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I think Plague of Hats suggested something like that a while ago in this thread, and it wasn't a bad idea at all. My disagreement was founded on the fact that I liked the way the difference in mote income and output signaled drama - if you're fighting someone and spending 2m per turn you're clearly not worried, whereas if you're fighting someone and spending 10m per turn you're on the clock and soon to be exhausted. The thing is, it demands that meaningful out of combat expenditures don't use motes alone, but less recoverable resources like willpower, or committed motes, or fake-committed motes ("after activating this charm the motes you spend won't regenerate for a scene") or arbitrary "per day" limitations, or whatnot.
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# ? Jun 19, 2014 22:24 |
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# ? May 29, 2024 05:23 |
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Incidentally, you know what Sail needs? A charm that lets you declare your daiklave, or indeed anything whatsoever a boat for the purposes of Sail charms and buoyancy, whether or not the item in question is actually on water. Solves all problems with Sail applicability plus you get the right to turn the Imperial Manse into a floating battleship if you divert a few rivers.
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# ? Jun 19, 2014 22:34 |
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Ferrinus posted:But isn't that weird? Like, the Storyteller is supposed to watch like a hawk to make sure you aren't deliberately stretching out fights to harvest resources. Except... the Charm in question inherently stretches out fights. You're literally trading your "end this fight now" points for "do stuff later" points. That's the entire point. Pinning down when it is or isn't okay to activate Unstoppable Magnus Approach is like finding the start of a roll of really thin and transparent sticky tape - and you aren't even rewarded for succeeding, because you just end up grinding against your Storyteller, or your players, or your own conflicting desires for A) the game to make sense but B) your character to get points to do cool stuff with. This is some very constructive criticism that I hope makes way to the people who are developing the game since at this point there have been enough responses to the leak that make strong points or point out potentially major issues to dedicate time to read them over for consideration. Accidental or not, good open development feedback is still free and useful and a waste not to utilize.
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# ? Jun 19, 2014 22:35 |
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Old Doggy Bastard posted:This is some very constructive criticism that I hope makes way to the people who are developing the game since at this point there have been enough responses to the leak that make strong points or point out potentially major issues to dedicate time to read them over for consideration. Accidental or not, good open development feedback is still free and useful and a waste not to utilize. I don't think there's any particular reason to believe they'll do so, though. Every single indication this development team has given is that they're close-minded and prickly to feedback, have no intention of actually changing problematic elements of the game, and that they have no particular skill or interest with working their community and consumers. I find it absolutely magical how fast they managed to dry up my reserves of good-will for them after most of the latter lifespan of Exalted 2E and the playtest documents give me absolutely zero confidence that they'll do anything to assuage my fears. e: Removed a dumb bit of pointless sniping. Tulul fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Jun 19, 2014 |
# ? Jun 19, 2014 23:05 |
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Ferrinus posted:I mean, Melee works the same way. Being able to roll 20 dice to attack for +15 damage instead of 10 dice to attack for +3 damage means something, because the game creates expectations that so and so opponents correspond to such and such defense and soak values. I think you just sort of explained why despite sharing the same basic structure Melee doesn't really work the same way as Craft does. I mean, I'm gonna be honest here and say that after years and years of playing RPGs I no longer have the appreciation for hugely inflated dice pools and modifiers that I did ten years ago, so my reaction even upon seeing something like "rolling 20 dice at +15 damage to sword a guy really really hard instead of just plain ol' really hard" is to think to myself "in the Year of Our Lord 2014 is there really no more elegant way to approach kung-fu demigods than adding more bigger dice and numbers to everything?" I realize that to a perhaps significant contingent of Exalted's fanbase rolling so many dice you need an actual container of some sort to do it all at once is perhaps a selling point and so this may simply not be for me, but I still can't help but feel that there are more, less dice-accumulative ways to illustrate actions on an epic scale. But even accepting all of that for the sake of argument, the fact remains that things like fighting dudes and talking at dudes are dynamic conflicts and crafting a thing is not. Which you yourself have noted and this is basically the crux of why crafting as a mechanic is almost always the complete pits in an RPG, because it's essentially nothing but a skill roll that's been stretched out and made overwrought with no real point or benefit. Combat, at least, can be exciting in the sense of immediately having to respond to new challenges and changing circumstances, of having to weigh tactical approaches and consider objectives in both the short- and long-term. Social conflict (in theory) is a duel of wits, with both sides making point and counterpoint, trying to outread one another and trading cutting, witty (in theory) remarks. Crafting is "roll a bunch of dice until you reach an arbitrary threshold." And all these charms you've brought up, all they seem to do is add new ways to make that process go quicker. So not only is the act of crafting still not anything exciting or engaging by the sound of it, even the game itself is telling you, the player, "hey, we know this process sucks too, just take some of these to get it over with quicker." If all crafting is going to be from a challenge standpoint is "throw dice at a number until you hit it" then why does it need more bigger numbers and like 20 different dice adders and re-rollers that mostly do the same thing? It seems like a lot of effort and design space being dedicated to a method of conflict resolution that frankly doesn't deserve that level of attention as it stands, unless this is simply a case of "but if the numbers aren't big how will people understand how epic this is?" which would be silly. Your suggestion for dynamic craft challenges is certainly one approach to take, where crafting is treated in the same sort of fashion that combat is for instance, and it could be pretty interesting if done right, but I have a feeling that might be regarded as a bit too "storygamey" for Exalted (unless you're out in the Wyld maybe).
