Exalted General

>threat to Solar circle
none

not even one

>Strong enough to be a combat threat

This

My players view gods only as pushover. I want to change that.

What is the circle like?

Isn't it enough to introduce a god who can challenge a Solar rather than a circle of Solars?

Ahlat, I guess? Do you have a Dawn with a Supernal Combat Ability? If so, then the only gods who AREN'T combat pushovers to them are Celestial elites.

But that's by design.

Ahlat.

If not even him can't faze you, you need to go higher. Poke Yu-shan. They have celestial gods of war and shit.

So, I've been roped into a quick 3e game, and I was planning on pretty much playing Urien, of Street Fighter fame. I was going to play him as a Zenith-caste with Brawl and Occult for Invulnerable Skin of Bronze (and First Circle Demon, because of course). My questions for people who have read more of the book than me are twofold:

-Is ISoB and Resistance charms going to be enough to tank a pack of Erymanthus? We're going to be busting a Yozi cult, and I'd really rather not have my first session end with striding confidently into the fray and immediately getting punked.

-Brawl is huge and between Integrity, Athletics, Resistance, and Occult, I don't have a whole lot of charm slots left. What are the charms that return the most combat value for the least investment? Would switching it out for Melee and carrying an actual weapon be a better plan?

How does a Dragon-blooded's clothes survive their anima banner?

>My players view gods only as pushover. I want to change that.

Again, whyyyyy?

"Gods" in exalted are basically immortal managers. The parrot manager oversees the parrot population, works for the head-of-section bird manager, and has sub-managers that oversee specific breeds of parrot like the manager for lilac-crested southern parrots.

If we call them "managers" this way, do you still feel the need to change your players' perception? Aren't "managers" supposed to be pushovers to some extent?

With that said, my answer stands at War Gods and other Direction-wide/Creation-wide gods of major concepts. Ahlat, Southern God of War and Cattle is in the corebook; Siakal is described in 2e and is the Western God of Sharks and Slaughter. She fights messier.
In the north the job is shared by Nasamara (the glory of war) and Voharun (the hardship of war). In the east there's Sunipa (dutiful soldiers and the rules of war) and in the center there's Tachi-Kun (war and exalted warfare).

Some possible examples of other major concepts that might have important powerful people in charge of making sure they work right, and harvesting a lot of sweet sweet prayer:
-gods of travel (if you want to draw inspiration from 2e you could look at Ruvia, head of the Division of Journeys, who answers directly to Mercury)
-gods of weather (all weather, not just Storm Mothers and the like)
-gods of secrets
-gods of food and drink
-gods of cities (not gods who are each of one city, but the God of Eastern Cities or the like)
-gods of flight (from birds to airships)

>Add (Essence) non-Charm bonus dice to her Craft, spell effects, and speculative Bureaucracy rolls, to Lore rolls which require logic or mathematics, and to any use of Wyld-Shaping Technique.
For the 'spell effects,' what does that mean? The attack roll to hit with an attack spell? Damage? What exactly is a spell's effects for the purposes of Heaven-Turning Calculations?

>Is ISoB and Resistance charms going to be enough to tank a pack of Erymanthus?

It ought to be. General consensus is that Aegis of Invincible Might makes you Fucking Invincible.

Pick up Sensory Acuity Prana from Awareness if you don't want to be caught with your thumb up your ass every time someone rolls Join Battle. Fists of Iron in Brawl will be great of you have a Defining Intimacy of the love of Violence, and Heaven Thunder Hammer is a good Fuck You button. Iron Battle Focus will help against Onslaught if you're ever outnumbered.

Melee is very good defensively and you can do a lot with little investment, but if you don't mind paying the Merit cost, consider swapping out Brawl for a Martial Art, as this will give you something to spend Solar XP on. Tiger Style seems to be thematically similar to what you want.

>Pick up Sensory Acuity Prana from Awareness if you don't want to be caught with your thumb up your ass every time someone rolls Join Battle.

BTW: Double 9s for 5m might not seem that good on Join Battle, so let me take the opportunity to reiterate that having a single Awareness charm also grants you use of the Awareness Excellency, which boosts JB much more directly.

And JB creates initiative, which is your damage resource. Awareness Excellency is a quasi-damage-excellency for opening combat.

I would say any effect the spell causes whether it's damage, roll for corrupted words, binding a demon/elemental, whatever 'effect' casting the spell causes to happen gets the bonus.

>God of Miracle
>God of Certainty

Also both are lesbian.

