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LGD posted:So would you say that the Lunar is balanced by being able to go all day, while the poor Solar is limited in that it can merely brings its overwhelming might to focus a few times per day?
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Oct 10, 2014 01:57
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LGD posted:Clearly. Or possibly a D&D group is a collection of protagonists working together to create a shared story, and it isn't usually the weakest among them who has the most control over that story or how big a role they play in it. Control over a story isn't protagonism. quote:So would you say that the Lunar is balanced by being able to go all day, while the poor Solar is limited in that it can merely brings its overwhelming might to focus a few times per day? Yes. Of course, both characters are going to enjoy passive perks of some kind and both characters are going to have access to figurative or literal beast modes that involve resource expenditure and dramatic, limited-use powers, but that's one way to establish a difference. Note, though, that this doesn't have to be "few times per day". It could be "few times per fight." A Solar vs. a Lunar could be like, the Solar has two or three solid chances to actually open up a weakness and take the Lunar down, but if they don't, well, they'd better hope they left themselves enough motes to run away with because a Lunar doesn't care about anything less than a deathblow.
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Oct 10, 2014 01:59
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Ferrinus posted:Control over a story isn't protagonism. LGD posted:But why is it actually better that it works this way, rather than in a way where, say, the other Celestials match Solars in terms of one-on-one fighting and other things that are inside their purviews? LGD fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Oct 10, 2014 |
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Oct 10, 2014 02:07
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LGD posted:No, the control over the story is used to better position a given character as a lead actor and mover and shaker within that story. You know, "how big a role they play" the part of that sentence you ignored. The size of a character's role within a story has nothing to do with their power level within that story, or the extent to which they are a mover and shaker. That's not how stories work. Protagonism is not a function base attack bonus. The words, you are using, are nonsense!! quote:Here is another sentence you previously ignored while responding to other sentences in a post that I would also like you to address: It's better for other Celestials not to match Solars in one-on-one fighting because it cleaves better to the premise that Solars were the mightiest of the Exalted. The ability to fight and win a duel is impressive and cool. Solars who aren't any stronger in a fight than Lunars or Sidereals and show their true power in the courtroom are lame, and entirely inappropriate as the default, marquee splat whose glorious return the corebook heralds. The Dawn Caste should not be a bait and switch.
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Oct 10, 2014 02:11
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Ferrinus posted:I told you: "party balance" is not a thing in Exalted. The game doesn't revolve around any specific group activity and there is no onus for every character to be equally good at that group activity. If they're not, that's just part of the story. Ferrinus posted:If I elect to play a ghoul in a Vampire game, or if I elect to play an Essence 1 newly-Exalted Solar in a game of Essence 3 established Solars - perhaps one who's taken on one of the established Solars as their fencing master, even! - I do so with full expectation that my character is visibly less effective than everyone else's, and indeed that at least some of the drama surrounding my exploits will revolve around the fact that I'm out of my depth.
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Oct 10, 2014 02:14
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Cycloneman posted:If I am playing in a game, and my character is built in such a way that his "time to shine" is in one area (diplomacy, stealth, lore, combat, whatever), I do not want to be clearly outshone by another PC in that area. I call that "party balance," if you have some other term you'd rather use, go ahead and I'll use it from now on so that we can have a conversation about the issues rather than whether or not this qualifies as "party balance." Then maybe build a character that another character doesn't outshine? Or petition your DM to ban the character who's outshining you from the game. quote:There is a difference between creating a fifth level Wizard in a party of sixteenth level Wizards, and creating a sixteenth level Fighter in a party of sixteenth level Wizards. Your suggestions rely on the assumption that Solar Supremacy is not just something true in the world itself, but is so fundamentally true, that they must stretch out into systems which only PCs interact with, and only matter for cross-splat play (i.e. XP). Yes. YES! The double capitalization! I'm so powerful right now. Ahem, anyway, yes, obviously. The Lunars book doesn't describe "PC Lunars, the super-special Lunars who are just as strong as Solars are". It describes Lunars. The Charms and essence pool calculations and so on described therein are actually representative of Lunars in the setting. Playing a Lunar in a Solars game is playing a fifth (more like thirteenth...?) level wizard in a party of fifteenth level wizard. Character level in D&D is like Exalt disparity in Exalted. Both are baseline setting assumptions.
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Oct 10, 2014 02:18
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Ferrinus posted:The size of a character's role within a story has nothing to do with their power level within that story, or the extent to which they are a mover and shaker. That's not how stories work. Protagonism is not a function base attack bonus. The words, you are using, are nonsense!! quote:It's better for other Celestials not to match Solars in one-on-one fighting because it cleaves better to the premise that Solars were the mightiest of the Exalted. The ability to fight and win a duel is impressive and cool. Solars who aren't any stronger in a fight than Lunars or Sidereals and show their true power in the courtroom are lame, and entirely inappropriate as the default, marquee splat whose glorious return the corebook heralds. 
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Oct 10, 2014 02:25
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LGD posted:We're talking about the stories generated by roleplaying games Ferrinus, and specifically the kind of stories generated by games that don't have dissociated narrative control mechanics. In those stories it is usually the characters that can best leverage mechanics to their advantage that become most important to the flow of the story. I love how you turned the phrase "mover and shaker" around so that it implicitly became about prestige and social acumen rather than the describing the extent to which a character influences the course of the group's story. Sadly I don't think you're making anyone look dumb here except yourself. Yeah, that has nothing to do with protagonism. "Deprogatonize" is gobbledygook. I won't have it. You don't influence a story more by winning a fight than by losing one. You don't influence a story more by sealing an alliance than by letting one slip through your fingers. Exalted is a White Wolf (well, "Onyx Path") game - unlike D&D or Only War or whatever, it does not revolve around a single activity that the entire group engages in repeatedly to measurable levels of effectiveness. It is a point-buy game in which different characters have wildly different levels of ability in wildly different fields. You do not become the protagonist of a roleplaying game by having high stats, and you do not cease to be the protagonist of a roleplaying game by having low stats. Your vocabulary is stupid. quote:They'd show their true power on the battlefield as leaders of men. Why is it more important that we cleave to your