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# ? Jun 19, 2014 23:21 |
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Ferrinus posted:I think Plague of Hats suggested something like that a while ago in this thread, and it wasn't a bad idea at all. My disagreement was founded on the fact that I liked the way the difference in mote income and output signaled drama - if you're fighting someone and spending 2m per turn you're clearly not worried, whereas if you're fighting someone and spending 10m per turn you're on the clock and soon to be exhausted. Or you could just roll with the idea that yes, you truly can Spy With Your All-Seeing Eye all day erryday, and instead find a limitation to the number of Fancy Things you can do at a time. I think introducing something like Chakras/Sefirot/Power Slots is a much better way to handle this problem. So it's assumed you can in fact use Essence Sight all day erryday, but then you may not be able to use Judge's Ear Technique round in round out. Gotta rearrange those essence flows first. Codify spammable effects into taking up slots and you solve the problem for the most part, I think.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 00:02 |
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Tomn posted:Incidentally, you know what Sail needs? Make all sail charms applicable to surfboards. Problem solved.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 00:30 |
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A_Raving_Loon posted:Make all sail charms applicable to surfboards. No, no, not surfboards, flying kiteboards like that bear kid on TaleSpin.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 00:46 |
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I'll be honest, what I have heard about the craft tree sounds like a thing that someone would make up in order to mock Exalted.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 01:31 |
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That's because Exalted is, by logical necessity, the thing that someone would make up in order to mock Exalted.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 01:32 |
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Dammit, I had been under the impression that there were going to be, like, split experience pools; one normal, one for craft/martial arts/sorcery. Which makes a lot of sense, even though it does moot some concepts until very high tiers.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 02:23 |
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I think that's still the plan, except that you can buy evocations/MA/sorcery out of your main experience pool if need be. Crafting experience points aren't really XP at all except that a few Charms let you spend them as though they are. Interestingly, there's a note near the familiar-boosting Charms expressly stating that if your familiar dies, all the xp you poured into it is refunded. However, there's no equivalent for the XP-consuming higher tier versions of Tiger Warrior Training Technique or similar. I couldn't tell you if this represents a design choice or is just an artifact of an incomplete playtest doc.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 02:29 |
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Thanatosian posted:Dammit, I had been under the impression that there were going to be, like, split experience pools; one normal, one for craft/martial arts/sorcery. Which makes a lot of sense, even though it does moot some concepts until very high tiers. Craft Points are not part of your character's XP total.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 02:30 |
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Thanatosian posted:Dammit, I had been under the impression that there were going to be, like, split experience pools; one normal, one for craft/martial arts/sorcery. Which makes a lot of sense, even though it does moot some concepts until very high tiers. The idea is to have one general experience pool that you can spend on everything, and one experience pool you can only spend on the stuff that everyone normally neglects spending XP on out of efficiency guilt. In practice, this translates to "One pool you can spend on everything," and "One pool you can spend on everything except your splat's core Charmset," because the set of things that people don't buy with XP out of efficiency guilt inevitably includes everything except their splat's core Charmset.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 02:32 |
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These are all Presence Charms, there are more sex Charms posted:Threefold Magnetic Ardor I am genuinely, honestly curious as to what the hell the Exalted developer's deal with sex is. Sex is maybe literally the last thing on Earth I would expect people to want more of in Exalted. Everyone who's spent time with the game has also spent time putting up with some absolutely embarrassing bullshit and juvenilia that goes into the books. Holden and John have spent years on the Internet, they know this. But everything I see in the playtest and preview materials indicates to me that the devs see hardcore loving as an integral part of Exalted. Not just a "the Cynis exist, tee hee", but actual, mechanical support for negging a fictional girl of your choice. It just leaves me completely and utterly baffled, because it's such a transparently terrible idea. Of course, looking back on it, they are the ones who stuck Artifact sex toys into a book, so who knows. Tulul fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Jun 20, 2014 |
