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spectralent posted:The system's actually far more annoying than that in that you're meant to not go off and make things in a cave, you're meant to make little tidbits that're meaningfully relevant to people like some kind of bizarre craft gremlin haunting your city. The rules are there to encourage you to eat up spotlight time doing pointless bullshit before you're allowed to fill your niche. Nor is it "do stuff that all feeds into it, such as swaging advanced occult alloy ingots which you'll later use Splendiforous Machine Lathe Touch to turn into the daiklave blade.' But rather, a horrible combination of both??
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Sep 17, 2015 10:37
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Nessus posted:So you're saying it's not "work on things generally to build up your competence before you attempt the Grand Project that was your out of character initial intent." Soooort of? You have to get craft XP by either making things for material trade/gains or doing intimacy-relevant things. All of this is to force you to be "onscreen" and interacting with the world while you're doing the busywork bit of crafting (and the later bit, but I don't think people actually mind unveiling their new doomsday weapon or magic volcano sword or whatever and having people be impressed and grateful/terrified by that since it's normal and flows naturally. Making someone a table less so). No part of it requires things to actually be useful or practical; it's all about your "creative energies". Solars don't lack practise or parts when they can't finish something due to lack of XP; they have writers block.
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Sep 17, 2015 10:54
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It basically feels like punishment because really, who's the guy who made a crafter to make loving tables. I mean I'm sure he exists, but poo poo.
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Sep 17, 2015 14:42
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Nihnoz posted:It basically feels like punishment because really, who's the guy who made a crafter to make loving tables. I mean I'm sure he exists, but poo poo. Honestly I would have accepted, but not really liked, the system if it began at the second tier of crafting, where you can make banquets, swords, and that sort of thing. The tier you actually have to start with is "whittling cutlery and fletching" and poo poo like that, and the mechanics are clearly intended to make this an on-screen process tied with your narrative, when really who wants to make a sorcerer-savant craftsman who spends their onscreen time making soup bowls and trying to get people to be amazed by it? At least something like cooking a feast for a warband is a narrative event, absolutely nobody gives a single poo poo about fletching.
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Sep 17, 2015 15:05
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Hang on, does this mean if I want to say, make a mundane but really awesome aqueduct system, say, do I have to make a bunch of tables and soup bowls and poo poo first? Honestly those seem like the sort of thing a Solar crafter should just retroactively have already made while meditating or something like that if they happen to need one. EDIT: I get the feeling the Exalted 3e devs do not really have a good idea of where crafting fits in the stories of god-kings strding creation etc. But they really want to include it anyway.
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Sep 17, 2015 15:10
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Zereth posted:Hang on, does this mean if I want to say, make a mundane but really awesome aqueduct system, say, do I have to make a bunch of tables and soup bowls and poo poo first? Yes. And not because it's in any way important to the aqueduct, but because your crafter just has a brainfizzle if he's not done the required table-based homework first. It's really really dumb and people are defending the ~engrossing narrative opportunities~ it makes. EDIT: And the crafting system is enough of a huge, overcomplicated multiple-moving-part system anyway that I expect most groups are just going to go "You know what, gently caress it, you make the sword or whatever" even if it weren't dumb. Hell, basic success generation for charm-based crafting is ridiculously complicated dice games, even before you get into the sublimating XP types into each other and spending XP on specialisations poo poo too.
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Sep 17, 2015 15:14
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Zereth posted:Hang on, does this mean if I want to say, make a mundane but really awesome aqueduct system, say, do I have to make a bunch of tables and soup bowls and poo poo first? At least it's better then where they think Bureaucracy fits into the stories of god-kings striding Creation, which is 'well you'll eventually do it I guess because you're Exalts but we're not giving you a system because we want the end result to be failure and you guys will just min-max it so you never fail if we give you anything to play with it/ we don't want one guy playing CiV while everyone else is bored but we're okay doing that with the crafter'
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Sep 17, 2015 15:14
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You might not be making tables and soup bowls, you might be making doors or levers or grates or instructional mozaics to put into the aqueduct. I think it's a good way to enforce connections with other characters to require you to constantly be making tiny little trinkets for all the NPCs you meet in order to power up.
