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pospysyl posted:I do think the complaints about the spoiled bad mechanics are exaggerated, but there aren't a lot of good mechanics to counter them with. pospysyl posted:Honestly, I don't think 3e is going to be great like everyone was hoping or even expecting. I do like the wackier stuff the devs have written, and I have faith that their combat and charms systems will work. The game will probably be decent, but that's about it. I still want usable systems to model the stuff that I really like and I believe that's what I'm going to get, but there is really not much to be enthusiastic about yet.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 16:14 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 01:40 |
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Since my probation I've had time to think about what I've read and what I've said and I have to say my confidence in the game line is shaken at this point. Without more evidence of mechanical strength and a lot more evidence that the writing team can handle criticism and feedback with maturity and a lick of thought for their fanbase I can't support them as strongly. I don't think I'll pull completely out of the kickstarter but I think I will definitely pull back my pledge to maybe just get the PDF instead of a physical book. (No matter how weak I am for that sweet sweet dead tree.)
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 18:33 |
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Sparda219 posted:Since my probation I've had time to think about what I've read and what I've said and I have to say my confidence in the game line is shaken at this point. Without more evidence of mechanical strength and a lot more evidence that the writing team can handle criticism and feedback with maturity and a lick of thought for their fanbase I can't support them as strongly. I don't think I'll pull completely out of the kickstarter but I think I will definitely pull back my pledge to maybe just get the PDF instead of a physical book. (No matter how weak I am for that sweet sweet dead tree.) I'm feeling somewhat similair, I want to embrace a more mechanically robust Exalted 3rd edition but I'm just getting a bad vibe from a lot of the interactions from the kickstarter. I'll sleep on it and make my decision before the end of the kickstarter.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 18:45 |
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HidaO-Win posted:I'm feeling somewhat similair, I want to embrace a more mechanically robust Exalted 3rd edition but I'm just getting a bad vibe from a lot of the interactions from the kickstarter. I'll sleep on it and make my decision before the end of the kickstarter. I've been getting the 'the inmates are running the asylum' vibe here. As I understand when you do an adaptation of a work, you always want people familiar with the work (or willing to learn it inside and out) but you don't really want fans of a work, because fans get attached to decisions that outwardly look completely and utterly daft. I think it'd have been good to have as one of the core devs someone who liked the idea of Exalted but hated its execution, just to be that little voice in the ear of everyone else being "remember, you guys can gently caress up too." On the bright side this might just be them being Bad At Taking Criticism Gracefully and not actually a sign that they're going to gently caress everything up forever and ever. On the not-so-bright side... I have to say that.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 19:01 |
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pospysyl posted:Like, taking the Exalted setting as a serious Forgotten Realms style setting is the absolutely wrong direction to go.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 19:05 |
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Heart Attacks posted:I think Holden gets off on doing the I know something that you don't thing. He's been doing it since long before he was an important person in the Exalted lineup.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 19:08 |
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Lymond posted:Hold on, Forgotten Realms is a serious setting and Creation isn't? Well, one's this nearly incomprehensible pastiche of real-world cultures and influences that largely started out as some sort of play ground to showcase the creative head's sexual fetishes. And the other is Creation. coulda gone either way with this one
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 19:09 |
Lymond posted:He's also mentioned on plenty of occasions that he's been gagged with NDAs, and he and the team were jumping up and down in impatience to tell people about what they were doing. Assigning a motive like this one is uncharitable and not reasonable.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 19:13 |