# ? Jun 20, 2014 02:38 |
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Addendum to previous post: It helps to understand how this idea formed. 1) Initially, there was going to be a general XP pool, and then a martial arts XP pool filled with XP you earn for doing Martial Arts-y things, in the same manner as Mage: The Awakening's Arcane XP that you earn by solving mysteries and doing mage-y things. 2) Then there was going to be a general XP pool, and a martial arts XP pool, and a sorcery XP pool, because they looked at the problem of spending XP on spells and decided it strongly resembled the problem of spending XP on MA Charms balanced at the Celestial rather than Solar level, and so the same solution might work. 3) Then they decided to collapse the MA XP pool and the sorcery XP pool into the same pool, because keeping track of two Arcane XP pools felt superfluous. This was inspired by them mentioning it on the forums and people complaining about the complexity. 4) Then they realized that evocations might in practice have the same problem as MA Charms and spells, so it became the "MA, sorcery, and evocations" pool. 5) Then they remembered that raising attributes and skills inspired the same efficiency guilt as buying MA and sorcery, so it became the "MA, sorcery, evocations, attributes, and skills" pool. This is where we stand now, as I understand it. Note that this has gone through a bunch of revisions and there's no guarantee it won't go through more.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 02:42 |
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Hypothetically, this is solvable at the base level by making sure that martial arts charms and evocations aren't worse on their face than Solar charms. You don't actually need each individual Solar charm to be better than each individual Snake charm or Dragon-Blood charm or whatever - you just need Solars to have better core stats (higher essence pools, stronger excellencies), and capstones whose scope is unachievable by characters from other splats. For instance, the emerald -> sapphire -> adamant progression that looks like it's going to exist in evocations and sorceries both looks really promising. Just because a solar sorcerer can cast Total Annihilation doesn't mean they stop ever needing to cast Death of Obsidian Butterflies. You could create a similar dynamic between Volcano Cutter's emerald and adamant evocations, and hypothetically write ultimate, godly Snake Style charms that only a Solar is puissant enough to perform. Right now, the leaked martial arts sort of hint at that already, but in a very limited way - in each cascade, there's a single charm that has a bonus effect if used by a celestial exalt.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 02:49 |
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Stephenls posted:Addendum to previous post: It helps to understand how this idea formed. This is a pretty bad string of decisions, though? It looks like you got fixated on a single idea and just kept layering levels of complexity over it. If this process has led to the realization that people don't like spending XP on anything but Charms, you should probably take a step back and consider how to address that, instead of just sticking to the idea you already had.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 02:52 |
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Tulul posted:I am genuinely, honestly curious as to what the hell the Exalted developer's deal with sex is. The real problem is that you've got Charms you can only perform by having sex, and then a bunch of Charms you can't perform by having sex, and then, at last, a capstone Charm that lets you achieve the sex-gated effects without having sex and the singing (or whatever)-gated effects by having sex. I don't really see how this serves anyone, including people who are excited to play eXXXalted 3rd edition, particularly well. It'd be like if they had separate Craft charm trees for swordsmithing, cobbling, masonry, sex toy manufacture, and glassblowing. You can only get double 9s while swordsmithing, but you can only reroll 6s for dildo design.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 02:53 |
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Ferrinus posted:For instance, the emerald -> sapphire -> adamant progression that looks like it's going to exist in evocations and sorceries both looks really promising. Just because a solar sorcerer can cast Total Annihilation doesn't mean they stop ever needing to cast Death of Obsidian Butterflies. You could create a similar dynamic between Volcano Cutter's emerald and adamant evocations, and hypothetically write ultimate, godly Snake Style charms that only a Solar is puissant enough to perform. Earlier you said something in regards to crafting to the effect of "[...]it's more satisfying to be able to get shitloads of successes on Craft rolls than it is to just look at a table and have it say "Solar? Okay you can. Mortal? Nope you can't," but now I'm wondering why you couldn't just take the Emerald/Sapphire/Adamant progression and apply it to the creation of artifacts as well.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 02:56 |
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Tulul posted:This is a pretty bad string of decisions, though? Nah.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 02:59 |
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Tulul posted:I am genuinely, honestly curious as to what the hell the Exalted developer's deal with sex is. I first started reading this thread because a lot of people, including people whose opinions I respect, liked Exalted and were excited about a new edition. Now I read the thread because it's funny. It still looks like there are a lot of good ideas in Exalted! But I'm not going to put a book down on the table that I have to preemptively apologize for. I mean, poo poo, there's a hell of a lot more sex in Vampire than there is in Exalted, thematically, and yet as far as I know there's no power that states that Protean 3 gives you a huge boner. Maybe I missed one?
