Posts

• italianranma Registered User regular

  May 2013 edited May 2013

  What We Know So Far
  
  The developers have been very tight-lipped on the actual mechanics of the game, but there is a wiki that has collected what information is available. To explain… No, there is too much. Let me sum up. The system is being reworked from the ground up promising faster more involved gameplay. Many of the underlying mechanics from 2nd edition are completely reworked with the intent to capture the ‘feel’ of classic 1st edition but provide a new modern and balanced approach. The release date isn’t currently known (the Kickstarter fulfillment has Oct for the PDF version), but it has been pushed back continually since last year.
  
  Why I’m So Hard Excited About This
  
  I never got an Exalted game of 1st or 2nd ed going, but I played a few one-offs and bought the core-books to browse. I liked the depth of the game and the setting, but just never got around to playing or buying any of the splatbooks. That being said what’s really won me over are the developers; both by how proliferate they are on forums, and by the way that they talk about RPG mechanics. I get the impression that they’re avid gamers who understand how to build a game for a variety of audiences and are willing to put aside their own biases to create a truly well-crafted game.
  
  Further Reading
  
  http://nishkriya.theanathema.com/ - this website tracks any new posts from the developers since the last time you visited the site: very useful once you've gotten caught up on the forums.
  
  http://nobilis.me/quotes-exalted - this is a collection of blog posts and other musings by the developers. There are some really good reads in here, and it's here that I became so impressed with the devs.
  
  http://avatarcomic.net/ExaltedWiki/mediawiki-1.19.1/index.php?title=Exalted_3E:_What_We_Know - this is the above wiki with all the collected info up to this point.
  
  Deluxe Hardcover Kickstarter out now!
  
  I'm only mentioning this (and with permission) because this will likely be your only chance to purchase a [edit] Deluxe hardcover version of this book. I won't link the site, but I'm sure you won't have trouble finding it.
  
  Let the discussion begin!
  
  
  
  

  italianranma on May 2013

  Without nipples, boobs would have no point.

  +1
• gtrmp Registered User regular

  May 2013

  John Morke wrote:

  OKAY, so here's what I have to say about the Getimian Exalted.
  
  The Getimian Exalted run off a system of Getimian Alchemy, in which they use sutras, katas—intense martial training developed by Rakan Thulio—to control their internal forces and release them. In a very similar sense to Sidereals, the Getimians can conduct their will along the threads of destiny by working their will internally through carefully balancing, combining, or interrupting the flow of yin and yang Essence through their bodies and then forcing it outward.
  
  Within each Getimian is a Loom of Fate. Pattern spiders race up and down their spines, their bones are the spun webs of destiny, their minds cycling through constant states of universal motion and the flow of the world. With a thought the pattern spiders within shift Essence between his chakras, giving him new power with which to enhance his actions, or disrupt the pattern of destiny.
  
  We have built a fuckin' awesome new Charm paradigm for these guys, based largely on which mote pool you pay with. Paying from your yin pool or from your yang pool could change the entire effect of a Charm.
  
  I will let Holden explain in more detail.

  Holden Shearer wrote:

  The Getimians are unlike the other Exalts you're familiar with in that their Personal and Peripheral Essence pools are the same size. Personal Essence is 'Yin' Essence-- dark, cold, passive, consumptive, negative energy. Peripheral Essence is 'Yang' Essence-- bright, hot, active, positive, creative energy. Some of their Charms can only be powered by one kind of Essence or the other; others don't care what you're spending; and still other Charms will behave in markedly different ways depending on what you're feeding them with. Their magic will also start to behave very differently as the two pools grow imbalanced with regards to one another. Some Getimians specialize in the use of one variety of Essence or the other, while others apply a more balanced approach-- this is down to their style as an individual.
  
  Getimian Alchemy is a mechanically separate system from their Charmset, reminiscent of but also markedly different than Sidereal Astrology. More detail on it will have to wait until later in the Kickstarter...

  Steam

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• Grey Paladin Registered User regular

  May 2013

  The art style looks neat. I just hope the mechanics are decent. When even WotC beats you on the balance front you are kind of in trouble.

