Zarick posted:

That still means Chejop could stand on a cliff above an army and just... kill all of them immediately. Which is still a huge problem, just not a Creation Destroying one.

Oligopsony posted:

All PCs exist to solve problems, but sometimes those problems are "I'm not the Perfect of Harborhead and haven't yet won the uncoerced love of Ligier," not "oh no! The Dowager is trying to assemble the Seven Emeralds of Destiny!" Both can be fun, of course.

Oligopsony posted:

All PCs exist to solve problems, but sometimes those problems are "I'm not the Perfect of Harborhead and haven't yet won the uncoerced love of Ligier," not "oh no! The Dowager is trying to assemble the Seven Emeralds of Destiny!" Both can be fun, of course.

KittyEmpress posted:

I think one issue that lead to Infernals winning so much in Shards is that... the only other villain splat couldn't really win and still leave a setting. A setting where the Deathlords/abyssals won would no longer exist. Infernals fill the role of 'villains that can be fought against even if they won', which makes them a lot easier to let 'win'

Zarick posted:

That still means Chejop could stand on a cliff above an army and just... kill all of them immediately. Which is still a huge problem, just not a Creation Destroying one.

Lioness posted:

You can have a world ruled by the Abyssals without the Neverborn automatically getting what they want and of course with this being Shards you could easily remove the Neverborn from the picture entirely.

Ferrinus posted:

Superman doesn't just destroy all the nukes

axelsoar posted:

What type of game do you run that does not have looming threats to things your PCs care about?

Ithle01 posted:

Sandbox exploration stuff. Also, sometimes my players respond to threat things they care about by not caring about those things anymore because that's not the sort of game they want to play either.

edit: It took me a second to realize what I was talking about in the first place because this was from a few days ago. I don't like the idea that PCs are there to solve problems and feel it's better to say 'PCs are people that do things' in the games I run, or prefer to run. If you really contort the matter you can frame anything as problem solving, but at no point is that mentality present in my usual play group. If the PCs don't intervene in a matter maybe it will resolve itself, or get worse, or turn out to be totally irrelevant. Likewise, intervention is no guarantee of success or a desirable outcome. That's generally what I try to go for.

Nessus posted:

Hopefully 3E, by the time it swings into the GHOST TOWN STATION, will have developed some kind of a vision that gives the Underworld style and gravitas and makes it so that fighting to be king of the Underworld isn't necessarily identical to wanting to become a Candarian demon and literally claim each and every soul of the living.

Mormon Star Wars posted:

I just want an underworld where the scary thing about it isn't that it wants everyone to die, but rather that all the dead people are old and have [/i]old ideas[/i] about how things should run and this Democracy of the Dead feels that they could do a better job of ordering living society than whippersnappers who just happen to be walking around.

Mendrian posted:

If you mean the PCs do not exist explicitly to fight the setting's big bag guys, I agree, there are a lot of other stories.

However all stories are problem solving, no contortions required. Person wants <thing>, they cannot have <thing> because <reason> , motivation established and drama ensues.

Ithle01 posted:

I see problem-solving as more of a mindset and I completely object to the idea that all stories are problem-solving because no, they're absolutely not, sometimes they're just about people living their lives. I can think of plenty of stories about Pulp heroes and their problem is that 'stuff keeps happening to me'. Except that's not a problem, that's just their life and it's not going to go away or ever get solved. It's the problem-solving mindset that I don't like, where there's a compulsion to chase everything down and try to get that 100% play through or score all the achievements. I have videogames if I want to go down that path and good videogames are invariably much better crafted than any story I'll ever tell or play in.

Exalted is a game where the axiom 'problems exist because the players haven't taken care of them' is missing the point. In Exalted, maybe half of your problems exist because of other people, the other half exist because of you just being yourself.

Mormon Star Wars posted:

I just want an underworld where the scary thing about it isn't that it wants everyone to die, but rather that all the dead people are old and have [/i]old ideas[/i] about how things should run and this Democracy of the Dead feels that they could do a better job of ordering living society than whippersnappers who just happen to be walking around.

Transient People posted:

I'm imagining a Creation with an uncountable number of generations of people like the ones that nearly pushed the USA towards defaulting and...yeah, that's pretty much the scariest drat thing I can think of. Much more than undead rape babies or whatever 2e Abyssals favored.

