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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted: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? It doesn't, actually. Fans posted: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. Okay, seriously, if you have a guy asking you to measure the average size, weight, and mass of a horse to see how it works in relation to this charm, maybe you can just, I don't know, murder the guy who asked you that question instead of dealing with him because god-drat.
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Feb 25, 2014 19:05
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Well yeah obviously that guy is being a dick. But if size matters and +10% is to help with that it stands to reason you are going to need to know how tall a horse (Or any animal) is so you know how much +10% is and if it takes it over the size boundary. Which yes, is completely insane. Also Exalted 2E does have size, but it's a Mutation and completely weird in implementation and not really applied with any consistency at all. Fans fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Feb 25, 2014 |
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Feb 25, 2014 19:13
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Fans posted:Well yeah obviously that guy is being a dick. But if size matters and +10% is to help with that it stands to reason you are going to need to know how tall a horse (Or any animal) is so you know how much +10% is and if it takes it over the size boundary. The whole idea of the 10% increase is "increases by a trivial amount." There are no mechanical effects to this slight size increase.
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Feb 25, 2014 19:21
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Bedlamdan posted:The whole idea of the 10% increase is "increases by a trivial amount." There are no mechanical effects to this slight size increase. There might be if you have a pet giraffe and are in the habit of using him as a ladder to perform burglaries where better valuables are held in higher floors of buildings, I guess.
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Feb 25, 2014 19:24
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Stephenls posted:There might be if you have a pet giraffe and are in the habit of using him as a ladder to perform burglaries where better valuables are held in higher floors of buildings, I guess. That would still require you to have exact knowledge of both the giraffe's neck and the height of the building. Which, I mean, granted, that's sort of useful but it's juxtaposed along side a game system that doesn't keep track of how much money you have.
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Feb 25, 2014 19:32
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I'm mostly just not sure under what circumstances I'm going to want to spend XP on five instances of the "bigger dog with more health boxes" charm in the first place, because that sounds like a ~really boring~ use of my XP.
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Feb 25, 2014 19:37
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Maybe you can pay for it with your Martial Arts XP or Solar XP or whatever.
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Feb 25, 2014 19:39
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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. Well sure but I'm not playing Dynasty Warriors. There are plenty of examples of people having comically oversized pets in mythology too. Personally I think the whole argument is dumb. Anything flavory but non-mechanical like that should be available without a charm purchase, regardless of if the charm came with some other benefit. Want a giant gator that you ride around like a surfboard? Fine, as long as you're going the same speed that you normally would. One of my favorite old characters was a Twilight that got his arm torn off by a first-age mechanical trap immediately prior to his exaltation. While designing the character, I asked my ST if I could have a first-age robot arm. He showed me some stuff from various splats, and I said "No no, I don't want an unearthly artifact or anything. The arm is story. It doesn't shoot lasers, it isn't super strong, it's just a description. As I level, I'll spend XP to make it awesome, if the story trends that way." We settled on making it a one-dot artifact, since the ST had a story boner for having it reveal mechanical advantages in the future. To me, that's what a familiar is. Is it six feet at the shoulder? Who cares? If I were to rewrite the ox-body for dogs, I'd excise the 10% and say "Familiars under the benefits of this charm often become noticeably larger or more heavily armored." Conveys the concept that this charm has a visible component without a weirdly specific calculation, allows for players to already have a bear that is larger than the average bear, and even tosses in the fun concept of bio-armor bear. Oh and it even allows that pets don't have to get bigger. Sometimes you might be a sneaky solar and you don't want 150% of a weasel familiar when a regular weasel would do. theironjef fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Feb 25, 2014 |
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Feb 25, 2014 19:48
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Stephenls posted:There might be if you have a pet giraffe and are in the habit of using him as a ladder to perform burglaries where better valuables are held in higher floors of buildings, I guess. Then just be sure that your giraffe and giraffe-enlarging magic are being measured in the same terms. Take whatever part of the game interacts with the scale of one's giraffe and define the bonus in that context. (Which will be there for all to see when this ends up in the book) If that context is rules-light and fluffy, then it should be good enough to know that yours is larger than the average giraffe. And if buffed again that it would become larger still. Potentially as much as a giraffe-and-a-half!
