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Desiden posted:Its not perfect, and there's some wonky elements (for example, from a mechanical perspective summoning 5-6 fighty demons and having them fight individually can be way more powerful than they would be as a battlegroup), but it does cover the biggest cases where farming init might emerge. Worth nothing that while 5 dudes versus 1 is way stronger than 1 battle group versus 1, because battlegroups attack multiple people, that battlegroup can attack more than 5 targets as well as benefit from all your War charms so it's not quite as straight forward that they're five times worse. They're definitely not as amazing in general, but there are cases where they shine. It's all the inverse-ninja law bullshit or whatever. Guy shows up with one Blood Ape? Oh poo poo, that's a strong demon. He shows up with 100? Well now those are obviously a bunch of mooks!
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Mar 26, 2019 17:11
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What if he shows up with five gorillas using Ape Hand Mastery to have them all wield the Immaculate Martial Art form weapons and he's dyed them the correct colors, what then? No joke, 'parody gorilla Immaculates' is a fight I desperately want to justify putting in a game of Ex3 someday.
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Mar 26, 2019 17:20
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Joe Slowboat posted:What if he shows up with five gorillas using Ape Hand Mastery to have them all wield the Immaculate Martial Art form weapons and he's dyed them the correct colors, what then? If characters are sufficiently distinct as to not be able to be generalized to a single mechanical profile, it's probably best not to use a battle group.
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Mar 26, 2019 17:24
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Exalted 3rd Edition: Sexy Time Having high Appearance makes you inherently better at impressing and awing people (or intimidating them, if you are Hideous). If your Appearance is higher than your target’s Resolve, you get a bonus to Instill and Persuade actions based on the difference (or Threaten, for Hideous). So that’s why being sexy matters…well, that and Appearance is a viable stat to roll for social influence if you can find a way to justify it. So it’s good at everything. But Mors, you say! What if I don’t want to be persuaded? Well, you have options. Even if your Resolve is overcome, you aren’t defenseless. You can spend Willpower! 1 Willpower will automatically prevent any influence that is trying to change how you feel – that is, by making, destroying or changing an Intimacy. Spending 1 Willpower will: 1. Stop a new Intimacy from being made, period. 2. Stop a Major or Defining Intimacy from being weakened. 3. Reject the effects of a successful Inspire action. Resisting a Persuade, Bargain or Threaten action that succeeds is somewhat harder. When you fail to resist one of those with Resolve, you enter a Decision Point. In a Decision Point, you must select an Intimacy and explain how it justifies resisting the specific influence against you. The Intimacy must have equal or greater intensity as the Intimacy that supported the influence roll against you, and it cannot be the same Intimacy you used to increase your Resolve, if one existed. If the ST accepts your argument, you may spend 1 Willpower to reject the influence roll entirely. Otherwise, you are swayed. I would be pretty lenient on what works, as long as it’s reasonable, but I would definitely have appreciated more advice here. NPCs will fairly rarely resist influence unless it’s vitally important to them, though. Once someone has resisted influence, it is much harder to sway them again. However, if you manage to produce the evidence needed to do so, the target can’t boost their Resolve using the same Intimacy they used the first time, though they can use the one that they used in the Decision Point to resist, if there was a Decision Point. The game explicitly says that it is a good idea to set up Intimacies in such a way as to make it so the stuff you really, really don’t want to do is protected by them. This leads us well into unacceptable influence. Anything that counts as unacceptable influence can be straight up rejected, for free, no matter what, even if your Resolve would normally not be high enough to defend against it. You may choose to have your character listen, but only because you want to. Nothing can compel a character to obey unacceptable influence except certain rare and potent Charms or spells. So what is Unacceptable Influence? It is: 1. Any Instill action that attempts to strengthen or weaken an Intimacy without exploiting an appropriately strong Intimacy in order to do so. 2. Any Persuade action that doesn’t exploit an Intimacy strong enough for the task. 3. Any Bargain action that does not provide a sufficient incentive (as determine by the person controlling the character being targeted) or any Threaten action that is insufficiently threatening (same) 4. Any influence that would make a character kill themselves or do something they know for certain would result in their death. 5. Any influence that would compel a character to abandon or end a Defining Intimacy. You might be able to seduce someone with a Defining Tie to their spouse, but cannot convince them to abandon or kill their spouse without first degrading that Intimacy. 6. Any attempt at seduction which violates a character’s sexual orientation, as defined by the person controlling the character. 