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Stephenls posted:Better to design to a goal while making the system sufficiently solid that homebrew is easy. I didn't mean to be demanding towards you, as I wouldn't expect you to include every sort of thing I think might be good in any particular game idea I have in the core system. I mean, inevitably I will end up homebrewing some oddball thing I want, regardless of how you spend wordcount, as that's just reality. It encourages me that Ex3 plans to have entire books that focus on engaging with this reality, like Exigents and Arms of the Chosen. I was mainly getting snippy with Lymond because I thought the assertion that charms like One Hand Fury and Hand Fang Intro and Blade of the Battle Maiden would have to be custom content was a bit absurd; While "tools are better than no tools" the system has a long history of charms that provide tools for you in countless ways; In 2.5, you can materialize your own weapon, learn kung fu that makes non-weapon fighting quite competitive, if not usually outright optimal, and can learn charms to temporarily or permanently put one's fists on par with artifact weapons. I would be surprised if these weren't present in the new edition in some way, as Ink Monkeys seemed to enjoy them. At any rate, I do agree with you that making the core system sufficiently solid that homebrew is easy is paramount. If the core system is rock solid and Arms of the Chosen is good, then one night when I have insomnia I'll stat up ten Kung Fu Secrets, gradually take feedback about them, and have everything I want without putting in work that is onerous or breaking the rest of the game.
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Jun 10, 2013 02:11
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It is my firmly held opinion that people are blowing poo poo out of the water with hyperbole and basing it entirely on a game system that has a massively different combat engine to Ex3 from what we know. I mean, poo poo, a lot of the basic premises of the system like speed and combos won't even exist anymore, so unless they just go and reprint all of Ex2's combat charms with no changes, I'm not too loving worried.
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Jun 10, 2013 02:28
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MiltonSlavemasta posted:I was mainly getting snippy with Lymond because I thought the assertion that charms like One Hand Fury and Hand Fang Intro and Blade of the Battle Maiden would have to be custom content was a bit absurd; It is an absurd statement. I was still thinking of sutras and meditations as you'd proposed earlier, stuff outside the scope of the martial arts styles that we know. If your problem with stuff like One Hand Fury and Blade of the Battle Maiden was only in their implementation—and I can sort of see that from your other posts now—then things should turn out fine with Holden in the dev team.
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Jun 10, 2013 03:17
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Nessus mentioned Lisa-Lisa, which got me to thinking about Hamon users in general. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (parts 1 and 2, at least) is a great example of Unarmed Combatants having the ability to be disarmed while still being able to keep up with a weapon user. The series always has a way of forcing a protagonist into a situation that puts them at a severe disadvantage, requiring them to macgyver a solution with what is around them. Plus, Hamon techniques can't be used if the user can't breathe or have regular blood flow. Basically, if MA in Ex3 is anything like JoJo's I'll be one happy gamer.
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Jun 10, 2013 03:25
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A_Raving_Loon posted:You can teach them how you do it. You can't invent kung-fu and then hand it to someone, which is what I very obviously said. You can build a sword and give it to someone. You can keep building swords and give them to people. In fact you can build a sword and then crank out a whole shitload of them because you just invented mass production, you prince of the earth. You can also do this with plows, airships, and other such things. Hell, you can even give them to mortals to play with! Maybe make up some magical stuff for them to help them fight in your army. Having tools is better than not having tools, now and since the beginning of time, and Exalted is pretty clear about this. It's a fairly realistic setting in that regard. Tool use is humanity's big thing and as exemplars of humanity Exalts are pretty loving good at it. And who says you learned it from someone else in the first place? If anyone is inventing stuff like entire martial arts styles it is the Exalted, those people who were responsible for the entirety of human social, spiritual and technological progress. Who taught Newton physics?
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Jun 10, 2013 07:42
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Broadly, I'm against "well my special kata is as deadly as a daiklave, but also as easy to disrupt as a daiklave is to disarm" because it's basically an admission of defeat with regards to making the different combat abilities actually work differently in the game. I think you either have to make Brawl and Melee radically distinct or you have to bite the bullet and fold Brawl and Melee into a single skill called "Melee" that governs all close range combat. Like, there could be a specific martial arts style whose overall effect is that your barehanded attacks acquire the salient characteristics of sword attacks (rather than those of barehanded attacks, or maybe they get a mix of both), but it shouldn't be the norm.