So any roll that takes place between finishing Shape Sorcery and the spell being concluded, basically?

I'd say any roll that would be made directly by your character in resolving the outward effects of a spell. Is there a specific spell you were thinking about?

In case of attack effects, I'd say the bonus only goes to accuracy though.

Nope, none in particular. There's just such a huge diversity of rolls from spell to spell, it wasn't clear to me what would count as a spell's effect and which is just, say, the delivering of its effect. Or whatever.

Thanks, that's pretty much what I was looking for. I already had Sensory Acuity and Surprise Anticipation on my short list, because I still have shellshock from 2e Paranoia Combat.

I just finished digging out charm cascades, which do a much better job of showing what my actual choices are, and Brawl isn't actually that overwhelming when you aren't using it as your supernal.

I completely glossed over the way Fists of Iron interacts with Intimacies, which stacks really well with Battle Fury Focus. I know that the Dawn in the group is going to go as far down the martial art that gives his sword its own initiative as he can, so I don't need to be THE most horrific combat monster ever created.

Question about what Flowing Mind Prana. That's the Lore charm that lets you give xp to other people.

In it, it says that
>At the end of each story, the Solar may roll a
number of dice equal to experience points spent on this Charm, regaining a number of experience equal to her successes, but not beyond the total amount of experience she expended in training.

I can see this being resolved a few ways:

One is that you only get one roll per story based off of how many experience you spent this story on it. So you only have one roll to recover the experience you spend.

Another is you keep a running total of how much experience you have spent total on the charm since you started using it and use that as your recovery roll with of course never going over your total spent. So your roll for recovering gets larger and larger without ever resetting as you use the charm more and more.

And thirdly, at the end of any story you can roll for whatever experience you have spent and not recovered. So say in the first story you spend three experience, roll three dice to recover, and recover one. Then in the second story you spend another three experience, you now have five unrecovered experience so you roll five dice to see how much you recover there.

I'd say that the third option is what I think it reads as, though I can see arguments for the first as being reasonable as well. Two seems a bit outright as after three or so stories you're always going to be recovering maximum experience basically doubling every experience you gain.

Keep in mind that ISoB counts as wearing medium armor, which locks you out of Tiger Style. Single Point etc. and Iron Demon allow medium armor, but not unarmed attacks, which pretty much leaves White Reaper as the only Martial Arts choice for a bare-handed, bronze-skinned fighter.

If you are going to be taking Sorcery anyway, I'd suggest Claws of the Wood Dragon, eventually. A brawl-compatible artifact with access to any tag you would ever want on a weapon is a pretty decent investment, even if it doesn't really mesh with the character concept.

>One is that you only get one roll per story based off of how many experience you spent this story on it. So you only have one roll to recover the experience you spend.
It's this one.

If you spent 10 XP on it this story, you roll 10 dice at the end of the story. Any successes, you get that XP back. And failures, it's gone and done - not waste, since you spent it on an ally, but still not yours anymore.

>Flowing Mind Prana

says "commits" at the start of the charm, which I really think is how you should treat these experience points (like committed motes), rather than "spent" which it says later which is a stupid confusing word for points you can get back. Roll for what's currently committed, IMO, option three. Conservation of experience is the reasonable course of action regardless of interpretations and vague wording.

There's also the upgrade to consider, Tireless Learner Method, which has functionality >implying things about how FMP works: the Solar can "pay" one experience point to reroll non-success on the roll to regain experience, and
>This Charm explicitly allows the Solar to gain back more experience points than she invested in training.

"invested"?

Fucking natural language plague, but TLM suggests that FMP uses option one by the Rules As Written.

I'd say that ISoB plus Claws can fit single point style if you tag yoru claws with slashing and narratively fluff it as a sword. Same with Steel Devil. Might seem a bit powergamey but it's still just a light artifact that you have to spend a turn 'drawing'. But that would just be my opinion.

It doesn't fit the aesthetic, narrative OR the mechanics. What are you smoking?

I know reading can be hard but:
>She might extend them into a lash of scourging brambles to grant them the flexible tag,

The book gives an explicit example of transforming them narratively into the shape of a weapon to give it a mechanical tag.

Giving it another tag doesn't help at all though. It's still stupid.

A tag's not a weapon. If the martial art style doesn't mention it works with any weapon with a specific tag, then it doesn't.

The only difference between weapons in the rules (say a light sword and a light ax) is the narrative description and the tags associated with them.