7. Some Charms can also add things that count as Unacceptable Influence. There are also a few situations that can change things up. It is possible to target multiple people with influence actions – either a select group of listeners or anyone that can hear you at all. However, you get -3 whenever targeting multiple people, as it’s harder to tailor your arguments. The exception is Inspire, which by default targets everyone that can perceive and understand you doing it without penalty, and in fact can’t target specific people without magic. Success or failure is determined for each target individually, as their Resolve will vary; when handling large groups of people who aren’t important enough to differentiate, just assume one average Resolve for the group. It is possible to perform influence through writing – letters, books, pamphlets, whatever. When doing so, the ability you roll is always Linguistics, no matter what you’re doing. Rolls are compared to Resolve as normal, and you can either target a single intended reader or anyone that reads the thing, with the normal rules for multiple target influence. It is also possible to attempt influence via gestures, appearance and body language alone, but the target gets +2 Resolve against that, and it’s normally only possible to do threats or seduction that way without being really creative. (Exception: inspire actions using dance grant no Resolve bonus.) What about sign language you ask? Does not get mentioned. So can you overturn someone else’s Influence to get someone to abandon a course they’ve been convinced to follow? Yes. However, the target gets +3 Resolve against any influence that would make them abandon what they were persuaded to do, on top of any Intimacy bonus. Second, you must spend a Willpower to make the attempt. If you manage to succeed, the target can choose to enter a Decision Point without spending Willpower, and indeed must spend Willpower and cite an Intimacy to be able to listen to you. And yes, these same rules apply to reversing a reversal, as long as you keep using new arguments. Once a story arc ends, any lingering influence can be overturned normally, without using these special reversal rules. We also get a sidebar on seduction and how to do it with influence actions, and The Red Rule, which is that a PC can only be seduced or put in a sexual situation with their player’s consent; otherwise, any attempt to do so fails automatically. This is entirely up to the player, who can choose whether or not to invoke this for any attempt. Which is…a good rule, yes, though I probably would have put it somewhere besides a sidebar. If you want to retry a failed social influence action, you are going to have to find a new argument or better offer to make before you can do it. For an Instill action, you will need substantially greater evidence of whatever you’re trying to convince the target of, or you must wait an arc before trying again. For a Persuade action, you will need either a new argument that plays on a different (but sufficiently strong) Intimacy, or you must wait an arc before trying again, or you must strengthen the target’s Intimacy that you were trying to use before trying again, whichever comes first. For a Bargain action, you are going to need a substantially greater offering. For a Threaten action, you will need to significantly escalate your threat. For an Inspire action, you must wait for a new scene before trying again, same for Read Intentions. Also of note: all social influence works just fine during combat, as long as it makes sense in context. You can make any social influence action as a combat action, and they can be flurried. One of the more likely things to show up as a combat social influence check is a surrender, from either side. Next time: Crimedoing
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Mar 26, 2019 17:24
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One thing I and my players quite liked with the social rules was that there was a bit more specialization in how you'd approach your situations than a traditional "I am the diplomancer" type build in these games. Identifying and hiding intimacies was one set of things, actually influencing in different manners were other charms/skills. So there was some value in having multiple people working together on a social problem.
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Mar 26, 2019 22:34
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Mors Rattus posted:We also get special rules for chasing down and slaughtering fleeing battle groups, though I have no idea why anyone thought they were needed. Gotta have them massacre rules, I guess? But basically when a battle group routs you can take an action to chase down and murder a bunch of the fleeing soldiers. I assumed that at the time this was just future-proofing for Abyssals because of their penchant for drawing strength from mass murder. Although, the 3rd edition Abyssals are supposed to be a bit different I expect that they won't be ditching that entirely. The social system was pretty impressive to me at first, but after using it a bit I found it to be really cumbersome and usually just boiled down to 'bigger numbers win' which made the entire exercise consume a lot of time for something that could've been handled by just rolling charisma + presence (or whatever you're preferred stats are) and moving on with my day. Just to be clear, you can say the same thing about combat so it's not like this is an indictment of the social system. Players spamming read intentions actions on everyone they meet made me fourth wall break and tell them to stop doing that, but that's not a big deal either. I think there's some pretty decent ideas here, but it's all stick and no carrot without any real means of enforcing its outcomes beyond what the player or GM feels like doing. In a 3rd edition game I ran using the leaked rules the one and only time the social system itself actually mattered and got used properly it killed the session because one player tried to influence another player and she was not having that. It was for completely innocuous reasons, she just didn't like the idea that she was going to lose 'social combat' as she preferred to call it and so that was that.
