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Yeah, a better analogy would be a charm that lets you use Bureaucracy to induce Performance-style orgasms.
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Aug 1, 2014 22:53
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zeal posted:Yeah, a better analogy would be a charm that lets you use Bureaucracy to induce Performance-style orgasms. Great, now all I can think of is the scene from Office Space where Peter Gibbons has nightmares about his girlfriend having hosed his boss.
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Aug 1, 2014 23:20
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Thesaurasaurus posted:Great, now all I can think of is the scene from Office Space where Peter Gibbons has nightmares about his girlfriend having hosed his boss.
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Aug 1, 2014 23:27
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Ferrinus posted:It's like having separate feats for axes and swords. BOY I GOT BAD NEWS
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Aug 2, 2014 02:34
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So what's the point of motes? If you don't have enough motes for an out of combat charm, you just wait a few hours or stunt a few times if you can be bothered. If you want to limit how often someone can use a charm, build the constraints into the charm itself so they only come up when it's interesting and appropriate. Combat charms can run on momentum. All charms can run on willpower.zeal posted:Would anyone mind if I started a thread for 1st and 2nd edition discussion/appreciation? yeah do this, i'll make posts in it.
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Aug 2, 2014 09:30
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Bigup DJ posted:So what's the point of motes? If you don't have enough motes for an out of combat charm, you just wait a few hours or stunt a few times if you can be bothered. If you want to limit how often someone can use a charm, build the constraints into the charm itself so they only come up when it's interesting and appropriate. Combat charms can run on momentum. All charms can run on willpower. I think the real truth is that motes serve no purpose and should probably be repurposed into making your Charms cooler rather than being the cost-of-entry when using them.
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Aug 2, 2014 10:16
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Someone raised the idea of having persistent charms take up slots for the the duration of their effect. Flavor these slots as the character's chakras, and affiliate different charms with different slots, and you get a natural system for restricting which effects may be stacked and combined. Give different exalts ways to open more chakras or get more use from the ones they have, and you have rich grounds to differentiate how each splat approaches the power curve.
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Aug 2, 2014 14:49
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Mendrian posted:I think the real truth is that motes serve no purpose and should probably be repurposed into making your Charms cooler rather than being the cost-of-entry when using them. Motes are a holdover from the idea of rules-as-physics. That's why they have such an odd number and originally increased/decreased according to non-Essence traits. I don't think they're a problem per se-making everything cost X number of motes, instead of giving every character a small pool of motes (like 5-10) and making really big cool effect cost 1-3, with no regen, would work better for bookkeeping.
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Aug 2, 2014 19:55
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Motes, even granular motes, are just fine. If you regenerate 5 of your 40 motes each turn, there are then big differences between spending 0 motes, or spending 5 motes, or spending 10 motes, or spending 20 motes on a single action. It immediately establishes and communicates whether you're catching your breath, holding steady, or being run completely ragged. You could probably compress the numbers if you had a mind to, of course, but you don't have to. 1 mote/die as a general standard is pretty easy to deal with.
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Aug 2, 2014 20:01
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A_Raving_Loon posted:Someone raised the idea of having persistent charms take up slots for the the duration of their effect.
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Aug 2, 2014 20:41
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Nessus posted:My idea earlier was that if you use certain scene-length Charms you've essentially committed the Essence for a while, and if jumped, you would start out with a much emptier tank of Essence, possibly leading to your rear end getting handed to you. The chakra idea sounds cooler though. That's how Charms have always worked. If you throw up Integrity Protecting Prana (5m, 1wp), those five motes are gone while you have the Charm up, and you can't get them back until you drop the Charm. Almost positive it worked like that in 1E and it definitely works like that in 2nd and 3rd.
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Aug 2, 2014 21:04
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Yeah, sustained "turn them on each morning" Charms work just fine with a game in which essence always regenerates quickly rather than only regenerates quickly in combat. However, there are a lot of charms floating around that trade essence for some other, slower-regenerating resource or for some valuable but short-lived or lasting effect that would be weird to deploy at-will. Simple example: Excellencies. If you always got 5 motes/turn, forever, you'd have no reason not to double the dicepool on like every out-of-combat action you took - haggling, debating, climbing, whatever - because worst comes to worst you'll get that essence back in two breaths. Of course, you could just decide in response to delete Excellencies, but I'm not sure if that would leave you in a stronger overall position.
