Exalted General - /exg/

A dude on the OPP forum wrote a bunch of DB Charms for 3E, and is apparently planning to write a whole Charmset. Being interested in playing Dragon-Blooded but not comfortable enough with the 3E mechanics to completely trust my own judgement on whether these Charms are balanced or not, I'd be interested in hearing /exg/'s opinions.

http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/exalted/875789-a-clutch-of-dragons-brawl-charms

http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/exalted/866932-a-clutch-of-dragons-db-overview-and-archery-charms

>http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/exalted/876347-exalted-returns-the-solar-backer-charm-pdf
>Solar power defines Exalted. We're not done with them—not nearly! We will revisit them eventually. The core book and the backer PDF is not the end, just the beginning.
So, Castebooks?

>>46963173
>>46963038

>tfw basically every change to Infernals save the removal of-okay, admittedly most of Chapter 1 except for the bit about privleges in Hell and the intriguing bit about build-your-own Shintais has been meh for me at best or like watching a treasured pocketwatch fall off a bridge into a whirlpool
>tfw you will never be a Devil Tiger in 3e
>tfw Infernals aren't likely to show up at all for a few more years

At this rate my last desperate hope is for someone talented somewhere to homebrew their own I Can't Believe It's Not The Broken Winged Crane! the same way TAW tried to fix Lunars.

>>46963173
>>Solar power defines Exalted

TRIGGERED

>>46963243
>the same way TAW tried to fix Lunars

"Tried" being the operative word here, seeing as TAW is a pile of Infernal fanboy trash led by a guy complaining that Lunars were Solar fanboy trash. No, EarthScorpion, "add more cthulhu" is not a panacea for perceived lack of flavor, and having shapeshifting be governed by Appearance Charms doesn't make Appearance better, it only makes shapeshifting worse.

Lunars as of 2.5e were flawed and could use more support such as errata coverage which was primarily applied to Solars; they really didn't need to be turned into mini-mes of

> the product of an unreal orgy of violence, seduction and consumption.

Backer charms incoming. Apparently there's a good spread among all abilities but Melee, Survival, and Sail got a lot of requests. They're all going to be powerful, high-end charms as well.

http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/exalted/876347-exalted-returns-the-solar-backer-charm-pdf

>>46963490
Fuck you, TAW is great and "silver Solars" was a serious problem. The problem with TAW isn't re-imagining attributes or shapeshifting, it's "why the fuck are these guys on my team?"
Srsly, it's like Solars are Space Marines, Lunars are Inquisition, Terrestrials are Imperial Guard, and TAW is Chaos Undivided.

>>46963558
You recognize that TAW is Chaos Undivided, but you don't recognize that Appearance Shapeshifting is a symptom of this problem of lolsorandumb reassignment of powers into nine kinds of chaos-bullshit? (Strength Gravity Manipulation, Dexterity Anima Manipulation, Stamina Social Manipulation, etc.)

Knacks as a category were conceived as a hack to dodge eclipse charmshare (and eclipse charmshare is stupid, sure) but ended up working well in their own right as a "tenth attribute" tree aligned with shapeshifting rather than any one particular Attribute.

I wouldn't necessarily do it that way again if I were rewriting Exalted, but I would do Independent Shapeshifting Category over Appearance Shapeshifting any day of the week.

>>46963558

What does that make Alchemicals then?

Speaking of which taking bets now! How long till Alchemicals!?

>ALSO as a BONUS we wrote 33 additional Solar Charms
>Solar players should consider these new Solar Charms a must-have for expanded play. These new pinnacle Charms are just too good to pass up.

My War boner is maximum

>>46963490
>>46963558
>>46963625

I feel like the spirit of TAW was in the right place (make Lunars strong independant beastpeople who don't need no Solar) but the implementation was overly colored by certain popular aspects of 2e which, as you say, pushed Lunars in certain directions that made them seem like barely coherent Chimeras than actual champions of humanity.

Going back to Infernals for a moment, I'm less than pleased about Vance's "band-aid" for them since nerfs are the last thing 2.5e infernals need.

>>46963644
Techpriests, c'mon.

That said, speaking as an Infernals enthusiast I pity you guys. I truly do.

>>46963491
If Infernals got a patreon I would submit many, many Shinai ideas but seeing as it's not concrete how Shintais even work I wouldn't know where to begin at the moment

>>46962094

I have no problem with more Charms. I have a bit of a problem with the "LOLOLOL these new Charms are so OP" method of introduction, as if unbalanced power creep is supposed to be a good thing.

I just hope they're more powerful charms like Mountain Crossing Leap Technique, or Knowing the Soul's Price, not more powerful charms like Perfect Strike Discipline, or Mind Manse Meditation.

>>46963803
I think one of the devs said that they're more of the over-the-top type stuff that is obviously miraculous instead of just AND NOW MELEE GETS REROLL 2s!

>>46964046
Guy in the thread said he asked for a charm that makes you so terrifying that 3rd circle demons poo their pants and vanish back to Malfeas rather than face you

Howdy all, my autism continues but I need YOUR help.

I've implemented a system that will conditionally format the Charm Name and the Ability/Attribute cell with the Essence and Ability minimums respectfully. I did this using the follow colors.

>Blue: 1
>Green: 2
>Yellow: 3
>Orange: 4
>Red: 5
>Really Red: 6+

I still need to add a legend somewhere so it's more obvious but I'm currently uncertain if the colors look all right. As you all are the intended audience I'd like to get your feedback on it. Check the Charm tab, I have a few Charms already listed so you can see the colors.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pfjmZKzcUqAX9mB58IAEUIFkZr8rq4CvdRRM4kzwwgU/edit?usp=sharing

>>46964064
No, he never mentioned 3rd circle demons, just demons in general.

>>46964064
Honestly if you need a specific Charm to scare demons instead of, you know, BEING A FUCKING SOLAR with decent Presence you should really reevaluate your career as a champion of the sun.

That tryhard shit's for Cecelyne.

>>46964105
I prefer the gold scale that charmlist sheet had.
Also having columns for all the necessary information available to the player.

>>46963173

Probably! I'm actually quite looking forward to it.

>>46964232
It might be cool, as long as revisiting Solars doesn't mean ignoring the other Exalted.

>>46962717

You know, for some reason, I've always been confused by the whole concept of Charms.

Like, being an Exalted should be an intuitive thing. Charms feel very rigid in concept, and they're even harder to explain in-universe because most of them are die-modifiers.

I can't help but think that something as simple as Excellencies are more of a way to go. When I try to explain the game to someone, and what they can actually do, I bog down a lot.

>>46964105
If you have the essence and ability requirements listed as numbers beside the charm, you won't need a legend or overly complicated colour-coding system, just a simple scale to look nice and check stuff at a glance.

>>46964182
Yeah I was looking at the gold scale originally but it just didn't seem very readable. Changed Essence to the gold scale, kept Ability the same for comparison, how does it look?

>>46964291
As for more columns, my thought was that the Charms tab is already pretty cluttered, on smaller screens the description and page number get cut off. And the information for Minimums is only relevant when you don't meet them, as soon as you do it just becomes useless. Which is why I set it to go away once you meet the prereqs.

>>46964271
They're D&D Feats - things you can do not spells you can cast

>>46964271
Watsonian hypothesis: Charms exist to represent specific feats and capabilities unlocked as you gradually realise your Exaltation's full potential through arduous enlightenment

Doylist hypothesis: Charms exist to prevent your players from saying things like "My first Athletics excellency which I got at essence 2 allows me nigh unlimited potential to master the art of jumping, therefore I pull a Sun Wukong and jump all the way across Creation from the edge of the Wyld and land right in front of the Unconquered Sun"

>>46964307
Go with rainbow if you won't have the numbers up, differentiating a shade is harder, just make sure to have rainbow colours in a tight order to be easier to remember, roygbiv.

Also can't be bothered checking, but have you updated the charms for the minor changes in the final pdf release?

>>46963681
>Going back to Infernals for a moment, I'm less than pleased about Vance's "band-aid" for them since nerfs are the last thing 2.5e infernals need.

The vast majority of TDO's fixes in the Infernal bandaid were buffs for Infernals that made them more viable in 2.5e, giving them additional methods of burrowing through the issue of absurd soak and dealing guaranteed damage. Playing a Kimberian Scourge, I absolutely welcomed these changes. If you want to look at nerfs, then the Infernal artifact edits in Ink Monkey Bones by... StephenLS, I believe, were much, much more detrimental to the splat.

That said, the only thing I recall being anything remotely close to a nerf within the bandaid had to do with Adorjan's round-long PD having a glitch where it'd cost less to use than her regular PD (something a sane, reasonable, and invested ST would never allow) resulting from the initial 2.5 edits. Not only was this patched, but the Charm received new functionality. I'm not sure what you could be referring to, otherwise.

>>46964351
The Charm descriptions I took straight from the Charm List the other kind anon posted and they're pretty vague.

As for costs and stuff, did any Charms change costs, keywords, or what have you? Some page numbers might be off.

>>46964347
If they had at least a rough difficulty table for all the abilities like they do with feats of strength, it'd be far easier to judge how capable someone is of pulling of particular feats through successes alone, charms could be used purely for going beyond successes and breaking physics, or doing something exceptional more consistently.

>>46964367
I'm charmlist anon, I stole most of the short summaries from Irked's let's read of 3e, filled in a few gaps with my own.
The specific rules in descriptions changed a few times, and there have been a few other changes like keywords, I was going through the pdf a few threads ago with the differences, I should finish that up now and update my list.
Also this has some of them:
http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/exalted/869500-final-pdf-what-s-new?p=869629#post869629

>>46964412
>>46964367
To add to this actually, I think you should have the book's description text somewhere in there, even if it's squeezed to the side as an optional thing to open up and read.
The charm text is where you'll get your important rules information, much easier than opening the book each time, and those summaries are more like reminders than full text.
But yeah, double rainbow for abilities and essence, much easier to read.

>>46964353
I was thinking of Sweet Agony Savored being completely replaced by charm that fills the overdrive pool off "Acts of Depravity" instead of just using LBE on people, which smacks of slipping back into the worst stereotypes of 2ebby on top of restricting playstyles yet more

Scorpion-Tailed Mirage does NOT have its' cost reduced in a place of desolation (granted the whole place of desolation thing turned me off from playing a Malefactor ever, fuck you Cecelyne we aren't all deserts)

Cold Fire Desolation Brand's most cost went up

MHM still feels like a light tap on the shoulder in practice for combat purposes; granted I just remembered Illimitable Boundaries Assertion which I'm admittedly unsure of how much of a difference it makes to my hypothetical 33 dice pool, (Essence) bashing damage Defiler build's combat viability

The BME counterattack against Holy effects is cold comfort since it seems to me stunts can easily allow a Solar to force the hit in through anyway.

>>46964378
I'm not disagreeing, but another thing I just thought of is while this setup works well for Solars and Abyssals, splats like Sidereals, Dragonbloods or Infernals whose powers tend to be more "weird" like Shintais might be harder to quantify in an interesting way under your proposed system.

>>46964485
*mote cost

Oh and Laughing Gust Denials' E5 effect now costs 3m1wp more

>>46964461
I was originally hesitant about adding full descriptions from the book due to copyright nonsense but added the vague descriptions that >>46964412 provided mostly because they were vague and similar to the descriptions in Anathema for 2E. You couldn't really use the Charm without them but they were helpful reminders if you already knew what they did.

>>46964165
He misunderstood. Here's the actual quote:
I literally asked for a War charm so goddamn powerful that demons looked at Solars using it and NOPEd out of Creation and back into Malfeas because that was safer for them. I figured if I was going to spend $200 on a custom charm, it would be better to request a charm that delivered something fucking awesome to the community as a whole and that pushed the boundaries of what the corebook offered.

Sure, it was kind of embarrassing when John indirectly pointed out that I'd completely misread Ideal Battle Knowledge Prana in a really bizarre way that made my request much too powerful to write, but I'm extremely curious about the alternative he suggested.

(In b4 my e-mails got lost in a vortex of confusion and the devs went with my backup request or something.)

>>46964515
Ah, I just assumed we weren't worried about copyright shit because this would be shared amongst fans and not on the official forums, plus we have all the books pirated here too.
Keep the descriptions out for your public sheet if you want, but I'll keep them in for my private games to help players reference it.

