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EthanSteele
Nov 18, 2007

I can hear you
Most builds need multiple abilities so its not that huge a downside. Oh no, you need to buy 3 more dots in a favoured/caste ability. You can also buy the charms with bonus xp so you can assemble your combo twice as fast as a Melee guy who can only use regular xp so it has its upsides as well.

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Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

KittyEmpress posted:

This is absolutely incorrect, by the way. Mixed Martial Arts build are insane bullshit that have a dozen abusive instant kill combos that break the game. Do you wanna do a barehanded murder of everyone within short range of you? Fire Dragon + Ebon Shadow got you. Do you want to grapple someone better than a brawl supernal? Mantis + Tiger means you now can savage someone for almost three times the normal damage.

The real issues with MMA builds is that 1. you need to buy multiple abilities up and buy charms in them, and 2. you can't benefit from artifact weapon stats.


Obviously MMA builds only work if you aren't taking multiple styles that rely on having their Form up. Things like Laughing Monster and Single Point rely on their form being active to be useful or neat at all. But most of the animal styles, the dragon styles, swaying grass, they all get nice little bennies but don't break without the Form.

That's good to hear, actually; I don't have a really dedicated mixed martial artist in my game so that I can see what going bare hands + three or four styles actually looks like, and I've heard from others that it just sucks for Solars in comparison to Just Melee or Just Brawl, but if it doesn't, great!

KittyEmpress
Dec 30, 2012

Jam Buddies

It's really good for solars. Solars, as released, should almost always go for mixed martial arts, esp if they are martial arts supernal. It's either this or make a homebrew artifact to supplement your martial art, which is the only real recourse for non-MMA compatible styles like Silver Voiced or Single Point. Otherwise you get 10-12 charms as your full combat suite, and you cannot improve it.

Lunars actually are better mono-stylists, since they can learn one style completely, then supplement it with native charms. They lack Mastery, but a Lunar Crane Stylist can take all of Crane's counterattack disarm bullshit, then add on their native disarm charms, to disarm better than any Solar crane stylist could. They also cost a lot more to raise their MA abilities and buy MA charms, so they suck as multi-stylists.



I personally think this is a weird thing, that Solars are worse at being mono-style masters at the peak of their chosen dojo, and Lunars are worse at blending together multiple arts to create a powerful and flowing combination, but it's how it is currently.

EthanSteele
Nov 18, 2007

I can hear you
The main advantage Mastery has over the Lunar charm thing is that they're free while still being very strong. One of the big Solar strengths is just how dang mote efficient they are when it comes to charms and Mastery adds that aspect to Martial Arts stuff. They can't do a big 4 charm combo like Lunars, but they don't spend out 4 charms worth of motes either for similar results in terms of effect e.g. the guy is dead/disarmed/turned inside out.

Single Point is a weird one, it uses a sword so artifacts are on the table, medium armour too! If you're MA supernal then you can't combo it with any other martial arts so you've got 9 charms that top out at essence 3 and it's not like War where one of them is Tiger Warrior Training. If you're not MA supernal then you have 2 combat charms plus excellency until essence 2 when you finally get to do the Single Point thing. I remember a thing where a guy was a Melee supernal and just had Single Point so when he hit essence 2 he'd have an extra little martial arts turn while being the big Melee man on his own turn so I guess there's no reason you couldn't have the extra Single Point turn while TigerSnake-ing the hell out of everyone else.

Attorney at Funk
Jun 3, 2008

...the person who says honestly that he despairs is closer to being cured than all those who are not regarded as despairing by themselves or others.
Yeah I think the system is complicated and confounding enough that abstract design-level verdicts about which kind of character is "better" are super unpersuasive, especially when - as with all other Exalted 3e experiences - people keep forgetting the drat rules even while trying to optimize them because there are so many. I'm much more interested in play pattern questions than balance ones as a result since those are a lot more legible and less prone to blithe takesmithing bluster about what's OP.

KittyEmpress
Dec 30, 2012

Jam Buddies

EthanSteele posted:

I remember a thing where a guy was a Melee supernal and just had Single Point so when he hit essence 2 he'd have an extra little martial arts turn while being the big Melee man on his own turn so I guess there's no reason you couldn't have the extra Single Point turn while TigerSnake-ing the hell out of everyone else.

