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Transient People posted:No, it is that players are lazy, complacent fucks because this isn't about Exalted. It's how it works in every single game. The vast majority of your playerbase will not care about 'getting good' at your game as a matter of course, whether it's Tetris, Street Fighter or a tactical roleplaying game, because their primary objective is to have fun, not increase their skills at playing. Transient People posted:their primary objective is to have fun, not increase their skills at playing. I would like you to seriously consider that you just described their wanting to have fun as a negative trait. I'm the goddamn GM, and I'd rather my players have fun than learn how to "be good" at the game. Like, there are skills to learn for the gaming table that increase fun, knowing when to compromise, getting along with the other players, etc. etc. but I get the feeling that's not what you're talking about. Has it occurred to you that perhaps rather than trying to fight against people's natural desire to have fun... it should make sure that every option is fun and mechanically well-balanced? So that "having fun" and "being good at the game" are not mutually exclusive?
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Mar 8, 2015 04:09
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PurpleXVI posted:hour of real time playing
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Mar 8, 2015 04:10
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NIV3K posted:More like an entire session. All the combat encounters I've been in have been a minimum of three hours long for one battle and typically extend to five hours. Even duels can last up to two hours easily. Though this might just be because my group plays online instead of in person. I was trying to low-ball it so no one could accuse me of exaggerating, because yeah, playing online with my old 2E group any reasonably complicated fight that wasn't a one-on-one duel or curbstomping some extras usually meant at least two hours, with a group of four players. When we added a fifth, usually we ended sessions when a big fight was coming so we could have an entire session to resolve them next time...
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Mar 8, 2015 04:11
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PurpleXVI posted:I would like you to seriously consider that you just described their wanting to have fun as a negative trait. I'm the goddamn GM, and I'd rather my players have fun than learn how to "be good" at the game. Like, there are skills to learn for the gaming table that increase fun, knowing when to compromise, getting along with the other players, etc. etc. but I get the feeling that's not what you're talking about. I didn't describe it as a negative trait, I described it as a trait that doesn't require getting good at the game. There's a small difference there, champ. And yes, most (not all because Exalted isn't a perfect game, but most) options are fun and balanced. What they aren't is properly explained and presented so as to entice players into exploring them as a matter of course. It's very hard to make all options equally attractive on first blush! In fact, not only is it really hard but it's not even desirable, because it means you have to homogenize concepts since certain interesting ideas resonate less with people (example: Being Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney is something that is less resonant for most people than being Link from Legend of Zelda. This doesn't mean the Ace Attorney series doesn't deserve to exist just because it's a more niche concept than Zelda, but it does mean it's not as attractive to most people). You cannot seriously pretend to blame the developers for not managing to make every option cause fireworks to go off in every reader's head in the same fashion. That's a ridiculous requirement. Transient People fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Mar 8, 2015 |
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Mar 8, 2015 04:14
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A more tactful description might be a comparison to a Smash Bros game, which is intended to be enticing both to people who obsess over the meta and also to people who just pick it up and pick the character whose game they liked best.
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Mar 8, 2015 04:15
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Transient People posted:I didn't describe it as a negative trait, I described it as a trait that doesn't require getting good at the game. There's a small difference there, champ. You described them as "lazy and complacent" and described that as a direct consequence of their prioritizing "having fun" over "getting good at the game." So no, that is exactly what you loving said. Transient People posted:You cannot seriously pretend to blame the developers for not managing to make every option cause fireworks to go off in every reader's head in the same fashion. That's a ridiculous requirement. Obviously, no, because every player is different, not every player wants to be a legendary thief or diplomat, but if every single player, or at least a huge majority, feels compelled to play/build their characters in one specific way, to the point where you need to put up some sort of hurdle to stop them... you hosed up, and you can't blame that one on the players.
