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Trust nobody, not even yourself.
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Apr 23, 2015 20:44
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So, Duke Nukem Exalted is still in layout. If there's anyone who knows, what's involved in laying out a book that takes so long? Does Maria only work on this for an hour per day, or is there some technical reason why laying out a print book is slower than copying it by hand Dark Ages style? The cynic in me thinks they've run out of money to pay the artists/writers, and are holding out publishing the book until they can scrape together the cash to pay them.
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Apr 29, 2015 14:12
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TwoQuestions posted:So, Duke Nukem Exalted is still in layout. If there's anyone who knows, what's involved in laying out a book that takes so long? Does Maria only work on this for an hour per day, or is there some technical reason why laying out a print book is slower than copying it by hand Dark Ages style? I have no idea what's going on with Ex3 right now, but every monday note smells like bullshit. Monday notes posted:February 23rd I don't know how the Layout process work, but if I had this weekly round of excuses for my job I would've been fired a long time ago.
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Apr 29, 2015 14:25
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Sounds like the editing process reset a lot of the work that was going on. Whatever, it'll be out at some point.
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Apr 29, 2015 15:20
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In theory, layout should take about a month, but it almost never does for any project. Onyx Path is pretty good about getting small books through in a reasonable amount of time, probably because they've been doing this long enough to have a number of reliable graphic designers on tap. The thing is, much like how nobody in the industry can afford to pay freelancers a living wage, nobody can afford to pay layout artists a living wage either. This means that the freelancer who's doing your layout is going to have a number of other jobs going that may conflict, especially since most people in the industry (avoids looking in mirror*) are also bad at keeping to a schedule and they'll be receiving things to work on later than they were scheduled and slipping behind their plans. I'd estimate Ms. Cabardo will finish sometime in June. * Chuubo was in layout for literally a year
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Apr 29, 2015 17:11
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Has Chuubo shipped yet? It doesn't look like it has from the last updates, but I don't follow it closely. It will get here when it gets here I suppose. My Exalted 3E money went to Chuubo's instead, funny enough.
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Apr 29, 2015 17:36
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Calde posted:Has Chuubo shipped yet? It doesn't look like it has from the last updates, but I don't follow it closely. It will get here when it gets here I suppose. My Exalted 3E money went to Chuubo's instead, funny enough. Eos tells us that the books are printed and will ship soon. We're working to get confirmation on that before we make an official announcement. Book 2, By the Docks of Big Lake, is in layout with Daniel Solis. Book 3 is in editing.
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Apr 29, 2015 17:40
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Didn't 3e also go back for another editing pass because it was the size of a planet?
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Apr 29, 2015 20:25
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Mendrian posted:Didn't 3e also go back for another editing pass because it was the size of a planet? It got sent back for cuts, yeah. I think Holden also mentioned that he was going to rearrange the Charm trees so that they'd go (All of Essence 1, All of Essence 2, All of Essence 3, etc) instead of (Root Charm, entire tree up to E5, root Charm, entire tree up to E5, etc).
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Apr 29, 2015 20:41
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Rand Brittain posted:It got sent back for cuts, yeah. While he's at it he probably should remove half of them to deal with the hilarious charm bloat.
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Apr 29, 2015 22:17
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Which ones?
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Apr 29, 2015 22:26
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Ferrinus posted:Which ones? All the ones that are only dice tricks.
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Apr 29, 2015 22:33
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That's less than half, makes prettt dramatic changes to combat balance, and actually leaches a lot of flavor out of the game because suddenly you've got no more Excellent Strike or Tiger's Dread Symmetry or similar.
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Apr 29, 2015 22:42
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Ferrinus posted:That's less than half, makes prettt dramatic changes to combat balance, and actually leaches a lot of flavor out of the game because suddenly you've got no more Excellent Strike or Tiger's Dread Symmetry or similar. You don't need eleven billion useless charms to make combat interesting. Having charms actually do something instead of adding one dice or success or 9-again or some other bullshit that add 5% chance of making the roll would add flavor. None of those charms are good, and there are way WAY too many charms. A good system doesn't a billion slightly different powers that you'll always forget to be interesting. The charm bloat is ridiculous, and one of the worst part of 3E.
