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Stephenls posted:(I admit when I saw that Charm preview my thought was "10% greater mass; or 10% greater height, length, and width? Because those are two different things....") Now I'm just seeing it as "Your familiar gets 10% fatter every repurchase" and you end up with one of those 50lb cats that get wheeled around in strollers on Youtube. If there's a different in combat between "People sized" and "Godzilla sized" (which there probably should be!) then having the Familiar Ox-body grant Kaiju size probably doesn't make sense, (but Mount-sized probably does AKA Clifford-sized.) It's preview text, and I'd recommend dropping the "10%" specifically because it feels like beta-text that hasn't been run through the flavor-generator, but I think that the charm itself is pretty solid. By 2 purchases your dog should go from "large example of his breed" to "that's... a really big dog" and by 5 purchases to "is that a dog?" But if you can spend this much exp on just upping your familiar's health I hope it can really be a badass combat companion, otherwise there isn't much point. VV-A fair point. I actually really liked the way it was optional in the charm-text too. mistaya fucked around with this message at 07:02 on Feb 25, 2014 |
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Feb 25, 2014 06:23
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I kinda like the understated size gain. Past a certain point, yeah, it's not really a dog anymore, it's some sort of prehistoric ur-dog, but if your character concept is "A guy with a dog" you presumably want to continue having a dog. Red Hare wasn't a twelve foot horse. Even with five purchases of this Charm you'll end up with an exceptionally fine and impressive familiar, but never to the point where it stops recognizably being what it is. Presumably there are other Charms for having an actual no-poo poo gigantic "Is that even a dog?" familiar, but there's no point forcing that on anyone who just wants a lot of extra HLs. EDIT: It works the other way, too—if you really want a double-sized familiar there's no point in gating that past Essence 5 with five Charm purchases, is there? You want it at like Essence 2 or 3, as one Charm. Stephenls fucked around with this message at 07:03 on Feb 25, 2014 |
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Feb 25, 2014 06:55
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Stephenls posted:Red Hare wasn't a twelve foot horse. Speaking of Red Hare. If him being one zhang long and eight chi tall is a measure of this charm, both Lu Bu and Guan Yu are amazing survivalists. Second off, what happens when Lu Bu dies and Guan Yu receives Red Hare? Does Red Hare shrink? Does he only shrink when Cao Cao has him, between the two? When Guan Yu gets him, can he make Red Hare even bigger (assuming the effect is truly permanent), or does only one set of these charms apply? Does Guan Yu go into XP debt until he can buy as many of those charms as Lu Bu had on the horse? These are questions you think about at midnight.
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Feb 25, 2014 07:06
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Stephenls posted:For the record, I can't give any hints about how Limit will be handled in 3e because I don't know; I haven't been given that section to edit yet. That said, neither Holden nor John have sought my input on it, either, which suggests they have a fairly strong idea of how they want it to behave. I want to ask you about this. Why wouldn't you know what they're up to? Could you get that information if you asked? I'm just worried we'll get a situation like Infernals where half the writers didn't know what the other half were up to. Thanks for your earlier reply on Limit by the way!
