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Schwarzwald posted:I am 100% on board with, instead of improving Exalted, purposely designing the least intuitive and most miserable version possible. 
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Mar 14, 2019 21:04
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Schwarzwald posted:I am 100% on board with, instead of improving Exalted, purposely designing the least intuitive and most miserable version possible. So you know how with Melee, the same five ability dots and the same set of charms apply to every different weapon you could use, but... Lore has one ability and one charmset but tracks “area of expertise” pseudospecialties— Performance has one ability but effectively multiple charmsets— Craft has multiple abilities and one charmset— Martial Arts has multiple abilities with a unique charmset for each— Occult has one ability and one charmset but that charmset unlocks spells and workings— ...I propose twenty five abilities each of which simultaneously enjoys all of these subdivisions.
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Mar 14, 2019 21:15
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Ferrinus posted:So you know how with Melee, the same five ability dots and the same set of charms apply to every different weapon you could use, but... This is how the Sword of Creation was designed.
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Mar 14, 2019 21:22
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Joe Slowboat posted:The fact that it is actually a fantasy universe which doesn't actually recapitulate Earth geography, or that Sail is not relevant to every game, doesn't change the value of Sail for thematic purposes. Sail being super-thematic doesn't actually help if nobody in a campaign ever Sails anywhere because the North and South are overwhelmingly empty wastelands, going to the Realm as a Solar is suicide, most of the East is one big blob of land, and getting to the West at all from anywhere else is either (a) an epic feat in and of itself if you make PCs actually play it out, or (b) a total non-event because you have to handwave a bunch of it to make it possible for anyone not a specialized PC. Compare to a theoretical Creation that was actually modeled off a super-Mediterranean, where to get even to comparatively close points of interest all over the map, you're either saving time by sailing or you just plain can't get there otherwise. Nessus posted:I'm uncertain why folks think that you need a whole lot of dinky little islands in a big chain for sail to work at all in the West. Granted that there are probably a lot of "flyspeck" islands that are too small to show on the world map, which I think has a surface area considerably greater than that of the real-life Earth, Edit: Also, the West is just visually boring as poo poo compared to actual places Southeast Asia or the Caribbean. Nessus posted:but the Polynesians were sailing all around the Pacific without any metal at all. Just getting from Wu Jian to the closest point of the mainland is about 1800 miles (and that's in the North, where there's no reason to go anyway), and from Wu Jian to the Blessed Isle is 2700 miles. That's a really huge distance of open ocean! Like, you're basically talking about people going from Hawaii to California and back again, regularly, in large enough volume to actually have trading routes carrying bulk cargo. And that's not even the actual destination. Nessus posted:Add that to the legacy of advanced sail and shipbuilding techniques which may be ritualistic folk-knowledge or connected to the teachings of Blob-Shaktur, the Shipwright-Cucumber, and his Manifold Doctrine of Being Angry At Everything, and it can all hang together. Roadie fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Mar 15, 2019 |
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Mar 15, 2019 02:52
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Ferrinus posted:So you know how with Melee, the same five ability dots and the same set of charms apply to every different weapon you could use, but... I also love GURPS.
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Mar 15, 2019 03:03
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The big city fleet that little boats attach to like a remora is rad. Some zoomed in maps that show various rivers and little islands that are too small to show on the huge scale zoomed out one would be amazing. Otherwise you end up with rivers that are like 7km wide based on the scale and that's also not good.
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Mar 15, 2019 03:14
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Roadie posted:Just getting from Wu Jian to the closest point of the mainland is about 1800 miles (and that's in the North, where there's no reason to go anyway), and from Wu Jian to the Blessed Isle is 2700 miles. That's a really huge distance of open ocean! Like, you're basically talking about people going from Hawaii to California and back again, regularly, in large enough volume to actually have trading routes carrying bulk cargo. And that's not even the actual destination. quote:"But generic magic without anything approaching rules or even an actual mention in the setting" is not an argument I consider valid.
