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Stephenls posted:Oh bluh what did I type last night.... exalted_writers.txt Re: "psychic artifacts" and containers for ideas, I can't tell how serious people are being when they talk about this with regard to Exalted but I think that one of Exalted's biggest problems as a game is that too many people over the years have treated it as a container for ideas and not enough people have treated it as a game for people to play. I think Glorious Lightshow Prana is a microcosm of that in action. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 18:27 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 18:25
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Kai Tave posted:exalted_writers.txt
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May 24, 2014 18:26
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I do think that, fundamentally, Exalted can only benefit from a clean 'for mechanics check this corebook, for fluff go here (where here might be a dev blog or a sidesplat that is just an Almanac of Creation, I don't care which), for examples of smooth integration of both visit Chapter 10 where we run you through a whole chargen + first play session' model. It has the side bonus of cleaning out a lot of the meaningless clutter because when most of your book is mechanics, you have to distill the fluff to essentials and make it count. This gets you closer to the mythical 1e Intro To Exalted, not further away from it, and it offers a clean canvas for the playgroups to paint their Creation on, with beautiful colours. This also makes it easier to create a 'Dark Sun for Creation' because suddenly a side book about the West, East, Malfeas or the Shining Void Between The Worlds can focus exclusively on making a very strong case for why you desperately need to play a game there and spend ten-twenty pages on rule tweaks if that.
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May 24, 2014 18:27
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Stephenls posted:Oh bluh what did I type last night.... Many and sundry things that would warrant quoting in grognards.txt if there weren't a rule against that. Seriously though, claiming fluff and crunch are inseparable is pretty drat groggy, and common-sense cases can probably be handled with a common-sense sidebar. Like, of course a fireball can set things on fire, or a lightning bolt can kickstart anachronistic Victorian-punk gizmos in a mad Twilight's lab. Mechanically-quantifying fireballs and lightning bolts does not change that. It just defines their baseline, white-room use such that the options your character took at the opportunity cost of other options can be understood and compared to those other options within the context of a game engine rather than the context of "Try to guess which adventure-game's logic your ST is following so you can click the right inventory-dongle on the right landscape-pixel and then never think about it again." I mean, you can talk about apples-to-oranges errors all you want, but the fact is that budgets and price tags make such comparisons not only feasible but outright necessary. Also, as Loon said, Lunars were not screwed over by a failure to integrate fluff and crunch. They were screwed over by a splat-level mandate to never step on the Solars' toes, while sharing a great deal of narrative and geographical space with said Solars, and by a writer who thought of their entire loving charmset as a sort of extended, splat-agnostic option like MA styles or Sorcery except that instead of needing to meet Martial Arts or Occult prereqs you needed to be an Eclipse.
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May 24, 2014 18:28
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Transient People posted:I do think that, fundamentally, Exalted can only benefit from a clean 'for mechanics check this corebook, for fluff go here (where here might be a dev blog or a sidesplat that is just an Almanac of Creation, I don't care which), for examples of smooth integration of both visit Chapter 10 where we run you through a whole chargen + first play session' model. It has the side bonus of cleaning out a lot of the meaningless clutter because when most of your book is mechanics, you have to distill the fluff to essentials and make it count. This gets you closer to the mythical 1e Intro To Exalted, not further away from it, and it offers a clean canvas for the playgroups to paint their Creation on, with beautiful colours. This also makes it easier to create a 'Dark Sun for Creation' because suddenly a side book about the West, East, Malfeas or the Shining Void Between The Worlds can focus exclusively on making a very strong case for why you desperately need to play a game there and spend ten-twenty pages on rule tweaks if that. I suppose there would be some efficencies in removing the barriers between people and their ability to create Exalted: But Like That TV Show I Like, which seems to be the dominant creative influence on the gaming groups I know. Personally I don't give a poo poo about the mythical 1E introgasms, I'd want something which was clearly "of that setting" and also fun to play and relatively easy to understand, while including enough information that I can put together a game with the targetted mouth-feel without having to backwards engineer it.
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May 24, 2014 18:34
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Nessus posted:If that poo poo's Chapter 10, what did you do in the first 9 chapters, beat off? Introduce everything else with piecemeal examples, of course. It's just a very neat way to wrap a corebook to show you exactly how all the pieces come together, instead of just explaining them bit by bit.
