Exalted 3E: Thanks to Kid Rock

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Exalted 3E: Thanks to Kid Rock

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Rand Brittain posted:

On top of everything else, I put out a new volume of the bestiary, this time full of Sidereals. Trying to pound out the 1e Charmset into a set of Charms that do meaningful things in 3e was quite a bit more work than the Lunars or Dragon-Blooded were, but presumably that just makes it more worth it for somebody.

Ceiling Jenna Moran is watching you worldbuild.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2020 02:06

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 22:14

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

You could do a revised solar Craft tree.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2020 20:04

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Roadie posted:

The basic problem with Sail that I'd really like to see addressed, before you even get to death spiral issues and all, is that it's a single-player game where the Sail Guy does the thing and everybody else is just along for the ride without the rules even bothering to acknowledge their presence.

I'm not saying that the Sail rules should be able to handle a Dawn super-swimming between boats and performing single-man boarding actions, but no, actually, I am.

Can I just say this is kind of the problem with Craft as written?

edit: one of the problems

# ¿ Jan 20, 2021 05:54

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Ferrinus posted:

Defining Principle: Crane Style's signature weapons look really stupid.

Defining Principle: It's all about looking cool.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2021 02:39

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?

# ¿ Feb 1, 2021 22:38

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...

# ¿ Feb 3, 2021 11:15

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Rand Brittain posted:

I'm pretty sure we've been officially told the Infernal Castes in 3e: Azimuth, Ascendant, Horizon, Nadir, and Penumbra.

Like, Nyadir. :v:

# ¿ Feb 6, 2021 22:37

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Nessus posted:

I was making a joke on how the vast majority of character development in Exalted is: "purchase another Charm," to the point where it seems like you could reasonably replace XP with "at a certain point, add another Charm, or if you really prefer, instead add (two dots to an ability/one dot to an attribute) + 1 beat forward or something"

So, how PBtA does it. :v:

# ¿ Feb 26, 2021 04:57

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Joe Slowboat posted:

I think that 'look, assigning health level damage to getting a mountain dropped on you is kind of silly' was perfectly reasonable. I just think that instead of framing it around 'uncountable' damage, they should have framed it around dramatically appropriate 'nobody could survive that' damage.

So you can freely survive anything that wouldn't get statted up as an attack, but perfect blocking attacks is more limited. Seems fine to me, and also includes things like falling damage because it obviously should.

Couldn't you dodge the mountain?

Or the ground... :v:

# ¿ Mar 1, 2021 06:30

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

I found a depiction of Sail in Creation. :v:

_{no it's not

but it's funny}

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaEXyQg7pCc

# ¿ Mar 17, 2021 08:24

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Ferrinus posted:

Right, that's what I mean. In Magic, unless something really memorably silly is going on, you don't have the cards and the mana you need to do some sort of crazy back-and-forth stack ten or twelve spells deep. The hypothetical complexity of any given interaction (attacking with one creature, casting one sorcery) is completely unbounded, but for the most part players can't actually access that complexity even if they want to.

In Exalted you've always got all your Charms and a pile of motes and willpower and things that are supposed to last you through the next three or four turns, not just this one, so there's much more of a threat of activating answers and answers to answers and so forth. Also, the most basic kind of answer is a "X" spell, so you have to decide if you'd rather add five dice or six (or seven, or...). Also, between each block of decisions actual dice rolls happen and need to be read and interpreted.

So DnD is Magic, while Exalted is Yu-Gi-Oh? :v:

# ¿ May 31, 2021 00:17

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Kestral posted:

Bless you for this. Sometimes the obvious take is the right one, and it's not like Exalted doesn't wear its influences on its sleeve, hat, jacket, pants, ridiculously oversized weapon, etc.

And its belts, zippers, weird shoe designs...

Attorney at Funk posted:

Okay, now get into thousands of words of deepest lore.

A young man stands in his bedroom. It just so happens that today, the 13th of April�

# ¿ Jun 4, 2021 16:59

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

TwoQuestions posted:

Not sure how I feel about "even in failure, the heroes should be heroes", but then again I play in a much more punishing 1e D&D campaign where natural 1s always roll on a fumble chart, but crits need to confirm, and players/characters are fumbling incompetents by default.

I mean, arguably, that was baked into Exalted's high concept from the beginning. Your PCs are Epic.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2021 17:01

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Schwarzwald posted:

Clearly, the highest level of combat is for two opponents to glare at each other for three minutes before one slices the other in half with a single, sinuous stroke.

I mean... that's pretty Exalted.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2021 23:16

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Ferrinus posted:

New Excellent strike is actually a really obnoxious design. Welding the generically useful combat effect of doubling overflow successes to an incentive to apply the biggest penalty to your own attacks you can find just creates perverse incentives that slow down gameplay.

It sounds like your table is prone to minimaxing. The Exalted (2E) games I played in never really were, which explains why we mostly had fun.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2021 05:18

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:

"Works at my table" has never been a good defense of bad systems.

OK, to be fair, 2E wasn't a good system.

I'm still glad we didn't really have any intense minimaxers around, though.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2021 06:12

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Crion posted:

I will say however we've had a really hard time incorporating White Veil Style into even that character's play...until now. It's just so wonky and hard to use when everyone in the group isn't on the same page. Now that everyone in the hearth knows her deal, however, that's a bunch of stealth checks she doesn't have to pass and a bunch of accomplices she has in the weird social combat zone, so it'll be really interesting to see if that makes a difference.