Transient People posted:

I'm imagining a Creation with an uncountable number of generations of people like the ones that nearly pushed the USA towards defaulting and...yeah, that's pretty much the scariest drat thing I can think of. Much more than undead rape babies or whatever 2e Abyssals favored.

Fans posted:

I've yet to ever read a Simulationists take on a game world that doesn't make them sound like they want to play Order of the Stick but completely straight faced.

Dammit Who? posted:

Ugh, now I want to write an in-character thing about that in Maoist "this is an eighth type" style. WHERE'S THE BOOK OBAMA

Lioness posted:

One of my Storytellers is somewhat simulationist in a way that I find makes her games more interesting.
For her Infernal and Sidereal games she produced a list with descriptions of all our NPC co-workers so we'd have a basic working knowledge of who everyone was. This is coupled with the fact that they do some pretty cool things both on and off screen, it makes for a very interesting tonal difference from games where these roles would be window dressing.

Something about the execution better helps the idea that these are people who have their own interesting adventures when they're not on-screen. It's a nice change of pace that makes the world feel more lived in.

Dammit Who? posted:

Yeah, what's cool about the various existential threats to Creation is that they're cautionary tales, examples of the excess that corrupts the souls of god-kings overlaid onto armies of gribbly monsters. The Wyld is the kind of amoral, solipsistic hedonism that ended up bringing down the First Age. Malfeas is paranoid hierarchical obsession that reacts with white-hot rage that any should say "I am" except through it. The Underworld is hollow tradition, a labyrinthine Gormenghast ruled by ancient ghosts that prey on ancestor worship, where only those things are done which have always been done and the reason is long forgotten.

Thesaurasaurus posted:

The sort of people who say that the Usurpation was impossible under 2.x mechanics, and therefore didn't happen, or who earnestly wonder why nobody's used the Creation-Slaying Oblivion Kick atop Mount Meru to kill everyone or turn the entire world population into ducks.

Mormon Star Wars posted:

I'd actually have the Abyssals be the spectre of the First Age. The ghosts of normal people trying to create historical gridlock is bad enough, but the Abyssals are the ghosts who still have the ideas of the Oldest and Worst age, the kind of terror that you are told about as a kid. And now they want their Golden Age back.

Dammit Who? posted:

Yeah, what's cool about the various existential threats to Creation is that they're cautionary tales, examples of the excess that corrupts the souls of god-kings overlaid onto armies of gribbly monsters. The Wyld is the kind of amoral, solipsistic hedonism that ended up bringing down the First Age. Malfeas is paranoid hierarchical obsession that reacts with white-hot rage that any should say "I am" except through it. The Underworld is hollow tradition, a labyrinthine Gormenghast ruled by ancient ghosts that prey on ancestor worship, where only those things are done which have always been done and the reason is long forgotten.

Since Exalted's Creation is a place where myths happen concretely, the "death curse of the Yozis" can be understood as a literal debuff on your character portrait or something inherent to power, or both. "Curing the Great Curse" is as much about rejecting the Wyld/Malfeas/Underworld within your own heart and acting virtuously as it is bugging Autochthon into building a cosmic handwringer that Lytek can run Exaltations through. Which of these is more difficult is left as an exercise to the GM.

Thesaurasaurus posted:

The sort of people who say that the Usurpation was impossible under 2.x mechanics, and therefore didn't happen, or who earnestly wonder why nobody's used the Creation-Slaying Oblivion Kick atop Mount Meru to kill everyone or turn the entire world population into ducks.

Mormon Star Wars posted:

I'd actually have the Abyssals be the spectre of the First Age. The ghosts of normal people trying to create historical gridlock is bad enough, but the Abyssals are the ghosts who still have the ideas of the Oldest and Worst age, the kind of terror that you are told about as a kid. And now they want their Golden Age back.

Transient People posted:

That's a poo poo player splat. Abyssals are, first and foremost, a seeding ground for PC concepts. They should be built with that in mind. This is why 2e Abyssals were such a colossal failure. Repeating that mistake is as pointless as it is nuts.

Lioness posted:

One of my Storytellers is somewhat simulationist in a way that I find makes her games more interesting.
For her Infernal and Sidereal games she produced a list with descriptions of all our NPC co-workers so we'd have a basic working knowledge of who everyone was. This is coupled with the fact that they do some pretty cool things both on and off screen, it makes for a very interesting tonal difference from games where these roles would be window dressing.

