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Stephenls posted:the established NPCs still have merit if executed well. Well this is true of literally everything isn't it? Given that, why keep them around?
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Feb 16, 2014 03:14
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Established characters seem more like a problem than an asset. I've already read everything I care to read about the Mask of Winters - unless you redo that guy, there's nothing to say about him. And if you redo him, you're maybe alienating anybody who just can't get enough of that guy because the Exalted fanbase has made a fetish out of the setting. Whereas if you make a new character entirely, hey, Masky is probably still around, so no harm done either way. I can see the merit. Old characters are part of the setting, people love the setting, gotta keep the old guys around. And from that perspective there's no reason to throw the baby out with the piss water, but I dunno. I have a lot of faith in the new writers and I want to see what they can do without a radioactive albatross around their necks.
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Feb 16, 2014 03:31
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Lymond posted:And this is probably the second thing I've heard about Lunars ever since third edition was announced that sounds great and brought a smile to my lips. Tempered by the fact that Lunars had no credible mechanics to support His Divine Lunar Presence as a character or NPC and the whole barbarian thing doesn't sound like it would either. I've had this discussion a lot. 2E Lunars are really good at Social combat, it's just that while the Solar skips the entire Mass Combat Social System, the Lunar plays in it, and most other Splats completely ignore it by having no way to interact with it. Sidereals can't as far as I know, in that they have no charms for it, not that they skip it ala Solars or Infernals. They can also do really good individual Social combat, which I can take the time to explain if I have to or not. the 'Lunars can only fight thing' is just a really bad meme based off of Lunars being good at combat and no one reading any of their other charms. Hell post-Usurpation if you wanted an Artifact 4 you better go ask a Lunar, they just did it slow.
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Feb 16, 2014 03:32
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Stephenls posted:We have some new ones; f'rex His Divine Lunar Presence is making the jump from Brennan's "Heaven's Reach" shard to the core setting. But the established NPCs still have merit if executed well. My two cents on the matter, the whole "edition model" sorta bugs me in rpgs, if developers are expecting people to pay all over again you would hope you are not getting "Lunars 3rd: we swear we nailed it this time!". I know I am totally in the minority here but I wished that the 3E crew took the liberty to start fresh with many aspects of the setting, hell, even so far as to reshuffle the base exalts, nations, geography, lore into something new. "This time the Lunars are the head honchos ruling most of creation" or other new takes on the base setting would have been cool. No matter how hard the writers try there is going to be plenty of word-count rehashing things we already know about the setting, and It kinda sucks to pay full price for the chapter telling me about the usurpation and gods and base exalts and everything else staying the same. This is why Shards is, and always will be, my favorite exalted book, it turned the base setting on it's head and had some really fun new ideas to work with. Totally not the fault of the exalted guys though, that is just how the industry works. Ash Rose fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 04:17
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Mendrian posted:Established characters seem more like a problem than an asset. I've already read everything I care to read about the Mask of Winters - unless you redo that guy, there's nothing to say about him. And if you redo him, you're maybe alienating anybody who just can't get enough of that guy because the Exalted fanbase has made a fetish out of the setting. Whereas if you make a new character entirely, hey, Masky is probably still around, so no harm done either way. If you can produce a cool new reading of an old character, then by all means, go ahead and do it! I just don't think it matters whether a character's already established - you don't keep characters around because they're old, you keep them around because they're good. The current devs have done some good stuff, but I think they have a tendency to pander to a very specific, established audience. Edit: Saw this after I posted: axelsoar posted:I wished that the 3E crew took the liberty to start fresh with many aspects of the setting, hell, even so far as to reshuffle the base exalts, nations, geography, lore into something new. "This time the Lunars are the head honchos ruling most of creation" or other new takes on the base setting would have been cool. No matter how hard the writers try there is going to be plenty of word-count rehashing things we already know about the setting, and It kinda sucks to pay full price for the chapter telling me about the usurpation and gods and base exalts and everything else staying the same. This is why Shards is, and always will be, my favorite exalted book, it turned the base setting on it's head and had some really fun new ideas to work with. Yes!! This is all great and I totally agree. Bigup DJ fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 04:21
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Speaking of reshuffling stuff about the setting, I got bored today and wrote up this alternative history/thematic niche for Abyssals.The Lorekeepers posted:A Dead History The prose is still rough, but you get the idea. Opening up the Underworld a bit more and giving Deathlords and loyalist Abyssals more nuance than "really wants everything to die right now" vs. kinda wants everything to die at some point in the indeterminate future, and also to make Abyssals more than just Murder Exalted. In addition, it creates a nice little trifecta of creators/preservers/destroyers with Solars, Abyssals, and Infernals.
