Exalted General - /exg/

>Frankly, it'd be pretty fucking obvious if both you and your super self were using the magical version of Single Point.
The particular circumstances help obscure it a little; I'm not pretending to be Joe Mortal in my normal identity or anything. More... one is Batman, one is the Kingpin, kind of a deal.

Accuracy and post-soak damage.

>The particular circumstances help obscure it a little; I'm not pretending to be Joe Mortal in my normal identity or anything. More... one is Batman, one is the Kingpin, kind of a deal.
That's dumb. Don't try to use a hyper-iconic fighting style in both identities and expect to have them remain distinct identities.

>Accuracy and post-soak damage.
How about Parry, homie? You really don't have to fucking worry about hitting hard.

ello lads if ww2 era planes became common or relatively common in creation, what would happen with halta? their whole thing is that they have more airships than anybody
would this mean they have some sort of air fleet

>halta
>their whole thing is that they have more airships than anybody
Are you thinking of the Haslanti League?

yes my bad lad

How do you figure out what the right amount of motes to spend in combat is?

In that case, no, their whole thing is that they have better mundane technology than everyone else. For example, aside from airships, they also have crossbows and feathersteel - and those are just prominent examples. The Haslanti League has built its economy and nation on the back of exploring First Age ruins and trying to reverse engineer any mundane technological advances they can out of them.

Trial and error.

In a fight overall? How bad do you want to win? A Solar can turn himself inside out to almost assuredly obliterate his target, but he's going to wish he hadn't the moment the second gunner shows himself.

On a given attack? How bad in the hole are you init-wise? How long has the fight been going on? Does he have any particular defenses up; are you gonna plow through them or hold off until they expire?

etc. etc. etc.

You may as well ask "how many pieces of bread should my character eat."

You regenerate 5m per turn, so the right amount of motes is 5+(Mote Pool/Rounds of Combat) mote per round. For example, if you expected a combat to last for, say, 5 rounds, and you had a 50 combined mote pool? You'd be able to spend 15 motes per round for five rounds before bottoming out.

Importantly, that's counting your defenses too.

>That's dumb. Don't try to use a hyper-iconic fighting style in both identities and expect to have them remain distinct identities.
It's not really hyper-iconic in the context of my game. There's a school teaching it, another local Exalt with the style, etc.

>How about Parry, homie? You really don't have to fucking worry about hitting hard.
What about it?

Single Point lacks much of anything in terms of accuracy boosters, and has zero stuff to pump post-soak. Soak monsters and constantly clashing fucks are currently pretty big weak points in my build.

....a what? just download the pdf and read it yourself

I haven't been around anything Exalted related for a month or two. What is /exg/'s consensus on the Backer Charms?

I'm reading them now, about halfway through, and the only thing that has come to mind is renewed sadness and confusion over how many dice trick Charms we got in the core book when there were clearly more awesome things to be had.

Some ok, there's some real dogshit and Morke is a raging retard.

Don't have good mechanics knowledge, so wondering which are good, op or suck

>constantly clashing fucks
YOU RANG?

I love the clash branch in the Melee tree.

Also, am I reading it wrong, or does Thunderclap Rush Attack let you clash a Round 1 initiative bomb decisive attack (i.e. the sort of attack Single Point wants to use) regardless of your initiative? And you can make that clash a withering attack to use your accuracy bonus against the incoming decisive with no accuracy bonus? Seems like it's easy to have a lot of fun with that charm.

Hey anons,

Been amusing myself by coming up with Lunar mechanical themes based of Morke/Holden's theme of monster/man duality. Plus general themes of adaptability, survival, instinct, and general over specifics.

What do you think of any of the below hooks of playing lunars?

* Lowered, but exponential training times, e.g. essence 1 charms can be learnt in a night, essence 2 in a week etc.
* Charms can also be unlearnt in the same amount of time - but the xp given can only be spent on more charms - call it instinct xp.
* Any instinct xp in the unspent pool acts as a bonus to both the spirit shape and warform abilities.
* One attribute is Bestial, allowing you to buy up / sell charms on battle level times - e.g. 1 turn for essence 1, 2 for essence 2. Unlike solar's supernal ability, you are still limited to your essence.

