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pork never goes bad posted:Has anybody articulated the arguments against the, um, fascist position here? I don't agree with it (the fascist position) but I think it's pretty lovely of a bunch of posters to basically just say "it's fascist, therefore bad" without bothering to take any time to say why, especially when the alt right loves calling out fallacies as a way to discount the lived experiences of marginalized people and communities. Every time I go to fuel up my jeep I politely ask the gas station attendant to describe how a combustion engine works before I will allow them to put gas in my tank, then I go inside and request that the cashier clarify the usage of currency and the requirement to pay for goods and services. Often at this point I have to calmly ask the recently arrived police to justify the existence of laws. I am just being reasonable here, we all know nothing good comes from unjustified assumptions and everyone really should stop getting so upset when all I ask is for them to simply explain themselves.
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# ? Apr 12, 2019 08:19 |
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# ? Jun 9, 2024 11:48 |
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I can't tell if you're posting in bad faith or not. A gas station is an established business where it is a reasonable expectation of their customers that they expect to buy some loving petrol. Something Awful is a lovely, old, internet forum where asking people to explain themselves is replied to with misplaced moralizing and paternalism.
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# ? Apr 12, 2019 08:46 |
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pork never goes bad posted:I can't tell if you're posting in bad faith or not. A gas station is an established business where it is a reasonable expectation of their customers that they expect to buy some loving petrol. Something Awful is a lovely, old, internet forum where asking people to explain themselves is replied to with misplaced moralizing and paternalism. can you explain yourself why you don't get the thing you are asking about? just asking
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# ? Apr 12, 2019 09:30 |
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Like, the Exalted are patterned after ancient gods and demigods. They're not an ethnicity - at best, the dragonblooded are a caste system. If the concept "if only the morally good gods were in charge, then it would be right for them to rule, because they're better at it than humans" is fascist then so are a bunch of religions. And also posadism I guess.
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# ? Apr 12, 2019 11:57 |
bewilderment posted:Like, the Exalted are patterned after ancient gods and demigods. They're not an ethnicity - at best, the dragonblooded are a caste system. The part here that gets gross in relation to real life is when we start putting a bunch of time into developing these Mage-chat-style arguments for why one theory would be better than the other, or whatever. They're all basically the same poo poo, and I figure that in Exalted more than most other games, the answers for a particular table are going to be deeply rooted in your characters and their motivations (at least, I'd hope so) and will not necessarily represent some eternal out of character truth.
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# ? Apr 12, 2019 12:07 |
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A setting element a friend of mine added to their game was that when the Solars ruled Creation, their system of governance was set up such that Mortals were considered as children are to adults and therefore were considered wards of the state with restricted rights and responsibilities. I considered that an interesting element and a neat way to show that the First Age had its own problems and maybe wasn't that good if you weren't an Exalt.
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# ? Apr 12, 2019 14:49 |
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pork never goes bad posted:Has anybody articulated the arguments against the, um, fascist position here? I don't agree with it (the fascist position) but I think it's pretty lovely of a bunch of posters to basically just say "it's fascist, therefore bad" without bothering to take any time to say why, especially when the alt right loves calling out fallacies as a way to discount the lived experiences of marginalized people and communities. Are you seriously asking people to justify their basic humanity? "Yeah, but can you PROVE that you're a person?" Look, if the alt-right is questioning whether or not a person is a person and throwing around accusations of "fallacies," why should they get a calm, rational argument beyond "go gently caress yourself" in response? Cessna fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Apr 12, 2019 |
# ? Apr 12, 2019 15:17 |
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yeah other people being of equal value is one of the a priori assumptions of a democratic society.
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# ? Apr 12, 2019 15:44 |
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Creation is not a democratic society, but (most?) people playing Exalted live in one, and it's a little worrying to see how eager some people are to abandon that assumption when faced with some jerk that can glow on command who claims divine power.
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# ? Apr 12, 2019 15:48 |
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If you need to be talked into treating someone as a person then you can also be talked out of it. That's why the bottom line has to be gut-level, pre-rational solidarity with your brothers and sisters or, as a temporary stopgap, the dictatorship of the proletariat.
