in Sunlit Sands made it so I couldn't stay to indulge myself- and there's always next time.
Moving forward a bit, I learned later that the entire Bloody Sands Expedition covered about 28 days- I really did not have a solid grasp of how long we were out of Gem, but in hindsight I'm super-pleased Aleph managed to keep track of it so well.
The major roleplaying beat that I took out of session 111, was that Inks had to learn that *pleasing everyone* was not her job, and that failure, or even failing to meet her own claims and aspirations, was not a doom-state. Which is why she went full extra queen-lawfare bitch and told everyone hounding her for attention to fuck off- because she'd been out for 28 days in the bloody sands and was *mostly* empty-handed.
Then we get to
Session 112, and this is where I fucked up. Badly.
Part of the mitigating factor here is that when I play Sunlit Sands, it's usually within an hour of waking up due to timezones, and at certain times of the year, I seem to have really inconsistent sleeping schedules. My alarm is set for one time, and I tend to wake up hours before it and can't get back to sleep. Which in turn leads to pounding headaches right when I'm at peak roleplaying/exalted time.
Not a conducive state of being to fun and engaging play. Session 112 was also split over two session-days, back to back, which was a huge boon in terms of continuity and pacing.
As for the specific events of the session- Pesala was a delight both in the punchline of the previous chapter, and as the opener to the current one. Then we segued to Sagacious Wing, and the more she's on camera, the more I want to see her character develop. She's in some way more mellow than Piercing Sun, at least by comparison, and I think the lingering experiences of El Galabi I have showed through via Inks in interacting with her.
At the end of the day, Inks is sympathetic and empathetic to Wing and her position with the Rangers. Inks strictly speaking does not want to be a military commander, and became the primary war-sorcerer of the Rangers on what amounts to a metaphysical technicality. Wing I think, back in El Galabi and now firmly wanted to establish a hierarchy where she is the commander and senior officer to Inks as a subordinate. And honestly, Inks is okay with that. Time will tell if Wing and Inks will butt heads.
Interestingly enough, one of Inks's major flaws is solipsism, but with Sagacious Wing she barely demonstrates it. Inks is not confident in her ability as a war-leader. Not in the same way she is as profit/loss rationality and her sense of ethics and morals. So she happily gives way to Wing as the more experienced hand. Put a pin in this, though.
After a bit of past-talking, we hit the first major flag that I missed at the time. Remember how I said I expected this to be a 'reset' before moving forward? My expectation was that there would be a 'no hassles' transition from Gem to Coxati to take care of the agreement that secured El Galabi.
Yeah that's not the case. Aleph basically picked up exactly where we left off in terms of tone and scope. I just failed to recognize that from the 'player' level at the time, and it cost me. You'll see how and why in subsequent sessions.
See, the Dragon Reborn had a backer, I knew this from investigations across the Anam Way, but didn't have the chance to really follow up on it. I had at the time assumed that because they were so far off out into the West-ish direction relative to Gem, that they couldn't project power without the Dragon Reborn as a cat's paw. That was a mistake on my part.
So Wing informed Inks of what's going on, and now we find out that the Giant's Fingers, the
single practical pass from Coxati out to Gem and the Scar, is blocked. And Wing is saddling up to address the issue with the expectation that Inks follows- and Inks will! But she has other entanglements she has to resolve first.
Like the Despot, and the Houses of Gem. The nuts-and-bolts and roleplaying of this sequence I think stand well enough on their own, though I am particularly proud of how I articulated in Inks's narration the view of failure and how self-damaging it can be to deny falibility.
The real monster moment of the session was with Trasti Gion, and where Aleph took gleeful, rutheless advantage of Inks's solipsism and my frustrating lack of diligence when it comes to social encounters.
The fact is, I don't like to play fastidious, paranoid information-gathering characters. Its
exhausting. Same with how I have in other discussions shown distaste for excessive information security and compartmentalization. But because of that, I don't go into social situations as a player with any real thought given towards 'theory of mind'. I treat NPCs the way I want to be treated, which co-incides with how Inks wants to be treated. That being good and virtuous is met with virtue in return.
Bluntly, Inks is naive, and has been powerful enough to evade the consequences of her naivety for nearly a decade.
