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I Am Just a Box posted:Holy gently caress, man. He's right, though. Insane amounts of weirdly hostile yet totally empty bluster are being thrown around in those posts. If you read carefully you'll notice thst the only cogent criticism to be found is along the lines of "the implementation of Resonance could be disruptive to play" but of course the acual playbook in use is so formulaic and devoid of detail that it could as easily be applied, as Stephenls demonstrates, to literally anything at all. Now people are even reaching for material so desperately as to bring up Raksi again... even though we have, in this very thread, already figured ou the problem in presentation there and had the book's editor himself acknowledge it.
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May 15, 2014 18:13
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Ferrinus posted:He's right, though. Insane amounts of weirdly hostile yet totally empty bluster are being thrown around in those posts. If you read carefully you'll notice thst the only cogent criticism to be found is along the lines of "the implementation of Resonance could be disruptive to play" but of course the acual playbook in use is so formulaic and devoid of detail that it could as easily be applied, as Stephenls demonstrates, to literally anything at all.  That said, my bitching about the Neverborn did leverage a synergy with bitching about Resonance, so it worked out.
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May 15, 2014 18:15
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The reasoning that was thrown around by Devs for why Raksi eats babies is some of my favorite Exalted stuff ever and is sadly lost to the forums. I think it's second only to why Bestiality and Cannibalism were awesome things to base an entire player splat around. Lunar's are the gift that keep on giving, even if all the gifts are terrible. Fans fucked around with this message at 18:23 on May 15, 2014 |
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May 15, 2014 18:20
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Fans posted:The reasoning that was thrown around by Devs for why Raksi eats babies is some of my favorite Exalted stuff ever and is sadly lost to the forums. I think it's second only to why Cannibalism was an awesome thing to base an entire player splat around. What I wonder is how you sacred-hunt a tree. But that is probably why you need advanced Exalted wisdom to do it right.
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May 15, 2014 18:23
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Ferrinus posted:Now people are even reaching for material so desperately as to bring up Raksi again... even though we have, in this very thread, already figured ou the problem in presentation there and had the book's editor himself acknowledge it. Let's be fair, "people" here is literally just "me," and I'm not really trying to seriously score points or anything; it just seemed like kind of an inevitable comparison, and you know what, I'll even own up and apologize for it as irrelevant rather than invite another Raksi talk. I've read all the retrospective posts about Raksi and what went wrong and what should have been done and, honestly, I've found a lot of the attempts to defend her as a solid concept that was merely poorly executed unconvincing, but I don't feel a burning need to rehash the argument. I do agree that there's a lot of irrational hostility being thrown around in this thread mixed in with the more reasonable criticism, and that's honestly why I don't often post here. Things got a lot bitchier again in the last few pages.
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May 15, 2014 18:23
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Fans posted:The reasoning that was thrown around by Devs for why Raksi eats babies is some of my favorite Exalted stuff ever and is sadly lost to the forums. I think it's second only to why Bestiality and Cannibalism were awesome things to base an entire player splat around. That gives me an idea! We could switch them over from Charms to Werewolf Gifts!
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May 15, 2014 18:23
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Stephenls posted:That gives me an idea! We could switch them over from Charms to Werewolf Gifts! The only gift I remember from the one Werewolf Game I played is the ability to stop a Car by looking at it. I'm not sure how this will apply to Creation, but you've promised Cars now and can only disappoint me from here on out.
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May 15, 2014 18:25
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Fans posted:The only gift I remember from the one Werewolf Game I played is the ability to stop a Car by looking at it.
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May 15, 2014 18:26
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Stephenls posted:That gives me an idea! We could switch them over from Charms to Werewolf Gifts! Would be cooler than what lunars have so sure.
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May 15, 2014 18:28
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Fans posted:The only gift I remember from the one Werewolf Game I played is the ability to stop a Car by looking at it.  Cars here seems like a solid elder-level Lunar concept to me.