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Mar 15, 2019 04:14
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Nessus posted:I mean, yeah? This is technologically feasible. The Spanish did it. Zheng He probably had the ability to do so although not the desire or knowledge. The figures you cite are comparable to transit across the Atlantic, not even the Pacific. Which, again, is completely throwing away any Bronze Age conceit (or even anything short of "early Renaissance", given the trade implications of 1400s-era treasure fleets going around everywhere. Nessus posted:I gave away my 3E book because I was mad at War Boy and Hamster Lad, but I'm gonna take a wild guess based on 2E that there are probably Charms, spirit abilities, thaumaturgy etc. which could greatly bolster shipping enterprises. Actually, 2e-style thaumaturgy, non-sorcerous demon/elemental summoning, and basically any organized way for mortals to use magic short of sorcery got tossed, and God-Blooded with Charms are no longer a thing. The list of stuff for that is now jack and squat aside from vague Storm Mother implications, assuming that you ignore sorcerers on account of their at least supposed ultra-rarity. Roadie fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Mar 15, 2019 |
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Mar 15, 2019 05:36
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Bronze-age post-apocalyptic fantasy. The Realm is, you're right, closer to Renaissance in its ship tech, though actually it's a super weird hodgepodge of 'ship designs that only work because of magical materials like super-strong tree masts or the Five Metals' and 'ship technology from the modern era that can be done with less advanced materials but was not historically invented or spread is actually pretty widely known because it survived the apocalypse.' But mostly... it's intentionally a world with some anachronism. Ship technology is significantly more advanced than it 'should' be on Earth, because they want the Chinamerican Roman Empire to be able to exploit distant islands as the Spanish did in the age of sail.
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Mar 15, 2019 05:52
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DBs have a weather control spell. Everyone else just sails every single other body of water that isn't Out West.
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Mar 15, 2019 15:24
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I love this game, but there's nothing worse than getting through a really rough combat session and realizing 15 minutes after it's finished that you completely forgot a tangential element of your Martial Arts form that would have changed the entire character of the combat, and no one else realized it either because there are literally a hundred moving parts to keep track of in any big combat session, and I was already having to track ten other things. I don't even know how to deal with this; a comprehensive combat engine app would be nice if it were possible
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Apr 3, 2019 06:30
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My answer would be 'power cards', except the core authors went out of their way to make Charrms as unsummarizable as possible on index cards.
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Apr 3, 2019 08:19
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Roadie posted:Actually, 2e-style thaumaturgy, non-sorcerous demon/elemental summoning, and basically any organized way for mortals to use magic short of sorcery got tossed, and God-Blooded with Charms are no longer a thing. The list of stuff for that is now jack and squat aside from vague Storm Mother implications, assuming that you ignore sorcerers on account of their at least supposed ultra-rarity. Thaumagutry exists but is all weird one off techniques, with an example from the Discord that Vance agreed with being 'using nursery rhymes to ward off demons and fae' Most of this isn't true. Demon summoning still is ritualized and every demon still has 'mundane' ways to summon it, that cultists who are not sorcerers use to call unbound demons into creation in Hope's of gaining boons. Some are very difficult, some are not. Elementals can and should literally be talked with quite easily by mortals, and are intentionally more gregarious and human-like in attitude than most other spirits. God-Blooded can explicitly have charms, it's just not that every single one does. Only the particularly lucky and blessed godblooded receive charms, and when they do they get 4-5 based on their parents charms and thematics, not access to the God charm tree.
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Apr 3, 2019 15:59
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running a game set in Harborhead, I have a lot of god-blooded and mortal sorcery running around, plus other weirder sources and users of power. 's cool
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Apr 3, 2019 21:31
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KittyEmpress posted:Thaumagutry exists but is all weird one off techniques, with an example from the Discord that Vance agreed with being 'using nursery rhymes to ward off demons and fae' Isn't the big thing that it went from a thing anyone could theoretically do (knowing the rituals, having the resources to accomplish it, etc.) to having to buy the merit for it and the merit being something you have to be born with?