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May 24, 2014 18:36
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What Transient People describes doesn't really make sense. Stephenls is broadly right that you can't straightforwardly separate Exalted's fluff and crunch. A spell thet teleports you to heaven is a spell that teleports you to heaven, you can't write it like: This spell teleports you to heaven. * EFFECT: Caster is teleported to heaven. It'd actually be a waste of space! The important thing is that increasingly crunchy, subsystem-heavy charms get increasigly technical writing. The social charms we see there make the implicit claim that E3's social influence system is super streamlined and easy to improvise with, because apparently all you need to do to effect big changes in the game state is to add or subtract an intimacy - there aren't additional fiddly details like initiative or rste or something to track. What would be amazing but unlikely is the combat system being similarly streamlined and therefore similarly accomodating to plain language, i.e. "the character gains a medium weapon" or "the character disengages their opponent". The fewer stats like speed, accuracy bonus, turn step #1-10, etc there are, the less formal even combat charms need to sound. We HAVE seen that mathy, gamey charms DO use nice, legible bullet points, like the reroll sixes (this mechanic still sucks btw) Sail charm or the iterative pet inflater. So, I'm not actually that worried about readability.
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May 24, 2014 19:00
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Stephenls posted:I have issues with the way conceptual rigor is giving way to playability in certain areas. For example, one of the things I like about Exalted is that we have magic swords, and they're justified like this: "How do you use magic to make an exceptionally dangerous melee weapon? Well, you start with a sword the size of a backhoe blade. Then you enchant it so that it's indestructible, so it can be sharpened to an arbitrarily sharp edge without becoming too fragile or brittle to use, no matter how hard you swing it or how tough the material you use it to cut. Then you sharpen it to exactly that arbitrarily sharp edge! Then you enchant it so that to the person wielding it, it has the apparent mass and momentum of a well-balanced reasonably-sized blade, but to the person being hit with it, it has the apparent mass and momentum of a backhoe blade made of an indestructible material denser than gold, swung at the speed, and with the nimbleness, of a well-balanced reasonably-sized blade. The result is something truly dangerous." I'd like you to take a second pass at this while properly rested. I want to discuss this, but without starting off from mad ramblings of 5am.
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May 24, 2014 19:20
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I'm really late to the discussion, but I'd like to throw in my thoughts on the whole light holograms deal. There's really only a few things the charm needs to be really good. One, the overarching system needs to make allowances for big flashy effects and how they affect social interaction and combat in general (beyond just 'use it for stunts', I mean. Attacking with a scary host of hologram soldiers is more intimidating than attacking alone, so what does that ultimately accomplish in the system). Since this charm need not have an exclusive claim on that, it should be a general part of the ruleset. Two, if you allow the charm to create semi-solid holograms with enough force to, say, pull a lever, when making a sufficiently small hologram (let's say a holographic copy of yourself) then suddenly it gains a huge amount of utility. If I could make lever pulling holograms with it I'd get it purely for that. Anyways, those are my thoughts on how you would go about making a holograms charm more fun and an actually competitive option.
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May 24, 2014 19:34
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Ronwayne posted:Lea, doesn't that just mean you're a bad game designer and shouldn't be doing this? Part of your job is resolving those things. If you've admitted defeat or near-defeat and inability to meet a schedule, it doesn't spell well for your ability to do this thing. Followup comment from last night's discourse: I read that as someone going up to Gödel and saying "Doesn't your inability to construct a system that's both complete and self-consistent just make you a bad mathematician?" EDIT: I mean, I'm not saying I'm Game Designer Gödel, but that's the issue here -- the inability to construct a system that's both a) self-consistent enough that people will never encounter problems, and b) large enough and containing enough stuff to feel like a complete, real world. This is Simulated World Theodicy. One of the two legs has got to get sort shrift. Stephenls fucked around with this message at 19:48 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 19:40
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Stephenls posted:I read that as someone going up to Gödel and saying "Doesn't your inability to construct a system that's both complete and self-consistent just make you a bad mathematician?" Stephenls, I like you, but don't make comparisons you cannot possibly live up to.