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Apr 29, 2015 22:56
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It seems that all these complex dice fucker tricks also are going to slow down rolls in practice, at least at a physical table. (To be fair they may be designing for the Internet, I guess. Probably would be more honest.) Like, how are you gonna keep track of these things, and what do you do when Jim realizes suddenly that he didn't fail, he succeeded, because he rolled 4 5s and he'd bought the Charm that made 5s count as successes? Say what you will about
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Apr 29, 2015 22:59
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Dicking around with the RNG is the least interesting part of any system anyway. Making numbers bigger is probably the core rpg experience for most people but it's boring as gently caress.
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Apr 29, 2015 23:15
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MonsieurChoc posted:You don't need eleven billion useless charms to make combat interesting. Having charms actually do something instead of adding one dice or success or 9-again or some other bullshit that add 5% chance of making the roll would add flavor. None of those charms are good, and there are way WAY too many charms. No, you need eleven billion useful Charms. Excellent Strike and Thunderbolt Attack Prana, to take the two purely mathematical Charms I've thus far used most commonly in play, make immense differences to melee combat. What are you going to replace them with? In what way do they not add flavor?
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Apr 29, 2015 23:32
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Ferrinus posted:No, you need eleven billion useful Charms. Excellent Strike and Thunderbolt Attack Prana, to take the two purely mathematical Charms I've thus far used most commonly in play, make immense differences to melee combat. What are you going to replace them with? In what way do they not add flavor?
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Apr 29, 2015 23:48
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Nessus posted:How do they make such immense differences? Well for example, Excellent Strike lets you reroll 1's, while quite a few defensive charms in the book let you retroactively subtract successes for everyone 1 your opponent gets in their pool. So Excellent Strike nullifies a lot of defensive options right off the bat. Combine that with the automatic extra success, the potential to turn 1's to even more successes, and it's hilarious mote efficiency, there's no reason not to use it with every single attack. It was even more absurd in the earlier playtest leak when it only cost 1 mote to use.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:04
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Bedlamdan posted:Well for example, Excellent Strike lets you reroll 1's, while quite a few defensive charms in the book let you retroactively subtract successes for everyone 1 your opponent gets in their pool. So Excellent Strike nullifies a lot of defensive options right off the bat. Combine that with the automatic extra success, the potential to turn 1's to even more successes, and it's hilarious mote efficiency, there's no reason not to use it with every single attack. It was even more absurd in the earlier playtest leak when it only cost 1 mote to use.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:08
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Nessus posted:How do they make such immense differences? Excellent Strike is a strict upgrade to the Melee excellency once you've got a high enough base pool, improves the efficacy of other sources of bonus dice, and protects you from various defenses that depend on your character screwing up. Thunderbolt Attack Prana doubles decisive attack damage. These do nothing but slide integers around but are extremely satisfying to see pay off and feel different to use than other sets of combat Charms would be.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:09
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Nessus posted:So there's a cheap and readily available Charm which just stabs a ton of defense options in the dick, eh? That's a good sign. For Solars, yeah, definitely. But I'd be surprised if a Dragonblood would ever get a charm like that.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:28
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Many Solar capitalize-on-failure Charms either count both 1s and 2s, explicitly count before any reroll effects, or have some additional bonus.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:30
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Nessus posted:So there's a cheap and readily available Charm which just stabs a ton of defense options in the dick, eh? That's a good sign. The other thing to consider is that "dice tricks" allow you to move the bell curve without changing the max possible result. It might not be something you like, but as a fan of crunch, I like it, at least when compared to simply adding/removing dice.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:33