  "All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible." - T.E. Lawrence

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• Auralynx Registered User regular

  May 2013

  Grey Paladin wrote: »

  The art style looks neat. I just hope the mechanics are decent. When even WotC beats you on the balance front you are kind of in trouble.

  
  Yeah, Exalted was a giant mechanical disaster. Everything people liked about White Wolf, particularly W:tA, plus everything they didn't all bundled up into one awkward mess with really cool flavor.

  Playing in:
  World's Largest Dungeon 4E as Torbera
  BSG Exodus Game 17 as Tom Zarek
  Twilight Imperium Game 7 as Muaat

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• PMAvers Registered User regular

  May 2013

  You know, for however much of mess the old editions were mechanics-wise...
  
  ...they were still a bloody blast to play.

  
  COME FORTH, AMATERASU!

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• Auralynx Registered User regular

  May 2013

  PMAvers wrote: »

  You know, for however much of mess the old editions were mechanics-wise...
  
  ...they were still a bloody blast to play.

  
  So was Werewolf! It's a really entertaining setting; one of my 4E DMs had most of the hardbacks and I'd flip through them between turns. I never actually got to roll a fistful of dice to hit a guy with a sword, but it seemed like it'd be fun in practice if you'd worked out your combos and whatnot in advance.

  Playing in:
  World's Largest Dungeon 4E as Torbera
  BSG Exodus Game 17 as Tom Zarek
  Twilight Imperium Game 7 as Muaat

  0
• italianranma Registered User regular

  May 2013

  Balance is such a sticky topic, and often when two people talk about it, they're talking about different things. A discussion about internal balance (choosing this ability v. this ability) starts talking about balancing tropes within the setting (magic-user v. non-magic-user) becomes a topic about situational balance etc. I was looking for some quotes were the devs talk about how they're solving the mechanical problems of 2E. In a nutshell they're using bounded accuracy and flatter power curves (among other things that we don't know about yet), but by far what impressed me the most was reading this discussion by Holden Shearer, which I'll quote in full under the spoiler since it's a lot of reading.
  

  Holden Shearer wrote:

  [On the subject of 2E 6 to 10 essence]
  
  So this is a thorny yet very interesting topic.
  
  Let me open by noting that we're going to get clobbered no matter how we handle this, just so you can get an idea where the thinking started. There are several mutually contradictory tensions at play here.
  
  I'll start by laying out some truths as we understand them:
  
  • There are concepts that are useful as building-pieces for a game, and there are concepts that are useful simply to have around as concepts. Take Golconda, in Vampire. They eventually went into Golconda, years into the game, but for a whole decade they never really needed to— it was a rich contribution to the game as a mechanics-free idea, an ideal for players and Storytellers to imagine and tell stories about and dream of, and for their characters to dream of. It was rare, and poorly understood, and you could tell lots of stories about characters trying to figure it out. Golconda was useful as an idea, moreso than as a concrete thing, because as a thing it was one thing, but as an idea it could mean and be many things to many people.
  
  • The ten-dot scale is illusory and always has been. Considering the sheer depth of Essence dots 2-5, there just isn't enough material there to add five more discrete notches to the scale. As such, Essence 10 was always really more of an ideal, a talismanic stand-in for "unimaginable power." Essence 6 was a conceptual stand-in for "the land over the hill," the thing that you can imagine but not grasp—power beyond what you have now. Basically, imagining yourself, but an order of magnitude more badass! Essence 7-9 were a kind of conceptual dead zone, there just weren't that many real gradations along the line, at least not for Exalts. The scale was more workable for gods, because gods are simple things compared to an Exalted Charm set, without nearly as much depth, and it's a lot easier to understand the difference between an Essence 6 and Essence 8 god than it is between an Essence 6 and Essence 8 Larceny Charm.
  
  And yes, I know we tried to put a 6-10 "meanings" scale in DotFA. Like I've said before, we took some magnificent stabs at doing the impossible back in the day, and carried it off pretty well in some cases; but at no point did I ever kid myself that the scale produced wasn't shaky as hell.
  
