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BryanChavez posted:It's really crazy how the World of Darkness is doing a lot of pretty amazing things that I guess Ex3 is just breezing right the hell past. I'm still not sure about some of the changes they've made, but hell, it's still really impressive. I don't even LIKE a lot of the God Machine Chronicle's changes. In fact, if I could will John and Holden and etc. to write the WoD's combat rules I'd do it in a flash! That's what makes this specific sticking point so incredibly bizarre. It's like Exalted 3rd edition is going to come out and be the savior of tabletop gaming but there in the corner of a page will be a table of experience level maximums for demihuman adventurers. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Nov 8, 2013 |
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Nov 8, 2013 02:23
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LGD posted:I'm not- I'm just pointing out why it isn't necessarily the devil or something that is really worth getting all that worked up over. I'm just going to put it out there that the sheer amount of bookwork involved in making an Exalted character once I started to understand the system and appreciate what it meant that, say, buying willpower at any time other chargen was a terrible, terrible idea was literally the single biggest reason I stopped playing Exalted. I got bored of finding myself making idiot savants because I didn't want to have spend ten sessions worth of XP to raise a handful of stats up to where I wanted them to (eventually) be for the character, got tired of lopsided character sheets. Got tired of "just don't do that then" because it would mean playing ineffective characters at any table with other players who fell into that ~system mastery~ trap. Heart Attacks fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Nov 8, 2013 |
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Nov 8, 2013 02:24
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Ferrinus posted:It's like Exalted 3rd edition is going to come out and be the savior of tabletop gaming but there in the corner of a page will be a table of experience level maximums for demihuman adventurers. The Dragon-Blooded aren't even real Exalted!
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Nov 8, 2013 02:26
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Attorney at Funk posted:The Dragon-Blooded aren't even real Exalted! This is objectively suboptimal.
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Nov 8, 2013 02:28
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A_Raving_Loon posted:Willpower in 2e is the go-to example of this. Costs 1bp at creation, 2x[Current Rating] in play. That's the single biggest one. You've also got a difference in value of 20xp on your top attribute set for Solars/Infernals Abyssals, 12xp for your second attribute set, and 8xp for your third attribute set, so just considering Attributes and Willpower, you can have a 110xp differential. Virtues are will get you roughly a 15xp difference without using BP on them, and Abilities will net you a difference of roughly 40xp between the least and most optimized characters. Altogether, even before bonus points come into the equation, you can have a difference of 165xp between characters just at the start before factoring in how "efficiently" the players use the rest of their BP. A difference of 200xp between starting characters wouldn't be that hard to create and has almost certainly occurred before. I don't like scaling costs or the xp/bp divide, so when I run a 3e game, I'm just going to hand out BP.
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Nov 8, 2013 02:43
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It continues to amaze and disappoint me that in the year 2013 we still have game designers who think asymmetric chargen BP/XP costs is somehow a good idea. You know what else would be cool, if you had to pay out of your XP pool for stunt dice. Let's just bring back all the terrible game design of the 90s and cram it into one book.Bigup DJ posted:This is really cool! The question then is what to do with the Dawn Caste - could you just say they're really good at tactics, logistics, training and so on and leave it at that, or should they be better at kung fu than the others? BryanChavez explained how Legends of the Wulin handled this and I agree with that approach if we're going for an "every Exalt knows how to kung-fu because come on, look at this game" approach. In Exalted-ese terms I would say that this would be represented by the Dawn Caste favoring War as their combat ability and there being a selection of War Charms that deal with scaling situations instead of just large mass-warfare...a Dawn Caste master of the arts of War can, with a glance, discern the flaws in an opponent's approach, fool others into thinking that the Dawn's stance is representative of fighting styles it isn't, know just how to exploit the environment to hold an entire army at a chokepoint by himself, etc.
