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Pasha posted:How good are the 3E rules for a two player game (one storyteller and one player)? I suspect it’s one of the better ways to play it. I ran a long 2-player 1-ST game that went very well, but the sheer burden of prep was gruesome by the end, and I couldn’t imagine running a high-Essence 3e game for more players than two players. One-on-one might work quite well if you’re mindful of the balance of the opposition.
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Aug 13, 2023 04:41
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Pasha posted:How good are the 3E rules for a two player game (one storyteller and one player)? I think 3e probably performs at its best in this environment, because all of the system's drawbacks get worse and worse the more people are at the table. Combat will be the snappiest and most legible it can possibly be when you're mainly using it for duels and assassinations and other action setpieces that center around one guy; the social system has a lot to dig into mechanically and intimacies let you go really deep on what makes a character tick. The unwieldy project frameworks (especially crafting) are still too convoluted but if you're not keeping a tableful of other people from playing while you work it out, they're so much less stressful to work with. The volume of setting material and the sheer number of charms and merits etc to look at can be daunting for STs and players alike, but again, never less so than when there's the smallest possible number of players. I've been playing and running 3e for years at this point and while the group vibe is irreplaceable and (for me) worth the effort, I've always felt like the game really clicked when I was doing solo vignettes, side scenes, preludes, etc. One thing to keep in mind is that even a strong player-character is going to be at the mercy of action economy if they're beset by a number of even significantly weaker opponents. So be mindful of when you're rolling multiple guys into the fight in opposition vs a battle group with comparable base stats - the former is a lot more dangerous.
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Aug 13, 2023 04:45
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Pasha posted:How good are the 3E rules for a two player game (one storyteller and one player)? 2-3 people (storyteller included) is an ideal exalted group number in my personal experience, any more than that and it can get hard to keep individual players focused when they have to wait for 3+ different people's dice trick cascades to resolve etc. Maybe that's just a skill issue but I don't think I'm the only one. Also seconding the preparation burden, even if a few of your players backbench in combat that creates its own prep cycle of needing to write in specific ways for them to thrive in their other niches with mechanical handles to hang their dice tricks on, and god help you if your player wants to hang their narrative hat on something like Medicine or Sail where you'll be really working overtime to justify the thing they want to be cool at because the system will not meet you halfway. A one on one game could be quite nice!
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Aug 13, 2023 05:11
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Hidingo Kojimba posted:Some day I am going to get my Black Rose Duelist arc of Utena inspired Infernals. Even if I have to hack it together myself. That's an extremely cool idea, like are you imaging their exaltation works the same way or is it some temporary state someone can end up in?
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Aug 13, 2023 12:33
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wiegieman posted:We, the exalted revolutionaries, are in a unique position to leap past the dangerous stage of bourgeois-dominated capital growth and instead democratize mystical enlightenment to all people by way a five year plan (that is, very large sorcerous workings.) Salina and her gang of upstarts talking like this is how you get young Kejak to start weaving Of Truths Best Unspoken into Of Things Desired And Feared.
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Aug 15, 2023 14:55
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Saw a picture from Crucible of Legends and there's an Alchemical in a flying wheelchair, which is very confusing to me since Alchemicals seem like the poorest choice for disability representation as they're literally robots who can have their mechanical spines repaired at any time and limbs replaced with tank treads and Doc Ock arms.
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Aug 17, 2023 19:22
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Whirling posted:Saw a picture from Crucible of Legends and there's an Alchemical in a flying wheelchair, which is very confusing to me since Alchemicals seem like the poorest choice for disability representation as they're literally robots who can have their mechanical spines repaired at any time and limbs replaced with tank treads and Doc Ock arms. The counter-argument for that would be wheelchair -> mechanical tech -> aesthetically in-theme for Alchemicals. "Disability representation is ill-conceived because the magic of the setting would logically allow for perfect repair of disabilities" is a remarkably unpopular opinion among disability representation advocates in the fandom.
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Aug 17, 2023 19:30
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Stephenls posted:The counter-argument for that would be wheelchair -> mechanical tech -> aesthetically in-theme for Alchemicals. I mean, you could still represent disability in a way that's consistent with how Alchemicals work, such as by having an Alchemical examining potential Charm upgrades to install in place of a missing leg. But, uh, that's beyond Onyx Path's capability at this point, which is why the Alchemicals in the book are just shiny metal people, because they can't communicate the correct look to their art team.