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Jun 10, 2013 07:49
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Ferrinus posted:Broadly, I'm against "well my special kata is as deadly as a daiklave, but also as easy to disrupt as a daiklave is to disarm" because it's basically an admission of defeat with regards to making the different combat abilities actually work differently in the game. I'm not pushing for exact, one-to-one symmetry between different combat skills, but in a system like Storyteller (or indeed in most engines that are crunchier than FATE), I'd prefer to keep parity of damage values and leave the distinction in weapon tags and the special attacks available to each weapon. Remember the Thrust tag in the 2.5 errata, where you could take a steeper DV penalty in exchange for gaining Piercing? I want to see more stuff like that, where different weapons unlock different options in combat.
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Jun 10, 2013 08:10
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TheSoundNinja posted:Basically, if Fixed that. Considering that you can apparently make social checks during combat, I want to be able to bluff and/or bullshit my way past a more powerful enemy, taking advantage of his confidence and stuff like that to make him make sub-optimal moves, and set up traps, and other hilarious stuff. Has there been any word of how social actions during actual combat work?
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Jun 10, 2013 12:05
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cenotaph posted:You can't invent kung-fu and then hand it to someone, which is what I very obviously said. You can build a sword and give it to someone. You can keep building swords and give them to people. In fact you can build a sword and then crank out a whole shitload of them because you just invented mass production, you prince of the earth. You can also do this with plows, airships, and other such things. Steel is weak. Will is Strong. quote:Hell, you can even Are you seeing the analogue I want to draw here? Creating a fighting school, with its accompanying knowledge base and traditions which propagate your special styles around the world is in itself a work of infrastructure. quote:And who says you learned it from someone else in the first place? If anyone is inventing stuff like entire martial arts styles it is the Exalted, those people who were responsible for the entirety of human social, spiritual and technological progress. Who taught Newton physics? Newton did not then capitalize on his discoveries by mass-producing pendulums and throwing them at peasants.
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Jun 10, 2013 15:03
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A_Raving_Loon posted:Newton did not then capitalize on his discoveries by mass-producing pendulums and throwing them at peasants. Mostly because after the first few he realized that throwing pendulums at peasants was in no way more satisfying than throwing regular rocks at them. He was a very intelligent man, you see.
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Jun 10, 2013 15:33
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cenotaph posted:You can't invent kung-fu and then hand it to someone, which is what I very obviously said. You can build a sword and give it to someone. You can keep building swords and give them to people. In fact you can build a sword and then crank out a whole shitload of them because you just invented mass production, you prince of the earth. You can also do this with plows, airships, and other such things. Hell, you can even give them to mortals to play with! Maybe make up some magical stuff for them to help them fight in your army. Having tools is better than not having tools, now and since the beginning of time, and Exalted is pretty clear about this. It's a fairly realistic setting in that regard. Tool use is humanity's big thing and as exemplars of humanity Exalts are pretty loving good at it. We never messed with it much in my group, but isn't there a whole set of Presence charms that specifically apply to teaching bulk quantities of mortals how to do rad stuff fast? Tiger-training Technique or some drat thing? At least in 2e, right? Also I would assume that in the real world Newton more or less taught himself physics by looking at basic principles and being a crazy genius. But on Exalted planet he was probably hanging around near a spirit of gravity, a prank-playing apple god, and two Sidereals with a plan to propagate science, who all conspired to mess with Newton the Mortal's value in the weave.
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Jun 10, 2013 16:38
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theironjef posted:We never messed with it much in my group, but isn't there a whole set of Presence charms that specifically apply to teaching bulk quantities of mortals how to do rad stuff fast? Tiger-training Technique or some drat thing? At least in 2e, right? Solars had one in War for teaching fighting, one in Lore for teaching a bunch of other skills. Other exalt types also got a few of their own super-teaching charms that worked in their own ways.
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Jun 10, 2013 16:44
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theironjef posted:
He actually went to grammar school, then Cambridge, and was one of the earliest members of the Royal Society. If you translated all the relevant people with whom he was bouncing ideas off of and discussing things into Exalted, it would probably be something like your latter answer! I think if I wrote Newton into the Exalted setting, it would be as a Terrestrial or Sidereal who works at Heptagram/Yu-Shan Sorcery School, and finds out the Sorcery they're teaching has blocks on it, being clearly wrong in some areas and woefully deficient in others. Then, I would start taking some artistic liberty and have him moved as a result to some sort of Special Activities Division.
