|
KittyEmpress posted:Solars are going to always suffer through 3e for the decision by Holden and Morke that people leaking the second leak document meant they were done play testing and editing and releasing it as is. None of this is true.
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 01:11
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 10:03 |
|
|
Solars are good as the intro one because they require the least attachment to the setting. You can get started with "you know there's a village over there and you've heard of the Demigod Dragon Warriors and there's a thing called the Immaculate Faith but you don't know the details" and then some huge power gets dropped on you and off you go. DB need the details of the Realm and house politics all that jazz to get the most out of it. As people posting on a forum about Exalted and charm tech you are already in the minority as the audience that has the buy in and knowledge and affection for the setting that everything except Solars, well, I don't want to say need because obviously loads of people have gone straight in to the other splats, but if you're going in with zero knowledge for your first game in the Exalted setting, Solars are the choice.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 01:23
|
|
|
Ego Trip posted:Decision makers at WW are/were garbage people and Paradox either condoned or ignored that. Beast, V5, defending Zak S., etc. FWIW the current devs are pretty much blameless and it not like it was their call to have the IP held hostage by garbage people. If you like their work but don't wanna support the shittiness of the larger company, Vance and Minton do have Patreons.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 01:26
|
|
|
Rand Brittain posted:None of this is true. It is definitely true that Solars are always going to suffer through 3E for decision by Holden and Morke.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 01:47
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:It is definitely true that Solars are always going to suffer through 3E for decision by Holden and Morke. Nah, that errata fixpatch/revisit is gonna happen at some point and I trust Vance and Minton to Fix That poo poo (TM). It's a herculean task, but hey, who better for that than the exalted dev team? :V
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 02:11
|
|
|
Unless it's a full on solars 3.5 that will just reduce but not undo the damage.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 03:13
|
|
|
Lunars!
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 03:37
|
|
|
I want to get the Lunars preview docs by backing immediately but I really should wait until after my fencing tournamentt Saturday, so I'm on tenterhooks waiting to know more than what people have been chatting about here.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 03:54
|
|
|
Rand Brittain posted:None of this is true. yeah they deleted and remade at least 3 systems after closing the playtest, and then only did in house testing for their own play group, it's totally untrue. This is why when I brought up to Hatewheel once how weak Perilous Charms were because I'd never seen someone just randomly launch a decisive attack without crashing an opponent first- meaning a lot of the ones that do stuff like make you more decisively resistant are of limited use- he said 'I have literally never seen anyone try a strategy of only decisive attacking after crashing someone'. Or maybe that was Holden. I don't remember.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 05:56
|
|
|
Stallion Cabana posted:yeah they deleted and remade at least 3 systems after closing the playtest, and then only did in house testing for their own play group, it's totally untrue. I don't really know what this means, but I had a great time launching a decisive attack on a non crashed opponent recently. So this is my first game of exalted, and every combat is a learning experience. This particular combat was against a battle group. The circle had just clandestinely boarded a realm navy flagship, with the objective of firing the essence cannon it had on board at a military parade to kill the leader of the local realm legion. As I understand it, this sort of bullshit is not atypical for solars. The whole anathema thing and the usurpation (is that right?) is sounding more and more reasonable. Anyway, we board the flagship. No notables on board, just some noncombatant nobles and some sailors, represented as a battlegroup. I didn't really grok what a battlegroup was, so after rolling extremely well on my blinding battle feint, I ambushed the bg. I stunted that I punched the guard in the mouth with my combat opening decisive attack. I threw some charms at it and rolled an ungodly amount of successes. So the ST describes the outcome as me punching the teeth/jaw/frontskull from the one guards mouth and mowing down half the crew with the shrapnel. Golly. The next session our least combat invested character, a medicine supernal, basically decapitated the local government, paving the way for us to suborn rule of Lap, by killing the most competent of the local rulers almost by accident after teleporting there. I don't really know about all this drama with the old devs, and based on my limited game experience I sympathize with many of the criticisms aired here about the mechanics and writing, but despite all that this game is cool. It's fun rolling up a solar, it's fun playing one, and it's even fun storytelling for them as far as I can tell. I don't want to stifle this discussion, but it'd be rad to hear about y'all's campaigns, characters, cool moments in play with solars, or your ideas for campaigns, characters, storylines and such for lunars or other future splats as well. I'm having a blast playing a solar, and I'm looking forward to future campaigns with other splats too.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 10:35
|
|
|
Honestly the extremely short version you need to know about Morke and Holden is that they're both extreme pieces of poo poo even outside of their (former) devspace and approached Ex3 with the level of grognardism "long time fans" in nerd culture think is entitled to them, and the brand is 200% better off without them. Ex3 core/Solars are a success story despite their incompetence and terribleness. Solars are fun. Dragonbloods are fun. Lunars look fun. Ex3 is fun. Monathin fucked around with this message at 11:10 on Feb 15, 2019 |
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 11:08
|
|
|
Autochthonians, coming to a Kickstarter near you Q1 2053
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 13:13
|
|
|
I'm not really sure how you'd do a Solars errata, anyway. You could do a craft errata, but most of the other problems you could identify with Solars are either "too many Charms", which isn't really fixable with errata and also isn't really worth fixing after the fact, or "there's two whole pages of persona/WST Charms that probably shouldn't exist", which is likewise pretty much just sunk cost at this point.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 13:26
|
|
|
A bunch of timing and resolution ambiguities, a bunch of XP-manipulating meta-charms, a bunch of fully-rolled-out multiattacks, a few character-defining tricks which only become available at Essence 2 or 3, some Charm trees being half to a third of others and effectively skipping entire Essence levels..