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Apr 4, 2019 04:11
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Argas posted:Isn't the big thing that it went from a thing anyone could theoretically do (knowing the rituals, having the resources to accomplish it, etc.) to having to buy the merit for it and the merit being something you have to be born with? Yes; the intent was, as I understand it, to curtail the 2e proliferation of Thaumaturgy as a totally teachable kind of lesser sorcery, which then became 'Thaumaturgy is Science and Science is the Key to Changing the Setting's Genre.' Like a number of the less... good, frankly, 3e changes, it was primarily for winning forum fights about the genre once and for all. Personally, I think it would have made sense to have 'unique magical powers' and 'thaumaturgy-as-folk-science' be separate, and just not publish thaumaturgy/folk medicine that breaks the setting if you start teaching it to appreciable numbers of people.
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Apr 4, 2019 04:58
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Yeah, I like thaumaturgy as folk science but it should end at getting ghosts' attention or making decent weather predictions unless it's an Exalt doing it (which, itself, would be depicted in Occult or Intelligence charms the way they already exist rather than being yet another subsystem). The good news is, it doesn't even really need to be a formal Merit or other special trait in that case; you can just have people make Lore or Occult rolls to know that a particular plant has healing properties or what have you.
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Apr 4, 2019 06:00
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Ferrinus posted:Yeah, I like thaumaturgy as folk science but it should end at getting ghosts' attention or making decent weather predictions unless it's an Exalt doing it (which, itself, would be depicted in Occult or Intelligence charms the way they already exist rather than being yet another subsystem). Agreed pretty wholeheartedly. I do think that having explicit examples of local thaumaturgy (possibly retiring the term from system use to 'the Realm calls mortal-derived folk knowledge 'thaumaturgy' when it is clearly effectual but doesn't fit into categories of essence use and/or engineering, etc) would be useful - knowing how to use salt wards, what spirits to propitiate for good weather, etc. The danger becomes players wanting actionable levers, and it being hard to write powers that are useful without being 'clearly it is optimal to teach everyone in my society all known folkways, constantly.' I'm reminded of how even before the dev changeover, the 'martial arts for mortals' non-charms got thrown out because balancing them without costs meant they had to be utterly worthless - because otherwise they distorted balance if Exalts could also learn them. Though I'm confused why we can't have non-charm 'knowing Tiger style means you can do X thing as a mortal' wouldn't be useful, even if it's just 'you get an initiative boost when you grapple' or something. IDK, I'm not a dev, but it would be valuable to making that Martial Arts merit worth something to nonmagical monks.
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Apr 4, 2019 06:48
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Joe Slowboat posted:Agreed pretty wholeheartedly. I do think that having explicit examples of local thaumaturgy (possibly retiring the term from system use to 'the Realm calls mortal-derived folk knowledge 'thaumaturgy' when it is clearly effectual but doesn't fit into categories of essence use and/or engineering, etc) would be useful - knowing how to use salt wards, what spirits to propitiate for good weather, etc. This is another good reason for "thaumaturgy" to just be, like, environment-dependent occult knowledge. So, if salt keeps ghosts away, you do teach everyone in your shadowland-adjacent city to make sure to pour lines of salt across windows and stuff. Hell, that's what they do in Chiaroscuro or somewhere, isn't it? quote:I'm reminded of how even before the dev changeover, the 'martial arts for mortals' non-charms got thrown out because balancing them without costs meant they had to be utterly worthless - because otherwise they distorted balance if Exalts could also learn them. Technically, it does. For instance, knowing Snake Style means you can use the same five dots to attack with your bare hands, section staves, or hook swords... and can stunt your unarmed attacks to deal lethal, to boot! Wow!
