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IIRC the 1e core actually does list the training times of caste/favored abilities as "instant". Mostly this did nothing for your actual specialty skill but did mean that an eclipse caste who's never seen a horse in their life could take to the saddle instantly if their player so chose. Milton's right that XP scaling's main effect is to discourage PCs who don't begin the game having already mastered their core skills. There's nothing actually wrong with starting with Archery 5 or whatever, of course, because the real meat of character decelopment happens when you buy notably flat-costed Charms. It does make it kind of obvious that Abilities, for players, are predominantly inhibitors and gating mechanisms rather than actual end-goals in and of themselves, and makes it weirder that the gating mechanism then has its own built-in gating mechanism further hindering your ability to buy it.
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Dec 1, 2013 17:26
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2E maintains favored and caste abilities being instant training time, which is something I liked. Specialties in them still took 3 weeks for some reason, as did raising an ability from 0 to 1, and attributes were months, which was crazy. Favored and Caste charms are Ability Days (So usually 5), while unfavored are Ability + Essence days. This is super weird because Unfavored and Out of Caste abilities are (Rating) weeks so usually it's faster to pick up a charm then learn an ability, and you wanted the charms anyway. So confusing.
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Dec 1, 2013 19:02
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I feel like almost everyone house ruled those training times to some extent. I feel like Ex3 would be better suited by having a more fiddly experience section. As in, have it have the ridiculous training times, but also have a section explaining how to best reduce those times or even remove them and how that might have an effect on your game.
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Dec 1, 2013 19:45
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Leave room for a sixth dot you can only get from an in-game training montage, required for capstone charms. The sixth dot is called the Martial Arts Dot.
DOCTOR ZIMBARDO fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Dec 1, 2013 |
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Dec 1, 2013 22:00
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There's a real, fundamental flaw with point buy xp systems where you ostensibly gain xp for the actions you take and then can spend that xp on whatever the hell you want. Training times make it even more absurd. You just successfully negotiated a treaty so now you have enough xp to take three months of downtime pumping iron for that new dot in Strength. You can do wishy-washy GM fiat "justify your xp expenditures" type stuff but that's too fuzzy to really be a rule and if you print it in a book it just leads to rear end in a top hat GM syndrome. A better solutions would be either: -Embrace the person-simulating aspect by using a Burning Wheel style system where your traits get better as you actually use them. Have rules for study and training to learn new things or improve stuff you won't naturally get better at. or -Just throw up you hands, admit it's a game, and let players spend xp on whatever they want whenever they want with no justification because it's fun to add new stuff to your sheet. Exalted unfortunately has pretensions of both with its escalating point costs and training times while also having magical powers that you just start manifesting naturally since there are no old solars around to teach them to you. Unless they're martial arts charms you buy with your martial arts xp or whatever the gently caress.
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Dec 2, 2013 02:44
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cenotaph posted:There's a real, fundamental flaw with point buy xp systems where you ostensibly gain xp for the actions you take and then can spend that xp on whatever the hell you want. Training times make it even more absurd. You just successfully negotiated a treaty so now you have enough xp to take three months of downtime pumping iron for that new dot in Strength. You can do wishy-washy GM fiat "justify your xp expenditures" type stuff but that's too fuzzy to really be a rule and if you print it in a book it just leads to rear end in a top hat GM syndrome. We maintained a "dual track" system, where XP spent on Charms/Essence had a seperate training time from XP spent on Skills/Attributes. Worked pretty well, and helped to keep player advancement diverse. We still did instant training for caste/favored skills, though, leading to moments like a Night caste going from Presence 2 to Presence 5 in a heartbeat, blowing a pile of willpower on channels and such, and using it to intone the proper command words to detonate a small army of Soulsteel-boned zombies.
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Dec 3, 2013 11:29
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One of the great disappointments I had when I started playing Exalted was that it didn't support master-disciple relationships. You don't need to work hard to convince the Great Volcano God to teach you his secret forging technique, or to sneak in a monastery and steal its secret scrolls. Well, unless they do it that way for Martial Arts but not the rest of the abilities, for unfathomable reasons that only the dev team knows. I also see little point in the attribute and ability systems. I don't understand the game design logic for "start at the pinnacle of human capability and then stay stuck there for the rest of the campaign": it's not narratively interesting and it serves little purpose as a gating mechanic. The only Attribute/Ability gating that players have to deal with is for things that lie outside their broad areas of expertise, and the game already heavily rewards you for specializing. It's unnecessary and (as I prefer generalist groups that make preparing sessions easier) also undesirable.