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Feb 16, 2014 04:53
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Lilith was fine up until the point when Desus started getting mentioned outside Ophilem's writeup in Creatures of the Wyld.
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Feb 16, 2014 05:09
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GimpInBlack posted:Speaking of reshuffling stuff about the setting, I got bored today and wrote up this alternative history/thematic niche for Abyssals. This is the best thing and I would play the holy hell (  ) out of this sort of setting.
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Feb 16, 2014 05:22
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A lot of poo poo in Exalted is great until a writer hears the siren's song of "you can leave your permanent mark on this setting by expanding this character" combined with "coming up with something completely new is hard". I'm not sure that Lilith and Desus can be stepped back from being poo poo now, though. Even if they only get their brief write-ups (Lilith might be your half-crazy ex! Desus punched a living lighthouse in the face, maybe he was you!), too many people will pollute the community waters with information gleaned from prior editions. It's a pretty poo poo deal, really. Edit: GimpInBlack posted:Speaking of reshuffling stuff about the setting, I got bored today and wrote up this alternative history/thematic niche for Abyssals. Also, this is really cool. BryanChavez fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 05:22
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GimpInBlack posted:Better underworld Hot drat, good stuff. Now do heaven.
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Feb 16, 2014 05:38
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Stephenls posted:Lilith was fine up until the point when Desus started getting mentioned outside Ophilem's writeup in Creatures of the Wyld. I agree! My point is that Desus started getting mentioned in a bad way and the whole spouse abuse thing was blown so far out of proportion that Desus and Lilith became toxic symbols of the Solar-Lunar Bond as a tool for abuse. Whatever merit the characters might have is overshadowed by the tone they set for Solar-Lunar relationships. Without disliking either of them (I enjoyed Lilith's writeup in the Scroll of Exalts) I would still shelf them because you can come up with something new that will be as good without having to shoulder that kind of baggage. Aggressive pruning of problematic NPCs opens up space for new ones to grow.
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Feb 16, 2014 06:16
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axelsoar posted:This is why Shards is, and always will be, my favorite exalted book, it turned the base setting on it's head and had some really fun new ideas to work with. Shards in nWoD were some of my favorite stuff, too. I wouldn't mind more bare bones settings + more shards.
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Feb 16, 2014 06:16
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BryanChavez posted:A lot of poo poo in Exalted is great until a writer hears the siren's song of "you can leave your permanent mark on this setting by expanding this character" combined with "coming up with something completely new is hard". I'm not sure that Lilith and Desus can be stepped back from being poo poo now, though. Even if they only get their brief write-ups (Lilith might be your half-crazy ex! Desus punched a living lighthouse in the face, maybe he was you!), too many people will pollute the community waters with information gleaned from prior editions. It's a pretty poo poo deal, really. Lymond posted:I agree! My point is that Desus started getting mentioned in a bad way and the whole spouse abuse thing was blown so far out of proportion that Desus and Lilith became toxic symbols of the Solar-Lunar Bond as a tool for abuse. Whatever merit the characters might have is overshadowed by the tone they set for Solar-Lunar relationships. Without disliking either of them (I enjoyed Lilith's writeup in the Scroll of Exalts) I would still shelf them because you can come up with something new that will be as good without having to shoulder that kind of baggage. Aggressive pruning of problematic NPCs opens up space for new ones to grow. To borrow a quote from Richard K. Morgan, some arenas are so corrupt that the only clean acts are nihilistic. I think this is sort of where I part ways with someone like Stephen and other people involved with Exalted...they look at something like the Elder Lunars or Desus and say "yeah that was bad...so we're going to give that another try and hope to do better." I look at something like that and my thought is that it would be easier to simply to simply drop that poo poo entirely and come up with something new and with none of the baggage that's encrusted around it. And of course it's easy to get too caught up in "spring cleaning" and wind up throwing things out that you don't want thrown out, but things like the Elder Lunars aren't, I would argue, some vital and integral part of the Exalted experience. Really, no NPC should be sacred because an RPG is, or should be, about the PCs first and foremost and NPCs can go pound sand. Even NPCs like Chejop Kejak or the Roseblack or whoever.