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May 24, 2014 19:45
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Ratoslov posted:Stephenls, I like you, but don't make comparisons you cannot possibly live up to. See the edit.
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May 24, 2014 19:47
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I take issue with the way people keep using the word 'fluff', because I don't think it has a clear definition, or it may just be that it's been used so many times in this discussion that it's lost all meaning. 'Fluff', in my experience, is usually 'fictional stuff that the designer thinks is cool but which is totally optional from the perspective of the player.' In an ideal world, the 'fluff' part of Charms wouldn't be optional, it would be a key part of how the Charm functions and anything else would just be excised. 'Please put all mechanics in bold font' only works when you can meaningfully separate the mechanics from the fluff. When you have Charms that don't add numbers to things or attack various MDVs or what have you, how do you meaningfully accomplish that? Also I think the biggest problem with Solar Hologram Prana is that it immediately came out and said you couldn't use it to fool anyone. But I mean, other than that, the thing is a toolkit, it's something you can do creative stuff with. Non-verbal communication, pass along descriptions in the blink of an eye, show someone the ancient writing you found in a tomb but didn't understand. "You can just do that with a stunt" is an issue I took with mid-late 2e and thoroughly disagree with. "I can make holograms because it would be cool if I did" doesn't work for me.
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May 24, 2014 19:50
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Also I do not really give a gently caress about Lightshow Prana. It was a useful demonstrative example of the way people at one point were objecting to the idea of spending superpowers resources to get a superpower that does a thing in the world, but not a thing that is easily systemized, but we are long past that one. I have not seen the new Phantom-Conjuring Performance or Phantom Conjuring Technique or whatever it's called, but I'm sure it'll have some decent rules attached to it. My larger point is you're never going to stop encountering issues like that, where you hit something that definitely exists in the world but doesn't have mechanics. Like maybe there's a Charm that lets you survive longer without food but the game doesn't have really rigorous rules for starving to death, some people are going to look at that and go "Well, there's no rules for eating so why spend XP on something that means you don't have to eat?" To which the response is inevitably going to be something like "Just because there's no good rules for starvation doesn't mean people in Creation don't have to eat; the Charm still does a thing." But people on the Internet are always going to be looking at the latest example of a border case thing where something abuts something else that isn't systemized, and they're going to say "Oh, this poo poo again, looks like the designers didn't learn their lesson from Lightshow Prana," to which I can only eyeroll. (I'm pretty sure the book will have rules for starving? I guess? Or maybe no Charm for not having to eat. Again, demonstrative example. We can have rules for anything, but can't have rules for everything.) Stephenls fucked around with this message at 20:09 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 19:57
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Mendrian posted:I take issue with the way people keep using the word 'fluff', because I don't think it has a clear definition, or it may just be that it's been used so many times in this discussion that it's lost all meaning. 'Fluff', in my experience, is usually 'fictional stuff that the designer thinks is cool but which is totally optional from the perspective of the player.' In an ideal world, the 'fluff' part of Charms wouldn't be optional, it would be a key part of how the Charm functions and anything else would just be excised. 