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Apr 4, 2019 08:26
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I stopped following Exalted right at the end of 2e, around the Abyssals or Ghosts or whatever Charm preview that was pretty creepy. So now as I understand their development leads and stuff have changed, but is there anywhere I can find a breakdown of what's gone on/what I've missed, not in terms of like releases but like ... the Exalted community and development team? Exalted discussion boards seem a lot quieter than they used to be. edit: Has anyone used the Shards stuff (especially Modern or Heavens Reach) with success, or did everybody move on to 3e? Heart Attacks fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Apr 4, 2019 |
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Apr 4, 2019 21:57
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I don't know that there's a whole lot going on; it pretty much amounts to "they released a book of artifacts that was pretty good, and a Dragon-Blooded book that was extremely good, and now they just finished Kickstarting Lunars." Meanwhile, I added a bunch of new stuff to my bestiary of elementals, if anybody wants to comment on the mechanics before I lay them out and add them to the Vault. (Martial artists will be up for sale as soon as I get the final cover back!) Right now it's up to twelve different sets of stats, so I really want to declare this finished before I lose my mind and start writing more. Rand Brittain fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Apr 4, 2019 |
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Apr 4, 2019 22:02
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I just realised the game has no Bureaucracy system for the same reason that it was a terrible mismanaged clusterfuck that took years to release anything. Morke and Holden had no idea what project management was supposed to look like.
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Apr 5, 2019 17:06
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No. Or, to give a slightly better answer, it's been said several times that there's no Bureaucracy system because they couldn't figure out one that a) did things and b) didn't result in a bigger Excellency meaning you would make good decisions and not terrible ones, which isn't how the setting works. The new devs haven't mentioned figuring out how they'd want to make this work either, although I think they've mentioned wanting to try for the Storyteller's Guide. Rand Brittain fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Apr 5, 2019 |
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Apr 5, 2019 17:15
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Rand Brittain posted:Meanwhile, I added a bunch of new stuff to my bestiary of elementals, if anybody wants to comment on the mechanics before I lay them out and add them to the Vault. (Martial artists will be up for sale as soon as I get the final cover back!) Right now it's up to twelve different sets of stats, so I really want to declare this finished before I lose my mind and start writing more. Don't have much to say on the mechanics as that ain't really my strength, but I really dig the concepts of a lot of these. They're normal enough at first glance in a way that really heightens their strangeness.
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Apr 5, 2019 17:19
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Rand Brittain posted:The new devs haven't mentioned figuring out how they'd want to make this work either, although I think they've mentioned wanting to try for the Storyteller's Guide. I'd start by enumerating things that they think a Bureaucracy excellency can do and can prevent. "Good decisions instead of bad" is a good principle to avoid, but it's also kind of vague and can potentially encompass anything, because everything anyone does involves decisions. The current 'blacklist' potentially encompasses all possible worlds; establishing an explicit whitelist will provide a staging ground to branch out from to determine the shape of the design space.
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Apr 5, 2019 18:29
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Rand Brittain posted:No. Good Bureaucracy rolls tell you how to better enact your decisions. They don't tell you if they're actually good decisions, although they can forewarn you of some of the consequences, just like how a good Melee skill makes you better at cutting dudes in half with a giant golden surfboard but that doesn't actually mean cutting dudes in half is a solution to your immediate problem.
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Apr 5, 2019 18:54
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RiotGearEpsilon posted:I'd start by enumerating things that they think a Bureaucracy excellency can do and can prevent. "Good decisions instead of bad" is a good principle to avoid, but it's also kind of vague and can potentially encompass anything, because everything anyone does involves decisions. The current 'blacklist' potentially encompasses all possible worlds; establishing an explicit whitelist will provide a staging ground to branch out from to determine the shape of the design space. Leaving aside merely making numbers go up in various ways, here are some broad ideas for what could be done with Charms in my view here: * Greatly increase some quantifiable output from a small group. (Other skills may be necessary to avoid consequences such as natural resource exhaustion.) * Inspire/endow heroic mortals or some equivalent of You Can Be More/Tiger Warrior Training * Leverage your bureaucratic infrastructure to alter social intimacies or something like that; basically let you actually encourage people to want peace/stop being bigots/embrace something else * Lawyering, probably up to Dog Plays Sacred Ball Game Technique, wherein you exploit loopholes and social structures to get official tolerance for starting the Solar News Network in the Realm One of the long running fantasies in Exalted is that you can create or reform one of the established societies already extant, or create a new one out of the ashes and flinders of the old. Obviously this is relatively dull compared to awesome anime swordfights and pulling your Devil Trigger, however, it is an important component of what a lot of people have hoped for in the game. It is possible that this is actually outside of Exalted's thematic space, although I think that this would both represent a major shrinking of the game's toolspace, and would be ignored by players anyway.