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# ? Apr 12, 2019 16:12 |
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pork never goes bad posted:Has anybody articulated the arguments against the, um, fascist position here? I don't agree with it (the fascist position) but I think it's pretty lovely of a bunch of posters to basically just say "it's fascist, therefore bad" without bothering to take any time to say why, especially when the alt right loves calling out fallacies as a way to discount the lived experiences of marginalized people and communities. Sure, let's do this. In practical terms, saying someone is more or less of a "person" is obscuring the point. Rather, the material goal tends to be deciding A)what rights an entity has and B)what weight that entity has in limited resource allocation scenarios. For A, in terms of basic rights the idea that Exalted have greater capacities and emotions doesn't reduce the rights of others. Nothing about the Exalted leads to "therefore, mortals cannot get married", or "therefore, mortals have no right to life". The comparison to nonhuman animals is outwardly sound, but misses a fundamental point. Rights aren't relative, they are absolute. Any person or group that passes a minimum threshold for sapience gets X rights (Note: Individuals with reduced capacity due to injury, illness or genetics still enjoy the full rights of the whole). This can exist in tiers, for instance we consider humans to have more rights than apes, and apes to have more rights than lobsters. However, the existence of a higher tier of rights does not diminish the rights of "lower" tiers. I'm not sure what additional rights Exalts might have (perhaps the right to be secure in their Essence, which mortals don't have to worry about), but none of them can take away from mortal rights. For B, it depends on the exact situation. If your village is about to be attacked, you may definitely want to save the life of a friendly Solar rather than the life of an innocent villager, just because that Solar can then help protect the other villagers. If there is an Exalt who is a tyrant, executing those she disagrees with and randomly assaulting people etc, but who also provides perfect healing services, magical infrastructure and protection I couldn't fault anyone within that system who decides it's worth it. However, there is a very important distinction between "you are doing good on net" and "everything you are doing is good". In that example, the Exalt's tyranny is still bad and everyone would be better off is she stopped doing that and kept doing the good stuff. Now, as for the argument that Exalted have richer inner lives and emotions and therefore the joy a murderous Exalt gets from killing mortals outweighs the pain felt by the mortals and those nearby, that is called a "Utility Monster" and there are a lot of good discussions of that concept that I couldn't do justice to in a simple forum post. I encourage you to look up the term and think about how it applies to Exalted. The short version is that it's one of the failings of utilitarianism, and one of the areas where you should really use a different mortal philosophy. SPEAKING OF moral philosophies, there are a lot more than just the utilitarian approach that justifies Exalted supremacy. Virtue Ethics doesn't care how powerful you are or how vividly you feel, "Murder Is Bad" is true regardless. Kantian Ethics would warn that any maxim that allows for Exalted to exploit mortals can also be used to justify those Exalted being exploited in turn and warns against embracing the idea. Consequentialists would likely advocate for committing to opposing all immoral Exalted actions, even if that Exalt is doing good on net, in order to create an end state where Exalted and Mortals both experience good lives. Don't be so quick to assume there is only one valid moral philosophy, or that all of them would support the idea of Exalted supremacy.
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# ? Apr 12, 2019 16:54 |
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Ferrinus posted:If you need to be talked into treating someone as a person then you can also be talked out of it. That's why the bottom line has to be gut-level, pre-rational solidarity with your brothers and sisters or, as a temporary stopgap, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Ferrinus has got it! LatwPIAT posted:A setting element a friend of mine added to their game was that when the Solars ruled Creation, their system of governance was set up such that Mortals were considered as children are to adults and therefore were considered wards of the state with restricted rights and responsibilities. I considered that an interesting element and a neat way to show that the First Age had its own problems and maybe wasn't that good if you weren't an Exalt. Yeah, it seems like a pretty sensible way for a Solar to go bad in line with that whole deal where they go bad. Them starting with "They're like children! They just break things and hurt themselves! it's for their own good!" is definitely a step on the road to making church organs out of people. The important thing here for the other posters is that you did this and knew it was bad and it was with the intention of it being bad.
