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Transient People posted:What would your five charms for any one ability of your choice actually be and how do they act as levers of self-expression? Giving the core a quick look, most non-combat trees barely have five good charms so that's not a problem. It's only the combat trees that would need major pruning/restructuring. I mean, there's only four Performance charms in the corebook. poo poo's hosed up.
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Jan 19, 2015 10:57
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Ferrinus posted:Feats and prestige classes are traps in games whose content actually consists of spells and powers. But charms are where Exalted's mechanics live. They're not sapping attention you could otherwise be spending on some other, more representative game mechanic. They're a major part of how the setting reveals itself to you. "Let me tell you what the wizard's spell list reveals about the setting" is both incredibly apt and loving horrifying Transient People posted:What would your five charms for any one ability of your choice actually be and how do they act as levers of self-expression?
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Jan 19, 2015 11:15
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In one of the campaigns I played with friends, one of us took Sail to five dots. And he bought a ton of Sail Charms. And then about 200 XP in went to the GM and said 'hey, these sail charms suck, can we get new ones?' and the GM said yeah sure go ahead. So we wrote up new charms. I don't have them saved, but from what I remember: We had three essence two ones. One of them was 'I can sail against the wind and not be slowed' another was 'I ignore currents completely unless supernatural and aimed at me intentionally', and the third one was 'me and a bunch of my buddies instantly know everything about a ship so long as I commit motes to this and we're touching it'. The last one was the most important one in my opinion, because it made it so all of us had effective dots in Sail so long as he was committing motes and we were all on a boat together. It also meant that we could jump from boat to boat as we found bigger ones. The first essence three charm was literally 'sailing being only one water is stupid, i can sail on land if I feel like it', and I forget the other essence three one, but the pinnacle one at E4 was 'any boat I am on can fly' It was ten times cooler than anything official.
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Jan 19, 2015 14:00
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I always liked the sneak attack Sail charm. I played a Sky Pirate who could ambush you in a cloudless sky.
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Jan 19, 2015 14:17
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I dunno, for me the thing I was super surprised by when I actually read Exalted for the first time wasn't the Charms list, it was the basic set of "what does X successes with Y skill do" tables. In Exalted 1E, no Charms, no Excellencies, no bullshit, five successes on Brawl is 'punch through a steel sheathed oak gate' regardless what what your stats are. Five successes on Endurance is 'run 250 miles nonstop' regardless of your Stamina. Five successes on Medicine is cure cancer, five successes on Performance is hold a nation in thrall, five successes on Bureaucracy is reform the entire bureaucracy of the Realm. Exalted don't need Charms or Excellencies to be awesome and frankly I'm at boggling at how people apparently think Charms are the core of the game and everything in Exalted is all about Charms and we're gonna silo XP so you have to buy things other than Charms and so on. I'm just sitting here thinking what the gently caress happened in 2E? Charms should be Disciplines and Arcana: loving superpowers that no amount of successes on regular rolls can get you, and that you only crack out on a special occasion. I don't need a loving Charm for "reroll 1s on Lore checks" because I am a goddamn Exalted and if I casually pass a roll with 1 success, I've just invented an entirely new method of organising libraries. The Charm for looking things up in libraries should be 'merge the village bookstore with the Grand Vault of Knowledge in Yu-Shan temporarily and look up anything using your Lore skill as normal regardless of whether that information would plausibly be present in this library. If the information exists and is written down, even a single copy in a forgotten locked vault in a First Age ruin, a neatly transcribed copy can be found in the library while this Charm is active' and not 'reroll 1s on Lore checks'. Way to miss the point, Holden et al. I really want to track down a copy of 2E core and read it, because the Exalted people talk about on the internet is loving unrecognisable from what I'm reading in the 1E core.