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Feb 25, 2014 07:22
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Bigup DJ posted:I want to ask you about this. Why wouldn't you know what they're up to? Could you get that information if you asked? I'm just worried we'll get a situation like Infernals where half the writers didn't know what the other half were up to. I am really, really limited in what I'm writing -- I did an introduction-to-Creation-as-a-place section modeled after the contents of the Exalted 1e corebook page 19 (...which was ultimately cut because it didn't fit with later chapter 2 drafts) and also a section on spirits. That's pretty much all the writing I've done. Beyond that, I'm a officially a copyeditor and unofficially-officially a prose-tightener -- I recently shaved about 3k off Minton's Threshold section just by careful removal of certain words, re-phrasing of certain ideas, and deletion of redundant paragraphs, which allowed us to fit three or four more locations than we otherwise would have been able to into the corebook. (This is kind of my thing; I did an absolute ton of it for Compass: Autochthonia and I like to think it's one of the reasons the book reads so well.) Because I'm a copyeditor, though, it's beneficial for me to not see the drafts until they're final or near-final, so I can come at them with fresh eyes. Holden and John bounce ideas off my head when they need creative input, and I'm in the brainstorming Skype calls where we discuss project progress or try to figure out a desired new direction for, say, elementals, or design a signature character spread, but a lot of the time I don't know how much of my input gets reflected in the text until I'm handed it for an editing pass. I could press for more disclosure from Holden but that would be me being a pain; dude's busy and he knows I want to help, so I trust him to accurately ascertain when I can help and when I'm not needed. I'll get to see the whole text eventually; what's the hurry? EDIT: Minton, not Vance. Stephenls fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Feb 25, 2014 |
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Feb 25, 2014 07:37
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Stephenls posted:I kinda like the understated size gain. Past a certain point, yeah, it's not really a dog anymore, it's some sort of prehistoric ur-dog, but if your character concept is "A guy with a dog" you presumably want to continue having a dog. Red Hare wasn't a twelve foot horse. Even with five purchases of this Charm you'll end up with an exceptionally fine and impressive familiar, but never to the point where it stops recognizably being what it is. And your first thought when reading an Exalted charm should never be "that sounds petty"*, because that is the opposite of what a charm should be. If "exceptionally fine and impressive familiar" was what you were going for, you should probably actually use those words, or any impressive sounding words, instead of implying that you were creating an Incrementally Fatter Pet Methodology. In the absence of any other information, it makes the resultant health levels also sound like a petty and meaningless amount of growth. It is the least interesting possible way of imparting what you were trying to impart. *Unless the charm in question is Petty Tyrant Revenge Technique, or something. Which should be a Bureaucracy charm. Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 11:19 on Feb 25, 2014 |
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Feb 25, 2014 10:45
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mistaya posted:Now I'm just seeing it as "Your familiar gets 10% fatter every repurchase" and you end up with one of those 50lb cats that get wheeled around in strollers on Youtube.  GISing for "fat pony" sucks a LOT now btw
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Feb 25, 2014 10:53
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BryanChavez posted:Speaking of Red Hare. If him being one zhang long and eight chi tall is a measure of this charm, both Lu Bu and Guan Yu are amazing survivalists. Second off, what happens when Lu Bu dies and Guan Yu receives Red Hare? Does Red Hare shrink? Does he only shrink when Cao Cao has him, between the two? When Guan Yu gets him, can he make Red Hare even bigger (assuming the effect is truly permanent), or does only one set of these charms apply? Does Guan Yu go into XP debt until he can buy as many of those charms as Lu Bu had on the horse? These are questions you think about at midnight. Obviously, it begins refusing to eat and becomes a gaunt and sickly shadow of its former self unless Guan Yu has the right charms. A Hero's stolen familiar doesn't just go over happily to someone else unless they are equally heroic and badass.
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Feb 25, 2014 11:15
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Hmm. random thought about Limit Breaks... I do believe they are important for the Exalted to have some huge flaw that may come up at the worst of times, as it happened to some other heroes of legend (Hercules flipped his poo poo, and murdered his family. Achilles got so offended that he refused to fight, and that got his friend killed). Putting it down mechanically can be pretty hard tho. I never -did- like the fact that some of the "you flip your poo poo out and begin killing people" Limit Breaks didn't let you use your Essence to fight, because what's the point of going Super Murder-Hobo if you can't access the thing that makes you, well, super? But about the mechanics itself, seeing how Solars are supposed to be the epitome of perfection... how about if Limit comes from failure? Not just any bad roll of the die, but in things that actually matter to you. As it rises, being simply reminded of your failure is enough to make you snap. You are a mighty warrior, in fact, you are The Greatest Warrior That Ever Lived. You just got thrown around like a rag doll by a being that cared nothing by your might, you couldn't hurt him, you couldn't defend against his blows, you had to escape. As you try to settle down with a drink at a town's tavern, you hear somebody make an off-handed comment about your battle-- or so you think. Next thing you know, every single person in the inn is dead, and you hold the bloody sword.