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# ? Apr 12, 2019 17:51 |
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As a final aside, its important as a community to remember that TTRPGs are heavily over represented with minorities in not just ethnicity and sexuality/gender, but how physically challenged they are and are heavily non-neurotypical (please correct me if my terminology is off here). So whenever you are addressing a broad section of people from this community, you are talking to a poo poo ton of people who have been marginalized, abused, called and treated as if they are sub-human, were literally targets of fascist states for elimination, forced sterilization, etc etc. You just barging in and demanding people defend the concept of personhood is extremely loving rude. You had multiple people ask you to drop it and you refused to do so, making you an rear end in a top hat. People aren't just upset at the topic, they are also upset at how you handled it and demanded answers of it instead of respecting the space and people involved. Don't be a dick is like rule zero of ttrpgs, so you know, please respect that and others in the space.
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# ? Apr 12, 2019 18:58 |
TaintedBalance posted:As a final aside, its important as a community to remember that TTRPGs are heavily over represented with minorities in not just ethnicity and sexuality/gender, but how physically challenged they are and are heavily non-neurotypical (please correct me if my terminology is off here). So whenever you are addressing a broad section of people from this community, you are talking to a poo poo ton of people who have been marginalized, abused, called and treated as if they are sub-human, were literally targets of fascist states for elimination, forced sterilization, etc etc. You just barging in and demanding people defend the concept of personhood is extremely loving rude. You had multiple people ask you to drop it and you refused to do so, making you an rear end in a top hat. People aren't just upset at the topic, they are also upset at how you handled it and demanded answers of it instead of respecting the space and people involved. Don't be a dick is like rule zero of ttrpgs, so you know, please respect that and others in the space. That thing LawPIAT said makes sense and I would also say that one key ingredient, to my taste here, is that it was part of a story in the game. Even if all it was was setting flavor in service to some other part of the game's story, it was there for a reason. To make an analogy of what I'm talking about : "The Deathlords advance a constructed ideology meant to further the power of ancestor cults, channel Essence to the Underworld, and get them a bunch of fifth columnists who will extend Shadowlands, support Abyssals and nemissaries, and so on" is all you need when you're talking about the Deathlords in general. When you get down to an actual specific Deathlord or Abyssal, then it makes sense to start thinking about finer details.
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# ? Apr 12, 2019 20:57 |
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Nessus posted:Perhaps they assumed Rule Minus One: "These rules apply either not at all, or with far greater charity, if you are making arguments from the Right." Ya, the discussion becomes less problematic and more concrete as an exploration when it is within the confines of why someone is the way they are, or are doing the specific things they do. I've expressed that I think a Deathlord who was a radical social anarchist who wanted to abolish all hierarchy and oppressive structures would be interesting because it starts getting weird when you get to specific nuances of the setting such as that for some reason magic can intrinsically bind demons and elementals to your bidding, which then starts to bubble into poo poo like "what is magic?" and does anarchist ideology not work in Creation because the only solution for it would be literally murder reality? Using fiction to explore ideas is...a lot of the point of fiction if not entirely. But trying to categorize personhood in the abstract has a lot of historical baggage with it that needs to be taken into consideration and just waltzing into a forum and blithely demanding it be addressed and that it is in fact central to engagement with the game is less than good in the best of circumstances. It also is ignoring the fact that humans are in fact super good at holding conflicting ideas in their heads and that we have a whole body of science that literally examines that exact thing. Rational actions are contextual and demanding that they must be consistent is actually not consistent with reality, because circumstances can force peoples hands in many ways. We find out who we really are when we are pushed, and we often fall short of our aspirations. We don't need to determine ahead of time if the gods are ur-fascist or not to use the medium to explore interesting questions, or hell, I dunno, just have some escapism fun from the hellworld a lot of people's day to day lives are. In fact a lot of us are trying to specifically escape dealing with a global rise in fascism/authoritarianism. Writing this out also made me realize that the questions and phrasing really reek of victim blaming. The onus isn't on us to justify personhood for people, just like the onus isn't on rape victims to not be raped. It's the other way around, and when viewed in this light is patently obvious why it is a monstrous line of questions. As Kaza42 stated, the existence of the Exalts might entail a new set of rights for Exalts, but their existence doesn't diminish the rights or personhood of other people and in fact could discover a whole new set of rights for each other and with respect to each other. Exalts have rights to their Essence, while people have the rights to their prayers and cannot be coerced into cults and the like. The recognition of females (I specify recognition vs discovery because these were rights denied that have taken time to fully uncover) as fully autonomous people and the feminist movement created a ton of new rights and expanded our concept of personhood, it didn't shrink it.
