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Speaking of chargen XP vs BP issues, I remember there being some good house rules for that, and I believe I saw some for crafting as well? I'm starting to do the ground work for starting up a game and could really use links to those if anyone has some (all of them? only one? I read this thread so infrequently) around. From the last game I ran, it seemed like things generally worked okay, but chargen was broken compared to xp costs, crafting was way too complicated and...maybe it was bureaucracy? was fairly funky as well. I only have 3ish players signed up right now, but we are at the "I would like to play Exalted" stage, and don't know what people will be choosing, so general tips and house rules to make things smooth are appreciated!
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Jun 19, 2017 23:31
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Calde posted:The semi-official BP/XP fix from Holden himself is here. I don't like it, but it's worth mentioning. The Ferrinus Approved fan version is here. Were I to use 3E it's what I'd implement, I think. The Ferrinus Approved version is the one I was remembering and enjoyed the last game I played! Bluewinds looks like...a lot to digest, but Sanctaphrax's seems fairly solid. I'll review them both as I'm remembering how to play and what I liked/didn't. Thanks for the links!
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Jun 20, 2017 03:42
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Super stoked! 
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Jun 21, 2017 06:09
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Kestral posted:Here's my attempt at Chuubo's-style projects in Exalted, with a few examples and commentary: Project Tracks. This is really enjoyable, I'll run it by my group and see if they are interested. It presents a great framework for making interesting stories, and get the whole table to buy-in. Thanks for putting the effort into it!
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Jun 27, 2017 04:38
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Two questions. First one, does anyone have recommendations on handling organizations? My first session went well (thanks for earlier tips btw!) and the players are moving along and already starting to ask questions hinting towards investing in a base of power, armies, economies, etc. I'm looking for an approach that is easy to handle - I was thinking of possibly just giving organizations merit ratings and using the existing dot system to handle that, but am open to suggestions. Second question, how do I see messages in the discord channel? I joined but it all just says I don't have permission to view anything.
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Aug 8, 2017 02:45
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Kestral posted:Handle in what sense? What function do you want the mechanics to serve? Let's start with that, and we can build from there. Be warned, this is a fairly contentious topic in Exalted circles. I want organizations/factions to be meaningful things that the players can see in a concrete way that they are improving or undermining. This is a space where I think theater of the mind specifically fails at, because there is too much room for misunderstood context, or it risks becoming some abstract rolls and suddenly things are different, but how? I admit that might just a failure on my part of imagination/my ability to "show not tell". So concrete example time. I've taken over that giant island next to Champoor in the southeast as the starting point for the game to contain the characters and give them room to figure out how dumbly powerful Solar are before they go out and get themselves killed by calling down a massive Wyld Hunt on them or something. The island has 3 main factions on it. Near Champoor is a port city that is essentially a vassal to Champoor, and is obviously lovely to the people living there. In the northeast is an old ruins fortress keep occupied by The Immaculate Order and shrouded in mystery that will start to amp up involvement as the game goes on. In the south is a port city that has aligned itself with Y'danna, and for the world of Exalted, is more or less above the board, with minor corruption and maaaybe something is going on with the Fair Folk but the players haven't figured that out yet. The players are starting to align with the southern port, and have asked questions around investing in it/helping it out. Our War Zenith can use Tiger Training Technique and deliver concrete results. The regular military can be turned into elite units in a month, and the irregular into battle ready main force in a week! Our Twilight crafting/bureaucracy can poo poo out all the weapons they need in like...a day. But if he wants to improve their industry overall and turn them into the definitive port of call on the island, starving out the Champoor port for influence and resources, that gets a looooot more fuzzy. There is stuff to root out corruption, and find malign influence sources. And then some stuff about turning the Solar into a master trader, but nothing about building up an organization that can run without you handling all the BS as far as I can tell. My first pass was trying something like this: Southern Port City Allies: 3 dots (Y'danna and Guild) Backing: 3 dots (Y'danna and Guild) Command: 2 dots (Small active standing military mostly around keeping order in the city with irregulars on call) Contacts: 3 dots (Ports and merchants of the Southeast) Cult: 1 dot (Water god of the island) Demesne: 2 dots (The city is on a site of power) Followers: 1 dot (Growing artisan district) Influence: 2 dots (The recent backing of Y'danna and Guild contracts have this on the rise) Manse: 3 dots (Parts of the city have been subtly designed to attune this area) Resources: 3/2 dots (3 dots worth flow through the city, and their pull of it comes to around 2 dots) Most of this information would start out hidden to the players, but can be revealed via actions of investigation, various buear charms, night caste spy operations, what have you. The same could be done for opposing organizations, and then players can take actions specifically around growing or undercutting those dots. Some of the merits would likely require some rescaling, but possibly not - they seem to follow a generally exponential nature in the books, so it might actually be fine. While this approach is probably workable, it smells of going to deep on single facets of things, but on the flipside, Exalted is all about crunch. I'm curious to hear other approaches and what has and hasn't worked for others.
