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Covok posted:So, is 3E a good game, according to goon-census? It's pretty good. It's hardly perfect but the system now does what it's billed to do. I'd still play a game with its combat/social engines even if they had nothing to do with the setting.
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Apr 13, 2016 23:23
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So if 2e/2.5e was such a poo poo-show, why did everyone play that instead of just sticking with 1e?
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Apr 14, 2016 01:02
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Hell, I did stick with 1st edition, warts and all.
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Apr 14, 2016 01:09
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I have some problems with 3e, and they pretty much all have to do with the various non-combat systems. With the social and craft systems, in order to get anything done you absolutely need to be doing something with it all the time (either playing the Read Intentions minigame with a optional side order of Investigation or making up excuses to make poo poo) in order to be able to do anything at all with them, and Social has the problem that aiming Read Intentions at another player is actually a kind of aggressive OOC social thing. Furthermore, Bureaucracy as a skill has no purpose outside of being a prerequiste for Bureaucracy charms, which is funny because there's a given system for performing large organizational projects that doesn't interface with the Bureaucracy ability in any way. Edit: Also, the Limit system sucks. Of the example Limit Conditions, about half of them would come up once every ten or twenty sessions, and the other ones are liable to go off two or three times per session. Ratoslov fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Apr 14, 2016 |
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Apr 14, 2016 01:14
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Berkshire Hunts posted:So if 2e/2.5e was such a poo poo-show, why did everyone play that instead of just sticking with 1e? Because then you couldn't play Infernals 
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Apr 14, 2016 01:21
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Berkshire Hunts posted:So if 2e/2.5e was such a poo poo-show, why did everyone play that instead of just sticking with 1e?
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Apr 14, 2016 01:34
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Bedlamdan posted:It's pretty good. It's hardly perfect but the system now does what it's billed to do. I'd still play a game with its combat/social engines even if they had nothing to do with the setting. It's main problem is Charm Tree and progression system
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Apr 14, 2016 02:06
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Berkshire Hunts posted:So if 2e/2.5e was such a poo poo-show, why did everyone play that instead of just sticking with 1e? A lot of people lament the lethality of 2e's system, where a tiny misstep can have characters suddenly being splattered across the cobblestones, ending fights suddenly, brutally, and fast. But unlike 1e combat, at least combat in 2e ends.
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Apr 14, 2016 02:45
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I'm still a tabletop scrub but 3e strikes me as extremely dependent on cooperative story telling. Maybe that's a given for games like these but there are soooo many poorly documented systems and banal charms that any given player wouldn't have to try very hard to be a complete poo poo heel, and I'm not even talking about intentional trolling or bad faith playing.
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Apr 14, 2016 05:05
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Ratoslov posted:Also, the Limit system sucks. Of the example Limit Conditions, about half of them would come up once every ten or twenty sessions, and the other ones are liable to go off two or three times per session. There's some pretty bad ones but I think that it allows you to decide how much you want to deal with Limit Break as a mechanic. It also tells the GM what kind of situations to put you in to test your character's mettle. Limit is interesting in that it doesn't really depend on if you succeed at what you're doing, if you expose yourself to whatever your trigger is it just kinda happens. You don't have to shopping list your Limit Trigger from the examples, you can make up one for your character that makes sense and will get pinged at a reasonable rate.
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Apr 14, 2016 05:23
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I used to really like Exalted 2E, because I got into Exalted at the moment it came out and it felt like a huge improvement over 1E to my untrained eyes and we had a lot of fun with it over the years. But as I grew older and more cognizant of game design and discovered more and more holes in the rules, I liked it less and less until I just couldn't play it anymore.
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Apr 14, 2016 05:38
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LatwPIAT posted:A lot of people lament the lethality of 2e's system, where a tiny misstep can have characters suddenly being splattered across the cobblestones, ending fights suddenly, brutally, and fast. With proper framing, you could actually turn the lethality into a feature, not a bug. In our game, I'd track just how many ticks had passed since the beginning of a fight, and then do a quick descriptive narration of what the fight looked like to the mortals around at the end of it. It made the ludicrously quick battles feel more epic rather than less, when you frame it properly. Doesn't mean it wasn't a bad thing overall, but it could be spun well. (And I made sure to never push my players into pure paranoia combat - NPCs made mistakes, missed opportunities, and generally acted like people rather than impersonal killing machines, which made my players willing to take risks.) Tarranon posted:I'm still a tabletop scrub but 3e strikes me as extremely dependent on cooperative story telling. Maybe that's a given for games like these but there are soooo many poorly documented systems and banal charms that any given player wouldn't have to try very hard to be a complete poo poo heel, and I'm not even talking about intentional trolling or bad faith playing. When you get right down to it, most tabletop RPGs are like this. Crunchy games just offer more places for assholes to be assholes while saying "it's allowed in the rules!" Kenlon fucked around with this message at 07:13 on Apr 14, 2016 |
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Apr 14, 2016 07:09
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Alright, let's say I was thinking of running Ex3. Literally, just a thought. What advice would ya give?