Since Lunar charms will be only in 9 attributes, this allows the Lunar wide flexibility in one particular charm,

The other mechanical idea I had (partially cribbed from Jukashi's Lunar Quest) is that Lunar's excellencies allow doubling the attribute die only for a high cost - representing unfettered power over the solar finesse.

What do anons think?

>not really hyper iconic in my setting

theres like...800 people in the entire world who even *could* use it right?
_______________________________
so in 2e if I take hive mutation twice do I become a colony of spiders? or do I die? because the text is a bit iffy on that... also how would injuries work?

>* Lowered, but exponential training times, e.g. essence 1 charms can be learnt in a night, essence 2 in a week etc.
This is cute, I like it, but remember that training times are kind of peripheral to a lot of groups, and XP costs matter more.

>* Charms can also be unlearnt in the same amount of time - but the xp given can only be spent on more charms - call it instinct xp.
A lot of STs allow retraining already, so I'm not sure granting it as a mechanic is really a good precedent. Maybe pursue it further, or try a different tack on the same idea? Plus it feels very Alchemical-y, and I'm not sure that's how Lunars should roll.

>* Any instinct xp in the unspent pool acts as a bonus to both the spirit shape and warform abilities.
Thisss might be interesting? It certainly makes sense that Lunars would be able to spend their Lunar XP on things like this, in addition to what Solars can spend Solar XP on. I'd have to see execution.

>* One attribute is Bestial, allowing you to buy up / sell charms on battle level times - e.g. 1 turn for essence 1, 2 for essence 2. Unlike solar's supernal ability, you are still limited to your essence.
Not a fan of this. A lot of STs just allow this to happen anyway if it's suitably dramatic (the buying anyway), and changing out your Charm loadout mid-fight is going to really drag things down, especially for players with choice paralysis.

> is that Lunar's excellencies allow doubling the attribute die only for a high cost - representing unfettered power over the solar finesse.
What's this supposed to mean? Remember that we already have a really good Excellency for Lunars as-is.

sounds interesting enough to wait for you to give me a pdf so i can see how it turns out, but i don't wanna help ;)

> A lot of STs allow retraining already, so I'm not sure granting it as a mechanic is really a good precedent. Maybe pursue it further, or try a different tack on the same idea? Plus it feels very Alchemical-y, and I'm not sure that's how Lunars should roll.

My orginal thought was an elder scrolls mechanic such that you get and lose charms based on what attributes you use the most, but would require tracking usage of 9 attributes, so scrapped it.

Thought of the unspent lunar xp acting as a bonus to allow easy xp flow between a lunar's human and animal forms - allowing an intellectual user to sacrifice in the short term their intelligence charms for a huge bonus - ala one winged angel form.

I agree the 3E quick character Lunar excellency is pretty good, but I was trying to think of way of increasing its power in return for no fine control - full power or nothing.

Alchemical / Lunar wise they have a lot of similarities already, but I see their differences in that Alchemical need to construct their charms, and have a support network, whereas ideally, Lunars would adapt to their current situation by being able to pick up the charms as needed.

E.g. you have a lunar as a recurring boss following you and as you move from the wild to civilisation she slowly adapts more and more.

Thus Lunars main advantage would be their unsupported versatlity and flexiblity out of the gate.

Do anons think all Exalted should have their own advancement gimmick like Solars supernal charm? E.g. DBs can buy high essence charms by sharing them among a group, or infernals can buy high essence charms for a terrible price?

I'm through it all now. Mostly; I skimmed some of those Ride and Sail Charms. Not likely to ever be relevant for me.

So... what's up with the Fastball Special Charm? That's a maneuver my group has employed since forever. Why exactly does my Zenith that can already juggle small houses and punch a dude hard enough to send him two hundred yards back and through a brick wall require an additional Charm to throw a consenting ally one rangeband?

Eh, wasn't thinking of developing it any further, just been trying to think of novel exalted mechanics on daily commute.