'Please put all mechanics in bold font' only works when you can meaningfully separate the mechanics from the fluff. When you have Charms that don't add numbers to things or attack various MDVs or what have you, how do you meaningfully accomplish that? e: For myself I could actually do with much less of the "the Solar contemplates the nature of the mountain in the storm, the river in the rain, and how your scrotum needs kicking." Though I mean, that specific example can stay. Using the below example, "The Solar gains control over her essence/anima/whatever to the point of being able to use it to project images of her design and memory rather than unguided manifestations" is not what I mean, because that seems to ground the trick in a simple way. "The Solar feels the pulse between a heartbeat and knows she has sixteen dice in her attack pool and this guy has, like, five tops" seems exciseable. quote:Also I think the biggest problem with Solar Hologram Prana is that it immediately came out and said you couldn't use it to fool anyone. But I mean, other than that, the thing is a toolkit, it's something you can do creative stuff with. Non-verbal communication, pass along descriptions in the blink of an eye, show someone the ancient writing you found in a tomb but didn't understand. "You can just do that with a stunt" is an issue I took with mid-late 2e and thoroughly disagree with. "I can make holograms because it would be cool if I did" doesn't work for me. Nessus fucked around with this message at 20:05 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 20:01
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Mendrian posted:Also I think the biggest problem with Solar Hologram Prana is that it immediately came out and said you couldn't use it to fool anyone. But I mean, other than that, the thing is a toolkit, it's something you can do creative stuff with. Non-verbal communication, pass along descriptions in the blink of an eye, show someone the ancient writing you found in a tomb but didn't understand. "You can just do that with a stunt" is an issue I took with mid-late 2e and thoroughly disagree with. "I can make holograms because it would be cool if I did" doesn't work for me. Ah, but you could do it with a stunt until the exact moment that charm was written and added to the game. Thenceforth numinous images consonant with your words and gestures could never be the results of spending a lot of peripheral essence to empower an important Performance roll, because that costs 8 or 10 XP, says so in the book right here! It's the worse kind of narrative rule - its only effect is to leach flavor from everything that isn't it. Absent that charm, using Performance or maybe Linguistics to do everything you describe would be possible with, pretty much, just an Excellency. (I'm not sure instant or nonverbal communication is even possible as described, because you still actually have to talk or sing and presumably details are manifested in hologram only as you personally add them to your performance)
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May 24, 2014 20:12
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Nessus posted:I think the rule of thumb would be to highlight like, the part that focuses on how you use it. "When meeting a new person" is just as valid as "when rolling damage" for this purpose. I agree with that! That's precisely what I mean when I say the rest should be excised. Or see my previous, "I step between heartbeats", so what? statement. Basically if a player can't use the information it shouldn't be in the Charm at all. I like that a lot of the new social Charms have non-mechanical bits that are still pretty useful ("everybody knows you are the guy for selling horses). A reduction in 'pure' fluff would be much appreciated though, particularly when, "the Solar meditates on X..." or "the Solar's mastery of Y..." or "Z knows its master" probably take up substantial word count in my Exalted books.
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May 24, 2014 20:13
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Ferrinus posted:Ah, but you could do it with a stunt until the exact moment that charm was written and added to the game. Thenceforth numinous images consonant with your words and gestures could never be the results of spending a lot of peripheral essence to empower an important Performance roll, because that costs 8 or 10 XP, says so in the book right here! It's the worse kind of narrative rule - its only effect is to leach flavor from everything that isn't it. Absent that charm, using Performance or maybe Linguistics to do everything you describe would be possible with, pretty much, just an Excellency. (I'm not sure instant or nonverbal communication is even possible as described, because you still actually have to talk or sing and presumably details are manifested in hologram only as you personally add them to your performance) Mendrian posted:I agree with that! That's precisely what I mean when I say the rest should be excised. Or see my previous, "I step between heartbeats", so what? statement. Basically if a player can't use the information it shouldn't be in the Charm at all. I like that a lot of the new social Charms have non-mechanical bits that are still pretty useful ("everybody knows you are the guy for selling horses). A reduction in 'pure' fluff would be much appreciated though, particularly when, "the Solar meditates on X..." or "the Solar's mastery of Y..." or "Z knows its master" probably take up substantial word count in my Exalted books.