  • Lots of ideas just don't scale when you stretch them that far, especially when the lower-echelon stuff ramps up so fast. By Essence 3, a Solar fighter can launch attacks that cannot be avoided by any means, dodge any attack no matter what, and land blows capable of extinguishing the immortal Essence of the titans that built the world. By Essence 6 he swings his sword and kills armies, and cleaves hurricanes in twain, and can land attacks that inflict infinite damage. Even in the arena of combat, escalation becomes problematic (and SUPER problematic for anyone having to fight someone rocking these inflated powers). In other categories, it gets even uglier; by Essence 3, a thief can steal anything flawlessly without chance of failure or being noticed. Where do you go up from that? How can you get even better? How can you get seven whole categories of better? Even if you move into crazy stuff like stealing souls or stealing everything in a whole city, that's only maybe three jumps up the ladder— that still leaves four to go. Again, the scale is illusory.
  
  • There's a contradiction in expectations when it comes to high-Essence power. On the one hand, people love imagining their First Age prior incarnations as these absurd Dragonball Z continent-shattering ultragods. On the other hand, some of those guys are still around; and people want the mechanics to support them. The World of Darkness has a well known Elder Problem, wherein the ancients are so much stronger than you that you may as well just put away the dice and bend over when they show up because no head-on confrontation is possible— it's like an ant confronting a man. People don't really like that experience in Exalted, they do not come to Exalted to play an ant. But they want to imagine ancient elder entities in the game as men next to ants. This, by the way, is the point where we can't win.
  
  • After some thought, we came to the understanding that men and ants aren't really necessary or desirable for our game, and that you don't need that dichotomy to still allow for jaw-dropping feats of amazing coolness to still exist (the Solar swordsman cleaving the top off a mountain and then surfing it down into the army of demons in the valley below, etc). To elaborate:
  
  • We asked ourselves, "what can a Solar at Essence 8 or 9 or 10 do that a Solar at Essence 5 can't?" and really the ultimate answer was "nothing." This clarified a lot of things for us.
  
  • We thought about what we'd want a fight between a circle of young Solars and Ma-Ha-Suchi to look like, and the answer was ultimately "brilliant high-energy kung fu fight," rather than something different. So we started wondering what, exactly, Ma-Ha-Suchi needs to be able to do that a really old, seasoned, experienced E5 Lunar couldn't do, and the answer again seemed to be "nothing, really."
  
  • In fact, in all the casting about for stuff, we found very few effects that were to the game's benefit that didn't seem to be able to exist in the E1-5 range. We looked at elder Exalt after elder Exalt and asked, "what signature thing does this person have that sets them apart from others of their kind, that clearly emerges from their elder Essence rating?" and really the only thing that cropped up was Leviathan as Whalezilla.
  
  • The Exalted system is an abstraction rather than a representation of how the setting works and how characters in the setting work. As a result, drawing the line up to the point where you become something all out of scope with your own nature and representing that as just more of the same stuff that represents the standard was……… not really smart.
  
  What does this mean in terms of EX3's support for high Essence?
  
  You can expect high Essence to still be a thing that exists. You can expect to eventually get stats for Mask of Winters & etc— you will be able to fight him and it will not be a 1e Kukla situation where it's like "turn in your character sheets." You can eventually expect to see Ma-Ha-Suchi and Leviathan and probably Kejak statted.
  
  What you shouldn't expect is for us to jump right back into anything like Dreams of the First Age rules. You probably shouldn't expect the power curve to look the same. You shouldn't expect to load your character up on E6+ Charms— what ancient Exalts look like mechanically is still a matter under discussion and refinement, but at this point I really, really doubt they're represented by having E6+ Charms that cost 8xp each. And I am dead certain they're not going to be running around with Dex 10, Melee 10, because doing that melts the probability curves the system runs on all by itself.
  