>>46964534
Oh, fair enough. What alternative did he suggest?

>>46964553
Figured I'd play it safe because it's not like the link for it is hard to find, always being posted in the OP, and they are certainly aware /exg/ is a place even if there's only a little cross-posting between here and the official forums.

>>46964593
Sure, I understand watching your back.
I'll post the full list of pdf changes here and update my sheet.

>>46964271

The way I always saw Charms in Exalted's setting had to do with how I've always felt reality works in it. Bear with me for a sec.

Creation and, indeed, basically all things are expressions of a pervasive universal energy - that is, Essence. Call it qi, prana, odic force, spiritual energy, it doesn't matter, but it is the underlying cosmic power that sets reality in motion, the power to exist.

The setting of Exalted, from Creation itself to the Wyld to Yu-Shan and Malfeas and the Underworld, is at a fundamental level an expression of a narrative. All things presently in existence ultimately arise from the Wyld, a seething and endless cauldron of narrative possibility.

The Raksha are "living" phenomenal stories (setting, characters, plot devices and all) that are able to shape their narratives on a whim. The Primordials - once called Deva - were similar beings who set their world-narratives in stone as it were and accepted rigid consequence, shape itself, into themselves. In doing so, their natures became fixed and vulnerable to long-term consequence - for example, an Unshaped Raksha can simply recreate one of their Emanations, but a Primordial has singularly more difficulty in replacing their souls - but their stories also became more meaningful, and that gave them greater significance and therefore power over their Raksha cousins. The importance of consequence is a core theme of Exalted.
Shinma also play into this, but they're just sort of there unless you have some magical bullshit in mind, so whatever.

The Loom of Fate would eventually be constructed by the Primordials to establish causality within Creation. Each strand in the Loom represents a person and the Loom's weaving is how they're interconnected. Manipulating Essence allows an empowered being to alter the course of the strands/destiny, which is incidentally why Sidereals are able to track Essence usage in the Loom.

(cont)

>>46964569
Dunno, he doesn't mention it

>>46964271
>>46964810

All-Encompassing Sorcerer's Sight allows one to look "into the Essence of the world and sees the patterns of magic that make up Creation." Before 3e, this allowed one to see the "wavelengths" associated with specific Charms, thus learning the specific way a person manipulated Essence to wield a Charm - in other words, what pattern of Essence was used to change the "story" of Creation, directing destiny based on the Essence expenditure. In 2e, this was especially useful for determining when an opponent was enhancing their actions with non-obvious bad touch Charms, which was valuable in determining when was the best moment to throw out your Perfect Defense of choice (especially post 2.5e).

That said, it seemed the case in previous editions that this understanding of a Charm's essence pattern allowed them to be categorized and named, and that's why they have a designation at all. Also presumably why Lytek had an archive of charms of the Celestial Exalted that could be referenced for training purposes (if you ever managed to get an audience with him in the first place, that is). But in 3e, AESS specifically says "This Charm does not reveal the working of the Charms of the Exalted" because the devs wanted to make Charms more abstracted, hence that whole blurb at the beginning of the Charms section about how "Charms don't exist in the setting."

Which, in my opinion, is strange and obviously a divergence from the original presentation of Exalted. Charms had a thematic name like Charms rather than, I dunno, "techniques" because they were meant to fit into the setting as a particular sort of magic. IIRC, Charms are even mentioned as a particular thing Exalts are aware of in the 1e opening fiction as the Solar uses them to fight off her Terrestrial pursuers. Well, I guess I understand why they decided to take this direction, though.

I just got an email from Onyx Path telling me Exalted 3e is out.

Bottom line it for me: Good or shit?

>>46965276
It's been out for over a year

Good

>>46965298
>It's been out for over a year
Then how come they're just shilling it to me now?

>>46965276
Grudgingly good. They're still a bunch of hipsters who now have no sense of scheduling, but it's better than 2e and 2e was playable.

>>46965298
If by "a year" you mean "a week", yes.

>>46965352
The backer preview has been out for a long while, but they've only just now released the final version, and up for sale.
There's only a few minor changes between those versions, so we've had pretty much the same rules for a long time to go over them.
Consensus is that's actually pretty solid mechanically, far better than 2e, and some are saying better than other systems.
Still has a few minor issues people like to bitch about though, plus it was late as fuck.

>>46965467
>minor issues

MA merit and Craft are not minor issues

>>46965467
>far better than 2e, and some are saying better than other systems.
It's a sad fact that being better at Exalted than other systems is higher praise than being far better at it than previous editions of Exalted.

>>46965536
Craft is shit, but the MA Merit is about as minor as issues can get while still reaminign issues.

Which specific and general issues did 3e fix from earlier editions?

>>46965276
>Bottom line it for me: Good or shit?

Its shit.

>>46965617

Combat isn't ass anymore. Social influence isn't ass anymore. Charms have levels of function between "completely obliterate the problem with no roll and no interactivity" and "don't do shit, lel." Power gap between the strongest and the weakest Exalts is smaller. Craft is dragged kicking and screaming into doing things on-screen (the Craft Charmset is overbloated shit, but the chassis itself accomplishes a noble goal).

>>46963173
>Solar power defines Exalted. We're not done with them—not nearly! We will revisit them eventually. The core book and the backer PDF is not the end, just the beginning.

Brave words after being over 3 years late with the core and 1,5 years late with the first splatbook.

What is the most busted ability I can use with the assloads of initiative I can get from using Awakening Eye and Fate-Shifting Solar Arete together for initiative?

>>46965649
Could you elaborate on which flaws of 2e combat and social have been improved? I mean general issues it hass solved, not the specific mechanical changes.

>>46965649
>Craft is dragged kicking and screaming into doing things on-screen (the Craft Charmset is overbloated shit, but the chassis itself accomplishes a noble goal).

The noble goal being to introduce grindquest mechanics to a tabletop RPG? Go craft five rats so you can craft a wolf, then craft six wolves so you can craft a bear, finally craft eight wolves so you can craft your epic mount.

>>46965695
Thrown really likes going first.

>>46965696
Combat has actual pacing now, so it's not "repeat the exact same thing I did last turn until one or the other of us runs out of motes and is therefore dead." The mechanics force moments of weakness even in strong combatants, and simple timing can make the difference between an attack that does jack shit and an attack that completely turns the battle around.

Social influence is driven completely by the target's Intimacies, so walking up to someone who ardently hates your guts and convincing him to do something for you is not just mildly more difficult, but flat out impossible until/unless you can find a different Intimacy to justify the favor and/or perform the long series of social influences needed to reshape his Intimacies towards liking you.

>>46963669
>"Solar players should consider these new Solar Charms a must-have"
That's why we didn't include them in the core book
t.Morke

>>46965735

If you're grinding with Craft, you're already literally wasting your time.

That's the whole point of the basic objectives: if you aren't solving an on-screen, relevant problem, you don't get rewarded.

The goal was to get Craft characters to think about problems the same way the Melee character does: "Here's an obstacle in front of the party. How can I help?" instead of the way crafting worked in 2E, which was more "Sits on the character sheet doing nothing until a week of downtime happens, then I outfit the party with a warstrider each."

>>46965778
>The goal
Too bad that's not what they accomplished then.

>>46965276

It's okay. Definitely not god's gift to gaming like Holden and Morke would like you to think. It's a pretty overwrought system for better or worse and, in my opinion, doesn't feel overwhelmingly stronger than 2e (post 2.5) in practice. Granted, there are definitely improvements, without a doubt - the social influence system is infinitely better than 2e's asinine social combat system, for example. Mass combat is significantly more sensible. I dislike certain directions they went with regard to things like languages and Martial Arts, which demand too high a cost. I also think Sorcery is, by comparison, too cheap. There's good, there's a lot of okay, but there's also some bad, basically.

But it's like... after all this time, I can't really bring myself to care too much about it. "Oh, it finally came out" was all I thought when the backer's version was released. It's not terrible or shitty or anything. By rights, it does a lot pretty good and now that the art has been changed, its presentation is quite extravagant. I'm just... not impressed, is all.

That's what it comes down to for me. It's okay. It's not bad, but it's not that impressive either.

>>46965794

Just about every person I've seen use Craft in actual play does exactly that. Maybe you're just bad at theorycrafting?

>>46965778
>The goal
>they wanted the system to be good so it is!

>>46963296
But true.
Stay mad.

>>46965649
>(the Craft Charmset is overbloated shit, but the chassis itself accomplishes a noble goal).

Translation:
Implementation is shit, but the devs had a good idea, once, for one or two minutes, though the implementation is so utter shit only a fanboy wouldn't throw up immediately.

Or:
"My country has economical issues I'll fix when I'd be elected!"
Five years later:
"Well, it's worse than before, now everyone is under the level of poverty, 95% of people are homeless, children are dying in groves, dysentery and malaria is running rampant, we are officially the poorest country on earth, the level of suicide is skyrocketing, in two years we'll all be dead"
Anon: This politician had a good idea, though the implementation is a little flawed.

Master of fucking understatement and ignoring the obvious right here.

>>46965808
>languages
Seriously? How can you fuck up languages?

>>46965794
Agreed. The problem with Craft,and I can't believe I have to reiterate this AGAIN, is that the charmset is designed to acomplish the exact opposite thing the subsystem is designed to do, instead of expanding on it. The charms are there to make the subsystem obsolete, not to make it more fun and interesting.

That's the problem of Craft. Everything else, as much of it as there is, is an afterthought. You want to fix Craft? Either remove the subsystem or remove the charms and replace what you removed with something that works nicely with what's left.

>>46965810
>I-I-I can't possibly be wrong! You must be t-theorycrafting!

>>46965834

They're a merit now, so you can master more than 5 and at a flat 3XP each instead of as scaling cost. I dunno what his complaint is.

>>46965831
>Implementation is shit

The chassis IS implementation.

The Craft Charmset is a separate issue from the chassis, and one i already acknowledged as horrid. It takes all of 4 Charms to be able to craft artifact 5s right out the gate, and everything past that is just wank.

>>46965871
Oh, you're one of those. The craft apologists.

Ok holden.

>>46965276
>>46965371
Yeah, basically this. It's 2e with a new coat of paint. (Which, no, despite the revisionism, is not what I was promised.)
If you thought 2e was good, 3e is good.
If you thought 2e was shit, 3e is shit.
>It's shit.

>>46964271
That's hat you get when you try to represent what in it's concept is a set of broad powers geared to describe unlimited number of different characters, who each expresses their power diffently, but you only have a couple of D&D games as your learning experience.

Exalted system is a relic of the past and the only thing keeping it alive is a zealous commitment to "muh tradition". It would be easier just to let it go and vanish into the sands of time where it belongs.

So what I'm getting from this: Craft is shit but otherwise it's pretty good?

>>46965654
Look, those pictures they have of Richard Thomas in compromising positions aren't going anywhere. So they know they get to keep writing.

>>46965892
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Holden specifically said they made Craft heavily convoluted and full of Charms specifically because they hated how players used Craft in 2e.

>>46965913
It entirely depends on what you're looking for! If you wanted Carft to be about trying to wriggle out of having to boring and mundane shit and build world-shaping wonders, by way of taking, like, 15 charms, then it's great!

If you wanted it wo work on it's own and be a fun thing anybody can engage in and didn't care much for making artifacts, it's shit.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the raksha. So they're basically chaos entities that take a form and get really into a storybook-like role in order to capture humans to suck their souls out? Anyone got any good examples of them being used?

>>46965920
>the previous system was dumb
>better make the new one so fucked that nobody uses it!
Is this also how we got 2e sorcery?

>>46965936
So it's shit.

>>46965940

More or less. They don't eat the whole soul, but they drain all the good parts out of it until all that's left is a dull-eyed, brainless husk.

Some clever Guild-traders have found a way to make three times the money: first they sell the victims to the Raksha, then offer to take the useless husks off their hands, then sell them again to people who need dumb-labor slaves.

>>46965961

Or you could read it instead of trusting autists on the internet who would blame Holden for their dog dying if they could.

It's shit, don't get me wrong, but its really fucking boring to see people just parroting each other.

>>46965943
That.

Holden wanted to make Craft not an autowin button. He wanted.

He wanted.

He had the desire to. Specifically, he once expressed the desire to. Want, desire. He said he wanted to.

But in truth, in the actual implementation, in the hard reality of what actually happens, either by genuine incompetence or malevolence, the Craft system is utter, unrelenting shit.