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May 24, 2014 20:35
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Mendrian posted:I agree with that! That's precisely what I mean when I say the rest should be excised. Or see my previous, "I step between heartbeats", so what? statement. Basically if a player can't use the information it shouldn't be in the Charm at all. I like that a lot of the new social Charms have non-mechanical bits that are still pretty useful ("everybody knows you are the guy for selling horses). A reduction in 'pure' fluff would be much appreciated though, particularly when, "the Solar meditates on X..." or "the Solar's mastery of Y..." or "Z knows its master" probably take up substantial word count in my Exalted books. I'll second this. Like with those Sample Charms - in Subject-Hailing Ideology, the "The Lawgiver gains power through knowledge of the roles and identities of others." sentence. That's... what? What's the point of that sentence? What the Charm actually does is in the next sentence anyway. I think the one that stands out most to me for questionable fluff is the "Through concentration and practice, the Solar sheds a piece of her soul into the lightless blaze of her anima, dimming it." sentence, since that implies all kinds of rules questions if somebody actually reads it literally ("can I use this is my anima is lit instead of... uh... lightless?"), and as I've already mentioned training people to not read fluff like that literally runs into problem with stuff like Sidereal Charms when wacky poo poo happens that people are meant to read completely literally ("yes, you literally pull bridle and reins out of thin air and stick them on the guy's head"). The other issue I have (as already mentioned) is the Charms being written in a way that feels kind of stilted and needing some minor editing for rules and intent clarity, but that's a problem more of whoever's writing these not running them past an editor before sticking them in the Kickstarter email. Roadie fucked around with this message at 20:45 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 20:36
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As it happens, re-phrasing awkward verbiage and trimming extraneous text without removing meaningful content during the editing process is one of my strong points! This is one of those assertions that's difficult to back up on my part, because we don't show off our pre-edit drafts, so I'll just preen over how proud I am at how tight Compass: Autochthonia's prose came in when I was done with it. EDIT: Except Minton's chapters. gently caress that guy. His prose is so tight I averaged one cut word per page. No sense of accomplishment editing those chapters at all. Stephenls fucked around with this message at 20:52 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 20:45
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When fans of *thing* are told a part of the thing is bad, they sometimes react defensively and insist it is a good thing: see, defending rape ghosts, ma ha such I, and raksi. When fans of *thing* become writers for *thing* or otherwise involved in the creation of it, they become not only tied up in being a fan and justifying bad elements there, but feel the need to defend things their coworkers do or like. If it seriously makes you upset to hear that the exalted group I played in gave us free reign to fluff most of our stuff how we wanted to (unnatural mental influence? Sure, fluff it as it echoing in his mind. Summoning a sword? Sure fluff it as ripping it out of the caste mark on your forehead) then you shouldn't be involved in a project. Because most of the time players don't look at a one line description and go 'that is all this can ever do'. If they can sword strike fast enough to send a wind/vortex blade at someone, maybe they want to fluff it so that they instead strike hard enough to tear reality briefly and hit from afar. If a charm says I cut down my crafting time due to moving unnaturally quick, why can't I fluff it as instead being that my character briefly transcends human limitations and manages to put together the item in a way that a normal human wouldn't even comprehend or something? Sure a normal person would find it impossible to connect x to z and not even add y, but you are an exalted. If a charm says tainted meteors fall from the sky, why can't I fluff it to be a green flame strike from the skies? It doesn't harm anyone if I do, except perhaps letting me light a radioactive fire without causing a huge impact crater. Then again, the group I played with was super prose prone and loved stunting - nearly every action was a 2 die. Did it make thengame feel longer? Probably. If we just rolled dice and said 'I used charm so wind blade hits him' we could have cut our game time in half, but we had fun stunting and stuff. I don't think anyone of us who had overlapping charms fluffed them the same way, and the ST was fine with that as long as it had the same mechanical effect. Edit: stunting and how varied I can make things with stunts is one of the big things that makes me find exalted more fun than other books. I can't stand most tabletop players and how they, even online, will just go 'rolls dice. I do x damage with y spell' because thats boring. So taking away options for stunts is bad in my opinion. See: the players in my 4e pbp, where I literally had to yell at them to interact and solve problems by talking IC, because 4e has people so conditioned to just going from one fight to the other. KittyEmpress fucked around with this message at 21:06 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 21:01
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Stephenls posted:My larger point is you're never going to stop encountering issues like that, where you hit something that definitely exists in the world but doesn't have mechanics. Like maybe there's a Charm that lets you survive longer without food but the game doesn't have really rigorous rules for starving to death, some people are going to look at that and go "Well, there's no rules for eating so why spend XP on something that means you don't have to eat?" To which the response is inevitably going to be something like "Just because there's no good rules for starvation doesn't mean people in Creation don't have to eat; the Charm still does a thing." But people on the Internet are always going to be looking at the latest example of a border case thing where something abuts something else that isn't systemized, and they're going to say "Oh, this poo poo again, looks like the designers didn't learn their lesson from Lightshow Prana," to which I can only eyeroll.  '. Yeah, no poo poo, but generally that's the sort of thing that you relegate to the unseen interludes between sessions. I mean, kitchen sink as it is, Exalted still generally tries to follow some high-powered thematic lines as opposed to trying to be a low-level life simulator, if you're dying of starvation and dehydration in a desert it's probably because you're in the middle of some ridiculous training montage to unlock your Super Mode or whatever rather than because you didn't buy quite enough provisions in the last town. And that's not to mention how if you could qualify for that charm, you've probably got a high enough level of Survival that you wouldn't gently caress that kind of incredibly basic thing up, right?..Again, that's the problem. Nobody is saying 'systemize everything' - just that if you're going to put something in that has no real mechanical usage, it should really be the sort of loving awesome thing that you couldn't just replicate by having a high ability or, you know, using existing game mechanics. Talking in people's heads? Sending long-distance messages? Talking to and understanding animals? That's the kind of stuff that can't be easily replicated and serves a purpose. 'You make more lights' and 'you don't starve to death'? Ehh.. not so much.