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Jun 10, 2013 16:53
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MiltonSlavemasta posted:He actually went to grammar school, then Cambridge, and was one of the earliest members of the Royal Society. If you translated all the relevant people with whom he was bouncing ideas off of and discussing things into Exalted, it would probably be something like your latter answer! I think if I wrote Newton into the Exalted setting, it would be as a Terrestrial or Sidereal who works at Heptagram/Yu-Shan Sorcery School, and finds out the Sorcery they're teaching has blocks on it, being clearly wrong in some areas and woefully deficient in others. Isaac Newton is pretty much the quintessential model for a twilight: after almost casually inventing Calculus and enumerating the laws of dynamics in his youth, he spent most of the rest of his life pursuing the twin goals of hunting down criminals using his mastery of disguise and becoming the foremost expert on alchemy, sorcery, and eschatology in order to calculate the date of the apocalypse and discern the mind of God.
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Jun 10, 2013 17:42
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Isaac Newton had all those giants helping him reach the high shelves; On a side note, forms of power (like genetically engineered theme park dinosaurs) that require little or no discipline to attain Own Hard.
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Jun 10, 2013 18:51
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Thesaurasaurus posted:I'm not pushing for exact, one-to-one symmetry between different combat skills, but in a system like Storyteller (or indeed in most engines that are crunchier than FATE), I'd prefer to keep parity of damage values and leave the distinction in weapon tags and the special attacks available to each weapon. Remember the Thrust tag in the 2.5 errata, where you could take a steeper DV penalty in exchange for gaining Piercing? I want to see more stuff like that, where different weapons unlock different options in combat. That's the kind of variation I want to see between different Melee weapons, not between Melee weapons and Brawl weapons. Something's wrong if the difference between Melee and Brawl is expressible through a couple tags.
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Jun 10, 2013 19:18
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With respect, "a couple tags" can make a pretty significant difference in playstyle. For instance, if a greatsword has a tag that reduces momentum buildup in exchange for doing absolutely gently caress-off damage when you do get to hit, while a dagger gives a massive boost to your effective momentum when you attack from stealth, while unarmed lets you undercut the other guy's momentum by knocking them off-balance or grappling or whatnot (seriously, let's have grapple rules that aren't just "You're grappled and you didn't put points into the relevant Attribute/Ability? GET hosed."), while brawling with a room full of loose objects makes it harder for the other guy to defend because he has no idea what you're gonna smack him with next, that's a pretty meaningful distinction. Ultimately there are going to have to be some similarities so long as any attack option has to have entries for accuracy and damage and reach and such, but having different attack types for each weapon can inject a lot of variety, and that's before getting into evocations and non-Charm MA Style Techniques. As a related aside, how would you see Archery and Thrown differentiated?
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Jun 10, 2013 19:41
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A_Raving_Loon posted:Creating a fighting school, with its accompanying knowledge base and traditions which propagate your special styles around the world is in itself a work of infrastructure. Although you can certainly do this, in Exalted the default assumption is that it's probably just easier, although maybe not better, to just hand out guns to people instead of teaching them to be Shaolin monks if you want to make your soldiers better at killing. Both methods are shown in Exalted. In the First Age the Solars wanted their Dragon-Blooded to be better fighters so they gave them armor-tanks and laser-bazookas, but when the Solars couldn't be trusted to maintain these wonders the Sidereals gave the Dragon-Blooded host Immaculate martial arts.
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Jun 10, 2013 19:46
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Thesaurasaurus posted:As a related aside, how would you see Archery and Thrown differentiated? They have said that there are a variety of engagement ranges (kind of like Burn Legend but not) at one point. I feel like that might be relevant. Other than that, Thrown will probably have a bit more versatility. From rocks and slings to daggers and axes, not to mention all the improvised objects. Also concealability. Meanwhile, Archery, you've got firewands, not to mention gently caress-off range (I know I said other than range, but seriously, big bow's gonna have big range), and I'd be willing to hazard a bit more stopping power (funny how the more lightweight, concealable, versatile style has a bit less power than the other one, isn't it. I wonder if that carries over to close combat in any way?).