  That last statement is probably going to spark a shitstorm all by itself. Before you start shouting angrily, check this out. I am not discussing design philosophy there, I'm discussing math. If we give Kejak Dex 10, Martial Arts 10, it won't matter what Charms he does or doesn't have because your character cannot hit him— the odds of it happening are somewhere below 1%. That's a stupid place to start an epic kung fu fight from.

  
  It's not just what he says in here, but the way he presents the information that really impresses me. He talks about both mechanics and math, about feel and balance. As I read more of what these guys write I get more and more the sense that they aren't approaching this as gamers or as developers but as enlightened gamer/developers.

  Without nipples, boobs would have no point.

  +3
• Auralynx Registered User regular

  May 2013

  Trying to tackle the fistful of dice problem head-on is probably doomed, in a sense, if they stay married to the old-style WoD rules, but it's good to see them realizing the power curve they were working with had positively Himalayan peaks and that it was a big part of the problem.

  Playing in:
  World's Largest Dungeon 4E as Torbera
  BSG Exodus Game 17 as Tom Zarek
  Twilight Imperium Game 7 as Muaat

  0
• italianranma Registered User regular

  May 2013

  Holden Shearer wrote:

  It's that time. For those of you joining us from Kickstarter-land or other forums, welcome
  
  Just a little preliminary before we get started though—I know everyone really wants to see this but for the sake of my sanity as I reply to the thread please try to keep the following in mind:
  
  • The point of this thread is to explain the play dynamic of the EX3 combat engine. I'm not showing off the mechanics of the EX3 combat engine in this thread. The combat rules are 7,000 words long, and I put them all there so the rules would be clear and cover everything. I don't want to show off just part of the rules and leave people walking away thinking we missed stuff! I also am not going to post the entire combat rules section before the book is out because I want you to actually buy the book to play the game
  
  (For the sake of comparison, the EX2 combat rules were about 17,000 words long; this is a much leaner system.)
  
  • This isn't the EX2 combat engine plus slight clean-up. The old paradigm does not apply, EX3 has not been built around it. It's not the nWoD engine either. It is a new thing that should be easy to grasp and use for long-time White Wolf fans (and also for newcomers), but also visibly different from anything they've used before in a WW game. Anyone citing the EX2 combat engine as a reason this or that won't work gets banished to the land of wind and ghosts!
  
  • This thread is going to have lots of people flocking to it to read this post from the Kickstarter and other messageboards, so let's try not to get too much blood on the floor in front of our guests emotion-1.gif
  
  Okay, that said--
  
  The Philosophy of EX3 combat.
  
  Exalted 1 and Exalted 2 both used what I think of an 'action model' combat engines-- that is to say, when you rolled your dice pool, that represented a discrete action. This dice roll is an attack, for example, and it tells me how good the attack is.
  
  This is a good model in that it feels very textured and involved-- "my roll represents my attack, and because I'm a ferociously skilled swordsman, I get to roll a lot of dice." That's visceral, and good.
  
  The problem of the system was that what Exalted wanted to emulate, when two of its larger-than-life heroes battled, was the martial clashes of cinema (whether this meant Errol Flynn, Chinese wuxia, or Jedi lightsaber battles was largely up to the tastes of the group playing). And Exalted did a fairly faithful job of recreating this! Unfortunately, an action-by-action recitation of such a battle usually looks like this: *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *dead*
  
  That's faithful to the source material, but we felt that it had problems as a gameplay model-- as a player, it was frustrating. It felt like you were getting nowhere, until very suddenly you won or lost. But in the epics, and in cinema (again, this is true whether you're talking Shaw Brothers kung fu, Lu Bu vs the Brotherhood of the Peach Orchard, or Luke Skywalker vs Darth Vader), most of the storytelling of the fight is contained in that "dead zone" where every swing is getting blocked or dodged or only banging the enemy around and otherwise generally not accomplishing its main goal of killing or defeating the other guy. It's not just whiff-whiff-whiff-- we can look at that fight and see how the momentum of the battle is running, we can tell who's winning and losing, and we can tell when someone has just pulled a marvelous reversal and is mounting a comeback. When Luke and Vader fight in Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader only strikes a single blow that really injures Luke-- the last one that cuts off his hand-- but we can see that Vader is clearly dominating the fight before that. Luke makes a desperate strike near the end, but only manages to graze Vader's arm and goad him on finish things by battering Luke to the end of the bridge and ending the fight with a decisive blow. That's good storytelling, that's an exciting fight scene-- much more than just the sum of "whiff whiff whiff whiff over."
  