If you are looking for 3E fan splat books,
someone's done them for Sidereals, including sorcerous working style fate weaving:
forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?782421-Exalted-3-Sidereals-Where-Fate-Has-Led-done-with-first-pass-of-charms-What-should-be-next

>Why exactly does my Zenith that can already juggle small houses and punch a dude hard enough to send him two hundred yards back and through a brick wall require an additional Charm to throw a consenting ally one rangeband?

YOURS doesn't. The backer who requested the Charm does, however. Maybe he has a stricter ST, or maybe he wanted it to be codified specifically.

Technically I guess you could get rid of all charms, and have their effects just be Gambits or high difficulties - Mage style sphere magic applied to Exalted.

thats what i thought, thanks.

so treating the mutations won't really help then.

What were your thoughts on the new Social charms? Burecracy, Performance, Presence, and Socialise?

>theres like...800 people in the entire world who even *could* use it right?
Dragon-Blooded can use it, so no. Mortals can use it (less magic ninja crap), so double no.

No, there's billions. Just like there's billions of people who know how to sword, but only ~300 who can sword spectacularly well.

Any mortal can learn Single Point, its just not mechanically any different to learning generic swording. Fluffwise, they'd be executing the same moves as the Solar, but theirs would be pale imitations of the Charm-enhanced attacks.

Also, DBs can learn Single Point, so even talking about the Charms, there's, at minimum, tens of thousands who could know them.

Bureaucracy:

Honor-Instilling Mantra: Another Ability 5, Essence 2 Charm in an edition that tells you resolutely not to min-max, then heavily rewards you for doing so.

Pattern-Exploiting Commerce Spirit seems kind of pointless. It only hits a city block around you, so you're already telling your GM "I'm looking for X kind of person" and hoping for fiat to put X kind of person within a city block of you. Without the Charm, you're telling your GM "I'm looking for X kind of person" and hoping for fiat to put X kind of person... slightly closer to you than with the Charm. It doesn't give you any new kind of permissions. It doesn't give you power in the mechanical OR narrative sense.

If it said, instead, "You put out word that you're looking for X kind of person, and THEY WILL show up, regardless of where in the world they should be." it would be a really cool Charm with significant narrative weight. It would also make an awesome Cecelyne Genie/Spacebending themed Charm for Infernals.

Creation of Adamant Specie is cool. I like it. There's some unnecessary demon hate in there, but the concept of the Charm is awesome.

Spectacle-Inciting Order reduces an entire awesome story, about a clever Solar using guile and wit to set up liaisons with spirit courts and Raksha nobles in order to create a scenario where they're able to unconventionally use their mercantilism skills to solve a problem into... press Charm button, get packaged result without effort or narrative.

>Honor-Instilling Mantra: Another Ability 5, Essence 2 Charm in an edition that tells you resolutely not to min-max, then heavily rewards you for doing so.

You mean it is too low essence / high ability for its effect?

He means the Solar Charmset is very top-heavy, when it comes to Ability prerequisites. Something like 1 in 3 Charms require a 4 or a 5 in your Ability.

hm, would it break the game at all to decrease ability prerequisite by 1 or 2 only? I thought the minmax issue was really for attributes rather than abilities

Not the original complainer, but my broad rule was as follows:

1) Set every Charm's Ability prerequisite to no more than its Essence prerequisite + 2.
2) Of the Charms that were already 3/1, set any with no prerequisites to 1/1, and any that had one Charm prerequisite to 2/1.

I haven't gone through and actually mathed out what this does to the Charmset numerically, but it does provide a solid ceiling; if I toss a 3 into a non-supernal, I know for a fact that I can buy any Charms I might be interested in for a while.

Performance:

Glorious Solar [Bagpipes]: Okay. Sure.

Seventeen Cycles Symphony: After making a big deal in the core book about how workings cannot be dispelled, and then making an even bigger deal in their forums about how anyone who thinks workings should be dispellable is bad and should feel bad, here's a way to dispel workings. Neat. It's a pretty cool Charm.