There is no such circle as the White-Veil-knowing-about circle. :v:

# ¿ Aug 26, 2021 09:35

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Why is the ST having the other PCs roll Perception (or whatever), though? Shouldn't they not really count for purposes of the calculation? Or at least, be fudged for dramatic purposes?

The PCs are Special, after all. That's Exalted.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2021 16:54

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

I mean, I'd go further and say that unless you're in a game that is strictly, deliberately simulationist (like DnD 1E), PCs are special because you're sitting next to the players in question.*
So: as a DM, the point is to tell a good story that everyone enjoys.

Which means, if it suits your storytelling purposes, fudge like crazy. That's my view.

And the solution to the players' goals being at odds is to sit down and plan out with them what would make a good story.

*possibly virtually, these days

# ¿ Aug 26, 2021 20:37

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Attorney at Funk posted:

That's fine general practice but White Veil's entire shtick inveighs against it, and while Exalted is very indecisive about the extent to which it models the world itself to some extent (which is the implicit assumption of a lot of its belabored crunch) or whether it's a cinematic action game (which is where poo poo like trivial opponents folds in), giving people a set of powers with very specific mechanical tests and assumptions and then just handwaving them for the sake of convenience says to me that the most convenient thing to do is ignore the style entirely and let people vibe it. Either it needs rules or it doesn't.

Hold on a second. Did White Veil significantly change between 2E and 3E?

# ¿ Aug 26, 2021 20:53

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Attorney at Funk posted:

I don't know, I didn't play 2E. In 3E, White Veil is a martial art about doing combat from stealth, but the stealth is primarily understood as social cover rather than physical cover. Poisoning someone in a teahouse, garroting someone at a ball, etc. Obviously stealth combat is a lot easier if you just decide by fiat no one can see you, but that's not really in the spirit of giving you ten discrete buyable powers to make you better at stealth combat. The existence of powers as problem-solving tools requires the problems they exist to solve to be present in the narrative, otherwise it's just an XP tax to describe your attacks a certain way.

Okay, yeah, it has changed a lot. I'm thinking of 2E white veil, which doesn't require Stealth from everyone or anything like that (just an opposed attack against the target)... or at least doesn't include PCs, I think. It's been a while.

EDIT: But yes, 3E white veil without the support of your party sounds like it would really suck.

Quackles fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Aug 26, 2021

# ¿ Aug 26, 2021 21:06

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:

The way this particular revelation played out, over 80 sessions, was that the other characters came across little clues and so on, or realized that someone had been murdered; in one case the murder was solved by enemy necromancers. But because nobody had all the details Crion�s character could carefully lie and omit or distract other characters from other key details. The other characters all thought she was a ditz, then a talented martial artist, then an assassin for V�Neef, and only after revealing new details did House Iselsi come into the picture. As a result, the plot unraveled slowly under many sessions instead of a big eureka moment all at once. Even as it was, Crion�s character probably could have tried to construct another lie but decided to come clean instead for other reasons. This is an example of how a slightly crunchier system allows for more organic and, I think, richer storytelling.

Wait, how much did the other players know about your character?

# ¿ Sep 29, 2021 06:05

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Ferrinus posted:

Woah woah woah you better not be talking about Destiny-Manifesting Method. I don't know what's written that would actually trigger DMM but it's been a lot of fun for my group in play. A few examples:

Your group sounds dope. Any advice on finding an Exalted group like that?

# ¿ Dec 19, 2021 21:57

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Ferrinus posted:

Sell your existing friends on Exalted rather than seeking out strangers who happen to like Exalted.

I mostly play tabletop with one friend online, where one of us DMs and has two 'PCs' and the other has three 'PCs' at once.

It works for rules-light games (PbtA). I think for Exalted the complexity would kill us.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2021 03:13

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

bbcisdabomb posted:

I have played Tomb of Dreams and had a real good time, though it was with my normal Exalted group so we already knew the system and have an awesome storyteller.

Objectively the pregen characters were pretty good, not so specialized to force a playstyle but not so generalist as to feel weak. You could easily do worse than Tomb of Dreams IMO.

Do you have any advice for DMing Exalted? It was the first tabletop game I was introduced to and I'd love to try it again, but, like... a lack of people was observed.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2022 20:06

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

I don't think I have players who are self-directed enough to play Exalted.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2022 18:15

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Rand Brittain posted:

Creaking towards the end now, with everything up to Survival added to the PDF. I can just skip War, right? Nobody would notice. But now that I went and finished with Sail there's no point letting War defeat me, since people do use it sometimes.

War! What is it good for? :v:

(No, seriously, what do people use it for?)

# ¿ Jul 10, 2022 11:33

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Rand Brittain posted:

So it looks like I'm going to have to start recruiting people for some playtest games.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2022 20:32

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Ferrinus posted:

I'm pretty pleased with the Sidereals manuscript, but only a coward would write Avoidance Kata as a teleport stapled to a memory tweak rather than an actual retcon of history.

Isn't one of the Three Big Impossibilities that you can't do actual time travel?

# ¿ Jan 4, 2023 06:48

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

No love for any artifact "wheel"chairs that perch and move about on a set of starmetal spider legs?

# ¿ Aug 18, 2023 21:59

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 22:14

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

Nessus posted:

I figured you'd want to play into the aesthetic in some form and if your aesthetic is "I want to be minimalist and boring and efficient about everything" well, do what you want at your table I guess, and I suppose there are always Sidereals.

Uh, the Sidereals are who the starmetal spider leg chair is for. :v:

# ¿ Aug 19, 2023 08:03

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