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Feb 25, 2014 13:04
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My issue with limit breaks is it kind of takes any responsibility off the characters. They are literally in no way accountable for their actions when under a curse, they have no say in it, it is not something that they can in any way be blamed for if you know the reality of the situation. Which isn't to say there is no drama to be had by people who refuse to believe its a curse, but it'd be much more impactful if the characters were actually responsible for the bad things they have done. Rather than being forced into it by primordial magics. I guess it comes down to what statement you want to make with it. I'm not really sure what statement "Primordial Magic forces you to be utter dicks now and then" makes, but I may be looking at it the wrong way.
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Feb 25, 2014 14:02
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:I agree, which is exactly why it's such a badly written part of the charm; it's an intentionally meaningless amount of growth, and it feels like it. System as statement, right? When I read "Your pet grows 10% larger," it doesn't sound like a cool amount of growth, it sounds like a really petty amount of growth, because it is a petty amount of growth. I think what you mean by system as statement here is pretty far from what I meant when I said we were moving away from it. It's a health level Charm that makes your familiar a bit bigger as a side-effect -- not a lot bigger, just enough to be noticeable. The mechanical effect of the Charm is pretty much just the health levels, so the size-gain is basically flavor to make the Charm less boring. That's not a bad thing. And I don't think anyone seeing it in the book next to Charms that are about having a bigger familiar is going to go "The bigger-familiar functionality of this charm not being rigorously-purposeful enough just ruins it for me" or even "This is nice but the bigger-familiar function of this Charm could really stand to be more rigorously purposeful." And, I mean, you could start with "If it doesn't work out of context then clearly this was a bad choice for a Charm preview" now I guess. Stephenls fucked around with this message at 14:59 on Feb 25, 2014 |
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Feb 25, 2014 14:56
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I'm going to have such an incredibly fat talking sparrow familiar you guys.
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Feb 25, 2014 14:59
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Attorney at Funk posted:I'm going to have such an incredibly fat talking sparrow familiar you guys. I fully endorse using this Charm to have Fat Pony.
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Feb 25, 2014 15:00
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Stephenls posted:It's a health level Charm that makes your familiar a bit bigger as a side-effect -- not a lot bigger, just enough to be noticeable. The mechanical effect of the Charm is pretty much just the health levels, so the size-gain is basically flavor to make the Charm less boring. I'm pretty sure he gets that, he's just saying that even for flavor purposes it's petty and boring.
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Feb 25, 2014 15:08
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Kai Tave posted:I'm pretty sure he gets that, he's just saying that even for flavor purposes it's petty and boring. In practice, lots of STs used to get hung up about 2-die stunts needing to be Awesome!, but the actual point of 2-die stunts was for the players to flesh out the environment with every description of their actions, so that it got more and more detailed as the encounter progressed and players began riffing off each other's details -- in that capacity, it wasn't important to mandate awesomeness in order to "earn" two dice with every single 2-die stunt action.
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Feb 25, 2014 15:12
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I have literally no idea what that's supposed to mean in relation to what I just posted. Here, maybe this will help? I don't even know: Old Kentucky Shark posted:If "exceptionally fine and impressive familiar" was what you were going for, you should probably actually use those words, or any impressive sounding words, instead of [using 10% increments]. If what you're aiming for is cool flavor for your Ox-Body Pet charm then use actual cool flavor instead of "your animal gets bigger by 10%," because that sounds more at home in a Pathfinder supplement than Exalted.