The way I see it is that the wood dragon claws can be shaped narratively to give it a tag, as demonstrated in the book. If they're shaped into the form of a sword to give them the 'slashing' tag, then they would be a 'slashing sword light artifact' weapon for the purposes of use with single point style which as the book states:
>This style uses slashing swords and their artifact equivalents

I'm perfectly fine with other people not using this interpretation but I would still think it's well within the realm of exalted fuckery as Sing Point focuses immense essence into their weapon to move it at bilinding speeds, etc. So focusing burning essence into yoru magical wood hands to grow a harded wood sword in the moment of a slash and then after it burns away from the sheer magical force contained therein fits the theme of 'sheathing' after every strike and the bonkers shit solars get up to.

>Any of the War Gods like Ahla
Is it still possible for a starting solar to reliably beat Ahlat in the first round? Or did the devs change the charms?

If by "starting Solar" and "reliably" you mean "one specific build that uses a Solar Charm illegally, requires Ahlat to not use one of his strongest Charms, be completely alone, and not get even slightly lucky," then yes, the Southpaw Empress build still "works."

Though, actually, I'm not sure she can afford the Heaven Thunder Hammers anymore, so it might not.

So yes.

That build relied on Ahlat being material and straying like that, since its completely incapable of hitting immaterial targets

Dematerializing is a simple action, so it's not really something you can do mid-flurry.

(I also really like it being that way because it means Restrain/Drag actions prevent spirits from doing so as well. If you can get a neomah in a headlock it can't just pomf.)

That build never worked. The guy writing it was abusing Thundebolt Attack Prana.

I rescind my argument because reading is hard.

I misread, thinking 'slashing' was a tag and 'sword' was a weapon type when Single Point was referring to weapon restrictions. I now see that 'Slashing sword' is a specific MEDIUM weapon which would put it out of the Claws range of being a LIGHT weapon.

I still say that Claws shaped as swords would be permissible for steel devil style since that one has no restrictions for weapon weight category.

So does anyone else think the absurd charm bloat in 3e justifies starting characters beginning with 20 charms?

I think the 20 charms is to balance the fact that you will always start at essence 1.

no, starting Characters are more than capable enough, in my experience.

I think you missed the point. The book says start with 15. This is a proposed houserule.

I see. I think 15 charms is fine for starting.

...

No. Your mistake is thinking of the charms as a check-list.

"There are a lot of Charms" doesn't actually imply "you need a lot of Charms to be good at [x]."

The difference between having 5 Melee Charms and 10 Melee Charms is much larger than the difference between having 10 and having even 20.

Actually, Fivefold Fury Onslaught / Hammer on Iron Technique no longer ignores Hardness; I don't recall if that has a significant impact on Southpaw Empress but IIRC she was just abusing the number of attacks she gets plus FFO's bonus damage. Ahlat's Hardness 10 now ignores the first few hits in that flurry, which is a big deal.

How are you confused Mr Chan? You basically asked if people thought that characters needed 20 charms to start, and once I understood what you were asking I stated that I think the base 15 that the rulebook gives starting characters is just fine. This means that I disagree with the concept of 'charm bloat' justifying more starting charms.

What sort of things should I aim for with Presence as a supernal?

>being this obtuse

>What sort of things should I aim for with Presence as a supernal?
What are you trying to do with your Supernal Presence?

The ability to make a stone feel fear.

Get empowering shout and the indefinite version. It's fucking insane. Basically, your circle will never, ever have a thing they aren't at least competent at.

Nobody took bureaucracy at all? Get Nerd with highest int and shout at him, bam 8+ dicepool
Need to repair a bridge and no craft guy around? Shout at guy with highest dex, 8+ dicepool
Find a guy bleeding out and nobody has medicine? 8+ dicepool!
Need to commandeer a ship and nobody bothered taking sail? You get it by now.

That's before you consider capbreaking on important rolls like attacks, sorcerous workings, artifact crafting etc.

Just play a Dawn.

forgot to mention: +2 Parry on the Dawn with already maxed Parry can give you a resting Parry of 9! If he has Steel Devil Style, he can have a resting Parry of 11 before he spends any motes.

>The ability to make a stone feel fear.
Dawn anima power, Listener-Swaying Argument, Harmonious Presence Meditation, Tiger's Dread Symmetry.

At Essence 2, Majestic Radiant Presence, Threefold Magnetic Ardor, and Awakened Carnal Demiurge.