interpretation of this particular premise to benefit sub-themes of 1-2 Solar types when it clearly has deleterious effects on the core systems of multiple splats and inter-splat play? Why does the potential power level of Lunar and Sidereal characters affect your Solar-only games Ferrinus? I mean are you really going to be sitting there fuming in anger if your Solar couldn't take Black Ice Shadow in a fight? Yeah, it's not, though. It's not clear. It doesn't have deleterious effects on other splats - 1e Sidereals and Dragon-Blooded and Abyssals and Alchemicals and so on were just fine. You made that up, just as you did last time. I can't believe the level of bargaining that's going on here, and the immense degree to which people who want to depower Solars specifically fetishize personal combat. Solars can be great, okay, they can be great at everything, everything in the world. They can be the smartest, prettiest, coolest, nicest, most popular and important people ever, I don't care, just let me beat one in a fight. Please. Please! Well, bad news, friend, I fetishize personal combat just as much. I value the immense rhetorical and dramatic power of straight-up winning a sword or fist fight as much as you do. Solars are a big deal, and an enormous threat to the status quo, and an exciting kind of character to play, precisely because they can kick rear end as well as take names. Like, seriously, it's crazy. Take Twilights. I love the wizard archetype, I play spellcasters/loremasters/intellectuals/etc. almost whenever a game will let me. You think Dawns are """deprotagonizing"""? Look at loving Twilights! There are three levels of sorcery and no one can actually use the last, which is called Solar Circle Sorcery, except for Solars. If a Twilight-caste sorcerer reincarnates somewhere in Creation, then holy poo poo. Holy loving poo poo. This is big goddamn news. This kid - this loving precious teenaged boy or wizened old crone or whoever they turn out to be - they hold within themselves the potential to call forth powers that have been lost for thousands of years. They can wipe cities off the map with hellfire nukes. They can turn entire regions into breadbaskets or dust bowls. They can call forth third circle demons (I'm pretty sure that, in 3E, a 3rd circle demon is actually a more powerful class of being than an Exalt is, though generally one that's pretty limited in scope). When was the last time a tier three demon walked Creation? The First Age? To anyone who cares about spellcasting even a teensy little bit, this poo poo is completely bonkers. It's a cataclysmic disruption of basically everything that's true. Practically no one is more important than this kid/lady/snakeman/other. Armies will march and dragons will soar for the sake of destroying, or capturing, or coopting, or befriending this figure of earth-shaking importance. That's the fantasy of playing a Twilight! A Dawn, in your ideal world? Ehhhh. Basically another Full Moon. I guess it's bad that there's more of them...? Well, gently caress off, mate. Every kind of Solar should be terrifying, not just the kind that does stuff that your personal PC isn't interested in. I want to play a Dawn caste and I want their sword to be as ruinous to Creation's status quo as would be a Twilight's lore or a Zenith's voice. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Oct 10, 2014 |
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Oct 10, 2014 02:39
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Ferrinus posted:Then maybe build a character that another character doesn't outshine? Or petition your DM to ban the character who's outshining you from the game. Ferrinus posted:Yes. YES! The double capitalization! I'm so powerful right now. Ferrinus posted:Playing a Lunar in a Solars game is playing a fifth (more like thirteenth...?) level wizard in a party of fifteenth level wizard. Character level in D&D is like Exalt disparity in Exalted. Both are baseline setting assumptions.
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Oct 10, 2014 02:40
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Cycloneman posted:I can do that in 3.x too. It's a system failure there too. It's not a system failure that your 12th level wizard is weaker than a 15th level wizard. quote:And there's no IC difference between PC Wizards and NPC Wizards in D&D 4E. But only one of them gets more than one healing surge at first level. The only characters who you actually build on XP in Exalted are PCs, is my point. So two Exalts of equivalent XP being imbalanced only matters if they are being played in the same game. Otherwise, it's irrelevant. There are going to be quick NPC generation rules in 3E, so a PC Lunar will be different from an NPC Lunar in the sense that the PC Lunar has more detailed traits, can accumulate and spend experience points, etc. However, they won't be categorically stronger than one, just as a PC 4e wizard isn't, in-character, necessarily stronger than an NPC one considered to be of the same level. quote:If there were some rules in the Lunar book that said "in order to ensure that Lunars are objectively inferior to Solars in accordance with canon, in cross-splat games, cut their mote pools in half and give them three-quarters XP" (or whatever), and the two Exaltations were otherwise balanced, do you think people would actually implement that rule, generally speaking? No, because that's extra work. People would use the rules as-written if they gave Lunars half-sized mote pools and inflated Charm costs, though.
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Oct 10, 2014 02:44
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Ferrinus posted:Yeah, that has nothing to do with protagonism. "Deprogatonize" is gobbledygook. I won't have it. quote:Yeah, it's not, though. It's not clear. It doesn't have deleterious effects on other splats - 1e Sidereals and Dragon-Blooded and Abyssals and Alchemicals and so on were just fine. You made that up, just as you did last time. quote:I can't believe the level of bargaining that's going on here, and the immense degree to which people who want to depower Solars specifically fetishize personal combat. Solars can be great, okay, they can be great at everything, everything in the world. They can be the smartest, prettiest, coolest, nicest, most popular and important people ever, I don't care, just let me beat one in a fight. Please. Please! LGD fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Oct 10, 2014 |
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Oct 10, 2014 03:08
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Ferrinus posted:It's not a system failure that your 12th level wizard is weaker than a 15th level wizard. Ferrinus posted:There are going to be quick NPC generation rules in 3E, so a PC Lunar will be different from an NPC Lunar in the sense that the PC Lunar has more detailed traits, can accumulate and spend experience points, etc. However, they won't be categorically stronger than one, just as a PC 4e wizard isn't, in-character, necessarily stronger than an NPC one considered to be of the same level. I understand what you're talking about re: mechanical-roleplaying connection. Lunars are "inferior" to Solars in lore (leaving aside for the moment whether or not this should be true). Therefore, the most logical thing is to make them mechanically inferior. The problem is that this mechanical inferiority only comes up to make mixed splat parties difficult to balance. If there is supposed to be a difference in power levels between Solars and Lunars, and this somehow effects the PCs in a particular game (say, both are antagonists to an Abyssal party), it will rely totally on the GM to implement it in game, since the GM is determining how many charms, motes, etc, his NPCs get, and will determine those in accordance with the needs of the story. A mechanical difference in power level of two similar-XP characters matters only to PCs. And if players want to play in a cross-splat party they, probably, are not seeking out a 12th level Wizard/15th level Wizard disparity. If they really and truly want that dynamic, they can just penalize the Lunar's mote pool or whatever. It's very, very easy to unbalance a balanced game, if that's what people want; very difficult to balance an unbalanced game. Ferrinus posted:No, because that's extra work.