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Jan 19, 2015 14:21
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Doodmons posted:I dunno, for me the thing I was super surprised by when I actually read Exalted for the first time wasn't the Charms list, it was the basic set of "what does X successes with Y skill do" tables. In Exalted 1E, no Charms, no Excellencies, no bullshit, five successes on Brawl is 'punch through a steel sheathed oak gate' regardless what what your stats are. Five successes on Endurance is 'run 250 miles nonstop' regardless of your Stamina. Five successes on Medicine is cure cancer, five successes on Performance is hold a nation in thrall, five successes on Bureaucracy is reform the entire bureaucracy of the Realm. Exalted don't need Charms or Excellencies to be awesome and frankly I'm at boggling at how people apparently think Charms are the core of the game and everything in Exalted is all about Charms and we're gonna silo XP so you have to buy things other than Charms and so on. I'm just sitting here thinking what the gently caress happened in 2E? Charms should be Disciplines and Arcana: loving superpowers that no amount of successes on regular rolls can get you, and that you only crack out on a special occasion. I don't need a loving Charm for "reroll 1s on Lore checks" because I am a goddamn Exalted and if I casually pass a roll with 1 success, I've just invented an entirely new method of organising libraries. The Charm for looking things up in libraries should be 'merge the village bookstore with the Grand Vault of Knowledge in Yu-Shan temporarily and look up anything using your Lore skill as normal regardless of whether that information would plausibly be present in this library. If the information exists and is written down, even a single copy in a forgotten locked vault in a First Age ruin, a neatly transcribed copy can be found in the library while this Charm is active' and not 'reroll 1s on Lore checks'. Way to miss the point, Holden et al. Agreed. Charms CAN provide flavor, but honestly a lot of them kinda sucked or were along the lines of "Why can't I just do X or Y already?". I remember that having a high enough Strength+Athletics roll in 1E meant you could start picking up ridiculous stuff to throw at people. Like, say, mountains. Exalted in FATE should be honestly pretty easy. Just put an emphasis on the "larger than life" thing of it all. Hell, it might even be easier to actually, you know, balance the rest of the Exalts (hello again Lunars). I agree with Clevinger's idea of having Aspect powers that are just defined, but of course if people can think or a cool power for their Dawn then that's cool too. He does not really touch on the entire Great Curse thing, which I -do- think is important to the setting.
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Jan 19, 2015 14:52
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Just wanna pop in and say that even when I still really enjoyed Exalted, I always found charms to be boring and tedious, I never liked that any concept would (have to) spend more time on designing charms than the much more interesting general lore and concept. I would rather see a fleshed out concept that I can develop on my own with some mechanical guidelines than having so much of the game's essential nature squirreled away in thousands of (basically) spells. I agree with whoever said that an "at skill+attribute X, you can do Y" suffices to handle much of what charms are supposed to do and whoever said that charms should be a few big spectacular things. (This could also possibly make Occult more coherent since its big flashy abilities would basically just be straight up Sorcery spells.) BTW, anyone else remember Exigents? I do! Remember how awesome Fieldmaiden Janesse (??) was? I think the Exigent concept was so interesting because it hinted at the possibility of that kind of "take a concept, develop it with guidelines" thing that I always thought Exalted should have been from the start.
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Jan 19, 2015 15:21
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Daeren posted:For instance, if you're The Best At Sailing, you shouldn't have twenty Charms that make your ship a little faster or a little more maneuverable and then two Charms that are actually impressive. The entry level should be something like "gently caress the wind, gently caress currents, I go where I want, I only roll when I'm actively being opposed by supernatural forces because I'm just that good," and escalate up a shorter tree from there. That actually sounds like the kind of Charms that ruined 2e, because a Charm like that obviates a bunch of sailing-based challenges and gives you less opportunities to show off your mad sailing skills instead of more.
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Jan 19, 2015 15:36
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Kerzoro posted:I agree with Clevinger's idea of having Aspect powers that are just defined, but of course if people can think or a cool power for their Dawn then that's cool too. He does not really touch on the entire Great Curse thing, which I -do- think is important to the setting. Definitely could've called that out more clearly.
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Jan 19, 2015 15:59
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Hyperactive posted:That's what the fifth Aspect is for. I decided to hint at it so groups looking for a Great Curse could go "Ah, there we go" without taking anything away from groups who might want to deal with the Great Curse through other means. Huh. You're kind of talking like you're the guy who wrote the hack. Are you the guy who wrote the hack?
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Jan 19, 2015 16:28
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Thesaurasaurus posted:Huh. You're kind of talking like you're the guy who wrote the hack. Are you the guy who wrote the hack?