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Nov 8, 2013 02:43
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Unfortunately, an "everyone can do both kung fu and non-kung fu, each at a guaranteed baseline competence" system doesn't reaaaally work with the Ability distribution as it stands - you'd have to cut down or reshuffle the Ability list or guarantee each character at least one Ability from each Caste or something. I'm personally fine with an Exalted 3E that, like, everyone obviously tacitly knows is about cool fighting but that isn't formally about cool fighting - if the combat system's smooth enough and more importantly non-exclusive enough, it'll be fine to have fights where the Dawn shines and then nonfights where other characters are more important and so on. Like I keep saying, noncombat actions just need stronger feedback and resolution mechanics, such that you can say "yeah, I stabbed him!" and "yeah, I fooled him!" with equal confidence.
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Nov 8, 2013 02:49
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Ferrinus posted:Could somebody please, PLEASE report this troll?  quote:No, it doesn't. The World of Darkness uses flat experience point costs now. The bad old days are over. quote:We're talking about one player having more power to advance and customize their character than another. The fact that this is often hidden well doesn't stop it from being a problem. LGD fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Nov 8, 2013 |
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Nov 8, 2013 02:50
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LGD posted:So it's absolutely a problem. Is it the most important problem that needs to be addressed with a new version of the system? I'm not nearly as sure about that, especially if the implicit price is awful XP-gen character creation. This must be one of those "letting perfect be the enemy of good" things I've heard so much about. If it's absolutely a problem then, y'know, maybe the designers who've trumpeted their horn a whole bunch about how their version of Exalted is going to be the super-bestest and wipe away the bad taste of 2E could, I dunno, fix it? I mean I get that they only have two prior editions and something like two decades worth of prior bad examples to learn from here but, well, that's why they're professionals.
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Nov 8, 2013 02:57
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quote:Is it the most important problem that needs to be addressed with a new version of the system? Is there any better time to fix it than right now, at the beginning of the new edition? Is there any reason not to fix it right now, at the beginning of a new edition? quote:I'm not nearly as sure about that, especially if the implicit price is awful XP-gen character creation. It's not! I mean, the devs like scaling XP so I guess it's unavoidable, but it's not as if it's the only way to do this. Heart Attacks fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Nov 8, 2013 |
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Nov 8, 2013 02:57
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LGD posted:Oh I hadn't kept up with the latest changes really, since its initial iteration really did nothing for me. Good on them. It'd be a sensible change to the Exalted system. I still think you and other posters have been generally misidentifying the sacred cow that most needed slaughtering in this case. Or at least phrasing that argument in an unintuitive way, because there is a bit of a gap between "the BP/XP split is the devil" to "death to scaling XP systems." But... it IS the BP/XP split. That's the principal problem. Like, I think a flat advancement system would fit Exalted much better than a scaling advancement system and would be much easier to use and introduce new players to. There are a few things scaling advancement has going for it and in fact I'm undecided as to whether I'd prefer a flat or scaling system in the World of Darkness, but if we had the vote here and now for Exalted's system I'd vote flat. However, both a flat system and a scaling system are, alone, perfectly fine compared to the clusterfuck you get with flat chargen/scaling advancement or vice versa. It is very much the combination that's an outright design flaw rather than a potentially-unpopular design priority. quote:I agree its a problem, I just think it's a problem that always implicates a notion of balance. It's absolutely lovely that you can create characters on an equal amount of XP and one is identical to the other but has ride +5. That sucks and it's something that the game should strive to eliminate. I just think that in-play such differences aren't incredibly noticeable given that you generally don't have examples of pure mechanical idiocy alongside examples of the most sublime optimization differences between character niches and respective power of different abilities obscures everything. So it's absolutely a problem. Creating your character and advancing your character are part of playing the game. "Well the guy with 200 extra XP could spend it like a moron and therefore lose a fight to the guy with 200 missing XP who spent his vastly smaller amount of XP wisely" in no way whatsoever excuses the existence of the XP disparity in the first place. They are separate issues. Also, quote:Is it the most important problem that needs to be addressed with a new version of the system? I'm not nearly as sure about that, especially if the implicit price is awful XP-gen character creation. Lay off this crap. Not making the game worse by overcomplicating and therefore introducing disparities into its character advancement system doesn't cost anyone anything, and an XP-gen system is not the necessary consequence of chargen rules that aren't terrible. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Nov 8, 2013 |
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Nov 8, 2013 02:59
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LGD posted:I just think that in-play such differences aren't incredibly noticeable One charm becomes eight.