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Feb 25, 2014 15:24
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Not having seen the other Charms in question I would still bet at least a nickel (and I am not a betting man) that there's some text elsewhere about familiars tending toward exceptionally fine examples of their species, or familiar Charms progressively making your familiar more impressive. This Charm in particular makes your familiar more impressive by making it a bit bigger; I would suspect there's a defensive Charm that also gives them a 10% more lustrous coat, and offensive Charm that gives them 10% fiercer-looking claws, fangs, or horns.
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Feb 25, 2014 15:33
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Stephenls posted:This Charm in particular makes your familiar more impressive by making it a bit bigger; I would suspect there's a defensive Charm that also gives them a 10% more lustrous coat, and offensive Charm that gives them 10% fiercer-looking claws, fangs, or horns. So is the idea here to compound boring on top of pointless and thus create cool, the way that doctors in wuxia films mix poison with more poison in order to create an antidote to the dreaded Golden Toad Palm technique? You know that thing Exalted 2E did? Where the writers ladled pointless, overwrought, fiddly details onto everything which resulted in the RPG equivalent of a bland, joyous mush? This is sort of that same thing right here. "Your pet gets 10% bigger" is both pointlessly precise in that D&D sense and bizarrely petty for a game about larger-than-life demigods. I get that not every charm can be some world-shaking ultimate kung-fu technique that sunders reality, but that doesn't mean you have to go out of your way to make them sound like Feats from some D&D handbook.
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Feb 25, 2014 15:44
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Kai Tave posted:So is the idea here to compound boring on top of pointless and thus create cool, the way that doctors in wuxia films mix poison with more poison in order to create an antidote to the dreaded Golden Toad Palm technique? Trying to think of a way to say "The Charm makes your familiar a bit bigger with each purchase, up to about half-again as big at five" that's concise, low-wordcount, easy to comprehend, and expressed in terms of what one purchase does rather than what five purchases do, but which doesn't invoke percentages. Maybe if I think of something I'll suggest it during an edit pass.
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Feb 25, 2014 16:18
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"With each purchase of this charm your familiar becomes subtly but noticeably larger and more robust, a true paragon of its kind." I don't see why you really need to make sure that you express the exact amount of change each charm provides you here since presumably the base rules for familiars will be the ones that tell people "Your familiar is this big" and that should give them all the guidelines to know that by five purchases of Dog-Body Technique that their "Medium" size familiar should be quite a sizable and vigorous example of dog-kind by then, but still probably not be as big as a palace or whatever. If the charm doesn't come right out and say "this charm raises your familiar's size in a way that mechanically matters" (i.e. turning it into something that can go toe to toe with a behemoth) then the unspoken assumption should be that it can't do that no matter how many times you buy it. I mean, the sail charm you guys previewed doesn't say anything about it improving the handling of your ship by 100% of its inherent capabilities (though that's mechanically what it does), it tells you that you can sail even a lovely junk barge as though it were a nimble pirate cutter. Does it actually let you sail a junk barge as though it were a nimble pirate cutter when the dice hit the table? Well who knows, we don't have any context, but it's okay to employ some vague hyperbole when you're talking about demigodlike abilities.