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Feb 16, 2014 08:17
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Kai Tave posted:To borrow a quote from Richard K. Morgan, some arenas are so corrupt that the only clean acts are nihilistic. I think this is sort of where I part ways with someone like Stephen and other people involved with Exalted...they look at something like the Elder Lunars or Desus and say "yeah that was bad...so we're going to give that another try and hope to do better." I look at something like that and my thought is that it would be easier to simply to simply drop that poo poo entirely and come up with something new and with none of the baggage that's encrusted around it. Agreed. A lot of people fall in love with Exalted, the setting, as opposed to Exalted, the Game, and I don't get it. This is one of the reasons I couldn't play oWoD with a straight face anymore. When the setting is bigger and cooler than the game you're playing there's a serious problem. I don't play Exalted to explore the idiosyncrasies of poo poo that's already been written. I wouldn't want to play a Star Wars game just to coo in awe at Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader. I don't even want those characters to make an appearance in my game. I'm not saying those characters actually are bigger or cooler than the PCs, but if you are unable to cut them because they're so ingrained, that's the message received. Exalted doesn't have a metaplot and I believe the writers when they say that. But the fan base is a different thing entirely. More has been built up around fanon than the writers could ever hope to cut off. Chejop isn't even important to Exalted, he's just a representative of The Old Wise Guard What Came Before and the Roseblack sort of just represents the potential for politics in the Realm, etc. But try telling the Exalted forum that. What would be lost if you cut those characters? The hard work of some other writers, I guess. The setting doesn't belong to iconic characters, they aren't sacred. The setting exists apart from its nuances. Nobody should feel obliged to include characters just because they existed before. At their heart those NPCs are just tools to communicate aspects of the settings. They aren't the only ways to accomplish that. One could argue that if it ain't broke don't fix it but I'm having a hard time coming up with a compelling reason for using existing characters other than creative exhaustion. Though that's a legit reason in many cases. Creation is now way bigger and more detailed than anybody ever envisioned back in 1E and if you want 3E to be anything like it you've got to reheat some of those characters or you just plumb run out of ideas.
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Feb 16, 2014 08:31
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Really, I think this is best exemplified in the changeover from the old World of Darkness to the new World of Darkness. While the nWoD is a series of modern horror/intrigue/action RPGs dealing with vampires and werewolves and changelings et al what it isn't is an attempt to try and make something new and better while also slavishly clinging to the past. nWoD werewolves don't fight Captain Planet villains, nWoD vampires still have petty politics and poo poo but all the old NPCs and factions and stuff about antediluvians coming back to eat everyone is more or less out and gone, nWoD changelings aren't insufferable otherkin manchildren... And the nWoD is, for the most part, a really strong series of games. Not being beholden to "shared continuity between editions" or whatever you want to call it is, I'm so positive I'd bet money on it, one of the key reasons why the new World of Darkness is as good as it is, because the designers and writers could do new, cool poo poo without having to try and finesse the bullshit baggage of the old games. That's not to say they have no callbacks or references at all, but I can't help but feel that "we're going to work really hard to make the Elder Lunars/Desus+Lilith/Chejop Kejack cool again" is like saying "we're going to try really hard to make Samuel Haight cool again."
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Feb 16, 2014 08:48
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I believe Holden or someone else in the thread raised the question of how long they will have to deal with the specter of earlier edition content, and the answer is: As long as you feel the need to keep reminding us of earlier edition content. Ash Rose fucked around with this message at 09:05 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 08:58
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Samuel Haight is cool again. (This was done by stripping away a lot of stupid dross and returning him to his roots.)
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Feb 16, 2014 09:00
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I guess the Ex3 team is like a circle of Exalts trying to assist the once-loyalist Abyssal in their quest for redemption, which is an impossible task and would require a miracle. I'm not crossing my fingers for miracles but I'm hopeful. Edit: Took the time to read GimpInBlack's take on Abyssals and I definitely love it.
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Feb 16, 2014 11:21
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axelsoar posted:Hot drat, good stuff. Admittedly I'm not as familiar with Heaven and it's particular problems, but I'll give it a think. Offhand we've got minimal opportunities/reasons to adventure there, junkie Incarnae, and Sidereals who are too tied to actually being in Heaven to really do much. That sound about right? EDIT: Thanks for the positive feedback, gang.