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Oct 10, 2014 03:12
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LGD posted:You don't become more or less prominent to the flow of the group's story based on what your stats enable you to do? A character doesn't become less central to the role of the story when a charcter who can do what they can do but better is introduced? I strongly disagree, and I disagree that D&D is different in this sense- the fighter being bad at his job and losing you a fight in D&D isn't more or less influential than losing a fight in Exalted, but a Wizard being too good their job causes the campaign to revolve around their capabilities (suggesting that player capability does influence story direction and prominence of characters within that story). No, you don't. Stories aren't about challenge ratings. Stories are about characters. "Deprotagonize" is meaningless gibberish. The existence of other hypothetical or actual characters who can beat your character in a fight does not change whether a story is about your character or not. quote:1st Edition Sidereals were as good/better than Solars, Abyssals are Solaroids, Alchemicals are both noted as being weaker than other Celestials (Lunars and Sidereals included) and located in an alternate plane of existence, and no one is suggesting Dragonblooded should be equivalent (talk about making stuff up). The only example that is relevant here is 1E Sidereals and they're not exactly what you'd call a prime example of Solar Exalted uber alles. They're actually far closer to the "equivalent to Solars in combat (with different mechanics), can do cool stuff the Solars can't, worse at other things" ideal. It was also their relative mechanical potency that originally got people up in arms about how Solars needed to be better, which has metastasized into the current obnoxious advocacy of universal Solar Supremacy. 1e Sidereals looked better than Solars when their corebook came out, but actually weren't. They appeared to have stronger Charms, but at best had on-level Charms but massively smaller essence pools to power those Charms. They also had published high-essence Charms where Solars didn't, but later books fixed that and the Power Combat update smoothed out the bits of the rules where later-released books (including both Sidereals and Abyssals) included tools or weird rules that early-released books just didn't have the chops to handle. So what I'm saying here is that your only example of a bad 1e splat is Lunars - and you can't actually forcefully argue that it's weakness relative to Solars that made them so bad rather than scatterbrained Charm organization, lack of a strong central concept, etc. Sidereals, Dragon-Blooded, Alchemicals, Fair Folk... all weaker than Solars, all well-designed and well-received additions to the game. You have no examples to sustain your assertion. quote:And your ideal version of a Dawn is simply a Full Moon with a little more pepper, rather than the next Ghenghis Khan. Who is sadly selling the concept short here? It isn't just about personal combat, it's just that that's the area with by far the most mechanical support, it's an area where all of the Celestial Exalted have obvious purview, and an area where their unique powers can and should obviously come to bear. It makes the comparisons and examples easier and more concrete, and if Celestial Exalted can't compete in this obvious area of in-setting and out-of-character focus, taking full advantage of their power sources, where are they actually going to be superior and what are their unique powers actually bringing to the table? Your answer is "nowhere" and "nothing" and I don't find that to be a good answer, especially when I can't see any actual benefit beyond letting you get your dick hard about how sweet and unbeatable your Dawn is. No, my ideal version of a Dawn is to combat what a Twilight is to sorcery. They're not a Full Moon with a little more pepper - they're more powerful than a Full Moon and can beat things a Full Moon can't, just as a Twilight can cast things a No Moon can't and build things a Secrets can't. They are qualitatively superior. They're not necessarily tremendously, absurdly qualitatively superior - as nuts as Solar Circle Sorcery is, there are plenty of things you'd much rather use Terrestrial or Celestial for and at that level the Solar's advantage is probably expressed in stuff like ability to gather motes quickly - but any kind of Solar is an earth-shaking threat, not just the kind of Solar that you, personally, don't care to play or don't feel challenged by. Cycloneman posted:It *is* a system failure that my 15th level fighter is weaker than a 15th level wizard, though! Yes, I agree. But a 14th level wizard is supposed to be weaker than a 15th level wizard, and a Lunar is supposed to be weaker than a Solar. These are the basic terms of the games we're talking about. quote:But a PC 4e Wizard is, in fact, mechanically more powerful than an NPC one of the same level, I'm reasonably certain. No. If I actually wanted to build the wizard nemesis for a wizard PC in a 4e game I was running, I would give that wizard a full complement of powers and healing surges and so on. The DMG rules for creating monsters with class levels make a bunch of leaps and shortcuts in order to simulate the various advantages that PCs have - for instance, a high level monster only gets a small benefit, sometimes none at all, from equipping a magic weapon because they're assumed to already be using a magic weapon, have a bunch of feats, etc. to sustain the kinds of attack and defense bonuses they're swinging at all. In 4e, wizards aren't the same thing as lay ritualists or minor adepts or whatever, but PCs aren't magically distinct from NPCs within the fiction of the game. It's kind of like World of Darkness tells you to assume that a minor NPC has 1 willpower point or 0 to spend in a given scene not because they're literally suffering from soul loss but just because it's assumed they're facing the same conservation/thriftiness challenges as PCs are. quote:I understand what you're talking about re: mechanical-roleplaying connection. Lunars are "inferior" to Solars in lore (leaving aside for the moment whether or not this should be true). Therefore, the most logical thing is to make them mechanically inferior. The problem is that this mechanical inferiority only comes up to make mixed splat parties difficult to balance. If there is supposed to be a difference in power levels between Solars and Lunars, and this somehow effects the PCs in a particular game (say, both are antagonists to an Abyssal party), it will rely totally on the GM to implement it in game, since the GM is determining how many charms, motes, etc, his NPCs get, and will determine those in accordance with the needs of the story. A mechanical difference in power level of two similar-XP characters matters only to PCs. If my Essence 1 Solar newbie runs into Ma-Ha-Suchi, I'll get my rear end handed to me (holy gently caress, I've been deprotagonized by Ma-Ha-Suchi! Judge! JUDGE!!!), but it'll still be true that he can increase his dicepools by a lower proportion than I can increase my dicepools, he has no option to erect a perfect defense while I do, etc. etc. (These are all assumptions about future game mechanics, of course, but please play along here) This is useful for worldbuilding and immersion even if no one in the game is ever going to play a Lunar. If people want to play in a cross-splat party, they are, in fact, seeking a low level/high level disparity because that's the premise of the game. It's like if I elect to play a ghoul or in Vampire or a hedge magician in Mage. Maybe the ST gives me a ton of extra XP to bring me up to par! But maybe they don't. Quite possibly I don't want them to, because what I'm looking for is, in fact, the experience of playing a were-pug among were-wolves. quote:Do you honestly think that that is the only reason why they would resist doing that? Yes. Canon has a terrible power. Otherwise people wouldn't care what the books told you the default was and just change it themselves. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 03:37 on Oct 10, 2014 |
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Oct 10, 2014 03:34
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Ferrinus is doing a good job of explaining why Exalted is and will forever be a bad game nobody should ever play, and I hope you will at least do him the courtesy of listening to this sage advice.
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Oct 10, 2014 03:51
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Comparisons between DnD (with Solars as Wizards and Lunars as Fighters) are dishonest at best. That is a mode of play, yes, but I don't know why mixed-circle games are like the testing ground for these sorts of ideas. You can't have a game where Lunars fill a party 'role' (like 'Fighter' or 'Healer') in a universe where Castes (literally a definition of role) also exists. You have like... roles within roles at that point, and it's pointlessly specific. I think that fatsplats used as a definition of how the various Exalts fulfill their adventures and along what sorts of lines they are divided is pretty much the only way to make the system work as it is. Also in my minimal experience, Solars being 'better' than other Exalts is basically a non-issue in actual play. I don't think anybody - least of all Ferrinus - wants to go back to 2e where a Lunar has to buy a very specific set of Charms to even coexist in the same combat as a Solar. Given than, how would inequality in a given field even manifest? I think what makes the splats fun is not how many dice they get to throw at a problem or even exactly what problems they can solve at Essence level X, but rather what hoops they have to jump through to solve the problem in question. Given what little we've seen of Solar social Charms for instance, it seems like affecting large societies and encouraging social change actually requires them to talk to a large number of people. It (seems like) we're moving away from the 2eism where a Solar can wear a tshirt that says 'gently caress the Wyld Hunt' for a couple of weeks and get everybody to agree with him. Knowing that, it seems like the smart thing is to have the other Exalts approach problems in different ways. Lunars solve problems with adaptation, trickery, and transformation; it might be that they, of all people, should get straight up mind-control magic, or maybe they can rewrite local history books retroactively, or some poo poo like that. Obviously Sidereals deal with problems through arcane, nonsequiter star magic. Basically what I'm saying is figuring out the respective 'power levels' of the splats is stupid and even in 2e where it is the stupiest I never really saw the problem in actual play. I did see lots of other problems though.