I've done this exact thing in a 3 player game. I mixed Single Point with Crane Style, since Single Point's biggest issue is its atrocious defensive suite. On my own turn I'd prep counterattacks and defenses, and then I'd stab people with my sword on my sword's turn, combining the strongest offensive style and defensive style

It's really quite strong, even if Crane kind of wants its Form to be the strongest defense. You might be better off just grabbing Melee and using melee's really strong defensive suite.

Attorney at Funk
Jun 3, 2008

...the person who says honestly that he despairs is closer to being cured than all those who are not regarded as despairing by themselves or others.
When I played a Single Point stylist that's what I did - I had Melee 5 and Hail-Shattering Practice and Bulwark Stance and stuff and did all my actual blocking that way.

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



That... is a very fun combo. I had a player who really liked Single Point Style the one time I got to run Ex3 and I'll suggest that approach to him for the future, since he's in my usual gaming group.

Kestral
Nov 24, 2000

Forum Veteran
One of the main antagonists of my long Ex3 campaign was also exactly that combo of Single Point and Melee defensive charms, eventually branching into Resistance to keep up with the horrifying power escalation of the PCs. It's a good time, can recommend.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Joe, I fully support your implementation of advanced sailing systems, but I have little to contribute beyond liking the boats.

I do remember someone, in this thread or one of its predecessors, remarking skeptically that it would be ridiculous for anyone without the benefit of at least early modern technology to successfully make these 2000 mile voyages across the West, much less have regular trade.

Disney, of course, addressed this one already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubZrAmRxy_M

Patrat
Feb 14, 2012

From what I recall of the 1e sailing supplement it was Very Important to remember that Creation was not actually using any kind of ancient world understanding of sailing outside of the primitive boonies. The Realm and the more competitive nautical powers still had an understanding of naval architecture from the First Age and even if they normally did not have the materials were fully aware of advanced hull and sale designs along with sophisticated navigation techniques.

Then again they also had the Realm navy operating fleets of literally thousands of tiremes on deep sea expeditions somehow. Actually given the crew of tiremes the Realm had WAY more people manning warships than in their legions and probably only had enough Dragon Blooded in the navy to have one per fifty ship sub fleet or something. Seriously, those fleets were gigantic.

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



I am a huge mark for Moana (in the current draft I'm looking at crab claw sails as the standard Western rig, which is fast but relatively unstable, with catamaran hulls being very stable but relatively low storage area).

The Exalted discord server basically erupted into small-scale war over triremes and how far afield they can go. There was a poster very set on the galleass as the appropriate ship.

Savage Seas from 1e has a lot of description of ship riggings in detail, which is nice, but also only had the junk, gaff, and Bermuda rigs - the Bermuda in particular being a wild moment because it's a rig that sailors recognize as deeply ahistorical/postapocalyptic, but a non-sailor would consider the most basic rig and not notice at all. Creation ought to have triangular lateen and crab claw sails as well, at least, and single square sails (not multiple square sails) as a less sophisticated option. I've got more or less rules for all of those, so far.

Plus the idea of 'gaff-rigged trireme' as basically the Red Comet Zaku of the Realm shipyards is eating me up, it's just the best idea.

E: I genuinely am a bit annoyed at the degree of navigation possible in Creation - you can determine your exact location anywhere but the equator, with a combination of a compass (which points to the Imperial Mountain), the North Star, and a latitude reading from the Sun's declination. If you're on the equator, you can't determine your location except that you're on the equator (and presumably, depending on the quality of your instruments, there's a band north and south of the equator with similar issues). I dislike this because it makes stellar navigation much less relevant if you have a compass or one of the Dragon-Blooded, when 'sophisticated stellar navigation' is precisely the kind of thing Exalted should have.

Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Feb 1, 2021

Roadie
Jun 30, 2013

Nessus posted:

I do remember someone, in this thread or one of its predecessors, remarking skeptically that it would be ridiculous for anyone without the benefit of at least early modern technology to successfully make these 2000 mile voyages across the West, much less have regular trade.