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Aug 2, 2014 21:09
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Tulul posted:That's how Charms have always worked. If you throw up Integrity Protecting Prana (5m, 1wp), those five motes are gone while you have the Charm up, and you can't get them back until you drop the Charm. Almost positive it worked like that in 1E and it definitely works like that in 2nd and 3rd.
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Aug 2, 2014 21:16
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Ferrinus posted:Simple example: Excellencies. If you always got 5 motes/turn, forever, you'd have no reason not to double the dicepool on like every out-of-combat action you took - haggling, debating, climbing, whatever - because worst comes to worst you'll get that essence back in two breaths. Clearly the solution is to give the PCs meaningful opposition that can do the same. Turn all Exalt-on-Exalt negotiations into fabulous, fabulous rap-battles with all the thrilling pacing and tension of actual blood-and-guts combat*. *make sure that actual blood-and-guts combat has thrilling pacing and tension so that this analogy can work, as opposed to 2e's attrition-oriented Spreadsheet-fu
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Aug 2, 2014 23:13
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Ferrinus posted:Motes, even granular motes, are just fine. If you regenerate 5 of your 40 motes each turn, there are then big differences between spending 0 motes, or spending 5 motes, or spending 10 motes, or spending 20 motes on a single action. It immediately establishes and communicates whether you're catching your breath, holding steady, or being run completely ragged. Excellencies are the only reason I'd keep motes around, but even then they're not necessary. You could do static Excellencies like "Add your ability score twice to rolls which involve it". Or fuse WP and motes into a single resource! My problem isn't motes so much as it is the proliferation of all these different resources - XP, Craft XP, Momentum, WP, motes and so on. I'm sure you could fold a few of them together and scrap others entirely without making a meaningful difference to the game. Even if you didn't get rid of motes entirely, there's tons of 1m charms which should either be free or have some keyword which says "you can't use this when you're out of motes". And sure, motes can communicate whether the characters are running low on effort or catching their breath or whatever, but there's other ways to establish that. Change the difficulty of their rolls, impose penalties and bonuses. Tracking motes is more trouble than it's worth.
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Aug 3, 2014 00:23
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Bigup DJ posted:Excellencies are the only reason I'd keep motes around, but even then they're not necessary. You could do static Excellencies like "Add your ability score twice to rolls which involve it". Or fuse WP and motes into a single resource! My problem isn't motes so much as it is the proliferation of all these different resources - XP, Craft XP, Momentum, WP, motes and so on. I'm sure you could fold a few of them together and scrap others entirely without making a meaningful difference to the game. Even if you didn't get rid of motes entirely, there's tons of 1m charms which should either be free or have some keyword which says "you can't use this when you're out of motes".
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Aug 3, 2014 00:30
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Bigup DJ posted:Excellencies are the only reason I'd keep motes around, but even then they're not necessary. You could do static Excellencies like "Add your ability score twice to rolls which involve it". Or fuse WP and motes into a single resource! My problem isn't motes so much as it is the proliferation of all these different resources - XP, Craft XP, Momentum, WP, motes and so on. I'm sure you could fold a few of them together and scrap others entirely without making a meaningful difference to the game. Even if you didn't get rid of motes entirely, there's tons of 1m charms which should either be free or have some keyword which says "you can't use this when you're out of motes". Penalties or whatever emphasize that a character is winded after the fact, but pools of expendable liquid resources are what the players of White Wolf games use to represent how much their character cares about something right in the course of play. A costly, exhausting charm that costs 10m/turn is better than a costly, exhausting charm that gives you a -1 penalty to Strength rolls, because tracking a lot of different mote costs is easier than tracking a lot of different penalties.
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Aug 3, 2014 00:32
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Ferrinus posted:Penalties or whatever emphasize that a character is winded after the fact, but pools of expendable liquid resources are what the players of White Wolf games use to represent how much their character cares about something right in the course of play. A costly, exhausting charm that costs 10m/turn is better than a costly, exhausting charm that gives you a -1 penalty to Strength rolls, because tracking a lot of different mote costs is easier than tracking a lot of different penalties. Ok, but what about all my other points? Why not reduce the number of charms which cost motes, fold the function of motes into another resource, or reduce the size of mote pools like Nessus said? Even something like making the mote pool and the mote regeneration rate equal across Exalts of the same kind and Essence would do tons to make things simpler. As for the costly, exhausting charm, just say "You can only sustain this charm for a number of turns equal to your ability. You can refresh this charm by meditating for an hour." If penalties come in after the fact of being winded, just raise the difficulty of the roll by an equal amount to what the penalty would have been. 1 success per 3 dice of penalties. I mean who cares, it's a game abstraction. While I'm on that, why have dynamic penalties as well as dynamic difficulties? Why not one or the other?