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 03:03 |
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Stephenls posted:Nah. I put it to you that it is, because it basically wraps around to being a single XP pool again and speaks to a problem that needs to be solved through deeper, more systemic changes rather than a "well we just won't let you buy nothing but your native charms" rule. If Exalted's going to use siloed XP pools, it should do so for the purpose of making sure all the characters can operate in the same sphere - like, you get this much combat XP, this much social XP. A "good things" pool and a "crappy things" pool are not satisfying.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 03:04 |
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Ferrinus posted:I put it to you that it is, because it basically wraps around to being a single XP pool again and speaks to a problem that needs to be solved through deeper, more systemic changes rather than a "well we just won't let you buy nothing but your native charms" rule. We're siloing to eliminate efficiency guilt in XP expenditure, not to mandate combat competence. Sitting over here, in the editor's chair and not the game designer's chair, it's a psychological trick, just like large dice pools or having variable damage or putting art in the book. (Then again, to some extent putting a book out at all and not just tweeting "Go do freeform RP on chaturbate or something" is a psychological trick. We're all just killing time between birth and death....)
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 03:20 |
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Ferrinus posted:If Exalted's going to use siloed XP pools, it should do so for the purpose of making sure all the characters can operate in the same sphere - like, you get this much combat XP, this much social XP. A "good things" pool and a "crappy things" pool are not satisfying. I completely disagree because what you're suggesting means there's no such thing as 'specializing'. Which is part of the fun of Exalted, to me, is specializing in things that your other circlemates are not and covering each other's weaknesses.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 03:21 |
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Stallion Cabana posted:I completely disagree because what you're suggesting means there's no such thing as 'specializing'. Which is part of the fun of Exalted, to me, is specializing in things that your other circlemates are not and covering each other's weaknesses. No, you could do as Ferrinus describes and still have one guy specialize in archery while another covers MA, and have those same people specialize their non-combat XP in, say, crafting vs. leadership. His approach works. It's just not what we're doing.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 03:24 |
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Stephenls posted:We're siloing to eliminate efficiency guilt in XP expenditure, not to mandate combat competence. So, hear me out: what if you mitigated efficiency guilt by... making purchases more comparably efficient?