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Feb 16, 2014 16:26
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GimpInBlack posted:Admittedly I'm not as familiar with Heaven and it's particular problems, but I'll give it a think. Yu-Shan is an office building the size of Asia, where ex employees are hiding in the air conditioning ducts and hidden corner offices of the Executives who used to be running the show. And in some places you occasionally stumble across an office of one of the Founders, who has a shoe polisher that will suck your soul out through your navel. But for all that, the place just feels like Space. Inconvenient Space. It's inhabited by people who don't care about the passage of time the way Exalted would, people who don't have the time to deal with things beyond their own little squabbles... ...And Fate Ninjas who are on the outs with everyone IN the corporation and likewise not operating on the same scale of time as the rest of the employees. For all its size, Yu Shan's canon writeup feels like someone took that office building, stuck a hose into it and started pumping it up with a bicycle pump.
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Feb 16, 2014 16:48
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Gearhead posted:Yu-Shan is an office building the size of Asia, where ex employees are hiding in the air conditioning ducts and hidden corner offices of the Executives who used to be running the show. And in some places you occasionally stumble across an office of one of the Founders, who has a shoe polisher that will suck your soul out through your navel. This sounds amazing what could I possibly do to improve-- Gearhead posted:But for all that, the place just feels like Space. Inconvenient Space. It's inhabited by people who don't care about the passage of time the way Exalted would, people who don't have the time to deal with things beyond their own little squabbles... Oh. 
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Feb 16, 2014 16:57
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Stephenls posted:Samuel Haight is cool again. Samuel Haight appearing in a published product again doesn't equal "Samuel Haight is cool again." Samuel Haight will never be cool again. Samuel Haight was such a joke by the end that the writers turned him into an ashtray. That is Samuel Haight's legacy. Not "maybe he was a cool character once but then the writers went off the reservation," but "the character so stupid even White Wolf couldn't allow him to live." Desus will not be cool again. Desus is the creepy spouse-abuser what abuses spouses. Oh? He punched a lighthouse man too? Yeah cool, sorry, I'm too busy reading this 50-page thread over on the White Wolf forums about how spousal abuse is really how Desus shows Lilith he cares for her because they're Exalted and hlhalhlkahdkafhsjhajhjahjs Meanwhile, the Elder Lunars, and Chejop Kejack while we're at it, were never all that cool to begin with.
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Feb 16, 2014 18:13
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Kai Tave posted:Samuel Haight appearing in a published product again doesn't equal "Samuel Haight is cool again." Samuel Haight will never be cool again. Samuel Haight was such a joke by the end that the writers turned him into an ashtray. That is Samuel Haight's legacy. Not "maybe he was a cool character once but then the writers went off the reservation," but "the character so stupid even White Wolf couldn't allow him to live." No one can make Samuel Haight cool. He was never cool. At least Leviathan had that one time another Lunar was eager to listen to the wisdom of the Great Whale in a chapter fiction. Then we found out that wisdom was "a bloo bloo look how petty I am" and suddenly why would anyone care what he thinks? To be fair, I grew to like that the elder Lunars were ultimately unimportant. It left a lot of room for young Lunars to be doing everything interesting in the Threshold.
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Feb 16, 2014 18:53
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I thought Chejop was cool. He saw that the world could end if he did not usurp the Solars, and knew it would mean fighting his best friend, and he loved Creation and the people in it so much that he killed his best friend because he knew that his sorrow at doing such a thing would mean nothing compared to the fact that so many others definitely got to exist in Creation, and have their lives. It showed that Exalts will at times be forced to make hard decisions, all Exalts, including the PCs, and that when those happen, you can't shy away from them, even if they are hard or scary, because you are an Exalt and the world relies on you. I thought Tammuz could have been cool if not for the idea that the sexist society he built up because he was angry at his mate abusing him was then back pedaled into 'not his fault', because if he made it on purpose, and willingly, it showed that under the glowing and the cosmic power, Exalts are still just people, prone to the same faults as normal people, not some transhuman God-Thing that is above all flaws, but their tremendous power magnifies their little grudges and dislikes tremendously. I thought Leviathan, Admiral Arkadi, and Queen Amyana could have been cool if not for the fact that Amyana was portrayed as Super Solar Jesus and Arkadi as Admiral Rapetastic. The challenge of loving someone who is your mate's wife, when neither you or your Mate have romantic interests to each other, but your Mate has been your mentor all your life, is an interesting story in Exalted, where the books often come off as almost mocking towards anyone who is monogamous or wishes to be monogamous, or something like that, and portrays a completely different story then most of the rest of Exalted, where a person is caught between who they love and who they are duty bound to. The idea that Leviathan is still agonizing over his lack of choice, that he realizes that his inability to pick led to the death of both, shows that the Exalted can fail. That they can make mistakes and fail, and that just because you are an Exalt doesn't mean you aren't perfect. Some of these are lessons that people who play Exalted that I know have never seemed to understand, who view Solars as always correct, unstoppable engines who never fail, are utterly flawless, and anyone saying something against them is in the wrong. I think that the Elders have been cool before and could be cool again if they got the chance and were written better.