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Nov 8, 2013 03:01
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Bigup DJ posted:This is really cool! The question then is what to do with the Dawn Caste - could you just say they're really good at tactics, logistics, training and so on and leave it at that, or should they be better at kung fu than the others? Tactics, logistics, training and so on and leave it at that. The "I'm better at kung fu than the other dudes" class shouldn't exist. Point-buying your way into being better at kung fu than the others by neglecting non-combat capability shouldn't exist. I consider it to be outdated game design.
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Nov 8, 2013 03:01
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LGD posted:Oh throw Lowtax a few bucks and do it yourself you big silly. I think we actually agree on most of the things going on here. Scaling xpgen by hand is more than I want to ask of most of my friends who might try the new Exalted. I think the real problem here isn't actually BP-gen, it's that once the game starts, you're told to swap over to this obnoxious and overly complex system of scaling xp and arbitrary training times. Maybe the rallying cry should be "BP forever!" You still eliminate all disparities by advancing within the same system.
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Nov 8, 2013 03:01
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Heart Attacks posted:Is there any better time to fix it than right now, at the beginning of the new edition? Is there any reason not to fix it right now, at the beginning of a new edition? quote:It's not! I'd much rather have the system scrapped and replaced with a flat XP system! I just think the BP/XP split is somewhat defensible if you're going to use a system with scaling XP costs!
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Nov 8, 2013 03:02
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Even Greg Stolze manages to fall into the BP/XP split in Reign, an otherwise excellent book. This is your chance to say you did something better than Greg Stolze, how the gently caress are you going to pass that opportunity up?
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Nov 8, 2013 03:03
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BryanChavez posted:In Legends of the Wulin, at least, the Warrior's Art is the Secret Art of Battle. They're able to adopt Approaches which grants them bonuses when they fight in a certain way, but those who recognize the Approach they're using can counter it by exploiting its weaknesses. They're no better at actual kungfu-ing, they're better at battlefield manipulation and controlling how the fight is actually fought. All of the other Arts can be used in combat as well, like the pressure-point secrets of the Doctor's Art, so it's not a big advantage for the Warrior - but other Archetypes need to invest more to easily use their Arts in the immediacy of battle, whereas that's the Warrior's bread and butter. That sounds perfect! I was thinking if I ever did a PBTA Exalted hack that everyone would get to make up a fighting style for themselves - Doctor's Art, Ebon Shadow Style, Zen Archery, whatever - and then they'd just expand on it with Charms. I'd also get rid of attributes and abilities and just turn the Castes into stats - +2 Zenith if you want to be really good at leader-priest-demagogue stuff, +0 Dawn if you want to be alright at tactics, waging wars, +1 Eclipse if you want to be good at diplomat stuff - travel, linguistics, etiquette. The only problem is figuring out what to roll if you're dissociating personal combat type skills from Caste. Also, how to represent average non-kung fu opponents and really terrifying super kung fu opponents - mortals and deathlords for instance. How does Legends of the Wulin handle that? Maybe Exalts, mortals and whatever else all do kung fu with the same mechanics, but Exalts get Charms and mortals don't.