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 16:50
|
|
|
i think the number of charms Solars have are good but on the other hand the current xp trade for the charms you get is obscene and needs to be toned down for the number of charms Solars have access to. Agreed on multiattacks, though. I had a Brawl Supernal Solar who had Fivefold Fury Onslaught-upgraded Hammer on Iron and I felt so dirty using it I never touched it again.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 17:03
|
|
|
I don't really care about how strong it is - like, if Iron Whirlwind had you make a single attack that halved-after-all-effects your enemy's defense and deal full damage for each threshold success or something, whatever. But the ability to occasionally take six or seven turns per turn if you're a Melee specialist is excessive and time-consuming.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 17:12
|
|
|
My players don't charop at all and even just basic Crane counterattack spam bogged down our game, that wasn't an obnoxious bespoke combo it was just "I have Crane Form and Fluttering Cry of Warning, our group is willing to use basic teamwork." Players accidentally stumbling into a method of rolling an extra attack for each attack roll made by enemies, with the first 3 charms of a tree, seems ridiculous given that one of the stated goals of the new edition was to explicitly to get rid of multiple attack spam tedium. The corebook is sprinkled with little maddening things like that, where the devs had stated elsewhere that they knew the kinds of problems Exalted tends to have, and yet they repeated them anyways because ??? Game is still fun, and good, but geez.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 17:47
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:a few character-defining tricks which only become available at Essence 2 or 3 I mean, this is why Solars have Supernal.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 18:30
|
|
|
RiotGearEpsilon posted:I mean, this is why Solars have Supernal. Supernal is, itself, a bad mechanic.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 19:09
|
|
|
The problem of combat bogging down gets exponentially worse as campaigns lengthen. I'm in the last couple sessions of a campaign with Essence 5 Solars doing Big drat Solar Things, and the two climactic battles of the campaign have both required me to essentially write a binder full of combat algorithms ("If this state, then this set of Charms, which cost this many motes/willpower, resolved in this way") for the opposition to keep fights rolling at an even moderately acceptable pace. It's torture and as much as I love the campaign and characters, I can't wait for it to be over so that I can run something less burdensome on the ST. Protip: never, ever put your PCs in the position of having or wanting to fight an Imperial Legion, or a full opposing Circle of Exalts.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 19:11
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:Supernal is, itself, a bad mechanic. It's cooler in theory than practice, but if you're mad at Supernal, yell at Supernal, not at the problems Supernal bypasses.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 19:47
|
|
|
Kestral posted:Protip: never, ever put your PCs in the position of having or wanting to fight an Imperial Legion, or a full opposing Circle of Exalts. On the one hand the final fights of a big thing should be rad and Exalted is tough to run with a lot of moving parts, but yeah that is nuts. Running a combat as 5 essence 5 characters is gonna be a lot of work and is gonna get bogged down vs 5 other essence 5 characters. A single essence 5 character has a lot of stuff going on and is a lot to manage for a player, upping that work to five times that is ludicrous. The major failure here is the lack of GM chapter telling you to not do that with advice how to construct simpler enemy-only versions of things. Lambo Trillrissian posted:My players don't charop at all and even just basic Crane counterattack spam bogged down our game, that wasn't an obnoxious bespoke combo it was just "I have Crane Form and Fluttering Cry of Warning, our group is willing to use basic teamwork." 3 motes per person if you have to defend each person only once in a row adds up, unless I'm not understanding the charm correctly. If there's so many that it bogs down combat, why are they not a battlegroup and if they're so trivial they have 0 chance to harm you why are you ignoring the writing on the wall and rolling dice and not just going "they are all defeated" after a couple of rounds or them changing tactic after seeing the Invincible Parry Princess effortlessly nullify them? Some fights warrant playing out in full, like a couple of really rude DBs that are a huge deal and having a little trouble hitting you, but not every single fight requires that level of investment.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 19:52