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If anyone buys the Chargen Example tier and names their character Exorcist of The Creeping Phantom or Chaste Exemplar of Discarding Lust, I will de-creepify and fully write up any three things in all of Exalted Canon
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 19:14 |
MiltonSlavemasta posted:If anyone buys the Chargen Example tier and names their character Exorcist of The Creeping Phantom or Chaste Exemplar of Discarding Lust, I will de-creepify and fully write up any three things in all of Exalted Canon
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 19:17 |
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MiltonSlavemasta posted:If anyone buys the Chargen Example tier and names their character Exorcist of The Creeping Phantom or Chaste Exemplar of Discarding Lust, I will de-creepify and fully write up any three things in all of Exalted Canon It's gone now. We are at the mercy of anyone who wants to write up the Invincible Sword Princess for the thousandth time. HidaO-Win posted:I'm feeling somewhat similair, I want to embrace a more mechanically robust Exalted 3rd edition but I'm just getting a bad vibe from a lot of the interactions from the kickstarter. I'll sleep on it and make my decision before the end of the kickstarter. Yeah, to be honest I've also put myself down for a PDF and that's about it. If it really is worth getting a physical copy over, well, Print on Demand is cheaper. Bedlamdan fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Jun 7, 2013 |
# ? Jun 7, 2013 19:18 |
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Lymond posted:Hold on, Forgotten Realms is a serious setting and Creation isn't? As someone who really likes the FR and was interested in the Exalted kickstarter, I think he means not as detailed and nitpicky, on top of being more narratively subdued. Like, the Realms generally has tales about one guy who turned into a single bear and won a single important battle, and combats are fought by people with swords versus people with axes. Exalted's mythic base instead puts it as a thousand guys turning into a thousand bears who fought a hundred dragons for a year and changed the course of the Empire for the next thousand years. Exalted is more freewheeling, a lot more and a lot more interested in absolutely crazy poo poo people do in critical situations. The Realms is just people doing cool poo poo through grit and perseverance - and ultimately not much more than pure human agency - in ultimately human struggles. Also, one other big note is that Exalted is sweeping but mythic in terms of generalities. It likes telling mythic tales that may or may not be true but are all highly figured and together make up the world. The Realms tells a lot of small things that come together and basically represent nothing more than people living their lives. While Exalted has fiction, the Realms has a one-hundred-and-sixty page supplement about history that is just a giant timeline with a bunch of essays attached. And a lot of the good stuff about the giant timeline supplement was sorting out who was born when and how and when they died, which isn't very epic but works well for that sort of play. So yeah, the heroic epic setting that Creation is isn't and shouldn't be like the FR, because they serve two different purposes. I think a product like that timeline would suck a lot of fun out of what people do in Exalted, and be super uninteresting and really useless for a lot of groups; conversely it was one of the best products of its edition for the FR. They're both serious, but different kinds of serious, if that makes sense.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 19:24 |
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Arivia posted:So yeah, the heroic epic setting that Creation is isn't and shouldn't be like the FR, because they serve two different purposes. I think a product like that timeline would suck a lot of fun out of what people do in Exalted, and be super uninteresting and really useless for a lot of groups; conversely it was one of the best products of its edition for the FR. They're both serious, but different kinds of serious, if that makes sense. Thank you, the clarification helps. The little I know of FR comes from playing with a DM who does love his god NPCs, and having Elminster and other level 20+ people faffing around must have given me a skewed perspective on the setting. Nessus posted:Hm. While I imagine there have been ample bonehead maneuvers, that is a point: is it possible that we aren't getting mechanics "because forums are mean" so much as "NDAs from Iceland, or perhaps the dark will of Richard Thomas"? Lymond fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Jun 7, 2013 |