I don't actually like that realization. It feels... off. I felt awful during this session- even if the roleplaying was excellent, fun and satisfying. I felt like I was doing myself and Inks-as-a-characater a disservice by playing her so poorly. I didn't feel like I was
winning- and that is a very thorny concept to unpack here.
A lot of people think winning in a TTRPG or even Exalted specifically is 'never failing rolls' and 'getting everything you want with no chance of contest'. I don't think that's a very good definition to follow. You'll see a lot of players who resent it when STs introduce complications, because the 'victory' condition is a frictionless existence reduced to the absolute minimum of necessary interaction.
Like- taken to an extreme, for a lot of people I've played with, 'victory' is the ST sighing in resignation and narrating that things happen exactly as the player wills- and that the only concession to vermilisitude is 'time', if that.
So I said 'winning', but I think the actual better word for what I felt at the time of Gion's conversation was
playing. Oh I was defintely playing, I was having fun, but I wasn't doing
gameplay, and as a consequence I left huge gaping holes in my competency that caught me out. In some ways this is a virtue- a statement that Exalts are not faultless platforms of automatic powers and unstated agency. I, and by extension Inks had to
choose to do things.
Having said all that, what did the Gion scene actually entail?
The crux of the matter is that I, and Inks by extension, assumed that Trasti Gion was a person, not a nation. That the right and moral course of action was to treat him as a person who wanted help and emotional closure. Instead, I was quite rudely informed that he is and will continue to be an imperialistic, bigoted dare I say liberal-conservative scion of a socio-economic power bloc within an extremely toxic capitalist extraction economy.
Basically, I forgot that Gem is a terrible place to have morals and ethics, and it burned me badly. I forgot in part because I was sympathetic to Gion's problems, and unreasonably assumed that his character was streamlined for the sake of the wide cast and far-reaching geopolitical skein of Sunlit Sands. I'm used to much simpler characters and problems. Aleph however is extremely diligent and has ample sounding boards to workshop ideas and formalize characters to put in front of me.
I'm not sure I want to forgive Aleph for making me correlate Gion and Gem at large with MAGA-types... (jokingly, I say).
Sessions 111 and 112 were primarily Roleplaying events, with really the major mechanical discussion happening at the end with Peacock Shadow Eyes.
Even in the original 2e text of the spell, it is a very powerful effect. The Book of Three Circles houseruled version is in its own way more robust and potent. So potent that Aleph immediately tried to correct for it by letting Gion apply his Principles to the roll.
In subsequent days we had several discussions of the mechanics and effect of the spell, and I think this is one of those pain-points between 2e and Kerisgame that Aleph and I stumble across every so often.
Speaking from my experience, how to explain... Okay, in Exalted 2e there are two MDVs; Parry and Dodge. Almost no one uses Parry because it is by mechanics, objectively inferior to Dodge MDV. The problem is that the books do a bad job of explaining what either MDV is actually for and if they have limitations on their applicability.
Dodge MDV is primarily as I utilize it, your ability to ignore 'ambient or area effect' mental influence. The buskers in a market street, vagrants asking for handouts, or the political messaging of a play that you happen to be watching. It's not strictly defined as 'DMDV defends against Performance Actions', though that's an easy rule of thumb.
Note also that DMDV is usually
very high for most characters, even mortals! WP + Integrity + Essence, rounded down. So a character with WP 5 and Integrity 1, Essence 1 has a DMDV of 3. WP 4-5 is usually the domain of 'non-heroic mortals'. A Heroic mortal likely has MDV of or even 5. And due to how storyteller dice probability works, you need about 10-12 dice to roll 6+ successes consistently- even moreso if you're not counting 10s as 2 successes.
Parry MDV meanwhile is [Charisma/Manipulation + Presence] /2, rounded down. And unlike regular parry, there's no equipment bonuses to help boost your defense. Or better to say, the 'equipment' you get for Parry DV are your Intimiacies in base 2e, and Principles in the kerisgame hacks.
And then of course there's the elephant in the room- Relative Appearance Bonus. This handly little mechanic can create a +3 or -3 swing in MDV depending on how you handle it, and the rules text does not actually clarify it it applies to DMDV or PDMV. Part of me, based on reading the text and years of mulling, almost wants to argue that Relative Appearance should primarily only benefit Parry MDV. Why? Because Parry MDV is your argument against an incoming social influence effect, it is you actively debating and deflecting the points presented. And 'how you carry yourself' is a pretty important element to marshaling an argument, even if we don't like what it says about people.