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Aug 8, 2017 20:41
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Kestral posted:Good poo poo Thanks for the indepth response. I am definitely jacking the timers idea at the very least, reminds me of Dungeon World's fronts, which I was already debating a bit on utilizing in some format or another. Also grabbed Godbound and am checking out their rules. Ultimately I also need to get more feedback from the players as well - I don't want to spend the work going too deep in complexity if they don't want to, which is part of why I was fishing for ideas and examples, which you provided a ton of, so thanks! As to Rand Brittain's consideration, my thoughts on it would be to probably attack it as a problem of decay/corruption that sets in over time. This tends to be the history of empires in general, ya? Some very hard work goes into setting up large organizations (that are sometimes better than things before), and then it goes to poo poo via complacency/loss of vision/corruption. Solars, through methods like the Reforming Kata and the like have means to handle that poo poo. Over in the merchant tree, they can literally tell if anyone is loving with their market. The can do poo poo like be Plato's Philosopher King and play perfect game theory against simplistic Rational Actor theory and have everything turn out okay, while the rest of us fall into alcoholism because it's a lot easier than facing our actual issues in life. Attorney at Funk posted:
I'd buy that as well. Honestly just having any loving guidance would be nice from the core book. I can come up with a number of solutions, but having one that is vetted or at least made by people who are professionals at it would be nice. I'll think on it some more and try to remember to do a trip report on it with where I land. Thanks for the feedback everyone.
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Aug 9, 2017 04:17
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A player linked this tumblr, which is full of solid Exalted inspiration material: https://sekigan.tumblr.com/archive
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Dec 23, 2017 23:34
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:Can you turn water to wine with Craftsman Needs No Tools and a handful of grapes? Rules as written, looks like it. Would depend on how you define the project, but making wine would likely be a Major Project slot, and that is allowed by the charm, so yes, yes you can. Note that this is a good example of a task (making wine) that the core book on crafting doesn't handle super well. I'd probably negotiate over the relative quality of a wine made in seconds, but I'd definitely allow it to be made.
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Dec 24, 2017 02:51
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Rand Brittain posted:Singing the seed out of a grape and coaxing it to grow into a small vineyard over the course of an hour is cool. Building off my previous response and this statement, that's why I mentioned discussing the quality of the wine. Wine made in a handful of minutes is gonna rate two buck chuck most likely. If they used a series of projects in a row accelerated by CNNT, to actually build out the entire process (vineyard, crushing/pressing facilities, aging facilities, etc) and then applied CNNT against that to accelerate the actual wine creation, then we're talking pumping out some top class wine in like a day to a week depending on rolls. Note that this stays the same in both core or if you are using the Sanctaphrax craft rewrite. Nessus posted:Making booze is a form of craftsmanship, I think that's really all that it needs here. (I assume cooking and similar endeavors are still classed under Craft.) They are explicitly listed as so in the book. Cooking a regular meal is a basic project, and preparing a banquet fit for a prince/god is a major.
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Dec 24, 2017 20:45
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LatwPIAT posted:It's not really good design to have a Charm that affects something the game doesn't have any mechanics for actually handling. I feel like this is more to the lack of a Storyteller section with guidance on how to actually run the game. I just intuited it as a ST fiat thing and just hammer out via negotiation with the players. We keep a record of these so we can avoid contradiction and have now gotten to a place where everyone agrees on it's general power against narrative scope. Worth mentioning that the rewrite handles this better and what it does is shift the time scale by one or two (phone posting so don't remember specifically which). 2 years of work becomes 2 months, 2 months goes to 2 weeks and so on.
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Dec 27, 2017 02:39
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GreenMetalSun posted:This might sound like a weird question, but do people not play Exalted online? And if they do, where do they play it? I always search for it on Roll20, and there’s a listing for it, but I’ve never seen a game available for any edition. The RPoL games all seem really insular and I really get the impression that if you’re not in the GM’s friend group, there’s no point in joining. Was there fallout between Exalted fans and Roll20? Or does it just not lend itself well to the system? I run a game over it and it half comes down to the dice support on Roll20 is poo poo and that Roll20 itself is fairly...well, poo poo. It is still a useful site for throwing up images for themes and stuff, and if you make maps or something in another tool, but the actual tools for running an Exalted style game is...irk. It works fine for something that is heavy grid based (and is in fact REALLY good i'd argue for wargaming). But for anything that is very crunchy dicewise, or has a very loose combat system, it's pretty lacking. Edit: We use Discord for voice because my tabletop group is also my everything else gaming group.
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Feb 3, 2018 02:31
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kaffo posted:While I'm here, I see there are some wicked spreadsheets to make game play easier, but they'd suck to print. I also saw they were selling cards with all the charms/artifacts etc on them for easy reference at the table but they cost $$$ Bit of a late reply, but 2/3rds down the OP there are links to Charm Cards that are blank that players can fill out: https://www.reddit.com/r/exalted/comments/4yby39/madletters_charm_cascades_version_3_including/
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Mar 20, 2018 01:55
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pospysyl posted:How good is White Reaper Style when you're not dealing with battle groups? Very. It's best to think of it as a strong martial arts style that gets busted against battle groups. You build up halos and then burn them to do insane poo poo, where insane poo poo can be slaughtering a few battle groups or dropping the hammer on a solo big bad, or turning multiple attackers advantage against them.