|
|
|
RiotGearEpsilon posted:It's cooler in theory than practice, but if you're mad at Supernal, yell at Supernal, not at the problems Supernal bypasses. I am mad at both. In principle I’m not against certain tricks simply being unavailable at game start but there are probably still a few which are unnecessarily gated, like getting to use the Form-type Charm of whatever MA you like or having an extra-strong pet. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Feb 15, 2019 |
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 19:54
|
|
|
Rand Brittain posted:I'm not really sure how you'd do a Solars errata, anyway. You could do a craft errata, but most of the other problems you could identify with Solars are either "too many Charms", which isn't really fixable with errata and also isn't really worth fixing after the fact, or "there's two whole pages of persona/WST Charms that probably shouldn't exist", which is likewise pretty much just sunk cost at this point. Well, the root of this conversation was SunAndSpring mooting that "every splat is just going to be more interesting and fun to play than a Solar", and an errata could definitely inject more interesting effects into the Solar charmset. You might exacerbate the charm bloat problem and the choice paralysis problem, but that is definitely doable. I think I'd be satisfied with just the craft erratum, though. That and culling the entire concept of dice tricks from the entire ruleset. You know, small goals.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 20:27
|
|
|
EthanSteele posted:3 motes per person if you have to defend each person only once in a row adds up, unless I'm not understanding the charm correctly. EthanSteele posted:If there's so many that it bogs down combat, why are they not a battlegroup and if they're so trivial they have 0 chance to harm you why are you ignoring the writing on the wall and rolling dice and not just going "they are all defeated" after a couple of rounds or them changing tactic after seeing the Invincible Parry Princess effortlessly nullify them? There's no alternative tactic to "Attacking will always trigger another attack" other than to not run combat encounters (our group theoretically wanted lots of combat!) or to load everyone up with "this attack cannot be countered" charms, which might be fun once or twice but it's an absolute poo poo design and a poo poo thing to do to your player if the only way to run a smooth combat is to specifically negate the gimmick a player invested in. Or I guess you could ask your players to deliberately avoid using good tactics in combat encounters, and if you ever find yourself doing that as a GM you should probably retire. Our group aren't idiots so that player just got refunded and took a different MA, but that shouldn't have been necessary. The game's core combat engine is really excellent, charms are great fun for players who like crunch, and our non-crunch players are perfectly happy to have bread and butter combos written for them by the others. It's just frustrating that the developers knew multiple attacks are a problem that bogs down combat, explicitly stated that they would be hard to use and limited access as one of their design goals, and then... Just didn't actually do that at all. The Single Point form is another example of trivially accessible constant extra attacks that also add another layer of extra bookkeeping, and it was also a terrible idea. The game should have been written such that extra actions that require full rolls are always gated behind being the equivalent of daily powers, full stop, no exceptions. It would not have made the game any less crunchy, or combat any less involved and mechanically interesting, or any less cinematic and cool wuxia shenanigans or whatever. There are other ways to explore the design and flavour space of "I attack lots really fast" or "I punish opponents who try to hurt my friends" than to require constant extra rolls.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 21:13
|
|
|
pork never goes bad posted:I don't really know what this means, but I had a great time launching a decisive attack on a non crashed opponent recently. So this is my first game of exalted, and every combat is a learning experience. This particular combat was against a battle group. So I had to check this, and it doesn't really matter much, but since you're new and still learning: battle groups can't be crashed, because they don't have initiative. Withering attacks hit their magnitude (health) track directly. You can launch decisive attacks against them, but coming straight out of join battle you'd probably do more damage with a withering? Depends on your setup and what you rolled for join battle, of course. 