>>46965913
>So what I'm getting from this: Craft is shit but otherwise it's pretty good?

Rather than "good" "shit", lemme try actually explaining it.

The new craft system tries, as anon mentioned, to make you do stuff on screen rather than wait for downtime and then shit out god tier artifacts.

The way it does this is by introducing several new resources and crafting tiers.

You must craft "basic projects" such as horseshoes and arrows to generate "silver points".

You then spend silver points to be able to craft "major projects" such as swords and armor. Completing these generates "gold points".

You then spend gold points to be able to craft "superior projects" such as daiklaves. Completing these generates "white points".

At each of these three tiers you get more color points from finishing a project if you <3 the result, or if someone else <3 the result, or if you get a long-term benefit from it. This is where the onscreen comes in: for example, you roleplay encountering a soldier in the tavern and make him a nice new sharp dagger so he <3 it and you get extra points.

Finally, you can spend white points to start crafting "legendary projects", but since these have a *minimum* completion time of ten years, they probably won't come up in play unless you buy ALL THE CRAFT charms to ignore half the craft rules, at which point, well, you're ignoring half the craft rules.

>>46965778
They didn't really solve the problem, though, because crafting is still a downtime activity. Everyone can participate in a fight or in a conversation, but if you're crafting something then everyone has to wait around for you to finish goldfishing with the abstruse, overcomplicated set of rules and charms. Whatever problem you're trying to solve to earn that crafting xp, a specialist in pretty much any other ability could have solved the problem faster and in a manner less boring to everyone else at the table.

>>46966163

If you're using more than an Excellency and one roll on basic and major projects (which are the ones you're supposed to use to solve on-screen, immediate problems), something has gone wrong.

File: neutral.jpg (118KB, 868x842px) Image search: [Google] [Yandex] [Bing]

118KB, 868x842px

>>46965834

They didn't fuck up languages, exactly. I said I disliked their direction, which is purchasing a Merit as opposed to tying it to Linguistics as had been the case previously. It's honestly a rather minor gripe, come to think of it, and not something I'd petition the ST to change.

More important things I don't like about 3E:
*Craft. Holy shit.
*Martial Arts buy in.
*BP/XP divide. Actually kind of a minor issue for myself, but I see why people find it a major problem.
*XP-using charms (mostly in Craft and Lore). I recognize the balancing purpose behind this, I just don't like it.
*The excessive charm bloat such that I feel my progress to the charms I actually care about is stilted, especially when there are so many charms that are more about giving minute dice advantages rather than special effects or anything that is playstyle defining. This is a source of much consternation for myself, actually, that rather than having a lot of neat options to select from and be excited about, like being able to choose one among a set of shiny jewels to reward myself with, I feel like I'm being forced to walk a mile, picking up little gold nuggets before reaching the slab they were chipped off of.

That's just my feelings, though. There are also things, however, that I do like, such as the Bridge keyword, social influence, that sort of thing.

I do not think 3e was a fuck-up or anything, exactly. I don't hate it at all. It just... doesn't instill in me a sense of prevailing happiness, excitement, and appreciation.

"Yeah, it's Exalted 3e. It's fine. It ain't bad. Still got a neat setting. Meh. I guess I'll play it. Will be fun with friends." That's how it is.

Are there some examples around for how this Craft system actually works, using a character with stats and certain Charms? I'd like to see for myself if it is as bad as you all say.

>>46966116
Did Holden not realize that the reason you don't craft onscreen is because it's boring, not because it doesn't factor into the party's goals? And the craft xp system makes it even more boring, because unlike every other kimd of character in Exalted a crafter has to do a steady supply of projects that are completely beneath him. The Melee guy doesn't have to kill a certain amount of extras before he can get rewarded for killing serious threats. The Lore guy doesn't have to regularly find a reason to research trivial subjects that any mortal with a library card could take care of. They all get to do the exciting stuff right away, but the Craft guy can't.

>>46963490
>TAW
I literally cannot conceive of anything more awful.

>>46963558
>silver Solars was a serious problem
It's a fucking squirrel shit system. If you don't think Lunar charms will simply rehash everything Solars can do but slightly worse, ha-fucking-ha. The dipshits running the show aren't creative and they'll leash their best writers to their worst standards.

>>46963681
>I feel like the spirit of TAW was in the right place (make Lunars strong independant beastpeople who don't need no Solar)
That wasn't what TAW was trying to accomplish. Like, at all. Maybe the "don't need Solars" part but that's ridiculous because you do need Solars on some level. To be foils if nothing else.

My group probed me on where I'd go with Lunars left to my own devices. It's lengthy, so have this pastebin:

http://pastebin.com/y5RM8pmX

The thing that bugs me about all the craft special rules is how they seem to be completely arbitrary PC-only limitations that represent nothing in the world.

Imagine that you're a sorcerer rather than a crafter, but you still want a custom daiklave. So you buy a workshop and you stock it with relevant supplies magical and mundane. Then you cast Summon Second Circle Demon and call up the ancient craftsdemon Alveua of the Forge of Night. You bind her to your service for a year and a day, point her to the workshop, and say "Make for me a daiklave that will search me out and fly back to my hand if I lose it."

Are we supposed to imagine that Alveua, who has crafted *entire species*, would ever be in a position to reply "Sorry, not enough colorpoints, I gotta make a bunch of horseshoes first" ?

>>46966283
>The Melee guy doesn't have to kill a certain amount of extras before he can get rewarded for killing serious threats.

The difference is, the Melee guy doesn't really have a choice in the matter. If he doesn't bother to kill some bandits because "nuyehh I wanna fight Ligier!" then... he's gonna die, on account of the bandits that stabbed him.

The craftsman absolutely has that choice, and a lot of the time they will choose to not bother with the "bandits" even if that means their Craft skill goes unused until downtime.

>>46965696
>Could you elaborate on which flaws of 2e combat and social have been improved? I mean general issues it hass solved, not the specific mechanical changes.

The system is extensively different to 2E, so it's kind of hard not to get into specific mechanics. At its heart it's still got the same core problem - the ultimate superiority of Dex over literally everything else - but that's not just an Exalted problem, is it?

The rest of the core combat system is vastly superior. Dividing attacks into withering and decisive is initially counter-intuitive for those who have played previous editions, but once you get past that, it completely fixes the central problems of lethality and perfect-spamming that afflicted previous editions. Your defensive powers just drop like a stone when you get Crashed; you're left vulnerable as shit, and you better pray your allies can save you. That's something previous editions couldn't even approach. Even Solars can be vulnerable now. To help, though, the movement system (while fiddly and imperfect) allows for ends to combats other than "one side dead" and "teleport away", due to the whole Withdrawal/Go To Ground ability, while Stealth is also a flipping enormous deal. Night castes are actually really survivable now, arguably more than Dawns depending on the build, since stealthing out is actually workable.

The other huge improvement is Battlegroups, which take the place of mass combat units from previous editions. There is no longer a distinction between mass combat and small-scale combat; BGs act like characters with huge dice pools and some special interactions with the combat system.

And finally, social influence (it's not really "social combat" any more) is now a Misc Action in combat time. Which means you can't use Join Battle as a counterargument any more and intimidation is a valid battle strategy.

>>46966253
https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?770414-Exalted-3e-Crafting-301-a-Tutorial

>>46965871
>4 Charms to be able to craft artifact 5s right out the gate
Which four charms?

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>>46965920
>not letting me just make an Imbued Amalgam to shunt all the Craft responsibilities on to
>instead making the Craft system something that I don't want to interact with in any capacity whatsoever

>>46965276
>Bottom line it for me: Good or shit?
The core system is not cripplingly flawed. But it does appear to break down a bit with combat. But you probably already guessed that would happen. This is a Storyteller engine game.

>>46966253
My buddy is playing a Craft Supernal and even with some houserules to tweak Craft he very quickly reached the point where he didn't need to meaningfully interact with the Craft system.

There are Charms to give you a ton of S/G/W XP just for doing random shit. There's ways to shift lower XP to higher XP. So you no longer have to actually worry about Craft XP.

Then there's the speed Charms which make even Superior and Legendary take only a bit of time.

Then finally the Power Charms. He rarely gets asked to actually roll out Craft because it takes me and him about 10 minutes of finish a single roll which inevitably ends up being far past what is actually necessary. He has reached the point where he can finish an Artifact 5 in a single roll which takes about 2 weeks without needing to roll because the average far exceeds 100 successes necessary.

>>46966251

I am of your opinion of shit I do not like in 3e. But I don't mind the flaws compared to the rest of the product. Craft is my biggest problem but I houseruled that first thing. The XP costs for some charms I toned down as well (like Wyld Shaping). 3e however as the rest of the system goes is damn fine and solid to where I want to play it.

>>46966116
Craft is a bizarre system because it's totally unlike how crafting actually works, either realistically or in mythology. I've never seen a story where the Ultimate Blacksmith spends all his time making average swords until he's got enough experience points to make the Legendary Sword of Destiny. He just makes the Legendary Sword of Destiny, because he's the Ultimate Blacksmith and his sword-making skills are unmatched.

Wanting to give crafters a reason to go out and do things is certainly a good idea. But instead of this weird grinding system, they should have focused on the actual connections craftsmen have with the outside world. Namely, materials and inspiration. Going out to slay an ancient behemoth to use its claws in a spear? Watching the weather patterns from a mystical moutaintop to figure out how to make a flying machine? That's the stuff stories are made of.

>>46966355
>The Crafting rules in 3e are excellent – easily my favorite of any RPG I’ve read – but they’re built for a certain style of character, and several core components that make the whole thing sing aren’t immediately obvious from a cursory reading.
Oh this'll be good.

>>46966374
>He has reached the point where he can finish an Artifact 5 in a single roll which takes about 2 weeks without needing to roll because the average far exceeds 100 successes necessary.
The average of the single roll that he makes far exceeds 100 successes? In one roll? There's no way that's true.

>>46966283
>Did Holden not realize that the reason you don't craft onscreen is because it's boring, not because it doesn't factor into the party's goals?
This was explained to him many, many times.

Keeping Craft as a single ability that lets the Twilight "fix/produce whatever is broken/needed as appropriate to the story" was suggested as the best fix.

BUT HE KNEW BETTER

Such a logical solution would never do, nay, sir, not for the masterwork that is Exalted 3!

>>46966356

Sorry, I thought Supreme Masterwork Focus applied to superiors.

Flawless Handiwork Method (x2), Experiential Conjuring of the True Void, Unbroken Image Focus.

5/5s in Int/Craft, plus a specialty and a stunt for 3 more dice. Plop a willpower down for an autosuccess, so we're at 7.5 successes. FHM gets us to at least 8.2 (I'm not sure how to account for reroll-10s, so assume it's a little higher than that). Experiential Conjuring gets you another non-Charm success and 6 non-Charm dice, so now we're up to 12.5, and then Unbroken Image Focus allows us to buy another ~8 successes, for 20.5

Artifact 5s have an effective difficulty of 21 (100 goal number / 6 terminus + 5 difficulty).

So I was slightly in error; I thought Supreme Masterwork Focus applied to superiors when it does not, making it a very close race, but if you can find literally any other boon (a 2-die stunt, a bonus from another Charm, etc.) you're good to go, and you definitely have artifact 4s and less on lock.

>>46966284
>http://pastebin.com/y5RM8pmX
Why aren't you writing Lunars? Now I'm sad

>>46966337
If the Craft guy is only crafting to solve pressing problems, which appears to be the intention of the new rules, then he doesn't really have a choice in the matter, either. Either he builds his thing or the important task goes undone.

What craft xp does, though, is create a perverse incentive to solve as much as possible through making gifts of shitty little crafted items. This is not an incentive that exists for any other ability. There's an incentive to put the entire party on hold so the Craft guy can run back to his workshop and make a goofy present for the guard that the Presence guy could have just made friends with or the Bureaucracy guy could have bribed with coin. And even though the latter two options might have made a ton more sense in the story, it's critical to one of the PCs' ability to keep up with the rest that the party choose the Santa Claus route instead.

>>46966476

Wait.

I'm an idiot, SMF does apply, but it needs a repurchase, so 6 Charms for Artifact 5s on lock, 4 Charms for artifact 4s on lock, and on down.

It's expensive craft-point wise, but you can do it.