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Feb 25, 2014 16:31
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There seems to be two separate complaints here: 1) "Ten percent bigger is not enough of a change to be impressive; it should make your familiar even bigger than that" (possibly with "Or if it's not going to make your familiar big enough to be genuinely impressive, it's not worth it to have the Charm make your familiar any bigger at all" amended). 2) "Percentages are a really clunky and flavorless way of getting across what the Charm does." For the first point, I just don't agree. There's nothing wrong with a Charm that makes your familiar a bit bigger but not a lot bigger, for those who want a fierce and impressive wolf companion but not a fantasy dire wolf that's six feet tall at the shoulder. Especially if there's another Charm for when you want a dire wolf. The second point might have merit. But as with many creative decisions this is more complicated than it looks! How many people, at this point, are trained to think of statements like "Your familiar becomes subtly but noticeably larger and more robust" as basically meaningless, such that they don't bother to incorporate it into their mental image of what's happening? If we say "This Charm makes your familiar bigger" but we don't say how much bigger, I think a goodly portion of players are going to assume "Enh, just fluff text; not bigger enough to be worth remembering to picture." Certainly actually saying how much bigger will help everyone at the table have the same general idea of just how big Alice's cool wolf companion is at the point that she's bought this Charm two times, but hold on -- is there even any benefit to ensuring everyone at the table is picturing Alice's wolf similarly? Or is something like "Hey, I purchased that Charm again, so my cool wolf is even bigger than it was last week, guys!" just let-me-tell-you-about-my-character wank? If you're not going to specify how much bigger in quantifiable terms, might it just be better to leave that detail off entirely and have the Charm just grant health levels? I don't accept that. I think insisting everything be mechanized or disregarded was a problem with late 2e; I think it is okay to portray the setting by making definite statements about it without necessarily having to tie those statements into dice and traits. "The wolf is four feet tall at the shoulder" is like "The room has four windows" -- establishing truths about the setting helps with player buy-in. The latter is probably more useful because it establishes just how many stunts involving freshly-broken windows the group will accept, but that doesn't mean the former is valueless. (See also: "My character has purple eyes and green hair.") But "10% bigger" is pretty clunky, even if it's preferable to "As much bigger as you want, as long as it's not bigger enough to have a mechanical effect!" This means... it's a trade-off. It's not particularly evocative prose, but it's clear and concise. Just how much does that un-evocative prose cost us, and can we measure that against the benefits of the Charm establishing a fact about the setting that people will be able to clearly picture? Well, no, not precisely, but we can make a subjective judgment. The sentence in question is "In addition, each repurchase increases her familiar’s size by 10%, to be manifested normally or only during Saga Beast Virtue and Deadly Predator Method." The bit I've bolded is the part that could be rewritten to make it less clunky and more evocative, assuming we keep the rest of the Charm's details the same. It's two words and I don't care. As part of a four-charm preview it's a big deal but on the page in a chapter with 25 abilities' worth of Charms, people will skip past it and move on to the next one, and using a precise benchmark like 10% rather than something fuzzier won't be notable. Stephenls fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Feb 25, 2014 |
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Feb 25, 2014 17:22
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Oh Jesus Christ the more I think about this the more it's a loving rabbit hole, too. Like, back when I was playing RPGs I always had difficulty engaging with the notional setting unless I could mentally treat it as a "real place," even though I know it's not a real place, so having established facts about it to go on helped with my "immersion," but that's not how everyone engages with these things and it raises the spectre of gamist-narrativist-simulationist and "Is immersion even a real thing?" arguments. And that's before we even bring up "Lea, you don't play anymore, so maybe you should shut the gently caress up and give primacy to the creative priorities of actual players."
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Feb 25, 2014 17:34
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This may be the first time in this thread that I've been talked into agreeing with Stephenls.
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Feb 25, 2014 17:37
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Is there a problem in making it so "this Charm can increase the size of your familiar by up to 50%, but this effect does not stack"? I don't see why it has to be done in itty bitty 10% increments.
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Feb 25, 2014 17:39
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Lymond posted:Is there a problem in making it so "this Charm can increase the size of your familiar by up to 50%, but this effect does not stack"? I don't see why it has to be done in itty bitty 10% increments. A Charm that makes your familiar a little bit bigger every time you buy it is cooler-feeling than a Charm that makes your familiar abruptly much bigger the first time you buy it and only provides HLs thereafter. This is an illusion, and may in fact be pointless, but so's grinding up your Smithing to 100 rather than just console-hacking it in Skyrim.
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Feb 25, 2014 17:50
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Stephenls posted:A Charm that makes your familiar a little bit bigger every time you buy it is cooler-feeling than a Charm that makes your familiar abruptly much bigger the first time you buy it and only provides HLs thereafter. This is an illusion, and may in fact be pointless, but so's grinding up your Smithing to 100 rather than just console-hacking it in Skyrim. It's also much more appealing to someone who just wants to have a really big dog and doesn't care a whole lot about the health levels. Front-loading that effect makes the Charm appealing to a greater audience, and meets your criteria of "concise, low-wordcount, easy to comprehend, and expressed in terms of what one purchase does rather than what five purchases do".