Drama-Fueling Ardor: A cool concept - give the people acting opposite you the chops to almost keep up with you. Then there's some non-Charm dice and bonus mote generation tacked on there because apparently that's what we do in this edition. Dice pool bloat and mote pool bullshit were big problems in the previous edition. So lets create really stringent limitations to prevent it from happening again. Then shit on them as frequently as possible. Also, the second paragraph doesn't DO anything. That's already something that happens in the system. If people like your performance enough to create an intimacy for it, they create an intimacy for it. It doesn't even auto-create an intimacy. It just reminds you that if your performance was liked *enough*, then someone gets an intimacy for it. That's what an intimacy IS.

Divinely Inspired Performance: I don't know, really. If the Charm let you cludge a performance you weren't familiar with well enough to accidentally improvise every line correctly, I would say that the Charm was both very Solar, and also shouldn't exist because it would just be an effect of having a very high dice pool. As it is, it makes you psychic in a way that Sid fate magic or SWLIHN would be jealous of. Kind of gently urinates on or around Solar thematics.

Seven Thunders Voice: Cool.

I'm considering getting Exalted 3E, but have heard horror stories about the mechanics from previous editions. Are Virtues still as weird and easily abused? Is combat still Rocket Tag with Perfect Defences? Do you still need a metric ton of dice in order to play?

>I'm considering getting Exalted 3E, but have heard horror stories about the mechanics from previous editions.
3e is a dramatic improvement. Imperfect, but good.
>Are Virtues still as weird and easily abused?
No.
>Is combat still Rocket Tag with Perfect Defences
No.
>Do you still need a metric ton of dice in order to play?
Kind of. The strongest "resting" dice-pool hovers around 14 dice at absolute tops, and charms can push that up to ~25-ish, but it's not like 2e where that 25-die pool is what you were using all scene, it's just on your big fuckwrecker attacks.

>Virtues
Don't exist, folded into intimacies
>Is combat still Rocket Tag with Perfect Defences?
nope, save or die combat heavily reduced in favor of combat "tempo" before damage

>Do you still need a metric ton of dice in order to play?
Can you buy 50 d10s for $20 from amazon?

>an edition that tells you resolutely not to min-max, then heavily rewards you for doing so.

Really? The admonitions not to min-max seem to come from a particular sub-breed of bad-wrong-fun fans, not from the actual rules. I mean, they explicitly have a sidebar title "Yes You Can Take A 5".

Presence:

Poised Lion Stance: I'm not sure this does anything. Core pg223 already says you can use social influence in combat as an action. It says nothing about you having to place it in a flurry, and all Poised Lion Stance says is that you can use social influence in combat without a flurry.

It should probably say you can take a non-social combat action and a social combat action on the same turn without a flurry. But that's not what it says.

Holy Touch: I'm not even sure what Presence's theme is anymore. Maybe this Charm is fine. Maybe it's terrible. I don't know. I reserve my opinion.

God-Heeling Gesture: What even IS PRESENCE? We're going back to 2nd edition's "I cure the sick person by punching the least god of his disease". With this Charm, you can bring stuff back to life by yelling at a God's domain hard enough. That's an actual example.

Unnerving Solar Presence: Effectively, another big wad of non-Charm dice.

Voice-Empowering Aspect and Divinity Conferring Touch: The devs are trying so hard. They've flung so much shit at the concept of enlightened mortals, but people want them so badly, and the devs want them so badly, and they're just... they're like "Okay, maybe just the tip. No enlightened mortals. But... just the tip, baby. Just for a second." Personally, I find the whole concept fine. But I would've preferred the game to just acknowledge that some players are going to want to uplift mortals, and tackle it with some unified mechanics. Right now they're just kind of all over the place.

>Do you still need a metric ton of dice in order to play?

Most of our players rock up with 20 dice. Then we either re-roll some, or borrow from another player for those instances that we need to exceed that number.

>Do you still need a metric ton of dice in order to play?
No, you just play on roll20 and type /roll 69d10sd>7.