>>46963243

I am working on an Infernal homebrew, albeit it has been stalled.

You can homebrew the old shintai`s in mine (Though they`re much weaker so its a question of why)

>>46963490

TAW did make a few good charms to cannibalize (Like their excellency rewarding Attribute dots when using them is neat, different from other attributes, and helps with the DBT problem)

>>46966476
>>46966512

I also completely forgot about the excellency, so just slap another 5 successes in there somewhere, idgaf.

tl;dr: Craft doesn't actually have that big of a buy-in, most of the Power tree is just win-more jank.

>>46966346
(cont)

I won't pretend it's perfect; timing is badly written even with the corrections and needs some Rule 0 to smooth over the cracks. This is not a one-mechanic-fits-all system and there are a million special cases to hold in mind; there are some good cheatsheets out there and I thoroughly recommend them. Gambits are a good idea that isn't quite fleshed out enough and needs more love. And while collapsing the weapons and armour stats into categories was a good idea, there just aren't enough armour tags to make it work (weapons are great, though).

Oh fucking hell, though, the Charms. This is a system where you HAVE to put a quick precis of the Charm mechanics on your character sheet, because if you try to remember all those mechanics you will go completely fucking crazy. Some of the combat Charms are fiddly dice tricks, which is annoying, but actually a lot of them completely change the way you approach fights; a Charm as basic as One Weapon Two Blows is enough to shift your tactical choices a lot. This is a system where Dodge can be used offensively. There's no One True Way here, no Chungian single optimal approach. That can be both good and bad, though; I know that my current player group are really wishing they made some different choices now they fully understand the options they have.

Ignore the bullshit about MA. Yeah, it's annoying paying through the nose for it, but you effectively get extra XP to spend on it, so it's not that bad and the Martial Arts themselves are stunningly designed. Every one of them is pretty much an entire approach to combat in itself, and they just so characterful I can see people buying them purely because being a Single Point stylist is just flat-out cooler than being Solar McSwordswell.

Oh, finally, Sorcery's a combat option now - although still not a particularly fantastic one, but some of the shiny new tricks that come with it can make an Exalted Sorcerer a serious threat to contend with.

>>46966453
I mean that's blowing a ton of Power Charms but yeah they combine in ridiculous ways. Let's see here.

Reroll 6s
10s explode
Double 7s
Every set of 3 successes lets you convert a failure to a 10, which explodes.
A ton of extra non-Charm dice, something like close to 20?
Once you've resolved all of that and you have your total successes. Divide that by 3, you roll that many more non-Charm dice. If you roll more than 3 successes on that, you get 3 more non-Charm dice. All those successes then trigger the same effect so you get even more dice.

It gets ridiculous.

>>46966393

I would agree that it's solid, especially in the sense that the game does not have any gaping holes a player is likely to fall into because the system is all sorts of broken. It is an improvement, I at least would agree. 3e's Core is miles ahead of 2e's Core without extensive errata in every capacity. I don't think that can really be denied.

But solid does not mean "marvelous" and my play experience with 3e has not been conspicuously superior to my play experience with 2e after 2.5 and alongside various houserules my table relies on. Perhaps this has more to do with the group I play tabletop with than the editions, since all of us put a lot of effort into our characters and roleplaying and the shift hasn't really changed that. It doesn't feel better, just different. Some of those differences are great, some are just changes, some feel outright bad.

But solid I can agree with, yeah. I just can't even bring myself to be disappointed that it doesn't feel like the shining glorious perfect edition the devs were so eager to deliver. Maybe it'll get better with supplemental books.

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>>46966636
What the fuck.

>>46965808
Of course not.

Morke and Holden are liars

>>46966684

It's extremely difficult to tell how many successes you're going to get on a roll, and it takes forever to actually make the roll.

The worst part is that when I think of a crafter character, I don't think of someone who sits at a workshop all day. I think of stuff like punching a wall, shattering it and revealing a perfectly crafted stone sword that shatters at the end of the scene. I think of someone who creates weapons casually.

It would probably make more sense to consolidate the crafting abilities into one, remove the points system, then require mortals to have a specialty to avoid a penalty, and make artifacts require the player to obtain a mystical item within the story.

So the circle goes into a city and deposes a tyrant, and the crafter rips out the tyrants heart and describes how he calcifies it and uses it as the crown jewel in a crown that allows you to spend a willpower to sense the intimacies of feat someone has. Or the circle kills a behemoth and the crafter uses its claws to make a spear. Or the crafter grabs a big block of obsidian and gets into a fight with a Wyld Hunt, using the blows to carve the block into a sword, finishing it by plunging it into the hearts of the Dragon-Blooded.

I think that's what Craft and the Crafting Charms should lead to.

So... How long until they realize that the system is shit and it gets handed off to someone else to make 4e?

>>46966864
That would require it actually being shit.

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In 3e, when you reroll a die, you still get to count all its successes, correct? Each 10 you reroll still gives you the two successes?

>>46966880
It is, according to everyone in the thread save one person.

>>46966922

>Each 10 you reroll still gives you the two successes?

Yes.

>>46966922
>In 3e, when you reroll a die, you still get to count all its successes, correct?

Yeah, exploding dice rules

>>46966864
>So... How long until they realize that the system is shit and it gets handed off to someone else to make 4e?

1e came out in 2001.
2e came out in 2006.
3e came out in 2016.
At this rate, 4e will come out around 2031, so the handover will probably be in the 2020s.

>>46966355
I don't see how the other PCs can interact with this system. It's one person playing with themselves and the ST, rolling dice and adding up numbers while everyone else does...what, exactly? Just sit around twiddling their thumbs? Maybe this system would be good in a video game or something but it doesn't look conducive to tabletop gaming.

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>>46966476
>>46966512
>>46966590

>>46966922

The vast majority vs vocal idiots.

Right.

Go back to 2.75e then

>>46967100
>Go back to 2.75e then
You realize we're talking about the Crafting system, right? Not the entire system?

>>46966922
Contrary to
>>46965276
discussion of the system doesn't actually come down to
>Good or shit?

The system has flaws, and its not helped by the fact that most of those flaws are most obvious while reading the book rather than playing the game. Personally, I think there's a lot of fun to be had from it, but then I'm good at playing and running flawed games. The key is to ignore or bypass sections that don't work so well and use what you like, and that's easy to do when the core systems (combat and social, in this game and in every other game, really) work well. Crafting doesn't work? Don't play a crafter. Sorry about that, but it really doesn't have to ruin everything else for you.

Put another way, it'd be much easier to create a Craft Charms 2.0 for Exalted 3e than it would to rebalance magic, make hacking rules that aren't horrible, and strip out everything that makes combat take hours in Shadowrun 5e. And I'm running Shadowrun 5e, so if I can get five players consistently having fun with that prematurely released mess of a core rule book then Exalted is going to be barrels of laughs.

>>46967110
The first guy said "the system" and "4e", pretty sure he was talking about the system as a whole.

If he was just criticizing the Craft system he would have referred to errata or something like that, not an entire whole new edition to fix one small aspect of a system.

>>46966880
It has parts that aren't but
>playing by the rules means you can get tons of artifact 5 through Craft
>specializing in craft gives you tons of free XP
(assorted gxp generation charms + sublime transference + exegesis of the distilled form)
>charm bloat
>everything about Lunars
There is already enough known to be wrong with 3e to justify going to a new edition.

>>46967110

I have played since the first leak, and not a single person in my group nor the other groups I know have had a problem with it.

All of you idiots need to actually see how it works out in play rather than just masturbating over numbers and screaming "IT'S BROKEN!!!" during orgasm.

>>46967138
Will that be a new record for the life cycle of an edition of a tabletop RPG? It's obsolete before it's even officially out. Even the old Ninja Turtles RPG had more shelf life than that.

>>46967131
Everyone for the past hour had been talking about Crafting. You don't need to >> to continue talking on the same subject. He mentioned 4e because how else are they going to fix the crafting system besides create a new edition? Try reading the thread sometime.

>>46967138
>everything about Lunars
Lunars isn't even out yet. Lunars isn't even previewed yet. Lunars isn't even leaked yet. What's wrong with Lunars already?

>>46967170

And I have had a player just stop doing a Crafter and essentially reroll because of Craft's bullshit. And the other groups I know looked at it and said fuck it. I do not know a SINGLE crafter personally now in 3e besides the ones that houseruled the bullshit away.

So yeah anecdotal stories.

>>46967170
>not a single person in my group nor the other groups I know have had a problem with it.
So you're saying nobody used it? That's probably a problem in its own right, fampai.

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>>46967263

>>46967202
One of my players had exactly the same experience with War. Let's try to put together a list of all the supernal abilities that should never, ever be taken.

>>46967304

Well that is due to lack of content rather then the system being shit at base. War and Mass Combat is nearly universally liked but it lacks any higher end charms simply because the low essence charms are too good.

>>46967180
Friend, I've been in this thread for hours, I see the flow of conversation and what that guy said was pretty easy to read both ways since at least me and one other guy both read it as "system as a whole" and you read it as "just Craft".

No need to be hostile friend.

>>46963243
If you want to go Devil Tiger, use the Exigent rules. I'm not saying play an Exigent, I'm saying use blasphemous sorceries to pervert your own Exaltation into one of your own design and use the Exigent rules as a guideline.

>>46967322

The Essence 4+ thing is only relevant after 25 sessions. Ride, Sail and Survival also have no high Essence charms, and they're sort of similar in that you can happily ignore them if they're not what your campaign is about.

If I'm reading the charm trees from the copypasta correctly, Dodge, Linguistics, and Thrown only have one Essence 4+ charm. Awareness and Integrity have two. Bureaucracy, Investigate, and Stealth have three.

I'm surprised that combat trees like Dodge and Thrown don't have higher level options, but they do already kick all the arse so I'm not sad about it.

>>46967304
But there's nothing wrong with War at all, what was your player's issue?

>>46967452
Just got back to the thread and-I don't know, I'm pretty sure the Exigent rules haven't actually come out. But I'm also pretty sure it'll still boil down back to hella homebrewing because I doubt the example Exigent charms will be on the level of Solaroid charms.

Also the issue of charms no longer being the DNA of the Yozis would make coming up with how exactly one starts developing into a Primordial harder.

>>46967631
Exigent rules will be out long before Infernals though.

>>46967687
True. Call me picky, but having power sourced from the OG creators of the universe just feels cooler regardless of mechanic, not to mention makes emulating them much more explainable since no Exigent's patron has third circle souls.

Do 4s and 5s in abilities cost both BP and one of the free 28 dots in chargen?

>>46967772

Just bonus points.

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>>46967602
Should take away 2 craft charms for the final version, but the rest is up to date.

>>46967924
God I hate the inverted proportions of Essence to Skill Rating. It makes no fucking sense.

>>46967924
Not including MA, each ability has an average of 31 charms each.
And then we're gonna get the 81 backer charms book.

>>46967304
War is solid through E3, which is all you want from a Supernal. The only reason to reroll a War Supernal is because there's no war in the campaign. Which is, granted, a very valid reason but has nothing in particular to do with War as a Supernal.

The other standard "LOL WHY NO GOOD E5" Supernal is Awareness, but that's just an indication that the person's never played a Supernal Awareness character as if they had they'd be unable to post due to all the Initiative in the way.

Supernal Integrity's shit, though. Here's hoping we get cool anima tricks for it like in 2.5e.

>>46967988
What would happen if you swapped Essence and Ability requirements for Charms?

>>46966922
No, Craft is shit. Craft is not the whole system. Fuck, you could fix Craft with a good Arms of the Chosen book - not that they will, it'll just be "LOL EVOCATIONS" but you could.

>>46968140

Basically nobody would have Charms outside their Supernal.

If you want a quick and dirty fix, just say that no Solar Charm can have an Ability prerequisite higher than its Essence prerequisite + 2. And of those that are already 3/1, the ones with no prerequisite Charms become 1/1, and the ones with exactly one Charm prereq become 2/1.

I dunno how much that specifically changes the numbers, but it at least ensures there's no 5/1 shit.

>>46968140
You could get by with lower ability scores, but you're fucked for starting essence in an incredibly steep curve leaving most of the charms for essence 4 and 5.
Encouraging people to start with 5s and having a bunch of options for essence 1-3 is a much better situation which we have.

>>46968140
Most trees would become effectively unusable until Essence 3.