Disney, of course, addressed this one already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubZrAmRxy_M

The dubious part isn't the navigation over long distances... it's the maps and the books setting up everything for thousands of miles around the West as blank empty ocean and then relying on you to invent a bunch of stopover islands to make the basic logistics of premodern ocean travel possible. 3e makes it worse by relocating the West even farther out without even trying to fill in the space with anything interesting.

Joe Slowboat posted:

E: I genuinely am a bit annoyed at the degree of navigation possible in Creation - you can determine your exact location anywhere but the equator, with a combination of a compass (which points to the Imperial Mountain), the North Star, and a latitude reading from the Sun's declination. If you're on the equator, you can't determine your location except that you're on the equator (and presumably, depending on the quality of your instruments, there's a band north and south of the equator with similar issues). I dislike this because it makes stellar navigation much less relevant if you have a compass or one of the Dragon-Blooded, when 'sophisticated stellar navigation' is precisely the kind of thing Exalted should have.

Shouldn't you be able to navigate from literally anywhere during the day by using that 600-mile-tall mountain on the horizon as a reference point?

Stephenls
Feb 21, 2013
[REDACTED]

Roadie posted:

Shouldn't you be able to navigate from literally anywhere during the day by using that 600-mile-tall mountain on the horizon as a reference point?

Atmospheric hazing and a false horizon, which may or may not be magical, prevent the Imperial Mountain from being viewed from anywhere in Creation. It can be seen from anywhere on the Blessed Isle, but past the Inner Sea you're too far out.

This is straight from the original developer and the setting is written with it as an assumption.

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



Roadie posted:

The dubious part isn't the navigation over long distances... it's the maps and the books setting up everything for thousands of miles around the West as blank empty ocean and then relying on you to invent a bunch of stopover islands to make the basic logistics of premodern ocean travel possible. 3e makes it worse by relocating the West even farther out without even trying to fill in the space with anything interesting.


Shouldn't you be able to navigate from literally anywhere during the day by using that 600-mile-tall mountain on the horizon as a reference point?

You also wouldn't get more out of that than out of a compass pointing to it anyways, it's not like the human eye can reliably gauge the size of something that beggars the imagination from an indefinite distance away, especially when you could sail hundreds of miles towards or away and its size would barely change.

The West is at an exaggerated distance, but Exalted naval tech is a weird mishmash that better approximates early modern than antique naval conditions. In particular, they have both blue water keels and gaff rigging - the Realm can in theory construct a ship that looks more like the Pequod than it would look like the Argos. The limitations of their technology and equipment do make them more likely to rely on island hopping, but with reliable positional navigation in the middle of the ocean via the methods outlined above, the West is closer than it would be on Earth, in practical terms.

Now, the Realm's ability to project force into the far West is limited - this is why the Peleps plan to build a giant fleet and go conquer the West is a plan, not an already-occurring actuality. The Realm controls Wu Jian, the major stopover location between the Realm and the West, and they take tribute in the archipelago, but they don't have the kind of force projection Peleps intends to focus on the region.

Now, what we could use more of (and hopefully will get) is, yeah, small island chains with interesting hooks, sargassum seas, siren shoals - more detail on why the large empty ocean is actually worth thinking about, just like the South and the North need categories of things in their vast expanses that make them more interesting and textured.

E: Like, if your only goal in navigating Creation is 'reach the Blessed Isle' you are in luck, you barely even need a compass to do that, just figure out which Direction you're in and sail Not That Direction.

Schwarzwald
Jul 27, 2004

Don't Blink

Stephenls posted:

Atmospheric hazing and a false horizon, which may or may not be magical,

The Immaculates don't want you to know the truth: Creation is a sphere!

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



Schwarzwald posted:

The Immaculates don't want you to know the truth: Creation is a sphere!

The really wild question is: The stars rotate East to West like the Sun, and there are seasonal constellations, etc. This means the stars (and the Sun!) rotate down below the plane of Creation before rising again in the East. Unlocked are the double doors of the Horizon, but where exactly do they lead?