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Oct 10, 2014 03:51
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Ferrinus posted:No, you don't. Stories aren't about challenge ratings. Stories are about characters. "Deprotagonize" is meaningless gibberish. The existence of other hypothetical or actual characters who can beat your character in a fight does not change whether a story is about your character or not. I'm not going to actually use that word because I'm perfectly content with my vocabulary, but I'm curious what you'd prefer. quote:1e Sidereals looked better than Solars when their corebook came out, but actually weren't. They appeared to have stronger Charms, but at best had on-level Charms but massively smaller essence pools to power those Charms. They also had published high-essence Charms where Solars didn't, but later books fixed that and the Power Combat update smoothed out the bits of the rules where later-released books (including both Sidereals and Abyssals) included tools or weird rules that early-released books just didn't have the chops to handle. quote:No, my ideal version of a Dawn is to combat what a Twilight is to sorcery. They're not a Full Moon with a little more pepper - they're more powerful than a Full Moon and can beat things a Full Moon can't, just as a Twilight can cast things a No Moon can't and build things a Secrets can't. They are qualitatively superior. LGD fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Oct 10, 2014 |
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Oct 10, 2014 03:55
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It's easy to forget in top-down, abstracted conversations like these that Exalted is an incredibly detailed and crunchy system. Like, if we were talking about some sort of lazy ultra-lite freeform RPG, the sum total of difference between Solars and Lunars would be this: Solar Character Creation: Assign 5, 4, and 2 Combat: Lore: Influence: Lunar Character Creation: Assign 4, 4, and 3 Combat: Lore: Influence: And you'd have this sort of empty business where, well, the Solar rolls 1d6+5 to win a fight while the Lunar rolls 1d6+4, yippee. Actually though we're talking about a game in which not just mano-a-mano fighting in general but each fighting style in specific is a giant pile of like thirty discrete powers. So even in socialization, which everyone is fine with Solars being the best at because you don't do much of it in Dungeons and Dragons, Solars employ their (probably the most straight-up powerful) influence in specific ways with a bunch of salient quirks that will make them situationally more or less useful regardless of the breadth or depth of the end effect or how many dice are ultimately rolled vs. Resolve or whatever. Edit: I edited an embarrassing mistake out of this post but for the sake of integrity I will call attention to it here: I had previously written "thirty discreet powers". Of course, it's only Sidereals who have that many Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Oct 10, 2014 |
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Oct 10, 2014 03:57
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Ferrinus posted:Solars employ their (probably the most straight-up powerful) influence in specific ways with a bunch of salient quirks that will make them situationally more or less useful regardless of the breadth or depth of the end effect or how many dice are ultimately rolled vs. Resolve or whatever. This is pretty much the most important element of implementation and the heart of the 'how' argument I was making earlier. It doesn't matter how powerful a Solar influence Charm is if it (I don't know, just for instance!) requires you to have sex with the target in order to function.
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Oct 10, 2014 04:02
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The actual, factual protagonists of the Lord of the Rings are Frodo and Sam. They are probably the least effectual members of the party in combat, in social skills, or in really just about anything besides Use Rope. The actual, factual protagonists of ur-shonen anime Jojo's Bizarre Adventure are at a disadvantage against 90% of the foes they face, even with their cool powers, and there's usually a pretty major disparity in abilities between the members of the group.
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Oct 10, 2014 04:04
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Jotaro like bodied half the villains by himself and except for the fight against Dio he was superior to the opponents in a lot of stuff, except perhaps on gimmicky situations like having his grandfather taken hostage or being forced to play cards or videogames.
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Oct 10, 2014 04:08
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LGD posted:What word would you prefer I use to succinctly say "made less central, important, or essential to the overall arc of the story?" This has nothing to do with one on one fights and everything to do with importance within a party and centrality to the narratives that all the players are experiencing. You know the characters that, if they were describing the campaign to someone else, would play the part of the protagonist? "Central, important, or essential" is a matter of whether the camera is on you, not a matter of how strong you are. Dumbledore did not deprotagonize Harry Potter. If a game does not revolve around tackling specific game-mechanical challenges as a team, repeatedly, as a strategic exercise/OOC challenge that happens alongside/on top of roleplaying, differences in power, influence, or in-world importance serve as characterizing elements. quote:This argument has only ever been about the other kinds of primary Celestial Exalted Ferrinus. The other splats don't figure into it, and of the four splats that have been released only 1E Sidereals would be considered good. It's also the one book that didn't obviously have "categorically worse than Solars in all things" (or copy and paste as much as possible and hope no one notices) as a design goal. No, that's not true. 1E Sidereals isn't the only weaker-than-Solars splat that was good (actually, 1E Lunars was the only one that was bad; the rest of them were good) and this discussion is by no means limited to Celestials alone. There've been people in this thread or the last who've said they'd be happy with Solar-strong DBs, for instance. But, okay, let's talk about Celestial Exalted. Let's talk, specifically, about Celestial Exalted meant to be, in the setting, weaker than Solars: * Sidereals * Lunars * Alchemicals Hmm, Sidereals and Alchemicals were great, Lunars were lovely, and all three were weaker than Solars - and if Lunars were powered up to be as strong as or stronger than Solars (easily done: up their mote pools, stick perfect defenses early in their trees, lower their Charm costs, maybe give them FLB/FFBS equivalents) they're still insanely boring and one-dimensional because the only character concept their book even tries to sell you on is "barbarian". quote:Then why keep suggesting that they're only marginally superior? Your whole argument is that Solars shouldn't be restricted to something as lame as being the Lawgivers when they could have Being The Best as their most essential core theme, so why not run wild with that? I can just sit here and laugh at the idea that its the people who oppose this interpretation of Solar Supremacy who don't care to feel challenged. A Twilight isn't "marginally superior" to a No Moon - they're superior in a clear and obvious way. Still, there are advantages to being a No Moon, and the specific manifestation of a Twilight's superiority is a weighty, even cumbersome one that ultimately yields options that a No Moon can never match but that can't always easily be brought to bear. Combat's more detailed than sorcery is and contains a lot more wiggle room for mechanical differentiation, so I don't expect that Dawn vs. Full Moon looks exactly like Twilight vs. No Moon. I do, however, expect it to be equally significant.
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Oct 10, 2014 04:10
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:Jotaro like bodied half the villains by himself and except for the fight against Dio he was superior to the opponents in a lot of stuff, except perhaps on gimmicky situations like having his grandfather taken hostage or being forced to play cards or videogames. He defeats his opponents handily when he can punch them, but he's still at a disadvantage against Dark Blue Moon (lack of air), Strength (trapped in the Stand's grip), Rubber Soul (can't touch this), etc. because they're able to put him in situations where it's hard to punch. About the only one he trivializes thus far is Justice, and that's after Justice has handily beaten Polnareff. More importantly, Jotaro and Polnareff are more powerful in combat terms than Kakyoin or Joseph, with Avdol somewhere in between with Iggy. Kakyoin and Joseph have out-of-combat knowledge, sure, but that's not so much the focus of things.