>>46968124
A Size 1 battlegroup is around 5 guys. And War supernal will still turn them into the killdozer.

Getting rid of Mass Combat made War a LOT more useful.

>>46968172
I totally agree, but if you're running a sneaky-social campaign War becomes pointless. Same as any other Supernal in the wrong campaign.

Am I wrong in thinking that sorceries during combat don't seem very useful?

Most attacking sorceries take 15-20sm which when you're rolling 8-10 dice for accumulating sorcery motes and then maybe 3-5 free from your once per scene shaping ritual, it's gonna take at least 3 and maybe 4 turns to unleash the actual spell, and they don't seem particularly more deadly than just making decisive strikes.

I can understand if they don't want there to be level 20 wizards casting thirty meteors in a single battle, but can one make a starting character's sorceries useful in combat?

Also I may just be retarded and gay for not understanding the rules well enoug.

Anybody here have a link to that craft rewite that one guy did and was it any good?

>>46968898
http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/exalted/797631-why-craft-sucks-how-i-fixed-it

>>46968898
which one? there's actually two rewrites

>>46968757
Excellencies.

>>46968978
thanks

>>46968757
You can excellency the shaping roll to push it down to 2-1 turns.

In any case, a spell like Death of Obsidian Butterflies is useful. There are very few charms that apply decisive damage in an AoE, and DoB has a pretty giant AoE.

If you roll 21 dice on the attack roll, and you get 10 successes against a couple large Battle Groups. They have 3 defense since they get a penalty from the spell, so 7 threshold successes. Your damage is (essence + occult + 7), so lets say 14 damage.

For every 4 decisive damage (round up) against a BG you get 1 automatic success. So +4 automatic damage.

So, 14 decisive dice + 4 automatic levels of damage against every BG in the area of effect, AND reduced damage against every individual in the AoE that it hits.

>>46968978
This is stupid because the guy gave craft powers from every ability. His new craft charms can make Glorious Solar Plate, but better because you can give it to people, Solar saber but better, etc

It doesn't feel like craft

any modules or adventures for exalted?

>>46969102
>>46969193
I haven't read enough on Martial arts but using excellencies on shaping sounds way more mote hungry than martial arts.

But I guess if you can get one big hit out of it it'll still be useful.

>>46969369
No, none exist, and definitely zero exist at all for 2e, such a thing would be a terrible idea.

>>46969395
Sorcery and MA are competing for your solar xp, but they're very different.
Sorcery gives you access to that combat ability with 1 spell, and then a bunch of other utility options when you buy more spells. The best part is access to the sorcerous working system.
MAs might be cheaper, but you have to pile on more charms to really see them come into their own and by then it's about regular combat charm balance.

>>46969271
Any other working homebrews then?

>>46969369
there's a few for e2. The intro adventure is fairly decent, but the others are pretty crappy and people like to pretend they don't exist.
e3's too new for official adventures, but I think some guy on rpg.net is putting together an intro adventure with pregens for con games or something.

>>46969407
>>46969369
http://fap.if.usp.br/~fmneto/exalted/pdf/Exalted%202E%20-%20Adventure%20-%20Daughter%20of%20Nexus.pdf

It's a decent starting place if nothing else. The plot hook has a Guild Hierarch hiring the PCs like they were standard adventurers, but plot hooks in Exalted are difficult regardless and I reckon the hook could work. The module begins with the PCs in her office, so if I were GMing it I'd state "Hierarch Artemisia has contacted you with a business proposal, and you are in her office. How did that happen?" and then let the players decide the specifics. If none of them can think of any reason why that meeting could ever take place without violating their character concepts, then either run a different module or tell them to come up with different character concepts because if no one in the party can into Intrigue then you're not doing Exalted right.

>>46969537
I saw one but can't find it right now. Somewhere on the OOP forums

>>46968757
Sorcery is the ultimate combat utility beast.

First up, there's straightforward AoE blasting. 3E Solars lack very much of this (though I expect DBs will have plenty). With an Excellency and a good pick of Shaping Ritual, you'll get it off in one round or two at most, and you don't become a complete sitting duck any more.

Secondly, you can pick up Mists of Eventide for crowd control. The fixed version probably won't drop many exalts, but you can likely rely on it to take battlegroups out of the fight.

Thirdly, even a frontline fighter can use Stormwind Rider to great effect, and not just for closing the gap.

Finally, as in all previous editions, Sorcery is unsurpassed at combat prep. Wood Dragon Claws + Skin of Unbreakable Bronze + Brawl + Demon of the First Circle (or Summon Elemental) means you can lay out insane single-target damage, with a degree of protection, and have your minions watch your back until you can get to the next poor sucker. And that's all before we start spending xp for combat bonuses from Workings.

>>46969774
Mist got nerfed to fuck in the final release

3e took so long to actually come out that I'm not even interested in playing it anymore. I feel no enthusiasm or compulsion to play.

:(

>>46970038
Autism is truly an under-represented killer

how hard can a non exalt sorcerer game sorcerous workings?

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Dex 5 build

>>46970069
They're more limited by the fact that they can't Full Excellency every roll (50% of that applies to DBs and uncreative Lunars), but they can still do stuff.

How good is the mortal sorcerer you're imagining? If you're talking talented but not incredibly talented, Intelligent but not Genius, that's probably Int3Occ3. Maybe add a specialization in Sorcerous Workings to that for seven dice.

A basic, Finesse 1 Ambition 1 Terrestrial working requires the sorcerer to get five successes over five rolls (more rolls if they have more Means), which is totally doable on seven dice. Ambition 2 requires ten successes, still pretty reliable, but Ambition 3's twenty successes is not. And if you add any Finesse, you're losing two successes per roll so you're probably limited to Ambition 1.

Mutations are the classic way to get long term personal advantages out of Sorcerous Workings (Ambition 2 Terrestrial), but the ones granted by a mortal sorcerer are more likely to be "I FEEL THE WARP OVERTAKING ME" than "and now I have angel wings".

>>46970069

Depends on how willing he is to get fucked up by Finesse, and how many Means he can assemble.

With 13 dice (5+5+spec+stunt) and 1 autosuccess (WP), he can manage 7.5*5 = 37.5 successes without any Means, which is enough to pull off a Finesse 1 Celestial-3 Working.

>>46970227
How does she breathe?

Wait.

>>46966337

If the Circle encounters a bunch of bandits that melee guy obviously outclasses, the ST probably isn't going to have him roll it out - just narrate the outcome.

If the Circle encounters a trivial crafty problem, Craftnerd is like "no, no, no, I must dice it for points!" which is just as slow and boring for the group as watching melee guy melee trivial opponents to death.

>>46969968

Isn't it just short range now and has a 1WP cost to start puppeteering somebody?

>>46970505
I play an online game, and I don't forsee it causing any delay longer than it takes to type '/roll 11d10'

>>46970340
With the caveat that reaching beyond your means is pretty punishing. A Terrestrial sorcerer aiming for a Celestial working fails totally on a botch, treats a failure as a botch, raises the base roll difficulty by 2, and increases the interval to 3 months.

So his 7.5 successes per roll drop some, courtesy the base Difficulty 3.

>>46970770

Right, totally forgot that. So knocking 10 successes off, he can still manage a Celestial-1.

>>46970310
>>46970340
>>46970770
>>46970802
So trying to get that immortality would be hard as shit, then? Probably have to do other workings to give elf buffs that make that getting Immortality easier

>>46970851
Immortality always has a caveat anyways, plus it puts a huge fucking target on your back.

>>46970851
Hard as shit, yes.

>>46970867
huge target?

>>46970867
>>46970944
It wouldn't make you any more targetable than a sorcerer in general, really. Maybe in a few lifetimes rumors that you never age or die might crop up, and people eager to live forever themselves might come at you for the secret, but otherwise, you'll be hunted (or not) for other reasons.

>>46970944
You're already anathema. Once word gets out that you're an IMMORTAL anathema, it's going to be hunts until either you're dead or the last person in creation.

>>46968124

There's nothing really good at E3 in war anyway. Get War God Descendant and Rout-Stemming Gesture, and you've got most of what War offers.

>>46971037
We were discussing mortals, mortals aren't already anathema.

Since the backer charms were suggested by random backers i always thought it was gonna be a joke thing. Like charms to always win at break dancing or charms to bind demons with rock paper scissors instead of a contest of wills.

>>46971068
War God Descendant, Rout-Stemming Gesture, and Ideal Battle Knowledge Prana are the "main' War Charms. Everything else is comparatively unnecessary.

>>46971068
The e3 War charm that gives permanent reroll 6s on all war rolls is pretty damn good. Its changing a d10 into a d9 essentially.

You're leaving out Tiger Warrior training, maybe the best war charm, that gives your men the Elite statblock

>>46971146

I've always thought order commands were a bit of a waste for Solar-tier generals, compared to actually taking a swing themselves. Hope one of the new charms gives an option for reflexive commands, even if its mote-intensive.

>>46971333
You could probably leave out more if you summoned your troops rather than recruiting mortals. Elementals or demons could stand ready, immaterial, for you to give the signal and whistle a Size 1 (+1 for War God Descendant) battlegroup into existence. Pretty sure that's what my Dawn Sorcerer is going to do if I ever get to play this game.

>>46971378
If you're not built to rock combat, Charm-buffed order commands give battlegroups ridiculous pools that likely outperform your personal abilities.

>>46971333

It gives your men the elite block *faster*. There's nothing saying you can't train them to elite status using standard training, its just slower.

The best thing about TWT is its E3 perfect morale thing, but you cant get that with supernal - and it comes with the downside of making all your rallying charms redundant, and precludes rally-for-numbers, so its a double-edged sword at best.

Four Glories is mechanically ok, but a passive dice-trick is pretty meh for a top-tier charm. It doesn't compare to the things you unlock with other Supernals.

The fluff for Supremacy of the Divine Army at the 3-point stunt level is something I'd expect from a top-tier charm - except that it requires a 3-point stunt, and mechanically its just pretty bleh - you already could do pretty much what that charm does, it just lets you do it reflexively, once.

>>46965536
They are if you aren't a Martial Artist or a crafter

>>46971092
Nah, for the back charms you give a narrative description of what you want the charm to do, and the Devs come up with the mechanics. Anything really silly or unflavourful gets locked behind a Apocryphal keyword - which basically means not balanced for all games, requires ST approval, like homebrew.

At least that was what the email I got mentioned.

>>46971378
Order Commands are superior to taking a swing if the Solar doesn't have much combat investment otherwise.

A Solar general outside the front lines performing a full excellency command has a net -5 motes per round (not bad) and is adding an average of 10+ dice to a battlegroup that attacks every opponent it touches.

A size 5 group of Tiger warriors has 16 attack dice, with the +2 bonus to command actions from elite drill, they are hitting everyone in contact with them for 28 average attack dice at 17 base damage. That will penetrate even Solar level defenses

>>46971571
You get things such as "Essence 3+" upgrades with your supernal, you just don't get the (essence x 2) stuff.

>>46971571
+2 might against armies of the Underworld is pretty huge

>>46971807
only if its a repurchase

>>46971814
Nah dude, the free upgrades and the rebuys are both unlocked for supernal as if you were essence 5.

>>46971814
>Charms in your Supernal Ability treat your Essence rating as 5 for the purpose of meeting the prerequisites to purchase and upgrade them
Page 122

>>46971479

Battlegroups *already* have massive dicepools - sure, your command actions make them bigger, but its just a few dice, all told. There's not actually that much you can do to enhance them, and all the options are just dice tricks (excellency, double 9s, reroll 6s) .

I want to see war charms that let you do the impossible with your battlegroup, the way melee charms let you do the impossible with your sword, not just make your numbers bigger. I want more awesome, not just more numbers; more than any other ability, War seems to be the "roll higher" tree.

Maybe some stuff like the Presence tree, where you can confer some of your overt Solar power to your troops. A perfect defence for your battlegroup, so they can just flat ignore uncountable damage because its YOU leading them. Maybe some Biblical inspiration, like how Joshua's army brought down the walls of Jericho with a single shout.

>>46971912
>Battlegroups *already* have massive dicepools - sure, your command actions make them bigger, but its just a few dice, all told. There's not actually that much you can do to enhance them, and all the options are just dice tricks (excellency, double 9s, reroll 6s) .
More dice is always helpful in combat, and Order actions give significantly more than "a few". The dice tricks are similarly helpful, as more dice is always good, and more successes directly translates to more damaging attacks.