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Feb 25, 2014 18:00
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drunkencarp posted:This may be the first time in this thread that I've been talked into agreeing with Stephenls. Huh. Normally I assume showing my work like this is just going to bore people. I mean, seriously, look at those two posts -- 784 words about the use of "by 10%" in the text of an extra health level Charm! I used to get paid for game reviews shorter than that! (Sigh. Pity writing video game reviews made me hate video games...) Lymond posted:It's also much more appealing to someone who just wants to have a really big dog and doesn't care a whole lot about the health levels. Front-loading that effect makes the Charm appealing to a greater audience, and meets your criteria of "concise, low-wordcount, easy to comprehend, and expressed in terms of what one purchase does rather than what five purchases do". I could probably write another 800 word essay on why the choice between front-loading and incremental progression is ultimately an aesthetic disagreement that ties into a bunch of other pervasive aesthetic disagreements that cause new flamewars every day in the online gaming community, but I don't really want to. Can I not?
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Feb 25, 2014 18:07
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I'd much rather have the flavor of "and it gets a little bigger, or CAN get a little bigger" as a side effect of the charm purchase than just excising it because you don't like the phrasing, what the hell guys. 
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Feb 25, 2014 18:12
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Stephenls posted:Trying to think of a way to say "The Charm makes your familiar a bit bigger with each purchase, up to about half-again as big at five" that's concise, low-wordcount, easy to comprehend, and expressed in terms of what one purchase does rather than what five purchases do, but which doesn't invoke percentages. I'd go with "The Charm makes your familiar a bit bigger with each purchase" I don't get why you need to impose a 50% upper limit because who really gives a poo poo, it doesn't have a mechanical effect.
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Feb 25, 2014 18:21
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Stephenls posted:I could probably write another 800 word essay on why the choice between front-loading and incremental progression is ultimately an aesthetic disagreement that ties into a bunch of other pervasive aesthetic disagreements that cause new flamewars every day in the online gaming community, but I don't really want to. Can I not? That sounds pretty interesting but you don't need to go there on my account. My argument for front-loading the familiar size thing is meant as a fix for a particular problem rather than a design philosophy. I don't have anything against incremental progression as long as it feels meaningful.
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Feb 25, 2014 18:21
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mistaya posted:I'd much rather have the flavor of "and it gets a little bigger, or CAN get a little bigger" as a side effect of the charm purchase than just excising it because you don't like the phrasing, what the hell guys. I don't think many people are seriously arguing excising that feature -- they just think it could be expressed in a more ideal way. And, on the one hand, "What ideal way would that be?" but on the other hand, critics don't need to surpass the creators of their objects of criticism for that criticism to be valid (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls doesn't invalidate Ebert's movie reviews), and it's ultimately up to the creative to make something the audience wants.
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Feb 25, 2014 18:21
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Fans posted:I'd go with "The Charm makes your familiar a bit bigger with each purchase" And we're right back to "But if past a certain point, size gain does have a mechanical effect, shouldn't we write the Charm so that flavor size increase from buying it isn't going to accidentally run up against that mechanical size threshold?" And then we need to establish an upper limit, and... how do we do that? And then I wrote almost 800 words. EDIT: The actual implementation here isn't ideal, though, because on the one hand, fifty percent volume or fifty percent mass?, and on the other hand, I'm not sure where the size threshold sits, but it's entirely possible that pushing an elephant or tyrant lizard up by 50% would cross it.... Stephenls fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Feb 25, 2014 |
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Feb 25, 2014 18:24
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Fans posted:I don't get why you need to impose a 50% upper limit because who really gives a poo poo, it doesn't have a mechanical effect. Because without a description of how it makes the familiar bigger, then the interpretation of what it does will be wildly different between various players? This isn't really a hard thing to understand. Giving a little bit of detail makes sure everyone's operating in the same mental space when picturing an animal under the effects of the Charm.