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May 24, 2014 21:09
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Stephenls posted:As it happens, re-phrasing awkward verbiage and trimming extraneous text without removing meaningful content during the editing process is one of my strong points! This is one of those assertions that's difficult to back up on my part, because we don't show off our pre-edit drafts, so I'll just preen over how proud I am at how tight Compass: Autochthonia's prose came in when I was done with it. You know, you could save a lot of space by replacing many instances of a particular two word phrase with a single, shorter word
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May 24, 2014 21:10
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KittyEmpress posted:When fans of *thing* are told a part of the thing is bad, they sometimes react defensively and insist it is a good thing: see, defending rape ghosts, ma ha such I, and raksi. As for the rest nothing seems wrong with that at all, though personally I'd be more prone to have sorcery be 'fixed' than Charms, which seem like they'd be more idiosyncratic than wedges of Doom Lore.
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May 24, 2014 21:11
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KittyEmpress posted:When fans of *thing* are told a part of the thing is bad, they sometimes react defensively and insist it is a good thing: see, defending rape ghosts, ma ha such I, and raksi. I feel like you're responding to a version of me that doesn't exist. If you say you have fun with material I had a hand in or even material that I'm just a fan of, I am almost invariably happy, even if you're using it for something that's not to my taste and especially if you're using it for something I never would have (or could have) thought up myself. Summoning your magic sword out of your castemark sounds pretty awesome to me.
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May 24, 2014 21:11
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Nessus posted:As for the rest nothing seems wrong with that at all, though personally I'd be more prone to have sorcery be 'fixed' than Charms, which seem like they'd be more idiosyncratic than wedges of Doom Lore.  (Naturally, the Absorption charm expects you to adhere to the rule that it offers no net advantage and pay full XP price every time you do it, but straight up gently caress that.)
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May 24, 2014 21:18
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MiltonSlavemasta posted:I don't think anyone here is that much of an rear end in a top hat. When someone says to me "Lea, doesn't that just mean you're a bad game designer and shouldn't be doing this?" that tells me they're not interested in talking to me; they're making a plausibly-deniable insult akin to "Have you stopped beating your wife?" And if it's someone I don't know, then it can't be because they legitimately dislike me, which leaves me to strongly suspect their motivation for saying it is "I wonder if I can say something so negative it ruins this person's day?"
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May 24, 2014 21:53
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Stephenls posted:When someone says to me "Lea, doesn't that just mean you're a bad game designer and shouldn't be doing this?" that tells me they're not interested in talking to me; they're making a plausibly-deniable insult akin to "Have you stopped beating your wife?" And if it's someone I don't know, then it can't be because they legitimately dislike me, which leaves me to strongly suspect their motivation for saying it is "I wonder if I can say something so negative it ruins this person's day?" Or you can just give them a "really, why don't you try harder and get facts right (AKA I am not a designer)? Also, gently caress you" and go on with your day. I wouldn't bother with listening to people who aren't even going to try to be serious with you. PS: On that note, can I reiterate my question from before on what your elevator pitch for Exalted would be if you couldn't frame it as a reaction to anything and had to sell someone utterly ignorant on fantasy in general on it?