# ? Jun 7, 2013 19:33 |
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Lymond posted:Thank you, the clarification helps. The little I know of FR comes from playing with a DM who does love his god NPCs, and having Elminster and other level 20+ people faffing around must have given me a skewed perspective on the setting. In retrospect that really doesn't sound all that different from a setting full of elder exalts and ancient ghosts faffing around.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 19:34 |
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Bedlamdan posted:In retrospect that really doesn't sound all that different from a setting full of elder exalts and ancient ghosts faffing around. Precisely. That's why I'm willing to believe that FR is a whole lot better than what I was exposed to.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 19:38 |
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Lymond posted:Thank you, the clarification helps. The little I know of FR comes from playing with a DM who does love his god NPCs, and having Elminster and other level 20+ people faffing around must have given me a skewed perspective on the setting. Even those people don't stand up to armies or giant apocalypses all alone like Exalts do. There's exactly once when a single character tries to fight an army (Nalavarauthoratyl, a giant dragon the size of a city, in Death of the Dragon) and she still loses. And basically all the characters like Elminster go she is crazy absurd powerful before and it doesn't "stick" in terms of that epic action creating victory.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 19:44 |
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The reasoning I've heard passed around on the lack of complete mechanical previews is that Exalted is still CCP's property and putting out complete mechanics could be used as a reason to put out the game now (The mechanics are out, therefore it's ready to make money!) rather than when the writers feel it's ready. It's a bit paranoid but not really surprising considering CCP's attitude on these games.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 19:50 |
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Arivia posted:Even those people don't stand up to armies or giant apocalypses all alone like Exalts do. There's exactly once when a single character tries to fight an army (Nalavarauthoratyl, a giant dragon the size of a city, in Death of the Dragon) and she still loses. And basically all the characters like Elminster go she is crazy absurd powerful before and it doesn't "stick" in terms of that epic action creating victory. I'd still say that losing against epic threats is something that happens more often in Exalted than you think. Geoff Grabowski, when he wrote 1E, wrote it with the assumption that the setting was doomed despite everyone's best efforts. The original idea was less Gurann Lagann, and more Achilles destroying himself because despite being the best of all the Greeks, he was an acutely dysfunctional person. Bedlamdan fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Jun 7, 2013 |
# ? Jun 7, 2013 19:53 |
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Yeah, I hate the idea of Exalted as the 'ten thousand bear-men fighting eighty thousand dragons' game. I know that it's moved on from it, but I like the original canonical idea that everything is (eventually) doomed, heroes are deeply flawed as personalities, and fighting and winning against a dozen Brides of Ahlat is an impressive and heroic feat, even if you're a Solar. As much as I've been down on Ex3 recently, the idea that a Solar would be sweating against several Legionnaires of Silence made me pretty happy.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 19:57 |
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BryanChavez posted:Yeah, I hate the idea of Exalted as the 'ten thousand bear-men fighting eighty thousand dragons' game. I know that it's moved on from it, but I like the original canonical idea that everything is (eventually) doomed, heroes are deeply flawed as personalities, and fighting and winning against a dozen Brides of Ahlat is an impressive and heroic feat, even if you're a Solar. As much as I've been down on Ex3 recently, the idea that a Solar would be sweating against several Legionnaires of Silence made me pretty happy. I've always had this beautiful dream that Limit Break would just be removed from the game entirely. In its place would be a list of larger-than-life character flaws that grant bonuses (big bonuses) when they're indulged, sort of like the nWoD's Virtue/Vice paradigm. Except for Greek-myth level flaws.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 20:05 |
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That might make me back the kickstarter, rapeghosts notwithstanding. Hell, can someone just make a generic RPG supplement that is just these so I can use them in every epic fantasy superhero game ever?