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# ? Apr 12, 2019 21:51 |
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Meanwhile, I finally published my first entry on the Storyteller's Vault: The Thousand Sanctioned Beasts — Martial Artists If you've ever wanted to run Exalted but setting up a combat seemed like it would sap your will to live, this should be just what you need. It's a gamist-focused bestiary that aims at making it easier to put together encounters no matter what level of power your circle sits at.
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# ? Apr 12, 2019 21:59 |
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quote:I like to think of Getimians as being the xianxia to the Sidereals’ wuxia I dunno if the game could handle a character that many exponentiations more powerful than a celestial exalt. (I bought your book! Thanks!)
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# ? Apr 13, 2019 02:18 |
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:
Thank you kindly! I hope it's useful! (The one on elementals is currently in layout, and man it's going to be much harder because very few things in it can be cut down to one column exactly.)
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# ? Apr 13, 2019 02:26 |
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TaintedBalance posted:You just barging in and demanding people defend the concept of personhood is extremely loving rude. You had multiple people ask you to drop it and you refused to do so, making you an rear end in a top hat. People aren't just upset at the topic, they are also upset at how you handled it and demanded answers of it instead of respecting the space and people involved. Don't be a dick is like rule zero of ttrpgs, so you know, please respect that and others in the space. At literally no point did I demand a defense of the concept of personhood, holy crap. The point was that while in our world the concept of 'is a person' is generally a 1-to-1 relationship with 'is a human', this concept doesn't work in Creation where there are things that definitely are not humans but are persons, and entities that might be able to justifiably claim "you see being a Person as Animal+, I see being me as Person+". Multiple posters have managed to successfully argue against this concept without accusing me of calling things 'sub-human'. Great Man Theory is wrong in our world. Exalted embracing it, in order to critique it, is barely subtextual. edit: Kaza42 probably both answered my questions and worded any theoretical position I had better than I did myself. I never said "well if Exalts are people, then logically humans aren't people"; I was saying that exalts/gods/demons/etc may hold themselves to be in a category even higher than being a person. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Apr 13, 2019 |
# ? Apr 13, 2019 02:38 |
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Ferrinus posted:If you need to be talked into treating someone as a person then you can also be talked out of it. That's why the bottom line has to be gut-level, pre-rational solidarity with your brothers and sisters or, as a temporary stopgap, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Man I knew there was a reason I never put you on my ignore list.
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# ? Apr 13, 2019 02:50 |
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bewilderment posted:At literally no point did I demand a defense of the concept of personhood, holy crap. The point was that while in our world the concept of 'is a person' is generally a 1-to-1 relationship with 'is a human', this concept doesn't work in Creation where there are things that definitely are not humans but are persons, and entities that might be able to justifiably claim "you see being a Person as Animal+, I see being me as Person+". Multiple posters have managed to successfully argue against this concept without accusing me of calling things 'sub-human'. Divine Command Theory exists in Exalted mainly so that you can punch its proponents in the face.
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# ? Apr 13, 2019 02:55 |
Cessna posted:Look, if the alt-right is questioning whether or not a person is a person and throwing around accusations of "fallacies," why should they get a calm, rational argument beyond "go gently caress yourself" in response? Here's a simple flowchart you can use to tell if an alt-right person is arguing in good faith: code:
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# ? Apr 13, 2019 03:37 |
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bewilderment posted:Great Man Theory is wrong in our world. Exalted embracing it, in order to critique it, is barely subtextual. I think "embracing it" is going a step far. Like, the whole reason the Second Age is so hosed even hundreds and hundreds of years later is because everything in the First Age depended so heavily and specifically on the Celestial Exalts, instead of having anything approaching normal societal progress. It's less 'lasting influence of great figures' and more 'take out the load-bearing magic people and history snaps back to where it was before they existed'. Roadie fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Apr 13, 2019 |
# ? Apr 13, 2019 04:19 |
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Clearly the founding political metaphor of Exalted, written before 9/11 at the peak of American post-Soviet malaise, needs to be updated for contemporary concerns. The Solars are no longer Great Men, the Solars are Oil. The Bronze Faction are radical ecologists trying to build sustainable infrastructure with green renewables (Dragonblooded,) with the understanding that the old scale of industrial mass production will no longer be possible. Gold Faction reactionaries are climate change deniers. Abyssals/Deathlords are British Petroleum and Enron. Lunars are nuclear advocates, or anarcho-primitivists if you want to be shallow and lazy. Infernals, idk, think Qanon will release secret CIA cold fusion tech next Tuesday or something. Wrap it up folks, time to scrap everything and start 4th edition.