>They've flung so much shit at the concept of enlightened mortals
They flung shit at mortal enlightenment camps where you could mass-produce your totally awesome army of Mortals 2.0 and transhumanify Creation because mortals are so funny and useless they really should thank you for that. Now there ARE ways to uplift your followers but those are relatively high Essence and require commitment. Also, I guess being "all over the place" is a feature because simple, unified systems are prone for abuse. Now it's mostly case-by-case so if you want it badly you can just ask your ST and think about something.

>With this Charm, you can bring stuff back to life by yelling at a God's domain hard enough. That's an actual example.
Eh, I think the bringing-back-to-tilfe example is kinda stupid because it contradicts the nature of death in Creation but the Charm itself is fine. You are basically entering a big standoff with a god where he uses his miracles trying to inspire awe in puny mortals while you make dramatic gesture and nullify them. It COULD be placed in Occult but if you stress the need for dramatic actions and clash of charismatic, divine figures then it's mostly fine.

>Core pg223 already says you can use social influence in combat as an action. It says nothing about you having to place it in a flurry,
Except it does? I mean, it doesn't explicitly say you HAVE to but it mentions social actions can be placed in flurry as normal. Which implies that if you want to swing a sword and use social action you have to use a flurry because otherwise that just wouldn't make sense.

>No, there's billions. Just like there's billions of people who know how to sword
There aren't billions of people in Creation, let alone billions who know how to use a sword. The estimates I've seen put Creation's population between 150 million and 300 million humans.

Citation please

I don't have a citation, but Creation has less than double the landmass of Earth with significantly lower infrastructure and population density, according to the fluff. Based on the calcuations I've seen others do, it puts the Creation's population at less than 500 million at the absolute highest.

Having even a single billion of people would be absurd, based on what we know about Creation's pre-modern population density.

Oh, right, so despite you presenting it as a definitive fact of the setting, it's just some numbers you pulled out of your arse and wafted around under everyone's noses for your own pleasure.

Fuck off.

best merits?

Why did 3e add ten new exalted?

Any that don't provide a direct dice bonus are pretty solid. The social ones are especially good (command, contacts, etc.)

Artifact (3) to buy a Belt of Shadow Walking, then spend two ability dots and a Charm to pick up Spirit-Cutting Attack, allowing you to hit people from a position of near-invincibility.

It didn't.

Exigents, Getimians, Liminals, 2 Lunar satellites, and the Spoken. Six are all that have ever been discussed in any seriousness, and there's no guarantee that all of those will even reach print.

Mechanically, artifacts, hearthstones and command give you nice crunch-points to hang stuff off (evocations, war charms, etc).

Fluff-wise, being a regional power (influence), being richer than Croesus (resources), or knowing everything of note that happens in your domain (contacts) is pretty cool - it just doesn't give you quantifiable mechanical advantages.

As the other user said, the ones that give minor mechanical buffs (+1 join battle, +1 health level, etc) are pretty crap, unless you're really trying to max the shit out of one particular thing - and even then, they're more likely taken to be a completionist than for their actual, practical value.

>The estimates I've seen put Creation's population between 150 million and 300 million humans.
Why would you ever think I was presenting it as a direct citation, angriest little faggot? You're bizarrely furious about someone pointing out that the idea that a barely-medieval setting with huge swathes of wilderness couldn't possibly have a population resembling modern, urbanized Earth.

As far as canonical information is concerned, though, even the setting's largest metropoli - like Nexus, for example - have populations of 'nearly a million people' at the very highest end. Every other city, other than the Imperial City, has even less than Nexus. Lookshy, canonically, has less than 200,000, yet is still considered a large city with a large population.

For context, Constantinople had a population of up to 800,000 people in about the 9th and 10th centuries AD, which would be a good point of reference. During those centuries, the world supported about 230 million people.

The idea that Creation, with its canonically small cities, canonically sparse towns and villages, canonically expansive wildernesses, and lack of modern farming, infrastructure, medicine, and sanitation would have a population measured in the billions is flatly absurd.

150-300 million people is a good and reasonable population estimate considering the limited size of the cities, the uninhabited wildernesses, the roaming fair folk, hungry ghosts, and dangerous elementals outside of civilized areas, and so forth. If anything, it's a little on the high end.