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 20:36 |
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Mendrian posted:I've always had this beautiful dream that Limit Break would just be removed from the game entirely. In its place would be a list of larger-than-life character flaws that grant bonuses (big bonuses) when they're indulged, sort of like the nWoD's Virtue/Vice paradigm. Except for Greek-myth level flaws. Aristotle held that vices could be an excess of a good character trait, so one who ceaselessly cultivated the heroic virtues might have character flaws like: Thrasus, the character trait of being too confident, associated with being fearless in all scenarios. Anaisthētos, someone so even-tempered they take no pleasure in anything. (This one actually sounds a bit dull, so I'd go with the opposite, Akolasia, the vice of PROFLIGATES.) Asōtia, being generous beyond good reason. Apeirokalia, making a great display of matters which needn't be made such. Chaunotēs and Philotimos, believing that one is destined for or deserves an absurd level of greatness, beyond all reason. Orgilotēs, which can be the hero who brings down her wrath for the right reason and the right time, but brings the full force of her righteous indignation whenever slighted. Alazoneia, excessive boasting regarding one's accomplishments. Bõmolochia, never being able to resist mocking people and making jokes. Now, I'm loving inspired to make a system of rewards for indulging these.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 20:38 |
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MiltonSlavemasta posted:Aristotle held that vices could be an excess of a good character trait, so one who ceaselessly cultivated the heroic virtues might have character flaws like: Honestly, I think flaws like these should be intrinsic to the Solar condition, rather than brought about by an outside Death Curse.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 20:41 |
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MiltonSlavemasta posted:Now, I'm loving inspired to make a system of rewards for indulging these. My table went apeshit over FATE-style negative Aspects. All they needed was the excuse of FATE points (which they could use to inflict troll declarations on the table) to go absolutely nuts with the Storyteller's compels. We also had a lot of fun with "negative" conditions that gave bonuses in Weapons of the Gods. I'd love to have a general system that could be plugged into different games.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 20:45 |
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You should check out Conditions in the World of Darkness's God Machine Chronicle. More immediately compatible with an ST-based system, at the least, and extremely cool. I think I actually like them better than negative aspects, they have a little bit finer level of control.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 20:55 |
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MiltonSlavemasta posted:Now, I'm loving inspired to make a system of rewards for indulging these. That looks amazing, I hope you'll share such a system if you make it. Sounds like it could be an awesome replacement for the current Great Curse. I'm kind of excited for full color versions of the Blessed Isle and Arms of the Chosen books. It makes me hope they'll splurge in Arms for full illustrations of the weapons a la Anima: Beyond Fantasy.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 20:56 |
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BryanChavez posted:I know that it's moved on from it, but I like the original canonical idea that everything is (eventually) doomed, heroes are deeply flawed as personalities, and fighting and winning against a dozen Brides of Ahlat is an impressive and heroic feat, even if you're a Solar.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 23:08 |
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BryanChavez posted:I know that it's moved on from it, but I like the original canonical idea that everything is (eventually) doomed, heroes are deeply flawed as personalities, and fighting and winning against a dozen Brides of Ahlat is an impressive and heroic feat, even if you're a Solar. Two and three are cool, but as for everything being doomed - why? We already have Call of Chthulhu, Delta Green, Paranoia, WFRP, a half-dozen variants of WH40K RP, the Dark Sun campaign setting, World of Darkness (both Old and New), and I don't even know what else to fill all your pessimistic RP needs. Why do we need yet another setting where everything's hosed and you're just there to watch the pretty colors as the world burns?
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 23:20 |
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The way it was frequently pitched back in the 1E days, which I liked, was that the course of Creation was inherently a doomed one only if the players did nothing to stop it. Like, as it stands Creation is on the decline and the various NPCs and factions are busy with their own shortsighted poo poo or clinging to the edge of the cliff by their fingernails. Left to their own devices things are some degree or another of hosed. You, the PCs, have the ability to change that and get it right. Or not, you don't have to, you can do whatever floats your boat. That's what being Exalted means; you have great power, you get to decide what your responsibilities are. This worked really well with how 1E presented the world as a frozen moment in time; there was no metaplot, that seems to have been more of a 2E thing, so a new game of Exalted by default meant that the PCs were always coming into things in the middle of this moment where the world is holding its breath, armies are massing and poo poo's getting ready to get real, and you get to be the ones to decide the course of history. I'm not really interested in "you and all your friends are complete assholes and the world is doomed, the game" myself.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 23:27 |