To further muddy the issue, lots of players and STs rule that the relative app bonus works on Dodge MDV, which makes an already higher-than-normal trait skyrocket- because under the best case of having a 3-dot difference, its not adding +3 dice. It's adding +3 to your MDV, or
six dice.
Now personally, I think that in some cases a higher relative app could apply to dodge MDV, but I definitely don't think it should be always applicable.
But as you can probably guess now by the above analysis, a lot of people don't like relative appearance modifier, or the idea that 'Appearance' is even a trait. As I've mentioned before, one of Inks's core concepts is that she
is Appearance 5. That in a very real sense, she is one of the most stunningly distinctive if not attractive people in Gem, Coxati and the Anam way. Essentially-
Trait 1: Below average
Trait 2: Average
Trait 3: You're recognized as distinct in your immediate area (hometown/neighborhood)
Trait 4: you're recognized as distinct in your wider area (Home city-state)
Trait 5: You're reocognized as distinct in
neighboring city-states.
Given the option I absolutely would have picked up all the pretty-person merits from Scroll of Heroes.
Anyway- all of this is to give you context for why Peacock Shadow Eyes is amazingly powerful. It's a two-stage effect of 'Roll to see if it takes' and 'roll to see if the target notices'.
The first roll, since its a spell, can't be augmented by Excellencies. To accomadate the higher-than-average Dodge MDV, you roll [Manip+Occult] and it gives you [Essence] automatic successes. Or Enlightenment/2 under kersigame hacks. So immediately, any character with MDV 3 or less can be enthralled by the Sorcerer. (Ess 3 +1 success beats MDV 4).
Gion as a heroic mortal and fairly strong mental defender, had a dodge MDV of 4. Inks being Essence 4/Enlightenment 9 means that she basically could have mind-crushed him casually. And on the one hand, that's not inherently a bad thing. On the other, it violates a pretty central tenent to what Aleph wants out of this game, and what a lot of people would agree with her for- Exalted is
notoriously bad at counterplay.
Several effects even with good intentions, are printed with mechanics that border on fiat-efficacy. They're so good they always work, or trivialize encounters. And mortals are in some ways meant to be trivialized, but then you get into mileu and suspension-of-disbelief. If Peacock Shadow eyes is so effective, why aren't sorcerers using it willy nilly on kings and such? So Aleph sought to correct it.
She let Gion apply his 4-dot Principle to the roll, boosting his MDV to 8. Suddenly Inks's pool of 7 + 4 automatic successes isn't looking so good. At the time of the session, I didn't want to bog things down by aruging, but I did make a point to seek clarification and arbitration afterwords. Shadow Eyes falls into a specific ambigious class of effects that are essentially... unknowable Influence Effects? Thematically and conceptually, you aren't really marshaling arguments against them or putting your ideals in the path of an incoming influence. It's just a check to see 'does this exceed your ability to ingnore an incoming influence'. The lack of nuance in that check however precludes counterplay.
It's sort of like saying something is Unblockable and Undodgable without actually using those system terms.
See, the end goal of counter-play is great. The problem is that its very easy to under or overcorrect. On top of this- this is the first time I had actually used the spell. I had purchased it litereally years ago, in-game and out of game, and never had an opportunity to really use it in a way that I felt justified. Inks isn't the type to casually enthrall and mentally manipuate her peers, but here it was a significant operational security risk that I felt was justified.
As much as I say want to use it on Rankar, my impression of him is so paranoid that he'd figure it out almost immediately.
So at the time of casting, I was feeling a little frustrated that a spell I hadn't had a chance to use was being nerfed on-the-spot. But at the same time I absolutely respected the intention behind the change and tried to meet Aleph half way.
After the session we did go over the spell and come to an agreement on how it works. (which I need to reconstruct and ammend to the text of the spell now...)
I'm not sure what to really
say about Session 112? It was good, I had fun. But I also felt bad and frustrated. There's nothing Aleph really needed to do or change, it was all on me for not playing to the standard I had set for myself.
Anyway, that's the postmortem, and next week I'll post session 113!
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