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Sep 17, 2015 15:16
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It's an attempt to make crafting interesting, the problem being that a description of making a thing is generally only interesting to listen to once. If you're lucky. I mean strap a corpse to a table and zap it with lightning, that's cool. Showing the process of making the machine that does that first, couldn't give a poo poo really. Cooking is still crafting. Just make dinner every day until you can make your lava cannon.
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Sep 17, 2015 15:21
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:You might not be making tables and soup bowls, you might be making doors or levers or grates or instructional mozaics to put into the aqueduct. I think it's a good way to enforce connections with other characters to require you to constantly be making tiny little trinkets for all the NPCs you meet in order to power up. Almost certainly not, since whether or not a project has anything to do with the end goal or not is irrelevant, and making a grate for your aqueduct is probably not going to be related to someone else's intimacy or done for profit beyond the eventual commission of the aqueduct itself. Those things would not get craft XP towards it. The one workaround would be if you have a crafting-related intimacy it's fulfilling, which is almost inevitably going to be what people do, but "This system is so awesome everyone uses the loophole to ignore it" is hardly a ringing endorsement.
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Sep 17, 2015 15:23
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:You might not be making tables and soup bowls, you might be making doors or levers or grates or instructional mozaics to put into the aqueduct. I think it's a good way to enforce connections with other characters to require you to constantly be making tiny little trinkets for all the NPCs you meet in order to power up. In order to get Craft XP you need to engage with the setting, yeah. My issue is less that specific idea and more the fact that the base system is something akin to cookie clicker. Sorcerous Workings are a better Crafting System than Craft IMO Edit: it's just off-putting: I get that the reason for Craft XP being the way it is, is because you have to engage with the setting through Crafting to get anywhere. It's just the rest of the system is so hyper-mechanistic and almost totally divorced from the rest of the game. Bedlamdan fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Sep 17, 2015 |
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Sep 17, 2015 15:26
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Fans posted:Cooking is still crafting. Just make dinner every day until you can make your lava cannon.
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Sep 17, 2015 15:56
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Exactly. The basic principle of that stuff doesn't seem awful; it emerges naturally from the fiction that a warlord is pleased with his meal, or that your enemies are in fear over your new Killbot 7000. Declaring those things are part of resource tracking is weird, and the system they're tracked for is a bytazine mess, but in principle that's reasonable. The issue is what the plot is meant to care about begins a step below "That might make a neat character moment" and directly within "Oh my god who the hell cares" territory. I can see an aspiring page being touched a kindly old forgemaster made her a sword. I have no idea who I'm meant to be wooing with fletching, or why we can't just assume a solar crafter can probably fletch arrows if needed and write that off as background.
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Sep 17, 2015 16:00
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Even cooking a fine meal everywhere I go for my hosts/fellow guests seems like it might be worth something, but only in as a whole. Fletching arrows seems completely insignificant if you're not making super awesome arrows and/or making an absolute shitload of arrows in a short time. The sort of thing a Solar-level crafter might do with their feet while doing something else that's actually important.
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Sep 17, 2015 16:18
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spectralent posted:The issue is what the plot is meant to care about begins a step below "That might make a neat character moment" and directly within "Oh my god who the hell cares" territory. I can see an aspiring page being touched a kindly old forgemaster made her a sword. I have no idea who I'm meant to be wooing with fletching, or why we can't just assume a solar crafter can probably fletch arrows if needed and write that off as background. There is actually a Prince Valiant story about Prince Valiant being touched by one of his new young friends making him a homemade set of arrows as a gift. There's also the occasional element of various medieval stories where archers take pride in and brag about the quality of arrows their fletcher has made for them. So if you want to woo people with your well-flying arrows, there's narrative precedent. (It's still an overdesigned system that examplifies H&h's love of mechanical maximalism.)
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Sep 17, 2015 16:30
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I think earning silver xp with small projects to work up to big projects is cool, and that the problem with the crafting system is that it's otherwise composed entirely of the kind of "here's a massive tedious penalty, here's a gigantic xp sink which does nothing but alleviate the penalty" design that's only lightly sprinkled over the game's other systems.
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Sep 17, 2015 17:29
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Ferrinus posted:I think earning silver xp with small projects to work up to big projects is cool, and that the problem with the crafting system is that it's otherwise composed entirely of the kind of "here's a massive tedious penalty, here's a gigantic xp sink which does nothing but alleviate the penalty" design that's only lightly sprinkled over the game's other systems. The base idea is fine, but the minigame you have to end up playing is boring and expensive.