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Feb 16, 2014 19:11
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Some writer mentioned that the reason Chejop Kejak doesn't personally come blasting down from the sky to assassinate every nascent Solar and Lunar is that there's a nonzero chance Kejak could lose and die, which is pretty cool.
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Feb 16, 2014 19:17
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Ferrinus posted:Some writer mentioned that the reason Chejop Kejak doesn't personally come blasting down from the sky to assassinate every nascent Solar and Lunar is that there's a nonzero chance Kejak could lose and die, which is pretty cool. This is true from what I know.
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Feb 16, 2014 19:20
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axelsoar posted:Hot drat, good stuff. I can try. But this has expanded into a reconstruction of the entire Primordial War mythology. You have been warned. The Immanent Revelation by Which The Transcendent Incarnate Came to be Concealed, by Most Esteemed Chosen of Secrets M Mor Moran Mordechai Noachim posted:
I am actually going to keep going with this, doing a new creation myth for how all the mortal races came to be as they are, and then establishing how Heaven came to be, having its formation actually simultaneous with that of the creation of the Celestial Exalts and the Primordial War to explain the distinct nature of its 8 layers, their differing properties, and their differing ways of connecting to the world. But this is what I have done for now.
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Feb 16, 2014 19:26
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Kai Tave posted:Samuel Haight appearing in a published product again doesn't equal "Samuel Haight is cool again." Samuel Haight will never be cool again. Samuel Haight was such a joke by the end that the writers turned him into an ashtray. That is Samuel Haight's legacy. Not "maybe he was a cool character once but then the writers went off the reservation," but "the character so stupid even White Wolf couldn't allow him to live." Kai, if you disagree with Ethan Skemp that the core idea of Samuel Haight -- a kinfolk whose abusive father blamed him for not getting the First Change, and who turned his bitterness at that abuse into a hatred of the entire Garou Nation, who then found a blasphemous ritual that allowed him to kill werewolves and skin them to take their power, and who used that to become the werewolves' boogeyman -- then you and I do not see eye to eye on what constitutes cool. Everything that followed was very 90s White Wolf, but there's a core of a good idea in there and I think there's worth in cleaning the crap off and presenting it. As for Chejop Kejak, I don't think his point is to be particularly cool. Rakan Thulio is pretty cool. Chejop Kejak is supposed to work. He performs the narrative function in the setting he's supposed to perform, and if we threw him out we'd have to replace him with someone similar and then make a character design for that someone and it'd be a lot of effort for no particular reward, because Chejop works where he is. The elder Lunars are a decent pantheon of ancient god-monster boogeymen; if we threw them out we'd just have to come up with another pantheon of ancient god-monster boogeymen to replace them with, and if we specifically set out to make a pantheon of ancient god-monster boogeymen who fulfill the same narrative purpose as the existing ones, but in a cooler way, it would take a lot of iterating before they stopped being Poochy -- the same amount of iteration applied to Lilith, Raksi, Ma-Ha-Suchi, Leviathan, Ka-Koshu, and Tamuz can turn them much cooler characters than the hypothetical new guys would be by that point. And hell, like Chejop they're supposed to be background elements anyway; conspicuous coolness and the sort of focus necessary to make that conspicuous coolness clear draws too much reader attention. (gently caress Desus, though. Dude's been dead for 1,200 years; even if we kept him, why would we mention him? Uka the Boar pretty much falls into the same "Why?" category of unsalveageable characters; he's a bullish agressive warlord like Ma-Ha-Suchi, and if we're cleaning all the conspicuous rape off both of them, they lose all distinction so there's no reason for both.) If someone on the design team has a cool idea for an elder Lunar, we'll use that, and if it means putting one of the existing ones on the back burner to highlight the new one, we'll do that, but if those cool ideas don't pop up, we'll continue iterating what we have. It's a more efficient use of our time and creative resources than throwing everything out and starting from scratch. The sigs get more focus because they're in the foreground of the book's presentation; we genuinely do want to put a lot of time and creative resources into making them as appealing as possible. Hence the new spread of Solar sigs and the upcoming new spreads of sigs for every other hardcover. Incidentally, I am incredibly proud of my contributions to the new Solar sigs, but getting them out in the open took a pair of 8-hour 6-person Skype conversations in which hundreds of ideas were floated, compared, and discarded; they didn't spring fully-formed from someone's forehead like Athena. Stephenls fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 20:55