Quackles
Aug 11, 2018

Pixels of Light.


Joe Slowboat posted:

The really wild question is: The stars rotate East to West like the Sun, and there are seasonal constellations, etc. This means the stars (and the Sun!) rotate down below the plane of Creation before rising again in the East. Unlocked are the double doors of the Horizon, but where exactly do they lead?

Isn't this literally the plot of Fallen London?

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Quackles posted:

Isn't this literally the plot of Fallen London?
Naw, Fallen London's a lot more about the alien space crab having a forbidden romance with the Sun, and incidentally solar lawgiver radiation is why the surface isn't that weird and this giant cavern beneath the surface lets you break many commonly understood laws of reality. e: popped in some spoilers since this is the kind of game where despite its age people probably benefit from that

You could probably make a crossover work though!

Roadie posted:

The dubious part isn't the navigation over long distances... it's the maps and the books setting up everything for thousands of miles around the West as blank empty ocean and then relying on you to invent a bunch of stopover islands to make the basic logistics of premodern ocean travel possible. 3e makes it worse by relocating the West even farther out without even trying to fill in the space with anything interesting.
They made it even BIGGER? Jesus. At a certain point you're just creating space for the sake of it.

Given the scale of those maps - which I think had a great deal more surface area than Planet Earth - some flyspeck islands would make sense and could be quite vigorously sized, of course.

Kaza42
Oct 3, 2013

Blood and Souls and all that

Nessus posted:

They made it even BIGGER? Jesus. At a certain point you're just creating space for the sake of it.

Given the scale of those maps - which I think had a great deal more surface area than Planet Earth - some flyspeck islands would make sense and could be quite vigorously sized, of course.

Creation in 3e is about 15,650 miles long by 9,650 miles wide according to the map we have. This gives it a surface area of 151,022,500 square miles. Earth has about 196,900,000 square miles. Creation's land area is a lot higher % than Earth's however. Creation is about 2/3 land, with about 100,681,666 square miles of land. Earth only has about 57,505,693 square miles of land. So Creation is both significantly smaller than and nearly twice as big as Earth, depending on the metric you look at.

EthanSteele
Nov 18, 2007

I can hear you

Nessus posted:

I do remember someone, in this thread or one of its predecessors, remarking skeptically that it would be ridiculous for anyone without the benefit of at least early modern technology to successfully make these 2000 mile voyages across the West, much less have regular trade.

That's why the big city fleet that floats around exists.


Joe Slowboat posted:

Sailing stuff

Time to break out the backstaff! My Solar has a little sail with the specialty of Celestial Navigation and has much higher Wits than Intelligence so he's constantly annoying the Actual Navigation Genius Scholar by going with hunches over using strict calculus to plot courses.

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



Personally I'd like there to be space for Polynesian style traditional stellar navigation as a meaningful skill.

Possibly the answer is just to emphasize that 'losing your geomantic compass' is a thing that can happen to ships without a Dragon-Blooded officer on them; you can improvise a new Jacob's Staff if your old one is lost, but you can't just use a magnetized needle in Creation for a compass to the pole of Earth, it's probably a bit more involved. Also, if you write the Western Wyld a little more interestingly, you can have a place where the compass is irregular but the stars are not, when you get far enough out to the edge...

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Joe Slowboat posted:

Personally I'd like there to be space for Polynesian style traditional stellar navigation as a meaningful skill.

Possibly the answer is just to emphasize that 'losing your geomantic compass' is a thing that can happen to ships without a Dragon-Blooded officer on them; you can improvise a new Jacob's Staff if your old one is lost, but you can't just use a magnetized needle in Creation for a compass to the pole of Earth, it's probably a bit more involved. Also, if you write the Western Wyld a little more interestingly, you can have a place where the compass is irregular but the stars are not, when you get far enough out to the edge...
It sounds like there might be a bunch of different navigational methods and people probably tend not to rely entirely on one. So you might usually use the stars but you always take a couple of caged frigate-birds for backup. Or you mostly use your directional pole compasses (and why not have several at once so you can always triangulate?) but those can be thrown off by enemy action or your Earth-aspect guy deciding to use his eight-mote j/o technique, AGAIN, and throwing off your figures. Or friendly gods. Or manse features that let you make lodestones that always point at the manse in question, like the log poses in One Piece.