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Sep 17, 2015 17:38
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The worst part is that it almost completely crowds out Craft charms that a character could conceivably use in play, during scenes, that other characters could see. It's analogous to the Fate Arcanum in the original Mage: the Awakening corebook, which contained so many variations on "one or more of your rolls are more likely to succeed than they were before" that it was short on actual magic spells that did things.
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Sep 17, 2015 17:41
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spectralent posted:Exactly. The basic principle of that stuff doesn't seem awful; it emerges naturally from the fiction that a warlord is pleased with his meal, or that your enemies are in fear over your new Killbot 7000. Declaring those things are part of resource tracking is weird, and the system they're tracked for is a bytazine mess, but in principle that's reasonable. The issue is what the plot is meant to care about begins a step below "That might make a neat character moment" and directly within "Oh my god who the hell cares" territory. I can see an aspiring page being touched a kindly old forgemaster made her a sword. I have no idea who I'm meant to be wooing with fletching, or why we can't just assume a solar crafter can probably fletch arrows if needed and write that off as background. Serious question, did you actually play a Crafter? Because when I made a poet/social activist/graffitist using Craft (because Lingustics is a broken loving charmset, if anybody wants to complain about anything, that's the charmset to bitch about), the mechanics jived perfectly with what I wanted to do - I spent my time writing little pithy verses and rhymes in-character, then moved up to sonnets and freeform poems, and my Superior and Legendary projects were basically making magical versions of things like the Poem of the Gifts from Borges. I get the distinct impression that Crafting isn't jiving with a lot of people because they're trying to make omnidisciplinary craftsmen, and Crafting this edition is very centrally focused on your one specific niche instead of 'craft all the things'.
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Sep 17, 2015 18:07
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Is Linguistics broken like Integrity in that it sucks or broken in the sense that you'd be a moron if you were an Eclipse or a Twilight and didn't have it?
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Sep 17, 2015 18:11
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SunAndSpring posted:Is Linguistics broken like Integrity in that it sucks or broken in the sense that you'd be a moron if you were an Eclipse or a Twilight and didn't have it? Broken in that it's both intensely boring if you want to actually be a writer or some other form of earnest communicator and yet super overpowered because it offers cheap Double 7s to social attempts that involve writing poo poo down. It's the perfect mix of 'too strong not to use' and 'too boring to actually bother with', outside maybe Twisted Words Technique. EDIT: Also, the charmset offers basically zero support outside of the Double 7s to attempts at earnest communication that don't involve Manipulation. That's another problem it has. It's just kind of a super phoned in set, tbqh. Transient People fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Sep 17, 2015 |
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Sep 17, 2015 18:17
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There's something beautiful about the fact that Exalted 3rd edition's presentations of the act of writing are either as a terrible slog where your end goal has little to do with your original idea (Crafts) or as a powerful tool for lying and little else (Linguistics).
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Sep 17, 2015 18:32
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I'd say the biggest problem with Craft right now is that once you dump in a truly obscene amount of xp the whole system stops mattering because you start going gold-positive on low dot artifacts that you then crank out on a daily basis to fuel your endless Doom-bots and xp-snowball engine. Having only a few Craft charms sucks, having too many Craft charms makes you a god. Then you compare this to the sorcerous project system where the buy-in is one charm that you would be stupid not to take on every character because it's so good. After that you can do whatever you want, but you have to pay xp for each individual effect. We have two 'make-stuff' (*) systems and they work in the complete opposite way. I had a player that wanted to be a crafter and even after I said that she could have infinite silver points if she didn't take Sublime Transference she gave up after a few months for not wanting to be forced to design nonsense so she could fulfill her actual character goals. * Really it's more like three and a half systems if you count the Leadership project non-system - which I actually enjoyed the other day much to my surprise - and the Wyld-Shaping Technique system.