But having even a billion - let alone plural billions - of people in Creation isn't just wrong, it's fucking dumb.

>Except it does? I mean, it doesn't explicitly say you HAVE to but it mentions social actions can be placed in flurry as normal. Which implies that if you want to swing a sword and use social action you have to use a flurry because otherwise that just wouldn't make sense.

Right, we're in agreement in what the standard rules are. The only thing I'm proposing is that Poised Lion Attitude is written poorly.

Here's the entire Charm text (sans the intro fluff sentence): "This Charm allows the Exalt to engage in Presence or Socialize based social influence on her turn during combat without the use of a flurry." All of it. There's no missing context. This is 100% of the mechanical text.

An Exalt can ALREADY engage in Presence or Socialize based social influence on their turn during combat without the use of a flurry. They can stand in combat and, on their turn, say something but not attack, thereby not using a flurry. You don't have to flurry a single action.

They only have to place their social influence in a flurry if they're also using a second, combat action. Which this Charm does NOT address. It doesn't say that you can use BOTH social influence and a standard combat action without a flurry, it only addresses using a single social influence in an action.

I think the intent of the Charm is easily guessed. But it's poorly written. That's all that I'm saying.

Two major reasons, I feel like:
1) Reduces the pigeonholing/"who's that Pokemon" feel of classic Exalts. Exigents in particular do this, but by adding more Exalts in general you get some benefits along these lines.

2) Exalts provide meaningful, dangerous peer level opposition, rivals, support, etc, for other Exalts. They're humans so they're more interesting than gods and 3CD and such. For example, Getimians give Sidereals something to do.

dice hell is somewhat inherent in the system at its core. no real way around it. I suggest using roller programs

It's no wonder your ideas are so shit, when you talk out of your arse like that.

Not a big personal fan of any of these, sorry user.

Creation has however many people you want it to have. It's sparsity isn't canonical - it's arbitrary. You can fill in as many little kingdoms and city states in the empty spots in the map as you want. Just because the book doesn't explicitly say what's there doesn't mean it's empty - it means it's content is indeterminate.

It may have a billion, it may have only a few dozen million - it depends on the Storyteller, his story, and what he wants it to have. Claiming that you have calculated the definitive population of Creation, and that other people are wrong, because you extrapolated from historical reality to calculate the population of a world of demigods, mythic sorcery and interventionist deities, is ludicrous.

There is no right amount, that's too situational

>Just because the book doesn't explicitly say what's there doesn't mean it's empty - it means it's content is indeterminate.
I'm not in any way suggesting that the locations without canon civilizations are empty of human habitation.

I'm talking about the canonical fact that huge swathes of Creation are overgrown wilderness dotted with isolated villages separated by huge stretches of primeval forests, deserts, and oceans, inhabited by strange monsters, dangerous elementals, and predatory Fair Folk.

Creation is, very explicitly, a place full of enormous tracts of land where no humans have walked in centuries, where humans barely settle, and villages that haven't had outside contact in over a generation.

>because you extrapolated from historical reality
Not just historical reality - the canon populations of actual places in Creation. They don't have large populations - at least unless you homebrew them too. The absolute largest outliers of cities in Creation don't even have a million people, and most canon entire citystates are barely pushing 100,000.

Chiaroscuro, for example, is described as having only a million total souls in the city and all of its surrounding territories combined, and that's easily the biggest city in the South, and one of the biggest in the entire world.

>it may have only a few dozen million
No, that's equally unrealistic. There's a few dozen million just in the described canon locations. Creation actually would have to be empty outside of canon locales for that to be true, which we know isn't the case.

Ultimately, for Creation to have more than a couple hundred million people, it would need to have either massive cities that dwarf even Nexus and the Imperial City dotting the unwritten parts of the world, or be covered in a massive spread of dispersed civilization, with towns bearing thousands of souls over every hill.

And for it to have less than that, it would be nearly empty.

It's not ludicrous at all.

I want to be raped by ma ha suchi in female form in the breeding pits!