>>46971912
>I want to see war charms that let you do the impossible with your battlegroup, the way melee charms let you do the impossible with your sword, not just make your numbers bigger. I want more awesome, not just more numbers; more than any other ability, War seems to be the "roll higher" tree.
Oh, absolutely. War's design is pretty lame. Like I said, there's only 3 Charms you really want. It's bare-bones, and it covers necessary ground, but nothing in it is especially cool.

>>46971571
i would say its probably pretty damn hard to get elite troops using standard training, and many of them simply won't become elites - they don't have the capability.

Example elites like the Brides of Ahlat spend their whole lives training, and the Realm elite are drawn from legionaries with years of front line fighting experience.

Tiger Warrior lets you turn beggars, fat slobs, anyone, into warriors that can match the best Creation has to offer after 1 month

>>46971956
More dice is a big deal when you're trying to penetrate Exalted-level defenses

>>46972133
Or deal greater amounts of damage to enemies with great volumes of health, such as other battlegroups or behemoths.

For all the problems with the minty fresh 3e, I think it's worth remembering just how bad 2e was when it came out:

The stealth caste made a better fighter than the fighter caste because most of the fighter abilities were redundant as fuck while most of the stealth abilities were necessary for combat,

the research caste had a damage buffer that practically made it invincible to low-level threats, and let it gain infinite motes from getting beat on with Essence-Gathering Temper,

social interaction consisted of two people shouting at each other until a) one of them cast fist, because you couldn't shout at people in combat or b) one of them ran out of Willpower and could be convinced to do practically anything that wasn't downright suicidal,

and Resources 1 was twice as valuable as Resources 2 - the former being up to 1 mina a year, the latter up to 1 shekel a year, and 1 mina = 2 shekels.

2e was a shit sandwich across the board and the devs deserve credit for producing a 3e that is not fucked up from one end to the other. (But not very much credit seeing as it's still packed with retarded subsystems and charm bloat. Still, I'll take charm bloat over a monetary scale that literally counts backwards.)

>>46972249
3e's not bad at all, really. Craft is trash and they really needed an editor to go over the systems and Charms and condense / clarify everything.

But overall, it's a solid game.

>>46972288
1E sucked to GM, 2E REALLY sucked to GM, 3E, sucks to GM. I think it's a 'solid game' for players, but woe to the fucking GM, it's the same goddamn terrible shit.

>>46964353
What's TDO again?

>>46972249
i love Charms. give me more charms

>>46972325
I haven't had much trouble on the GM side, though admittedly I've only done so in brief spurts. You need to know the broad strokes of the subsystems, is all.

>>46972327
The Demented One, wrote a whole bunch of 2E errata, along with the current devs.

>>46972327
Robert Vance, Ink Monkey and freelancer for Ex3.

>>46966284
>http://pastebin.com/y5RM8pmX

This has everything to do with that Lunars cannot do and very little to do with what they can and is therefore a very poor write-up from my perspective. It is inordinately focused on their limitations rather than their capabilities and would probably lead to the creation of an unsatisfying splat.

>>46963296

They're right, though.

>>46974774
Arguable.

The main power balance is between the Lunars on one side, and the DBs and Sids on the other.
You need a balance of power such that no group can easily overcome the other, whether due to mechanic reasons or setting reasons. Solars, Infernals, and Abyssals are recent additions, so there isn't a setting reason to keep them balanced, especially since those are the three splats most expected to rock the boat in terms of the setting.

Basically, if the DBs, Sids, or Lunars are too much more powerful than their enemies, the setting doesn't make any sense. No such restrictions exist for the Solaroids.

>>46974481
Since we're all sharing our Lunar headcannon: http://pastebin.com/T34hZcWp

I wrote that before the leak, so some of it might not make sense in the context of 3E (although some of it matched 3Es treatment, like Lunar assassination of the the empress potentially being a thing).

So i'm working on writing up a 3CD. I was wondering if anyone had an opinion on this kind of note for a very upbeat dancy demon. Please be gentle...

-Passively gains double 9’s and +3 dice to dance actions, for 10m can gain double 7’s. Her dances gain an addictive property akin to the dancing of her sashes, and many witnesses gain a desire to see her dance again once seeing it once. Further her dances can be used to transfer messages almost as clearly as speech, she is not limited to what she can instill through dance.

>>46976410

I think you're actually underselling how potent a 3CD is by quite a lot.

>>46976410
>>46976690
For reference the addictive effect of her sashes tends to impose an instant major intimacy of desire to see their dance again if it overcomes resolve.

>>46976410
That's a weak 2CD son.

-Add (Essence) (usually 8 or 9) automatic successes on all dance actions.
-Her dance are so addictive that it is treated as a (Charisma + Performance) attack adding (Essence) autosux. If it overcome the resolve of the opponent he suddenly develop a maniacal, pathological defining intimacy of love and desire to see that dance again.

A 3CD summoned in Creation topple kingdoms, destroys cities, and warp reality only by existing. If you want a demon dabbling in some things or another create a 2CD.

>>46977277
You can change passive (Essence) autosux by passive double 7', depending on what is advised nowadays for spirits. In 2E it was passive autosux, but could be different for 3E, never thought about it.

>>46977277
>>46976722

Alright! I guess i've been looking at this wrong. I will make some changes. Thanks

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>>46977329
Yes.

If you want a 3CD master of dance, it will be a 'I gouge my eyes out because I know I will never see such glory again' 3CD. Her dance will make entire populations go crazy in a rampage through the lands until they drop dead, a smile on their faces. She will be called something like 'The Dancer Of The Apocalypse' and revered by crazy infernal cults of nihilistic, genocidal ballet masters in all creation.

What you are describing is a 2CD master of dance, which is perfectly fine by all standard.

>>46972859
>>46972818
Also the coolest member of the Ex3 team by a wide margin.

Although I'd like him to clarify Crane Style's counterattack rules.

>>46965695
Athletics and Martial Arts (Shining Point Style). Double your Decisive damage on one attack with Thunderbolt Attack Prana, and using Shining Point Form to roll Join Battle twice.

It's entirely possible for a starting Solar with those charms to be able to single-handedly annihilate two Size 5 Battle Groups in one action or kill anything short of a Resistance-supernal Solar or a combat-focused Second Circle Demon (or a god or elemental of equivalent power) in one shot.

>>46977562
>Although I'd like him to clarify Crane Style's counterattack rules.

Aren't Holden and Morke the rules people?

>>46977576
They're also liars

>>46968199
>but if you're running a sneaky-social campaign War becomes pointless

Get a fang of minikin, develop sneaky Tactics and use War to gaslight people.

>>46977576

Vance did the Martial Arts chapter.

>>46968199
>if you're running a sneaky-social campaign War becomes pointless

The Red Wedding disagrees with you.

>>46970310
>>46970851
Immortality would probably be a Celestial 2 Working, "grant a person a supernatural power". It's totally doable for a Moral Sorceror.

With 14 dice + 1 autosuccess (5 Intelligence, 5 Occult, Specialty, Exceptional Equipment, and Stunt), he's getting 8 successes per roll on average, so he can pull off Finesse 5 Terrestrial Workings without any Means, and he can pretty easily get enough Means to make Finesse 3 Celestial Workings too - he'd be getting 4 successes towards the goal per roll, so to get the 30 successes he needs for a Power 2 working, he needs three points of Means. He can do this easily with a Complementary Skill (likely Medicine, though maybe Craft for alchemical potions or Performance for some sort of ritual prayer), a Complementary Spell (easy, since any of the spirit-summoning or personal augmentation spells would likely work), and Cooperation (for having a spirit with powers of rejuvenation helping you). That gets you the eight rolls you need. Add in some Sorcerous Infrastructure, and you can pull off Ambition 3 Finesse 3 Celestial Workings, too.

Top-end, what a Mortal is capable of? Finesse 1, Power 2 Solar Workings. This is only really feasible for one of the most powerful sorcerers in a nation like Ysyr, but it's possible with enough infrastructure. Goal Number 50, so you need 12 rolls (seven points of Means). So, let's say that the most powerful sorceror in Ysyr wants to rip a mountain from its roots, flip it upside down, and hold it aloft in the air, so that it can serve as a mobile city and fortress for them. Complementary Skill (likely Craft, in this case) with a suitable spirit bound into a Yasal Crystal or a decent selection of supernatural powers from Celestial Workings gets you two points of Means. Complementary Spells gets you another point (in this case, Stormwind Rider or Cirrus Skiff). Consuming a suitable artifact gives you another point of Means. (cont.)

>>46978097
>14 dice + 1 autosuccess (5 Intelligence, 5 Occult, Specialty, Exceptional Equipment, and Stunt)
So, the single most powerful mortal sorcerer in existence, and better base stats than canon Exalted sorcerers like Mnemon or Raksi. I'd be uncomfortable giving that stat line to any mortal other than the Perfect of Paragon, and I'd still feel like 13 Parry Mortal anon.

>>46978097
Mortals lack the dice pools to successfully craft even two-dot Artifacts on their own, though, so they're going to need some help. There are Craft-related Elementals and Demons (even if we don't have stats for them yet), so summoning one an sticking it into a Yasal Crystal might be a viable option, as would summoning a powerful Second Circle like Berengiere or Alveua, or a minion created with an Ambition 3 Celestial Working. You're in Ysyr, and this will benefit the city as a whole, so you can probably convince enough sorcerors to help you to gain two points of Means from Cooperation. And, of course, you'd get another point of Means from Sorcerous Infrastructure.

That gets you the seven points of Means you need (2 Complementary Skill, 1 Complementary Spell, 2 Cooperation, 1 Sorcerous Infrastructure, 1 Exotic Components). You can add on Extra Time for some wiggle room if you really want to, but it's not necessary, especially if you can get some dice-adding or dice manipulation tricks from Evocations or Spirit Charms.

>>46978243
Mara can train up their stats, and with immortality, they've got all the time in the world to train up the stats they care about anyway.

The real moral of the story is "Don't fuck with Ysyr, they've got the potential to be stupidly strong as a group." They might not know kung fu, but they've got Second Circle demon-equivalents (along with their First-circle Equivalent spawn) and armies of mortal Janissaries with every single beneficial Mutation running round to do the kung fu for them.

They're blatantly inspired by the villains from Conan, and it's entirely possible that they've got shit like Lovecraftian abominations, multiple different varieties of dragons (Lesser Elemental Dragons, mutated Tyrant Lizards with wings and venomous breath, 2nd Circle-equivalent sapient Western Dragons along with 1st-Circle Equivalent "drakes", et cetera), and fucking Pillar Men from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, all created with Ambition 3 Celestial Workings, and that's before you get into the bullshit they could pull off with Solar Workings...

>>46977562
>Although I'd like him to clarify Crane Style's counterattack rules.
As he said that you can't make multiple counterattacks, there's really no meaningful ambiguity at this point. (Solar Counterattack is the only preemptive counterattack.)

>>46978373
>Mara can train up their stats, and with immortality, they've got all the time in the world to train up the stats they care about anyway.
Again, Mnemon and Raksi. They've had time and resources to do the same. Do you just assume that every character of any sort of importance has fives in everything they do?

>>46978459
>Again, Mnemon and Raksi. They've had time and resources to do the same. Do you just assume that every character of any sort of importance has fives in everything they do?
When they're the very best, they're going to have fives in their most important areas.

>>46978534
And they're also both Exalts, which means that they have Excellencies, where mortals don't.

>>46974481
>defining boundaries leads to poor coloring
O-ok, holden

>>46977961
The show one? Sure, they fucked that up.

The book one? Ha. Haha. Hahahaha.

I feel this is veering into "why don't poor people just spend some XP to buy Resources" territory. XP is a player character advancement mechanic. NPCs have different constraints.

Guys, I'm building a Single Point stylist/Melee focused Dawn. I know I need a metric fuck-ton of Initiative so I have Wits, Awareness and Perception 5, Awakening Eye and that overpriced merit that gives you +1 on JB rolls. Is this enough? Should I also bother with Thrown and it's Initiative boosters or am I approaching retarded levels of specialization?

>>46978243
Soooo you'd feel like you're giving your players exactly what they want? Do I have reiterate that, the Dawn guy specifically wanted that fight to be a challenge.