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Sep 17, 2015 18:53
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:There's something beautiful about the fact that Exalted 3rd edition's presentations of the act of writing are either as a terrible slog where your end goal has little to do with your original idea (Crafts) or as a powerful tool for lying and little else (Linguistics). Well, you can use Linguistics for quite a few things besides lying (just like how there's a bunch of branches in every charm-set), but yeah, magic based around manipulating language has a lot of utility in also manipulating others. Letters that are so alarming that people die, missives that magically force people to repeat words they don't believe in, shitposts on internet forums, etc. Though, Craft is specifically for making your books look pretty and do layout stuff, etc. while Linguistics is always actual content and penmanship (with maybe supplementary illustrations that support the work). Bedlamdan fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Sep 17, 2015 |
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Sep 17, 2015 19:05
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Transient People posted:I get the distinct impression that Crafting isn't jiving with a lot of people because they're trying to make omnidisciplinary craftsmen, and Crafting this edition is very centrally focused on your one specific niche instead of 'craft all the things'. At least one charm rewards you for being omnidiscipline, and another charm helps you become omnidiscipline. So even your graffiti artist could use his time spent writing "Romans Go Home" to make an orichalcum doomcannon, and the charmset encourages you to do so. Mile'ionaha fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Sep 17, 2015 |
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Sep 17, 2015 19:09
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Mile'ionaha posted:At least one charm rewards you for being omnidiscipline, and another charm helps you become omnidiscipline. I thought the omnidiscipline charm just helps you expand into areas that are tangentially related to what you already have? So you could change armor-crafting into weapon-smithing and cooking into medicine making, but not book-writing into cannon making. unless the books are really heavy which I would allow, if I were GMing.
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Sep 17, 2015 19:15
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:There's something beautiful about the fact that Exalted 3rd edition's presentations of the act of writing are either as a terrible slog where your end goal has little to do with your original idea (Crafts) or as a powerful tool for lying and little else (Linguistics). 
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Sep 17, 2015 19:25
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When the book comes out my soul is going to slough off and fall into Lethe
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Sep 17, 2015 19:30
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:When the book comes out my soul is going to slough off and fall into Lethe I am not entirely convinced the forums will still be online when the book comes out.
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Sep 17, 2015 19:33
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Transient People posted:Serious question, did you actually play a Crafter? Because when I made a poet/social activist/graffitist using Craft (because Lingustics is a broken loving charmset, if anybody wants to complain about anything, that's the charmset to bitch about), the mechanics jived perfectly with what I wanted to do - I spent my time writing little pithy verses and rhymes in-character, then moved up to sonnets and freeform poems, and my Superior and Legendary projects were basically making magical versions of things like the Poem of the Gifts from Borges. I get the distinct impression that Crafting isn't jiving with a lot of people because they're trying to make omnidisciplinary craftsmen, and Crafting this edition is very centrally focused on your one specific niche instead of 'craft all the things'. Craft was rejected on sight by numerous members of my group. Almost everyone disliked it. You also have to concede using it as a social system standin might make a system focused around intimacies a little more relevant, yes?
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Sep 17, 2015 19:47
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Stallion Cabana posted:At least it's better then where they think Bureaucracy fits into the stories of god-kings striding Creation, which is 'well you'll eventually do it I guess because you're Exalts but we're not giving you a system because we want the end result to be failure and you guys will just min-max it so you never fail if we give you anything to play with it/ we don't want one guy playing CiV while everyone else is bored but we're okay doing that with the crafter'
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Sep 17, 2015 19:59
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Nessus posted:I think Bureaucracy or something in that same zone with a more thrilling name/angle could work completely fine. It's the ability about like, criminal justice and controlling organizations, if I recall correctly. Yeah, Bureaucracy's potentially a great bit. Solars are meant to be god-ordained judges of the wicked after all; doing it a bit more literally seems in-theme.
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Sep 17, 2015 20:35
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Stallion Cabana posted:At least it's better then where they think Bureaucracy fits into the stories of god-kings striding Creation, which is 'well you'll eventually do it I guess because you're Exalts but we're not giving you a system because we want the end result to be failure and you guys will just min-max it so you never fail if we give you anything to play with it/ we don't want one guy playing CiV while everyone else is bored but we're okay doing that with the crafter' I am still super-bitter about this. Caesar Augustus and Lord Vetinari should be character concepts just as viable as Conan and King Solomon, and should have the same degree of mechanical weight.
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Sep 17, 2015 22:03
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Slightly Lions posted:I am still super-bitter about this. Caesar Augustus and Lord Vetinari should be character concepts just as viable as Conan and King Solomon, and should have the same degree of mechanical weight. I know they were planning on a big book of war and rulership further down the line, with more mechanical support for both systems, but who knows if plans have changed or not.