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Apr 15, 2016 03:46
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Covok posted:Alright, let's say I was thinking of running Ex3. Literally, just a thought. What advice would ya give? The way my group's traditionally done it is the DM picks what he wants the major player of the story to be, tells the players "it is set in this part of creation- i do not know how, but you have met up hereabouts," and lets them go nuts determining exactly who and what they are. Since it is totally acceptable for a starting character to be a medium-size king, a martial arts legend known across an entire Direction, and/or worshipped as a god by tens of thousands of people, and that's -before- they start buying magic powers, this is probably where a lot of the setting is created in and of itself! Then the DM establishes how the major player starts getting involved and watches the fireworks. Exalted resists the DM putting a story in front of the players and telling them "follow the road" much harder than D&D, or any of the FFG RPGs, or even most of the World of Darkness games, because your PCs start off incredibly powerful and get stronger from there. Exalted is, once your players get well and truly into it, a game of "it's not a question of if you succeed, it's a question of what the consequences of your success will be." And up until that point, it is a really neat game of "ahahaha holy poo poo this game actually lets me do this this is awesome"
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Apr 15, 2016 05:03
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more specifically for someone familiar with the setting: check out the Southeast, it owns, the combat system's a ton more manageable than the previous one but I'd recommend coming up with some quick generic statblocks for fightin' time that you can modify on the fly, and the social rules are pretty decent as long as you remember to give your NPCs intimacies. good standby I've found is that everyone has a minor intimacy towards their job, their nation, and their co-workers, distribute "hell yes" or "i hate these people" as appropriate.
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Apr 15, 2016 05:08
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My own table had a standing rule requiring Compassion 2 minimum because we had a few too many cases of psychopathic killasauruses. To be fair to that psycho, he wasn't killing other Solars, just mortals.
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Apr 15, 2016 05:12
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Covok posted:Alright, let's say I was thinking of running Ex3. Literally, just a thought. What advice would ya give? Have the PCs coup/conquer/inherit a small nation or territory and go hog wild from there
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Apr 15, 2016 06:04
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Covok posted:Alright, let's say I was thinking of running Ex3. Literally, just a thought. What advice would ya give? 1. Width makes fights hard. Having a lot of combatants, particularly battle groups, pressures players' resources enough to force them to think tactically about where their motes are going round on round and whether they're spending thoughtfully enough to outlast. Attrition is important to define the stakes of fighting from moment to moment and spur combats to their conclusion, but it can also feel like a huge grind. 2. Height makes fights scary. Having individually strong combatants, ones that can stand toe to toe or even surpass the PCs in power, adds to the swinginess and intensity of combat. Giant dicepools and strong powers colliding with each other increases the risk that things will go wrong or at least unpredictably. The variance and tension adds drama and excitement but it can also just feel like bullshit.
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Apr 15, 2016 07:54
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Ze Pollack posted:Exalted resists the DM putting a story in front of the players and telling them "follow the road" much harder than D&D, or any of the FFG RPGs, or even most of the World of Darkness games, because your PCs start off incredibly powerful and get stronger from there. Exalted is, once your players get well and truly into it, a game of "it's not a question of if you succeed, it's a question of what the consequences of your success will be." A good way to give players free reign without being completely overwhelmed, particularly in a kitchen sink setting like creation, is to have a session of history building using Microsope. The goal of the session is to write the history of the starting region from the First Age to now, and let them seed the area with plot hooks. It's a good way to basically ask them what they find cool about Exalted in a more structured way - and Microscope is just hella fun.
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Apr 15, 2016 15:59
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I love that idea. Does the GM pre-seed history with canon events?