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Mar 26, 2019 23:21
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So I'm in the process of prewriting a bunch of posts for the Neotech 2 write up (ultimately I might just end up pre-writing most of them because this poo poo is just so dense) and I'm starting to realize I may need to learn to be short and to the point because the character generation takes 40 steps to go through.  I am sorely tempted to give you all the full experience but then it feels like I'm going to have posts rivaling Mors. So we'll see.
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Mar 26, 2019 23:30
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Ithle01 posted:In a 3rd edition game I ran using the leaked rules the one and only time the social system itself actually mattered and got used properly it killed the session because one player tried to influence another player and she was not having that. It was for completely innocuous reasons, she just didn't like the idea that she was going to lose 'social combat' as she preferred to call it and so that was that. I'm not really surprised. I don't like the idea, as mentioned, of social combat with players on the receiving end, but it would at least be one thing if the GM was doing it. One player getting to dictate to another player how they should play their character would be even worse.
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Mar 26, 2019 23:48
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"Social combat" is really not the right framing, IMO, of what social influence is actually about, and I hate 2e's introduction of the phrase.
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Mar 27, 2019 00:18
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PurpleXVI posted:I'm not really surprised. I don't like the idea, as mentioned, of social combat with players on the receiving end, but it would at least be one thing if the GM was doing it. One player getting to dictate to another player how they should play their character would be even worse. It wasn't that, it was extremely innocuous and was basically just 'I try to use to the social system to change your mind on a policy issue' and the other player going 'gently caress you, no'. The player using the system was the party Eclipse and was trying to fulfill a character goal to create a union between the living outside Whitewall and the dead outside. One player thought they were walking into a debate, the other thought differently. Also, social combat is what it was called in 2nd edition and everyone hated that because it was terrible and misrepresented what it was trying to achieve. Either that or it accurately represented a terrible idea, I can't remember which. 3rd edition writers did have some good ideas and expunging that phrase was one of them. Now, if they had kept going with that, maybe they would developed a system that actually produced results beyond 'bigger number wins' (which is fine, most of the time). Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Mar 27, 2019 |
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Mar 27, 2019 00:21
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Mors Rattus posted:"Social combat" is really not the right framing, IMO, of what social influence is actually about, and I hate 2e's introduction of the phrase. combat isn't the right model for a system that should allow for finding mutual benefit or common ground in a contentious discussion, for one SirPhoebos posted:Question for FATAL & Friends the chromebooks are fascinating as a study of how splatbooks can go haywire but can i write in Listen Up, You Primitive Screwheads, which is a pure how-to-run-a-game GM's guide with some amazingly forward-thinking advice for when it came out?
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Mar 27, 2019 00:22
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I'll just throw in the remote future possibility of Night's Edge, one of the first books published by Dream Pod 9 as a licensed book for vampires in Cyberpunk 2020. It's... real bad. It's got some interesting ideas (I liked why old vampires look more monstrous was centuries of everyday radiation) but generally it's very much rah rah vampires rad humans dumb.
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Mar 27, 2019 00:27
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:The Chromebooks. I want to see mllaneza defend his writing. That would be the vehicles section in Chromebook 1.
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Mar 27, 2019 00:30
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I wonder if player reactions to influence attempts by each other or NPCs would change if it was a carrot rather than a stick. Something like getting a buff or other mechanic reward for accepting the influence. Of course, unless really well set up that sort of system could be gamed and broken in many many ways, but I'm more just wondering if changing the parameters would be more comfortable for some players and get away from the feeling like they're having to blow personal resources to not be told what they think or do.