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Stephenls posted:The elder Lunars are a decent pantheon of ancient god-monster boogeymen; if we threw them out we'd just have to come up with another pantheon of ancient god-monster boogeymen to replace them with, and if we specifically set out to make a pantheon of ancient god-monster boogeymen who fulfill the same narrative purpose as the existing ones, but in a cooler way, it would take a lot of iterating before they stopped being Poochy -- the same amount of iteration applied to Lilith, Raksi, Ma-Ha-Suchi, Leviathan, Ka-Koshu, and Tamuz can turn them much cooler characters than the hypothetical new guys would be by that point. And hell, like Chejop they're supposed to be background elements anyway; conspicuous coolness and the sort of focus necessary to make that conspicuous coolness clear draws too much reader attention. Yeah, but is there anything more to them then that? Ancient god-monster boogeymen are cool and all, but they're not just that - they're also the most prominent extant examples of a PC splat, and, at least in 2E, defined the upper bound on Lunar competence. Like, if a Lunar PC lives through all the Wyld Hunts and Sidereal death-squads and internecine strife within the Pact and innumerable other horrors of Creation, congratulations: this is what you have to look forward to. If you don't care for this, you can also be a real protagonist's pet! (Said protagonist may or may not be an NPC, or even have any relevance to the campaign). If neither of these appeal to you, you can...uhhh...hey, Boris Vallejo did some pretty sweet artwork, right? I mean if they're supposed to be a bunch of incorrigible asshats, then you could still make a kickass campaign out of hunting them down and eating them for their powers, a la Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, but if you can spare some depth and nuance for the Deebs and the Sids and even the freaking Deathlords then come onnnnn.
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Feb 16, 2014 21:23
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I think we must be working from a different set of assumptions; at no point does it occur to me not to attempt to inject depth and nuance into a pantheon of ancient god-monster boogeymen. I keep getting tripped up by things like "I have to explicitly state that we don't intend to make these guys 2-dimensional villains only good for hunting down and killing."
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Feb 16, 2014 21:25
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Stephenls posted:The elder Lunars are a decent pantheon of ancient god-monster boogeymen; if we threw them out we'd just have to come up with another pantheon of ancient god-monster boogeymen to replace them with, and if we specifically set out to make a pantheon of ancient god-monster boogeymen who fulfill the same narrative purpose as the existing ones, but in a cooler way, it would take a lot of iterating before they stopped being Poochy -- the same amount of iteration applied to Lilith, Raksi, Ma-Ha-Suchi, Leviathan, Ka-Koshu, and Tamuz can turn them much cooler characters than the hypothetical new guys would be by that point. Just so we can all be on the same page here, what is the narrative purpose of the elder lunars? Because right now they serve the purpose of me shaking my head and going "Well, that gross poo poo is not going in my game." And speaking of effort, If you guys do decide to make people like ma-ha usable, no matter how well you write him, anybody who dealt with him last edition is going to have to dedicate time at their table to go. "No, he is not all about rape and hackneyed savage tropes. Seriously." It may take less effort on your end to re-use old characters, but for the people playing the game it is going to be hard to get people to change their opinion on characters they have know about for years.
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Feb 16, 2014 21:40
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MiltonSlavemasta posted:I can try. But this has expanded into a reconstruction of the entire Primordial War mythology. You have been warned. Man, here I am scribbling half-formed notes like "As Above, So Below," "Neo-Confucian Noir," "Three Days of the Lion Dog," and "Sidereals Have the Glengarry Leads" and Milton goes and rewrites the creation of the drat universe. Cool stuff.