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Aug 17, 2023 19:32
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Rand Brittain posted:I mean, you could still represent disability in a way that's consistent with how Alchemicals work, such as by having an Alchemical examining potential Charm upgrades to install in place of a missing leg. Yeah, but people want to see themselves in representation. People in wheelchairs don't just want generic disability representation; they want fantasy characters in cool magic wheelchairs.
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Aug 17, 2023 19:39
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Stephenls posted:Yeah, but people want to see themselves in representation. People in wheelchairs don't just want generic disability representation; they want fantasy characters in cool magic wheelchairs. I mean, I think you could make it work if the "wheelchair" is something like "an Infernal being princess-carried by Octavian everywhere she goes, and casting her wicked magics from his lap." That has drip. A regular wheelchair... I dunno, I think part of it is that Exalted kind of wants to eat its cake and keep as far as "realism" goes, since it's explicitly a setting where crippling injuries are treated realistically a thing that can ruin your life even as an Exalted warrior* (see: the Slug), but also a setting where you don't have to wear a helmet as part of your fancy battle armor because you want to show off your cool anime haircut. So it's arguably unfair that wheelchairs fall on the "realism" side of the line that determines which rules player characters get to ignore. It might just be waiting for someone to come up with a good visual concept? A plain mechanical wheelchair is going to look out-of-place in Harborhead, but a cool magic wheelchair that's built up to Exalted's level of "swords should be seven feet long" is probably going to look stupid unless you know what you're doing. * unless you have access to Celestial healing magic, because they're just that special
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Aug 17, 2023 19:51
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Bad artistic representation of Alchemicals in particular especially sucks because the basic idea of them actually just being made of clay but getting specific (usually) visible cyber-augs with each Charm is so good.
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Aug 17, 2023 19:59
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I suppose it depends if you’re thinking in Watsonian or Doylist terms. In Doylist terms it is easy: you have some cool people in cool wheelchairs. QX. The design aesthetic for Exalted allows this trivially. The fictional environment clashes with it, in a way that is complex. Exalts recover easily from most injuries and Medicine Charms or god magic can do even more. Now I’m imagining ancient Artifact chairs so sick that the non-wheelchair-using would want them in their own right.
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Aug 17, 2023 20:02
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Stephenls posted:The counter-argument for that would be wheelchair -> mechanical tech -> aesthetically in-theme for Alchemicals. This counter-argument doesn't really seem to work since it assumes that Autochthonian society (famously a bad parody of real life Marxist-Leninist societies where everybody must work if they can for the good of the motherland and all that) has the same attitude towards disability as real world advocates for the position that disabilities do not ever need to be relieved and that seeking out medical relief for them is bad in and of itself because they believe it promotes the idea that all disabilities should be "corrected". I have disagreements with this view as someone with a particularly major disability (borderline personality disorder) where I would really LOVE a more efficacious treatment for it, so I really don't see the benefit of only accepting that view of things as the default.
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Aug 17, 2023 20:04
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If it was any other exalt but alchemical you might even be able to swing 'I could repair my leg/spine/whatever but I want to show the children of Creation that people in wheelchairs can do cool things (as long as they Exalt)' as a character motivation. ...Hell, now that I think about it you straight up could probably do something similar with alchemicals. Have their creator intentionally design them to be in a wheelchair as a propaganda piece.
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Aug 17, 2023 20:05
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Internal setting logic representation vs. aspirational representation is the hugest can of worms, and one of the thorniest problems to solve in worldbuilding. It's not just disability rep, it's also gender and sexuality rep and racial diversity rep. "gently caress it, just put in the rep people are asking for" is the solution the current design team seems to have settled on, and while that's actually the solution I personally like the least -- I find it offputting when the setting is internally inconsistent like that, and it's one of the reasons I don't really care to engage with Exalted much anymore -- I also think it's probably the most objectively correct. You cannot hire minoritized creators to diversify your team and then not listen to what they have to say when they tell you the changes that need to be made and the things you need to start including.
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Aug 17, 2023 20:20
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Do not Cold Equations this. My comrade in Marx, they wrote the setting.
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Aug 17, 2023 20:34
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I mean, you could also just put the representation in the parts of the setting where it makes sense, which Exalted does have. Terrestrials with permanent disabilities who still function as heroes have been part of the setting since the first edition*, and it also works fine for most of the other Exalted, too, even Solars, since not every Solar knows another Solar who's a doctor. * I mean, if you want your representation to be aspirational, you'd probably want to invent a better iconic rep than the Slug, but that's not difficult.