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Mar 27, 2019 00:41
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Desiden posted:I wonder if player reactions to influence attempts by each other or NPCs would change if it was a carrot rather than a stick. Something like getting a buff or other mechanic reward for accepting the influence. Of course, unless really well set up that sort of system could be gamed and broken in many many ways, but I'm more just wondering if changing the parameters would be more comfortable for some players and get away from the feeling like they're having to blow personal resources to not be told what they think or do. This is basically why the system doesn't work right here. Because at the end of all the dice rolling you, the player, can do whatever you want and you have no reason to bother to engage with the system if you don't feel like it and the system doesn't give you a reason to do so. It tries to escape from the conceptual parameters of 'social combat' and has a lot of good ideas and complex pieces, but then at the end it falls right back in because one player is using influence on someone else and that looks a lot like getting hosed. I never bothered to have any NPCs actually try to use the social system against the players because I already knew what the result was going to be. Something about a Roman adage 'the ideal man is one with no holes'.
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Mar 27, 2019 00:56
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Ithle01 posted:This is basically why the system doesn't work right here. Because at the end of all the dice rolling you, the player, can do whatever you want and you have no reason to bother to engage with the system if you don't feel like it and the system doesn't give you a reason to do so. It tries to escape from the conceptual parameters of 'social combat' and has a lot of good ideas and complex pieces, but then at the end it falls right back in because one player is using influence on someone else and that looks a lot like getting hosed. I mean, I can't quite figure out why, but the Exalted 3e social system just mostly evokes a feeling of dread and revulsion in me just hearing about it at having to justify saying no to things in-character. And I'm someone who'll happily self-compel or take compels in Fate or Strike all the time, basically. ...at least it's not Ex2e's "all mind control, all the time, hope you bought a defence charm." Mind you, "hope you bought a counter charm" is a hilariously large part of 2e.
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Mar 27, 2019 01:25
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gourdcaptain posted:I mean, I can't quite figure out why, but the Exalted 3e social system just mostly evokes a feeling of dread and revulsion in me just hearing about it at having to justify saying no to things in-character. And I'm someone who'll happily self-compel or take compels in Fate or Strike all the time, basically. Given your poor experiences with 2e, I would suspect this is because it evokes the idea that there'd be some implied social pressure to play along even though the rules permit you to say no?
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Mar 27, 2019 01:29
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Night10194 posted:Given your poor experiences with 2e, I would suspect this is because it evokes the idea that there'd be some implied social pressure to play along even though the rules permit you to say no? That, and it feels entirely like a "Oh, you don't agree with my lengthy argument about something? Justify your opinions in detail with citations because feelings are invalid and I'm perfectly calm and rational" tactic a particularly lovely person used on me. I mean, it might be citing my character's feelings, but I have to act on what's written down, and I have to make sure I have Willpower in case it's relevant and oh god, yeah, I just had a panic moment there. ...this may be personal issues in large part, but I do think I dislike it outside of that.
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Mar 27, 2019 01:32
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Honestly, I spent most of our campaign feeling sad that nobody ever tried to use social influence on my Twilight even though his character sheet basically had "I am incredibly needy and will gladly betray the circle to the first hot guy who pretends to be interested" written across it in gold ink.
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Mar 27, 2019 01:54
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Also people that hyperfocus on Social stuff will use the "but you're invalidating my character!" defense as well.
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Mar 27, 2019 01:56
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Also people that hyperfocus on Social stuff will use the "but you're invalidating my character!" defense as well. If I'm reading folks' problems, here, the general issue is the idea that social influence rules could be turned on PCs, either by other PCs or the GM, right?
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Mar 27, 2019 02:18
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Nessus posted:If I'm reading folks' problems, here, the general issue is the idea that social influence rules could be turned on PCs, either by other PCs or the GM, right? That's my beef with it, personally, yes. Also everything related to intimacies feels like fiddly bookkeeping designed to paste over the big glaring point of: "You can't just talk someone into shooting himself/betraying everything he believes in over the course of five minutes and one really good roll." So instead of "use common sense" we get "note common sense down in triplicate so you have RPG evidence if someone complains."
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Mar 27, 2019 02:26
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PurpleXVI posted:That's my beef with it, personally, yes. Like, you don't really need an exhaustive and exclusive list for it to work. Just like putting down "concept" or "background" or "motivation" or whatever, it's useful to keep track of and you can sink some mechanical hooks into it, but ultimately it's just knowing who the character is and what they want. It's way easy to wing. (The part that sucks is that the mechanical endpoint is simplistic and boring, despite the multiple possible reward methods and currencies already in the game.)