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Dec 4, 2013 17:21
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Lymond posted:I also see little point in the attribute and ability systems. I don't understand the game design logic for "start at the pinnacle of human capability and then stay stuck there for the rest of the campaign": it's not narratively interesting and it serves little purpose as a gating mechanic. The only Attribute/Ability gating that players have to deal with is for things that lie outside their broad areas of expertise, and the game already heavily rewards you for specializing. It's unnecessary and (as I prefer generalist groups that make preparing sessions easier) also undesirable. You don't stay stuck there, charms are natural expressions of your abilities. It's not like getting a 5 is the end of your character's development in that ability, the true test of capability is what charms you take after that. I also vastly prefer specialist groups because I find them to make things more interesting. Like watching someone use a chainsaw to solve a 'hammer' problem. The gating problem doesn't really bother me, just that the way the costs are setup is rear end-backwards and everything should be either flat or scaling. Preferably flat.
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Dec 4, 2013 21:24
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Ithle01 posted:You don't stay stuck there, charms are natural expressions of your abilities. It's not like getting a 5 is the end of your character's development in that ability, the true test of capability is what charms you take after that. I also vastly prefer specialist groups because I find them to make things more interesting. Like watching someone use a chainsaw to solve a 'hammer' problem. The gating problem doesn't really bother me, just that the way the costs are setup is rear end-backwards and everything should be either flat or scaling. Preferably flat. I do not understand why we need both though, if anything worth caring about starts at 5, why not just have 2 or 3 states for an ability to be in and have charms be the progression factor for an ability? Hell, if you wanted to stick to the 25 ability, 5 caste + 5 more favored format, have 5 skills be at focused, 5 at trained, and the other 15 at untrained and say your 5 caste abilities must be at least trained. Instead of having focused/trained/untrained effect xp cost, just say you cannot have more untrained ability charms than trained ability charms, and you can't have more trained ability charms than focused ability charms charms. There are dozens of potential ways of streamlining the system.
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Dec 4, 2013 23:50
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axelsoar posted:There are dozens of potential ways of streamlining the system. Because the system is used for things other than the Exalts? You need to have room for other levels of skills. And one of the draws of Exalted for me is the relatively crunchy system - not all games need to be simplified. Stuff like the BP/XP split is a problem because you have two systems that provide very different incentives when it comes to character design, but not all complex design is bad design.
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Dec 4, 2013 23:59
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I agree, I like a crunchy Exalted. I don't want it to be simplified, at least not a lot. I think it needs to be Standardized, not Simplified. Like, I don't understand why you can't learn Martial Arts without a tutor. I don't like that you can learn how to be the world's greatest swordsman without a teacher, but even if you were a tough street brawler who learned how to fight in the streets, you can't learn First Pulse Style without an actual teacher, even though that style is called out as not being one made in a monastery or anything like that. Could we go down to 5 sets of 3 instead of 5 sets of 5? Sure. I don't see why not. I could probably get people into the game easier with that. Turning all abilities into three tiers starts to get too fluffy to me. I mean, I like crunch. I don't really like Nobilis because it feels too flurry, at least to me. If the 3E devs are aware of the problems of 2E, the Charms will be more spread out. I know that it is a problem in 2E where all of the charms basically start at (Ability) 5, but I figure the devs can see that and are working on making it so charms scale better.