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Apr 15, 2016 17:56
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bartkusa posted:I love that idea. Does the GM pre-seed history with canon events? Every time I've done the Microscope pre-game, our GM was one of the players so he could drop things in like normal. Or you can also say, "The following X things are immutable because Reasons" and let people work around that.
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Apr 15, 2016 18:22
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kaynorr posted:A good way to give players free reign without being completely overwhelmed, particularly in a kitchen sink setting like creation, is to have a session of history building using Microsope. The goal of the session is to write the history of the starting region from the First Age to now, and let them seed the area with plot hooks. It's a good way to basically ask them what they find cool about Exalted in a more structured way - and Microscope is just hella fun. Dang thats actually pretty sweet. I should have come with that on my game.
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Apr 15, 2016 18:27
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kaynorr posted:Every time I've done the Microscope pre-game, our GM was one of the players so he could drop things in like normal. Or you can also say, "The following X things are immutable because Reasons" and let people work around that. Give the GM an extra go or two at the Palette before you start. An extra two bits of absolute control will really help them shape the game in a way they can run without burning out, and honestly if they need more than two extra concessions for Microscope they need to talk to their players. The other thing Microscope does really well is give an easy shared history to the entire group. You don't have to mention how Seven Cities of Iron and Brass was destroyed, everyone already knows that The Dutchess That Collects War showed up so it's probably a Shadowland now.
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Apr 15, 2016 19:19
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What are Infernals? Like, Solars are greek heroes, dragonblooded are the chinese nobility, abyssals spread fear in the name of death, etc. What is an Infernal?
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Apr 15, 2016 23:19
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Satanic Solars, range from psychos out of 70s italian ghiallo movies to Miltonian devils to Dick Dastardly
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Apr 15, 2016 23:28
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I'd probably name Zorayas or Azhrarn as prime inspirations. Kind of Solars with the decadence dials turned up to ten from the beginning.
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Apr 15, 2016 23:33
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:Satanic Solars, range from psychos out of 70s italian ghiallo movies to Miltonian devils to Dick Dastardly
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Apr 15, 2016 23:46
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Ratoslov posted:I dunno. While the mechanics of 2.x are a garbage fire, there's a lot of cool mechanical ideas. Infernals is one of the best for this and in my mind is the best book in the line ideas-wise if you take an X-acto knife and remove all of Chapter 2, then burn it. It is a chapter from another, altogether worse book which some idiot published in the middle of a pretty cool book. That chapter absolutely ruined Infernals for me. I am now at full on antipathy towards the very concept of their existence thanks to that terrible writing.
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Apr 16, 2016 01:23
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Covok posted:What are Infernals? Like, Solars are greek heroes, dragonblooded are the chinese nobility, abyssals spread fear in the name of death, etc. What is an Infernal? Demonic Rock-Stars. We still don't know much about their 3E fluff, but at least in 2E they were basically the celebrities of Hell who do the Yozis' dirty work while being given as much drugs and groupies as they could want. Naturally this all goes out the window if they start aspiring for more than just their own gratification. Or even if they just started out that way, the point is that the Yozis don't understand people that much and assume they can be kept in line with just hookers n' blow instead of having actual aspirations. The Infernals being "Heroic" characters, this kind of goes out the window pretty quickly. Some characters, like Manosque Cyan are on board because she wants to see the Realm collapse upon itself while Cearr's ambitions seem to begin and end with ultraviolence, while others include a single father searching for his kidnapped child and a medic who lost a patient (and comes from a culture with a much more benevolent view of the Yozis than is really accurate, wise, or safe). They all have reasons for accepting the Infernal Exaltation, but how compliant they are after they get a fire that can never be revoked is kind of a crap-shoot. Not to mention the Yozis may not understand if they're being ignored or defied, given that they include batshit insane figures like Adorjan, who is just as likely to give someone an urge like "Destroy all art that offends your sense of aesthetics" as she is to give them a goal that is actually constructive. There's also the fact that Infernals can basically cheat any punishment from the Yozis by acting like a bond villain. Like leaving obvious calling cards at a crime scene, or telling your enemies your plans before you kill them. Keeping in mind, that means it's perfectly legitimate to say, be Zorro and mark a Z whenever you perform a heroic rescue, or detailing to a tyrannical king how you plan on improving their kingdom after they're deposed. Because the Yozis aren't so much evil as simply psychotic by human standards, and otherwise have no regard for others beyond whether or not they can help them escape from their prison. Except for the Ebon Dragon, who actively defines himself by being malicious and hateful, but even then he's still just as likely to pull the wings off a fly as he is to reduce an entire nation to anarchy and famine. Keeping in mind, all this might go out the window whenever Infernals 3E comes out. But as a way to differentiate them from Abyssals, Infernals basically come with a lot more bombast, spectacle, and scenery-chewing just by the nature of their abilities, their masters, and their mechanics. Bedlamdan fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Apr 16, 2016 |
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Apr 16, 2016 01:27
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I enjoyed playing a super-honorable Knight who served Malfeas using Nuclear Fire in a game. It was fun.