  That's what EX3 aims to capture, by turning the 'dead zone' into something compelling.
  
  In Exalted Third Edition, the majority of attacks heroes launch at one another don't damage the opponent's health track*. Instead, these attacks are used to build momentum, gain the upper hand, and place the character in an advantageous position relative to his opponent(s!). They are also calculated to stymie the enemy's attempts to do the same, to disrupt his tempo, and to confound his efforts to harm you. If an attack of this sort succeeds, then it might force the opponent back, batter down his defenses, push him into disadvantageous position, or even land a blow that rattles him but inflicts no telling injury.
  
  Once you feel you've garnered sufficient advantage, your character can attempt to launch an attack which can damage the enemy's Health Track-- and if you've fought well enough, picked your moment well, and the dice are with you, you might even slay your opponent in a single well-aimed blow, striking off his head or running him through! However, attempting to strike such a blow with undue haste can be quite risky-- it might even create an opportunity for the opponent to turn the tables completely, and seize control of the fight!
  
  This is the battle dynamics philosophy of EX3, and is the result its combat engine has been designed to realize.
  
  *Note: This is a mechanical abstraction intended to represent the ebb and flow of cinematic combat, not an actual thing that exists in the setting. When a Solar and an Abyssal are swinging daiklaves at one another, they very much are trying to cut and kill their enemy with each blow-- even if we, the players, know that all the attacks this round are able to do is to win them advantage.

  Without nipples, boobs would have no point.

  0
• Ringo Registered User regular

  May 2013

  I am hopeful about this

  Ceres wrote: »

  I'm just going to go ahead and lock this thread before I feel any worse about humanity.

  AUGMENTOS - Edcrab's Exigency RPG

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• Rainfall Registered User regular

  May 2013

  Auralynx wrote: »

  Trying to tackle the fistful of dice problem head-on is probably doomed, in a sense, if they stay married to the old-style WoD rules, but it's good to see them realizing the power curve they were working with had positively Himalayan peaks and that it was a big part of the problem.

  
  I'm not entirely sure where I heard it, so this may be complete bullshit, But I seem to recall Holden saying that the die pools will cap out at around 26 dice.
  
  Which is a lot, but since I've seen 100+ pools get rolled, I'm kind of thankful it's not more.

  HEY SATAN

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• Capfalcon Do you desire the POWER? Giant Mecha SuitRegistered User regular

  May 2013

  Well, I'm disappointed that it looks like I can't get a dead tree version for less than 100 dollars, which is a bit out of my price range.
  
  Still, really excited about the game, and if I have to read it on a PDF to play it, I guess I'll just suck it up.
  
  Also, on the off chance you're reading this Holden Shearer, that whole talk about the conceptual space of Essence 7 to 9 not really having anything importance in it really sold me on this game.

  Steam: Laharal

  +1
• italianranma Registered User regular

  May 2013

  @Capfalcon, Onyx Path/White wolf's new business model is to sell their books through Drive-through RPG dot net. You'll have the option there for a dead tree copy using their print on demand function. The Kickstarter is for a deluxe hardcover with color pages, etc.

  Without nipples, boobs would have no point.

  0
• Capfalcon Do you desire the POWER? Giant Mecha SuitRegistered User regular

  May 2013

  And now I feel even better about my decision.
  
  Thanks!

  Steam: Laharal

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• OptimusZed Registered User regular

  May 2013

  I was always intrigued by the concept of Exalted, but I think playing Hero and Champion has left me with an aversion from systems that take a ton of time to resolve anything.
  
  If they're clearing that up, I'll probably check it out. At some option below the $300 gold-plated book level.