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May 1, 2018 22:46
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I think the Errata/3.5/GM guide need to take a real critical eye to revise/implement the systems for Craft, Martial Arts, Bureaucracy and hitting the combat engine a few times with a stick. In addition, I think that the Solars need a stronger opening hook in the game to build concepts around and keep a group together. There is I think a fundamental problem with the concept of bronze age demi-god mythology and rolling in a group - notably that most of that mythos is about individuals and not groups unless it was their elite but still generally mortal dudes. DBs have multiple existing societies to build and hook into, Lunars have the shahan-yas, the Silver Pact, the Vanguard, etc etc. Solars just float weird and it can be real poor if you don't have super engaged/proactive players (which in my experience is a lot of players, especially ones coming off of D&D). I can come up with dozens of cool individual characters for Solars, but making a group that is going to spend a ton of time with each other is a lot harder by the very nature of them being tuned to be so amazing at solo poo poo. Even the majority of the stories about the Solars in the books are individual legends or maybe a pair wrecking face/building wonders across Creation. I actually disagree that they are the best splat to intro people on - I think Lunars, even with just what we have so far, are far superior because you can still do the "start in a remote place isolated so you don't need a ton of info" and then once they Exalt there is an in-fiction support network that can help ramp them up as the players start to do their own reading, or if they are real lazy about it, you can have entire sessions around them learning about how big and crazy Creation actually is compared to their little village. The game gives the ST active support for this - Solars, not so much. And if you're going to be running a DB game, it should only be with players who will actively read up on the background and lore in the book, because that's like half the point of a DB game - unless you're doing an outcaste game, in which case, you have plenty of tools for them to not know that much about Creation either, so you're golden. Solars don't have any default support system they can rely on, it's all dependent on either other books or knowledge from previous editions, so it's not a good self-contained system.
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Feb 16, 2019 05:19
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Crion posted:The Solars should have all the built-in support systems they need for figuring out common knowledge about the world, because the actual work of that sort of onboarding for new players is the Storyteller's to do already,. Maybe if there was actually a Storyteller section on running the game this would fly, but its really not there. The game does not lend itself well to being run easily/new players and Storyteller friendly and that is a design flaw. It should be addressed.
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Feb 16, 2019 19:50
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Ferrinus posted:Speaking of mutation dots, is it just me or is the thick hide mutation that just plain gives you +(merit rating) dots of soak absolutely incredible value for money? It's insane value and just further enforces that they have no loving clue what they are doing with the mutation merits, costs and effects. They are all over the place in terms of their utility to cost ratio and it's taking a lot of energy to not just completely redo them right now. I will probably do so once the all-in-one backer preview drops though. It's egregiously poorly balanced, more so than almost anything else in this edition.
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Feb 25, 2019 18:21
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Ferrinus posted:Yeah that was my thought. I figure if I had anyone who actually wanted "natural armor" mutations I'd probably just make it give you always-on mundane armor that's light/medium/heavy based on point value, and the upside is that while it's still got mobility penalties you can sleep in it or whatever with no ill effects. Maybe something like 1/2/3 dots for light/medium/heavy, and then you can invest extra dots up to five to lower its mobility penalty by that many points (but it still counts as armor). That's clean and pretty good. Honestly, I'm annoyed that they didn't just extend out how they did the Natural Toxins or whatever it's called extension system. They should have done the same thing for Enhanced Senses and the like instead of it being a bunch of different stuff all over the place, poorly organized. Enhanced Senses (Vision) should have the options on Thermal Vision, Night Vision, etc., instead of those being completely separate merits that still require Enhanced Senses (Vision). It's messy and bad as is, they can do better and literally have the tools in front of them from their own frameworks to make it better.
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Feb 25, 2019 20:20
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Thesaurasaurus posted:e: also I'm pretty sure the reason Enhanced Toxin etc. exist as separate mutations is because including them with the base mutation would put their pricing over 5 dots, which is strictly-disallowed for any Merit because that's the precedent set by the corebook so we're apparently stuck with it forever. I mean yes, but that's a good system overall. It shows pre-reqs, and builds up an existing system instead of throwing it all over the place. I'm arguing for it mostly from a UX standpoint. You could essentially build a merit tree if you wanted to, and its a good way to think of it imo. Also, I was wrong, only Thermal Vision requires Enhance Sense (Vision), while Night Vision doesn't which is even weirder? I think, grappling with my own thoughts some more, is that mutation/innate merits really don't feel like they are handled well on a systemic level. They clobbered together a bunch of one offs and claimed it's a system for building things up, but it is poorly designed for such a thing and isn't even particularly well balanced against that goal. "Rand Brittain" posted:I mean, it's not like it's too late to throw in suggestions if you have any; the Dragon-Blooded book changed plenty between the manuscript and the final release.
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Feb 25, 2019 21:43
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Ferrinus posted:A purchased merit’s listed cost is New Rating x 3 experience points, but, and I MIGHT be making this up, one of the old devs clarified that you don’t have to buy levels that don’t exist. So, Martial Artist (****) costs 12 xp, but Tough Hide (****) costs 3 + 6 + 8 + 12 xp. Tough[Unusual] Hide is an Innate merit, so you can't actually buy it with xp, rules as written. I do believe that you use house rules that treat Innate and Purchased as just Purchased, because I jacked your house rules as the baseline for my game after running it RAW for a bit and hating it. Well, hate is a strong word, but there are some very ugly flaws despite the fact this is hands down the best system for the line yet and has some excellent systems within it (social so good). These problems of course all go away if you just hand out BP instead of XP.