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# ? Apr 13, 2019 05:55 |
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Lambo Trillrissian posted:Clearly the founding political metaphor of Exalted, written before 9/11 at the peak of American post-Soviet malaise, needs to be updated for contemporary concerns. celestials are renewable, dbs are being formed by drilling out the blood of the dragons and their anima is a dangerous pollutant.
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# ? Apr 13, 2019 08:48 |
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If Celestials are really renewable then after the Usurpation the Sidereals shoulda just collected up the fresh batch of Solars and reinstated them until they turned bad again. Just cull the crop every century or so when it's like "ah yup there's the curse again".
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# ? Apr 13, 2019 10:22 |
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I don't think its wrong, IC or OOC, to look at Exalted and see a different valuing of beings in it. The unconquered sun would be a massively different point than Sally Joe Farmer mortal would be. Losing Chejop is to many, more of a loss than losing a newbie, because you lose all of his experiences and the massive amount of history he has built up. A solar who looks at an assured death to save mortals and says 'but I could save many more than this, and do more than all of them', to justify not going to that assured death isn't inherently wrong. Unless one of those mortals exalt, they do literally have more power to save and make changes. Just saying it is fascist without thought beyond modern political views is sad.
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# ? Apr 13, 2019 12:33 |
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That's totally different from 'more a person' though. That's a question of expertise and priority; it's like prioritizing saving a doctor's life over an English graduate student's (that's me, for the record, I wasn't about to assign anyone else the 'less skilled, therefore allowed to die' slot). The fascist dimension is the desire to produce a taxonomy of humans - because the Exalted are human - which is a philosophically bankrupt approach from the first second. We don't have to defend not wanting Essence Phrenology in our elfgames. That's even before we ask 'more important to whom' - one could make a very good argument that Chejop Kejak being killed will measurably improve Creation, far more than the death of even the most brutal mortal king. The 'personhood' discussion is purely about innate qualities, not one's practical moral value to humanity as a whole. And in any case, your edge case claim of 'a powerful Exalted hero's like is orders of magnitude more valuable than a peasant farmer's' already is something the setting deals with, because plenty of sorcerers are ready to devour peasants' lives to live longer. They don't need a generalized 'also sorcerers get better qualia and have more sapience' theory to put that in the setting.
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# ? Apr 13, 2019 13:48 |
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bewilderment posted:If Celestials are really renewable then after the Usurpation the Sidereals shoulda just collected up the fresh batch of Solars and reinstated them until they turned bad again. oh yeah just like BP and Shell started investing heavily in renewable energy when they became aware of the likelihood of anthropgenic climate change back in the 50s
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# ? Apr 13, 2019 13:52 |
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Just got into a real fight with a Lunar made with the Lunar book for the first time in my game and, well, Flowing Body Evasion is nuts, and almost literally doubly so on a swarm-form Lunar. Feels like it needs a 1/scene restriction like most of the other perfect defenses.