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Jun 10, 2013 20:00
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Thesaurasaurus posted:With respect, "a couple tags" can make a pretty significant difference in playstyle. For instance, if a greatsword has a tag that reduces momentum buildup in exchange for doing absolutely gently caress-off damage when you do get to hit, while a dagger gives a massive boost to your effective momentum when you attack from stealth, while unarmed lets you undercut the other guy's momentum by knocking them off-balance or grappling or whatnot (seriously, let's have grapple rules that aren't just "You're grappled and you didn't put points into the relevant Attribute/Ability? GET hosed."), while brawling with a room full of loose objects makes it harder for the other guy to defend because he has no idea what you're gonna smack him with next, that's a pretty meaningful distinction. Oh, yeah, you can in principle make tags do some really heavy lifting, such that a short sword and a fist are both Light weapons. It seems a bit weird for some tags to make so much more of a difference than others, but it might be a better way to do it than packing special rules into the Archery, Brawl, Melee, and Thrown skills themselves. On the other hand, I kind of favor the special qualities of unarmed combat actually being part of Brawl itself rather than being qualities of the "Unarmed" tag found on the punch, kick, body slam, fighting gauntlet, and war boot weapons, such that being able to use a weapon with your Brawl ability versus being able to use the same weapon with your Melee ability were automatically distinct from each other, but then again you can still do that by specifying which tags are gained or lost at which times. quote:As a related aside, how would you see Archery and Thrown differentiated? I'm not sure. I'd figure that Thrown attacks cost you less momentum or require you to have less momentum to be able to get work done with them, but on the other hand it was actually Thrown that was the "assassin" ability in prior editions and it's not like having a knife through your throat is better than having an arrow through your throat. It probably makes sense for thrown attacks to require less setup to be able to make effectively but to have a way worse time dealing with a prepared opponent, by some means.
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Jun 10, 2013 20:09
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Ferrinus posted:I'm not sure. I'd figure that Thrown attacks cost you less momentum or require you to have less momentum to be able to get work done with them, but on the other hand it was actually Thrown that was the "assassin" ability in prior editions and it's not like having a knife through your throat is better than having an arrow through your throat. It probably makes sense for thrown attacks to require less setup to be able to make effectively but to have a way worse time dealing with a prepared opponent, by some means. With abstract range, you can get a lot of differentiation between ranged abilities, I think. I was thinking that perhaps Archery, by default, can engage opponents several zones away, whereas Thrown users have to at least be up in the periphery of the big throwdown; This means thrown users expose themselves to a lot more danger, but should be better at breaking down defenses while they are up in there. Thrown is the ability of Skirmishers who play a dangerous game by dancing around the battlefield, and also works as an auxiliary ability for melee-types who want to be able to step back and chuck a hatchet at a thug when they're worried about their own safety. Archers might have difficulty shooting at someone close-up, or perhaps arrows are great at delivering a killing or disabling blow but need something else doing the heavy lifting of breaking down defenses, or both. Just vaguely speculating, your Dawn who masters all combat abilities might use all of Melee, Brawl, Thrown, and Archery; Thrown is going to be when you want to try dancing around just out of range, Archery is when you're far afield, and Melee and Brawl are two ways of going toe-to-toe, with Melee having more of an emphasis on killing blows and direct attacks, while Brawl has more of an emphasis on weakening, disabling, or disrupting the opponent. MiltonSlavemasta fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Jun 10, 2013 |
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Jun 10, 2013 20:55
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On the other hand, you probably don't want to have an entire ability whose main premise is "if I do things right I get to take two or three more turns than you do".
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Jun 10, 2013 20:59
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Thesaurasaurus posted:With respect, "a couple tags" can make a pretty significant difference in playstyle. For instance, if a greatsword has a tag that reduces momentum buildup in exchange for doing absolutely gently caress-off damage when you do get to hit, while a dagger gives a massive boost to your effective momentum when you attack from stealth, while unarmed lets you undercut the other guy's momentum by knocking them off-balance or grappling or whatnot (seriously, let's have grapple rules that aren't just "You're grappled and you didn't put points into the relevant Attribute/Ability? GET hosed."), while brawling with a room full of loose objects makes it harder for the other guy to defend because he has no idea what you're gonna smack him with next, that's a pretty meaningful distinction.