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Feb 26, 2019 05:17
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EthanSteele posted:You can't even purchase any Martial Arts abilities without the Martial Artist merit. That's what the merit is for. Martial Arts are really strong and letting people just buy them without having the merit pre-req can get really rude. Then it should be backloaded for Essence users, not a pre-req for access to the ability. There are no MA "abilities" in a meaningful sense where they place the gate - Tiger Style at 3 dots is in no way functionally better than Brawl at 3 dots. They only get strong at the Charm level, and even then their utility is limited and heavily moderated already, throwing an additional tax on top of that is very questionable. It's an objectively badly written and costed merit, the only real argument around it is how bad is it written and how poor is its cost. Related, I actually think their entire approach to MA is rear end backwards and doesn't make sense in setting or in system or in real life and we've modified our games accordingly. Which is the benefit to being the ST I suppose and playing with like minded players. This is particular to our table, but after a lot of back and forth, we actually nuked Archery, Brawl, Melee and Thrown and now everything is an MA with your style determining if you can access Charms within those trees. All of them get access to the Brawl tree, most get access to the Melee tree, Righteous Devil gets access to Archery, Silver-Voiced Nightingale gets Thrown, etc. This is on the more extreme side of house ruling, but everyone in my game does martial arts of some sort IRL and really enjoy the wuxia influence on Exalted. This modification embraces that thematic and brings it out in a much stronger fashion.
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Feb 26, 2019 19:06
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Lambo Trillrissian posted:I don't actually think they're too strong compared to the default Solar kit, which is very strong, I think that the easy extra actions they grant bog down the game and can cause unintentional and unwanted spotlight hogging. Important difference! This I agree with. They are also very flavorful and can really excel at specific niches which make them insanely good from time to time, and if the ST doesn't develop challenges properly, they will look better than they are. Speaking from experience, it took me a few encounters to get a handle on my groups setup and how good each player was at playing the game to come up with challenges that were good for everyone. This is mostly accomplished via having multiple objectives in a single encounter. Your tiger stylist or shining point are gonna dunk all over most 1v1 challenges, but would get loving wrecked by a commander with a strong bodyguard and a battle group or two, which in turn lets your righteous devil and crane stylist shine. Martial Arts trees can feel OP because they are built towards a specific purpose - like that's the entire point. On the other hand, Ferocious Jab is a hilariously powerful attack under the right circumstances for a 1m cost and is literally a starting charm in the Brawl tree. Which, going off on tangents again, is hilarious, because the solar brawl tree is basically 3 or 4 martial arts styles that just aren't called that. You've got Solar Boxing Style, Solar Grappling Style, Solar Hit A Lot Style and Solar Hit Things Better And Harder Supplements. They went through a lot of work to make a bunch of artificial barriers between MA and everything else when I think they should probably have just made everything MA? It's something I continue to toy with, but there is a lot of work to make artificial barriers and distinctions that just fell and play very odd with the system they developed.
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Feb 26, 2019 21:14
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EthanSteele posted:Alternate punchline: character generation and theoretical advancement is all that matters because no one actually gets to play Exalted. Much like Skyrim Modding, Exalted char gen is the game. And while I don't agree with Monathin that Ferrinus is a bad faith poster, he does have a very particular view on the game and views it from a very systems focused approach that searches for min/max problems and doesn't really consider adapting and tweaking the system on the go to make it a good experience for everyone. He is correct that there is a very optimal approach to char gen and advancement and some weirdness with how rules interact that can cause a number of problems. The solution to that for actually playing the game is to talk about it at the table and come to a solution that works for everyone involved. On the plus side, Ferrinus does consistently mention and put forth a number of rather good rule edits and tweaks imo, and I do appreciate that. Otoh, you aren't going to get very far in a debate with him if you aren't trying to fix the problems in the game vs working through the problems in the game.
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Feb 27, 2019 01:47
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Ferrinus posted:It should be pretty clear that every game I participate in suffers enormously for my inclusion, but that’s just the price everyone else has gotta pay for up to date access to my incredible house rules. Speaking of, I'd love to see a post on any updated rules you've had/thoughts, especially with what we are seeing post DB and with Lunar stuff dropping now. Last time I jacked some of your rules was back when we just had core, and I'm gonna be in a new game soon, so I at the very least won't poo poo all over you for posting well thought out stuff.