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Kenlon posted:The other thing to consider is that "dice tricks" allow you to move the bell curve without changing the max possible result. It might not be something you like, but as a fan of crunch, I like it, at least when compared to simply adding/removing dice. I have not read the leak thoroughly so this may not be nearly as much of a thing as I'm envisioning, hearing people talk.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:39
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It's actually, for-real not. Most of more complicated dice tricks apply to noncombat rolls and the only time you really stack dice tricks on top of each other is if you're playing the cookie clicker crafting minigame. In Melee, for instance, there are basically three: 1) Reroll 1s on attacks 2) Penalize your attackers for any 1s or 2s they roll 3) IF you've used a full Melee Excellency, get bonus dice/successes if you roll a 7-8-9-10 straight
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Apr 30, 2015 00:44
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Ferrinus posted:It's actually, for-real not. Most of more complicated dice tricks apply to noncombat rolls and the only time you really stack dice tricks on top of each other is if you're playing the cookie clicker crafting minigame. In Melee, for instance, there are basically three: This is one thing I realized as I read the book, for most abilities, you only actually ever get 1 'Reroll X' number; you might get more 'Double Xs', but usually for each ability or each subset of ability, you only get 1 Reroll number; like Stealth might have 2 Reroll numbers (I don't remember if this is right), but they'd be in different tress and unlikely or impossible to overlap.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:53
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MonsieurChoc posted:While he's at it he probably should remove half of them to deal with the hilarious charm bloat. "Four hundred charms" or whatever the number is sounds ridiculous, but once you run the numbers you realise it's not actually all that many. You've got twenty-five Abilities and five levels of essence to fill. If you go for the basic option of having one tree per Ability with one charm for each Essence level then you're already talking about one hundred and twenty five charms. If you want to add additional trees, or god forbid branches, then things spin out of control very very rapidly. If you're stupid enough to try and find a charm for every combination of Essence level and Ability level... (Of course, in practice not every Ability has multiple trees or even a charm for every Essence level; it's been a while, but I think when I broke it down I found that the bulk of most charm trees was located in the 2 to 3 Essence range, with a smaller but still significant quantity at Essence 1. Essence 4 or 5 charms are much rarer, and usually if an Ability is going to skip an Essence level it's 4.) The real problem (if there is a problem) is that there are just too many goddamn Abilities to flesh out. I think we need to Brawl and Melee into one close-combat skill Archery and Thrown into one ranged-combat skill Dodge into Athletics Sail, Ride and Survival into one Travel skill Occult and Lore into one know-things skill Maybe also Awareness/Investigation, Larceny/Stealth (or throw Stealth into Athletics along with Dodge) and Presence/Integrity, though those seem like more of a stretch to me. If you also drop Resistance outright (...not really certain how that one's something you learn) then you're down to only fifteen Abilities, which... is still going to leave you with a charm count in the hundreds, but a smaller number of hundreds. Alright, new plan. Instead of having a lot of itty bitty little charms spread across Essence tiers you have a few big chunky ones, all available at Essence 1, which get more powerful as your Essence increases. Maybe they just get more oomph, maybe they get more sideways utility, more flexibility, more options, I don't know. Maybe there are optional add-ons you can buy to keep things interesting. I think- I'm not certain, but I think- you could cover the same space in fewer words that way.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:01
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You could easily condense nine attributes to six and twenty five abilities to fifteen if you felt like it. You wouldn't even have to reduce the Charm count - Fists of Iron and Excellent Strike could still be incompatible and the roots of separate combat cascades.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:07
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You could probably make an Exigent who works that way too, though that's an uncertainty since we don't have that book but everything about them points to being relatively flexible. This doesn't help the entire concept, admittedly, but it might help you make what you're looking for and refine it into your style. Personally I'd mix Larceny and Stealth and Occult and Lore at least. Though this would result in pretty large abilities for those two because Larceny has Doors, Stealing, and Disguise for separate trees and Occult has both Non-Combat and Actual Combat Stealth, while Occult is Wyld Shaping, Evocations, and Demon fuckery while Lore is Facts, Teaching, and I think some other stuff. I will honestly admit that the sheer amount of different stuff in Occult and Lore kind of made me accept that they need to be separate, but I also dislike the Evocation Tree in Occult (I understand why it's there but I disagree with the basic premise meaning I can dislike their 'solution') and the Learning stuff tree in Lore (Seriously. Just make it one goddamn charm and don't make it be you giving other people your EXP and you don't have to have all this reroll to regain the lost EXP stuff)