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 21:35
|
|
|
I don't think dice tricks are really prevalent in the Solar corebook, if I'm going off them being defined as causing dice rerolls. At the very least, I don't think most combat trees have more than one or two. Generally Solars just get extra dice based off Essence or stats, start making 9s/8s/7s doubled, or lower opposing static values. Craft is lousy with dice tricks however. I think dice tricks are way more prevalent in the DB book, simply because it's a weaker effect than getting free dice for cheap or double #s. In any case, I think the problem with Solars is that the fluff states they are god-monarchs, rulers of all they survey and just about perfect at running poo poo in the way they want to run it. But none of the charms reinforce this. Oh, the charms do reinforce they're smarter than everyone else, better at fighting than everyone else, and stealthier than anyone else. But their social charms are just so underwhelming for people who are supposed to be the Chosen of the King of All Gods. loving Dragon-bloods have, in certain areas, way better charms at getting a society up and running than a Solar. Certainly Solars can't just plop down a big stone that makes it impossible to betray their organization for anyone but those with Defining reasons to do so, and they don't have charms that just turn people they just met into instant friends. Like, the Lunar charm preview that just went up has a charm where the Lunar sets up a territory that's about (Essence times 10) miles big, and the people living in the territory get benefits from your dominion there; forests will be easier to scrounge, your secret desert oasis village will be harder to invade, and so on. Solars have nothing like this. EDIT: Really the only thing that lives up to the Solar reputation of being god-emperors is that their War charms are pretty good. You can raise an army of soldiers on par with anything your rivals can field in large numbers in about a week and turn them into elite badasses in a month, your troops can basically ignore being ill-fed or in bad climates because they love you so much, your siege weapon drills make them into terrifyingly good shots with a catapult, your enemies' troops will switch sides mid-battle because they're in awe of you or afraid of you, and at a certain point your soldiers are utterly fearless and can throw down with supernatural armies and giant monsters on equal footing. But running a country after your Glorious Solar Army conquers it? Well, here are some charms that only work on one person at a time or have utterly niche effects more suited for running a trading company than a kingdom, have fun! SunAndSpring fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Feb 15, 2019 |
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 21:44
|
|
|
Understanding the Court is an incredible country-running social charm. Aspersions Cast Aside is the trickiest dice trick that ever tricked dice. Speed the Wheels lets you rebuild the entire country's road network in a single season by pointing at your Transport Ministry and telling them to do it good. I guess it depends on your definition and idea of what a God King is/does, but being able to point at a department and go "your entire organisation cannot embezzle taxes and anyone that does will be purged, not that anyone will because I've made you all have a Defining Intimacy that prevents you from breaking this law" seems pretty rad to me.Lambo Trillrissian posted:A lot of good words.  I wouldn't be surprised if there was a quote for the opposite too. Not that it invalidates any of your points at all because its only related to encounter design, but: why are archers an edge case? Even taking it that you can defend infinite people, why are they always in a ball that means the guy can Defend Other everyone every time when you can only defend someone else at Close-Range? Those "arbitrary hypotheticals" I listed were attempts at solutions to the problem of combat not being streamlined. I also said that some combats do deserve multiple individual opponents and specifically called out meaningful Exalt opponents, just that that scenario shouldn't be every single fight. A long combat every now and then seems fine to me, but that is just my personal opinion. I do know someone that after 8 sessions had 3 players that didn't know how withering attacks worked or what any of their charms did and how to use them so I know it's possible to not get a grasp of it. But that's why you write it down and can just go "ok its 5 and I always do these two charms" or whatever for your basic attacks and defence pools. I wouldn't be able to play at all without doing that because I have real trouble with numbers due to dyscalculia so having my basic stuff written down saves me having to count out on my fingers to figure out 7+5 is 12 every time I do anything.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 23:01
|
|
|
I'm still not entirely sure what should happen if my PC Defend Others your PC and then a battle group we're enmeshed in rolls a melee attack on the both of us or we're both subject to some other AoE effect. Thus far I've just been applying the original attack to the defender twice (e.g. it either misses or hits and might deal damage, then recalculate onslaught and wound penalties and such, then resolve it over again as though it rolled the same successes with the same bonuses and on-hit effects) but it seems hacky. Of course, in this game, what doesn't?