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Feb 27, 2019 03:24
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EthanSteele posted:Jokes aside, I'd love more people to post things they think need fixing and their solutions to said things. In the spirit of that, and since I only poo poo on parts of the system because I think overall it's a solid system, I'm gonna post on using the frameworks they have to do cool stuff. Know what's cool and good? Shaping rituals! Some of them are probably miscosted, especially in the eternal XP vs BP/char gen vs char advancement debate, but lets ignore that aspect, and focus on the cool part: Shaping rituals at their core are a way to give flavorful access to power. Super technically you buy Terrestrial Circle Sorcery charm or whatever the splat equivalent is, but RP wise it seems implied that you learn that charm as part of your shaping ritual initiation. This framework of buying into the system and having it grant access to things, in particular, the ability to gather Sorcerers Motes via the Shape Sorcery action, is a great framework for other things. I've mentioned it here and there, but I used this system to grant MA charms to mortals. Our MA Dawn wanted to take some of the best students for the army they were raising as lieutenants, and we explored ways to make them really stand out power-wise. At one point he said "I really wish they could just use MA charms" and I happened to have reviewed shaping rituals just before that convo, and now you get to hear about it! Martial Initiation Like the sorcerers and their eldritch benefactors learned to cultivate motes in ways that didn't require essence, so too have the martial masters of the past and the present. Martial Initiations are secret trials, ceremonies and rites that allow even mortals to express the hidden potential locked in the esoteric martial arts of the Exalted. Martial Initiate (•• to ••••)—Purchased This merit allows any non-essence user the ability to purchase Martial Arts charms, with the (merit dot rating - 1) representing their Essence rating for pre-requisites and any formula dependent on it in the charm. A character must have spent at least as much xp as is required for a Dragon Blooded to be at that Essence rating. They also must have a Martial Arts rating of (merit dot rating + 1). In addition, this merit grants one free Martial Initiation and grants access to the Cultivate Essence action. [Note: this merit replaced Martial Artist in my game because we had already ditched it initially, then realized it would be a useful stand in for something that was actually beneficially versus just being a gate. I'll continue to add notes for anything that might need adjustment for your game based on how RAW you play it.] Martial Motes and the Cultivate Essence Action Like the Shape Sorcery action, this allows the user to access a form of motes that are used exclusively to fuel specific actions. In this case, they are used to fuel Martial Arts charms the user has access to. The primary difference to Sorcerous Motes/Shape Sorcery action is that the user does not need to declare what charm they will be used for ahead of time, and they do not degrade if a turn isn't spent gaining them. They instead dissipate at the end of a scene if there are any unused Martial Motes left over. When a user wishes to gather Martial Motes, they take the Cultivate Essence action and roll ([Primary Stat Depending on Martial Initiation] + Martial Arts). Each success gathers one Martial Mote. Martial Motes can exclusively be spent on powering Martial Arts charms. A player can flurry this action, but they do suffer the -3 to their Cultivate Essence action, with no merits being able to prevent this. Gathering essence is hard for mortals. [Note: We never hit an issue with mortals being able to gather so many martial motes that it was a problem. If you really want you could throw a cap on, it never actually came up in our games.] Suggested Stat for Styles:
We never got around to fully specing out a full Martial Initiation, but look at shaping rituals and use that as a template. The weirdness here is the focus on bringing non-essence users up, as we did not allow essence havers/users to access Martial Motes because it seemed like it had the potential to be really imbalancing. This was a hacked together system for customizing NPC Retainers, but it's rather extensible and with the right design intent could supplement the existing Martial Arts system quite a bit. Feedback appreciated!
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Feb 27, 2019 05:09
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This is gonna be kind of rambling as I'm just throwing out half-formed thoughts as I've been going through the preview manuscripts. Lunars is my favorite 3E book so far, and I really enjoyed DB. I think they overall have done a pretty good job of balancing them as both protagonists and antagonists. I do think that Ferrinus has some good points on how the Lunars make certain missing things from core even more of a problem; warfare and social/faction systems being some, while I think using merits for mutations is ultimately really problematic, as I've mentioned in this thread before. The costing is all over the place and its sharing a bunch of design space that is honestly supposed to be a bunch of one off/misc systems. They really need to bite the bullet on it and make an actual functional system since it underpins a large part of the Lunar design space and they are trying to have their cake and eat it instead. I feel that Lunars would probably be the best splat to introduce players to the setting who don't want to do a ton of reading before hand - there is enough structure and existing social systems that mentors and the like make sense and you can keep the circle together, with enough large scale goals to build entire campaigns around. Solars are too disconnected with the core setting/lore to actually make good groups imho, while DBs require a lot of upfront work on behalf of the players. Lunars hit a sweet spot of having examples and heroes to show you How to Lunar while also providing a functional path to becoming the Best at Lunaring. Solars lack the first part of that and DBs, Realm in particular, are just larger and more important cogs in a machine, but still just that without a LOT of work on both players and the ST. The charms have more flavor than Solar charms, and I think we're really seeing Vance/Eric getting better at their work. This is always a problem with games designed around this kind of release strategy in that your best work is going to be that which you've made after you've had time to improve and go over your design style and intent many times. I think they should do their 3.5 revision sooner rather than later, but w/e, at least we have a mostly functional system this time around. In general I think they've done a really, really, really good job of using their limited word count to design and pick examples for systems that enable players and STs to make more things, something that core was nearly as good at doing. Raksi’s Tutelage shaping ritual is really useful if you wanted to make real functional mentors - if a DB player wanted to have Mnemon as her mentor and the one who taught her deeper ways of sorcery, I can look to Raksi's Tutelage as inspiration and a barometer. It's a tangible example that ties into the writing that already exists on Raksi as a shahan-ya and helps show design intent across multiple systems. Student of the Heptagram is similar in the DB splat book, but feels a bit less solid to me. The additional artifacts we just got reinforce this as well, in particular the panflutes are fantastic. Overall this book doesn't just enable me to run a Lunar game/Lunar NPCs better, it enables me to play Exalted better, and that's something every book they release should strive to do.