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Jan 19, 2015 16:54
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Cool. I wasn't trying to be all internet detective or anything, this thread just has enough people talking past each other without confusion over who's even saying what.
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Jan 19, 2015 16:56
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My biggest problem with FATE combat was that it mostly boiled down to BUMP, SET, SPIKE against any foe of worth. Having weapons add +damage meant that you were well served going mano-a-mano for schmucks, but against anything with high defenses or FATE points of their own, it was always "Pile aspects on one dude, our best Fight Dude tags them all for +10 to Murder" On the other hand, Exalted probably needs at least a *couple* setup techniques besides Clinch. I guess that's what Lore is for in 3e, eh?
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Jan 19, 2015 17:10
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My primary concern with the hack is that it doesn't really add anything to the table. Reading through it, the Exalted Robo hack doesn't do anything more than "Here, reflavor your stunts to represent charms!", "Put your aspects here if you want to represent this part of Exalted", and "Everyone should take a megastunt, but only one." Personally, I don't think anything with the hack is wrong, because that's the beauty of Fate's abstractness is that we can just rename and refluff things to put Fate into another setting. It just lacks anything interesting saying "here's what makes this hack blend the two systems together!" I think an actual critique I have against the hack is that it simply just turns the Science Mode into Sorcery...but the way the Science skill is setup it doesn't feel like it would work in actual Exalted play anywhere near as well as it does in Atomic Robo which runs off exploiting the laws of physics.
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Jan 19, 2015 17:15
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Mile'ionaha posted:My biggest problem with FATE combat was that it mostly boiled down to BUMP, SET, SPIKE against any foe of worth. Isn't this what the initiative setup will make in 3e though? Setup your target for an initiative crash then apply murder?
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Jan 19, 2015 17:49
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MonsieurChoc posted:Giving the core a quick look, most non-combat trees barely have five good charms so that's not a problem. It's only the combat trees that would need major pruning/restructuring. That isn't what I asked though. I want an example of your five chosen charms for a skill, any skill, and I also want to know how receiving these charms and only these charms allow the player to make 'my character' more effectively than personally selecting their own choices. You need to look at the RPG Gamer demographics and cater to them or consciously ignore them when you design. A design that barebones obviously does not cater to the optimizer, has issues with attracting the casual player because it still induces option paralysis, fully fails to give the expressionist a chance to show off their concepts in mechanics, and is dependent on picking good charms to interest the players who just look for 'awesome'. You asked about flaws, and I'm trying to point out what they are. Right now, you're not satisfying any demographic much if at all, and that's a problem. Mile'ionaha posted:My biggest problem with FATE combat was that it mostly boiled down to BUMP, SET, SPIKE against any foe of worth. The three years of one FATE game have taught me that while bump-set-spike is always useful, there's other ways to do the job as well. One memorable instance was to initiate a pin via an ice spell to completely lock down a snake god while everybody else wailed on him. With a boss that used AoE, more time was spent getting clear of the killzone (or suffering horrible injuries) than there was piling up advantages because the team would've died. This was all pre-Robo too, so I bet some cool poo poo can be done when you add Bulletproof and easier armor ratings to get players outta their comfort zones.
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Jan 19, 2015 19:06
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Stormgale posted:Isn't this what the initiative setup will make in 3e though? Setup your target for an initiative crash then apply murder? You don't need crash unless the target has damage reduction. You just need one person w/ high initiative. Once the aspects are created in Fate, is there anything you can do to remove them?
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Jan 19, 2015 19:13
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bartkusa posted:You don't need crash unless the target has damage reduction. You just need one person w/ high initiative. Yes, you can roll to Overcome and eliminate the circumstances that enable the Aspect. If you're Prone and stand up that Aspect vanishes.