For bonus points, some methods work better than others in some reasons, and perhaps you have to master others if you want to get to Treasure Island independently.

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



Nessus posted:

It sounds like there might be a bunch of different navigational methods and people probably tend not to rely entirely on one. So you might usually use the stars but you always take a couple of caged frigate-birds for backup. Or you mostly use your directional pole compasses (and why not have several at once so you can always triangulate?) but those can be thrown off by enemy action or your Earth-aspect guy deciding to use his eight-mote j/o technique, AGAIN, and throwing off your figures. Or friendly gods. Or manse features that let you make lodestones that always point at the manse in question, like the log poses in One Piece.

For bonus points, some methods work better than others in some reasons, and perhaps you have to master others if you want to get to Treasure Island independently.

So, for the record, the elemental poles of everywhere but Earth are just 'in that direction' - so you know where the Elemental Pole of Water is by the setting sun, and Air and Fire are always North and South respectively.

It's only Earth that you can triangulate against, which is why you have the multi-part navigation method with the sun, the directions, and the pole, rather than simple triangulation.

Crion
Sep 30, 2004
baseball.
As the person who has played the Sail character piloting the airship in our game for some five years and seen almost all the dumb stuff this system has to recommend it, I would offer the opinion that different cultural navigational techniques for setting a course with your ship are a great thing to put into the flavor following your successful Sail roll against a difficulty set by the Storyteller, and not something to reify in game mechanics at all. We already noted upthread that the biggest problem with the Sail mechanics as they exist is they're just one player doing poo poo while everyone else sits around! And if we're talking about expanding the Sail mechanics so that each person gets a shot at being the one person the Storyteller is dealing with (the captain, the navigator, the boatswain, the lookout, etc) you're just replicating the siloed nature of why the system has a problem in the first place, in my opinion.

Crion fucked around with this message at 09:35 on Feb 3, 2021

Roadie
Jun 30, 2013

Crion posted:

As the person who has played the Sail character piloting the airship in our game for some five years and seen almost all the dumb stuff this system has to recommend it, I would offer the opinion that different cultural navigational techniques for setting a course with your ship are a great thing to put into the flavor following your successful Sail roll against a difficulty set by the Storyteller, and not something to reify in game mechanics at all. We already noted upthread that the biggest problem with the Sail mechanics as they exist is they're just one player doing poo poo while everyone else sits around! And if we're talking about expanding the Sail mechanics so that each person gets a shot at being the one person the Storyteller is dealing with (the captain, the navigator, the boatswain, the lookout, etc) you're just replicating the siloed nature of why the system has a problem in the first place, in my opinion.

I just realized a point of comparison here could be Pathfinder 2e's exploration rules, which bake in as a default assumption that characters generally automatically know how to get where they're going and, for example, will never get lost in a dungeon unless some explicit trickery or hazard messes with them. Instead the exploration rules are about what you're doing during that time—being sneaky, watching for attacks, scanning for magic auras, etc—with most of the exploration actions then linking into initial modifiers in encounters you run into.

It's a fairly nice abstraction of how such things usually get played out anyway in D&D-alikes, and I think something analogous could work well for having a Sail Montage that connects the zoomed-out and zoomed-in views while giving all the characters some theoretically equal space for mechanical attention. Under this schema I think a theoretical "Captain" exploration action would have some kind of universally useful but not all-attention-commanding effect like turning Sail rolls into Join Battle buffs for fights or other benefits for noncombat exploration stops—so that if you're traveling on a boat you will always benefit from having a Sail Guy, but without it actually turning into a decker session.

Roadie fucked around with this message at 10:49 on Feb 3, 2021

Quackles
Aug 11, 2018

Pixels of Light.


Has anyone ever tried to adapt Bridge of Birds into an Exalted campaign or similar? Both the book and Exalted have a heavy dose of Asian pastiche in their DNA...