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 23:06
|
|
|
I see that the decaffeinated, antiseptic, and overall blandly dull Lunar snuggle charm only requires one minute of physical intimacy - and doesn't even spell out the minimum base the characters in question need to get to. I'm sure Holden is spinning in his grave.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 23:41
|
|
|
Autonomous Monster posted:So I had to check this, and it doesn't really matter much, but since you're new and still learning: battle groups can't be crashed, because they don't have initiative. Withering attacks hit their magnitude (health) track directly. You can launch decisive attacks against them, but coming straight out of join battle you'd probably do more damage with a withering? Depends on your setup and what you rolled for join battle, of course. I did know that BGs can't be crashed, but it was mostly just an excuse to describe (poorly, now I reread it) something cool that happened in my game to make the point that metadrama is boring and the game is cool despite some mechanical disfluencies. I do remember that I rolled an insane join battle. Rolling using blinding battle feint and a full excellency netted me something like 25 successes and the top of the initiative track. Then the ambush/surprise attack (I can't remember how these differ without checking my combat reference and I'm phone posting for the second time in a row eek) proceeded with me rolling extremely well again. I think it was a decisive because Ambushes are decisive? It was fun, anyway.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 23:51
|
|
|
EthanSteele posted:Those "arbitrary hypotheticals" I listed were attempts at solutions to the problem of combat not being streamlined. I also said that some combats do deserve multiple individual opponents and specifically called out meaningful Exalt opponents, just that that scenario shouldn't be every single fight. A long combat every now and then seems fine to me, but that is just my personal opinion. I do know someone that after 8 sessions had 3 players that didn't know how withering attacks worked or what any of their charms did and how to use them so I know it's possible to not get a grasp of it. But that's why you write it down and can just go "ok its 5 and I always do these two charms" or whatever for your basic attacks and defence pools. I wouldn't be able to play at all without doing that because I have real trouble with numbers due to dyscalculia so having my basic stuff written down saves me having to count out on my fingers to figure out 7+5 is 12 every time I do anything. It's just too easy in the corebook to stumble into having a powerful option that is absolutely asinine to use in practice because it abuses action economy. Easy access to multiple actions is bad in a system with potential for lots of conditional modifiers to rolls that can take a while to resolve. It's terrible if it's a problem that happens all the time, but it's still bad if it happens some of the time. The solution to this shouldn't be to bend your play around avoiding the bad mechanic. It's to not write mechanical options into the game that aren't a good fit for its system, especially when you already know that they're a problem! That's good that there's now a Vance ruling that it's only supposed to protect one person, much more sane. It still doesn't solve the fact that (with Crane Form) it's a repeatable easy source of extra action economy. The game still just plain shouldn't have those. And good lord does the charm text not make it clear that it is only supposed to be one parry against one target, even if you ignore the flavour text at the start of the charm that straight up says allies (gently caress you natural language!!!)
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2019 23:54
|
|
|
Lambo Trillrissian posted:It's good advice to resolve trivial violence stuff with just a simple roll when it makes sense for the story, and really is one of those things that should have been in a (sorely missing) GM advice chapter. EX3 p212 We offer one final word of advice about the combat rules: sometimes you should ignore them. In some situations, breaking into a detailed blow-by-blow battle would slow things down rather than spicing the game up. For example: Six months into an ongoing chronicle, a mighty Dawn Caste warrior wielding a formidable artifact weapon comes upon an inexperienced sentry walking the walls of a fortress the Solar is storming. Deciding there’s little doubt as to the fight’s outcome, the Storyteller decides to simply offer the Dawn’s player a chance to make a difficulty 2 (Dexterity + Melee) roll to dispatch her hapless and outmatched foe before he is able to raise an alarm. Alternately, if an infiltrating Night Caste wants to sneak up on a patrolling mortal house guard and knock him out with a sap or headlock, a simple (Dexterity + [Brawl, Melee, or Martial Arts]) roll will probably take care of the problem. If he wants to knock out Octavian, the Living Tower… that’s a job for the combat engine. Ultimately, when to skip over combat is up to the judgment of the Storyteller.