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Oct 10, 2014 04:13
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Effectronica posted:He defeats his opponents handily when he can punch them, but he's still at a disadvantage against Dark Blue Moon (lack of air), Strength (trapped in the Stand's grip), Rubber Soul (can't touch this), etc. because they're able to put him in situations where it's hard to punch. About the only one he trivializes thus far is Justice, and that's after Justice has handily beaten Polnareff.
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Oct 10, 2014 04:15
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Ferrinus posted:"Central, important, or essential" is a matter of whether the camera is on you, not a matter of how strong you are. Dumbledore did not deprotagonize Harry Potter. If a game does not revolve around tackling specific game-mechanical challenges as a team, repeatedly, as a strategic exercise/OOC challenge that happens alongside/on top of roleplaying, differences in power, influence, or in-world importance serve as characterizing elements.  quote:No, that's not true. 1E Sidereals isn't the only weaker-than-Solars splat that was good (actually, 1E Lunars was the only one that was bad; the rest of them were good) and this discussion is by no means limited to Celestials alone. There've been people in this thread or the last who've said they'd be happy with Solar-strong DBs, for instance. quote:But, okay, let's talk about Celestial Exalted. Let's talk, specifically, about Celestial Exalted meant to be, in the setting, weaker than Solars: *ignoring that 2E combat was completely about PD-based mote attrition battles quote:A Twilight isn't "marginally superior" to a No Moon - they're superior in a clear and obvious way. Still, there are advantages to being a quote:Combat's more detailed than sorcery is and contains a lot more wiggle room for mechanical differentiation, so I don't expect that Dawn vs. Full Moon looks exactly like Twilight vs. No Moon. I do, however, expect it to be equally significant. I've always said this was a position you could take, it's just one that I don't agree with for reasons that would be fairly clear at this point if you weren't busy insisting that mechanics have relationship to narrative control or player participation in a bizarre attempt to win a semantic argument. I'm fairly confident my position is the one most people would prefer, and I'm even more confident neither of us is actually going to get exactly what they want out of 3rd edition. LGD fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Oct 10, 2014 |
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Oct 10, 2014 04:41
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RPZip posted:Ferrinus is doing a good job of explaining why Exalted is and will forever be a bad game nobody should ever play, and I hope you will at least do him the courtesy of listening to this sage advice. Joke's on him, we already had plenty of reasons from the developers themselves to never play Exalted (without heavy house rules).
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Oct 10, 2014 04:42
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LGD posted:And guess what crunchy games like Exalted tend to revolve around? But no, we're clearly all free-forming this poo poo, which is why you care about Solar combat effectiveness so much. Crunchy games like Exalted revolve around their settings. It's not a free-form game at all. You play Exalted to play Exalted - to tell stories about Exalts. It doesn't have a focus on a single, particular, full-group activity the way that D&D 4e does. Even in an all-Solars campaign, there is frequently going to be one character who's a better fighter than all the other characters. This doesn't matter because Exalted isn't actually about fights and you don't have to contribute to fights to play Exalted. quote:That was out of 1E Sidereals/Lunars and 2E Sidereals/Lunars, and Celestial-level DBs isn't a position I've been advocating. 1E Sidereals weren't stronger than Solars. Like... everything in 2E was bad. The base system wasn't good. However, most things in 2E were bad because the base system was bad, and because the writers tended to just vomit out 1e copypasta with completely nonsensical changes. Like, the problems with 2E Sidereals had nothing to do with Sidereal vs. Solar balance. The problems with 2E Lunars had nothing to do with Lunar vs. Solar balance. This thing you keep talking about, where some splats are good, some splats are bad, and some splats are specifically bad because they were made to be weaker than Solars - you have no examples! You can't point to anything that differentiates between the second and third element of that list! The thing you said - that other splats have somehow been made worse by the premise that Solars are the mightiest Exalted - you can't sustain it. quote:If you're going to argue for superiority argue for superiority. Don't pussyfoot around and talk about the risible "advantages" of an option you're advocating must be inherently and forever worse. I... just... did? Are you having problems reading? I clearly just told you that a Solar is a better sorcerer than a Lunar, full stop. There are drawbacks to the Solar's advantages and there are probably things the Lunar can do with lower-level spells that the Solar can't (of course, I imagine the reverse is also true) but the Solar clearly and indisputably enjoys advantages. That's the point. The thing is, if you're playing a two-player Exalted game about a pair of sorcerers, one Solar and one Lunar - and let's say that this is like, 1e or something, there actually aren't sorcery-affecting mechanics besides each character's anima power and the spells themselves - the fact that only the Solar can cast Benediction of Archgenesis does not actually make the Lunar's Magma Kraken less powerful. Sometimes Magma Kraken is more important to cast than Benediction of Archgenesis. XP spent on BoA is XP not spent on Magma Kraken. Solar-tier spells are bigger and more impressive than lesser spells, but they are frequently less appropriate and pretty much always more taxing. This means that if your goal is "I want to be the best sorcerer ever", you play a Solar, full stop. If your goal is "I want to be a sorcerer", you just play anything capable of sorcery, because being actually the best at something, or potentially the best at something, is different from being one of the main characters of a story. If you can't imagine playing a character in an RPG without that character being the best ___ ever, well, congratulations, I have a splat right here just for you.
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Oct 10, 2014 04:58
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It's actually really perfect because carefully looking through all your options and making sure to pick the one that's absolutely best for your intended game role and carefully examining its prospects for long-term growth/maximization/specialization etc, all so that you can overcome obstacles with maximum efficiency and assuredness while having earned the highest score, is exactly the D&D party construction mindset. Well, guess which exalt type's splats happen to be Fighter/Cleric/Wizard/Rogue/Bard. The answer may surprise you!