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Mar 8, 2015 04:17
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Transient People posted:D&D 4e was built by a team of something like eight dudes. Would you say it's not actually complex and has a lot of nuances you wouldn't catch at first glance as well? Do you mean the ones that actually exist or the ones you just think do? What's unusual, here, is that you're using the words "actually complex." But what tatankatonk was disagreeing with was the words "finely tuned". Why would you try to make an argument over quality into an argument over the existence or nonexistence of complexity, I wonder. quote:Because it's an attitude that is prevalent in every area of game design that involves complicated moving parts. It's usually phrased more nicely than this, but it's a fact you gotta deal with when building the game. If Ex3 came with a proper tutorial on how to build mans, it'd be 1200 pages long, not 950, and you'd still be leaving a lot of important things unsaid. If Ex3 came with a proper tutorial on how to build a character, people would still want to take supernal combat abilities on non-Dawn castes, and simply switch from non-Dawn castes to Dawn castes once they're told they can't, because the game would still favor engagement with the combat system over disengagement from the combat system. I mean, we've directly seen that the writers either can't or won't create a guide on how to build a character - the advice actually provided in the chargen chapter is laughable and the single most important fact about dot assignment isn't so much as hinted at by any of the text - but this isn't actually about squeezing 12% more DPR out of ten charms or whatever. It's about an unwillingness to either fix or accept the consequences of a bone-level systemic problem. quote:Not rolling with pure BP. BP makes the process of maxing out dicepools much faster, just to cite one thing that it does different from XP. Characters end up much more well rounded and less flawed than they otherwise would. Ah, that's what I thought: you were wrong. You said using BP instead of XP "factually", accelerated PC growth, but it actually doesn't. BP doesn't have to be given out at the same rate at XP. BP costs don't have to match the ones in the table. Flat XP costs could be used instead. The blanket statement that it makes things go too fast or too slow is totally unfounded. You're also wrong here. Using flat-costed rather than scaling-costed attributes and skills does not stop characters from being flawed, or force characters to be well-rounded.
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Mar 8, 2015 04:18
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Rand Brittain posted:A more tactful description might be a comparison to a Smash Bros game, which is intended to be enticing both to people who obsess over the meta and also to people who just pick it up and pick the character whose game they liked best. I wouldn't say Smash Bros because Smash is like...a really, really streamlined game, one of the most intuitive on the market. Comparing it to Street Fighter is a fair comparison, though. There's a lot of arcane bullshit (links, negative edging, option selects, whatever the gently caress else you can think about) that is either subtle or completely nonobvious to the average player and yet is super important to properly playing the game and adds to it considerably. You don't need to know any of it to throw out a shoryuken and feel good about it, but you do need it to branch out from that simple playstyle and start experimenting.
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Mar 8, 2015 04:20
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Mostly unironic question: Why do we even bother having five dot ranks in skills? They might as well be a Merit: "You have 5 dice on rolls with this ability." Maybe have a one-dot merit that only gives you two or three, and a two-dot merit that gives you five.
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Mar 8, 2015 04:22
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PurpleXVI posted:I was trying to low-ball it so no one could accuse me of exaggerating, because yeah, playing online with my old 2E group any reasonably complicated fight that wasn't a one-on-one duel or curbstomping some extras usually meant at least two hours, with a group of four players. When we added a fifth, usually we ended sessions when a big fight was coming so we could have an entire session to resolve them next time... Also, while people have rightly stated that you don't need much investment in combat to contribute I will say that personally I haven't found that contribution to be fun. You just end up doing the exact same thing every single round and it starts to feel like you might as well not be there and have the ST just run your character on auto-pilot. Charms are pretty much what the entire game hangs it's interesting decisions on. Rolling dice in Exalted is boring, which is why despite Excellencies being extremely efficient they have always been extremely boring. Incinerating people's souls and shooting laser beams is where the fun is in combat. Just throwing a knife every round to help whittle off an enemies Initiative and inflict Onslaught Penalties is boring.
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Mar 8, 2015 04:23
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Nessus posted:Mostly unironic question: Why do we even bother having five dot ranks in skills? They might as well be a Merit: "You have 5 dice on rolls with this ability." Maybe have a one-dot merit that only gives you two or three, and a two-dot merit that gives you five. Excellency granularity and legacy mechanics, as far as I can tell (not saying I have the one true answer here, really, because this is kind of a very hard question to properly answer without delving into all three Exalted editions, and I don't really know 1e too well). There's honestly no reason you couldn't shrink the scale if you felt like it, really, it'd just make most characters more homogeneous since your range of values goes down.