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Mar 27, 2019 02:37
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Joe Slowboat posted:What if he shows up with five gorillas using Ape Hand Mastery to have them all wield the Immaculate Martial Art form weapons and he's dyed them the correct colors, what then? Then you have the best loving Super Sentai show ever conceived.
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Mar 27, 2019 02:55
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I'll just throw in the remote future possibility of Night's Edge, one of the first books published by Dream Pod 9 as a licensed book for vampires in Cyberpunk 2020. Never heard of Night's Edge. Let me look it u-  Cease to Hope posted:the chromebooks are fascinating as a study of how splatbooks can go haywire but can i write in Listen Up, You Primitive Screwheads, which is a pure how-to-run-a-game GM's guide with some amazingly forward-thinking advice for when it came out? Since we've got a contributor in the house, Chomebook 1 is going to be the next review. But'll keep Screwheads in mind for the next book.
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Mar 27, 2019 03:54
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The whole character compulsion problem is why I like Fate's Compels so much. They're literally things you come up with that your character is vulnerable to, and it's explicitly baked in that you are rewarded for having them suffer from their problems. Having that mechanical backing is very important.
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Mar 27, 2019 03:58
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Nessus posted:Well speaking as someone who likes, conceptually, the idea of people who will use "social" means rather than "physical" means - if the social rules boil down to "idk ask your GM, maybe roll a social skill?" and the physical rules unfold into a glittering gamescape of complicated challenge and prowess, it does kind of suck. That's not my issue with it at, That Old Tree basically gave my reason for discontent, but whatever I'll just make it clear here. The social system gives you no reason to engage with it and as presented it's almost the exact opposite. But that doesn't actually matter because the social system has no means of enforcing its outcomes without charms. You can spend a really long time working through a social encounter using all the options at your disposal and then it just turns into fiat - which is true of just about everything because this is a pen and paper game, but here it's especially noticeable - and if that's the resolution then why did we spend all that time working through the complicated subsystem when we could have just said charisma + presence vs. difficulty 5 and get it done in thirty seconds? If people have a problem with losing some agency over their character they should probably play a different game? I don't mean that to be a dick, I mean, it as actual advice because it's been in the game since the beginning and is a fully intended part of the game experience. Exalted is fairly up-front about all of this and even tells you so at character creation. So if you have a problem with social influence being used against you then don't play Exalted. The tricky part is making that happen in a good way without pissing people off and Exalted has consistently failed to deliver on this, 3rd edition is no exception. It's not a surprise why so many Exalted hacks use Fate.
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Mar 27, 2019 04:33
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If you're still taking characters for DtD I nominate Grigori von Bitenstan, Space-Marine Werewolf who puts every possible point into Bite. His father but people, his grandmother bit people, his great-grandmother bit people, and by Vectron's nosehair he's going to bite people too!
The Lone Badger fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Mar 27, 2019 |
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Mar 27, 2019 05:13
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wiegieman posted:The whole character compulsion problem is why I like Fate's Compels so much. They're literally things you come up with that your character is vulnerable to, and it's explicitly baked in that you are rewarded for having them suffer from their problems. Having that mechanical backing is very important. That's better, but even for Fate in general, Exalted, Exalted-adjacent, or not, I hate that refusing a Compel costs a Fate point. I much prefer it being purely "do/suffer something bad but in-character, get a reward" and leave it at that.
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Mar 27, 2019 05:15
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The Burning Wheel did some pretty cool stuff with players being able to influence each other with it’s “Duel of Wits” subsystem. Basically each of two players (one of which can be the GM playing an NPC) decide what concessions they want from the other party and engage in a mini game influenced by their skills and stats that results in either a total concession from one party or, more often, a compromise from one or both parties. The system, if I remember correctly, cannot force your character to believe anything, only to honestly promise to do try to do it to the best of your ability. It’s only used for big complex important debates, and either party can at any time reject the outcome and draw swords.