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Oct 10, 2014 05:05
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Ferrinus posted:Crunchy games like Exalted revolve around their settings. It's not a free-form game at all. You play Exalted to play Exalted - to tell stories about Exalts. It doesn't have a focus on a single, particular, full-group activity the way that D&D 4e does. Even in an all-Solars campaign, there is frequently going to be one character who's a better fighter than all the other characters. This doesn't matter because Exalted isn't actually about fights and you don't have to contribute to fights to play Exalted. quote:1E Sidereals weren't stronger than Solars. quote:I... just... did? Are you having problems reading? I clearly just told you that a Solar is a better sorcerer than a Lunar, full stop. There are drawbacks to the Solar's advantages and there are probably things the Lunar can do with lower-level spells that the Solar can't (of course, I imagine the reverse is also true) but the Solar clearly and indisputably enjoys advantages. That's the point. quote:The thing is, if you're playing a two-player Exalted game about a pair of sorcerers, one Solar and one Lunar - and let's say that this is like, 1e or something, there actually aren't sorcery-affecting mechanics besides each character's anima power and the spells themselves - the fact that only the Solar can cast Benediction of Archgenesis does not actually make the Lunar's Magma Kraken less powerful. Sometimes Magma Kraken is more important to cast than Benediction of Archgenesis. XP spent on BoA is XP not spent on Magma Kraken. Solar-tier spells are bigger and more impressive than lesser spells, but they are frequently less appropriate and pretty much always more taxing. edit: Ferrinus posted:It's actually really perfect because carefully looking through all your options and making sure to pick the one that's absolutely best for your intended game role and carefully examining its prospects for long-term growth/maximization/specialization etc, all so that you can overcome obstacles with maximum efficiency and assuredness while having earned the highest score, is exactly the D&D party construction mindset. Well, guess which exalt type's splats happen to be Fighter/Cleric/Wizard/Rogue/Bard. The answer may surprise you! LGD fucked around with this message at 05:56 on Oct 10, 2014 |
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Oct 10, 2014 05:46
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My issue is the Solar's shtick of "Better than everyone else" is kind of poo poo. I know that's not well formed and wordy but there it is. Narrative wise if you have one character who's just better than everyone else "Because they are" then they're usually pretty loving unlikable and you want to see them get beaten up. Making that person the Primary Choice for players leads to pretty awkward stories. Or Axe Cop. Also Exalted is 'really' crunch heavy. Like, really really crunch heavy. Having one Splat be mechanically better than all the others makes the rules all a bit pointless. Why not just cut straight to "Look in a fight/whatever the Solar wins because they're the Solar. Let's just skip that and get on to the fun emotional stuff already." There's not a huge amount of satisfaction in winning a fight where you had the odds all tipped in your favor in the first place. Fans fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Oct 10, 2014 |
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Oct 10, 2014 06:04
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LGD posted:Why do crunchy games revolve around their settings more than freeform games? I'd think it would be the opposite since the lack of mechanics makes setting detail the only limiting factor. I thought the same for a little while, but nowadays I feel like rules-lite games are mostly about how lite their rules are. If you look at something like Ars Magica or Pendragon or, indeed, Exalted, you see a really sincere attempt to represent a shitload of cute little details within the game world such that they're actually part of the process of play. It's a labor of love, and the point is to give people mechanical handles to grab onto no matter what little part of the setting they're engaging with. quote:And why do you think this is restricted to fights? Fighting is just one way of exercising mechanical influence, there are plenty of others. The introduction of an Eclipse diplomat to a party of Dragonblooded has a high likelihood of deprotagonizing the DB who previously did the talking- the Eclipse is going to make anything he does in his area of specialty largely superfluous and you would expect the Eclipse to get much more "camera time" and exercise much more control of the story than the deprotagonized DB. Obviously that's an extreme and unrealistic case, but I don't understand why this notion is so anathema to you. And a Solar can absolutely deprotagonize another Solar character as a result of superior system mastery if they have the same area of focus- that's part of the reason niche protection is important! That's also why I want Lunars and Sidereals to actually have niches to begin with rather than a Shared status of "categorically inferior Solar help mates." Actually, he doesn't. It's impossible to "deprotagonize" someone by having more points than they do, because whether someone is the protagonist of a story has nothing to do with how strong or weak they are within the fiction. "Deprotagonize" is, in general, an insanely stupid word and idea. What you actually mean is "be more powerful than." Like, literally, I can replace "deprotgaonize" with "be more powerful than" in every case you use it, and you get this sort of boring, empty business. An Eclipse has a high likelihood of being more powerful than a Dragon-Blood. A system-mastered Solar has a high likelihood of being more powerful than a haphazardly-constructed Solar. Yaaaawn. You don't appear to be able to be correctly identifying even the most basic mechanics of a narrative, so stop pretending to talk about them. Say what you mean. quote:1E Lunars was made worse by that notion, and I think the worst parts of 2E Lunars were touched by that notion as well. I don't think 1E Sidereals was designed with the kind of Solar superiority you advocate in mind, and 2E is clearly nonsense that should be ignored. That's two books that I think were negatively impacted by that design decision, and one that was good because I don't think it was designed with that philosophy in mind (instead Sidereals were weaker over time due to XP costs and their limited charm pool). Those are the examples that would apply, because those are the books that would have been written with a Solar power limit in mind. The others you've mentioned are either intentionally and explicitly intended to be lower power level than the Lunars/Solars or are Solaroids. I don't think writing low powered splats is the problem, I think writing high powered splats that are allowed to creep right up to the line but cannot ever exceed it are. I admit that there isn't overwhelming evidence in favor of this, but there also isn't any evidence of benefits to this power limit beyond your ability to build the biggest baddest Dawn caste ever. See, you don't... point to anything. You "don't think" 1E Sidereals was designed with that in mind... even though, like, one can literally dig up quotes by Jenna Moran explaining how and why Sidereal combat or social powers or whatever, despite appearing more powerful in isolation, are actually weaker than corresponding Solar powers. You do think both editions of Lunars were designed with that in mind, which is why they are bad - although, if you actually list what was wrong with either Lunars 1E or 2E, the problems are things like "little variety between characters", "incoherent splat identity", and "lack of an overarching goal", not "15% less DPR than Solars." You also think Alchemicals and Dragon-Blooded were fine... despite explicitly affirming that Alchemicals were designed to be weaker than Solars. I guess it's okay because they're designed to be weaker than Lunars and Sidereals, too? Of course, I'm pretty sure 1e Lunars were weaker than 1e Alchemicals due to how atrocious their design was. This is acceptable for some reason, though, because- It's entirely incoherent. We can boil it down to this: Both Lunar cores were lovely, this is somehow the fault of Solars. Well, you're wrong, because like I said you could easily make Lunars as strong or stronger than Solars in some or all avenues and you would not have fixed the fact that they're far, far less compelling than the objectively weaker Dragon-Blooded. quote:And this is what I meant by pussyfooting around- that isn't actually an advantage for the Lunar any more than getting more 6th level spell slots in place of 9th level slots would be an advantage in D&D. These sorts of mealy-mouthed "but he can go all day!" objections are frankly insulting. If instead of a two-person game you had a normal game where both a Lunar and a Solar sorcerer were part of the same party you would fully expect the Solar to overshadow the Lunar Sorcerer to the extent that they were doing sorcery-focused things. It'd be cool if the Lunar could do something with their Shapeshifting to contribute something meaningfully unique or on a Solar level, but if a Solar gives a poo poo about anything that Lunar is always going to be playing second fiddle. This would be fine if they were characters like Dragonblooded or Heroic mortals who were both meant to be footsoldiers and mighty as a host, but they're the loving Chosen of the Celestial gods and peers of the Solars- it seems like they should get to have a role better than "sub-par Solar replacement." I'd like to see them get that, and nothing you've ever said has convinced me that the game is made at all better by a design philosophy of Solaroids Rule, Lunars and Sidereals Drool. I'm not pussyfooting around, I'm speaking plainly. If you know only one spell in the entire world, Benediction of Archgenesis is not strictly superior toMagma Kraken. If you know two spells, Benediction of Archgenesis plus Magma Kraken is not strictly superior to Magma Kraken plus Travel Without Distance. You don't discard tier 2 spells once you've learned tier 3 spells, and two people who can cast tier 2 spells is better than one person who can cast tier 2 spells, even if one of those two people can also cast tier 3 spells. For every tier 3 spell they know, they don't know a tier 1 or tier 2 spell instead. Who's the better sorcerer? The Solar, obviously. Who's the protagonist of this game? Both characters are, because the camera points at them, not the much more powerful Mask of Winters whose spellcasting powers leave both of our hypothetical PCs in the dust. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Oct 10, 2014 |
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Oct 10, 2014 06:08
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The notion of 'superiority' within a given niche is usually moot anyway though. Specific implementations aside (and we don't even know what they are yet), to what extent should a Solar be 'superior' anyway? Solar superiority in the setting is almost always equated to greater potential for the Solars. The Solar v. Lunar argument is dumb because both 1e and 2e Lunars were pretty lackluster. 1.) Should a Solar always throw more dice? Should their dice mean more? 2.) Should a Solar expend fewer resources to do the same thing as a Lunar? 3.) Should specific tiers of effect be purview of a Solar to the exclusion of a Lunar? If so, how would you describe those tiers? In terms of antagonist factions you can face on your own (so Deathlords, Titans, Gods, etc)? And if so, at what level of development are these feats possible? I would posit that Perfect Defenses and Solar-tier sorcery are pretty much the only examples we even have of this kind of exclusive-only effects. PD's are dying in a fire, aren't they? So in that case, at a given level of play between 'char gen' and 'infinite xp', to what extent will a given Lunar be inferior to a Solar? If the answer is anything other than 'difficult to measure' or 'it depends on what they buy' then I think there's a solid case against Solar superiority but otherwise it's pretty academic, isn't it?