Something about the execution better helps the idea that these are people who have their own interesting adventures when they're not on-screen. It's a nice change of pace that makes the world feel more lived in.

Roadie posted:

Thinking the game mechanics should at least in theory support the game's background and avoid obvious fridge logic "hang on, why didn't the 5,000-year-old super smart guy do this?" stuff isn't the same as thinking that the game should be a physics engine.

Tulul posted:

The rules should match up to and support the story, though. If the rules say that the Deathlords can murder a good chunk of Creation pretty trivially and the story says that that hasn't happened, then one or the other needs to be changed (the rules, obviously, in this case). Saying that the Usurpation is impossible under the ruleset is an entirely legitimate complaint; you shouldn't have to resort to handwaving to play out that story.

MiltonSlavemasta posted:

Yeah, I don't really like that idea for several reasons.

Firstly, I think it's a very narrow frame of mind to give a PC splat; One of the issues suffocating Abyssals is that the book gives them about one motivation that doesn't constantly result in them getting chastised/exiled/exploded/etc, and I like to see a wide variety of potential motivations for any player splat.

Secondly, I am kind of starting to hate First Age poo poo that gets any more explicit than uncertain myths and legends. I want it to be more of a mysterious before-time that can materialize in different games as whatever the story needs it to be, to the point of leaving "How corrupt/terrible did things get under the Solars?" as a big open question. I even think the Deathlords being the ghosts of 13 First Age Solars is too explicit nowadays, and I'd prefer them to have brief and vague backgrounds eclipsed by stories of all their current undertakings (primarily in the Underworld, so it seems like the Underworld is actually a good place for big undertakings and has a lot going on).

Lastly, I'd like Abyssals to shed a lot of their Grimdark baggage in favor of a more neutral focus on Death, Memory, and Endings, and I think Infernals would be a much better type of Exalt to represent obsessions with old hierarchies, strange and alien ways of thinking, nonsensical ideas of what is good and right, et cetera due to their association with Malfeas.

Thesaurasaurus posted:

Yeah, what I'm specifically indicting here are the people who look at these scenarios and think, not "The rules and the narrative are in grave contradiction, therefore the rules ought to be changed to bring gameplay more in line with narrative expectations (along with a lot of other reasons the rules ought to be changed, because Exalted 2e)" as you did, but "The rules and the narrative are in grave contradiction, therefore the narrative is wrong." People who get mad when you veto their attempt to play Pun-Pun, or who think it's possible to empirically-prove the existence of hit points in real life by seeing how many whacks with a sword it takes to get to someone's gooey Tootsie-Roll center (no seriously, this exact argument has been made in some grogmined posts).

RPZip posted:

Every campaign is now Dark Sun ... is a monumental ... valid of an approach for a DM to take.

Nessus posted:

Well this is the correct way to approach D&D. However, I also think at a certain point it smacks of simulation reasoning. Certainly the Sidereal Doomkick should be adjusted. But I don't think that its existence, even unedited, means that you should structure every campaign with a key question being "Has C.K. killed an entire direction with his Doomkick?" Because that old gently caress isn't necessarily important, to your story, you know?

Transient People posted:

That's a poo poo player splat. Abyssals are, first and foremost, a seeding ground for PC concepts. They should be built with that in mind. This is why 2e Abyssals were such a colossal failure. Repeating that mistake is as pointless as it is nuts.

EDIT: And I say that while my very first Abyssal concept was a deathknight who was born in the first age. He didn't come preemptively brainfucked like the Ghostbyssals would, however, which is a huge, key distinction that needs to be made for the concept to be PC-worthy.

Tulul posted:

The rules should match up to and support the story, though.

Mormon Star Wars posted:

That post was mostly just saying that if "this represents the failures of the First Age" is going to be anywhere, it's probably more appropriate in the splat that actually has ties to the First Age and not the wyld.

Ithle01 posted:

quote:

. It's the problem-solving mindset that I don't like, where there's a compulsion to chase everything down and try to get that 100% play through or score all the achievements. I have videogames if I want to go down that path and good videogames are invariably much better crafted than any story I'll ever tell or play in.