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Dec 5, 2013 06:24
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The thing about 5 dots per Ability (and per Attribute) is that dots don't really mean anything. They're just +0.5 average successes each, and successes themselves are not only totally interchangeable (successes produced by Dex aren't different from successes produced by Melee) but also totally abstract. They're just, you know... successes. Good-doing-ness. They might be compared to other successes or eventually transformed through a series of steps into wounds inflicted or cubic feet of fire conjured or whatever, but the actual mechanism by which successes are transmuted into narrative effect vary by the activity and might be totally invented by the ST on the spot. So a five dot ability where each dot is another die is just insanely, insanely boring. It could as easily be a percentile system where each single experience point you spend gives you +0.5 on a d100 roll and I guess that'd be more "crunchy" by some metric, but would it really? I don't think so. I don't think the granular difference between Melee 3 and Melee 4 is actually visible in the narrative, ever. It helps if you're playing online and can look at the readout of your dice roll and be "Hah! My exact last die came up 10! If I hadn't bought that last Ability dot I would've gotten two fewer successes on this roll!" but even that's still a metagame thing because successes, themselves, are an abstraction. If each dot of an Ability actually did something concrete and new - Melee 1 means you can roll Strength + Dexterity to attack with your sword without any penalty, Melee 2 means you can parry others' blows, etc. - then sure, give each Ability five or ten or twenty tiers of gradation. What we've got now, though, is pretty much a function of inertia. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 06:38 on Dec 5, 2013 |
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Dec 5, 2013 06:35
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So something like the Mastery System from LO5R?
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Dec 5, 2013 06:43
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I've never read or played LO5R, but, frankly, I'd like something from World of Darkness or Exalted but that's interesting instead of dull. White Wolf's products are filled with cool 1->5 ability progressions, but they're always in special backgrounds, merits, or powers rather than the core system. If Abilities are going to go up to five dots, and/or if they're going to have scaling costs, they should look like Disciplines or Charm Trees. They shouldn't just be the boring prerequisites to all your other powers actually succeeding rather than failing. The problem is that you crack open the book and it says "Bureaucracy 5: You can clear out the corruption in the very Realm" (or whatever) but what it would say if it was honest would be "Bureaucracy 5: An average of 2.5 more successes on Bureaucracy rolls." But imagine if Bureaucracy was a set of mundane "charms" one of which let you make bargains, one of which let you organize teams, etc.
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Dec 5, 2013 06:51
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Really, many iterations of Storyteller already sort of do that by quantifying expected capabilities at 1, 3 and 5 dots. There's just a narrative wasteland in between those dots that acts as an xp speed bump. Of course, there's also the problem that most such descriptions of what a given Ability rating "means" are, uh, pretty whimsical.
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Dec 5, 2013 06:54
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Absolutely, but they don't back it up. Like, with a level 5 ability you're a master of whatever or a world-class whatever, and I guess that's true insofar as you're likely to get more successes than someone who doesn't have level 5 in that ability, but compare that to the difference between having Hardship-Surviving Mendicant Spirit and not, or, hell, even to the difference between having Resources 3 or not. Plus (fraction of a die) expected successes just doesn't cut it in a game that also has Charms.
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Dec 5, 2013 07:01
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Kenlon posted:Because the system is used for things other than the Exalts? Should it be, though? I mean, I used to think the same thing! I really liked the idea that you could take a mundane hero who has to worry about gangrene when they get cut and scale them up to be a supernatural badass who can kung-fu fight the god of disease. The problem, though, is that it's a total pipe dream. There's no such thing as a truly universal system and those two characters are from entirely different games. Trying to jam them together is going to be detrimental to one or the other, or both. You saw this in 2E, where the Exalted were about as sturdy as tissue paper in the face of the offense they could put out. So if trying to fit in mortal concerns damages the Exalted side of the game, why not just completely cut out the ability to play mortals? You can't design your system to do everything, so design to it to fit the characters that the game is about.
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Dec 5, 2013 07:01
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I disagree that Exalted's well-served by cutting out playable mortals. Instead I put it to you that the core Attributes/Abilities framework does mortals a disservice by being so incredibly bland. A mortals game would depend entirely on the level of tactical detail available in the various conflict resolution systems and the amount of concrete (rather than abstract) character differentiation available through martial arts, thaumaturgy, sorcery, and other Merit-supported systems, which honestly sound like they'll be pretty cool and therefore only cause the core A/As further embarrassment.