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Oct 10, 2014 06:15
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Fans posted:My issue is the Solar's shtick of "Better than everyone else" is kind of poo poo. First of all, being "the best" doesn't guarantee success. People all the time manage to fail, lose, etc. despite being "better" or whatever. Second of all, being the best at something doesn't mean you're the best at everything. Even having the potential to be the best at any one of a bunch of skills, doesn't make you the best at all of them. And of course it also doesn't speak to how effective you are at things that aren't directly skills. So actually I don't think that Solars, as a whole, being The Best at skills makes individual Solar characters or other Celestial player characters any less interesting. There's just no basis to it. Other Exalts get other gimmicks that allow them to act transcendentally; to beat a Solar they should have to leverage them. LGD posted:Says the dude arguing for making Shapeshifting and Fate Manipulation eternally sub-optimal choices for doing whatever you intend to do. I don't think there is any basis to this, whatsoever. Shapeshifting and Fate Manipulation are not sub-optimal choices for "whatever". They are lateral solutions for problems, yes, but whether or not they are suboptimal depends heavily on context - what it is you are actually doing. Both of those powers may be worse for delving dungeons or white room fights -- but that's fine, because Exalted is a game trying to deconstruct conventions like the white room fight and the dungeon delve. DOCTOR ZIMBARDO fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Oct 10, 2014 |
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Oct 10, 2014 06:27
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Ferrinus posted:Actually, he doesn't. It's impossible to "deprotagonize" someone by having more points than they do, because whether someone is the protagonist of a story has nothing to do with how strong or weak they are within the fiction. "Deprotagonize" is, in general, an insanely stupid word and idea. What you actually mean is "be more powerful than." quote:See, you don't... point to anything. You "don't think" 1E Sidereals was designed with that in mind... even though, like, one can literally dig up quotes by Jenna Moran explaining how and why Sidereal combat or social powers or whatever, despite appearing more powerful in isolation, are actually weaker than corresponding Solar powers. You do think both editions of Lunars were designed with that in mind, which is why they are bad - although, if you actually list what was wrong with either Lunars 1E or 2E, the problems are things like "little variety between characters", "incoherent splat identity", and "lack of an overarching goal", not "15% less DPR than Solars." You also think Alchemicals and Dragon-Blooded were fine... despite explicitly affirming that Alchemicals were designed to be weaker than Solars. I guess it's okay because they're designed to be weaker than Lunars and Sidereals, too? Of course, I'm pretty sure 1e Lunars were weaker than 1e Alchemicals due to how atrocious their design was. This is acceptable for some reason, though, because- quote:I'm not pussyfooting around, I'm speaking plainly. If you know only one spell in the entire world, Benediction of Archgenesis is not strictly superior toMagma Kraken. If you know two spells, Benediction of Archgenesis plus Magma Kraken is not strictly superior to Magma Kraken plus Travel Without Distance. You don't discard tier 2 spells once you've learned tier 3 spells, and two people who can cast tier 2 spells is better than one person who can cast tier 2 spells, even if one of those two people can also cast tier 3 spells. For every tier 3 spell they know, they don't know a tier 1 or tier 2 spell instead.
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Oct 10, 2014 06:56
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:I don't think there is any basis to this, whatsoever. Shapeshifting and Fate Manipulation are not sub-optimal choices for "whatever". They are lateral solutions for problems, yes, but whether or not they are suboptimal depends heavily on context - what it is you are actually doing. Both of those powers may be worse for delving dungeons or white room fights -- but that's fine, because Exalted is a game trying to deconstruct conventions like the white room fight and the dungeon delve. There is every basis. Ferrinus' entire premise is that Solars are supreme in their purview, which is "doing things." What practical end results do Shapeshifting or Fate Manipulation achieve that Excellency isn't better at achieving? They're only "lateral" solutions in that people who have a power base rooted in them need to shift the conflict to some other realm that the dude powered by Excellency isn't as proficient in to stand a chance. But there are no realms they can access that Excellency doesn't trump if it's focused in that area, and the users of Fate and Shapeshifting don't have any greater degree of flexibility in what they're good at than someone powered by Excellency. They're suboptimal in the context of "doing things." What context do you see them being better in?
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Oct 10, 2014 07:03
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A_Raving_Loon posted:Yes, designing a game around your primary antagonists being a trivial non-concern over whom you will inevitably and effortlessly triumph. Cutting through this bullshit discussion that is completely inane and pointless here (PS guys, be more interesting, you're boring the auditorium to tears) to jump in on this one. Yes, this is, in fact, desirable. Making Exalted work on Devil May Cry/Shoot 'Em Up mechanics (the movie Shoot 'Em Up, not the game style) is probably something that would be very well in theme and reinforce the intended playstyle of the game more. Picture Exalted if it adhered to this tagline: "It's not about whether you can win. It's how, and whether it's worth the price". This is a much more interesting baseline, I think, than the bullshit Exalted uses right now.