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Aug 3, 2014 00:44
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One of the things about Exalted that I think is actually really good is that barring hosed up sidereal magic you aren't actually jerking around with a bunch of iterative rules for what the gently caress you're supposed to roll. Everything is "TN 7." If you roll a 7, 8, or 9, it's a success. If you roll a 10, that's two successes! I forget offhand how 1s interface, but I think you only botch if you roll zero successes and also get a 1. So penalties would have to affect how many d10s you're throwing.
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Aug 3, 2014 00:46
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I've always believed Exalted had too many resources, particularly since when you think about it "time as resource" factors into like 4 of the various resource pools to begin with. Consider 2.5e: Motes (personal, peripheral, overdrive, commited), willpower, virtue channels, DDV/attack penalty, xp and active charms. Then consider the implied resources, stuff like stunt boni, bonus adders from ongoing charms, coordinated attacks, and poo poo like that. Fold some of that down. Complexity does not equal tactical depth.
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Aug 3, 2014 01:46
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Nessus posted:One of the things about Exalted that I think is actually really good is that barring hosed up sidereal magic you aren't actually jerking around with a bunch of iterative rules for what the gently caress you're supposed to roll. Everything is "TN 7." If you roll a 7, 8, or 9, it's a success. If you roll a 10, that's two successes!
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Aug 3, 2014 03:42
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NIV3K posted:I suggest you go take a look at what's slated for Solar's in EX3. I swear to loving God. quote:The Solar capitalizes on her own genius. Her hands and Essence flow in tune with the spirit of her craft, turning even the shoddiest materials into sublime masterworks. Craft rolls supplemented by this Charm reroll 10s until 10s fail to appear. At Craft 3+, this Charm may be repurchased, allowing the Exalt to also reroll 6s until 6s fail to appear. quote:This Charm permanently enhances its prerequisite. The Solar’s genius inspires her to greater heights, making her aware of patterns and possibilities unforeseen by mortals. For every three of a kind successes (ex: three sevens, three eights, etc.), the player may choose one non-success die and convert it to a 10, adding two successes to the result. If Flawless Handiwork Method is used, 10s created in this fashion are also rerolled until 10s fail to appear. quote:By sheering away all distractions, the Exalt may recognize the strongest elements of her design as she brings them forth, enhancing them to the betterment of the entire project. This Charm allows the Solar to supplement Attribute + Craft rolls for basic and major projects with double 9s. At Craft 5+, Essence 2+, it may be repurchased, allowing the Exalt to alternatively spend five motes, one Willpower, and one gold point to supplement a basic, major, or superior project roll with double 8s. At Craft 5+, Essence 3+, it may be repurchased a third time, allowing the Exalt to pay two motes and one white point to grant any one Attribute + Craft roll double 7s. quote:Each time she uses her talents to build or repair, the Exalt comes closer to the core truth of her existence. For every three successes earned on a Craft roll, the Solar earns an additional non-Charm die. This effect is recursive; if generated non-Charm dice create at least three successes, another die is generated. quote:The Solar shapes wonders from the very fabric of the world. This Charm enhances the prerequisite; if the non-Charm dice generated by the initial roll turn up three or more successes, the new non-Charm dice are augmented by an additional three non-Charm dice. Okay this is kind of picking on the fat kid because goddamn is the Craft minigame horrible, but this is an exciting preview of the sort of dice wizardry you can look forward to with Exalted 3E.
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Aug 3, 2014 04:01
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"The Solar crafts a new game with RPG elements and roguelike world design. Throw your dice at the GM"
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Aug 3, 2014 04:02
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Tulul posted:I swear to loving God. Having actually PLAYED with these rules, all that dice wizardry makes for an actually pretty exciting game and is really, really fast. Bitch about other stuff. The dice tricks don't subtract from the game when you actually play it instead of reading it in the shitter.
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Aug 3, 2014 04:46
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Transient People posted:Having actually PLAYED with these rules, all that dice wizardry makes for an actually pretty exciting game and is really, really fast. Bitch about other stuff. The dice tricks don't subtract from the game when you actually play it instead of reading it in the shitter. Are y'all basically just running test combats or playing a full-on (except that it contains no sorcery or evocations or w/e) game? How's it been?