>>46979036
Give him a DB with charms allowing him to 13 parry, or a demon-blooded with a charm allowing him to 13 parry, or a god blooded, or a ghost warrior, or something.

A 13 parry mortal is lazy, incoherent, and stupid. Please remove yourself from the premises.

>>46978974
Pick up Athletics and Thunderbolt Rush Attack to double the damage on a Decisive Attack, and keep in mind that you can't combine Melee and Single Point Style charms on a single attack or defense.

Generally, what you'll want to do is to spend a couple extra motes so that all of your Join Battle-related charms have a Duration of One Round, and then activating Single Point Form in the first combat round, so its Join Battle roll benefits from them.

Also, if you've bought that Merit, take an Awareness (Join Battle) Specialty as well; it's cheaper.

>>46979158
>A 13 parry mortal is lazy, incoherent, and stupid.

Ooor just the kinda guy who is due for an Exaltation, even if he was able to attain that power, briefly, by using an artifact.

In any case I am still amused by how in the wake of spikes in power of beings like Ahlat and Octavian, putting them as real threats to fully specialized Solars and things like the Mask of Winters not even being statted, mortals are apparently the one group of people that cannot have it's representatives that would challenge Solars, through underhanded means, for a very limited period of time. Infinitely amusing.

>>46979185
I was wondering, do I need to be that specific with the speciality, or would something like "quick reflexes" work? Or is it the sort of question only my ST will answer?

Also, I though you can't combine Martial Arts with anything, or is it just that Thunderbolt allows you to combine it with other things explicitly?

>>46979311
>I was wondering, do I need to be that specific with the speciality, or would something like "quick reflexes" work? Or is it the sort of question only my ST will answer?

Ask your GM, but "quick reflexes" isn't really a subcategory of Awareness tasks, I don't think.

>Also, I though you can't combine Martial Arts with anything, or is it just that Thunderbolt allows you to combine it with other things explicitly?

Can't combine it with other combat abilities. You can combine it with other non-combat abilities, though, like Awareness, Athletics, or Occult (e.g. Ghost-Eating Attack).

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>>46979276
>Infinitely amusing.

You are so smug at being stupid.

I, personally, find that hilarious.

You were told, countless time, that you were a retard. There is no excuses, no mitigations for your acts. And you still act is if your infinite stupidity is a proof, somehow, of your superiority. Because people aren't able to accept your delusions as a reality.

This is high grade and frankly absolutely hilarious.

>>46979382
You can keep calling me a retard until you're blue on your face, but it will not suddenly become true, I'm afraid. Life would be so much easier for you if you could just call someone you disagree with a retard without presenting a point and suddenly that would just become a reality spontaneously. You have my sympathy.

>>46979185
Wait, so if I spend 2 additional motes when activating Awakening Eye I extend it's buff to the sword's roll? That doesn't sound like that's the spirit of that rule.

>>46979464
Not that guy, but it really is quite stupid. Parry 13 is an absurd number. Mortals can't get that high; they don't get magic or artifacts; that's why they're called "mortals"; once they get supernatural powers (like sorcerers do), they're no longer really mortals anymore.

What's more, it's so stupidly high that not even a specialized *Solar Exalt* who is burning through his mote pool at an amazing speed can pump it that high; they can only reach Parry 12 (Dex 5, Melee 5, Specialty, Medium Weapon, 10 motes on Melee Excellency).

That's a Solar, and they're literally the pinnacle of what is possible in this game. There is no splat more powerful than them, at a given Essence rating (which mortals don't even have); there is no splat with better raw dice pools.

Parry 13 is just not possible within the setting except possibly for the most powerful spirits (and I mean folks on the level of Ligier and the Unconquered Sun, there; even Octavian and Ahlat only have Parries of 6 or 7), and arguing that it can be just makes you look like an idiot.

>>46979641
I was about to say "Yup," but I just checked and it specifically says "Instant-duration Reflexive Charm," and Awakening Eye is Supplemental. Huh. I guess I misread it a while back, then.

Well, you can still enhance the roll with the charm, though. You just need to spend another 5m 1wp.

>>46979684
That said, though, it just occurs to me that Awakening Eye gives you a "free full Excellency", and the Awareness Excellency is specifically noted to be one of the ones that you can spend 2m to extend. So, if you want, you could probably spend 2m to extend the Excellency to your sword's Join Battle roll, even if you don't transfer the other benefits of the charm.

>>46979650
>That's a Solar, and they're literally the pinnacle of what is possible in this game. There is no splat more powerful than them, at a given Essence rating (which mortals don't even have); there is no splat with better raw dice pools.

Citation needed. You won't find that stated anywhere in the 3e. It's an assumption that only has value because people have been making since forever, but it never was founded. It's just a meme and there has always been plenty things that will be straight-up better than Solars. The metaphysical lines between beings have never been clearly set as well and they're only getting more blurry with Exigents. I'm confident in saying that it's very much in the spirit of the setting, for the one thing to challenge the Solar, to topple the most high and break all the rules, to be mortal.

>>46979717
>Citation needed. You won't find that stated anywhere in the 3e.

The devs have explicitly stated it, bro. Solars are the top dogs of the setting. The gap between the different types of Exalted is smaller and less absolute than it was before, but it's still there.

>>46979737
Until such an infantile and contradictory notion actually worms it's way into the books, I am free to ignore it completely and if it does, I will ignore it with the only consequence being me having to say "in my games I actually follow logic and will ignore silly contradictions in favor of well established observational facts".

>>46979806
What "established observational facts"? That you make retarded house rules where Mortals have better Parry Defenses than Exalts and Gods do?

>>46979848
The fact that you have canon gods who will absolutely punk any upstart Solar trying to duke it out with them, no matter how over specialized they are.

>>46979985
An established god versus a new Solar is hardly a fair fight, but even then any god barring the Most High can be beaten in white room scenarios with chargen builds. An actual Essence 5 Dawn could probably take down anyone who isn't named Ligier or Ignis Divine.

>>46980142
>An actual Essence 5 Dawn could probably take down anyone who isn't named Ligier or Ignis Divine.

I could see Luna or the Maidens taking him down, too, if not necessarily in direct combat. They've certainly got enough defenses to be able to survive his MDV: Sword while they use social maneuvering or destiny-warping bullshit to get him to stop trying to murder them. That sort of sideways approach is what Luna especially excels at, in fact.

There are probably other combat-oriented Third Circles who'd be able to hold their own against Essence 5 Dawns, too, even if they lack the raw transcendent power of Malfeas's Fetich Soul.

>>46980335
If we're talking about white room scenarios, I think most Ess 5 Solars can hold their own against Luna and Other Third Circles. In an actual scenario, there are too many factors to predict the outcome of a battle.

A question from a newbie guys. Dreaming Pearl Courtesan Form allows me to treat items and clothes as light artefacts, but I still need con consume motes to attune them?

>>46980455
No. It doesn't let you treat it as light artifacts, but merely gives them the stats of one. So other artifact-only effects would not apply, either.

>>46967261
that reminds me, just what are the Exalts on pages 54-55? I recognize the alch, the girl next to her is probably either an Infernal or an Akuma, the dude on the far right is the one that that girl isn't, but what about the other two?

Just curious. In what part of creation did your campaigns primarily take place in?

And unrelated - but does the qm of exalted quest visit this place on occasion?

>>46980605
They're all new Exalts, other than the Alchemical and the Infernal on the far right. The other three are the two Lunar foils and the other Sidereal foil, though we don't know which is which.

>>46979696
The sword rolls JB with Wits+Martial Arts and therefore cannot benefit from any awareness boosting Charms.

>>46979650

They can also channel a willpower, or stunt, or take a total defence action. Any of those will boost them to parry 13.

But your point regarding mortal parry 13 still stands.

>>46980620

Current one: south. Prior one: east, south-east

>>46979985
In what way is an established powerful god justification for a mortal with the near upper limit possible for parry?
Also this was scene-long right, not instant duration?

>>46979806
>"in my games I actually follow logic and will ignore silly contradictions in favor of well established observational facts".
How does logic lead you to come up with a 'mortal' capable of things that are factually beyond the limits of mortal power in the setting, anon?

>>46964378
>If they had at least a rough difficulty table for all the abilities like they do with feats of strength, it'd be far easier to judge how capable someone is of pulling of particular feats through successes alone
Oh, is that all you wanted? Here you go.

>As great heroes, Exalted characters are assumed to possess abundant confidence and competence. Tasks which run of-the-mill individuals in Creation would consider challenging (such as picking a lock or removing a patient’s appendix without killing him) are ordinary fare for heroes. Such tasks are appropriate for difficulty 1.

>Performing challenging tasks under significant duress (such as picking a lock or removing an appendix in the dead of night, without sufficient light, in the midst of a howling storm) is appropriate for difficulty 2.

>Tasks which might daunt even heroes, by contrast, are appropriate for difficulty 3. Examples might include plucking a gem from a nest of writhing serpents without being bitten, or breaking a man-eating horse born in the depths of the Wyld so it accepts the hero as its rider.

>Performing such tasks under significant duress (such as plucking the aforementioned gem while the temple collapses around the intrepid thief, or breaking the maneating horse in the midst of a raging forest fire) are appropriate for difficulty 4.

>Near-impossible feats, even by heroic standards, are appropriate for difficulty 5. Examples might include reading a letter in pitch blackness by feeling the texture of ink on the paper, leaping over the rail of a sorcerer’s flying chariot to land safely in a hay cart hundreds of feet below, or running for three consecutive days and nights without succumbing to exhaustion.

They don't do a great job of emphasizing it, but even mortal heroes with Attribute 5+Ability 5 are capable of frankly superhuman feats at 5 successes. Use that as your baseline and context.

>>46981020
Yeah, something like that, but with at least 1 example per ability.
A mortal with 5+5 is a huge stretch, but possible.

>>46980620
>exalted quest
which one? The Solar Slut-Queen one?

>>46980628

>Infernal on the far right.

Has that been confirmed? I thought that we only knew the Alchemical for sure.

Who is best Exalted waifu, and why is it Manosque Cyan?

>>46981035
>Yeah, something like that, but with at least 1 example per ability.
I think it's pretty easy to extrapolate from there.

>A mortal with 5+5 is a huge stretch, but possible.
They're certainly not going to be a 'typical' mortal, if that's what you're implying, but mortal heroes are absolutely a thing that exists in-setting. I wouldn't even necessarily expect there to be one such profoundly-expert individual per city, on average, but not every exceptional individual out there is one of the Exalted, or even capable of wielding essence.

For example, I wouldn't be at all shocked to find an Intelligence 5, Occult 5 grand-master priest in Sijan - the sort of person that people make pilgrimages to study under. These aren't the sort of people who would be rare and exceptional on the order of magnitude of the Celestial Exalted, but would be rare and exceptional in every other sense.

>>46981038
The one with the zenith casta maka, not really sure if you mean her.

>>46981082
White Novia

>>46981094
Yeah, they exist, people just need to understand their rarity and how big a deal they are for the area they're in.

>>46981082
>yfw no qt3.14 red panda waifu

>>46971422
>Elementals
>immaterial
Pick one. Elementals are material spiritual beings in 3e that lack the ability to dematerialize by default.

>>46981135
That means you can see them. And hunt them. And sell the entrails at market.

>>46970069
>how hard can a non exalt sorcerer game sorcerous workings?
Pretty hard, especially if he gathers plenty of Means (which is easy to do), and ESPECIALLY if one of his first Workings is giving himself a basic Essence pool and some kind of Occult dice-adder.

>>46981082
Best Exalted waifu is obviously Anju. Or Truth, but only if you ARE Anju.

>>46981143
What's a good elemental to feed your family?

What iconic elemental-meat meal would your grandma bring out on Calibration Eve to serve to the extended family as you come together and barricade the doors and windows?

File: Kabaneri-of-the-iron-fortress-episode-2-Mumei-e1460728321131.png (322KB, 800x425px) Image search: [Google] [Yandex] [Bing]

322KB, 800x425px

Setting aside the stupidity of that anon (he is only 'pretending' to be retarded), have you seen Kabaneri? I am currently watching it and this is exalted as fuck.

It's a medieval shogunate setting with steampunk machinery and magical zombie. The main girl, Mumei, is the posterchild for an exalted character done right.

>>46980983
Show me it being stated anywhere that this is " factually beyond the limits of mortal power in the setting, anon" especially when they use an artifact to acheive that.