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Jun 10, 2013 21:02
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Ferrinus posted:On the other hand, you probably don't want to have an entire ability whose main premise is "if I do things right I get to take two or three more turns than you do". Right. In order for a Thrown person to succeed given the paradigm I've presented, the Thrown person should need something that keeps the target from charging them. In the majority of cases, I see this being an ally who is in melee range of the opponent and engaging them, but terrain, traps, and other hazards could also do a lot of heavy lifting for that purpose, making it a good ability for Ninja-types, as it should be. Oligopsony posted:The whole theme of the Thrown trees have been surprise attacks, haven't they? Or is that just Solars? Unexpected attacks, multiple attacks, and harrying via repeated or ongoing attacks seem to be the primary themes in past editions. All non-Solar thrown trees have attacks that cause a persistent or semi-persistent disabling, damaging, or weakening effect, and all trees tend to grant multi-attack charms better and earlier. These, plus unexpected attacks, tend to give the ability a very coherent ninjutsu theme. MiltonSlavemasta fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Jun 10, 2013 |
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Jun 10, 2013 21:03
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The whole theme of the Thrown trees have been surprise attacks, haven't they? Or is that just Solars?
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Jun 10, 2013 21:04
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MiltonSlavemasta posted:Right. In order for a Thrown person to succeed given the paradigm I've presented, the Thrown person should need something that keeps the target from charging them. In the majority of cases, I see this being an ally who is in melee range of the opponent and engaging them, but terrain, traps, and other hazards could also do a lot of heavy lifting for that purpose, making it a good ability for Ninja-types, as it should be. I meant archery, actually. Being able to attack at stupendous range tends to translate into Turn 1: I shoot you, you approach me. Turn 2: I shoot you, you approach me further. Turn 3... Abstracted rather than bean-counted engagement ranges can solve this but don't necessarily solve this, because whether I'm 300 yards or 3 zones away from you I'm still the free hits guy. I don't know if such a situation should be categorically impossible to set up, but it shouldn't be the key strength of archery or else it becomes the job of every archer to play the game such that their enemies don't get actions.
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Jun 10, 2013 21:09
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Ferrinus posted:I meant archery, actually. Being able to attack at stupendous range tends to translate into Turn 1: I shoot you, you approach me. Turn 2: I shoot you, you approach me further. Turn 3... Like, you can snipe some targets to death (but not Named NPC tier targets). For that tier of targets, all your sniping does is build momentum, and maybe you can't stack multiple shots in a linear progression as they close the distance. (Or not. I dunno.)
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Jun 10, 2013 21:16
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Ferrinus posted:I meant archery, actually. Being able to attack at stupendous range tends to translate into Turn 1: I shoot you, you approach me. Turn 2: I shoot you, you approach me further. Turn 3... There's a lot of past edition and mythic support for archers being able to attack at stupendous ranges, but that doesn't mitigate the very valid game design issue you've pointed out. I don't know if I want "stay out of range and kite people" to be a totally invalid method of fighting, but I absolutely see where you're coming from. It could be that making attacks at stupendous ranges is mainly for Exalt-level combatants and other Exalt-level combatants will generally have the ability to easily close that range unless they've chosen to diminish their mobility for other bonuses in the hopes that allies will back them up. Personally, one advantage I'd like to see for archers is the ability to bring a lethal strike to bear whenever any of the opponents on the board are vulnerable, so your archer on the high ground can spy all five Immaculate Monks and deliver a killing shot whenever there's an opening on any of them. Being able to attack at a range that can't be easily closed, though, should be draining enough that you can't just kite people indefinitely. In Wulin you have to spend scarce resources to attack