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Feb 25, 2014 19:49
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I'm fine with the 10%. It's the fluff attached to the charm, not the reason to purchase it. You purchase it so you can make your familiar more durable with extra health levels. That is the point of the charm. The "gets 10% bigger per purchase" works for me, personally, because of the other things that it mentions. Your pet being bigger is "manifested normally or only during Saga Beast Virtue and Deadly Predator Method". So, the charm gives you the option of either being the type of hero that wanders the earth with an animal companion that is larger and fiercer looking than any normal version of that animal could be OR you're the hero that wanders around with a normal sized dog and when someone threatens you, it grows half-again in size, muscles rippling and teeth becoming sharp as daggers. I also like it as saying 10% instead of "gets a bit bigger" for a few reasons. 10% immediately tells you that it gets bigger without getting massively so. Spending word count on "your familiar gets noticeably larger with every purchase but not so much so that it is comically large or gains a mechanical benefit" is silly. Saying that it gets a bit bigger up to half again as large at five purchases is literally just a round about way of saying that it gets 10% bigger per purchase since you can get it 5 times and it gets up to 50% larger at the max end. Also, for those players that are just looking for crunch, actual numbers being used means they are more likely to pay attention to it and incorporate it into the familiar. Essentially tricking the players that are just looking for crunch into putting more description and thought into their fluff.
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Feb 25, 2014 20:40
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Grnegsnspm posted:Spending word count on "your familiar gets noticeably larger with every purchase but not so much so that it is comically large or gains a mechanical benefit" is silly. You know how you can convey that it lacks a mechanical benefit regardless of added size and also save word count? By not including a mechanical benefit.
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Feb 25, 2014 20:43
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I want to hear stories about Stephenls, games journalist. Were you one of the guys going on about how dark and sexy Dragon Age 2 was? Did you get into fights with them?
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Feb 25, 2014 20:46
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theironjef posted:You know how you can convey that it lacks a mechanical benefit regardless of added size and also save word count? By not including a mechanical benefit. It doesn't though. There is no "with every 10% increase in size your pet does +1L damage". There is no size category in exalted so making it bigger doesn't do anything until you apparently get to kaiju status. If a melee charm says it makes my sword sharper by 10% but there is no mechanical benefit to "sharpness" then it is just description given to perhaps make a player think about how to use it in a stunt or how they describe it.
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Feb 25, 2014 20:47
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Grnegsnspm posted:It doesn't though. There is no "with every 10% increase in size your pet does +1L damage". There is no size category in exalted so making it bigger doesn't do anything until you apparently get to kaiju status. If a melee charm says it makes my sword sharper by 10% but there is no mechanical benefit to "sharpness" then it is just description given to perhaps make a player think about how to use it in a stunt or how they describe it. And 10% sharper is dumb because people would have a difficult time visualizing that, but 10% bigger is efficient, albeit un-evocative, shorthand. I'm not sure why it's being called mechanics -- can non-mechanical things not be described in quantifiable terms? ... Game journalism! I did video game reviews for Vice Magazine; you can probably find some of them by googling "Sheppard's Video-Game Pie" (which is not the title I chose for the column; I wanted "No Numerical Score;" I was omitting numerical scores about six months to a year before that was the cool thing to do). I also did a few three-to-five-minute review videos for Motherboard under the title "The Gaming Hour." About the most interesting thing that happened to me during that was Ubisoft flying me and a bunch of not-working-for-dedicated-gaming-outlets game reviewers to Rome for a preview of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood... and the most interesting part of that was probably when I missed my flight and had to spend a day in the airport killing time until the next one. And that was remarkably boring, as interesting things go. I dunno, I got games in the mail, wrote reviews -- by the end my theme was "Unimpressed." I didn't touch Dragon Age 2, which in retrospect was probably to BioWare's benefit.
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Feb 25, 2014 21:28
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Stephenls posted:And 10% sharper is dumb because people would have a difficult time visualizing that, but 10% bigger is efficient, albeit un-evocative, shorthand. I'm not sure why it's being called mechanics -- can non-mechanical things not be described in quantifiable terms? Yeah, like 10%. 10% more hair is quantifiable and not a game mechanic. You could count the hairs on a plumber and get that he is 10% hairier than an adjacent plumber. It also doesn't evoke as much as "Before you stand a plumber and also a somewhat hairier plumber." Well, maybe ... "Before you stand a plumber and a 10% hairier plumber." Yeah, I guess that's alright. The whole reason I was balking at the 10% is that it appeals to a certain mindset that would think that way. Like "my raptor is 11 feet instead of 10" instead of "my raptor is larger than others of it's ilk, and bears rippling musculature blah blah blah."
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Feb 25, 2014 21:36
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Fans posted: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. Bad Limit Break mechanics, Great Curse as magical disease and terrible, terrible 2e chapter comics with Solar ghosts suddenly going "wow, my whole life I was a power-abusing tyrant, now its time to be a REAL HERO" do lead to this sort of banal outcome. You can't be faulted for believing it, that's how 2e is written. There's a reactionary viewpoint that removing the Great Curse entirely should have no effect at all on the history of Creation; people are jerks and power corrupts, after all. I'm more sympathetic to that argument, but the game loses a lot of its majesty and message without the Curse. Calde fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Feb 25, 2014 |
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Feb 25, 2014 21:37
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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". If a player really wants to have a big dog and isn't bothered about the charms, I would suggest the player take a familiar that is already a big dog from the outset.