>Chiaroscuro, for example, is described as having only a million total souls in the city and all of its surrounding territories combined

So? How many cities are there half the size Chiaroscuro in Creation? A dozen? Fifty? A thousand? There's no canonical number, because Storyteller can add as many as they want, and there's enough landmass to support an essentially arbitrary amount.

> There's a few dozen million just in the described canon locations. Creation actually would have to be empty outside of canon locales for that to be true, which we know isn't the case.

No, we don't. We know there's a whole bunch of space that may be occupied if the ST wants it to be. If you want your story to take place in a world of isolated city-states, separated by vast empty tracts of wilderness, you totally can.

>it would need to have either massive cities that dwarf even Nexus and the Imperial City dotting the unwritten parts of the world
Which it totally can, if you want.

>covered in a massive spread of dispersed civilization, with towns bearing thousands of souls over every hill.
Which it totally can, if you want.

And that's ignoring your excluded middle, where it has numerous, high-density cities that don't significantly exceed the canonical biggies.

There's a region in the East called the "Hundred Kingdoms". Even low-balling their populations at 100,000 (10% of Chiaroscuro), you're getting 100,000,000 just in one relatively-small area, of one direction, with no real notable powers.

Add in stuff like the Blessed Isle, which has a landmass the size of Australia, experiences multiple harvests per year, still has the technological relics of a mythological age, and the capacity to supernaturally enhance its own fecundity, and you could cap a billion easily.

The population of Creation isn't canonical. It can be whatever you want it to be, and telling other people they're wrong because they don't agree with your non-canonical assumptions is, indeed, ludicrous.

>the Blessed Isle, which has a landmass the size of Australia
Two Australias, actually. Yu Shan is the mass the size of a single Australia.

Anyway, I've already stated why I disagree with assumptions that would place the population of Creation anywhere near the billions. It's flatly absurd. Even ignoring the impossible logistics of it and the fact that it flies in the face of canon locations, it would result in a Creation-wide human presence that simply isn't represented anywhere in the fluff.

But as you say, if you're so inclined to have it be that way in your games, it totally can, if you want.

But it's my strongly-held opinion that doing so goes aggressively against both the setting as it's presented by the canon, and against anything resembling common sense.

I think the main point of it was to get rid of the flurry penalty you'd normally get for using a social and attack action each round.

Yeah, obviously. But as-written, it doesn't do that - as-written it doesn't do anything.

>Two Australias, actually. Yu Shan is the mass the size of a single Australia.

I was going by a size estimate off the mapping tool. But that's even more ridiculous - twice the size of Australia, and not fertile? That's bigger than mainland China, with significantly more advantages - like being the cultural and military centre world, and being able to call on supernatural power. And even pre-industrial China had half a billion people.

>Online at PnPRPG's

Defeating the purpose of the game mate.

1) The only thing Exigents did is bloat a setting that quite frankly didn't need them. The original exalted and antagonists fit Creation just fine without adding 80 billion tons of more crap with it.

2) Exalted already had tons of shit to do in terms of peers, rivals, and support for exalts. Gods/spirits/Raksha/fey/akuma provided even more mystery and intrigue than mortals ever did. Sidereals also had something to do in the first place, its called Lunars. You know, since how it was from fucking 1e.

The setting bloat they did is terrible, there is no defending it.

Are there guns in Exalted?

The Exigents are the least intrusive extra Exalt, IMO. At least they keep in line with the original concept of Exaltation - a gods divine power, infused into a mortal, making them a champion of that god.

The Getimians, Liminals and super-surprise Exalt...I don't mind these beings existing, but they don't really seem like Exalts.

Not as such; people in Creation use flamethrowers instead of guns, due to differing nature of the natural resources they have access to (gunpowder isn't a thing; firedust is).

There are not. Nothing stopping you from making them though. Stat blocks are easy enough to do in 3e.

>people in Creation use flamethrowers instead of guns
I think calling flame weapons 'flamethrowers' is a bit misleading.

For me, at least, when someone says 'flamethrower' I think of something that fires a somewhat sustained spray/spread of fire, but that's not really how flame weapons work.