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Nov 8, 2013 03:20
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Ferrinus posted:Unfortunately, an "everyone can do both kung fu and non-kung fu, each at a guaranteed baseline competence" system doesn't reaaaally work with the Ability distribution as it stands - you'd have to cut down or reshuffle the Ability list or guarantee each character at least one Ability from each Caste or something. Cutting down the Ability list to something more reasonable is one of the first things I'd do with Exalted, together with setting baseline competences. There is no point in pretending that Ride and Melee have the same value. The problem here isn't even one of lack of feedback/resolution mechanics, it's about narrative significance. Is Exalted about riding things? Is it about making perilous treks through the desert and struggling to find food? Or is it about smacking down the old order and setting yourself up as the new world order? Melee and Presence are going to be orders of magnitude more important than Ride and Survival for the default playstyle of the game. I've played using a FATExalted adaptation that condenses abilities down to 20 by, among other things, merging Ride and Survival and Sail into one Travel ability. It works better and I'm convinced you could boil it down further to around 15 without losing anything meaningful. I was disappointed when the devs announced the ability spread wasn't changing—I consider that a no-brainer, just like doing away with scaling XP costs. Ferrinus posted:I'm personally fine with an Exalted 3E that, like, everyone obviously tacitly knows is about cool fighting but that isn't formally about cool fighting - if the combat system's smooth enough and more importantly non-exclusive enough, it'll be fine to have fights where the Dawn shines and then nonfights where other characters are more important and so on. Like I keep saying, noncombat actions just need stronger feedback and resolution mechanics, such that you can say "yeah, I stabbed him!" and "yeah, I fooled him!" with equal confidence. I'm fine with this too as long as the degree of difference is small enough that every player feels useful. Lymond fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Nov 8, 2013 |
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Nov 8, 2013 03:21
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A_Raving_Loon posted:One charm becomes eight. Ferrinus posted:But... it IS the BP/XP split. That's the principal problem. quote:Creating your character and advancing your character are part of playing the game. "Well the guy with 200 extra XP could spend it like a moron and therefore lose a fight to the guy with 200 missing XP who spent his vastly smaller amount of XP wisely" in no way whatsoever excuses the existence of the XP disparity in the first place. They are separate issues. Also, quote:Lay off this crap. Not making the game worse by overcomplicating and therefore introducing disparities into its character advancement system doesn't cost anyone anything, and an XP-gen system is not the necessary consequence of chargen rules that aren't terrible.
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Nov 8, 2013 03:26
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LGD posted:...in actuality a perfectly balanced pure XP-gen system would be more detrimental to people's ability to take up and enjoy the game than the hybrid BP/XP system is in practice. Why? Edit: I mean why is there even a possibility that someone can "build their characters terribly" in the first place? What purpose is served by keeping that in the system? Bigup DJ fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Nov 8, 2013 |
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Nov 8, 2013 03:31
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Bigup DJ posted:That sounds perfect! I was thinking if I ever did a PBTA Exalted hack that everyone would get to make up a fighting style for themselves - Doctor's Art, Ebon Shadow Style, Zen Archery, whatever - and then they'd just expand on it with Charms. I'd also get rid of attributes and abilities and just turn the Castes into stats - +2 Zenith if you want to be really good at leader-priest-demagogue stuff, +0 Dawn if you want to be alright at tactics, waging wars, +1 Eclipse if you want to be good at diplomat stuff - travel, linguistics, etiquette. Legends of the Wulin has ranks that determine how strong you are (rank 5 being the weakest, rank 1 being the strongest, rank 4 being the default for starting PCs). It has a Lesser Legends and Minion systems to represent dramatically unimportant opponents. It also has two varieties of kung fu: External Kung Fu provides the character with basic combat statistics and certain descriptors that determine how the character fights and interacts, not only with his opponents, but with his surroundings. External styles are strong or weak against specific approaches, and only work with specific types of weapons. Internal Kung Fu allows you to spend Chi to perform special maneuvers or add special effects to your attacks. It's fairly simple to map out different kinds of beings to power levels, narrative importance and supernatural capability. Your average mortal can be a minion, an accomplished mortal warrior can be a lesser legend, a heroic mortal with story significance can be a ranked warrior. The capability to use Essence means having access to internal kung fu. Lymond fucked around with this message at 03:56 on Nov 8, 2013 |
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Nov 8, 2013 03:36
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LGD posted:One charm becomes 25 apparently going by the numbers above. I just don't think it works out that way in practice super often because the system mastery aspects are fairly obvious and while I won't pretend they're a good thing I don't think too many people opt for a 3/2/2/2 distribution of virtues and don't spend any BP on WP and then in game go "oh time to jack this up to 10." Actually, people do this all the time so it may be obvious to me or you, but it's definitely not obvious to most gamers. Most of the gamers I meet refuse to acknowledge system mastery as a "thing that exists" and just refer to it as munchkinism or power-gaming if you don't slap the dots down on your character sheet going by whatever 'feels right' or some other happy horse poo poo.