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Apr 16, 2016 03:07
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MonsieurChoc posted:I enjoyed playing a super-honorable Knight who served Malfeas using Nuclear Fire in a game. It was fun. I'm in a mixed game (mostly Solars) as a Kimbery Infernal, and have brought in a 4-dot Slayer ally who is immensely popular with the rest of the table. He just wants to find his family and crush the realm(for kidnapping his family) while also leaving rad infrastructure that glorifies the Yozis in his wake (his Urge). He's a better hero than some of the Solars, to be honest.
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Apr 16, 2016 19:28
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Mile'ionaha posted:I'm in a mixed game (mostly Solars) as a Kimbery Infernal, and have brought in a 4-dot Slayer ally who is immensely popular with the rest of the table. He just wants to find his family and crush the realm(for kidnapping his family) while also leaving rad infrastructure that glorifies the Yozis in his wake (his Urge). He's a better hero than some of the Solars, to be honest.
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Apr 16, 2016 19:34
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Nessus posted:True, but what does he do after he finds his family and/or brings down the Realm? That'd be something to figure out between myself and the GM, but he probably wouldn't embrace the reclaimation. As it stands, the realm is in mid-collapse in my game, so he'll probably end up leaving it to die while defending the SouthEast against other nasty incursions, or maybe go back to Hell and build gigantic spires to provide accupressure to Malfeas. Dude needs to unclench.
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Apr 16, 2016 19:47
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Mile'ionaha posted:go back to Hell and build gigantic spires to provide accupressure to Malfeas. This is an incredibly clever idea.
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Apr 16, 2016 20:00
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Covok posted:Alright, let's say I was thinking of running Ex3. Literally, just a thought. What advice would ya give? Make sure character creation is done with all the players sitting around the same table (or on the same voice chat). Having the players go through the stages of character creation at the same time helps, too: having everyone pick castes, then all move on to assigning attributes, then skills, and so on, building connections between the characters as they go. It leads to much more coherent, cohesive groups without baked in personality conflicts.
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Apr 16, 2016 20:39
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Nessus posted:True, but what does he do after he finds his family and/or brings down the Realm? There were three sequels to Taken
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Apr 16, 2016 20:48
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Mile'ionaha posted:As it stands, the realm is in mid-collapse in my game, so he'll probably end up leaving it to die while defending the SouthEast against other nasty incursions, or maybe go back to Hell and build gigantic spires to provide accupressure to Malfeas. Dude needs to unclench. I had an Infernal that was all about helping the Reclamation if one could find a means to "heal" the Yozis from their relatively twisted state. Granted, she had a firmly pollyanna-ish view of what the Primordials were like, but then, most of the information on them is at least somewhat apocryphal anyway.
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Apr 16, 2016 22:12
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I had an Infernal that was all about helping the Reclamation if one could find a means to "heal" the Yozis from their relatively twisted state. Granted, she had a firmly pollyanna-ish view of what the Primordials were like, but then, most of the information on them is at least somewhat apocryphal anyway. Probably somewhat less important if you don't have Solaroid PCs though.
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Apr 16, 2016 22:20
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Liquid Communism posted:That chapter absolutely ruined Infernals for me. I am now at full on antipathy towards the very concept of their existence thanks to that terrible writing. What was in that chapter? I never played 2E.
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Apr 16, 2016 22:24
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Boing posted:What was in that chapter? I never played 2E. If you cut out the horrid loving Lillun stuff it's pretty cool. But it's not like, "one sidebar and an unfortunate illustration," it's threaded throughout Infernals and the 2E climax metaplot book and other stuff. Why? Because White Wolf is cursed to produce material that is forty percent rad poo poo, forty percent OK stuff, and twenty percent absolute loving horror show.
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Apr 16, 2016 22:31
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