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Mar 8, 2015 04:24
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my pet peeve has always been how weirdly it's distributed, especially for Abilities. 0 Dots is 'untrained, a lot of people might have this', 1 dot is 'novice', 2 is 'Average', then 3, 4, and 5 are all different levels of 'Better then Average'. Why is 3 not Average? I guess it makes sense in WoD but not really here. The major reason now, I guess, is so that they don't have to increase the dots at chargen, which I feel like they would need to if they raised it up slightly.
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Mar 8, 2015 04:29
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Transient People posted:Excellency granularity and legacy mechanics, as far as I can tell (not saying I have the one true answer here, really, because this is kind of a very hard question to properly answer without delving into all three Exalted editions, and I don't really know 1e too well). There's honestly no reason you couldn't shrink the scale if you felt like it, really, it'd just make most characters more homogeneous since your range of values goes down. Basically it seems like anyone who is focused on a thing will have it at 5 quickly, so you might as well just take away this lengthy XP cycle.
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Mar 8, 2015 04:30
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Stallion Cabana posted:my pet peeve has always been how weirdly it's distributed, especially for Abilities. But at that point you'd also need to increase the scale beyond 5 dots to have a decent representation for the beyond-average options, and then it wouldn't really be Storyteller any longer, and for some reason some people don't want to abandon that system. I certainly can't explain why.
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Mar 8, 2015 04:31
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PurpleXVI posted:But at that point you'd also need to increase the scale beyond 5 dots to have a decent representation for the beyond-average options, and then it wouldn't really be Storyteller any longer, and for some reason some people don't want to abandon that system. I certainly can't explain why.
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Mar 8, 2015 04:33
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I think calling all players, in general 'lazy, complacent fucks' is pretty rhetorically dishonest. Like I see what you're driving at. System mastery tends towards the low end since, anecdotaly, less than half of any given gaming group typically have a high enough degree of system mastery/memorization to optimize a given concept. You're describing this as a bad thing, though. You're saying it's good to assume most players will take the 'lazy' option [combat] and design around it because players are too dense to figure out that there is a perfectly viable build waiting for them in-caste. Am I close? Edit: Edited to be less combative.
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Mar 8, 2015 04:43
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Remember: there's no reason to believe that specializing in a combat ability is a lazy option, or that it indicates a failure of system mastery or some other lack of understanding. There's no real reason not to take the offhand mention of all those different verbamancer and noun-monkey builds to be anything more than hot air. I mean, hey, maybe Supernal Bureaucracy and Supernal Linguistics and Supernal Integrity are all just as great at getting you involved in combat as Supernal Melee! I bet they're not, though.