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Aug 3, 2014 04:57
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Transient People posted:Having actually PLAYED with these rules, all that dice wizardry makes for an actually pretty exciting game and is really, really fast. Bitch about other stuff. The dice tricks don't subtract from the game when you actually play it instead of reading it in the shitter.
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Aug 3, 2014 05:29
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Nessus posted:Is it exciting if your character isn't a crafter? (This matters a lot less if it's actually quick.) Yes. Excellent Strike is the Melee charm half the tree piggybacks off for a reason, and it isn't because it's a mote-efficient version of the Second Excellency, lemme tell you that. Same thing for Awareness, whose base charm is a scenelong 'double 9s, plus also reroll 6s once, except if you have a Sense Focus, then reroll 6s forever' and balls out amazing at that. They're not 'funny dice tricks', they're powerful and useful and totally worth it. Ferrinus posted:Are y'all basically just running test combats or playing a full-on (except that it contains no sorcery or evocations or w/e) game? How's it been? Full on play. It's been fun. We're setting up the lucha show to end all lucha shows right now, as part of an extended play to marry a patron's daughter into a position of power. I have exactly 0 2e play experience, so I came in to 3e with a fresh perspective and no expectations beyond fluff. It's been very, very fun. It doesn't feel like the system is getting in the way of fun in any way, shape or form. Considering what more senior players have shown me of 2e, I think EX3 is a Good Game, overall. Not 'with some problems' or whatever, it's actually good. The quibbles are fluff-focused, not mechanics focused. People in another group who've talked to me about the craft mechanics have told me they run pretty smooth too, even using the super Alpha rules that are out in the wild.
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Aug 3, 2014 05:54
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Transient People posted:Yes. Excellent Strike is the Melee charm half the tree piggybacks off for a reason, and it isn't because it's a mote-efficient version of the Second Excellency, lemme tell you that. Same thing for Awareness, whose base charm is a scenelong 'double 9s, plus also reroll 6s once, except if you have a Sense Focus, then reroll 6s forever' and balls out amazing at that. They're not 'funny dice tricks', they're powerful and useful and totally worth it. Also, I meant the crafting poo poo in specific.
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Aug 3, 2014 06:02
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Nessus posted:Well that's good to know. That said, I think this is a minor point of philosophical annoyance, which is that if every Charm gives you a different set of divergent dice abilities and qualifiers it seems like you're gonna get a headache or use the wrong one and realize it five minutes later etc. etc. and so forth. Yeah, all the dice crap doesn't really strike me as "fun", it strikes me as "ugh, time to get somebody to code a dicebot to handle all this stuff automatically so Slow Counting Bob doesn't drag everybody down all the time".
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Aug 3, 2014 06:28
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Roadie posted:Yeah, all the dice crap doesn't really strike me as "fun", it strikes me as "ugh, time to get somebody to code a dicebot to handle all this stuff automatically so Slow Counting Bob doesn't drag everybody down all the time".
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Aug 3, 2014 06:34
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Nessus posted:Well if it's only one or two at a time, and especially if there's some logical order to it, it won't necessarily be awful. But it does seem like a bit of a step back. The "two steps forward", in this instance, is that you no longer need scientific notation to express the size of routine dicepools. That does a lot for manageability; hence, the emphasis on making the dice you DO roll accomplish more.
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Aug 3, 2014 06:59
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Thesaurasaurus posted:The "two steps forward", in this instance, is that you no longer need scientific notation to express the size of routine dicepools. That does a lot for manageability; hence, the emphasis on making the dice you DO roll accomplish more.  It was always easy for me to figure out how many successes I got that way since I could just scoot them over to the side, and if I didn't have enough dice because I was somehow alpha-striking, reroll the failures. Now I'll have to apply sixteen different modifiers to the same old handful of dice!!This doesn't mean that getting those things under some control isn't a good idea, of course; however, if we halve the dice pools, yet treble the number of random things we have to keep track of, have we really advanced?
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Aug 3, 2014 07:06
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Nessus posted:I... I liked the big dice pools Yeah. It's easier, demonstrably so, to do More With Less than Less With More. The human brain is more wired toward the former than the latter. 3e is faster, guys. Honest. We had a 'Slow Counting Bob' in our group and things still went really smoothly.