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Dec 5, 2013 07:05
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Tulul posted:So if trying to fit in mortal concerns damages the Exalted side of the game, why not just completely cut out the ability to play mortals? You can't design your system to do everything, so design to it to fit the characters that the game is about. I don't think it's impossible to do a game where you can just pick up any actor in the setting and play them, but it's definitely going to be difficult in a game like Exalted where the system tries to dance between Thematic Resolution Mechanic and Reality Simulation Engine. I think following the example of a lot of smaller games (and some bigger ones like D&D 4e) where the rules that apply to players are not the same and don't pretend to be the same as the rules that apply to everyone else is the way to go: versatility is wasted if you sacrifice everything else to reach it.
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Dec 5, 2013 07:22
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Ferrinus posted:The thing about 5 dots per Ability (and per Attribute) is that dots don't really mean anything. They're just +0.5 average successes each, and successes themselves are not only totally interchangeable (successes produced by Dex aren't different from successes produced by Melee) but also totally abstract. They're just, you know... successes. Good-doing-ness. They might be compared to other successes or eventually transformed through a series of steps into wounds inflicted or cubic feet of fire conjured or whatever, but the actual mechanism by which successes are transmuted into narrative effect vary by the activity and might be totally invented by the ST on the spot. This is a huge point about the Storyteller system in general that I think people keep missing and I want to agree with it harder but there's no 'agree' button on the interface here. The system is surprisingly opaque and bland for all its seemy-crunchy-ness, very opaque even by most RPG standards, with each dot of <thing> really adding nothing but arbitrary do-goodness, as you say. In a percentile system you know roughly your odds of success before even rolling; in Storyteller, the goalposts typically shift based on Storyteller whim and circumstantial modifiers. Having those percentile points generated somewhere by some system is perfectly okay, since I think being quantifiably good or bad at things is a fine point in games, but it shouldn't be where you hang your most colorful descriptions. I would love to see an Exalted where the focus of competence was simply narrower, but where a given Ability (or whatever it mutates into) becomes applicable in more circumstances. Like, I wouldn't want a system where every discrete dot of every Ability granted some new power, unless you have considerably fewer on your sheet. Shadowrun is my highest level of tolerance for fiddly mechanics. Having discrete bonuses for every dot of something and then having Charms and Merits and Flaws and Backgrounds would probably make my head explode. One of my biggest let downs about Exalted is the extremely diluted nature of character competence that happens in a full circle. Usually a given character is the Melee and Stealth guy - but that character also has another 15+ dots of Abilities in other things that may or may not overlap with other characters. Being kinda okay at a couple of things isn't much of a narrative standard, and it's even more boring in Exalted where characters tend to be larger than life rather than human-seeming facsimiles of real-world concepts. In real life I probably have a couple of dots in a lot of things with very few stand-out specializations; but statting up real people isn't really the point of Exalted, it's creating heroes defined by their dizzying heights and painful lows. The point-by-point percentile nature of the Storyteller system asks use to invest character resources in 0.5 successes, but I'm not convinced having +0.5 successes is a relevant milestone in Exalted to begin with. Be Good or Be Awful should be valid character traits when it comes to the things Abilities govern, but Be Mediocre just seems so counter to Exalted's tone.
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Dec 5, 2013 07:52
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Well the way the dice pool math works it gives you a nice balance between predictable results and wild outliers, which is a nice feature for an rpg. The 1-10 scale (not that this really exists in Exalted) works pretty well for it. There's no reason to have attributes and abilities though, outside of some dubious simulation value. I don't really care that the dots don't mean anything, although I do agree that it makes a mortal game pretty boring to not have any extra bits to fiddle with. Exalted (and pretty much every white wolf game) is about making a person and then layering stuff on to them that shows why they're special, magical snowflakes. I find the concept appealing and don't want it to change, especially since I've seen what kind of systems people come up with when they start off with superpowers as the baseline assumption. It would be nice if charms didn't have to bear the entire load of providing interesting crunch.