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Nov 8, 2013 03:41
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Ithle01 posted:Actually, people do this all the time so it may be obvious to me or you, but it's definitely not obvious to most gamers. Most of the gamers I meet refuse to acknowledge system mastery as a "thing that exists" and just refer to it as munchkinism or power-gaming if you don't slap the dots down on your character sheet going by whatever 'feels right' or some other happy horse poo poo. Yeah, I see this happen all the time, and it'd probably still be happening in my group if I wasn't the resident power-gamer telling everyone that if they actually want to be good at the thing that they seem to want to be good at, they need to do [this], [this], and [this]. It's very much a pretty big problem. There are still people who take D&D 3e Toughness, for god's sake.
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Nov 8, 2013 03:47
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LGD posted:Except the guy with 200 less effective XP by definition spent his XP/character resources terribly. Like you say, character building and advancement are all part of a unitary process that determines relative character power. , and, like I say, the problems with BP/XP have nothing to do with relative character power. They're about player power. Character imbalance is a frequent side effect but crucial to the issue. quote:And I disagree, because in actuality a perfectly balanced pure XP-gen system would be more detrimental to people's ability to take up and enjoy the game than the hybrid BP/XP system is in practice. A pure XP-gen system wouldn't be worse than a BP/XP system, no. A BP/XP system pretends to be less complicated than an XP system, but it's actually more complicated, and indeed makes character generation much more of an ordeal than normal unless you're specifically starting a game from the equivalent of level 1, which not everyone does all the time. A pure XP system with slimmed-down costs ("Each dot costs XP equal to its rating, here's a table with the total dot cost of each rating such that a 1 is 1, a 4 is 10, etc") could easily be simpler and faster than the ordeal that 2e chargen is now. Like, right now, first you look up how many dots you get, then you make sure you fulfill all these various minimums, then you look at the BP costs table...
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Nov 8, 2013 03:52
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Ferrinus posted:, and, like I say, the problems with BP/XP have nothing to do with relative character power. They're about player power. Character imbalance is a frequent side effect but crucial to the issue. quote:A pure XP-gen system wouldn't be worse than a BP/XP system, no. A BP/XP system pretends to be less complicated than an XP system, but it's actually more complicated, and indeed makes character generation much more of an ordeal than normal unless you're specifically starting a game from the equivalent of level 1, which not everyone does all the time. A pure XP system with slimmed-down costs ("Each dot costs XP equal to its rating, here's a table with the total dot cost of each rating such that a 1 is 1, a 4 is 10, etc") could easily be simpler and faster than the ordeal that 2e chargen is now. Like, right now, first you look up how many dots you get, then you make sure you fulfill all these various minimums, then you look at the BP costs table... Please. Pure XP-gen can be made just about bearable, but lets not lie to ourselves. edit: I'll also point out that there's nothing about the BP/XP table that necessitates the disparities seen in EX2. Those huge gaps can be substantially curtailed if the formula for determining WP and the costs to increase it (at creation and in play) are tweaked. (Again, it is obviously better to just replace it with a flat cost system) edit: Bigup DJ posted:Why? LGD fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Nov 8, 2013 |
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Nov 8, 2013 04:16
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quote:It's definitely easier math than assigning 15 points from a short list of options! BP is really easy if you don't care about how your character is going to advance during the game, sure.
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Nov 8, 2013 04:23
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LGD posted:I just don't think it works out that way in practice super often because the system mastery aspects are fairly obvious They really aren't, unless you are someone that has been playing exalted a long time. Being familiar with the system makes them obvious to you but a new player isn't going to look at go, "Oh I better load up on charms now if I want to be able to contribute at the same level as everyone else."