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Mar 8, 2015 04:47
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Mendrian posted:I think calling all players, in general 'lazy, complacent fucks' is pretty rhetorically dishonest. Like I see what you're driving at. System mastery tends towards the low end since, anecdotaly, less than half of any given gaming group typically have a high enough degree of system mastery/memorization to optimize a given concept. You're describing this as a bad thing, though. You're saying it's good to assume most players will take the 'lazy' option [combat] and design around it because players are too dense to figure out that there is a perfectly viable build waiting for them in-caste. Am I close? Hmm...more or less yeah. I explained it in a very abrasive way that I think may have muddled the issue a bunch. I think there's fundamentally two ways to handle this problem of players not having high system mastery and thus picking only the most obvious options. A) You can teach them how to play the game properly. Not merely the rules of the game but also its metagame. A good example would be explaining that 'against very strong fighters, you need a defense penalty negator', to use a very simple example. If you make a build that shows off how a Presence heavy character can win combats without raising a sword even once, people will understand how specializing in not-combat will not harm them. B) You can build the game in such a way that the players are incentivized to not take the laziest road to fun they can find. This can be through mechanical incentives (an example of this is making a 'healer' archetype heal easier and faster than a damaging archetype can hurt, thus making the healer more mechanically satisfying to compensate for the fact that the role is less thrilling for a lot of people), through presentation incentives (the healer archetype has very interesting and attractive fluff that causes people to look into it instead of just fixating on the damage dealer), or through systemic disincentives (your options are limited to playing oddball or offbeat archetypes, such as a healer or face - you cannot play a damage dealer). Option A requires possibly even more work than just making a good ruleset, because you don't just need to have a keen grasp of your system but also be a great communicator and a good teacher. You pretty much need a secondary team dedicated entirely to breaking down the game in ways newbies can understand to get things done at the same pace - or double the effort from a singular team, with consequent delays. Option B is what Exalted goes with, in a variety of different ways. Supernals being caste-only is an example of systemic disincentives, setting fiction is one presentation incentive amongst many when it shows diplomats and musicians doing incredible things without fighting, and the mechanical incentives are too many to list, but the way something like Anointment of Miraculous Health works compared to an attack roll is a good example, since it's more accessible and easier to pull off. Going for Option B isn't a bad thing and doesn't indicate the developers found a problem they couldn't solve. It just indicates that they could not or did not want to devote the resources they had available to writing a strategy guide for their own game. Transient People fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Mar 8, 2015 |
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Mar 8, 2015 04:54
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Personally, I thought the existence of the Dawn Caste itself was kind of at odds with the core conceits and influences of the game from the very first 1e book. Like, Grabowski was running around posting on internet forums that you shouldn't be having fun if you ignored kung fu abilities and went all-in on using sorcery for combat because you're playing the game wrong. The game has a history of talking out of both sides of its mouth about everyone important being a kung fu master and only 20% of any given splat being the kung fu masters, and supernal brings this issue very much front and center. Ironically, Dragonblooded and Sidereal Exalted seem to be mostly exempt from this issue, because they don't have a clear "I am the combat man, I win at combat" caste.
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Mar 8, 2015 04:57
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Option C) Don't have a "metagame" that needs to be dug up and discovered, make the game's functionality obvious to even newbies, with no hidden traps or penalties. Instead of incentivizing non-"punch a guy until he stops moving" options by penalizing people or putting barriers in their path, make the other options sound fun and interesting... and also make them mechanically able to compete. Or simply build chargen in such a fashion that players don't, for instance, have to choose EITHER combat functionality OR non-combat functionality, but that everyone gets basic competence in both. Like, what does "playing the game properly" even mean? By the explanation you're giving, it seems to be "playing to win."
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Mar 8, 2015 05:00
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Every game has a metagame that needs to be discovered unless there is only literally one way to play. Tic-Tac-Toe has a hidden metagame, Purple. If you quizzed a number of people (both who had and hadn't played it before) on what the optimal move to make is, not all of them would tell you that you always take the center square as your first move. You can't prevent this, and especially not in a complex game.
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Mar 8, 2015 05:03
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Transient People posted:Hmm...more or less yeah. I explained it in a very abrasive way that I think may have muddled the issue a bunch. I think there's fundamentally two ways to handle this problem of players not having high system mastery and thus picking only the most obvious options. This doesn't really have much to do with what people are complaining about. Indeed, the only thing that really touches on it, like, at all, is this sentence: quote:If you make a build that shows off how a Presence heavy character can win combats without raising a sword even once, people will understand how specializing in not-combat will not harm them. Even then, it's only a tangential relationship, because the basic point that started this was that combat abilities are more attractive because the combat system has much more depth than the rest of the game does. Saying "you can short-circuit the combat system", even if true, doesn't change that combat has more things to do that aren't just freeform dialogue. People will be attracted to combat abilities because combat allows you to do more things, to think more strategically, than noncombat stuff. So the real A) and B) are as follows: A) Bring combat and noncombat together, either by simplifying combat or making noncombat activities more strategic. B) Accept that most players will focus on combat primarily and design around that. B) is a whole lot simpler and in line with previous editions, but instead we have C) Add a kludge to enforce a particular behavior. Unfortunately, kludges just don't work all that well for role-playing games, where modding is so easy that it can be done entirely accidentally.