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May 15, 2014 18:34
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This slap fight still sucks, but the Abyssal splat keeps coming up, so I'll ask a question that's been on my mind for a while. Is David Lo Pan more properly an Abyssal Exalt or a true Deathlord?
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May 15, 2014 18:37
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Stephenls posted:That gives me an idea! We could switch them over from Charms to Werewolf Gifts! Hey, that's an upgrade. About as many Gifts are actually good as are Lunar Charms, but you can skip Gift prereqs.
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May 15, 2014 18:44
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Ferrinus posted:Hey, that's an upgrade. About as many Gifts are actually good as are Lunar Charms, but you can skip Gift prereqs. Throw in sorcery and martial arts access like presumably everyone will have at least a little of, and you got yourself a stew cooking.
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May 15, 2014 18:52
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Nessus posted:I don't know. Cars would clearly work better as a devil tiger than as an elder lunar. Yes this is me being sarcastic. KittyEmpress fucked around with this message at 19:00 on May 15, 2014 |
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May 15, 2014 18:54
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Surely Lunars went whole hog. Going partial hog sounds like chimerism.
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May 15, 2014 18:55
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Certainly that would be a big improvement, given that Lunar trees were the worst outside of the boring and static Martial Arts railroads.
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May 15, 2014 18:55
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Nessus posted:What I wonder is how you sacred-hunt a tree. But that is probably why you need advanced Exalted wisdom to do it right. Not being able to turn into a tree until Essence 4 is one of the things about 2E Lunars that makes me sad. 3E BETTER CORRECT THIS INJUSTICE.
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May 15, 2014 19:35
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mistaya posted:Not being able to turn into a tree until Essence 4 is one of the things about 2E Lunars that makes me sad. 3E BETTER CORRECT THIS INJUSTICE.
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May 15, 2014 19:45
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Whoa, whoa. You can't just turn into a tree! You have to earn that poo poo. I mean, turning into an immobile object that can um... photosynthesize? You don't have to pay anything for food! That poo poo can break a game early on. Like, if you're in a manse, and you turn into a tree, you can trash that manse, especially if you have 50 years to root yourself right into the dragon lines. Think about it. 
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May 15, 2014 19:56
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Ferrinus posted:Now people are even reaching for material so desperately as to bring up Raksi again... even though we have, in this very thread, already figured ou the problem in presentation there and had the book's editor himself acknowledge it. I was just making a funny joke-'em-up about Lovecraft being a huge racist piece of poo poo that should never be used as a justification for anything, though.
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May 15, 2014 20:01
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Whoa, whoa. perfectly still long enough for the tree to forget you're sneaking up on it. See clearly the evocations you'd get from your tree-form would be poo poo like this. "I can cop snacks and energy from sunlight!" "I can do siege-attack poo poo against heavy objects, if not very quickly!" Both of these are useful (if niche) abilities. I recall dimly that 2E had, in fact, a sidebar basically saying "let Lunars with a large library of heart's blood forms do this kind of computer-adventure-game poo poo, either automatically (monkey climbing rope) or with hefty bonuses (monkey climbing slippery oiled tentacle)."
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May 15, 2014 20:03
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BryanChavez posted:I was just making a funny joke-'em-up about Lovecraft being a huge racist piece of poo poo that should never be used as a justification for anything, though. Lovecraft is cool because he was terrified of absolutely everything: birds, dogs, colors, books, black people, you name it. There's plenty to like in his collected works, and, like, liking his stuff is all you need. There's no "justification" here - "I like ____ so I'm drawing inspiration from it" isn't a justification, it's an explanation. You can't justify daiklaves and animas and unintelligibly insane elder gods because they're part of the premise.