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Aug 17, 2023 20:35
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Rand Brittain posted:I mean, you could also just put the representation in the parts of the setting where it makes sense, which Exalted does have. Terrestrials with permanent disabilities who still function as heroes have been part of the setting since the first edition*, and it also works fine for most of the other Exalted, too, even Solars, since not every Solar knows another Solar who's a doctor. There's a path dependency element here, though. They clearly wanted to put wheelchair rep in a prestige spread art piece, because that's where it'll have prominence, and it's a bit too late to go back in time and put a wheelchair in one of the corebook prestige spread art pieces. (And even if you had a time machine, John Morke would have vetoed it, because he thought giving Exalts anything other than perfectly fit and toned god-bodies was stupid.) It had to go in the picture for the Alchemicals, Infernals, or Getimians, because those were the splats getting prestige spreads in Crucible of Legend. There aren't going to be any more prestige spreads.
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Aug 17, 2023 20:45
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Whirling posted:I have disagreements with this view as someone with a particularly major disability (borderline personality disorder) where I would really LOVE a more efficacious treatment for it, so I really don't see the benefit of only accepting that view of things as the default. I have family who couldn't walk, and while watching an old Star Trek episode with him he told me how disappointed he was seeing Captain Pike in a wheel chair given what he presumed medical science would be like in the far future. Granted, that was only one person's opinion, but its enough that I'm unwilling to believe that all people in wheelchairs are in consensus.
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Aug 17, 2023 20:45
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I just don't think art needs to represent everyone and that's a bad view point to have for artistic expression. I feel like that attitude is bleeding in from capitalist mindset of "everyone MUST buy our product if they can" and its making certain discourses really strange, like how there was talk of how sex scenes in popular films are bad because they make asexual people uncomfortable, or how From Software was being ableist because Elden Ring didn't have an easy mode, and it just always makes me so depressed that the response isn't "gently caress it, I'm going to make what I want and I'm going to band together with my fellow workers so we ALL can make what we want", which is what would REALLY foster diversity and representation more than anything else by making art freer and more accessible to work on.
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Aug 17, 2023 20:50
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Schwarzwald posted:I have family who couldn't walk, and while watching an old Star Trek episode with him he told me how disappointed he was seeing Captain Pike in a wheel chair given what he presumed medical science would be like in the far future. Granted, that was only one person's opinion, but its enough that I'm unwilling to believe that all people in wheelchairs are in consensus. That's fair, and I should have qualified my statement there. There's no consensus even among members of the affected groups. Some people want aspirational representation and some people want internally consistent representation and there's no way to make them both happy in all situations. The wheelchair-using pro-wheelchair-representation people are generally more publicly enthusiastic than the wheelchair-using anti-wheelchair representation people, though.
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Aug 17, 2023 20:54
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An Alchemical who specifically uses a wheelchair isn't inconceivable; they might've suffered some damage beyond the capability of even their local vat complex to repair, and they might further not want to just flens their lower body apart completely to replace it with spider legs or tank treads because they want to retain a hold on their human body, put mortals at ease, serve as an example to regular Autochthonians, or all three. Possibly they do go full Scorpion King when it's time to throw down, but iirc that was one of the Charms you couldn't just uninstall for convenience back in 1e, 2e, or both, so maybe not. I did do a double take there at first, but you're not actually forced to sacrifice tone and consistency for representation's sake here.
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Aug 17, 2023 21:02
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I think representation discourse is one of those things where an insightful and important criticism of culture at large runs into difficulty when used to evaluate or create particular works of art. I also think ttrpgs are a place where representation is particularly powerful. Since the books are inviting people to imagine both themselves in a fictional world and a fictional self in themselves, making sure everyone feels inspired both to play and to play a wide variety of characters is very valuable. Making it clear that disabled people should feel free to make their over the top power fantasy self also have that disability seems more important than flavor dissonance (that you can work around).
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Aug 17, 2023 22:14
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Whirling posted:Exalted 3e's storyteller guide finally dropped about seven years after the core book. I still have no idea what is going on with the production pipelines of these books where this book was harder to put out/considered less urgent than the book that added more items to the game, but here it is. If anyone has any opinions about the book, would love to hear them. Only thing I can say without buying it is that the cover art looks bad. Where's the Storyteller Guide? I couldn't find the drat thing either on DTRPG or the Onyx Path website, or any mention of this. Am I just crit-failing my google-fu?