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Mar 3, 2019 20:44
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Ferrinus posted:Yeah I think the Primordials hadn’t bothered to human-proof themselves since humans sucked so much. WARNING: This may in fact be 2E canon rather than 1E, in which case I disclaim it Have they even confirmed the Primordials are a thing in any of the books? A quick word search in core doesn't even get a hit for that word in that context, and the small description of Gaia they give seems like, at least at the time of core being finished, they didn't know where they were going with the pre-current gods powers that be. To further back this up Infernals are not mentioned under other Exalted types even though Abyssals and Exigents are listed. Yozi are mentioned and fleshed out a bit, but closely examining the core text, they really went out of their way to be circumspect about Primordials and what they are/were. Core posted:"Gaia: A spirit of vast creative force, she is the mother of
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Apr 9, 2019 04:03
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bewilderment posted:Me personally, or my ratings? Bro, just asking questions about what makes someone sub-human isn't the Socratic method, its off putting, disgusting and vile. Stop being Sophomoric.
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Apr 12, 2019 04:31
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As a final aside, its important as a community to remember that TTRPGs are heavily over represented with minorities in not just ethnicity and sexuality/gender, but how physically challenged they are and are heavily non-neurotypical (please correct me if my terminology is off here). So whenever you are addressing a broad section of people from this community, you are talking to a poo poo ton of people who have been marginalized, abused, called and treated as if they are sub-human, were literally targets of fascist states for elimination, forced sterilization, etc etc. You just barging in and demanding people defend the concept of personhood is extremely loving rude. You had multiple people ask you to drop it and you refused to do so, making you an rear end in a top hat. People aren't just upset at the topic, they are also upset at how you handled it and demanded answers of it instead of respecting the space and people involved. Don't be a dick is like rule zero of ttrpgs, so you know, please respect that and others in the space.
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Apr 12, 2019 18:58
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Nessus posted:Perhaps they assumed Rule Minus One: "These rules apply either not at all, or with far greater charity, if you are making arguments from the Right." Ya, the discussion becomes less problematic and more concrete as an exploration when it is within the confines of why someone is the way they are, or are doing the specific things they do. I've expressed that I think a Deathlord who was a radical social anarchist who wanted to abolish all hierarchy and oppressive structures would be interesting because it starts getting weird when you get to specific nuances of the setting such as that for some reason magic can intrinsically bind demons and elementals to your bidding, which then starts to bubble into poo poo like "what is magic?" and does anarchist ideology not work in Creation because the only solution for it would be literally murder reality? Using fiction to explore ideas is...a lot of the point of fiction if not entirely. But trying to categorize personhood in the abstract has a lot of historical baggage with it that needs to be taken into consideration and just waltzing into a forum and blithely demanding it be addressed and that it is in fact central to engagement with the game is less than good in the best of circumstances. It also is ignoring the fact that humans are in fact super good at holding conflicting ideas in their heads and that we have a whole body of science that literally examines that exact thing. Rational actions are contextual and demanding that they must be consistent is actually not consistent with reality, because circumstances can force peoples hands in many ways. We find out who we really are when we are pushed, and we often fall short of our aspirations. We don't need to determine ahead of time if the gods are ur-fascist or not to use the medium to explore interesting questions, or hell, I dunno, just have some escapism fun from the hellworld a lot of people's day to day lives are. In fact a lot of us are trying to specifically escape dealing with a global rise in fascism/authoritarianism. Writing this out also made me realize that the questions and phrasing really reek of victim blaming. The onus isn't on us to justify personhood for people, just like the onus isn't on rape victims to not be raped. It's the other way around, and when viewed in this light is patently obvious why it is a monstrous line of questions. As Kaza42 stated, the existence of the Exalts might entail a new set of rights for Exalts, but their existence doesn't diminish the rights or personhood of other people and in fact could discover a whole new set of rights for each other and with respect to each other. Exalts have rights to their Essence, while people have the rights to their prayers and cannot be coerced into cults and the like. The recognition of females (I specify recognition vs discovery because these were rights denied that have taken time to fully uncover) as fully autonomous people and the feminist movement created a ton of new rights and expanded our concept of personhood, it didn't shrink it.
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Apr 12, 2019 21:51
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Rand Brittain posted:So, speaking of rules and the delight of crunch, I've been doing these bestiaries, and I've gone one more .doc left to do layout on before I run out of prewritten material. So, I want to ask people: More strange and magical animals of Creation that imply and inform the area they would be in. Weird bugs that grow crystals but require extremely stable ecology as a random example off the top of my head. In this case the bugs could just be a threat because maybe they are extremely territorial and the town is growning, but there is also opportunity, because hey these crystals have value. Do we just exterminate them and loot their poo poo, or do you figure out how to domesticate them in some way? Maybe the town has already domesticated them, but something is loving up the local ecology and the players need to find out why so the local economy doesn't collapse, etc etc. That kind of weird old Monster Manual stuff where they'd just shove in "Oh ya, ankheg plate is a thing and turns out its super cool for druids and certain other classes because its plate, but it isn't metal!" which just gets the mind racing with potential. Things that imply setting are fantastic. More dinosaurs is...eh?