Hell, Perfect of Paragon achieves smiliar levels of impossible might, just ina idfferent field.

>>46980401

>In an actual scenario, there are too many factors to predict the outcome of a battle.

My point exactly, thank you. There are too many factors to take into account to unambiguously state that no mortal, ever, could be a challenge to a Solar, in a straight-forward way. And beings in Exalted cross boundaries all the time, mortals become gods, gods become demons, elementals become mortal, it's one huge metaphysical clown fiesta where rules are literally made as you go along.

To say that a mortal cannot possibly challenge an Exalt is to ignore everything about Exalted that is Exalted.

>>46980630
Awakening Eye explicitly enhances a Join Battle roll with a free full Perception + Awareness Excellency, it doesn't matter if you roll Martial Arts, Stealth or Awareness, you get the buff.

You can't combine combat charms with Martial Arts, but you can combine anything else, including Awreness and Athletics.

>>46981112
Oh, for sure. Like I said, they're the sort of people that folks take pilgrimages to study under, or the sorts of people who are held up as Heroes in a way not unlike exalts, or people who will live in infamy forever. People with 5+5 Attribute+Ability are very rare, very important, but also still very much a thing that exists.

>>46981096
>Slut
>Ever not being Maka
Come on, now.

>>46981163
>What's a good elemental to feed your family?
Garda Bird - it just keeps growing back.

>What iconic elemental-meat meal would your grandma bring out on Calibration Eve to serve to the extended family as you come together and barricade the doors and windows?
100 Garda Bird roasts, harvested laboriously by killing the same bird over and over and over again.

Also, I know you're joking, but Calibration is less HIDE INDOORS FOR FIVE DAYS and much more 'Dia de los Muertos, Carnivale, and Chinese New Year had a weird bastard child - HAVE A STREET PARTY' in most of Creation. The only places where that's less true are places very close to active Shadowlands, Wyld zones, or doorways into hell.

>>46981206
How did they attune to this broken-as-fuck artifact seemingly granting them a ludicrous bonus to their parry?
What were their default stats before using the artifact?

>>46981143
>That means you can see them. And hunt them. And sell the entrails at market.
Explicitly so. Most elementals in 3e are basically elementally-themed demigod animals. Phoenixes, walking Little Shop of Horrors plants, kelpies, or walking crystal end-tables.

It's only once you start getting into the high-Essence range that they start taking the forms of dragons or men. That's also the tier where they unlock Dematerialize. Fakharu is the only Elemental in 3e Core, for example.

>>46981206
Ah yeah, the clever mortal used his wits and superior numbers to take advantage of a weakened exalt, by piling on environmental penalties, using poisons and disease, capturing hostages, and draining their motes with waves of mortal battle groups.
Or was it just Kamina facing him off with a bullshit plot device?

>>46981299
Please don't feed the troll.

>>46981261
I thought you meant that other exalted quests had also "slut queens". I only ever read makas quest, so I was kinda confused.

Anyway, I found the twitter, so I probably don´t have to bother you guys anymore. Thanks, anyway.

>>46981323
But he's not a troll, he's a regular in these threads for months and genuinely believed his scene made any kind of sense and we were wrong for calling him retarded.

>>46981206
A mortal should not be capable of having a Parry of 13. A single mortal should be capable of killing a lone Solar, given a lot of time, planning, and/or cleverness, depending on the circumstances.
Poison works well, and if the Solar doesn't have Resistance or Medicine, it shouldn't be at all impossible for a combat-focused mortal to take down a non-combat focused poisoned Solar who's suffering either initiative damage, a penalty to all attacks or defenses, or a wound penalty.

Against Dawns, single combat should not be an option, but there are still many avenues of success. Throwing small groups against the Dawn so he can't recover, traps of all sorts, poisons as mentioned earlier, social influence to turn him against others he can't beat.

Or just call the Wyld Hunt down on him.

A mortal can best a Solar, but not in their sphere of influence. A mortal shouldn't be anywhere close to a Solar in their sphere of influence. Forget Charms and Sorcery and Martial Arts. Mortals should be limited to Attributes and Abilities of 3, and require specialties to avoid penalties. There shouldn't be even a single non-augmented mortal in Creation with 5/5 + specialty.

Hercules is a Solar, not a heroic mortal. (Technically he's a Godblooded, but whatever.)

>>46981299
I actually wonder if I should even answer this question, knowing that whatever I say you'll say "that's bullshit" to which I will retort "it's perfectly within the mechanics and in thematic scope of the setting" and we'll get nowhere sooooo pass.

>>46981320

That isn't actually relevant here.

The relevant part here is that the very essence of the setting is this: nothing is sacred. No border is absolute, no peak too high, no threat too immense. The victory of the Exalted over Primordials is impressive precisiely because by all accounts, it should not have happened.

That is the point here- that turning around now and saying "but Solars are strongest, tots, like for real" creates a contradiction. There is no "the strongest". What you think is weak today will rule the fucking world tomorrow, rape your guts and imprison you for eternity.

To suggest anything else is hypocricy. To play by such hypocricy is simply to not play Exalted, but something very different.

>>46981338
Nothing prevents a troll from being a regular. He's been trolling for far too long, Don't feed him, he will naturally go away.

>>46978097
>Immortality would probably be a Celestial 2 Working, "grant a person a supernatural power". It's totally doable for a Moral Sorceror.
Can someone remind me why they think 'living forever' is easier than 'being made young again'? Especially when people think one is Celestial 2 and the other is fucking Solar.

>>46981344
>A mortal should not be capable of having a Parry of 13.

Beeeeeeecause?

...

No, seriously, why? Any in-setting thematic reason? Any mechanical reason? Any narrative reason? Anything?

>A mortal can best a Solar, but not in their sphere of influence.

Again, this is not stated as fact anywhere and the very way this setting operates prohibits this from ever being the case. I realize that this makes you uncomfortable, but in order for Solars to best Prmirodials, mortals must have the potential to best Solars. That's just how it is.

>Mortals should be limited to Attributes and Abilities of 3, and require specialties to avoid penalties.

Again, something not stated anywhere. And we know for a fact that mortals break this rule on regular basis- Brides of Ahlat. Stats through the fucking roof, much larger than what you're proposing and nothing supernatural about them.

>Hercules is a Solar, not a heroic mortal. (Technically he's a Godblooded, but whatever.)

In Exalted Hercules was mortal once, now is a Prince of the Universe and the next day he might be bested by his own descendant devoid of any super-powers whom he thought to be mere pebble under his shoe.

That is the core assumption behind the Exalted history.

>want to look up how onslaught works
>check the index
>no results for Onslaught
>no results for Penalty


But hey, at least they individually listed every single fucking Charm

>>46981361
When the 13 parry mortals usurp the exalted and rule creation, I'll give my dog a daiklave and scene-long 20 evasion so he can usurp them.
Get your Cosmic Exalted shit out of here, you're passing off your very poorly thought out ST fudges as some genius and thematically appropriate decision that somehow works within the mechanics of the game and isn't 100% pure gmpc fiat.
And you're scared to back up your decision with facts because you know we'll call it bullshit. Maybe that's because you know it's bullshit and have no defense for it.

>>46981413
>Beeeeeeecause?
A mortal can have a max of 5 in the relevant attribute and a max 5 in the relevant skill. The formula for parry is ability+attribute/2. So the highest is 5. A specialization bumps that to 6. A medium weapon to 7. That's the highest possible cap under the best possible conditions. Mortals don't get motes. They can't use charms or use artifacts. That's the best they can do.

A mortal can't go higher than that unless you homebrew something to make it happen. Congratulations, you went against the system and homebrewed something to make it happen.

>>46981413
5 Attribute, 5 Ability, 1 Specialty, maybe a tiny bit more if you cheese it, but 13 just shows you have zero mechanical understanding of 3e.
The exalts defeated the Primordials because they were explicitly created to do so, to beat the unbeatable and break the rules of physics.
Yes Creation has a cycle of patricide, but mortals have no reason to best a superior being in a clean 1 on 1 fight. They can win through strategy, advantages and weakening their foe first, not because you scribbled a retardly high number on their sheet.

>>46981413
>No, seriously, why? Any in-setting thematic reason?

Because, thematically, mortals are supposed to be weak.

> Any mechanical reason?

Because their is literally no mechanical way to increase parry that high outside of magic, which isn't the purview of mortals.

> Any narrative reason? Anything?

Because if random chump mortals are just as good/better than Exalts, why not just hand in your Exaltation, avoid all the Wyld Hunt malarky, and just be a super-powered mortal?

>>46981413
>mortals must have the potential to best Solars.

Caterpillars have the potential to be butterflies, but they still can't fucking fly.

>>46981532
>Because, thematically, mortals are supposed to be weak.

Not stated anywhere, again.

>outside of magic, which isn't the purview of mortals.

Sorcery wants to have a word with that assertion.

>Because if random chump mortals are just as good/better than Exalts, why not just hand in your Exaltation, avoid all the Wyld Hunt malarky, and just be a super-powered mortal?

Because this isn't something you can actually plan on, and neither is Solar Exaltation. And framing such orccurences as "any random chump mortals" is just as innane as saying "any random chump Solar".

>>46981413
The Solars did not best the Titans in their spheres of influence, and certainly not one on one. It took a very long war in which the Celestials died and reincarnated many times over to defeat the Titans.

A Solar can never be a better king than Theion, or a better crafter than Autocthon. Being a better king than Autocthon is fair game. Similarly, a mortal cannot best a Dawn in single combat, but any other field is fair game.

Mortals are not limited to 3/3, and I think this is to the detriment of the game. You end up with battlegroups of mortals with the theoretical maximum human capacity, and with the grand hero no better than a mere background character.

Hercules was never a mortal. He was the son of Zeus, and that was the source of his power.

Isn't giving a mortal a Parry of 13 a fucking awful way to make a fight harder anyway? It does nothing to make it more interesting, it'll just take longer (and probably not THAT much longer anyway, att 5 + abil 5 + spec 1 + acc 3 + excellency 8 + Excellent Strike still hits it nearly half the time before any sort of defense penalty comes into play)

>>46981361
No, you obtuse piece of garbage.

The point is that your method of breaking limits is to shit out a Parry 13 mortal.

You don't get to bring this into high design territory, this isn't about themes or high-brow concept, it is about you taking the themes and concepts and coming up with the least subtle way possible. That you cannot realise how terrible the idea of a Parry 13 Mortal is as far as illustrating the game's themes of breaking boundaries goes is the point.

>>46981582
>>outside of magic, which isn't the purview of mortals.
>Sorcery wants to have a word with that assertion.
Sorcerers aren't mortals.

>>46981607
With none due respect, I absolutely disagree.

>>46981602
wait, forgot to factor in the free success, So it's more than half the time.

Seriously people, did no one ever tell you not to argue with retards?

>>46981644
Our favorite pastime is bitching at Holden and Morke.

>>46981607
>it is about you taking the themes and concepts and coming up with the least subtle way possible to play on them.

Fixed

>>46981644
That. Please ignore that guy in the future, he's obviously either too stupid or a troll.

>>46981602

The fight would end the moment the Dawn realized that winning a Clash ignores the losers defence.

>>46981644
When someone is making an actual argument and not just trolling, arguing against them can be useful, if only to refine your own train of thought. If it hadn't been for him, I wouldn't have gotten the 3/3 mortal cap idea, which was way better than every other idea I had to stop entire armies of perfect humans.

>>46981702
>I wouldn't have gotten the 3/3 mortal cap idea, which was way better than every other idea I had to stop entire armies of perfect humans.
What about Tiger Warrior Training Technique? They have at least 4/4 + speciality.

>>46981224
Awakening Eye is a Supplemental Charm and can therefore van only be used on Awareness rolls unless explicitly stated, and no just saying Join Battle doesn't let you. Look at the JB boosters in Thrown for the language that would be there if it let you combine it with different abilities.

>>46981583
>Mortals are not limited to 3/3, and I think this is to the detriment of the game. You end up with battlegroups of mortals with the theoretical maximum human capacity, and with the grand hero no better than a mere background character.
>You end up with battlegroups of mortals with the theoretical maximum human capacity
Do you? Isn't this entirely up to the ST? It's not like the players themselves can just decide to have a Battlegroup of mortals with peak human ability.