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Mar 8, 2015 05:11
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I think there's probably some bad advice being thrown around in terms of 'well you don't need to be able to fight'. Combat is mechanics heavy, more so than and other system, and it takes a substantially longer time to play than most other challenges unless it's trivially easy. This means that the players of characters with no real combat ability are stuck not really being able to play the game for extended lengths of time, which can make players bored really fast. Even if the player is nominally ok with not being able to act in certain scenes, it puts extra pressure on the GM to write equally extended social/snaking/crafting scenes that the mechanics don't require, and thus either slight the non-combat players out of spotlight time, or allow non-combat characters to achieve much more during their spotlight time, since their actions take less time to resolve. If all characters can instead at least contribute to combat (and all combat-specialized characters able to perform some secondary role), this problem is neatly sidestepped. For better or for worse, combat is the central mechanic of Exalted, and players need to understand that and build accordingly. Besides, you don't need to invest super heavily in combat in order to be able to contribute meaningfully. Even a Dex+Skill of as low as 6 can (with a good accuracy weapon and a stunt) regularly hit even fairly competent battlegroups and secondary enemies, while the Dawn or other battle specialist fights the enemy champion. Throw in two or three defensive charms, a combat skill excellency and possibly another combat charm or two and you have a beginning solar that at has a role in combat, even if they aren't as powerful as the Dawn.
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Mar 8, 2015 05:20
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The point where I'd disagree with that is that other systems are sufficiently developed to stand up to combat, though. Social influence at the least certainly is (and if your combats don't have much use for Gambits I'd actually say it's considerably deeper than fighting). Combat was by far the most developed thing in Exalted 2e, but not so much anymore.
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Mar 8, 2015 05:22
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Transient People posted:As an aside based off this, 'please stop buying more melee charms' is exactly why Supernals were made caste-specific. It's not about Combat based Supernal abilities being more powerful or interesting (go read Presence. Go Read Performance. Go read Stealth or Survival), it's that player psychology is a very real thing in game design most of this thread has not actually read up on or bothered to think about. The vast majority of players are lazy, complacent fucks. They do not care to pursue options beyond the most obvious ones. They won't iterate on their charsheets to make sure they're achieving maximum fidelity to concept or making the best mechanical choices. They won't innovate (why do you think every complicated game ends up developing a charop board thinktank from which all the innovative build ideas trickle down until they become cookie cutters you show to less experienced players?). They'll take the very first thing they notice and stick with that. Since most stories Exalted is based on aren't about tense political thrillers, tactical espionage action or the power of rock 'n roll, this will translate to picking combat. Setting Supernals as caste-based was a very smart move to make sure players who picked a niche that wasn't 'the fightman' actually bothered to explore that niche and reap the rewards for it. Much like a lot of other little choices (silo'd XP, the evocation system replacing the old lovely artifacts of 2e, the changes to the Eclipse charmshare, the new mechanic for casting sorceries), a ton of thought that is very nonobvious went into it, and it never ceases to give me a headache that so much of the thread is willing to rip into the system before actually bothering to try and trace the reasoning behind and consequences of a design decision. The game is too drat finely tuned to keep acting like it's a haphazardly crafted piece of poo poo like past editions. If that is the reason for Supernals existing then that is terrible and they ought to be excised immediately. At first I like supernals because it let you take something that made you feel awesome right off the bat and it kept people in the mindset of their caste and I'm all for that. Then I tried making characters and began to lose my interest in supernals (literally my first character where I found out that you can't take higher circles of sorcery, but even after that). Now it's just 'game designer is a dick' and I'm going to bury that poo poo like a chihuahua. There's a lot of good in Ex3 like you said, but I really wish they'd stop doubling down on the bad decisions. For what it's worth, the reason my players keep eating up Melee or Archery or what have you is because of two things. One, they're locked into the mindset that I'm out to get them and they need to protect themselves no matter the cost. It's more about paranoia, I have no idea where it comes from because they've had very few lasting consequences come from losing fights beyond 'you lost'. If anything I'm entirely too nice. Two, sunk cost, once you've bought ten melee charms people don't feel like it's worth branching into other charm trees. Ex3 does what it can to limit this, but then supernals pop up and it's 'just five more charms to the capstone. I can see it from here!'. Xp gating Essence is something I've tried before and it appeared to work reasonably well so I'm somewhat pleased to see it in 3rd, but I'll have to play more before I make my decision on the matter.