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Mar 27, 2019 05:16
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The Lone Badger posted:If you're still taking characters for DtD I nominate Grigori von Bitenstan, Space-Marine werewolf who puts every possible point into Bite. His father but people, his grandmother bit people, his great-grandmother bit people, and by Vectron's nosehair he's going to bite people too! There's no way I'm making more than one. Holy hell was that the most flipping I've done for character creation in a long time, and I've read this book a couple times. That said I will definitely be involving Vectron because he's the best british sketch comedy reference in the book. I gotta tell you, the layout of this book is batshit insane. AdEva and DtD make me long for anything with an editor or someone who knows how to organize content. There's absolutely no sense anywhere in this book that they should bold or signpost important information, the fundamental rules don't actually show up until over 200 pages in, and really important stuff like 'Weapon skills don't use a stat' are actually pretty hard to find and not mentioned at all in the actual weapon skill entry. Also, Fellowship and Charisma are the same goddamn stat, DtD, stop making me look up which one Kim uses for what. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Mar 27, 2019 |
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Mar 27, 2019 05:17
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That reminds me of one of my minor peeves with Exalted: skills that are pretty much the same as attributes. What is the difference between Charisma and Presence? Stamina and Resistance? Willpower and Integrity? Etc.
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Mar 27, 2019 12:17
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Exalted 3rd Edition: Seemingly Pointless Repetition What comes next in the rules is…taking the basic action resolution rules, and listing out a bunch of ways that Larceny can be used to do crimes and Investigation can be used to figure out those crimes. I’m not totally sure why they’re all listed out like this, because it is emphatically not a new subsystem or anything like that. It’s just the normal action resolution system, just with specific listed examples of what you roll to pick pockets or locks, make disguises, or case crime scenes or profile suspects. But they exist and, well, that’s two pages that are basically example text on what you can do with Larceny and Investigation, I guess? And then we’re into the Leadership subsystem, which is as close as the game is going to get to a Bureaucracy subsystem, and quite frankly it is lacking. It is in fact a non-system. Basically, a character is a leader of a group can undertake a Project. Projects are efforts to get something or develop something, either for yourself or the group you lead, or otherwise gain advantage. First step: is the project possible? If not, why not? The GM must inform the player of what they would need to make the project possible and how long it will take once it is possible. The player must then set about achieving the conditions to make the project possible. Once the project is possible, no rolls are done. The project succeeds, by default, unless interrupted by plot events. That’s it. However, sometimes a project will have failure conditions. These are complications that, if not dealt with, make the project fail. They are entirely at the whim of the ST, but in general should only exist to make things interesting. Otherwise, the project succeeds. Also, the more the PC has to gain from success, the more likely a failure condition happens. Once a failure condition exists, it must be dealt with. PCs and NPC advisors can offer their plans for how, but ultimately the leader decides. So the leader must figure out why the problem is happening and deal with it. Which presumably is handled by…engaging the actual parts of the game that have rules, or just throwing Merits at the problem. The book actually suggests the latter – you point to the Merit that solves the issue and it goes away. Real interesting. Going and dealing with it personally only gets an offhand mention as an “attractive option” for Exalts, when in reality it’s going to be option 1 because it means your players get to do a thing. Anyway. If the ST rules that the response is inadequate or the PCs do nothing, the project fails. All assets are lost, etc. If they resolve the failure condition, the project succeeds. Possibly with consequences or complications. The game is literally taking five pages to spell out that, yes, PC plans are going to affect the world around them in ways that make stories happen. This is not a rules subsystem. These rules do not exist. There are no rules here. Next up: Feats of Strength. These are all Strength+Athletics actions to lift heavy poo poo, break things with your bare hands or otherwise be impressively swole. You cannot attempt a feat of strength at all unless you have Strength 3+, and some feats have higher Strength minimums. You get automatic successes to breaking poo poo if you have a logically useful tool to do so, like a sledgehammer to smash a statue, and more if it’s an artifact weapon. The book notes to ignore these rules in combat in favor of what allows for cool stunts, so this is purely non-combat breaking poo poo. Also, if your pool is at least 3 times what’s needed to do the feat at all, you automatically succeed. Also, breaking stuff with your bare hands can use Martial Arts instead for martial