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Apr 5, 2019 21:24
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Adapting a version of the Sorcerous Working system for bureaucratic projects seems like such an obvious no-brainer to me. You get differing levels of scale, mechanics for doing things slowly and safely, and mechanics for everything going screwy when your reach exceeds your grasp. At first I didn't really care about the absence of a bureaucracy system because of how easy it was to adapt something that worked for my table, but maybe that was only easy for me because I have personal experience with the management and execution of projects on an organizational level (the absence of which is clearly lacking from more than just the rules text in the core.) But as time went on the vague blandness in the bureaucracy tree really showed compared to the spark that some of the other trees have, and it was a big disappointment for our group. There is absolutely no reason for a mundane projects system for bureaucracy to not to exist in the corebook and treating it like an impossible quandary unsolvable by mortal minds (a treatment the old developers seemed to frequently give to anything they weren't personally good at figuring out) is just ridiculous. As a bonus you could completely throw out the garbage craft system and have it also use the project system, maybe even use it to give investigation and larceny some meat to hook into instead of "this is the charm you use and now you have a heist." The sorcerous working project rules are one of the best things about 3e and it would really help the game to apply those good rules as a familiar baseline for all long term projects instead of giving each their own different subsystem to track, or in the case of bureaucracy, absolutely nothing. The objection of "more dots in bureaucracy shouldn't let you make right decisions because that's not what this game is about" seems trivially paper thin. That's like saying "we didn't implement a combat system because people would use it to not get hit in combat." It sounds like they got hung up on one niche player situation that they wanted to avoid at all costs and boxed themselves into a corner not being able to see past it. I get not wanting people to say "I roll bureaucracy to implement mass industrialization and solve poverty forever," but that's something you avoid by having rules for it, just like "I roll socialize to be loved by everyone" is avoided by having a social system!
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Apr 5, 2019 22:08
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I think the actual comparison with combat is it's like saying that just because you can stab people doesn't mean that stabbing people is the right decision. High melee doesn't make the GM go "well I guess killing that guy was the correct thing to do after all" and it would be bad if it did, instead the GM says "here is how people react to you killing that dude" and I feel it should be the same sort of thing for Bureaucracy. It should let you enact policies and do things you think are right and correct, but it doesn't have to make it actually be right and correct. You should be able to institute what you consider a completely fair tax system, but still have people revolt because either they think taxes are bad even they are fair or that they have lost a bunch of specific exceptions to the tax laws that they used to have under the old system and now they're in revolt. Your system is fair and good and working as intended, but it sucks for them compared to what they had before and they hate it. More dots in Bureaucracy shouldn't make you immune to that, that's what actually going out and reading all the old laws and talking to the people and rest of the playing of the game is for. It certainly shouldn't let you go "I roll 20 die to institute secret police to kill anyone that says I'm bad" and then get 10 successes and then that be good and your little society Happiness and Stability gauges go up.
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Apr 5, 2019 23:44
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EthanSteele posted:I think the actual comparison with combat is it's like saying that just because you can stab people doesn't mean that stabbing people is the right decision. High melee doesn't make the GM go "well I guess killing that guy was the correct thing to do after all" and it would be bad if it did, instead the GM says "here is how people react to you killing that dude" and I feel it should be the same sort of thing for Bureaucracy. It should let you enact policies and do things you think are right and correct, but it doesn't have to make it actually be right and correct. You should be able to institute what you consider a completely fair tax system, but still have people revolt because either they think taxes are bad even they are fair or that they have lost a bunch of specific exceptions to the tax laws that they used to have under the old system and now they're in revolt. Your system is fair and good and working as intended, but it sucks for them compared to what they had before and they hate it. Of course this gets down to a sort of meta-fictional statement: "Is it possible for things to improve in the general sense, or is it all a question of how you manage the entropy?" I think the sheer buckets of sorcerous anime power you are constantly handed in Exalted has some dissonance if you lean hard into the latter.