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Mar 8, 2015 05:33
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Transient People posted:The point where I'd disagree with that is that other systems are sufficiently developed to stand up to combat, though. Social influence at the least certainly is (and if your combats don't have much use for Gambits I'd actually say it's considerably deeper than fighting). Combat was by far the most developed thing in Exalted 2e, but not so much anymore. There's still a lot more space devoted to combat than to social influence, boyo, even taking that as given. Which I don't.
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Mar 8, 2015 05:36
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Effectronica posted:There's still a lot more space devoted to combat than to social influence, boyo, even taking that as given. Which I don't. I'll give you that, yeah. It doesn't mean the combat system is deeper, but it certainly gets more pagecount. It's hard to find a solution to this other than either simplifying the combat system further (not that easy...there's some irreducible complexity in there), or making the social combat system more byzantine. Other subsystems definitely can use an expansion though, like Leadership.
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Mar 8, 2015 05:56
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Ithle01 posted:For what it's worth, the reason my players keep eating up Melee or Archery or what have you is because of two things. One, they're locked into the mindset that I'm out to get them and they need to protect themselves no matter the cost. It's more about paranoia, I have no idea where it comes from because they've had very few lasting consequences come from losing fights beyond 'you lost'.
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Mar 8, 2015 06:05
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I don't like the Supernal Ability because I tend not to enjoy incentives to hyperspecialize right out of the gate (which is when the Supernal Ability is most valuable) but my impression of the system, having only run a few test combats and built a few characters, is that even a Solar with only Essence 1 combat charms is really fearsome in a fight. The margin between competence and excellence can get fairly wide, but the floor is high enough that I wouldn't peg the inability to bum rush a combat skill's charm tree as a problem. You'd be an idiot not to invest in traits that you can use in fights, but the investment you need to be functional is pretty reasonable. As a point of ideology I certainly prefer a chargen system that produces better-rounded characters, but the Supernal Ability's defects are largely a matter of taste. Meanwhile, using scaling XP costs and flat chargen should get you sent to prison.
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Mar 8, 2015 06:07
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Okay I decided to look it up, and apparently Lethal damage getting to your Incapacitated health level now means you're "dead or dying" so the margin between "on your feet" and "dead" is now entirely up to GM fiat.
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Mar 8, 2015 06:10
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Just to get some numbers: Combat, including battle groups and strategic warfare, is 30 pages in the leak. Social Influence is 15 pages (14.5 more like, but I'm rounding). Crime and Investigation, Leadership, Environmental rules, Sailing, Crafting, Lore, and Medicine are a combined 29 pages. Combat is about 40% of the rules. That's not including combat Charms, Martial Arts, weapon lists, combat sorcery, and Evocations. On the other hand, it also doesn't include all the non-combat Charms, non-combat panoply, non-combat sorcery, and sorcerous workings. And whatever else I'm forgetting. It's definitely not as bad as 2e, but combat still looks like it's the single most extensive subsystem by volume, and likely that percentage grows if you include Charms and stuff.
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Mar 8, 2015 06:17
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Also the majority of each NPC's statblock is stuff like join battle, soak, the stats on each of their attacks, etc. Which is great, because I want to be able to kill them all, but freaking lol at the idea that people who want to super-favor a combat skill even on a Twilight or Eclipse are somehow doing it wrong.