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Sep 17, 2015 22:13
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spectralent posted:Craft was rejected on sight by numerous members of my group. Almost everyone disliked it. You also have to concede using it as a social system standin might make a system focused around intimacies a little more relevant, yes? I'm not sure what you mean by the second part. Care to elaborate? And with regards to the first...I've seen tons of people have a gut impression of 'it's poo poo' with regard to the combat systems and those people weren't right either. Presentation matters, but it doesn't have anything to do with how useful or interesting a system is in actual play. EDIT: quote:Well, you can use Linguistics for quite a few things besides lying (just like how there's a bunch of branches in every charm-set), but yeah, magic based around manipulating language has a lot of utility in also manipulating others. Letters that are so alarming that people die, missives that magically force people to repeat words they don't believe in, shitposts on internet forums, etc. The problem is that Linguistics is ONLY about manipulating others right now, instead of allowing you to express yourself as a lyrical artist or writer or playwright. If I want to write something like the Poem of the Gifts (something Borges wrote because he was going loving blind and had to let it out), or Pablo Neruda's Desperate Song, I'm not trying to manipulate anyone. I'm just writing so passionately that it generates emotional responses in other people...and Linguistics helps dick-all with that, which loving sucks. This is what I mean when I say Linguistics is phoned-in. It doesn't actually help you represent many classical artistic archetypes because the charms lack the proper attribute support (the same goes for a lack of Intelligence-using charms, for the record). Transient People fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Sep 17, 2015 |
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Sep 17, 2015 22:37
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Well I'd say that while it's not a very nice way to look at it, you could see things like that as works which are meant to "manipulate targets," but the agenda is less "Convince the Deliberative to authorize a budget disbursement to fund my latest giant temple to my genitals" and more "Share the pain of my tragic loss of sight, slow and certain, with all who read it." Slightly Lions posted:I am still super-bitter about this. Caesar Augustus and Lord Vetinari should be character concepts just as viable as Conan and King Solomon, and should have the same degree of mechanical weight.
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Sep 17, 2015 23:02
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You could see it like that, but it just rubs me the wrong way. Why should all competent writers also be skilled liars? It makes much more sense to say that most writers are passionate communicators (which they are, as a rule, unless you're writing something you were commissioned to write), if you have to settle on one attribute to use as a general rule. PS: So what I'm saying is, much like in D&D, Death To Ability Scores.
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Sep 17, 2015 23:14
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Nessus posted:Would Phoenix Wright be a Solar or a Sidereal? To be frank if the Sidereals were recast to be more like "the overworked guardians of the way things ought to be, dammit, with justice for all" and their rebellion was at least in part motivated by growing Solar excess being wrong as opposed to merely "a risk to Creation,'" well I for one would find that to be a great new direction for what otherwise seems to be the Smuggest Splat. Sidereals, if only because they act as legal consuls in heavenly courts. Broken, hopelessly corrupt, heavenly courts.
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Sep 17, 2015 23:15
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Transient People posted:You could see it like that, but it just rubs me the wrong way. Why should all competent writers also be skilled liars?  Bedlamdan posted:Sidereals, if only because they act as legal consuls in heavenly courts. Broken, hopelessly corrupt, heavenly courts.
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Sep 17, 2015 23:25
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Transient People posted:The problem is that Linguistics is ONLY about manipulating others right now, instead of allowing you to express yourself as a lyrical artist or writer or playwright. If I want to write something like the Poem of the Gifts (something Borges wrote because he was going loving blind and had to let it out), or Pablo Neruda's Desperate Song, I'm not trying to manipulate anyone. I'm just writing so passionately that it generates emotional responses in other people...and Linguistics helps dick-all with that, which loving sucks. This is what I mean when I say Linguistics is phoned-in. It doesn't actually help you represent many classical artistic archetypes because the charms lack the proper attribute support (the same goes for a lack of Intelligence-using charms, for the record). Conceivably you're supposed to use Performance for this, except oops they split Performance charms up by instrument used and while there are a bunch for speaking there are none for writing. Presumably if someone directly transcribes something your character says while making a Performance roll the ink just turns to ash before it can soak into the paper.
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Sep 17, 2015 23:51
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