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May 24, 2014 22:30
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Stephenls posted:When someone says to me "Lea, doesn't that just mean you're a bad game designer and shouldn't be doing this?" that tells me they're not interested in talking to me; they're making a plausibly-deniable insult akin to "Have you stopped beating your wife?" And if it's someone I don't know, then it can't be because they legitimately dislike me, which leaves me to strongly suspect their motivation for saying it is "I wonder if I can say something so negative it ruins this person's day?" Dude, no. While I won't deny that SA condones a certain amount of trolling if it's sufficiently funny (gently caress, that's what the site was founded on), that's not what this is. This is taking your statements to their logical conclusion so that you can hopefully see the absurdity, appreciate that it's excuse-making, and (this is the important part) learn from the experience so that you stop repeating these loving mistakes. Our motivation for saying these things isn't to ruin your day, it's to bring your attention to some pretty glaring issues because, as you are someone in a position to maybe do something about them, we might end up with a better game for it! Everyone wins! The reason you're still hearing these things from us isn't that we have it out for you, personally. In fact, it's just the opposite - when Morke and Holden were here, it sometimes felt like we were talking to a brick wall, even before they shat the bed a year ago (almost to the day!). With you, there's an actual element of conversation, of a constructive dialogue. This isn't about scoring e-penis points on the cheap. It's about us loving Exalted - a lot - and getting exasperated when we see it reaching for that needle, time and again. Yeah, Exalted swears it's just taking its insulin this time, but it's already fallen off the wagon before, and its rap sheet is unlikely to get it any sympathy from the judge who, in this tortured metaphor, represents the general consumer base for elfgames. Christ, that's a lot of posting about posting. So, Craft charms! I'm enthused to see if and how you've made them fun and dealt with crafting's widespread Decker Problem! One of my current characters is a Defiler (before anyone asks, That Part of Infernals was never published as far as this campaign's concerned), and the Mind-Hand Manipulation tree is just crazy-fun, like goddamn. I'm looking forward to an engine that can handle it without grinding play to a halt.
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May 24, 2014 22:31
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I was just reminded with how obnoxiously smug Exalted players can be, sorry Stephen. I don't mean to be the same to you. I don't understand how you interact with people from the cesspit that is the official forums.
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May 24, 2014 23:04
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"Maybe you are bad at things you like and should give up" isn't really constructive criticism. You can say you're trying to shock the man into seeing the light as much as you want but that's not how real people communicate. "Hey nerd, you've got noodle arms" might be a constructive attempt to tell someone that exercise can improve their life expectancy but I'm going to give you a serious side-eye if you try to sell me on its genuineness. Also the more I read about people's suggestions for Exalted the more I feel like the only games people respect anymore are AW and FATE. And like, I love those games, I think they've created some great innovation for the industry, but I'd rather see Exalted develop in its own direction and see where that leads than make it an AW re-write or whatever.
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May 24, 2014 23:20
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Mendrian posted:'Please put all mechanics in bold font' only works when you can meaningfully separate the mechanics from the fluff. When you have Charms that don't add numbers to things or attack various MDVs or what have you, how do you meaningfully accomplish that? If you've got to keep the paragraph format, I think the clearest answer is to bold how you use it, as Nessus said, and then italicize any game mechanical terms. I've played Exalted with people who've had a huge amount of difficulty with this, playing the game but not being familiar enough to know when a word indicates a mechanical term, and when it's just, you know, a regular word, which leads to a lot of 'Holy poo poo, what does this do, how can I use this', and it's a really simple way to make it more clear. Edit: I don't think anybody thinks Exalted should be an AW re-write. I do think Exalted could learn a few lessons as to how to clearly combine mechanics and narrative and not leave it at all ambiguous what things do. Doc Aquatic fucked around with this message at 23:30 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 23:27
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Mendrian posted:Also the more I read about people's suggestions for Exalted the more I feel like the only games people respect anymore are AW and FATE. And like, I love those games, I think they've created some great innovation for the industry, but I'd rather see Exalted develop in its own direction and see where that leads than make it an AW re-write or whatever.
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May 24, 2014 23:34
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Mendrian posted:Also the more I read about people's suggestions for Exalted the more I feel like the only games people respect anymore are AW and FATE. And like, I love those games, I think they've created some great innovation for the industry, but I'd rather see Exalted develop in its own direction and see where that leads than make it an AW re-write or whatever. Wushu, too, I think. Nobody ever says Wushu is incoherently designed.