  We're reading Rifts. You should too. You know you want to. On Hiatus!
  
  GT: batshido Hit me up on ME3.

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• Rainfall Registered User regular

  May 2013

  Holden Shearer on SA wrote:

  The SA thread has been super cool through the KS so far so, tell you what, I'll drop one.
  
  (Though I've talked about this before, here and there.)
  
  There is no mass combat system.
  
  No 'extras' either.
  
  What you have instead is a thing called a battle group.
  
  When a group of what 1e or 2e would call 'extras' show up, they are automatically abstracted into a battle group, which is basically, on a mechanical level, a katamari made of ninjas. It's a ninja + some very easy-to-remember bonuses, with a big health-track that wraps around several times and which can potentially have its morale 'break' and panic and run away as you keep lapping the health track and killing dudes, well before you actually kill all the ninjas.
  
  "Mass combat" is just a combat in which very large battle groups show up, i.e., it is absolutely no different than regular combat, i.e., there is no mass combat system. An army is just a really big battle group (or, potentially, several really big ones).
  
  The battle group functions a bit differently than an individual character in terms of how it interacts with health damage and wrasslin' for momentum, but again, the rules difference is extremely simple and easy to remember and use. I think all told, there are four mechanical differences between a BG and a solo character-- "make sure these rules are easy to remember and use" was the top priority in putting together battle groups.

  
  I dig this, and it makes me very curious about War charms.

  HEY SATAN

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• Capfalcon Do you desire the POWER? Giant Mecha SuitRegistered User regular

  May 2013

  So, "The Return To The Revenge Of The Tomb Of Five Corners" is the tentative name for the quickstart adventure.
  
  Why has everyone not given these people all of your money?

  Steam: Laharal

  +1
• Rainfall Registered User regular

  May 2013

  It won't actually be about the Tomb of Five Corners or called that.
  
  Pledge cancelled.

  HEY SATAN

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• Auralynx Registered User regular

  May 2013

  Capfalcon wrote: »

  So, "The Return To The Revenge Of The Tomb Of Five Corners" is the tentative name for the quickstart adventure.
  
  Why has everyone not given these people all of your money?

  
  Because it's not called Celestial Chance-Adapting Method for the Promotion of Harmonic Discourse and Rapturous Enjoyment: Return of the Emerald Kingfisher.

  Playing in:
  World's Largest Dungeon 4E as Torbera
  BSG Exodus Game 17 as Tom Zarek
  Twilight Imperium Game 7 as Muaat

  +2
• Erich Zahn Registered User regular

  May 2013 edited May 2013

  Kejak Chejop Bobblehead
  Artifact •
  
  These simple dolls portraying the Bronze Faction leader can be purchased on nearly any corner in Yu-Shan. With a one-mote commitment, they can be made to say anything that the owner desires, provided they are within one yard. Their voice is tinny and could never be mistaken for the actual Kejak Chejop, but this has not stopped daring young Gold Faction Sidereals from holding contests to make him say the most absurd things. To the continual annoyance of their elders, the doll is even popular among the younger members of the Bronze Faction, though they are at least more circumspect with what they do with it. Some Bronze Faction elders suspect that Ayesha Ura is responsible for their production, though they have never been able to prove anything.
  
  Though he would never admit it, Kejak himself owns one, which he keeps hidden in a back drawer on his desk, and which he has mock-arguments with when he believes no one is looking.

  Erich Zahn on May 2013

  +2
• italianranma Registered User regular

  May 2013

  This Friday (17 May) there will be additional limited reward tiers on the kickstarter. These are things like having your own custom charm made, having character art made by the official artists, or getting your character's name in a fiction piece somewhere down the line. If this kinda crazy waste of money appeals to you, start updating at 0800 EDT.
  
  I've been following a lot of the developer's comments closely, so if anyone has questions or wants me to look something up, I'm happy to do so. There's a tremendous amount of chaff on the official forums: people arguing about whether the name of a Lunar exalted should be Seven Devil Clever or Seven Devils Clever for example.

  Without nipples, boobs would have no point.

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