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Mar 8, 2015 06:37
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Not that someone who doesn't want to super-favor a combat skill is doing it wrong either. In my last few experiences with Exalted (2e) there was only combat every 3-5 sessions, maybe. Over a couple characters I got more use out of Stealth, Presence, Performance, Awareness, Lore, Investigation, and Occult than I did Melee or Archery (or Firearms, in the case of one character). Probably even if you compare roll-to-roll. My Sidereal didn't have an offensive combat Charm for maybe six months into the weekly game, and 2 dots of Firearms most of that time. That character was devastatingly powerful in the social arena, and I still had fun in combat flailing around acting like a scared idiot. Most of my games seem go like this. nWoD has combat one in a blue moon, and even the 13th Age game I'm in only has a fight every other session at the most.
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Mar 8, 2015 07:04
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How much of this is Mark Rein Asterisk Hagan's dark agenda of making combat such a huge pain in the rear end that people will set out to avoid it, though?
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Mar 8, 2015 07:23
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Nessus posted:Mostly unironic question: Why do we even bother having five dot ranks in skills? They might as well be a Merit: "You have 5 dice on rolls with this ability." Maybe have a one-dot merit that only gives you two or three, and a two-dot merit that gives you five. I've thought about this as something like: Remove Attribute/Ability dots and Attribute/Ability minimums. Remove Excellencies and most other Charms that add dice or successes in a straightforward way. Exalts get 10+Essence dice on Favored or Caste Abilities and 5+Essence dice on others. Mortals get five dice on Favored Abilities and two dice on others. There's a merit that can give +2 dice to a non-Favored/Caste Ability. Jigger with the numbers as necessary, but the gist is to crib D&D 4e style auto-scaling skills, and to make the idea of Charms that give even small bonuses to rolls actually interesting because they're rare and normally you just plain don't get extra dice. MiltonSlavemasta posted:Ironically, Dragonblooded and Sidereal Exalted seem to be mostly exempt from this issue, because they don't have a clear "I am the combat man, I win at combat" caste. I still remember the first time I looked in the DB book, saw the caste allotment of Abilities, and realized that it'd make for an actual interesting allotment of combat styles since most DBs would have a default combat Ability tempting them instead of the way non-Dawn Solars are incentivized to just pick Martial Arts as Favored since it can cover every kind of combat. And then in 3e, instead of fixing that the devs are just gating Martial Arts behind extra point sinks. 
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Mar 8, 2015 07:25
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Roadie posted:I've thought about this as something like: Remove Attribute/Ability dots and Attribute/Ability minimums. Remove Excellencies and most other Charms that add dice or successes in a straightforward way. Exalts get 10+Essence dice on Favored or Caste Abilities and 5+Essence dice on others. Mortals get five dice on Favored Abilities and two dice on others. There's a merit that can give +2 dice to a non-Favored/Caste Ability. I think that would suffer a bit from making all Exalts of a given Caste kind of similar, with really only their charms and two favoured abilities to distinguish them, if I'm understanding your idea right.
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Mar 8, 2015 07:37
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I'm always going to take non-combat abilities as Supernal out of sheer stubborness. 
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Mar 8, 2015 07:39
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Zereth posted:Okay I decided to look it up, and apparently Lethal damage getting to your Incapacitated health level now means you're "dead or dying" so the margin between "on your feet" and "dead" is now entirely up to GM fiat. I see no way this will lead to awkwardness for DMs and players alike. (Seriously, do they have something against making the health system less ridiculously coarse there? I kind of facepalmed the first time I looked at the Ex3e leak and went "Yep. Still seven level health track with no useful way it increases outside of spending resources on Ox-Bodies."
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Mar 8, 2015 08:03
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There is that rule about taking some kind of permanent debility to avoid dying on the spot, but yeah as it stands it's basically a 'how roguelikey are you' question the game poses to each group of players.
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Mar 8, 2015 08:14
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PurpleXVI posted:I think that would suffer a bit from making all Exalts of a given Caste kind of similar, with really only their charms and two favoured abilities to distinguish them, if I'm understanding your idea right. Five Favored Abilities, not two. But "Favored Abilities" and "selection of Charms" are basically the only things that distinguish Exalts of a given Caste now, because everybody just puts a 5 in anything they actually plan to use anyway. 3e just compounds this by making the vast majority of all Charms require Ability 5 in the first place.
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Mar 8, 2015 09:43
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