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Dec 5, 2013 09:46
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Ferrinus posted:The thing about 5 dots per Ability (and per Attribute) is that dots don't really mean anything. They're just +0.5 average successes each, and successes themselves are not only totally interchangeable (successes produced by Dex aren't different from successes produced by Melee) but also totally abstract. They're just, you know... successes. Good-doing-ness. They might be compared to other successes or eventually transformed through a series of steps into wounds inflicted or cubic feet of fire conjured or whatever, but the actual mechanism by which successes are transmuted into narrative effect vary by the activity and might be totally invented by the ST on the spot. Well, thanks to Excellencies, they're more like +1 average success each for many Exalt types. More than 1, really, but it's something like +1.1. And the problem is with earlier versions of Exalted is that binary success / failure of combat rolls combined with the lethality of combat makes squeezing out the highest values you can get is essential to plain survival. Add in the fact that your dice pools can subtract or add damage in combat, having a good defensive pool ends up being more important to survival than your actual health levels.
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Dec 5, 2013 22:37
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Actually, the combat system is one of the only things that does give narrative meat to Attribute and Ability ratings. The +2.5 successes that having Melee 5 gives you isn't just a generic good-doing numerical abstraction, it can actually be translated into some percentage chance to kill a grown man where he stands. It's still dull to tick your expected_success_total up by a fraction with each dot purchase, mind you, but at least its narrative and game-mechanical relevance is clear.
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Dec 6, 2013 04:24
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A part of this seems to be good old legacy Storyteller, which was originally designed around doing Vampires and Werewolves in game mechanics. And while those were superhuman to be sure, the Exalted operate on a different scale. This means that you wind up with a character sheet rather similar to the ones from oWoD.. but you're playing baseball elephants and composing sonnets that make a person's tears turn into diamonds.
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Dec 6, 2013 04:38
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Ferrinus posted:Actually, the combat system is one of the only things that does give narrative meat to Attribute and Ability ratings. The +2.5 successes that having Melee 5 gives you isn't just a generic good-doing numerical abstraction, it can actually be translated into some percentage chance to kill a grown man where he stands. It's still dull to tick your expected_success_total up by a fraction with each dot purchase, mind you, but at least its narrative and game-mechanical relevance is clear. But there's no difference between Dex 1 Melee 5 and Dex 5 Melee 1 in an individual roll. You need the charm system to bear that load. The only way to tell the differences is to bring other skills into play. Then you get into situations where the Dex 5 Stealth 5 sneak master who never picked up a sword is only one die short of the Dex 1 Melee 5 crippled swordsman because the system forces you into that. It's trying to simulate that talented but untrained people will be broadly mediocre at different things but that's not something that always lines up with reality or the fictional inspirations. It would make more sense to only have skills since it allows for more customization, reduces derived statistics, and gets sidesteps the "what the hell is the difference between Charisma and Manipulation" problem. Obviously a skill only system isn't going to happen (and I don't really care that it won't happen) but if one were to design a dice pool system from the ground up skills would generally be a better choice. The only mildly interesting choice Attribute + Ability adds is figuring out optimal xp expenditures when you want to be competent at a variety of skills, and even that's mostly removed because your splat determines whether your charms (the primary measure of competency) have prerequisites of one or the other. You buy the one your charms tell you to.
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Dec 6, 2013 06:44
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Oh, yeah, it doesn't differentiate between them a jot, but there's a real difference between getting 1 success on a punch and 5 successes on a punch. It's not immediately clear and you have to perform a bunch of transformations involving damage and soak and such to figure it out, but you can make statements that X many successes are probably enough to inflict Y injury on Z type of person. That's not to say I don't agree with the rest of your post. Basically, there are a lot of broad criticisms to be leveled at the classic White Wolf stat/skill array - I've been harping on the vagueness of "successes" and the lameness of traits that are so important and difficult to buy doing nothing but giving you more successes on the average, but there's also fuzzy differences between traits, drastic gulfs in each trait's mechanical relevance compared to the next's, etc. I guess the takeaway here is: attributes and abilities aren't interesting enough to be as important as they are, and even given that they're not important enough to deserve futzy training times and scaling costs.
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Dec 6, 2013 07:07
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I like the comparative straightforwardness of Attributes and Abilities a lot more in WoD games than I do in Exalted, because in WoD games the basic premise is generally that you're just, a regular person who is a monster now. Exalted is about people who were heroes before they became demigods. The mundanity of the base system is a lot less rewarding, and does less to differentiate between normal actions and magically endowed actions, here.