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Nov 8, 2013 04:27
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LGD posted:So the players have the power to do what? Have their characters audited by the GM in a transparent manner? Or does it have something to do with the capabilities of their characters? To edit their characters. Experience points aren't about damage per turn, they're about making your character be the way you want them to be. Even if there's nothing whatsoever you want to buy at the moment, there's a very big difference between getting an XP reward at the end of a session than not, because XP have a creative and social value totally independent of their ability to make one PC stronger than another PC. quote:Yes, it's incredibly hard except in the circumstance it's primarily designed to address. Oh wait it isn't, it's just hard for you because it gives you a nerdrage stroke. And don't worry we can have charts! Multiple charts! And conversion tables! It's definitely easier math than assigning 15 points from a short list of options! And this somehow solves the incredibly complicated problem of making sure you have appropriate minimum scores in the areas you want your character to focus in, which is a totally relevant point. You're looking up point values and performing addition and subtraction either way. An XP-based character generation would require more absolute front-end math but on the other hand could cut out the secondary pass entirely and, most importantly, free you from the intense embarrassment that will inevitably result when one of your players looks up and asks you if these costs they're looking at now are the same ones that the game uses post-chargen and you have to tug at your collar and explain the situation. Ground-up scaling XP chargen demands a simpler XP cost system than the one 2e's got, sure, but so what? Why would we want to use any single thing that appears in second edition verbatim?
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Nov 8, 2013 04:37
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Mormon Star Wars posted:They really aren't, unless you are someone that has been playing exalted a long time. Being familiar with the system makes them obvious to you but a new player isn't going to look at go, "Oh I better load up on charms now if I want to be able to contribute at the same level as everyone else." I'm not talking about paranoia combat or anything like that. I'm talking about stuff like "its really easy to get Willpower cheaply during chargen" and "It is mechanically better and thematically appropriate to be maxed out in the Attributes and Abilities that relate My Thing." As long as you do those things you'll avoid the bulk of the theoretical XP deficit being discussed above. I mean the Willpower disparity especially is really bad, but it only becomes realized under not-especially common conditions. It shouldn't exist and if it does it should be minimized, but in terms of system mastery "difficulty" it's not a high bar to clear. (But then again neither is D&D Toughness) Heart Attacks posted:BP is really easy if you don't care about how your character is going to advance during the game, sure. Or aren't being incredibly anal about relative efficiency, yes. And honestly in my experience most of the people who are like the game of character creation.
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Nov 8, 2013 04:42
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Bigup DJ posted:This is really cool! The question then is what to do with the Dawn Caste - could you just say they're really good at tactics, logistics, training and so on and leave it at that, or should they be better at kung fu than the others? The 2.5 Dawn Solution sooooorta did this with the Martial/Martial-Ready keywords and Dawn King's Strife, where you could hang the Excellency dicecaps for all Dawn Abilities off of your War rating, but you ask a good question because this kind of set Dawns head and shoulder above other Solars for both straight-up shitwrecking AND everything else related to fighting. The answer to "You only really need one attack skill" was to make them good at all of them - don't get me wrong, it's pretty awesome to be able to do Dante without sinking every last XP you have into it, but it only makes the issue of Caste-based pigeonholing worse. On the broader subject of chargen disparity, the real issue is that it's just no fun to realize you've permanently cheated yourself out of (effectively) triple-digit XPs, and even more obnoxious that the 'winning move' is to hold off on the stuff you actually want so that you can get all the stuff you will eventually need right now and not suffer down the line. And like Ferrinus says, putting one player waaaaaay further ahead/behind on their wishlist than another is just irritating. Say you have two combat-focused characters (ignoring the question of "Should We All Be Kung-Fu Fighting?" for a second), and you're both playing it as a friendly rivalry. It's more than a little obnoxious for both parties to know that they'll have to abstract and handwave everything because if they get dice involved one of them will effortlessly roll the other! They weren't even trying to be That Guy, they're just good at math and reading comprehension and did what they saw as the sensible thing!