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Kai Tave posted:This worked really well with how 1E presented the world as a frozen moment in time; there was no metaplot, that seems to have been more of a 2E thing, so a new game of Exalted by default meant that the PCs were always coming into things in the middle of this moment where the world is holding its breath, armies are massing and poo poo's getting ready to get real, and you get to be the ones to decide the course of history. If Creation is doomed and saving the world is impossible, then the Exalted PCs will save it anyway, and it'll just be that much more impressive when they do.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 23:30 |
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Thesaurasaurus posted:Two and three are cool, but as for everything being doomed - why? We already have Call of Chthulhu, Delta Green, Paranoia, WFRP, a half-dozen variants of WH40K RP, the Dark Sun campaign setting, World of Darkness (both Old and New), and I don't even know what else to fill all your pessimistic RP needs. Why do we need yet another setting where everything's hosed and you're just there to watch the pretty colors as the world burns? Because my favorite settings are worlds like Dying Earth and Polaris. It's not pessimism, not for me, anyway. It's very hopeful, in my eyes. Things are going to go to poo poo. In ten years, fifty years, a hundred years, a millennium, eventually the world is going to go to hell. You hold out against the terrible things for as long as you can, and give people a better life for as long as you can, until eventually you can't anymore. You've still made things much better for the five hundred million plus people of Creation. The end doesn't have to come within the game itself, or even in the foreseeable future. But everything is temporary, and that includes whatever wonderful society you've built up. I suppose in some ways it derives from my spiritual beliefs, as well. The beauty of transience, the bittersweet appeal that something can't be forever, that everything eventually ends. There will never be another place like the kingdom or republic or whatever you carve out in Creation, and at the end of everything your castles will be buried by sand and nobody alive will remember that for one shining moment, everything was better than it had been before. But for the thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands you helped protect and empower, you were the most glorious creature to have ever existed, even if none of those people have been alive for ten thousand years. There's this old story about Xenophon's anabasis, his escape back to Greece after being caught far south from his homelands. And during this retreat, he comes across this old, massive city. Huge walls, towering over his army, thicker than anything he'd ever seen before. It was Ninevah, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, but he didn't know that. So he asked local tribesmen what city this was, and who had once lived there, and none of them could recall the names. This was less than a hundred years after Ninevah had fallen. That story always sticks with me, and it informs my storytelling. So yeah. That's why, at least personally, I like the sense that everything is (eventually) doomed.
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# ? Jun 7, 2013 23:35 |
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BryanChavez posted:There's this old story about Xenophon's anabasis, his escape back to Greece after being caught far south from his homelands. And during this retreat, he comes across this old, massive city. Huge walls, towering over his army, thicker than anything he'd ever seen before. It was Ninevah, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, but he didn't know that. So he asked local tribesmen what city this was, and who had once lived there, and none of them could recall the names. This was less than a hundred years after Ninevah had fallen. Reminds me a bit of Mshatta. While the palace's history is known, its name isn't; "winter palace" is just what the Bedouins called it, because that's where they camped out in winter. e: Germany's Pergamon Museum is loving amazing, especially because of the Gigantomachy frieze. bartkusa fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Jun 8, 2013 |
# ? Jun 7, 2013 23:51 |
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MiltonSlavemasta posted:If anyone buys the Chargen Example tier and names their character Exorcist of The Creeping Phantom or Chaste Exemplar of Discarding Lust, I will de-creepify and fully write up any three things in all of Exalted Canon Speaking of de-creepifying, for my MHR hack I came up with this alternative to the whole Lillun garbage for Infernals: quote:In between mortal host-bodies, the captured Solar Exaltations are held within the Garden of Earthly Delights, a prison-within-a-prison crafted by the five Reclamation Yozis and set amidst the sands of Cecelyne, six days’ journey from the border of Malfeas. The Garden’s nature is fivefold, for each of the great Demon Princes set one of their souls to its making: Adorjan sent Kekilath, Who Stills the Runners, her seventh soul. He flies above the Garden in an endless mandala, in the form of a raven-headed man with a wolf’s teeth, and slays anything that makes even the slightest tremor. EDIT: Forgot to grab the rest of it: quote:On the Thing Infernal GimpInBlack fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Jun 8, 2013 |
# ? Jun 8, 2013 00:36 |
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That's a heck of a lot better. Wow.
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# ? Jun 8, 2013 02:04 |
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The Garden of Earthly Delights is a pretty cool adventure hook. If the 3e Infernals don't have something better, I'll probably just steal that if it ever comes up.