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Apr 5, 2019 23:52
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The thing is that sorcery and bureaucracy systems aren't really working towards the same ends. The intention behind the sorcerous workings system is that you can put some time and a pinch of XP in to do a weird thing, and then you basically get the thing you asked for only a bit weirder than you really wanted. I don't think Exalted really wants to work along a model where social change is instituted by "some yellow guy decides to institute reforms and starts rolling dice." For one thing, that's not really what politics feels like, and for another, well... Exalted kind of secretly feels like the main obstacle to you being a good ruler is you. The model I've heard people talk about that sounds sort of interesting is something based on the clan ring system in King of Dragon Pass, where you have a bunch of advisors who all give you well-meaning but slanted advice. In the Exalted systems I've heard people theorize, you'd basically interact with a political entity by abstracting it into several of the NPCs who are in charge of it, and you'd have to deal with them.
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Apr 6, 2019 00:03
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Rand Brittain posted:The thing is that sorcery and bureaucracy systems aren't really working towards the same ends. The intention behind the sorcerous workings system is that you can put some time and a pinch of XP in to do a weird thing, and then you basically get the thing you asked for only a bit weirder than you really wanted. I don't think Exalted really wants to work along a model where social change is instituted by "some yellow guy decides to institute reforms and starts rolling dice." For one thing, that's not really what politics feels like, and for another, well... Exalted kind of secretly feels like the main obstacle to you being a good ruler is you. But why is it necessary to both 1) mandate a bad outcome and 2) stipulate that said outcome is the fault of you, the player? I mean can you at least see why the bolded portion is not going to find as much traction these days, in the same manner as "what if faith healers...were RIGHT?!" in the World of Darkness?
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Apr 6, 2019 01:00
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Thesaurasaurus posted:But why is it necessary to both 1) mandate a bad outcome and 2) stipulate that said outcome is the fault of you, the player? e: To be fair to Rand I imagine he's saying that "the obstacle of any ruler being a good ruler is that ruler's own interior traits and hubris and such," and while this has great narrative heft it is also kind of fundamentally unsatisfying to many people. Like if it's, "nothing lasts forever," sure -- but there is strong, strong desire to make something that IS pretty good, for a while, or at least is better than you found it, perhaps even for reasons other than "you murdered some of the bad people, and perhaps applied force for long enough to encourage some people to be less bad." Nessus fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Apr 6, 2019 |
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Apr 6, 2019 01:01
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I mean that it doesn't track well these days as it becomes increasingly-clear that the main obstacle to good governance isn't the petty personal foibles of a singular leader, but that the system as a whole is held in thrall to some of the worst people imaginable and we don't have nearly enough recourse for getting rid of them.
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Apr 6, 2019 01:14
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EthanSteele posted:I think the actual comparison with combat is it's like saying that just because you can stab people doesn't mean that stabbing people is the right decision. High melee doesn't make the GM go "well I guess killing that guy was the correct thing to do after all" and it would be bad if it did, instead the GM says "here is how people react to you killing that dude" and I feel it should be the same sort of thing for Bureaucracy. It should let you enact policies and do things you think are right and correct, but it doesn't have to make it actually be right and correct. You should be able to institute what you consider a completely fair tax system, but still have people revolt because either they think taxes are bad even they are fair or that they have lost a bunch of specific exceptions to the tax laws that they used to have under the old system and now they're in revolt. Your system is fair and good and working as intended, but it sucks for them compared to what they had before and they hate it. High melee does make the GM go 'well going up against a heavily armored guy with reach advantage wielding a rusty spoon ended up working out for you' though. It can make objectively bad Combat Decisions into perfectly acceptable Combat Decisions.