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Nov 8, 2013 04:43
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Ferrinus posted:To edit their characters. Experience points aren't about damage per turn, they're about making your character be the way you want them to be. Even if there's nothing whatsoever you want to buy at the moment, there's a very big difference between getting an XP reward at the end of a session than not, because XP have a creative and social value totally independent of their ability to make one PC stronger than another PC. quote:You're looking up point values and performing addition and subtraction either way. An XP-based character generation would require more absolute front-end math but on the other hand could cut out the secondary pass entirely and, most importantly, free you from the intense embarrassment that will inevitably result when one of your players looks up and asks you if these costs they're looking at now are the same ones that the game uses post-chargen and you have to tug at your collar and explain the situation. Ground-up scaling XP chargen demands a simpler XP cost system than the one 2e's got, sure, but so what? Why would we want to use any single thing that appears in second edition verbatim? Because sharkdad owns? And would you care to point out some full XP-gen systems that are known for their fast character creation? Because there aren't many. Sorry, XP-gen has advantages but swiftness or ease of use to the uninitiated are not among them.
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Nov 8, 2013 04:51
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LGD posted:Options are power. The BP/XP split doesn't cause you to not hand out XP at the end of a session. You only "lose" XP if you put it into inefficient areas you neglected at chargen, and only in relation to another PC. What are you comparing if not power relationships between characters? Any system with resource sinks - "inefficient areas" - is a bad system. Resource sinks are a flaw in the system and 'efficiency' is a dumb paradigm in the first place - all your XP should be worth the same and if you're using a good system there's no 'better' or 'worse' way of spending it. A new player should be able to make what they want as easily as an experienced player.
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Nov 8, 2013 04:58
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LGD posted:Options are power. The BP/XP split doesn't cause you to not hand out XP at the end of a session. You only "lose" XP if you put it into inefficient areas you neglected at chargen, and only in relation to another PC. What are you comparing if not power relationships between characters? Options aren't always power and this isn't about power. I have explained this to you several times: experience points have creative, communicative, and emotional value independent of their ability to boost damage rolls. quote:Because sharkdad owns? And would you care to point out some full XP-gen systems that are known for their fast character creation? Because there aren't many. Sorry, XP-gen has advantages but swiftness or ease of use to the uninitiated are not among them. Sharkdad is dead and only the ignorant weep. Also, are you pretending Exalted has fast character generation? Because it just plain doesn't. There are too many moving parts and special exception-based rules to look up. Like, you could literally play it with a full 2E-calibrated XP-from-zero houseruled chargen system and the mathematics of spending your points would consume no time whatsoever compared to actually perusing lists of Charms and equipment and calculating your attack pools and four different DVs and combo costs and mote commitments. I honestly cannot fathom who these hypothetical people are that Exalted' specific 1e/2e chargen system supposedly appeals to, where, like, they're perfectly fine with huge lists of Charms and can intuitively grasp that they should take Str 1/Dex 5 instead of Str 3/Dex 3 but will turn tail and run if they learn too early that increasing their character traits down the line will include both multiplication and subtraction, so you have to get them invested first and hope that the sunk cost fallacy keeps them at the table once you reveal the experience point system. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Nov 8, 2013 |
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Nov 8, 2013 05:01
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Bigup DJ posted:Any system with resource sinks - "inefficient areas" - is a bad system. Resource sinks are a flaw in the system and 'efficiency' is a dumb paradigm in the first place - all your XP should be worth the same and if you're using a good system there's no 'better' or 'worse' way of spending it. A new player should be able to make what they want as easily as an experienced player. Yes. I know. That just has to be weighed against the initial difficulty and approachability of chargen. Or not if you go with non-scaling costs, which is better. But if you do I think that there is a reasonable case to be made for not doing XP-gen character creation. That's all I'm saying*. *Ok I'm also on a dumb ol' tangent saying Ferrinus' analysis is fundamentally rooted in an implicit equation between experience and character power.