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Jan 19, 2015 20:00
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Doodmons posted:I dunno, for me the thing I was super surprised by when I actually read Exalted for the first time wasn't the Charms list, it was the basic set of "what does X successes with Y skill do" tables. I remember that table. It was a pretty cool table and basically completely ignored by players, GMs, and writers alike. If we're sharing personal anecdotes the thing that surprised/impressed me when I read Exalted for the first time did have to do with Charms but it wasn't the number of them or anything to do with their specific individual mechanics, it was the fact that there were Bureaucracy and Linguistics and Lore Charms alongside the stuff you'd expect to see in an RPG like fighting and athletics and stuff. So in terms of "mechanics informing setting" the sheer fact that in this game of supernaturally-empowered demigods the techniques of overwhelming bureaucracy were weighted the same as the techniques of masterful swordsmanship informed me plenty. There being dozens of Charms per skill at that point was irrelevant, I could have gotten the same takeaway with a handful per, and even back then when I was younger and dumber and still enraptured by the shiny new, I could still tell "man, there's a lot of cruft here." Like, it didn't escape my notice that what Melee focused characters really wanted were these two or three Charms here, here, and here, and everything else was a speedbump, either obviated by something better or taken to unlock something you really wanted and quietly forgotten about. I always have to wonder in discussions like this if someone taking the "pro Exalted's mechanics" stance is talking about some hypothetical perfected version of Exalted or Exalted as it actually factually exists. Because like, yeah, I can see the germ of Ferrinus' point but on the other hand you have two editions of Exalted that have, mechanically, been kind of a huge mess overall despite the occasional cherry to pick like 1E Sidereals. You can scoff at Fate's "tactical depth" but Exalted 2E has about as much tactical depth as Fate does, it's not like those zillions of Charms actually make 2E's combat (or any other sort of challenge for that matter) rich and robust and interesting as a result.
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Jan 19, 2015 20:18
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Transient People posted:That isn't what I asked though. I want an example of your five chosen charms for a skill, any skill, and I also want to know how receiving these charms and only these charms allow the player to make 'my character' more effectively than personally selecting their own choices. You need to look at the RPG Gamer demographics and cater to them or consciously ignore them when you design. A design that barebones obviously does not cater to the optimizer, has issues with attracting the casual player because it still induces option paralysis, fully fails to give the expressionist a chance to show off their concepts in mechanics, and is dependent on picking good charms to interest the players who just look for 'awesome'. You asked about flaws, and I'm trying to point out what they are. Right now, you're not satisfying any demographic much if at all, and that's a problem. It's easy to choose five good charms for every skill, but you're right about the lack of choice. Hmmm.
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Jan 19, 2015 20:47
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Kai Tave posted:I remember that table. It was a pretty cool table and basically completely ignored by players, GMs, and writers alike. Doesn't it kind of have to be? Like since the table says 5 successes is the greatest achievement in human history, a flawless success that transcends the very notion of success, and then players say "Oh, okay. What's 18 successes?"
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Jan 19, 2015 20:47
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Less depth, even. Did a single buffbot build in Exalted work and do more than an average combatant? Could you meaningfully debuff enemies without straight up SoDding them? Was playing aggro tank a viable strategy without just PDing everything? Did big finishers have the slightest place in a Perfect Defense world? As far as I know, the answer is no to all of those.
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Jan 19, 2015 20:49
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Daeren posted:I defy you to explain to me why you need several thousand words of Sail charms to understand the setting. Without them, you don't know the difference between an Exalted sailor and a mortal sailor. Even the existence of five separate roll boosters (this one rerolls 1s, this one doubles nines, this one gives a bonus success on a straight, etc) teaches you something: contested or high-difficulty Sail rolls are potentially really important, and it's possible to deeply invest in doing as well on them as possible. Now, I don't think Sail actually needs that specific list of five charms (and iirc didn't have one - in the leak Sail charms tended to do a lot of different stuff, while Craft was the skill that had twenty different success incrementors) because I doubt the existing Sail rules can support that kind of depth. But, for example, the combat rules certainly can, and either putting in five different ways to squeeze out a fraction of a success on a thrown knife or not doing so at all signal to the reader how the game is played and what happens between characters in the setting. Old Kentucky Shark posted:"Let me tell you what the wizard's spell list reveals about the setting" is both incredibly apt and loving horrifying It's not horrifying if the front and center assumption of the game is that everyone is playing a wizard, though. If 3.5e sold itself as an adventure-centric Ars Magica there'd be considerably less about it to object to.
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Jan 19, 2015 21:36
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Rand Brittain posted:That actually sounds like the kind of Charms that ruined 2e, because a Charm like that obviates a bunch of sailing-based challenges and gives you less opportunities to show off your mad sailing skills instead of more. Good point, that was a bit reactionary of me.