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# ? Jun 8, 2013 03:03 |
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On the note of Exalted's mechanics, I always wonder why RPG teams don't try to hire a real game designer to try to make their crunchy game actually satisfying. D&D evolved out of a wargame, and if you want your game's combat to be any good, it's going to have to be a lot like a board game. Obviously something like FATE doesn't need to be interesting as a game to be compelling. If you're a storygame and combat follows from the narrative, the math does have to work out to a certain extent, but it isn't really that important. But if you want combat to be an integral part of your game, with real tactical choices, why wouldn't you toss David Sirlin or whoever some money to take a month and give you a decent core to work off of? I mean, having a fun game doesn't matter if your characters are boring and nobody wants to play in your setting, but from what I can see of 2e, it doesn't work out to have cool ideas in a broken game, either.
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# ? Jun 8, 2013 05:31 |
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nrook posted:On the note of Exalted's mechanics, I always wonder why RPG teams don't try to hire a real game designer to try to make their crunchy game actually satisfying. D&D evolved out of a wargame, and if you want your game's combat to be any good, it's going to have to be a lot like a board game. Because people think they can design a better system. Full-stop. Look at how many fantasy heartbreakers and other stuff there is out there that amounts to "d20 kind of" or something similar to one of the few big systems, but with hilariously bad or broken mechanics. Everyone who designs a game thinks they can build a better system than the last guy who built it. Also, it's difficult to build a system that encompasses power levels from "Dirt Farmer" to "Able to punch out gods without breaking a sweat" and have it work well in every part of the spread. Also, without dedicated playtesters willing to break the system for you, and a team willing to fix it when it breaks before release, there's almost invariably going to be something in a system that can be abused. When you release a system to thousands of who have nothing better to do than break down the math and come up with the optimal solution to whatever systems, they're going to do just that. Plus, the example of D&D is awful. D&D is probably one of the best examples of needless systems getting tacked onto a game and having characters that completely negate the need for other characters. When it comes down to it, designing a system for a game that can be played by a group at a table is hard. That's one of the reason there were so many awful charms in 2e Exalted. There wasn't any single person who was checking charms and going "This completely unbalances things" or "our combat charms encourage players to basically spam surprise combos at each other and defend with combo-negating perfect defenses until someone runs out of essence to use, then they get splatted." The biggest reason I'm willing to take the mechanics on 3e on faith is that they've been pretty up front with saying that they are trying to examine things so that nothing is too horrible. This doesn't mean that within a week there's going to be about "optimal builds" and all that. Any crunchy game gets that. The hope is that the difference between "twinked out murder-machine" and "clueless newbie build" should be small enough that both players can contribute relatively equally. If I get burned on this, so be it. I'd rather support something I like a lot (despite rapeghosts) and be disappointed now that I can afford to.
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# ? Jun 8, 2013 06:14 |
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Really most of the things I'd point to as missteps of the current developers are areas where they haven't been smugly confident enough that they could do better. A combination of timidity when trying to adapt past material (the Infernals preview, where they hid their much better idea behind a lamer one because they were afraid people wouldn't get it) and an attachment to legacy mechanics that are just really obviously goofy to someone who hasn't become attached to Exalted's specific way of doing things (a Martial Arts ability, a BP/XP divide). And then there's that other thing.
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# ? Jun 8, 2013 06:21 |
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Attorney at Funk posted:(the Infernals preview, where they hid their much better idea behind a lamer one because they were afraid people wouldn't get it) Could you remind me of the "much better idea" hidden in the Infernals preview?
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# ? Jun 8, 2013 11:59 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 01:40 |
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Dodge Charms posted:Could you remind me of the "much better idea" hidden in the Infernals preview? The Infernals preview had the Reclamation as a long-form escape plan that would include a second wave of Infernals 2.0. People were like "hey, wait a second, that's super lame" and then they came back and admitted their original idea was a complete de-emphasis of the Yozi and the Reclamation as a plot to free them from Hell, putting the spotlight entirely on the Infernals themselves. This is way better and also actually in keeping with all the things they've said about the way Infernals were positioned in 2E was harmful to the setting.
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# ? Jun 8, 2013 12:20 |