EthanSteele
Nov 18, 2007

I can hear you
The thing with Exalted is if you want to highlight the fact that navigation in Creation is balls hard and just sailing anywhere without the coast in sight is already an Exalt level feat then you don't want navigation to be an auto-succeed.

Obviously if everyone doesn't care about the sailing part and the boat is just a car taking you to places on the road trip then skip it, but if you're a Sail guy being good at the insane stuff is how you show off that you're the Sail guy (or the Lore guy by doing the big calculations)

Crion posted:

And if we're talking about expanding the Sail mechanics so that each person gets a shot at being the one person the Storyteller is dealing with (the captain, the navigator, the boatswain, the lookout, etc) you're just replicating the siloed nature of why the system has a problem in the first place, in my opinion.

I was reading this as more akin to everyone getting a turn in a fight or debate and not "time for this guy for 10 minutes" but I think the most common result of splitting the duties up like that will be that the Sail Guy will be the only one with any dots in sail/everyone else isn't interested in sailing so it'll be that guy doing all the roles meaning you don't change anything about the one man band problem.

Attorney at Funk
Jun 3, 2008

...the person who says honestly that he despairs is closer to being cured than all those who are not regarded as despairing by themselves or others.
You can just impose penalties on the roll or increase the difficulty if you don't want it to auto-succeed. Building out a baroque subsystem doesn't fulfill that need any better. And a baroque subsystem that only one player touches is a huge drag on the actual game-as-played, as anyone who's played a tabletop game can tell you.

Roadie
Jun 30, 2013

EthanSteele posted:

The thing with Exalted is if you want to highlight the fact that navigation in Creation is balls hard and just sailing anywhere without the coast in sight is already an Exalt level feat then you don't want navigation to be an auto-succeed.

What does benefit does it not auto-succeeding bring to the actual gameplay experience? If a game is not specifically about Being Odysseus (and usually even if it is), navigational sailing is just the thematic montage to get to the next interesting thing, and failure just turns into a slow-to-play and clunky way of adding complications and random encounters. At that point you may as well design for something like that experience explicitly, which gets you something like those exploration mode rules I mentioned.

Roadie fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Feb 4, 2021

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



So my actual goal with this is to give examples to players of skills they can use to help with the operation of the ship, beyond the one character with Sail (who can roll for basically any of these, but can only roll for one thing per interval, and most likely is using Sail to command the crew and set the general course).

So having more detail means 'hey, you can use Lore here, or you can use Craft to produce useful instruments at the Sail guy's instructions, or you can use Performance to direct the sailors while they work to keep time' - none of which is as efficient or as universal as Sail but which lets everyone get involved every interval.

This is a crucial part of making sail more interesting, because if you make it more interesting just for the Sail character you've reinvented the Decker Problem but on a boat.

I am reasonably certain that 'Sail guy takes the lead but everyone can do things that make the Sail system work better' will be better than either 'Sail barely exists' or 'Sail is 10 minutes of Sail Guy doing every roll.' Also it makes the actual operation of the boat produce a little more fiction onboard.

EthanSteele
Nov 18, 2007

I can hear you

Roadie posted:

What does benefit does it not auto-succeeding bring to the actual gameplay experience? If a game is not specifically about Being Odysseus (and usually even if it is), navigational sailing is just the thematic montage to get to the next interesting thing, and failure just turns into a slow-to-play and clunky way of adding complications and random encounters. At that point you may as well design for something like that experience explicitly, which gets you something like those exploration mode rules I mentioned.

So just going to ignore the "if" there and the bit where I say if the group isn't into it you should skip it, huh?

"navigational sailing is just the thematic montage to get to the next interesting thing"? If you're a sail guy then doing that sailing is the interesting thing to you! Do you regularly montage out the Dawn's fight scenes and the Eclipse's diplomacy?

I'm not calling for a subsystem, baroque or otherwise, just that navigation shouldn't be automatic because in a lot of cases that's what is actually being tested. And like I said if you just want the boat to be a means of getting you to the next thing then skip all of the sailing stuff, that's fine! But if you're a sailing guy you probably want to engage with sailing and that means navigation. You wouldn't have to do navigation if you're going between two places you have good charts for or have been to before or whatever (there's a Sailing charm for that even!), but going somewhere new without charts? Then I feel navigation should play a part because that's the thing that's actually being tested.