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Aug 17, 2023 22:32
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https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/448809/crucible-of-legend
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Aug 17, 2023 22:35
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TwoQuestions posted:Where's the Storyteller Guide? I couldn't find the drat thing either on DTRPG or the Onyx Path website, or any mention of this. Am I just crit-failing my google-fu? It's called Crucible of Legend because everything in exalted needs to have a confusing name.
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Aug 17, 2023 22:38
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spectralent posted:It's called Crucible of Legend because everything in exalted needs to have a confusing name. Thank you, that was really bugging me! The people in the reviews complaining about safety tools are getting some very  looks from me, as there are some truly horrible bits of the setting that only the edgelordiest of edgelords would want to bring to the table.
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Aug 17, 2023 22:44
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spectralent posted:It's called Crucible of Legend because everything in exalted needs to have a confusing name.
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Aug 17, 2023 23:26
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Ferrinus posted:An Alchemical who specifically uses a wheelchair isn't inconceivable; they might've suffered some damage beyond the capability of even their local vat complex to repair, and they might further not want to just flens their lower body apart completely to replace it with spider legs or tank treads because they want to retain a hold on their human body, put mortals at ease, serve as an example to regular Autochthonians, or all three. Possibly they do go full Scorpion King when it's time to throw down, but iirc that was one of the Charms you couldn't just uninstall for convenience back in 1e, 2e, or both, so maybe not. I feel like Alchemicals would be a perfect place for some variety of Metron's floaty power chair, just like it's the same splat that should get whatever the gently caress that thing that Orion flies on is.
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Aug 18, 2023 09:18
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(Almost) particular art piece is easy to mentally throw out if you don't like it, so I'm in favor of polarizing art in general. Some of the discussion here is pretty interesting, certainly moreso than anything else that's come up w/r/t Crucible.TwoQuestions posted:The people in the reviews complaining about safety tools are getting some very Oligopsony fucked around with this message at 12:15 on Aug 18, 2023 |
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Aug 18, 2023 12:09
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Stephenls posted:(And even if you had a time machine, John Morke would have vetoed it, because he thought giving Exalts anything other than perfectly fit and toned god-bodies was stupid.) I could have sworn there was wheelchair art in the corebook. Big purple thing with spiked wheels? I can't find it now. I remember it specifically because someone piped up at the time saying that, as a person with a wheelchair, she found off-putting because it looked too large and heavy to actually function as a mobility aid. It's not in Miracles, Arms or the DB books either, I'm beginning to feel like I'm losing my mind.
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Aug 18, 2023 16:41
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I think that was in Essence.
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Aug 18, 2023 17:16
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That one's extra annoying since the character is an abyssal, so litter carried by skeletal servants is right there.
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Aug 18, 2023 21:21
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:I remember it specifically because someone piped up at the time saying that, as a person with a wheelchair, she found off-putting because it looked too large and heavy to actually function as a mobility aid. I think asking for inclusion is one thing, but this is Exalted; asking them not to make something way too large to be practical is a bridge too far!
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Aug 18, 2023 21:56
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No love for any artifact "wheel"chairs that perch and move about on a set of starmetal spider legs?
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Aug 18, 2023 21:59
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Quackles posted:No love for any artifact "wheel"chairs that perch and move about on a set of starmetal spider legs? Does it also come with the Wild Wild West theme on repeat?
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Aug 18, 2023 22:26
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Quackles posted:No love for any artifact "wheel"chairs that perch and move about on a set of starmetal spider legs?
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Aug 18, 2023 22:29
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:I could have sworn there was wheelchair art in the corebook. Big purple thing with spiked wheels? I can't find it now. It was indeed in Essence. 
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Aug 18, 2023 22:55
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God, I love it so much because you can tell that every single person involved couldn't even be hosed to google 'what does a wheelchair look like?', nevermind speaking to one (1) actual disabled person. Like, yeah, it it should definitely have no cushions/belts/support (and the armrests look loving uncomfortable), and there should be no way to get in or out of it, and there should be no way for the user to touch or reach the wheels, and also it should be so bulky that it actually restricts your movement because why would a person who needs a mobility aid need to get inside a building or go through a doorway? A wheelchair is exactly the same thing as a daiklave, right? Bigger is better? No need to confirm that, I think we've got it, lads. Like at least being carried on a litter by the enslaved dead would be loving rad.
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Aug 19, 2023 00:04
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Not to defend the murder death skull wheeled throne too much, but I don't think it's meant to pick up groceries in.
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Aug 19, 2023 00:07
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