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Feb 16, 2014 22:09
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axelsoar posted:Just so we can all be on the same page here, what is the narrative purpose of the elder lunars? Because right now they serve the purpose of me shaking my head and going "Well, that gross poo poo is not going in my game." Not to be your friends and support network, for starters. Certainly not to be role-models for ethical conduct. They're a pantheon of ancient shapeshifting god-monsters from the depths of what-the-gently caress, living relics of a fallen age of the world who demand respect and acknowledgment, whose designs for Creation may be fathomable, but who are probably not impressed enough with you to explain themselves. They're potential mentors, but they're also Baba Yaga -- be clever and pass her tests and she'll help you out, but if you fail them or don't skedaddle quickly after your reward she's likely to roast you in her oven and eat you. Another way to put this, if you don't buy into any of the awe or terror they generally inspire in the rest of the setting, is they're a bunch of fuckers puffed up on their own power and entitlement, who've decided their continuing survival means they're justified in doing whatever the hell they want and if the rest of the world doesn't like it, the rest of the world can get the hell out of their way. In this mode, they make for a decent set of end bosses, although they're more meant to be like mountains in the distance -- maybe you'll interact with one or two, but only in a campaign dedicated to mountain-climbing would you make a point of interacting with all of them. (And when I hear "Why bother putting them in at all if they're meant to be background scenery?" I sort of translate it into a money guy going "Why are you paying artists to put that mountain in the background if it's not part of the playable level in this video game?" or Chris Bell asking why the setting has more than one Deathlord if individual STs aren't likely to use more than one.) There are exceptions to that "Not role models for ethical conduct" thing, but it's like how Warren Buffet seems cool and Bill Gates does a lot of philanthropy but that doesn't mean you want to look to the Ten Richest People list for guidelines on how to live a good life marked by consideration for others. axelsoar posted:And speaking of effort, If you guys do decide to make people like ma-ha usable, no matter how well you write him, anybody who dealt with him last edition is going to have to dedicate time at their table to go. If we do our job right, he'll be cool enough that people will want to. Stephenls fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 22:14
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Stephenls posted:If we do our job right, he'll be cool enough that people will want to. I dunno, man, "No, he is not all about rape and hackneyed savage tropes. Seriously." is pretty close to the bottom of the list of things I ever want to have to say at a gaming table full of my friends and colleagues, and Exalted as a game line has already given me a lot of those kinds of lines to say. Sometimes it really is better to cut lines and do something fresh.
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Feb 16, 2014 22:19
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You know, it's funny, because people seem to like almost all of my creative output, but every time I explain the mechanics of my creative process people tell me it sounds like I'm on the wrong track and should drop what I'm iterating and start again from a better, more original and more inspired foundational idea. I'm not just talking about people on forums -- even John Mørke has this thing about how a list of creative priorities does not an inspired vision make, which is almost completely incompatible with how I always work from a list of creative priorities and never, ever work from an inspired vision. I am deeply distrustful of inspiration; I'm a craftsman, not an artist. That's where I'm coming from -- exhortations to drop something tainted by imperfection and start again with a more ideal beginning seem, to me, to violate basic Fail Faster good practices.
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Feb 16, 2014 22:41
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Stephenls posted:If we do our job right, he'll be cool enough that people will want to. Alternatively, you could not make rehabilitating bad characters an essential part of your job? It's not actually a requirement. I mean, Shards of the Exalted Dream was maybe the single most widely praised Exalted product since, I guess, 1st edition, and it was nothing but "What if we made Exalted but threw out all the terrible poo poo?" It was literally "Exalted, the Game" minus "Exalted, the Setting" and it loving sang. It's kind of reductionist, but at this point I honestly think that everything I've heard about 3rd edition that people have mostly liked has been something new, and everything I've heard about 3rd edition that people have mostly hated has been an attempt to defend or retool something from previous editions, and maybe that should be a guidepost for you guys? Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 23:05
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Stephenls posted:I keep getting tripped up by things like "I have to explicitly state that we don't intend to make these guys 2-dimensional villains only good for hunting down and killing." It seems like maybe this is the inevitable byproduct of recycling so many ideas from material where they were, in fact, those things. You get judged on your own merits when you have your own ideas. If you're putting a spit-shine on someone else's idea, then in the absence of new material you get judged on what's already there. There's no font of good will for you guys to draw on when you're trying to rehabilitate poorly-done or poorly-received ideas that other people had. This is the flip side of it taking less effort. Iteration is a great creative process. Getting mystified that, when iterating, people tend to form impressions based on the previous iteration is sort of dishonest.