people who aren't in zones adjacent to you, and maybe something like that would be best for Exalted. This maybe lends itself to a conception of archers as something like artillery or Devastator Marines or whatever example you prefer; Archers plant and deliver precision lethal attacks to wherever it's needed; This planting is part of how the Archer does their poo poo, and if they need to work on the run, they can't use the full extent of their capabilities, and even firing on the run usually limits their mobility to such an extent that they're going to get caught by someone who isn't shooting back, even a fullplate doofus. Such an implementation could help avoid the Invincible Horse Archer issue early 4e had. Edit: Now, as a practical consideration, I should maybe point out that even if what I mentioned previously is taken as the default, it would be pretty unreasonable in the Exalted setting to avoid allowing a player to be Never Within Reach of meleeists, given all the potential for flying mounts, wings, et cetera. There's ultimately no way you can let players play in the setting and not allow for the possibility of someone riding a butterfly spirit to a dozen yards in the air or so and raining arrows down on people. This probably means characters who ought to be able to fight solo well with no backup will need to have some method of ranged fighting or be highly, highly mobile. I'm not sure this is a bad thing; It also encourages groups who fight all types of entities in Exalted to have a combined arms makeup instead of being Grand Daiklave and Full Plate Society. MiltonSlavemasta fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Jun 10, 2013 |
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Jun 10, 2013 21:28
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MiltonSlavemasta posted:Edit: Now, as a practical consideration, I should maybe point out that even if what I mentioned previously is taken as the default, it would be pretty unreasonable in the Exalted setting to avoid allowing a player to be Never Within Reach of meleeists, given all the potential for flying mounts, wings, et cetera. There's ultimately no way you can let players play in the setting and not allow for the possibility of someone riding a butterfly spirit to a dozen yards in the air or so and raining arrows down on people. This probably means characters who ought to be able to fight solo well with no backup will need to have some method of ranged fighting or be highly, highly mobile. I'm not sure this is a bad thing; It also encourages groups who fight all types of entities in Exalted to have a combined arms makeup instead of being Grand Daiklave and Full Plate Society. I think that's actually a good thing. I mean, in a modern sense, special forces lone wolves like Jason Bourne types are always very good with pretty much every combat style. You need to be, to be a lone-wolf. I'd expect even if a hero doesn't like using bows much, he'd be capable of using one if his shtick is being a lone wolf killing machine. That, or some magical way of tanking hits indefinitely until the enemy runs out of arrows and then shoving the bow up that person's rear end.
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Jun 10, 2013 22:02
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MJ12 posted:I think that's actually a good thing. I mean, in a modern sense, special forces lone wolves like Jason Bourne types are always very good with pretty much every combat style. You need to be, to be a lone-wolf. Oh, I didn't mean to imply that it was a bad thing, just that it would almost certainly be a thing. And, yeah, you're right about that stuff. If you're going to be a lone wolf, you need to be able to handle yourself in any situation, and I actually loving love the poo poo they added in 2.5 to help Dawns and Dusks in doing that. If it's an Enemy At The Gates sniper duel, either you are a top-level sniper yourself, or you have some method in your bag of tricks to help handle the scenario without trying to succeed by charging like a dumbass*. Maybe you have Red Hare to blitz forward if you're Lu Bu, maybe you hole up in a trap-infested warren and tunnel through the ground if you're Rambo, and maybe you even reluctantly signal for help from someone you aided back when. *I do not mean to say that Solars or whatever other type of Exalt should never triumph if they directly charge at a sniper, but it should be a tense situation that makes everyone worried for your character. Probably my most-played archetype is the hot-blooded guy who's arrogant enough to attempt that sort of thing and assume he can handle it, and I would like those to actually be tense moments instead of "There's no way a DB archer is going to bypass my 12 Parry DV."