Pick up Enemy-Castigating Solar Judgement and Terrifying Apparition of Glory, and Blazing Glorious Icon at Essence 3.

If you make it to Essence 4+, start looking into Countenance of Vast Wrath.

Now, this requires you to be Dawn, and means you can't take Presence as a Supernal. But it's worth it, because a Dawn makes the very heavens themselves shake with fear at his dreadful footsteps.

First for Morke and Holden are liars

>How does a Dragon-blooded's clothes survive their anima banner?
The physics engine of Creation considrs their clothes part of them, so they're not damaged by their anima for the same reason the Dragon-blooded themselves don't get hurt.

>How does a Dragon-blooded's clothes survive their anima banner?
A Dragon-blooded's equipment is specifically called out as being immune.

That said, I often stunt clothing destruction, personally.

How is stage magic trated in the setting?

>capbreaking
>+2 Parry on the Dawn with already maxed Parry
>The subject’s Attribute and Ability ratings may not be increased past five with this Charm
What in the actual fuck are you talking about?

Probably with wonder and the occasional witch-burning. Most peasants in Creation have never seen literally any magic, and are a superstitious and cowardly lot. I've heard the 'average' cultural and technological level of Creation be compared to the Witcher a lot, where there are the occasional rare sorcerers and monster-slayers, but most people have never met one, or didn't know that they did.

>What in the actual fuck are you talking about?
Those are two different uses. The Instant Duration base charm is cap-breaking unless used on a parry.

The Indefinite version is charm dice, yes. A maxed parry, in this case, refers to Dex 5 Melee 5 Speciality + Medium Weapon, which has a maxed, resting Parry of 7. With the Charm commited, it has a resting Parry of 9. With Steel Devil's defensive Form or the capstone form up, he has a resting Parry of 11, with a Charmcap at Parry 12

Oh also, while Empowering Shout doesn't stack with itself, it stacks with the Indefinite Version. If you have time to throw it up and need to boost a non-maxed dicepool, you can add up to 8 dice to a roll, 4 of which are non-charm.

>a resting Parry of 9

Since Favor-Conferring Prana doesn't work on a character who is already at peak mortal, that Parry of 9 is only accessible when the Presence-user is constantly shouting at them. It's a nice versatile charm, but that's not really my definition of "resting".

That said, if you did want to use Empowering Shout every round, if the Dawn is using Melee and not Steel Devil they could at least use War Lion Stance to return the favour. I'd want to do something other than shout, though; shame you can't flurry anything with a Simple charm.

>Most peasants in Creation have never seen literally any magic
I wouldn't say that. Maybe not Sorcery level magic, but spirits are very common, and so are elementals and, to lesser extent, ghosts and demons. You can literally speak with your dead grandmother if your are living in a Shadowland or nearby. If that's not magic then I don't know what is. There are also First Age and Shogunate remnants, various halfbloods and mutants, Wyld incursions, Raksha meddling, Fate glitches and so on. Exalted is a high magic setting, even tough there probably are backwater villages where the only magic is the local field god appearing once a year to "bless" the crops or something.

If you want to do that, use the rules for starting at Essence 2, which includes 20 charms.

What do you think is the Realm's cultural stance on disability, wether inborn or acquired?

"Can you still contribute? Then contribute."

Slug demonstrates that there's no real special exceptions made, but nor is there any particular discrimination.

Of all the times I've seen that picture, this is literally the first time I've ever noticed the Penguin Boots.

Damn it.

Have you noticed the spider he's sitting on and the octopus at the hip? Those are important for sorcery.

Yeah, I did, which is why I'm surprised I didn't catch the penguins.

>spirits are very common, and so are elementals and, to lesser extent, ghosts and demons
The IDEA that they exist is commonplace. Having actually met any of them is super rare. Your typical peasant prays every week to their local god, who nobody but the town priest has even claimed to have spoken to in decades.

Places where that's not the case are overwhelmingly the exception, and are almost always places of great peril or intense wonderment.

The things you're talking about all exist, and they're easy to run into if you're an Exalt the same way that in the Witcher you run into djinns and dragons and shit that nobody else has every even heard of just by dint of being an exceptional badass who puts their nose where it doesn't belong.

But most people lead extremely mundane lives where these things are rumors and legends, things of superstition and hearsay, not something that they've actually experienced or know about in any kind of objective detail.