arts tournaments. Things you need Strength 3+ for: lifting a person or anvil, breaking a board, carrying a bale of cotton on one shoulder, kicking a door open, lifting a mule, breaking a sword on your knee, lifting a warhorse, bending an iron bar with your hands. Strength 5+: Lifting an ox, pulling a loaded wagon, bending a horseshoe into a pretzel, lifting a boulder, throwing a warhorse, lifting a rhino, snapping iron manacles, smashing through a brick wall slowly, throwing an ox, twisting a steel lock off a door with your hands, kicking down an ironclad door. Strength 7+: Lifting an elephant, raising a drawbridge by hand, smashing through a brick wall, raising a locked portcullis by hand, punching through a wooden fortress gate, pulling a loaded wagon out of a sand trap, ripping iron bars out of stone one-handed, ripping out the supports of a city gate, lifting a boulder one-handed, tearing down temple pillars a la Samson, lifting a tyrant lizard, carrying a giant statue on one shoulder, pushing over a Guild wagon, pushing open a locked and reinforced fortress gate. Strength 10+: Uprooting a giant tree, slowly smashing through a stone fort wall, lifting a mammoth, throwing an elephant, tearing a steel portcullis apart, lifting a tree onehanded, cracking a boulder in half, ripping a portcullis out entirely, throwing a mammoth, pushing over a stone tower, pulling a boat away from a waterfall, tearing open a crevasse, smashing through solid stone, lifting a yeddim, outpulling a team of yeddim or towing a boat away from a waterfall while swimming. How do you get Strength over 5? Charms, mostly. We also get rules for environmental hazards and wilderness survival. Hazards basically deal a set pool of damage, rolled once per set interval, and have a dicepool that lets you avoid taking damage. Hazards ignore soak and hardness and deal damage straight to your health, so they can be quite nasty. Especially if they deal damage per round, like acid, being on fire or being in the presence of the Silent Wind in Malfeas. (Don’t do that last one.) Traps work similarly, but usually only hit once. Falling damage is dealt based on how many range bands you fall, dealing automatic damage plus a rolled amount of damage dice. This can make falling stupidly lethal, but the game suggests the ST should always allow a cool stunt to give you a chance to mitigate or avoid falling damage. This section also includes the deprivation rules. You can go (Stamina) minutes without air, (Stamina) days without water and (Stamina) weeks without food. However, you get a penalty to all actions after (Stamina) days without food, or in your final hours without water. If you’re in combat or similarly exerting yourself, or if you’re being forcibly drowned, you can only go (Stamina*2) turns without air. Poison rules work similar to environmental hazards. Poison deals a set amount of damage dice (ignoring soak and hardness) per interval, with intervals usually short, and apply a penalty to all actions while poisoned. They last for a set duration, but a Resistance roll reduces this. They also have a vector that determines how they get in – contact, ingested, or a poisoned weapon, say. (A weapon must hit with a Decisive Attack to poison someone, but need not do damage.) Some poisons deal Initiative damage, only doing actual damage when their victim is Crashed. Other, more esoteric ones, may damage your Willpower or Essence. Exalts and other magical beings can reduce a poison’s duration to zero, but mortals can at best halve it. Diseases! Diseases work differently. They have a Virulence (the difficulty of a Resistance roll to avoid catching them when exposed), a Morbidity (the difficulty of a Resistance roll to keep them from worsening) and Interval (how often you roll). When first infected, you suffer a Minor Symptom. This has no mechanical penalties – you just have to show your discomfort from the disease once per session, or else the ST is instructed to take 1 Willpower from you. It can then get worse, becoming a Major Symptom. Once per session, when you have that, the ST can declare you automatically botch due to the disease’s symptoms flaring up, or may just take a Willpower if there’s not an interesting point in a session to do that. If it gets worse from there, it becomes a Defining Symptom, which renders the automatic botch (or WP drain) once per scene instead, though the ST is instructed that grinding someone down to 0 WP is not fun, and so shouldn’t do a WP drain more than once or twice per session. If it gets worse from there, mortals die. Exalts and other supernatural beings are immune to dying of disease. Some diseases may not be able to reach certain levels of Symptom. How do you determine if you get worse? When you make the Morbidity check, if you fail it, the symptom progresses to the next stage. If you succeed, it reduces one stage (or goes away, if it was Minor). The game lists a bunch of possible diseases, but all mundane diseases follow the same rules and do the same thing – all that varies is their Virulence, Morbidity and Interval, and whether they can kill. Of the ones listed, the only one that can’t kill is syphilis. Because of course they decided to provide rules for syphilis. Each disease gets a full paragraph describing it, but again, they have no actual mechanical distinction besides those few stats, and the fact that Exalts and other supernaturals are immune to infected wounds, but mortals aren’t, and that’s the most common disease. Supernatural diseases also exist. These diseases have special effects