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Feb 25, 2014 22:13
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Hatewheel posted:Free combos means that you can combine almost anything. You no longer have to pay to build a combo and then activate that combo with a special cost. You just put the Charms together as you like. There are still rules regarding Simple-type combinations, however. No, you don't need to get your eyes checked, I'm just vibrating really quickly.
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Feb 25, 2014 22:19
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Double Cross style combo mechanics are the best combo mechanics, so it's good to see that seems to be the way it's headed.
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Feb 25, 2014 22:38
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unseenlibrarian posted:Double Cross style combo mechanics are the best combo mechanics, so it's good to see that seems to be the way it's headed. Damnit I'm going to have to order that loving thing, aren't I?
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Feb 25, 2014 22:44
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Double Cross is cute and cool, but I don't like that, instead of having any kind of mana bar or cooldown system or whatever, the limiting factor on your power use is that you're playing blackjack with future experience points.
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Feb 25, 2014 22:48
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Now, I don't know that the Familiar charm is underpowered relative to the new system, but I do think it seems at least pretty boring. Even in 2.5 with super-heavy plate wearers or power armored characters or Earth Dragon stylists or Full Moon Lunars (the characters who would most benefit from it), I can hardly ever be arsed into buying Ox-Body. If I wrote 3e, I might make it as automatic as receiving Excellencies is now where you just automatically have the maximum number of "Ox-Body Purchases" you could manage as determined by your Essence, Stamina, and Resistance. While I can certainly get behind low-fi charms being the norm at lower levels of essence (I am getting the feeling that I will be able to get by much better at low-'level' play purchasing straight combat skills and not having to buy an assload of combat charms, and I would prefer all the GLORIOUS SUN LASERS type stuff be high-essence when it's needed at all), a charm that is nothing more than Bonus HP is hard for me to get excited about. Maybe Ox-Body type charms do more than that now, as was stated in the thread, but I have yet to see exactly what that is. The other thing someone just pointed out to me is that repurchasing charms over and over again is very boring. I actually think it would be quite clever if repurchases of a charm were, by default, half or a third of the price of the original so a player does not feel bored buying the same thing over and over. I would probably like Pet Ox-Body if I could give my familiar an attribute dot with each purchase and every repurchase were half-price. As it stands, with what I know, I only ever see myself buying it eagerly if I were making a silly build where I played an archer who had an Ankylosaurus or the Creation-equivalent constantly spamming Defend Other.
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Feb 25, 2014 23:42
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As long as we're discussing Charm design, here's some more quotes from John on the WW forums.John posted:The way I wrote the set, Charms tend to be very strong and broadly useful at the base, with small mechanical upgrades in the middle, and gigantic spikes of power toward the top. Lafing Cat posted:Doesn't this make the middle part of the journey *feel* bad though? If the intro is shiny, and the end is shiny, that leaves the middle very dull by comparison. I mean that may be viewed as an acceptable tradeoff to make dabbling worthwhile, but it's the concern that jumps to my mind. John posted:Only if the Charms suck. (They don't.) (Note that Life of the Aurochs branches from Bestial Traits Technique.) Stephenls fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Feb 26, 2014 |
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Feb 26, 2014 00:06
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Stephenls posted: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."
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Feb 26, 2014 02:33
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Zereth posted:That is the exact reaction I have to "10% bigger", with the added bonus of Oddly Specific Number. Same. 10% bigger doesn't do anything and doesn't mean anything. I still like the model of saying "Familiars that receive the benefits of this charm are often larger or visibly armored." That way it encourages the player to imagine their familiar with some cool visuals, and leaves the window open for different expressions of visual distinction.
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Feb 26, 2014 02:45
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"10% bigger" doesn't really do anything, according to Stephen all it is is a piece of verisimilitudinistic flavor text that, for some reason, they don't want to simply leave up to the players and GMs at the table to interpret however best benefits them. Oh, well my Yeddim familiar is 20% bigger and has a 10% more lustrous coat, these detailed percentages sure do help me calibrate my imagination properly. If the interpretation of how big varies between players and GMs then...so? I can't possibly think of many more issues in an elfgame I care less about. There are plenty of games out there with flavor descriptions that don't utilize precise 10% increments of flavor and they don't collapse into unplayability because Group A's vision of "bigger wolf" doesn't mesh with Group B's. And even if there is somehow an argument over how much bigger Bigger Dog Methodology makes your pet the important answer, which is implicitly supported by the charm as it stands, is "not enough to have an actual mechanical impact, calm down."