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May 15, 2014 20:12
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Ferrinus posted:Lovecraft is cool because he was terrified of absolutely everything: birds, dogs, colors, books, black people, you name it. There's plenty to like in his collected works, and, like, liking his stuff is all you need. There's no "justification" here - "I like ____ so I'm drawing inspiration from it" isn't a justification, it's an explanation. Yeah I think this drives at the core of it. "I had an idea, and I wrote it down" is basically the core idea behind being a writer. You can't justify everything you write. Game designers need to examine the writerly crap and figure out how they're going to use it, but some things are setting elements and not strictly speaking mechanics. "I kept this thing because it was the idea I had at the time and I liked it" is why 90% of Exalted exists as it does. It wasn't designed by committee in a white room by carefully examining each and every choice to make sure it conformed to play standards or genre conventions or whatever. JUSTIFY LOOKSHY looks just as stupid when you break it down. "I like Sparta and they are technomagic Sparta" isn't much of a justification either but it sounds better when it's a thing you like.
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May 15, 2014 20:56
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Mendrian posted:Yeah I think this drives at the core of it. Yes, thank you.
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May 15, 2014 21:02
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Mendrian posted:JUSTIFY LOOKSHY looks just as stupid when you break it down. "I like Sparta and they are technomagic Sparta" isn't much of a justification either but it sounds better when it's a thing you like. It's a bit of a bad example, considering earlier writers loved Lookshy in an impure manner.
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May 15, 2014 21:12
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It's a bit of a bad example, considering earlier writers loved Lookshy in an impure manner. JUSTIFY DAIKLAVES, then. Or JUSTIFY DEMONS. Or whatever. Literally everything is somebody's creative idea that was first thought up and written down, and how you use that thing is hashed out later. I'm all for excising stuff that is downright offensive or which adds nothing to the setting, but critisizing a neat idea because it was had at all is sorta silly. I agree we can do more with the Neverborn, I doubt anybody contests that, but they weren't created in the first place because of some broad purpose or for some specific thing. They were created because somebody thought about it for a while and thought it was cool. Or more accurately they thought about Wraith for a while and thought it would be cool in Exalted, and I don't really see why not.
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May 15, 2014 21:21
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(That said, in Part 2 of my creative process I do put a lot of thought into "Does this setting element contribute to a playable setting? How can I adjust this setting element so it contributes to a more playable setting?" And I will occasionally-to-often take something from the list of things I come up with in Step 1 and throw it in the garbage because it doesn't work.)
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May 15, 2014 21:25
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Isn't the entire point of having an absurdly massive kitchen-sinky setting like Exalted, that contains play venues of almost every scope and genre, the fact that it doesn't need each atomic setting element to be justified to all parties from first principles? If you wanted a game with a really tight narrative scope you could probably get away with like 20% of the pagecount
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May 15, 2014 21:26
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Mendrian posted:Yeah I think this drives at the core of it. Lookshy presents an example of a powerful threshold state - strong enough to keep The Realm out of their business, but not enough to impose order over the direction without making a lot of concessions to other local powers and straight up leaving bind spots in their authority. Pragmatic enough to cut deals with anathema, but too battle-hardened and independent to just roll over and embrace the return of the old kings unless they drat well prove their worth. They're armed with some of the greatest and most terrifying weapons of the golden age, and with their decline in recent generations they're becoming desperate enough to start using them if that's what it takes to survive. All of that is hook that you can put to use in a game, or use as a model for building your own content. Most material about the Neverborn to date gets up to "Incomprehensible, spooky, hates you," and then stops. This would be fine if they were a far off background element, but the game then takes their presence and influence and drops it on the shoulder of every Dracula via resonance, whispers, and necromancy. One of those should change to make them fit, and if we want them to stick around because they're legacy and a Cool Thing (Which I agree they can be) it should be adding enough substance to make them inspire stories.
