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Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Mexcillent posted:

The same one that recommended you use different weapons to differentiate your lunars? I mean Barbarian Warriors?

I mean, I'm very comfortable with saying that the first part of the book which made lunar-"civilization" antagonism a conflict between subjected people and the Realm is probably a better representation of that element that everyone ignores in favor of the dumber, broad stuff from the STing chapter (written by a different author).

It's important to remember that Lunars were originally intended to be a purely antagonist splat, wyld-tainted monsters sort of in the same way that Abyssals were death-tainted genocidal maniacs. But both of those got toned down quite a bit midway through 1e's development when it was decided to let all the Exalted types be playable, and while the Abyssals sort of kept their theme (such as it was) the Lunars were really left flailing with no real niche or specialty.

# ¿ May 31, 2013 04:13

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Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Denim Avenger posted:

Solar Mate was a desperate attempt to try and fit Lunars into the setting and make it feel like they belonged there when they very obviously didn't. It says a lot that they initially considered removing Lunars all together from Third Edition.

Honestly, I'm not sure I'd disagree with the removal either. Pretty much all the existing canonical Lunars could probably work just as well as some other Exalt type (probably Solar or Dragon Blooded, but still) and you really only have to look at an NPC like, say, the Bull of the North to see this in action. A barbarian warlord on the edge of creation who's a major threat to the "civilized" nations and the great empire, with an animal name? And... a Solar. Yeah. The Lunars (in 1e and 2e) were basically completely accessory to the theme... you couldn't excise the Solars or the Dragon-Blooded or even the Abyssals or Sidereals without drastically changing the setting, but you could do the same to the Lunars and not really feel the lack. 2e tried to fix things with the civilization-building aspect, but it was still running off 1e's setting inertia and kind of just muddled things more than it solved, sadly.

# ¿ May 31, 2013 04:24

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

pospysyl posted:

The complaints about having too many Charms doesn't really make sense to me. D&D 4e had over a hundred powers per class and that works out alright, grognards aside.

Well, a big thing with 4e powers is that even with the classes with sprawling lists to choose from, they were broken up into much smaller chunks by level, powers were presented in a simple block form with usually standardized effects, and you only had a finite number of powers available at a single time to a character. It was still a bit too sprawling, but it was still pretty manageable. Unfortunately Exalted's charm list (in 1e and 2e anyway) doesn't share this... there's hundreds available at any one time, many of them have unique and elaborate mechanics, and there's theoretically no limit to the amount of charms most characters could have beyond experience limits and GM patience. Way more unwieldy in practice.

At least Exalted has nothing really resembling Feats, though.

# ¿ Jun 6, 2013 11:43

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