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Feb 26, 2014 03:22
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So you acknowledge this is a disagrement over a very, very minor point of aesthetics, then?
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Feb 26, 2014 03:24
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I thought about acknowledging that it's not like this is some game-shattering point of contention but then you went and wrote a thousand word essay defending it so I assumed that if you felt like that was worthwhile then "who cares about this, shut up" was off the table as far as responses went. I mean, you could have just said that in the first place if that's what we're going with.
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Feb 26, 2014 03:33
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Kai Tave posted:I thought about acknowledging that it's not like this is some game-shattering point of contention but then you went and wrote a thousand word essay defending it so I assumed that if you felt like that was worthwhile then "who cares about this, shut up" was off the table as far as responses went. I mean, you could have just said that in the first place if that's what we're going with. I don't generally like to do the "Who cares about this, shut up" thing until I'm absolutely certain that no conversation is possible and both sides are spinning their wheels.
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Feb 26, 2014 03:50
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I'm really excited by the prospect of a system that manages to reward both a basic buy-in and specialization. This is something Storytellering games have never really done in a satisfying way.
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Feb 26, 2014 03:57
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Size is a factor in fightblobs, yes? Then it makes sense for multiple 10% increases in size to have little to no effect on their own, but synergistically...
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Feb 26, 2014 04:51
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All's I'm gonna say is, Paul Bunyan is clearly a Solar and Babe the Blue Ox was really goddamn big.
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Feb 26, 2014 04:58
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Attorney at Funk posted:All's I'm gonna say is, Paul Bunyan is clearly a Solar and Babe the Blue Ox was really goddamn big. Do you have an accurate size of Big Blue Oxs? Maybe he only had 1 purchase of the charm even.
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Feb 26, 2014 05:49
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Maybe Babe was his Lunar mate. I aint gonna judge.
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Feb 26, 2014 06:11
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All I'm sayin' is that I want a castle-sized dog that is as strong as a regular dog. I don't think that's even special. Creation is like infinity miles across, so there's gotta be some giant fat weak dogs somewhere in it, and I want one for a familiar without having to get 5 charms deep on dogfats.
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Feb 26, 2014 07:52
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Is spending five charms on making your dog bigger (and tougher I guess) as huge an investment as spending five charms on the same thing was in 1e/2e?
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Feb 26, 2014 08:28
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Surely another balance pass might raise that 10% size increase into a 12.5% size increase?
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Feb 26, 2014 09:18
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I think buying the same Charm 5 times with the same effect each time is really dull, and it has intrinsic diminishing returns. If (for instance) a Familiar has (for argument's sake) 2HL by default, and a Charm (again for argument's sake) adds 2HL, then the Charm has doubled the Familiar's survivability, which is keen. If the same Charm, purchased again, adds another 2HL, it has only added 50% to the Familiar's survability, and so forth. Each purchase makes the next one less attractive. Unless HLs are re-purposed a little. I liked the design we saw late in 2E with Infernals, where you could buy the same Charm multiple times, but each purchase (generally) added a little more functionality to the Charm. I would say you shouldn't be buying the same Charm more than 3 times anyway, and each time you buy it, there should be another hook attached to it. At the very least, one should look at how each purchase of the same Charm makes subsequent purchases uglier. On the subject of HL and Ox-Body in general. The reason Ox-Body was such a non-starter in previous editions was because each purchase added linear bonuses in a system with unbounded lethality. It doesn't matter if a Charm gives you +3HL if your opponents pick up 22 dice to determine how much damage they do to you. Yes, you are more likely to survive by a measurable factor, but it's so unreliable and invisible that it's not very fun to buy. If, however, successful attacks deal a predictable amount of damage within a set range (say, 1-3 damage) then additional health levels look more and more attractive.
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Feb 26, 2014 10:32
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I'm also leery of Charms you're expected to (sometimes) buy five times. I don't think I've seen a single static bonus that a White Wolf game expects you to buy five levels of that couldn't be condensed down to three levels at no cost whatsoever. The other worrisome thing here is that a familiar with its own health levels is, quite possibly, a familiar that's taking its own turns in combat, and therefore something that multiplies the length and impact of a given character's turn by giving them extra rolls to make.
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Feb 26, 2014 11:44
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If we are talking about aesthetics. Esthetics should be lead by the GM. If there is something that says 10% and I don't like it or the player doesn't like it. We change it. And if the creature gets too large, suddenly there are social penalties for bringing your 50 pound cat everywhere. Or some verbiage like "Each time this Charm is taken you add a feature to your chosen beast. Examples include, but not limited to, horns, claws, increase in size, decrease in size and imagination"
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Feb 26, 2014 14:23
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