They're accurate and narrow enough that aiming matters and called shots to shoot weapons out of someone's hands is a thing, and they have an instant flash-and-done like a gun going off, rather than shooting out with a spray that sustains.

They're more fire-guns than flamethrowers, at least based on what the latter term evokes to me.

Yeah, but that's too long for an off-the-cuff remark.

I think the closest parallel is shotguns with Dragons Breath rounds: youtube.com/watch?v=RP4FjODPDFA#t=4m40s

Stupid embed doesn't process the timecode. 4:40 is where they use the Dragon's Breath.

>Are there guns in Exalted?
Kinda, but think less muskets and more dragon's breath.

See, Creation has different natural laws from the real world. In the real world, gunpowder exists. Gunpowder, when ignited, dumps most of its chemical energy into rapidly expanding pressurized gas, and only some of its energy into heat.

In Creation, though, they don't have any substances like that, or haven't discovered them yet.

Instead, they have something called Fire Dust. Fire Dust looks like something between black ash and ruby sand, and it drifts into Creation on the thermal winds that roll off of the Elemental Pole of Fire, settling onto the dunes of the Deep South. Tribes go out there with long-handled rakes to collect it, like people trying to collect sea salt on the Indian Ocean, with explosive results for improper handling.

But the thing is that Fire Dust works the opposite way from gunpowder. Its energy, when ignited, goes mostly to heat, and relatively little to expanding gas. So, it's not strong enough to drive a musketball out of a barrel at significant speeds, and would probably slag the inside of the barrel from the heat if you tried.

So, instead, they don't use musketballs. Out of the barrel shoots a narrow tongue of flame, which has a limited range before it loses momentum and the flame dissipates. It's still a sudden flash, and in both 2e and 3e at the very least it's been narrow enough to not only not be able to hit an entire area, you can shoot precise targets out of someone's hands with one, with proper aiming.

There are cowboys with flame six-shooters, pirates with flame pistol braces, and even ships armed with flame cannons, but the important thing to remember is that no matter what form they take, they have extremely limited range. They're not for sniping, and they're not artillery pieces, and there's no hiding this kind of muzzle flash.

Are they loud?

>In Creation, though, they don't have any substances like that, or haven't discovered them yet.

And even if it simply can't work using Creation's laws you always have the option to Sorcerous Working it.

I think so. I don't care to go looking up the specifics on how they sound at this time of night, but if they don't make a bigass bang the way gunpowder does, they surely make at least the roaring whoosh of rushing flame.

I expect that the initial ignition and then sudden heat differential does make a gunshot-style bang, though.

For sure. Ultimately, the issue is that nobody's figured out how to make a substances capable of launching a bullet in the manner of gunpowder in a way that's both effective and accessible to mundane folk. Yet.

That doesn't mean that it's not possible. It just means it hasn't been done.

Me, if I was going to try to go that route, I'd try to find some crystallized lightning in the frozen reaches of the North. The guy who figures out how to turn that into rapidly-expanding pressurized Air has my bet for being the guy who figures out Earth-style pressure-guns.

That or, you know, fuck it, Northern long-range lightning-guns to play counterpoint to the South's fire-guns. Lightning crossbows versus flame muskets. Who wouldn't be down for that shit?

We must consult the Moracle to decipher this mystery.

What's the difference between Gods and elementals?

Gods are immaterial, they have defined areas of influence and are responsible for monitoring, maintaining, protecting and growing them. They are byan large unique individuals.

Elementals are material, they are manifestations of one of the elements as defined by the essence of the location they are in. They are part of the natural world, but except at high essence they have no agendas as such, they are more like intelligent animals than people. They have no place in HEaven, but at High Essence can rival many Godly peers.

Miracle Solar is cute. CUTE!

So is Lookshy supposed to resemble Japan?

Boo hoo, they added more shit to the setting.

Isn't there a martial art based around flame throwers?

Given that it was the capital of a government called the Shogunate (which, in retrospect, could've just been Exalted's convenient shorthand for "military government"), probably.

Yup. Righteous Devil Style. It's in the Ex3 Core.