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Jan 19, 2015 22:52
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Ferrinus posted:It's not horrifying if the front and center assumption of the game is that everyone is playing a wizard, though. If 3.5e sold itself as an adventure-centric Ars Magica there'd be considerably less about it to object to. Playing a 3.5 full spellcaster was still super tedious, though. As evocative as the power lists were they still interfaced with the underlying rules (and with each other) in a way that demanded rigorous accountancy and extranarrative resource management. I think a less stupid argument against the Exalted charm structure would run the same way. If the setting is communicated through rules that are a chore to play with then you've ended up with a game that's meant to be read rather than played. It's possible for a rule system to be both irreducibly complex and yet still too complicated.
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Jan 20, 2015 04:00
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When it comes to stultifying complexity it's actually the pre-Charm rules that worry me. The leak's Charm trees didn't really come off like overwhelming sprawl (the twenty or so Craft roll boosters were kind of pushing it, mind you, but I can at least see the theoretical appeal there). My guess is that Exalted 3's mechanics will fall the most flat when it comes to trying to having real resolution systems for all twenty five skills, unique merit effects that are subtle but turn out to be functional prerequisites for participating in entire swathes of the system, stat changes that cause other rippling stat changes, long lists of special actions/conditionals that are baked into the non-magic combat rules, etc.
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Jan 20, 2015 04:56
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Those charms seemed incredibly sprawly to me - Craft is certainly the most egregious example but even the Melee or Occult charms didn't looked daunting and dreary rather than like a set of nouns and verbs I'd want to write a character with. The resolution systems are designed from the ground up to support a massive amount of charms, remember.
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Jan 20, 2015 05:00
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There were *22* awareness charms in the playtest leak. There was differentiation between a charm that helps you find hidden people by hearing them, and a charm that helps you hear hidden people who are moving. I'm really hoping this got cut down.
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Jan 20, 2015 05:14
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xiw posted:There were *22* awareness charms in the playtest leak. There was differentiation between a charm that helps you find hidden people by hearing them, and a charm that helps you hear hidden people who are moving.
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Jan 20, 2015 05:17
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Attorney at Funk posted:Those charms seemed incredibly sprawly to me - Craft is certainly the most egregious example but even the Melee or Occult charms didn't looked daunting and dreary rather than like a set of nouns and verbs I'd want to write a character with. The resolution systems are designed from the ground up to support a massive amount of charms, remember. Maybe it's because I'm used to 1e and 2e, but Melee (which I just glanced over now) looks pretty tight to me, and that's even without an actual visual diagram of what leads to what. There are clearly five or six broad prongs/specialties/whatever (attack boosters, extra attacks, parries, weapon summoning, blessing/enchanting your weapon) with a little progression for each. It lets you define a fighting style in a way that just plunking dots into Melee doesn't and gives you a lot of stuff to look forward to learning in the future. Occult looks like it's mostly divides into powers for loving with spirits, powers for aiding or wielding spirits, and a fairly small grab-bag of wizard tricks like activating mage sight or phasing away from a deathblow. It seems like unless you're a dedicated exorcist you'd tend to ignore most of that stuff, although a demon summoner would have reason to pick up at least a few of the binding/aiding powers. Of course, the real draw of Occult is (one would hope) the spell list. Of course, I haven't actually looked over all the Charm trees closely, and may literally never do this even upon the game's release. "Eh, archery is lame" *flipflipflip* has been a habit of mine since first edition.
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Jan 20, 2015 05:44
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Ferrinus posted:Maybe it's because I'm used to 1e and 2e, but Melee (which I just glanced over now) looks pretty tight to me, and that's even without an actual visual diagram of what leads to what. There are clearly five or six broad prongs/specialties/whatever (attack boosters, extra attacks, parries, weapon summoning, blessing/enchanting your weapon) with a little progression for each. It lets you define a fighting style in a way that just plunking dots into Melee doesn't and gives you a lot of stuff to look forward to learning in the future. Do you think it's possible for a game to compare favorably to the first and second editions of Exalted and still be too much of a chore to learn and play? I can't tell what your benchmark for success is.