at each Symptom level, on top of the normal ones, but otherwise are identical. There is only one supernatural disease listed: Puppeteer’s Plague. It is a disease caused by the meat of cattle fed human flesh, and Mask of Winters has used it as a biological weapon. It curses its victims by animating their skeletons as undead monsters…while they’re alive. When Minor Symptoms are active, it causes unstoppable itching along the spine and limbs, and requires a Resistance roll each night to be able to regain Willpower from sleep due to terrible nightmares of committing atrocities. At Major, the skeleton begins to act on its own. The nightmares continue as before, and when the ST would inflict a botch due to disease, they may instead cause the infected character to perform a physical action that is cruel or malevolent, such as hitting someone, stealing something or crushing a small animal. The victim may resist by spending a Willpower, but must enter a Decision Point to do so and draw on a Major or stronger Intimacy. At Defining, the skeleton is now actively a monster, and it functions as per the Major Symptom but only Defining Intimacies can be used in the Decision Point to resist the evil impulses, which again can occur whenever the ST would assign a disease-caused botch. Upon death from the disease, the victim’s skeleton tears itself out of their body, rising as a bonesider. Yes, really. That’s the name. Next time: Nerds.
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Mar 27, 2019 12:58
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That Old Tree posted:Like, you don't really need an exhaustive and exclusive list for it to work. Just like putting down "concept" or "background" or "motivation" or whatever, it's useful to keep track of and you can sink some mechanical hooks into it, but ultimately it's just knowing who the character is and what they want. It's way easy to wing. From my group's play experience, I kind of wished they had just treated minor intimacies as flat out condition cards that were auto returned either at the end of the scene or adventure. The players in my group who felt intimacies were a lot of bookkeeping also generally had the takeaway that minor intimacies were a little bit less disposeable than that. Not that they didn't wither away when not relevant (the book is pretty clear on that), just how long it took. Having them clearly be a "this is a temporary thing, don't bother writing it on your sheet unless something triggers off it that bumps it up somehow" might have helped convey how situational minors are supposed to be.
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Mar 27, 2019 13:01
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Those project management rules being so light makes me want to gamify PMBOK. Roll Appearances to get buy in from key stakeholders! Roll Intelligence to identify the critical path! Roll Resilience to deny scope-expanding requests! Will YOUR project be one of 30% that succeed, on time and on budget? New from TSR, the Planners and Projects module!
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Mar 27, 2019 13:35
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Alien Rope Burn posted:That reminds me of one of my minor peeves with Exalted: skills that are pretty much the same as attributes. What is the difference between Charisma and Presence? Stamina and Resistance? Willpower and Integrity? Etc. The Presence Socialize divide also seemed odd.
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Mar 27, 2019 13:39
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Dawgstar posted:The Presence Socialize divide also seemed odd. Presence/socialize divided kinda made sense in play, with presence as the more persuasion/inspiration type skill and socialize the more intrigue/gossip/manipulation type skill. Naming them "presence" and "socialize" respectively though wasn't particularly helpful if you weren't already familiar with how both worked in play.
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Mar 27, 2019 13:42
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Alien Rope Burn posted:That reminds me of one of my minor peeves with Exalted: skills that are pretty much the same as attributes. What is the difference between Charisma and Presence? Stamina and Resistance? Willpower and Integrity? Etc. Sadly, D&D cannot ever change its ability scores, and Exalted must use the same Attributes as the first edition of Vampire: The Masquerade, because of reasons.
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Mar 27, 2019 13:54
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That's what happens when you have 5 different skills for different kinds of fighting, and you decide this means you need 5 different skills for different kinds of social interaction. Also you have 3 physical stats so clearly you need 3 social stats. e: As a bonus, this makes Exalted one of the kings of putting players in a position where they're more convincing while lying their asses off than when telling the truth. megane fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Mar 27, 2019 |
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Mar 27, 2019 14:03
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megane posted:That's what happens when you have 5 different skills for different kinds of fighting, and you decide this means you need 5 different skills for different kinds of social interaction.
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Mar 27, 2019 14:19
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