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Nov 8, 2013 05:06
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Ferrinus posted:Options aren't always power and this isn't about power. I have explained this to you several times: experience points have creative, communicative, and emotional value independent of their ability to boost damage rolls. quote:Sharkdad is dead and only the ignorant weep. quote:Also, are you pretending Exalted has fast character generation? Because it just plain doesn't. There are too many moving parts and special exception-based rules to look up. Like, you could literally play it with a full 2E-calibrated XP-from-zero houseruled chargen system and the mathematics of spending your points would consume no time whatsoever compared to actually perusing lists of Charms and equipment and calculating your attack pools and four different DVs and combo costs and mote commitments. quote:I honestly cannot fathom who these hypothetical people are that Exalted' specific 1e/2e chargen system supposedly appeals to, where, like, they're perfectly fine with huge lists of Charms and can intuitively grasp that they should take Str 1/Dex 5 instead of Str 3/Dex 3 but will turn tail and run if they learn too early that increasing their character traits down the line will include both multiplication and subtraction, so you have to get them invested first and hope that the sunk cost fallacy keeps them at the table once you reveal the experience point system.
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Nov 8, 2013 05:13
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LGD posted:No, you've said that several times and then totally failed to back it up. I don't know where I equated character power to damage rolls. It absolutely extends to narrative control and soft power. But it's still character power. I mean where are the experience points being lost? The are not- it's the options that they can buy that are being lost. And options are power. Experience points aren't the same thing as character power and someone who didn't care about relative character power easily could and probably would still care about experience points. Experience points give players the authority to define their characters, whether or not that definition includes "powerful". No one's character concept should cause them to lose that authority, and certainly petty bullshit like buying stats in the wrong order shouldn't have any bearing on it. quote:No, it's not fast at all. Charm knowledge takes the longest. But I strongly disagree that distributing your points would take next to no time, especially when all of your abilities and power (charm selection, etc) depend on that distribution. But hey, I'm sure those DVs take people a real long time. You have four of them and they're spawned by different game traits and they get bonuses from different kinds of equipment, specialty, and power. You have to look all this stuff up! It's never the math that takes a lot of time, it's the research and decision-making. quote:That isn't the argument at all? The argument is distributing a huge pool of points up front is necessarily complicated, time consuming and unpleasant, while distributing small pools in play is fine. You distribute a huge pool of points up front either way, and in a way that permanently affects your ability to distribute small pools of points later on. The BP/XP system isn't actually fast and easy, unless you're a really strange person with an extremely specific temperament and set of goals - you really hate arithmetic, but you really love extremely lopsided and min/maxed stats, but you really hate planning for the future OR don't care whatsoever about your character's future stats, etc.
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Nov 8, 2013 05:24
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Ferrinus posted:The BP/XP system isn't actually fast and easy, unless you're a really strange person with an extremely specific temperament and set of goals - you really hate arithmetic, but you really love extremely lopsided and min/maxed stats, but you really hate planning for the future OR don't care whatsoever about your character's future stats, etc. ...this would actually explain a lot of what we see in grognards.txt. "I don't care about what we're actually doing in play, you storygaming Swine! All that matters is that I made The Best Character! I WIN!"
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Nov 8, 2013 05:34
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The key to liking BP+XP with different costs for everything in chargen vs play is to not understand anything about how it works. That it is still in 3e is worrying.
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Nov 8, 2013 05:43
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I don't get it. If we all agree that a flat-cost system would be better, and we all agree that this is a legacy issue sticking around for no reason, than what are we still disagreeing about? Whether or not this issue is worth going to the mat about? Whether or not it's the biggest issue with the system that we know of? Whether or not we can tolerate a BP/XP split? I've lost the thread, guys. I don't get it.
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Nov 8, 2013 05:45
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As far as I can tell, too many people criticized BP/XP in harsh and intemperate tones.
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Nov 8, 2013 05:48
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