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Jan 20, 2015 05:47
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Attorney at Funk posted:Do you think it's possible for a game to compare favorably to the first and second editions of Exalted and still be too much of a chore to learn and play? I can't tell what your benchmark for success is. Broadly, I'd expect for the resolution systems themselves to be easy to pick up, and for the majority of the Charms to be easily ignored by someone who's neither interested in practicing Solar sailing or in learning all about the ways of Solar sailors while sitting on the toilet. Like, what made me put down 2nd edition was the tedium of running combat (ticks, ten step attack resolution, etc) - I'd mostly started ignoring the game long before it became apparent that all the canon was turning into an incestuous parody of itself, fights between optimized combatants were insane grindfests, etc. My hope is that someone like me who is excited about Melee will get #value out of the size of the Melee Charm tree while other people can just shrug impassively at it rather than sighing and putting on their reading glasses.
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Jan 20, 2015 05:50
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Ferrinus posted:Broadly, I'd expect for the resolution systems themselves to be easy to pick up, and for the majority of the Charms to be easily ignored by someone who's neither interested in practicing Solar sailing or in learning all about the ways of Solar sailors while sitting on the toilet. Like, what made me put down 2nd edition was the tedium of running combat (ticks, ten step attack resolution, etc) - I'd mostly started ignoring the game long before it became apparent that all the canon was turning into an incestuous parody of itself, fights between optimized combatants were insane grindfests, etc. My hope is that someone like me who is excited about Melee will get #value out of the size of the Melee Charm tree while other people can just shrug impassively at it rather than sighing and putting on their reading glasses. If the Charmset communicates vital setting information, then is it to the game's credit or detriment that you expect people to gloss over it a la carte and only learn the ones they've decided, a priori, that they care about?
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Jan 20, 2015 05:55
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Put another way: what are we supposed to say to the person who hasn't nursed a character concept for two to ten years through past, lovely versions of Exalted, and wants to open this book and learn how to play it? How does that person acquire an understanding of the game if that understanding is contingent on becoming familiar with a volume of rules you assert aren't meant to be taken in all at once?
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Jan 20, 2015 06:03
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Attorney at Funk posted:I think a less stupid argument against the Exalted charm structure would run the same way. If the setting is communicated through rules that are a chore to play with then you've ended up with a game that's meant to be read rather than played. It's possible for a rule system to be both irreducibly complex and yet still too complicated. This is basically where I'm at in this argument. However idealistic one's interpretation of Exalted's melting of setting and mechanics are, and I think assuming that the sprawling web of hundreds and hundreds of Charms serve a vital and integral role conveying Exalted's setting and themes is very idealistic, it clashes with the actual reality that running and/or playing Exalted, either existing edition to date, is a huge unfun pain in the rear end for many reasons, some of which have to do with Charms. I also think it's frankly a bit generous to ascribe this kind of importance to the vast majority of Charms produced for Exalted. RPG designers are highly prone to going "eh gently caress it, throw it in 'cause it's cool!" and do so all the time, even when it would be counterproductive for them to do so, and so I have no way of determining which Charms are intended to convey important information to me as a player or GM and which are in there because it was nearly 5:00 and by god they were gonna finish this Charm tree or else. Like, I find it really hard to believe that Craft having a dozen different minor variations on "get a reroll" is a purely intentional design decision meant to convey the importance crafting and artifice hold in Creation. Likewise individual magic weapons having two dozen discrete unlockable bonuses or powers may say something, but I don't feel it's a thing that needs those two dozen powers in order to convey. Basically I'm not convinced that this sort of thing is deliberate instead of a happy accident when it actually happens to work out that way. Accepting that 1E Sidereals is the golden Faberge Egg of Exalted, blending mechanics and theme and the conveyance of information in a beautiful harmonious whole, the other side of that coin is 1E Lunars. And many other hundreds of Charms that may not be as bad as that but still aren't great and serve to make an already clunky game that much clunkier. Re: the particular hack that sparked this discussion, I also think it's kind of silly to criticize something like a Fate/Exalted hack for lacking the same capacity to convey information via Charms because who is a hack like that aimed at really? Not someone who has no idea what an "Exalted" is, the person who's in the market for a Fate/Exalted hack is almost certainly someone already familiar with Exalted, who enjoys the setting and themes and magical kung fu, who simply does not want to play Exalted RAW and can you really blame them? Exalted, the game, isn't very fun. It's tedious, it's full of pitfalls, and it has about as much genuine gameplay depth as a puddle. Like hey, I'll even agree with you...the idea of "let's play Exalted but in Fate" doesn't immediately make me want to start drafting a character up. I actually like Fate and I even still hold some fondness for Exalted but mixing the two together just doesn't hook me. However I have less than no desire to play Exalted using Exalted so I can't blame someone for deciding to run it in Fate or M&M or Cortex or whatever.