Edit:

Joe Slowboat posted:

So my actual goal with this is to give examples to players of skills they can use to help with the operation of the ship, beyond the one character with Sail (who can roll for basically any of these, but can only roll for one thing per interval, and most likely is using Sail to command the crew and set the general course).

So having more detail means 'hey, you can use Lore here, or you can use Craft to produce useful instruments at the Sail guy's instructions, or you can use Performance to direct the sailors while they work to keep time' - none of which is as efficient or as universal as Sail but which lets everyone get involved every interval.

This is a crucial part of making sail more interesting, because if you make it more interesting just for the Sail character you've reinvented the Decker Problem but on a boat.

Sounds good!

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



EthanSteele posted:

I'm not calling for a subsystem, baroque or otherwise, just that navigation shouldn't be automatic because in a lot of cases that's what is actually being tested. And like I said if you just want the boat to be a means of getting you to the next thing then skip all of the sailing stuff, that's fine! But if you're a sailing guy you probably want to engage with sailing and that means navigation. You wouldn't have to do navigation if you're going between two places you have good charts for or have been to before or whatever (there's a Sailing charm for that even!), but going somewhere new without charts? Then I feel navigation should play a part because that's the thing that's actually being tested.

I am once again calling for a subsystem

Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

EthanSteele posted:

Do you regularly montage out the Dawn's fight scenes and the Eclipse's diplomacy?

EthanSteele
Nov 18, 2007

I can hear you
Oh. gently caress me then, I guess.

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



Crion posted:

As the person who has played the Sail character piloting the airship in our game for some five years and seen almost all the dumb stuff this system has to recommend it, I would offer the opinion that different cultural navigational techniques for setting a course with your ship are a great thing to put into the flavor following your successful Sail roll against a difficulty set by the Storyteller, and not something to reify in game mechanics at all. We already noted upthread that the biggest problem with the Sail mechanics as they exist is they're just one player doing poo poo while everyone else sits around! And if we're talking about expanding the Sail mechanics so that each person gets a shot at being the one person the Storyteller is dealing with (the captain, the navigator, the boatswain, the lookout, etc) you're just replicating the siloed nature of why the system has a problem in the first place, in my opinion.

So I'd love if you'd expand on this. If each player gets a chance to make a roll in, say, an interval of naval combat akin to a combat round (and apply relevant personal skills and charms), how is that siloed? Especially if their own skills can each apply, rather than combat (where, to be fair, they likely each have a unique combat skill to apply).

E: Pretty sure Ferrinus is joking, he can't montage out diplomatic engagements or his players would never have a chance to negotiate the complex realities of supporting the young empires against the Realm while preparing for the inevitable post-revolutionary conflict between factions. Raksi is anti-hegemonic and therefore requires full support until such a time as the Realm is defeated, at which point...

Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Feb 4, 2021

Attorney at Funk
Jun 3, 2008

...the person who says honestly that he despairs is closer to being cured than all those who are not regarded as despairing by themselves or others.
Our circle in Ferrinus's game actually sided with Kejak against Raksi, even though Raksi was one of our Solars' Lunar mate. She was just too evil, and sitting on too many loot drops.

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



Attorney at Funk posted:

Our circle in Ferrinus's game actually sided with Kejak against Raksi, even though Raksi was one of our Solars' Lunar mate. She was just too evil, and sitting on too many loot drops.

Ferrinus! Is this praxis!? loljk get her rear end, Raksi's a perfect example of the Silver Pact letting awful poo poo slide in the name of their larger cause and one of my favorite Lunar concepts is 'anti-Thousand Fangs insurrectionist who Exalted and suddenly is expected to play nice with the tyrant god-queen crushing their society.'

KittyEmpress
Dec 30, 2012

Jam Buddies

Raksi owns.

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Attorney at Funk
Jun 3, 2008

...the person who says honestly that he despairs is closer to being cured than all those who are not regarded as despairing by themselves or others.
Raksi owned.

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