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Apr 19, 2019 03:29
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Zereth posted:I think deadlines play a role in things, too. The art director may not have the luxury of going "that isn't what I asked for try again" until they get something correct. I can't speak for table top gaming, but in video games, in particular any with live operations or continuous content updates, this becomes a real problem. Especially once marketing gets involved and fucks a bunch of poo poo up a week before release because they finally realized they need to do something before they get fired and make it your problem. Or someone from the exec team sees it and gets all racist about it in a closed door meeting with the art director who just had a kid and is for some reason back in the office (because they have bills to pay) and they just can't anymore and just put in the order and what happens happens. Or your outsourcers in China/Korea have literally never interacted regularly with dark skinned people and so they put over emphasis on a bunch of poo poo from looking at some quick references they googled because that is what stands out to them from lack of exposure. Quality art is loving expensive and no one budgets for it correctly because at the end of the day the art isn't usually seen critically until the product is in hand and paid for, so who loving cares? Its complicated and messy is what I'm saying.
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Jun 4, 2019 04:12
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:i'm one tough punch-wizard Thank you
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Aug 15, 2020 02:47
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:I’m going to say it: I think Cathay, in recently-released total war warhammer 3, is very The Realm, and not just because it’s an ancient China pastiche ruled by a caste of “dragon-blooded” warrior-wizards. It's the Terracotta Sentinels.
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Feb 24, 2022 01:10
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Rand Brittain posted:I've never heard of any disputes over money; what happened was that they were determined to continue working on the book until they were satisfied with it, and when Onyx Path said "no, we're tired of waiting; give us what you have and we're publishing that", they said no and were fired/quit. Is there a short synopsis of the Ex3 timeline to date in terms of development/developers and what went down? I've been following this since the kickstarter and still get poo poo mixed up in my brain about how we got to where we were just because its been such a long road and there was so much drama at various stages of things. To my understanding it goes something like this: Kickstarter happened and was successful, but took for loving ever and the product we got out of it was an inspired and sometimes even great mess. However, between a lot of justified backlash at how long it took and what a mess it was, and then some sexpest/creeper poo poo? happened and OP + the original Ex3 devs washed their hands of each other. Since then, Ex3 development was taken over and has run at a much more brisk pace (still slow, but seems to be moving along at a more even pace) with more consistent editing and development. I've backed everything and have mostly enjoyed the stuff coming out of it, even if I mostly just use it as inspiration at this point, but realized on reading the last page of back and forth that How We Got Here is actually super murky to me and you seem to actually know more or less while also being able to describe the situations in a fairly neutral way.
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Jan 25, 2023 02:05
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Stephenls posted:It will likely remain murky; many of the people involved have positions on what constitutes professionalism that disallow airing what they would constitute as dirty laundry in public. Ya, I guess that's fair. I was hoping there was a "clean" version of the story, but considering everything involved, there really isn't a way to do that without leaving giant holes in the story or waking lying dogs. Back to looking forward.
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Jan 26, 2023 08:02
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wiegieman posted:Creation really should be a very magical place; if Occult is supposed to represent minor magical knowledge, there should be a table of thaumaturgy-like things that you can accomplish with Occult and their difficulties. Inherited peasant magic is very in theme and it should be all over the place. I feel part of this comes from Occult still being an Ability in the first place and not broken into something more like Lore (Occult) and an Occult merit that forms the backbone of the casting and Ritual Shaping systems. I still find Occult as an Ability to be very unsatisfying from how they try to justify it as its own thing although I get its really all just window dressing to answer "what Ability do you roll when casting?" and them not liking that being Lore for Reasons? I guess maybe fear of overloading the Lore Charm tree? I don't really have a great answer here, but I know I dislike it.
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Jan 29, 2023 22:23
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Ferrinus posted:I'd actually characterize Lore as the odd man out there, since as Roadie points out there's a lot of skills which in principle could be rolled to know stuff in various fields but that Lore rudely shoves aside. If I wanted to keep 25 distinct skills I'd probably reframe Lore as more specifically akin to Academics from WoD games where it's like knowledge of liberal arts, mathematics, library science, and education but not history, geography, or (super)natural science. More strongly supporting Occult with systems and rolls, while breaking Lore up across a couple of abilities and then sectioning off its own utility is something I could support. Lore is Too Big.
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Feb 13, 2023 09:56
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Schwarzwald posted:For all its problems, I do think the lore of 3e (can I use that word unironically here?) is some of the best written and most imaginative Exalted has every had. The Sidereal draft write up of Yu-shan competes with Games of Divinity and does more to sell the location as a potential game setting. Fangs at the Gate is the most compelling (and coherent) portrayal that Lunars have ever had. Even Exigents, while failing to provide the rigorous structure for making charms that most of us wanted, made its example Exigents far more interesting than I expected. I broadly agree, on both points. 3e generally feels a lot more coherent as a world+setting, and without losing much of the magic that makes Exalted tick. As to Essence, it almost feels like a bit of a failed project? I think some of the mechanical stabs (this is all working off the draft) were actually pretty good and I had done similar hacks on certain things like extended actions myself. Sagacity as mentioned upstream is a way to approach Lore that might not be perfect, but is at least trying to deal with the issue. Crunching attributes and skill count is good for getting people in quick, the general framework devised for putting the splats together is actually an incredibly good tool for putting together NPCs and challenges as well, far better than the completely anemic advice in the core book. But at the same time, it feels like a loving mess and I'm not sure at the end of the day it actually made it net easier vs just moving around where the pain points are with maybe some smoothing going on. This does make me want to run a short ExEss game with friends now that I've got the nice looking pdf, but we'll see how long that feeling persists as I actually read it all.