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# ? Apr 14, 2019 05:58 |
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Crion posted:Just got into a real fight with a Lunar made with the Lunar book for the first time in my game and, well, Flowing Body Evasion is nuts, and almost literally doubly so on a swarm-form Lunar. Feels like it needs a 1/scene restriction like most of the other perfect defenses. That's at least an Essence 4 Lunar right there. They have to spend willpower to use the super nutso part of Flowing Body Evasion, but otherwise of course they're strong, they're an Essence 4 Exalt! Swarm form is also 4m a round so that Lunar was haemorrhaging resources, which you don't always realize when you're fighting against a guy. They did have a bunch for being E4 of course, but the resource management game was definitely not in their favour. Working it out they have at most 10 uses of Flowing Body Evasion and like 6 rounds of being a swarm if they spend motes on literally nothing else. I'm not saying it's not strong, cos it is! It's nuts strong, but also. Minimum Essence 4, and all your juice means it should be. The willpower cost is interesting. It's not quite technically a perfect defence, but might as well be for the effect it gives you and it being limited by willpower means you can spam out multiple in a single scene, but then you might only be able to do it once per day for the rest of your life after that compared to every scene no matter what you get 1. Could add a rider of once per scene, but reset if you completely dodge an attack so it works until it doesn't and someone's figured out your trick.
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# ? Apr 14, 2019 15:59 |
All this Swarm talk is making me think: Is Metal Gear Solid 3 just a story of Lunar-on-Lunar fratricide?
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# ? Apr 15, 2019 00:07 |
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Nessus posted:All this Swarm talk is making me think: Is Metal Gear Solid 3 just a story of Lunar-on-Lunar fratricide? The Boss is the most Solar Solar to ever Solar, so no.
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# ? Apr 15, 2019 10:12 |
LatwPIAT posted:The Boss is the most Solar Solar to ever Solar, so no.
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# ? Apr 15, 2019 12:42 |
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EthanSteele posted:That's at least an Essence 4 Lunar right there. They have to spend willpower to use the super nutso part of Flowing Body Evasion, but otherwise of course they're strong, they're an Essence 4 Exalt! Swarm form is also 4m a round so that Lunar was haemorrhaging resources, which you don't always realize when you're fighting against a guy. They did have a bunch for being E4 of course, but the resource management game was definitely not in their favour. Working it out they have at most 10 uses of Flowing Body Evasion and like 6 rounds of being a swarm if they spend motes on literally nothing else. I'm not saying it's not strong, cos it is! It's nuts strong, but also. Minimum Essence 4, and all your juice means it should be. The Charm supplement I'm looking at (the backer preview) has Flowing Body Evasion at Essence 3, and either way the Lunar generally comes out ahead on that resource trade because just about every attack worth a Lunar shaving 6 or 7 or 11 damage successes off of is going to cost more than 5 motes to assemble, and a fair chance of a WP too in either a charm cost or for roll security
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# ? Apr 15, 2019 13:14 |
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Nessus posted:All this Swarm talk is making me think: Is Metal Gear Solid 3 just a story of Lunar-on-Lunar fratricide? No, because Ocelot is Solar Big Boss's Lunar mate
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# ? Apr 15, 2019 13:42 |
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Crion posted:The Charm supplement I'm looking at (the backer preview) has Flowing Body Evasion at Essence 3, and either way the Lunar generally comes out ahead on that resource trade because just about every attack worth a Lunar shaving 6 or 7 or 11 damage successes off of is going to cost more than 5 motes to assemble, and a fair chance of a WP too in either a charm cost or for roll security The Essence 4 thing I was talking about is swarm form itself, which is the 4 motes a round I was talking about so the Lunar is going through at least 9 motes and possibly a willpower every turn if they're using Flowing Body Evasion only once. I'm not saying it isn't strong, because its super ultra strong, I'm just not sure that an Essence 4 Lunar being really strong isn't working as intended. It could well be that it is a level beyond just being a reasonable level of super strong for a high essence Lunar cos of the rad synergy.
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# ? Apr 15, 2019 17:17 |
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Crion posted:No, because Ocelot is Solar Big Boss's Lunar mate "Who are The Getimians?" "The Ra-Kan-Thu-Li-O?"
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# ? Apr 16, 2019 00:54 |
Crion posted:No, because Ocelot is Solar Big Boss's Lunar mate
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# ? Apr 16, 2019 02:18 |
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# ? Jun 9, 2024 11:48 |
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I complain a lot about Exalted in this thread but climactic fights that push you to your absolute limit with storyline consequences where even breaking even with two Circle members incapacitated means you held the line to at least figure out how to handle the next big challenge...well that feels better in this system than it does in just about any other in my opinion
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# ? Apr 17, 2019 07:47 |