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 03:31 |
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Attorney at Funk posted:So, hear me out: what if you mitigated efficiency guilt by... making purchases more comparably efficient? There comes a point when you have to ask yourself, just how much design paradigm that one likes is one willing to throw out in pursuit of conceptual rigor? For example, Magic: The Gathering could be made much more theoretically rigorous, from a math and strategy perspective, if it were redesigned to remove asymmetry.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 03:37 |
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Stallion Cabana posted:I completely disagree because what you're suggesting means there's no such thing as 'specializing'. Which is part of the fun of Exalted, to me, is specializing in things that your other circlemates are not and covering each other's weaknesses. I'm not saying they need to do that, I'm saying that would be something novel you could accomplish by segregating XP into separate pools. A "must spend on good Charms" bucket vs. a "must not spend on good Charms" bucket is a bandaid on a deeper issue.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 03:38 |
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nrook posted:It still looks like there are a lot of good ideas in Exalted! But I'm not going to put a book down on the table that I have to preemptively apologize for. I mean, poo poo, there's a hell of a lot more sex in Vampire than there is in Exalted, thematically, and yet as far as I know there's no power that states that Protean 3 gives you a huge boner. Maybe I missed one? I think "thematically" is actually the key word there. Sex in Vampire is largely metaphorical, because you can't (shouldn't) approach the subject matter literally. Sex in Vampire, on the whole, is extremly negative, because metaphorical sex is usually metaphorical rape in Vampire. The sexual themes in Vampire aren't about love and pleasure, they're centered around a horrible violating act that's intended to make you really uncomfortable if you think about it. This flows into the way writers approach relationships within the game; all of the bonds in Vampire are about the hosed up nature of power and control. New Vampire makes a coherent statement about sex and rape that it writes around, and despite dripping sexualization, it generally manages to handle it in a fairly mature manner (nWoD here, nobody need bring up the oWoD). Meanwhile in Exalted, the thought seems to be that since the Exalted are great at everything, they should be great sexhavers. There doesn't seem to be any thought or coherency to it, it's just something that happens, because sex happens in the real world, right? Compare two things Holden wrote from 2E (same book, even). Sapphire Veils of Passion is explicitly a Martial Art about sex, but there aren't any Charms that literally make you better at sex. It makes you better at punching people in odd ways and just centers it around a cynical exploration of how sex works. This is good! Then you have the aforementioned sex toys. quote:HEAVENLY ECSTASY AIDES (ARTIFACT •) This is bad (in case it needs to be said). There's absolutely no purpose to it. It's just wobbling green jade dildos all the way down, and tries to shove sex into every aspect of the setting by telling us that a lot of Dragon-Bloods have Artifact • (Anal Beads) somewhere on their sheet. It's exactly the same approach Exalted 3E seems to take to sex, and it's just not a good idea, on any level. Sex in RPGs should serve some sort of purpose. This is because, unbelievably, nobody you should care about wants to sit around the table roleplaying out sex with their friends. Without any sort of thematic purpose, sex in RPGs is just pathetic, and 99.9% of tables will just relegate that content into the FATAL bin.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 03:40 |
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A_Raving_Loon posted:Make all sail charms applicable to surfboards. Make an initial sail charm the ability to count anything that might vaguely be the right size as a surfboard too. Gonna surf my daiklaive into battle.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 03:43 |
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I feel like it'd be hard to make the current system feel anything but gamey in presentation. It's basically "XP for anything (but you're gonna use it on charms)" and "XP for anything but charms" for no reason at all other than people trend towards buying charms. If you wanted to make it seem less nakedly psychological, you could sort out everything the secondary pool can be used for into categories, like: Physical Attributes Social Attributes Mental Attributes Martial Arts Sorcery Evocations Crafting Investment in Familars Investment in Mortal Support and then let players pick three of those at character creation (or Essence of those, or whatever other metric). Call it "Areas of Interest" or something. It actually reduces the flexibility of the secondary pool, but it doesn't look like it to anyone but a game designer and a bunch of people discussing game design. Comes with the added bonus of the bonus pool looking like anything at all other than the "You guys keep just buying charms" patch, and gives you a new design space for hooking new power sources into the game later. Like it would be easy for "Vat Engineering" to make it into an Alchemical Area of Interest.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 03:43 |
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Stephenls posted:There comes a point when you have to ask yourself, just how much design paradigm that one likes is one willing to throw out in pursuit of conceptual rigor? For example, Magic: The Gathering could be made much more theoretically rigorous, from a math and strategy perspective, if it were redesigned to remove asymmetry. Sure could. Of course, Exalted doesn't sell charms in booster packs of 15, and it doesn't rotate which charms are allowed regularly so that it can keep things from getting stale instead of ending up in an ouroboric cycle of self-one-upmanship. And Magic doesn't get to hard reset with new editions that loudly disavow their predecessor and promise a new, fresh take. More to the point, Magic doesn't apologize for its asymmetry by writing mounting piles of progressively sillier rules to paper over it. In fact, this analogy doesn't seem at all tenable. It's like, not even fiveable.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 03:46 |