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Aug 3, 2014 07:31
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We got to test the leaked rules on friday, at first combat. It was exciting, we had four test characters, three for normal play and one character geared for combat. It was pretty intense fighting and the expected outcomes (coming from 2nd edition) never showed up. We had some nice turn arounds, some unexpected long fights and some really short once. The only thing every character had was one combat ability at 5 with a specialty. Dex ranged from 2 to 5, Str and Sta from 1 to 5, light normal weapons to heavy artifact weapons and no armor to heavy artifact armor. As such I'm really looking forward to the complete rules, there are some charms that maybe are too cheap for what they do (Excellent strike) or too strong (Snake Form), but overall we didnt get the feeling that a combat character is outclassing everybody else in combat (at least with starting characters).
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Aug 3, 2014 13:39
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Transient People posted:Yeah. It's easier, demonstrably so, to do More With Less than Less With More. The human brain is more wired toward the former than the latter. 3e is faster, guys. Honest. We had a 'Slow Counting Bob' in our group and things still went really smoothly. LC1984 posted:We got to test the leaked rules on friday, at first combat. It was exciting, we had four test characters, three for normal play and one character geared for combat. It was pretty intense fighting and the expected outcomes (coming from 2nd edition) never showed up. We had some nice turn arounds, some unexpected long fights and some really short once. The only thing every character had was one combat ability at 5 with a specialty. Dex ranged from 2 to 5, Str and Sta from 1 to 5, light normal weapons to heavy artifact weapons and no armor to heavy artifact armor.
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Aug 3, 2014 17:18
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Nessus posted:Well that's good to know. That said, I think this is a minor point of philosophical annoyance, which is that if every Charm gives you a different set of divergent dice abilities and qualifiers it seems like you're gonna get a headache or use the wrong one and realize it five minutes later etc. etc. and so forth. A sufficiently well designed character sheet could help a lot. If such roll mutating shenanigans are common you could for example have a sheet with (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0) below each skill and a standardised symbology, so draw a square box around everything that counts as a success, draw a circle around everything that counts as two successes and draw a diamond around everything that rerolls once, umlaut for reroll infintely. A peruse of character sheets of the past does not fill me with huge confidence but I can hope to be surprised.
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Aug 3, 2014 17:28
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Nessus posted:Well if it's only one or two at a time, and especially if there's some logical order to it, it won't necessarily be awful. But it does seem like a bit of a step back. The only ability that doesn't restrict itself to 1 or 2 're-roll x's or odd modifiers total is the Alpha Craft. Maybe Melee if you stretch the definition a bit? I don't think so.
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Aug 3, 2014 19:04
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LC1984 posted:We got to test the leaked rules on friday, at first combat. It was exciting, we had four test characters, three for normal play and one character geared for combat. It was pretty intense fighting and the expected outcomes (coming from 2nd edition) never showed up. We had some nice turn arounds, some unexpected long fights and some really short once. The only thing every character had was one combat ability at 5 with a specialty. Dex ranged from 2 to 5, Str and Sta from 1 to 5, light normal weapons to heavy artifact weapons and no armor to heavy artifact armor. Are characters with low Dexterity viable—by which I mean, do they not get stomped on by a dude with the same Ability rating and Dex 5—and is there any point to high Strength besides making a grappling monster?
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Aug 3, 2014 19:32
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Lymond posted:Are characters with low Dexterity viable—-by which I mean, do they not get stomped on by a dude with the same Ability rating and Dex 5-—and is there any point to high Strength besides making a grappling monster? Dexterity's still the best stat per point invested, but no longer overpoweringly-so like in pretty much every other Storyteller game in existence. With the way the Withering/Decisive accuracy split works and the absence of Perfect effects, Withering attacks will generally hit, and Strength does more than Dexterity in determining how much Initiative they steal. Dexterity is, by default, the bigger factor in landing Decisive attacks, but there are many, many more charms that scale with or otherwise reference Strength as a determining value, so it really depends on your charbuild setup more than anything.
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Aug 3, 2014 20:00
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Transient People posted:Having actually PLAYED with these rules, all that dice wizardry makes for an actually pretty exciting game and is really, really fast. Bitch about other stuff. The dice tricks don't subtract from the game when you actually play it instead of reading it in the shitter. Counterpoint, as someone ELSE who has actually played the game, all the weird dice tricks are distracting, take up time, charm space, and are boring as hell. Could not even finish the combat, way too tedious.
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Aug 3, 2014 20:10
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