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Feb 16, 2014 23:08
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I think Stephenls is right here. Like, arguably, the specific names "Raksi", "Chejop", etc are so loaded down with audience baggage that it's impossible or at least highly unlikely that their reinclusion will help rather than harm the game, regardless of their actual portrayal, but you'd pretty much have to replace then with renamed, palette-swapped versions of themselves since they fill such important, archetypical roles. If Raksi vanishes but Iskar the crazy jungle witch-queen who rules over a horde of lemur-men shows up, it's like, okay? Everyone will just think of her as not-Raksi anyway.
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Feb 16, 2014 23:08
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:Alternatively, you could not make rehabilitating bad characters an essential part of your job? It's not actually a requirement. It is to the extent that I enjoy it and would not be doing this if I weren't enjoying myself. The thing is, we are surrounded and inundiated by enough crap media that it is always easy to hear a pitch, imagine how it might be executed badly, and then criticize it on that grounds. But that a pitch can be executed badly doesn't mean it should be thrown out and replaced by another pitch, because all pitches can be executed badly. I am always far happier to hear about an upcoming remake of a bad movie than a good one; I love seeing an idea that was once done terrible done well, instead. "Ma-Ha-Suchi, terrible goat-shifter warlord out to go all Atilla the Hun on the River Province with his army of goat-men descendants" is a pitch. I mean, have you seen goat eyeballs? They're creepy! "Raksi, the ape-shifting cannibal Baba Yaga of Mahalanka, the City of One Thousand Delights" is a pitch. Rakshasas are great. "Leviathan, the legendary god-orca of the West, who guards a sunken city full of lost treasures" is a pitch. "Tamuz, subtle gazelle-hound-shifting ghost of Southern politics" is a pitch. That these pitches have been executed badly past makes me want to execute them well in the present; I am far more enthusiastic about the idea of doing those pitches justice than I would be about coming up with a new set that are only arbitrarily different because they're meant to fill the same sorts of roles. And I perform much better, creatively, when I'm working on an idea I'm enthusiastic about than when I'm working on anything else. Old Kentucky Shark posted:I mean, Shards of the Exalted Dream was maybe the single most widely praised Exalted product since, I guess, 1st edition, and it was nothing but "What if we made Exalted but threw out all the terrible poo poo?" It was literally "Exalted, the Game" minus "Exalted, the Setting" and it loving sang. This may be me being selfish: Shards is not the sort of project I dig working on. Ferrinus posted:I think Stephenls is right here. Like, arguably, the specific names "Raksi", "Chejop", etc are so loaded down with audience baggage that it's impossible or at least highly unlikely that their reinclusion will help rather than harm the game, regardless of their actual portrayal, but you'd pretty much have to replace then with renamed, palette-swapped versions of themselves since they fill such important, archetypical roles. If Raksi vanishes but Iskar the crazy jungle witch-queen who rules over a horde of lemur-men shows up, it's like, okay? Everyone will just think of her as not-Raksi anyway. Yeah, this. Except, in my experience, the moment you release a version of a previously promising but badly-executed idea that is well-executed, people immediately jump all over it and go "This is so cool now; it's great that you fixed that sucky thing and made it great!" Stephenls fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 23:10
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Ferrinus posted:I think Stephenls is right here. Like, arguably, the specific names "Raksi", "Chejop", etc are so loaded down with audience baggage that it's impossible or at least highly unlikely that their reinclusion will help rather than harm the game, regardless of their actual portrayal, but you'd pretty much have to replace then with renamed, palette-swapped versions of themselves since they fill such important, archetypical roles. If Raksi vanishes but Iskar the crazy jungle witch-queen who rules over a horde of lemur-men shows up, it's like, okay? Everyone will just think of her as not-Raksi anyway. I don't think the Lunar elders really fill inevitable archetypal roles, though. Lunars in general don't, because their splat was something of an after-thought in 1e. If Raksi and Ma-Ha-Suchi in particular had never existed, I don't think people would have even noticed their absence in the way that they would have if the Scarlet Empress or Memnon or Ketchup Carjack were missing.
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Feb 16, 2014 23:11
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