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theironjef posted:I feel like it'd be hard to make the current system feel anything but gamey in presentation. It's basically "XP for anything (but you're gonna use it on charms)" and "XP for anything but charms" for no reason at all other than people trend towards buying charms. Wouldn't this be bad because unlike most of the other stuff, the Attributes have very hard, very specific limits on how much you can raise them? And I don't mean in some kind of super long term thing, but something that could occur relatively soon. This also kind of applies to the 'familiars' term depending on what exactly you mean by that.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 03:46 |
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I don't have the playtest leak, so I'm not privy to the amount of development you can invest in stuff like your Familiar. If I'm broadening it beyond the limits of what the game has, it's just as easy to say "Pick one from Martial Arts, Sorcery, Craft" and then that's your secondary pool.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 03:48 |
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Stephenls posted:There comes a point when you have to ask yourself, just how much design paradigm that one likes is one willing to throw out in pursuit of conceptual rigor? Well, in my case I was really hoping the answer for Ex3 was "more than this", given my lasting complaints about Dodge, the uselessness of Sail in most games, all the problems that exponential XP costs incentivize, most martial arts and sorcery just not being worth it mechanically for a Solar to buy (except for demon summoning but that's because demon summoning can do everything under the sun for one or two spell purchases), etc.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 03:49 |
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Stephenls posted:There comes a point when you have to ask yourself, just how much design paradigm that one likes is one willing to throw out in pursuit of conceptual rigor? For example, Magic: The Gathering could be made much more theoretically rigorous, from a math and strategy perspective, if it were redesigned to remove asymmetry. Or as an even more accurate analogy, if Blue's control over counterspells and control were reduced so it wasn't 'The Magic colour'. Magic would be a more balanced game that way. It also wouldn't quite feel like Magic if every colour had somewhat nerfed variants of Force of Will at their disposal.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 03:53 |
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Stephenls posted:There comes a point when you have to ask yourself, just how much design paradigm that one likes is one willing to throw out in pursuit of conceptual rigor? For example, Magic: The Gathering could be made much more theoretically rigorous, from a math and strategy perspective, if it were redesigned to remove asymmetry. You could remove exponential costs on attributes and abilities, and that'd make them a lot more attractive. As it is, in Ex2, I can spend 3, 1, 3, 6, 9 or whatever to raise abilities, or like 30 points to get an attribute to 5... or I could spend a flat 8/10 XP to get a charm. No matter how deep it is, no matter how amazing it is. Charms are almost always a better purchase from sheer cost. So what I'm saying is, get rid of exponential costs.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 03:53 |
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Transient People posted:Or as an even more accurate analogy, if Blue's control over counterspells and control were reduced so it wasn't 'The Magic colour'. Magic would be a more balanced game that way. It also wouldn't quite feel like Magic if every colour had somewhat nerfed variants of Force of Will at their disposal. This is somehow an even less accurate analogy. We're talking about comparative efficiency here, not what mechanics fall under what abilities. What Lea is describing is a world where Red gets Force of Will at nine mana, but also Magic contains a rule that says 'Mountains can tap for 3 mana to cast Red Force of Will'.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 03:55 |
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# ? May 29, 2024 05:23 |
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nrook posted:It still looks like there are a lot of good ideas in Exalted! But I'm not going to put a book down on the table that I have to preemptively apologize for. I mean, poo poo, there's a hell of a lot more sex in Vampire than there is in Exalted, thematically, and yet as far as I know there's no power that states that Protean 3 gives you a huge boner. Maybe I missed one? There's literally a devotion called Wet Dream which lets you force someone to have sexytime dreams about you. Every vampire, simply by being a vampire, can cause someone to become unbearably horny, or at least unbearably lusty to do something they wouldn't usually - this is part of predatory aura. Vinculum turns just about anybody into a sex slave. Anything can sound embarrassing if you discuss it in relentlessly reductionist and absurd terms. This doesn't just go for games, it goes for life, but systematic abstraction (ie, game writing) is particularly prone to it. Especially when you're dealing with subjects redolent with mess and meaning like sex. Like always, though, no one will complain that the cholera rules are insensitive to their ancestors/cousins in the developing world, much less about the combat rules, because oh my god, they wrote about sex. That said, I'm pretty sure that Exalted has gone over the line at times and that the developers are aware of the problem. Holden's talked about being incredibly proud of his work on MOEP: Alchemicals but never being comfortable showing his family the book because of the cover art. I imagine he intends to not have that issue again if he can help it.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 04:03 |