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Oct 10, 2014 07:18
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LGD posted:Yes, because in all of those cases I was suggesting that the power differential was leading to one character being "made less central, important, or essential to the overall arc of the story." There would be exact overlap. The Eclipse Diplomat makes the Dragonblooded character "less central, important, or essential to the overall arc of the story" because he does everything the Dragonblooded could do normally and if he has a different agenda he's the one who can better push it, altering the course of the story and keeping the camera increasingly focused on him. The well-constructed Solar makes the poor combatant "less central, important, or essential to the overall arc of the story" because every fight becomes an extended display in how awesome he is, he receives the accolades, and he gets more camera time because he's the guy who is either doing the heavy lifting when it comes to fighting the big-bad or laying waste to far more enemies. The group's "camera" naturally focuses on him and his actions to a much greater extent than it does his incompetent partner, especially if his partner had a similar concept. This is a fairly boring and straightforward observation which is why I am baffled it seems to be taking so long to set in. But that's not true. The lovely fighter takes as many turns as the great fighter. We turn to the great fighter, and see him dispatch a mook. Then we turn to the lovely fighter, and see him miss a mook. We turn to the great fighter, and see him headlock a dragon. We turn to the lovely fighter, and see him run from a dragon. One of them is more powerful than the other, but they enjoy equal focus, because they are not competing against each other in a sport but co-starring with each other in a story. How central, important, or essential you are to a story has nothing to do with your power level. You've been offered multiple examples by multiple posters of this incredibly common phenomenon, but for some reason you can't separate narrative importance from in-character task-completion likelihood. It's weird. quote:You should try reading it- I myself pointed out repeatedly that Alchemicals turned out better than Lunars, and if we truly gave a gently caress about strict power hierarchies this would be as much of a problem as the other Celestials potentially beating out Solars in some areas. I also pointed out that Sidereals 1E were intended to be weaker overall than Solars but "weaker" means something different than your interpretation. You also seem to have missed that the objection doesn't have to do with characters being designed to be significantly weaker than Solars so much as it does with characters being designed to be marginally weaker than Solars. If you're designing for a significantly lower power level you have a lot more design space to work with because even if you design things that are above your target power level it probably doesn't matter unless you really screwed up. If you're designing something that is intended to be almost but not quite as good (and cannot under any circumstances be better) you have a lot less space to work with and there is an obvious and tempting solution of just making things the same but slightly worse to the extent that you can. This seems to be exactly what happened with Lunars- 1st edition is just Bad Silver Solars, and in 2nd edition most of the good stuff seems to be concentrated in the charms where they felt they had room to push the power level while imposing controls to keep things "safe" and a lot of the bad stuff seems to be related to their inability to let the Lunars make use of their power outside of these areas. Letting Lunars access some Solar level effects wouldn't have fixed all of the issues, but I'd have been shocked if it hadn't led to some more interesting charms than what we got. In contrast Sidereals works because it's willing to let Sidereals be right at/over Solar power levels locally but trusts the Essence structure and restricted charm tree to keep things in check. This is just wrong. 1e Lunars don't structurally resemble Solars or, really, much of anything. 1e Sidereals aren't stronger than Solars, and you can look up explanations by the writer of 1e Sidereal Charms as to why. 2e Lunars don't have any power level problems - in fact, their balance problems were those that pushed them too high, not too low, because of weird interactions with "natural" spirit shape Str scores or multi-limbed war forms or whatever. In general, your hypothesis that designing something to be much weaker than Solars works great but designing something to be slightly weaker than Solars works poorly does not bear out, because Sidereals, designed to be slightly weaker than Solars, are really good, and Alchemicals designed to be slightly weaker than Solars (it's a little more nuanced than that - they're broadly weaker but capable of coming close by specializing themselves with their modular charms), work great. It's only Lunars who are bad, and you've thus far failed to demonstrate that Lunars who were intended to be as strong as Solars would be any less boring or one-note than Lunars intended to be weaker than Solars. quote:And a party with a fighter is better than one missing a player. It's not a valid comparison. Spell breadth isn't either because the Solar draws from a wider list of effects than the Lunar does. It's possible for a Lunar to situationally have an applicable spell the Solar doesn't, but it's more likely the Solar has one covering the situation that the Lunar doesn't have a hope of getting. And while both are protagonists of the story it's highly likely the actions of the Solar are significantly more important to the other members of his party than the actions of the Lunar, and that consequently there is increasingly more more story focus on the sorcerous actions of the Solar than those of his Lunar companion. A good GM will counteract this tendency somewhat, but when you've made "your poo poo sucks compared to his" a fundamental premise of your game it's pretty hard for the No Moon's travails and triumphs to play as central a role in the campaign's story as whatever the Solar gets up to. The Mask of Winters doesn't figure, unless you have a truly poo poo awful GM running him as an NPC who shows up constantly and solves the party's problems with his sorcerous might (which is going to deprotagonize a lot more than the No Moon Sorcerer). I don't think you read what I wrote at all. Go back and read it again. If I know one terrestrial, one celestial, and one solar spell, and you know one terrestrial and two celestial spells, and no one of us knows a spell the other knows, who is the better sorcerer? I am, obviously, since I've attained the very apex of sorcerous power. Which of us is more important or useful to the invisible Starcraft player who's micromanaging both of us from on high, having me hotkeyed to 1 and you hotkeyed to 2 in hopes of deftly maneuvering us to the end of every challenge map? Whoops, this is unanswerable, because tier 3 spells aren't actually strict upgrades of tier 2 spells, but instead operate on an entirely different level, at an entirely greater cost. Is the Mask of Winter a problem if he shows up every session and casts all the spells we know? What if he shows up every session and casts spells neither of us knows? What if he never shows up? He's still out there, after all. Out there, better at sorcery than even my Solar... Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Oct 10, 2014 |
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Oct 10, 2014 07:21
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Transient People posted:Cutting through this bullshit discussion that is completely inane and pointless here (PS guys, be more interesting, you're boring the auditorium to tears) to jump in on this one. Yes, this is, in fact, desirable. Making Exalted work on Devil May Cry/Shoot 'Em Up mechanics (the movie Shoot 'Em Up, not the game style) is probably something that would be very well in theme and reinforce the intended playstyle of the game more. Picture Exalted if it adhered to this tagline: "It's not about whether you can win. It's how, and whether it's worth the price". This is a much more interesting baseline, I think, than the bullshit Exalted uses right now.
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Oct 10, 2014 07:22
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Transient People posted:Cutting through this bullshit discussion that is completely inane and pointless here (PS guys, be more interesting, you're boring the auditorium to tears) to jump in on this one. Yes, this is, in fact, desirable. Making Exalted work on Devil May Cry/Shoot 'Em Up mechanics (the movie Shoot 'Em Up, not the game style) is probably something that would be very well in theme and reinforce the intended playstyle of the game more. Picture Exalted if it adhered to this tagline: "It's not about whether you can win. It's how, and whether it's worth the price". This is a much more interesting baseline, I think, than the bullshit Exalted uses right now. That's a very cool Sidereal Charm that got a lot of people in a tizzy when it was printed, but I don't think it should be a core game principle. You should be able to just, like, roll bad and lose and have to figure out what to do from there.
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Oct 10, 2014 07:25
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Ferrinus posted:That's a very cool Sidereal Charm that got a lot of people in a tizzy when it was printed, but I don't think it should be a core game principle. You should be able to just, like, roll bad and lose and have to figure out what to do from there.
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Oct 10, 2014 07:27
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Nah, I think you should be able to choose what you lose instead, and how. If two guys are fighting and both say 'I win the fight', they then sacrifice something and either up the ante or decide how to satisfy both parties. This is a better way to do things than 'BUT MY BIGGER DICEPOOLS' or 'BUT MY LOCKED TIER EFFECTS', I feel. Solars will be 'better' than Lunars or whoever in this setup because they are primed to have more to lose, thus living lives of great and heroic tragedy.
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Oct 10, 2014 07:28
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