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Apr 6, 2019 01:53
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Rand Brittain posted:I don't think Exalted really wants to work along a model where social change is instituted by "some yellow guy decides to institute reforms and starts rolling dice." For one thing, that's not really what politics feels like, and for another, well... Exalted kind of secretly feels like the main obstacle to you being a good ruler is you. These are statements that are perfectly fine and make sense. They also don't justify having no mechanical support for the bureaucracy ability. If you're going to have it in the game, substantiate it with mechanical hooks. The sorcerous workings system doesn't just let you "get a weird thing by rolling dice," it creates bounds and expectations of what kind/strength of weird thing you can get from what kind of inputs. A bureaucratic "working" system wouldn't just let you go "insert dice output change society," it would give bounds and expectations of what you can change for how much effort. The means and scale systems in sorcerous workings are great, they allow you to substantiate the kind of resources and infrastructure you have available and compare them to what kind of work you want to be doing. Bureaucratic effort also requires resources and infrastructure to be effective! It's a good model for representing those things with game mechanics! And it's also a great model for mechanically representing limitations and things that go wrong, it encourages players to create specific policy objectives that stem from actually existing things they've established in the fiction, this makes goals more likely to be the tangible "I mobilize my street gang to push out the drug dealers from the Guild" rather than "I remove the drugs from the city," which gives the storyteller better room to create complications borne from the personal choices and foibles of the PCs. Which I agree, is what the game is about. If the problem of Bureaucracy is strictly that it lets players roll dice to do politics, why does it even exist? Or, if the game lets players roll dice to do everything else, why is it uniquely a problem? The game would feel much poorer without it, because it still wants to give the players mechanical handles for working with bureaucratic institutions. Those are also part of the game's themes! If there's a bureaucracy ability in the game that hooks into the system of "cool demigods are good at some things" then let someone be good at it in a meaningful way. It's fine! Handwaving it away by not defining how the ability works doesn't solve any of the problems that you have. It makes them worse!
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Apr 6, 2019 01:56
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Belatedly, I really liked 2e thaumaturgy because, basically, it gave people a reason to do weird superstitious stuff that wasn't "wrong" in the way that a lot of fantasy settings have a hard division between "superstition" and "real magic".
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Apr 6, 2019 02:28
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The Projects system on page 226 onward exists as a basis for stuff. It's 2 or 3 steps removed from a solid mechanical subsystem, but for building one it seems like a reasonable start. Another form of "you" as an obstacle is that the next guy isn't you and can't roll 20 die at every problem so they can't possibly wrangle the system you've set up, e.g: A major point of the setting is that everything ran perfectly well* until the Scarlet Empress disappeared and then it all fell into civil war. Or it could be that the system of democracy you set up works great when you're there with your corruption-detecting charm but once you're gone it starts to slip. It doesn't have to fall into chaos immediately, might even get as far as three or four rotations of politicians/bureaucrats/voters, but the deal is very much that nothing lasts forever. You can make it better for a time, but its never perfect and certainly not forever. It might last a thousand years with you at the helm, adjusting things and then the Great Curse amplifies your bullshit too much and it all goes wrong, it might last 300 before it becomes irrevocably corrupt etc *"perfectly well" involved sucking the threshold dry with an iron fist and infinite slavery so, y'know reignonyourparade posted:High melee does make the GM go 'well going up against a heavily armored guy with reach advantage wielding a rusty spoon ended up working out for you' though. It can make objectively bad Combat Decisions into perfectly acceptable Combat Decisions. Your example is turning a bad decision into an effective one, which is what more dots in Bureaucracy should allow you to do. More dots should mean your death camps are the best in the world, not that they were a Great Idea, Actually and truly really helped stabilise the nation.
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Apr 6, 2019 17:57
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EthanSteele posted:Your example is turning a bad decision into an effective one, which is what more dots in Bureaucracy should allow you to do. More dots should mean your death camps are the best in the world, not that they were a Great Idea, Actually and truly really helped stabilise the nation. The thing is that historically a lot of this stuff tends to fail because it was a bad idea and not because the autocrat didn't implement it well enough. Hell, a lot of thus stuff only gets tried because it was done by an autocrat, because anybody who allowed himself to be contradicted would have had somebody around to say it could never work.
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Apr 6, 2019 18:07
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Bureaucracy should let you be able, logistically, to get your nation to build that tower to heaven you were excited about. The smiting and ruin that comes after is a straightforward consequence of achieving your bad idea, but a lesser ruler wouldn't even have been able to get hit with the consequences.
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Apr 6, 2019 18:10
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