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May 25, 2014 00:30
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Mendrian posted:"Maybe you are bad at things you like and should give up" isn't really constructive criticism. You can say you're trying to shock the man into seeing the light as much as you want but that's not how real people communicate. "Hey nerd, you've got noodle arms" might be a constructive attempt to tell someone that exercise can improve their life expectancy but I'm going to give you a serious side-eye if you try to sell me on its genuineness. *that would be gurps; in time, all souls will come
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May 25, 2014 00:31
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Stephenls posted:Wushu, too, I think. Nobody ever says Wushu is incoherently designed. People have been pretty nice about Chuubo but maybe they just didn't feel like hate-reading a 1,000 page draft manuscript or buying a Kindle.
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May 25, 2014 01:25
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Rand Brittain posted:People have been pretty nice about Chuubo but maybe they just didn't feel like hate-reading a 1,000 page draft manuscript or buying a Kindle. Well. Chuubo hasn't given anyone nearly as many reasons to hate-read it as Exalted has. EDIT: To be clear, this is facetious -- I don't actually assume people are hate-reading Exalted. Also, when I talk about staying around to annoy people who don't want me to, I'm not trying to imply that's most of the people here. Just one or two. Most of the criticism here is coming from a position of sincerity. Stephenls fucked around with this message at 01:47 on May 25, 2014 |
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May 25, 2014 01:40
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Stephenls posted:Well. So I have to ask: How bitter are you about drawing the short straw on PR? Seriously, you deal with WW players, and 9 times out of 10, that involves wanting to just ragequit the entire business (I kid. Sort of) I love me the gently caress out of exalted1 , but sometimes I really wonder about what the gently caress is going on with the Onyx Path staff. From my browsing of the current status, I'm suddenly, and very sadly, glad that I didn't pre-order the 3rd Edition book. Who's idea was it that they shouldn't release significant information on their next edition, especially after a series of very serious PR gaffes, and then decide NOT to hire professional PR for this project? It reeks of some cult of personality controlling the whole creative process and screaming "MY VISION!!!1!" while brow-beating everyone else2. I love the setting, but I'm beginning to think that a FATE hack will be a better investment of my time than waiting for the official '3E'. 1see my occasional story about my 6 year 2E campaign, which saw, among other things, the creation of a fae deity on accident (leading to a 3rd baelorian crusade), Lookshy getting 9/11'ed by a disgruntled solar, and the accidental summoning of (and curing of) autochton by the self-same solar deciding to muck with the control-room of creation. 2seriously, some of your replies pretty much sound like a battered spouse making excuses for bruises.
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May 25, 2014 07:25
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Zest posted:Who's idea was it that they shouldn't release significant information on their next edition, especially after a series of very serious PR gaffes, and then decide NOT to hire professional PR for this project? I don't think professional PR people are as willing to be paid in cartoon moths flying out of a wallet as RPG writers are.
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May 25, 2014 09:31
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Zest posted:So I have to ask: How bitter are you about drawing the short straw on PR? Seriously, you deal with WW players, and 9 times out of 10, that involves wanting to just ragequit the entire business (I kid. Sort of) But that does explain why so many of my ideas are half-formed on here. (It helps to undertand I spent my formative Internet years on unmoderated newsgroups, yelling about White Wolf stuff with some of the most truly miserable people you've ever seen. As hostile as this place gets it's nothing like dealing with Kamikaze Hughes every single loving day.) Zest posted:I love me the gently caress out of exalted, but sometimes I really wonder about what the gently caress is going on with the Onyx Path staff. From my browsing of the current status, I'm suddenly, and very sadly, glad that I didn't pre-order the 3rd Edition book. Who's idea was it that they shouldn't release significant information on their next edition, especially after a series of very serious PR gaffes, and then decide NOT to hire professional PR for this project? It reeks of some cult of personality controlling the whole creative process and screaming "MY VISION!!!1!" while brow-beating everyone else. Zest posted:I love the setting, but I'm beginning to think that a FATE hack will be a better investment of my time than waiting for the official '3E'. Dammit Who? posted:I don't think professional PR people are as willing to be paid in cartoon moths flying out of a wallet as RPG writers are. Anyway I'm going to bed this time, instead of hanging around and posting poo poo I'll regret in the morning. Not that I don't stand by everything I said, I just probably could have said it a lot better. Stephenls fucked around with this message at 09:47 on May 25, 2014 |
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May 25, 2014 09:45
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