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2019 01:39
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:I see that the decaffeinated, antiseptic, and overall blandly dull Lunar snuggle charm only requires one minute of physical intimacy - and doesn't even spell out the minimum base the characters in question need to get to. I'm sure Holden is spinning in his grave. Anyone who doesn't like Lunar Therapy Dog Charm is a bad person. There, I said it 
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2019 02:15
|
|
|
I think the Errata/3.5/GM guide need to take a real critical eye to revise/implement the systems for Craft, Martial Arts, Bureaucracy and hitting the combat engine a few times with a stick. In addition, I think that the Solars need a stronger opening hook in the game to build concepts around and keep a group together. There is I think a fundamental problem with the concept of bronze age demi-god mythology and rolling in a group - notably that most of that mythos is about individuals and not groups unless it was their elite but still generally mortal dudes. DBs have multiple existing societies to build and hook into, Lunars have the shahan-yas, the Silver Pact, the Vanguard, etc etc. Solars just float weird and it can be real poor if you don't have super engaged/proactive players (which in my experience is a lot of players, especially ones coming off of D&D). I can come up with dozens of cool individual characters for Solars, but making a group that is going to spend a ton of time with each other is a lot harder by the very nature of them being tuned to be so amazing at solo poo poo. Even the majority of the stories about the Solars in the books are individual legends or maybe a pair wrecking face/building wonders across Creation. I actually disagree that they are the best splat to intro people on - I think Lunars, even with just what we have so far, are far superior because you can still do the "start in a remote place isolated so you don't need a ton of info" and then once they Exalt there is an in-fiction support network that can help ramp them up as the players start to do their own reading, or if they are real lazy about it, you can have entire sessions around them learning about how big and crazy Creation actually is compared to their little village. The game gives the ST active support for this - Solars, not so much. And if you're going to be running a DB game, it should only be with players who will actively read up on the background and lore in the book, because that's like half the point of a DB game - unless you're doing an outcaste game, in which case, you have plenty of tools for them to not know that much about Creation either, so you're golden. Solars don't have any default support system they can rely on, it's all dependent on either other books or knowledge from previous editions, so it's not a good self-contained system.
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2019 05:19
|
|
|
As someone who had never heard of Exalted before the friends I play with told me to look at the version of this thread like, three iterations ago or whatever, and who has been in at least one weekly-running game since the playtest doc leaked, I can report that making a Solar yokel is incredibly easy -- I have done it twice now precisely for the purpose of hiding how little I still retain of the Exalted lore -- and that my biggest source of anxiety with regards to knowing book-learning backstory and such had to do with specifically Canon NPCs, and either not recognizing them or, worse, recognizing them but misremembering something significant about their character. It's all well and good to mix up cities or what have you, but named characters tend to find that insulting. And while obviously the Storyteller can go nuts with introducing those guys from the jump if they so choose, having a bunch of NPCs immediately following me around the Creation map like some kind of demented scripted questgiver from Fallout telling me I need to start doing stuff in a political scene that is fully and dominated by important setting NPCs is something I would have highly resented. The Solars should have all the built-in support systems they need for figuring out common knowledge about the world, because the actual work of that sort of onboarding for new players is the Storyteller's to do already,. I wasn't aware the Lunars got to excellency their soak/damage as well, probably because that was not actually the case with the Lunar excellency presented in core. Considering that the drawback of the excellency seems trivially easy to circumvent in most cases so long as your character is doing things it makes sense for your character to be doing, that's a trade I'd make pretty much all the time, as there's not actually a character build out there that couldn't benefit from any amount of on-demand emergency soak whatsoever. Also it's a neat, intuitive way help make it so Lunar combatants don't feel like they need to be rolling around in heavy plate to play a tank brickhouse combatant, though I assume there will be more on that in the charm trees themselves.
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2019 12:45
|
|
|
Making players more proactive isn't the game's job. There's society hooks for Lunars and DB because of specific setups, but Solars are supposed to be able to be dropped into any old backwater of Creation and be effectively on the same level. I think their ubiquitousness is their strength there. Convincing passive players to be proactive is one of those problems as old as the genre, with solutions that vary from table to table. I guess if you absolutely need/want a hook for Solars the best one is focusing on their reincarnation aspect, the fact that every Solar who exalts in the modern day inevitably had their Solar Fragment cause some terrible poo poo in the Usurpation, but I also respect not everyone wants to tell that story, and people want to play the Champions of Creation without worrying about that.
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2019 13:15
|
|
|
The Lunar Excellency’s little “Storytellers please be generous. Players don’t just always use your highest stat... please... we beg of you...” sidebar is pathetic and unbecoming. Maybe if you didn’t want me blithely adding my 5-dot Wits or Dexterity to everything I do you should have designed it differently!
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2019 14:19
|
|
|
What kind of jerk buys 5 dots in anything? Shameful!
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2019 14:37
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 10:03 |
|
|
Ferrinus posted:The Lunar Excellency’s little “Storytellers please be generous. Players don’t just always use your highest stat... please... we beg of you...” sidebar is pathetic and unbecoming. Maybe if you didn’t want me blithely adding my 5-dot Wits or Dexterity to everything I do you should have designed it differently! "Don't use the same Attribute twice in a row" might work in a pinch - if I played a Lunar I might try to discipline myself with something like that informally.
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2019 16:18
|
|