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Dec 6, 2013 07:16
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Ferrinus posted:Oh, yeah, it doesn't differentiate between them a jot, but there's a real difference between getting 1 success on a punch and 5 successes on a punch. It's not immediately clear and you have to perform a bunch of transformations involving damage and soak and such to figure it out, but you can make statements that X many successes are probably enough to inflict Y injury on Z type of person. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. There needs to be some sort of baseline system to start layering interesting effects on. A random number generator is the traditional rpg choice and I'm personally fond of dice pools for reasons I've mentioned previously. The basic "hit to make health bar go down" that almost every rpg combat system is derived from is boring enough that it needs lots of stuff added to it to make it interesting. However there's no reason not to get those bare essentials down as quickly and easily as possible instead of gunking them up with all the crazy stuff WW does.
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Dec 6, 2013 07:21
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Ferrinus posted:I disagree that Exalted's well-served by cutting out playable mortals. Instead I put it to you that the core Attributes/Abilities framework does mortals a disservice by being so incredibly bland. A mortals game would depend entirely on the level of tactical detail available in the various conflict resolution systems and the amount of concrete (rather than abstract) character differentiation available through martial arts, thaumaturgy, sorcery, and other Merit-supported systems, which honestly sound like they'll be pretty cool and therefore only cause the core A/As further embarrassment. I'm not disagreeing that playing heroic mortals in Exalted could be super-cool, because it definitely can. I'm just not sure that you can fit in both styles of play without harming one or the other, and if you can't, it's pretty obvious which part of the game should be sacrificed. I mean, thinking about it, the basic problem is that you build Exalted as mortals and then scale them up, and like a lot of RPGs, Exalted doesn't handle scaling well. Like, in a rough analogy to D&D 3.5, mortals are the level 1-10 range, while Exalted start out at 11+. You start out at a point where you're already introducing scaling problems and then compound them as you rack up the XP. So maybe if you built the system to handle mortals and Exalted in different ways, instead of making Exalted scaled up mortals, you could sidestep the problem? Not sure how that would work, though. On the other topic, I like the idea of giving Attributes/Abilities more to do, but I'm also a little leery of introducing more complexity. I'm also not sure what you would actually put in there; because you would need really broad "powers" because each individual stat can mean a lot.
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Dec 6, 2013 07:43
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The scaling is something the new edition is supposed to address, namely that heroic mortals can be threats to exalts.
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Dec 6, 2013 07:57
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cenotaph posted:The scaling is something the new edition is supposed to address, namely that heroic mortals can be threats to exalts. That would be great, but I'll believe it when I see it. The only specifics relating to this that we have seen so far seem to be "numbers do not go past 5" and "we are scaling back charms", but without charms of their own, any mortal can be chumped with something as simple as first excellency, so call me skeptical on that.
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Dec 6, 2013 10:05
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axelsoar posted:That would be great, but I'll believe it when I see it. The only specifics relating to this that we have seen so far seem to be "numbers do not go past 5" and "we are scaling back charms", but without charms of their own, any mortal can be chumped with something as simple as first excellency, so call me skeptical on that. Mortals are getting *something* like Charms, since one of the things about martial arts is that (lesser?) forms' techniques could be learned by anyone but they have additional effects that can be turned on by spending motes.
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Dec 6, 2013 10:16
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Dammit Who? posted:Mortals are getting *something* like Charms, since one of the things about martial arts is that (lesser?) forms' techniques could be learned by anyone but they have additional effects that can be turned on by spending motes. So mortals can only threaten exalts if they are martial artists? that's also problematic.
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Dec 6, 2013 10:30
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axelsoar posted:So mortals can only threaten exalts if they are martial artists? that's also problematic. I dunno, depends on whether it's martial arts, martial arts, or martial arts where all the fun stuff for mortals hides.