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Jan 20, 2015 06:29
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Attorney at Funk posted:If the Charmset communicates vital setting information, then is it to the game's credit or detriment that you expect people to gloss over it a la carte and only learn the ones they've decided, a priori, that they care about? I don't know if I'd say "vital". Even if you ignored the Charms entirely, for instance, Exalted's setting is absolutely enormous, and if you had to learn about forest witches and dragon kings and yozi souls before you could sit down and make a guy, you could never actually sit down and make a guy. I think the way Exalted works in practice, especially for new players, is that it gives you a massive swathe of stuff that's described in incredibly broad strokes, and then it lets you zoom in almost arbitrarily close to whichever part happens to grab you. I didn't know poo poo except that I could be a cool magic warrior when I first opened and read an Exalted book, but the more charms I read after having skimmed basic setting information and Caste descriptions (and these were underwhelming-in-retrospect 1e charms!) the more excited I got about the idea and the more detailed my mental picture of what a cool magic warrior actually looked like became.
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Jan 20, 2015 07:02
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Ferrinus posted:I don't know if I'd say "vital". Even if you ignored the Charms entirely, for instance, Exalted's setting is absolutely enormous, and if you had to learn about forest witches and dragon kings and yozi souls before you could sit down and make a guy, you could never actually sit down and make a guy. Maybe my perspective is skewed because I learned about Exalted from my friends rather than a book, but I really can't imagine looking at stuff like the spoiled charmsets blind and finding inspiration there. It'd be like feeling the wind in my hair and imagining the sun-dappled highways as I read the owner's manual for my used 2002 Honda Civic.
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Jan 20, 2015 07:39
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Personally, I like having a large-ish Charmset, but there needs to be a lot more tightening and focus in how the Charmsets are put together. For example: SrGrvsalot's Charm Redesign - Five charms per Ability, all themed around the four phases of the constellations (and a basic, fundamental Charm that roots the tree's themes) to play off the astrological motifs of the Sidereals, each charm provides something fairly unique, and the size of the charm list is a large but very manageable 125 before Martials Arts trees. I'd love to see Charmsets for all the Exalts pared to down to roughly that level of focus, frankly. Edit: Not to pimp out any specific fan work or anything, just using this list of example of a Charmset that's expansive but focused. Punting fucked around with this message at 08:42 on Jan 20, 2015 |
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Jan 20, 2015 08:38
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I have two reasons for wanting to play Exalted, playing a resurgent epic hero and mechanically playing CCG: The RPG. I like the idea of big comboable Charm lists even if its never really worked out like that in practice. Heading towards FATE with its own peculiarities heads away from CCG style play in favour of a system I've found works fairly unevenly (some GMs take to it really well, some do not and the power level of your character will vary based on how often you get compels) I'm struggling to think of a good comparison here but suggesting FATE for Exalted feels to me like being asked "Why are you playing Magic the Gathering, shouldn't you play Fluxx instead?" Basically I find myself thinking why didn't Exalted just ditch dice and character sheets and play with Charm Card decks instead. Guess I'm looking forward to Penny Arcades Thornwatch a lot.
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Jan 20, 2015 12:47
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HidaO-Win posted:I have two reasons for wanting to play Exalted, playing a resurgent epic hero and mechanically playing CCG: The RPG. I like the idea of big comboable Charm lists even if its never really worked out like that in practice. Heading towards FATE with its own peculiarities heads away from CCG style play in favour of a system I've found works fairly unevenly (some GMs take to it really well, some do not and the power level of your character will vary based on how often you get compels) Oh man, imagine if every Exalted charm had its own individual art. Now imagine what that book would weigh and how much it would cost 
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Jan 20, 2015 17:43
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