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Apr 30, 2015 01:09
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Stallion Cabana posted:You could probably make an Exigent who works that way too, though that's an uncertainty since we don't have that book but everything about them points to being relatively flexible. Wyld-Shaping and Evocations are Lore.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:14
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jagadaishio posted:Wyld-Shaping and Evocations are Lore. Right. Yeah okay they should be combined if I can't even remember that. I don't know why I thought Occult; Wyld Shaping was in Lore in 2E too.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:15
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My putative narrowed-down stats list for Exalted would look something like: Strength/Dexterity, Intelligence/Perception, Charisma/Manipulation -Melee/Ranged/War -Presence/Resistance/Survival -Craft/Lore/Medicine -Athletics/Investigation/Stealth -Bureaucracy/Linguistics/Travel
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Apr 30, 2015 01:20
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It's just not Exalted without the appearance stat.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:21
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I could see making Presence and Manipulation the two social stats, nWoD style, and having Performance and Socialize or Performance and Linguistics or similar be the available social skills. Possibly the Zenith trio should be Integrity/Performance/Survival or similar, where Integrity does what Presence used to do, but I haven't given it that much thought.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:26
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I still don't know why lore and occult are different things given how ubiquitous magic stuff is in the first place.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:45
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Bedlamdan posted:I still don't know why lore and occult are different things given how ubiquitous magic stuff is in the first place.
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Apr 30, 2015 02:43
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Ferrinus posted:It's actually, for-real not. Most of more complicated dice tricks apply to noncombat rolls and the only time you really stack dice tricks on top of each other is if you're playing the cookie clicker crafting minigame. In Melee, for instance, there are basically three: Vouching for this now that my weekly Ex3 game resumed play. Considering I took the combat monster slot (wayyyyy before Supernals were even a thing, at that), I had to get pretty intimately familiar with Melee and Ferrinus isn't lying. Your dice tricks are Excellent Strike, Rising Sun Slash, Foe Cleaving Focus (upgrade of RSS that give you back motes for your 10s), Hail Shattering Practice and Bulwark Stance (both penalize 1s, HSS penalizes 2s as well IIRC). That's it. Those five charms are everything in the tree that relates to dice tricks. Brawl is similarly low on modifiers. Even the more trick-loaded abilities, like Performance and Socialize, still don't break something like five distinct effects, most of which are Double X variants. Craft is the only big offender with ludicrous dicetrick cascades, every other ability is reasonable enough. Bedlamdan posted:I still don't know why lore and occult are different things given how ubiquitous magic stuff is in the first place. 'know magic poo poo' and 'know the sciences and academic pursuits' is a reasonable split, mostly. Mostly. It's just that the lines can get blurry at times. Occult has a pretty distinct identity in Ex3 compared to 2e, but it used to be real bad once upon a time.
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Apr 30, 2015 02:46
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Transient People posted:'know magic poo poo' and 'know the sciences and academic pursuits' is a reasonable split, mostly. Mostly. It's just that the lines can get blurry at times. Occult has a pretty distinct identity in Ex3 compared to 2e, but it used to be real bad once upon a time. Yeah, magic poo poo in 2E was treated as a legitimate science, which only served to make things more confusing.
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Apr 30, 2015 02:48
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Bedlamdan posted:Yeah, magic poo poo in 2E was treated as a legitimate science, which only served to make things more confusing.
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Apr 30, 2015 02:52
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