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May 15, 2014 21:31
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A_Raving_Loon posted:Lookshy presents an example of a powerful threshold state - strong enough to keep The Realm out of their business, but not enough to impose order over the direction without making a lot of concessions to other local powers and straight up leaving bind spots in their authority. Pragmatic enough to cut deals with anathema, but too battle-hardened and independent to just roll over and embrace the return of the old kings unless they drat well prove their worth. They're armed with some of the greatest and most terrifying weapons of the golden age, and with their decline in recent generations they're becoming desperate enough to start using them if that's what it takes to survive. I agree that the Neverborn could have more done with them, but this post says more about your taste in what constitutes a 'valid' hook that it does about either setting element. What your saying is a valid justification for Lookshy - but what if I say that I don't need it, it could literally not exist and my game wouldn't change? I wouldn't be wrong, though it would likely create inconsistencies for some players. "Incomprehensible malevolence given form, massive body-tombs that float over the mouth of the void whispering horrid truths to their supplicants, creatures whose very dreams thrust bony fingers through the flesh-soil of the Underworld" is plenty evocative. For some people. For others it's trite and too little.
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May 15, 2014 21:36
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The difference between what Loon said about Lookshy and what Mendrian said about the Neverborn is that the Lookshy stuff is detailed and concrete. Lookshy has a bunch of these artifacts and about this many Exalted and here are stats for some of them. The Neverborn are vague and abstract, even in the cool description Mendrian wrote. They don't actually do anything in the setting as written except piss on the agency of Abyssal PCs. This isn't to say I don't like the Neverborn because I really do. I even like just saying Neverborn. But they need to be something more if they're going to be a great part of Exalted, instead of a bit of background for Deathlord bad guys and a pain in the rear end for people trying to do anything with Abyssal PCs.
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May 15, 2014 21:55
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Well, they certainly need to be something if we plan to talk about them as much as 2e did.
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May 15, 2014 21:59
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Mendrian posted:I agree that the Neverborn could have more done with them, but this post says more about your taste in what constitutes a 'valid' hook that it does about either setting element. What your saying is a valid justification for Lookshy - but what if I say that I don't need it, it could literally not exist and my game wouldn't change? I wouldn't be wrong, though it would likely create inconsistencies for some players.
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May 15, 2014 22:02
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I don't have an strong opinion about the Neverborn other than that there isn't much to know. Evocative as a fiction idea? Sure! Functional as a game concept? Ennnh.
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May 15, 2014 22:04
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Things need to be justified when they're actually contradictory or harmful to the project as a whole, not when they're some combination of underused and poorly implemented as the neverborn were. To pick a totally random example, you, and here I mean the generic everyman "you" and no specific person, COULD but let's be honest here should demand justification for Martial Arts existing as one of the twenty five core Abilities. That's not because martial arts are boring or some equally generic taste-based complaint, but because the place of the supernatural martial arts in the setting clashes with that game mechanical implementation - it falls short of the vision and implies the opposite of what it should about the setting. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 22:45 on May 15, 2014 |
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May 15, 2014 22:39
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You don't say.
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May 15, 2014 22:45
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Ferrinus posted:Things need to be justified when they're actually contradictory or harmful to the project as a whole, not when they're some combination of underused and poorly implemented as the neverborn were. 
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May 15, 2014 22:47
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I'm starting to think every ability should be Martial Arts.
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May 15, 2014 22:50
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Stephenls posted:Well, they certainly need to be something if we plan to talk about them as much as 2e did. They need to be something if they're the basis behind the Abyssals power. I mean you can be vague about poo poo players are never going to interact with, but you can't be vague about the thing constantly whispering in your ear that they're going to kill everyone you love if you don't start murdering people. While we're on "Stuff that should probably be fleshed out a bit more if it has to stay in" it'd be nice if Spirit Shapes had a little bit more to them than "Because Spirit Shapes guys."
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May 15, 2014 22:50
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In my opinion the Neverborn should be entities whose existence is determined primarily through their absence, like a black hole. A couple particularly curious and puissant ghosts - the Deathlords - had the gumption to stroll right up to the event horizon and peer at them with pinhole telescopes. But many among the dead study them. Through their careful study they learned that Martial Arts shouldn't be a core Ability in competition with Brawl and Melee.
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May 15, 2014 23:26
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