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Feb 25, 2014 18:34
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Kenlon posted:Because without a description of how it makes the familiar bigger, then the interpretation of what it does will be wildly different between various players? This isn't really a hard thing to understand. Giving a little bit of detail makes sure everyone's operating in the same mental space when picturing an animal under the effects of the Charm. (Unless one person's picturing mass and another is picturing volume and it's being applied to an animal big enough that the difference would be notable.)
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Feb 25, 2014 18:35
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I'll bet you money that peoples interpretation of what's "10% larger" differs just as much as "A bit larger"
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Feb 25, 2014 18:35
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For what it's worth, I'm still wondering how Bigger Dog Technique works with the mythic example Bryan put forth. Because that's hilarious. The fact that health boxes, and "more health boxes!", have never been a particularly excitement-making thing for a game is enough to make the charm yawn-inducing. The fact that the "Now with Ten Percent More Dog!" tag is added just makes it genuinely funny. EDIT: Oh hey I remembered a health box thing that is excitement-making on an off-moment; Tenra Bansho Zero's Dead box. Guess that's the exception that proves the rule. Andrevian fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Feb 25, 2014 |
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Feb 25, 2014 18:36
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Stephenls posted:And we're right back to "But if past a certain point, size gain does have a mechanical effect, shouldn't we write the Charm so that flavor size increase from buying it isn't going to accidentally run up against that mechanical size threshold?" And then we need to establish an upper limit, and... how do we do that? And then I wrote almost 800 words. Yeah, but is the size threshold abstracted or scaled to hard ranges of h/w/d and mass the way GURPS does it? If it's the former, it'd probably help to have a general shorthand or keyword for when a charm's FX are cosmetic or, at most, there to sceneset for stunting; if it's the latter then someone probably needs to take a step back and rethink priorities, because they're not gonna out-GURPS GURPS and despite the 'U' for Universal in the name, the system's really at its best for gritty simulationism that doesn't always mesh well with heroic/mythic fantasy. Admittedly, if it's a known effect of the charm (insofar as charms exist independently of the game engine in 3E), it might help if PCs or NPCs could run into a wolf with teeth like spearpoints that can outpace the wind and immediately guess "Okay, this thing is probably friends with something divine and powerful and ganking it out of hand would be A Bad Idea," but that seems like the sort of thing that's better handled in setting material to avoid twisting the fluff and the crunch together into a Mobius strip the way 2E did.
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Feb 25, 2014 18:41
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Why not just +1 Size every 2 dots, or every dot if you think a 200 pound housecat or pigeon would be cool to hang out with (probably not at the same time unless you don't mind a mess). Exalted has Size just like Storytell right?
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Feb 25, 2014 18:48
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Fans posted:I'll bet you money that peoples interpretation of what's "10% larger" differs just as much as "A bit larger" Yes, but at least you're all operating in the same general space, making it easier for everyone to end up with a coherent picture. The desire to strip out all the specifics from 3e, while understandable as a reaction to the overspecificity of late 2e, is just as bad. Mechanics, and the description thereof, help to shape the world you're playing in. For a game like Exalted, where the crunchiness is one of the major reasons to want to play it, having details baked into powers is very useful.
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Feb 25, 2014 18:53
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| # ? May 31, 2024 09:44 |
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I'm fine with powers having mechanics. But "10% bigger" is such a weirdly specific bit of description that even if it's tied to a mechanic it's going to be a nightmare to run. No game should have a system where I actually have to look up the size of a horse on the internet unless that absurdity is part of the game itself. Which is why it's a funny thing to see in a game, but I don't think it was intended to be funny.
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Feb 25, 2014 18:59
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