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Feb 22, 2023 07:20
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Whirling posted:I mean, all you need is a Resistance Excellency (or Stamina if you're a Lunar) to get the dice needed to overcome this or any other hazard, which is something any Exalt with Ox-Body Technique has available to them. Couple points, and just using this quote as a stand in for your other related discussions on the topic, although my first point will directly address this. First, no, actually, you don't. Resistance isn't the "beat hazards" ability, it is one of the potential abilities for defeating a hazard. This actually works to make TBS slightly less bonkers, since there is a strong argument to be made that someone should be able to do a Dex+Dodge roll to resist the damage, and maybe others depending on the present fiction/stunting. In fact, if I was the ST, Dex+Dodge would be my default call for it. How the hell is Sta+Res stopping artifact weapons from tearing through you without stunting or maybe the right Charm to enable that roll. I'd probably let some crafty uses of Manipulation + Performance or similar also work given the line about the hazard ignoring allies. Second, just broadly on your defense of it, the approach you are taking of "well if you build this way, it can be defeated" is a bad one, not even getting into if the approach actually works. Everything in Exalted can be defeated with This One Weird Trick that the Exalted hate! Defending a style/feature/system requires a review of it versus the other option space out there, how it interacts with them, and if it is just raw better than anything else. Which TBS just is, its a mess on relative balance. Thousand Blades Unleashed breaks massively with the core system and breaks it in multiple key ways, with the most insane to me is the attunement cost reduction, followed very closely by the fact that you count as wielding the artifacts while it is active. Just grabbing some of the premade daiklaves, if you Arsenal Beloved Adorei, Spring Razor, Distaff, and Flying Silver Dream (we're not even touching 5 dot artifacts yet!) you get +1 to accuracy and one automatic success on all withering damage rolls (Beloved Adorei), Howling Lotus Strike evocation (Spring Razor), +1 Parry against Disarm gambits with their difficulty being raised by 1, in addition to the out of combat Distaff silk (The Distaff), a free non-charm success on all awareness rolls to detect danger, no defense penalty on drawing/readying including reflexive readying against surprise attacks (Flying Silver Dream). All of those come from just attunement, doesn't even get into the very strange and broken stacking you'll be able to do with Evocations. Also, those permanent evocations? Always active as long as you're wielding the weapons, which you're always doing when they are your Arsenal weapons because TBU just lets you do that. Oh, also, you don't need the MA merit for this style because *waves hands. This doesn't even get into how many hearthstones this gives you access to on just your weapons, which further increases your option space on the cheap. TBS explosively increases an Exalt's option space for a greatly discounted cost compared to any other style. So strongly so, I'd say its as bad as the BP/XP divide in terms of massively incentivizing players to develop their characters in very specific ways, which also ties back to your "well, this build can counter it" approach. That situation is part of what devolved 2e into paranoia combat (at least imo), and is something that should really be avoided if at all possible. It is both too good at what it does specifically, is very good at multiple other things (flying WITH movement dice bonuses! large scale moving and extremely dangerous always active AoE that doesn't effect allies!), and is functionally a large discount on expanding your option space and permanently buffing an Exalt. Whirling posted:Didn't really see anything from Rand that implied he talked with them about it, but if we assume that this is a doomed effort from the start and that Exalted will never achieve its true platonic ideal form, than I guess I can just bow out of this since nothing will be advanced by this discussion beyond maybe me learning about a very critical sidebar tucked away in Solar Archery. Third, this is kind of weak. I know you just joined after lurking, so welcome, but you came in with contention and got a response. If you've been lurking long enough, this should be expected, especially from Ferrinus. I have had several disagreements with their opinions and preferences for how games should be designed/played, but when it comes to doing their homework on the number crunching and remembering the mind numbing amount of options and rules, they are top notch. When it comes to mechanical crunch and rule space, I'd heavily advise reading what they are saying carefully and asking clarifying questions instead of just trying to rebut - I know I've learned a poo poo ton about how the RAW actually should be working from their breakdowns vs how I interpreted them because seriously why are there so many weird specific rules and important pieces of information in random sidebars? But also, as I'm sure you're noticing, Ferrinus bites back. Rand did the golden calibration, in addition to working in industry and has specifically discussed talking with the devs and different people on the teams in this thread. You can click the ? in the lower left-hand corner of a users posts in a thread to review someone's post history in the thread. A number of people here, if you pay attention and associate users over time, work in the RPG/gaming industry in general, and have worked directly with Onyx or related entities. This is also a rather small community, with some of the problems that can entail, but it is also incredibly dense with industry talent and individuals who do this poo poo for a living, not just random opinions on how they'd like it to work.
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Feb 23, 2023 23:57
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