The idea that they exist is UNIVERSAL. If there's a mention of a place in Creation where spirits are regarded as superstition, please tell me, 'cause that's hilarious. Meeting one is rare but not really unusual. The IO, for example, is very fond of making spirits manifest during festivals and publicly proclaiming their support. The IO covers a lot of territory.

Anyone got art of assassins disguised as japanese courtesans?

...

They might not, depending if its dramatic.

And some DBs e.g. Dynasts being the shameless lechers they are, often don't care about strutting their stuff.

Not in the Umineko pornography I actually fap to they're not!

Haha, bigotry!

I have, in fact, been treating them like a checklist.

Why should I give charms more respect in 3e than I did in 2e and think of them as anything more than stepping stones on my journey to craft the Perfect Build For The Character I Want To Play™?

I'm the person who asked the question here, just btw, and was not the one who posted Jackie Chan. I am not particularly taken aback by someone disagreeing with my initial premise.

>I have, in fact, been treating them like a checklist.

You're confused.

The "checklist" comparison is in terms of completionism.

You aren't going to master all of Melee, in Ex3e. You aren't SUPPOSED to master all of Melee. You master the parts of Melee that express your character's particular Melee fighting style (focus on counterattacks, flurries, defense, etc.), and then move on.

Having even 10 or 15 Melee Charms would make you the most terrifying thing you'll ever run into in a campaign, but it does mean that your fighting style isn't "literally anything and everything Melee does," and so if you ran into another Melee master, you wouldn't be clones.

>What sort of things should I aim for with Presence as a supernal?
Worshipful Lackey Acquisition.

Does your character ever considers wether or not he/she is "the bad guy"?

Mine does. I'm the voice of reason in the circle.

I stopped doing that after, while fighting a hit-and-run battle against a Dawn murder machine I'd heavily poisoned yet still otherwise had little chance of finally beating (because he'd already murdered all of my combat Demons), I reestablished concealment and, rather then trying for another surprise attack or backing off for the moment like the ST expected, took on the shape of his childhood friend and lover via Perfect Mirror, pretended to have arrived to rescue him, then used the moment to ambush him with Heart-Ripping Claw.

No use pretending what you are at that point.

Of course she doesn't. Her way is always the right way. How dare you consider that she, the one DESTINED to Rule Creation in its ENTIRETY could ever be wrong. Watch your tongue, peasant. She will have it cut from your head.

"But why SKULLS?"

Sorry, but they are as lesbian as it gets. They are the essence of lesbianism.

I actually tried to stat Lambada and Bernie as high essences Raksha, but then Graceful Wicked Mask. I tried very hard but Graceful Wicked Mask, man. It was me against the monster. I was weak. My body crumbled, my mind shattered before I was able to complete my quest.

I need to let it go. It was six years ago man.

>Sorry, but they are as lesbian as it gets. They are the essence of lesbianism.

There's a person on the side of this image that's been cropped out, and it ain't a girl.
I'd adjust it to "the essence of yuri," in any case, because the essence of lesbianism probably doesn't shave its legs as often as it should.
Haha, bigotry!

>but then Graceful Wicked Mask

I used Graceful Wicked Masques to make a Manse out of an Unshaped Raksha once since I had to stat out its Emanations. It was a nightmare both in and out of game, to say the least.

I would almost say that GWM couldn't have done Umineko Witches justice, but honestly, as far as practice goes, it actually fits pretty well, what with Shaping Fantasies and all. Spirit Charms would just be so much simpler, though, even though they'd lose a lot in aesthetic.

>then used the moment to ambush him with Heart-Ripping Claw
Black Claw seems so much fun, I'm tempted to invest in Martial Arts with my future character just for it. It's an Eclipse.

So, what is some good animu for getting in the Exalted mood?

Who thought GWM would be a great idea?

Who thought 'Yes, we have a book with charm trees absolutely nobody understands, using a ton of very, very poorly explained new concepts, with rules for Shaping that don't work and also Raksha Sorcery (!) that is also different from anything else in the setting. That's a great idea. People will love it'.

GWN was my first Exalted book, because I wanted to play a Raksha very hard. You can guess how it went.

>I would almost say that GWM couldn't have done Umineko Witches justice,

It depends a lot of how you consider them. There is much ambiguity in what they are able to do, how they do it, and what it really means.

You could easily stat them as Essence 6 Raksha nobles, all the way up to Essence 10 Unshaped (but still shaped?) Raksha. Or as spirits, too.

I like to think of them as human souls swallowed by the wyld and reborn as high essence Raksha.