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Dec 6, 2013 13:38
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axelsoar posted:So mortals can only threaten exalts if they are martial artists? that's also problematic. This is a problem I've always had with mortals vs. Exalts. In 2e at least (my experience with 1e is limited) there is a problem wherein only martial artists and sorcerers get any tricks at all to bring to bear against the Exalted. I think that mortals should get chumped by the various Chosen for the most part but if you're going to give Heroic Mortals some space to breathe they should probably all get some tricks they can use. If a mortal goes up to Mt. Zen to train his chi or whatever so he can fight that smug Twilight Caste that keeps coming around the village that's thematic; but it's stupid when, as an ST, I'm forced to use a martial artist every time I want a Heroic Mortal to stand up to one of the characters. As an ST I'd be tempted to fudge it by giving Heroic Mortals one or two really basic Charms they can use N times per session and then changing to fluff to reflect their nature as Normal Dudes.
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Dec 6, 2013 17:20
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I don't think mortals need martial arts or sorcery to threaten Exalts, just a fair shake in the combat system. If named, heroic mortals are allowed to build up momentum and launch killing blows and so on just like Exalts are, then it's entirely possible to set the numbers up so that they have a good chance of at least driving an Exalt off or leaving the Exalt bedridden for a solid week. It definitely would help if there were Merits that enhanced endeavors that weren't martial arts or sorcery, but it's not technically required. That said, if it were up to me I would give every being an essence pool and make every Ability go 1. an Excellency, 2. some Ability-specific trick, etc. Of course, while Exalts regenerate 5m/turn mortals would regenerate 1m/turn or 1/m minute or something.
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Dec 6, 2013 18:15
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Ferrinus posted:That said, if it were up to me I would give every being an essence pool and make every Ability go 1. an Excellency, 2. some Ability-specific trick, etc. Of course, while Exalts regenerate 5m/turn mortals would regenerate 1m/turn or 1/m minute or something. If you're going to change the mote economy that much, just go whole hog and get rid of the traditional MP-style motes. Turn them into an ever-present action bar, say, 10 motes per turn. Commitment resources come out of something else, if you even need to have that mechanic, because these are your "do cool stuff" points and making wuxia heroes less likely to wuxia because they wuxia'd too much is bullshit. Of course, this requires a more drastic revision of the Charms framework, but this is all spit-balling that will never go anywhere anyway so who cares.
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Dec 6, 2013 18:28
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If you treated motes per turn and maximum motes as the same thing, you could leave commitment (with rejiggered numbers) in almost identical form. For instance, you've got 10m (I feel like your per-turn power points is what should be called "Essence" and your power trait should have a different name in a world like this) so by default you can buy a total of 10 bonus dice across all your actions, but if you decide to sustain some kind of 2m buff you've only got 8m/turn left over for bonus dice. Buffs wouldn't need actions to instantiate - you'd just decide if you're using one or not, turn by turn. Mind you, I'm not completely sold on something like that, because having a deep essence pool that refills at a certain speed and might eventually be expended actually makes for its own drama. If Solars always respirate 5m per action, then a Solar who's spending 1 or 2m/turn to fight you thinks you're a joke, a Solar who's spending 5m/turn to fight you is taking you seriously, and a Solar who's spending 10m/turn to fight you is actually legitimately challenged and had better freaking be making some headway or they're eventually going to be exhausted and crushed. If you had limitless, simplified motes like the ones you describe, you might find yourself wanting to make up some separate exhaustion mechanic anyway, since it's possible that willpower, health, and however the heck combat momentum works aren't quite set up to enable it. The ability to spend so much of your resources right now that you're at a disadvantage later is an important dramatic tool. Here's the change they absolutely should make to Ex3 if they haven't already, though: motes should regenerate 5m/turn all the time, not 5m/turn in combat only. The latter's awkward and doesn't really stand up to narrative scrutiny, and powers whose use you want to limit on a per-scene or per-day timescale should be costed in terms of ongoing commitment (such that any fight you get into you're likely to start with less essence on hand), willpower, or health.
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Dec 6, 2013 18:36
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Even animals are getting special moves. And don't forget that weapon stats are getting simplified, which probably means they'll get funky abilities to differentiate them.
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Dec 6, 2013 18:47
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| # ? May 30, 2024 18:54 |
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Wouldn't it be just like a tabletop RPG for animals to get special moves but not humans, though
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Dec 6, 2013 19:04
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