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Jun 10, 2013 22:14
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MiltonSlavemasta posted:I would like those to actually be tense moments instead of "There's no way a DB archer is going to bypass my 12 Parry DV." I'd like to take this time to note that systems built around binary pass/fail events can very quickly break down into unfun slogs. The above was an all-too-common occurrence in 2E. Before 2.5, piling on defence was the only way to reasonably improve your change of survival, and for someone trying to get by you it's a question of your actions either doing nothing, or bringing enough punch to past that magic number and This left few options for variety in an encounter. A_Raving_Loon fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Jun 10, 2013 |
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Jun 10, 2013 22:26
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A_Raving_Loon posted:I'd like to take this time to note that systems built around binary pass/fail events can very quickly break down into unfun slogs. This is a good point. Exalted is a bit more difficult to design for, as, on the one hand, binary pass/fail is terrible, but on the other hand, an arbitrary large number of very regular guys shouldn't be able to break down an Exalted's defenses through repeated application. Maybe the system should be designed around the idea that the lowest numerical range for an outcome based on attack successes, the range of outright failure, is only likely to be hit by mortals with little training and noncombatant Exalts. Attacks from competent Exalts or elite mortals are likely to exceed whatever threshold completely negates the attack most every time, and then produce a variable effect dependent on by how much they exceed the value. This makes Dragon-blooded who have decided to attempt a full-on We Are Legion strategy legitimately terrifying, and means players will almost never take a combat action that accomplishes nothing. In fact, I bet something like this is already being implemented based on Holden's comments re "A dozen Legion of Silence bros vs. newly Exalted Solar." I am reminded of Ferrinus saying "The optimal way to do a mortal army is to differentiate every individual" and such design may successfully render this false, as some types of mortal soldiers may need to merge into battlegroups in order to make attacks that actually do things against Exalts. MiltonSlavemasta fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Jun 10, 2013 |
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Jun 10, 2013 22:52
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W/rt long-range archery, it'd be nice if hits were conditional, unless you have a homing attack or "I knew you were going to do that" magic. Like, I fire an arrow on this turn, and say "next turn, this will hit you unless you stop attacking my friend" or "next turn, this will hit you unless you stop running away."
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Jun 10, 2013 22:56
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MiltonSlavemasta posted:There's a lot of past edition and mythic support for archers being able to attack at stupendous ranges, but that doesn't mitigate the very valid game design issue you've pointed out. I don't know if I want "stay out of range and kite people" to be a totally invalid method of fighting, but I absolutely see where you're coming from. It could be that making attacks at stupendous ranges is mainly for Exalt-level combatants and other Exalt-level combatants will generally have the ability to easily close that range unless they've chosen to diminish their mobility for other bonuses in the hopes that allies will back them up. This might work, but the more I read over the issue the harder it seems to make a system that differentiates fighting abilities, is balanced (for whatever definition of the word you want to use) and also fun for everyone involved given all the constraints we have. I'm drawn to redefining the problem by giving characters competence in several different types of weapons and just making each have strong situational advantages. If you can see your enemy coming, your group can all grab bows and make pincushions out of your opponents. If your enemy is up close, your group can adopt their close combat fighting style of choice. Most people might want to keep a hatchet on hand or a set of knives strapped to their forearms, to be used when an opportunity arises out of your close-combat reach. This would simplify design in that you don't need to worry too much about any weapon ability dominating another: if you didn't bring a bow and you can't reach that horse archer, the problem is not in the system but in your being unprepared. Unfortunately, this goes against the grain of the ability system we'll have.
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Jun 11, 2013 05:36
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Ferrinus posted:I meant archery, actually. Being able to attack at stupendous range tends to translate into Turn 1: I shoot you, you approach me. Turn 2: I shoot you, you approach me further. Turn 3... My vision of the ideal fight with a really good Solar level archer would play out something like the sniper duel with The End (assuming you didn't cheat)--but The End worked because it was a one-off deal. If every encounter in MGS3 had been The End then it would've been ridiculous. It's a tough row to hoe.
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Jun 11, 2013 20:50
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The Archery image I have is that the sniper's options are: - Take out an Extra. - Damage a battle group of Extras. - Influence a non-Extra's Momentum (mildly). - Trick shot (set up something for the melee guy other than momentum). - Expend serious motes to block / parry a deadly blow for an ally.
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Jun 11, 2013 21:27
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Contrabassoon posted:My vision of the ideal fight with a really good Solar level archer would play out something like the sniper duel with The End (assuming you didn't cheat)--but The End worked because it was a one-off deal. If every encounter in MGS3 had been The End then it would've been ridiculous. It's a tough row to hoe. But then, my Exalted gaming has a heavy dose of That Guy in it. 
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Jun 11, 2013 21:37
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So quiet lately. Has there been any new news on the new edition such as when it will be released and potentially shipped?
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Jun 17, 2013 18:27
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I asked in the official forums when we'd get the 1st edition stuff, and they said for previous Kickstarters they'd get back to them in a month or two. If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on November/December. I doubt they want to miss the Christmas window.
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Jun 17, 2013 19:03
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In other news, I just got Legends of the Wulin, and the similarities between that and the hints about Exalted 3rd are striking. I wonder how much the writers took that book as their inspiration. Didn't find much on the Wiki, I think Plague of Hats mentioned it once.
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Jun 17, 2013 19:07
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