Exalted General - /exg/

So what do you guys want from Warstriders when Arms hits? Walking magical WMDs? Something that adds to the game but doesn't derail or define it? Anime Mecha Bullshit?

The middle one! The middle one!!!

Yeah. Devs said way back when that Evocations should put regular Artefacts on the same level as Warstriders, and with both 5 dot artefacts that we've seen so far being capable of taking out entire city blocks.

Strormbringer has me hyped for Arms. Lets just hope that book will have rules for homebrewing Evocations.

The middle one, I guess. I want them to have enough power and complexity to be an interesting element of games when they're around, but not warp everything else around them. Ideally they'll be terrifying weapons, but have limits to how they can reasonably be used so that "hop in your mecha" isn't the standard response to every conflict.

I don't know what those restrictions would be, though, beyond the obvious logistics of hauling around a giant suit of magic robot armor. Maybe that's enough. I like to think they'll be better at mass destruction and fighting giant opponents than dueling human-sized combatants, though.

Didn't one of the devs post a gambit that tore open the fuselage of a Warstrider, allowing you to attack the pilot for 1i? IIRC, it could be fixed in battle with a Craft roll.

>That irc stuff last thread
Well I had hoped for a while that this was a more voluntary thing and there were still chances of seeing them doing some work once they got their personal lives sorted but looks like that's shot.
Remind me, did vance say he's been doing basically all the work on the DB charmset? Guess we find out how bad this is when that hits.

Morke and Holden quite literally ripped off the battle system from a rather popular video game, introduced ridiculous Charm bloat when one of the worst parts of 2E was the 10 thousand fucking Charms hanging around for everyone, and delivered a product years late, then proceeded to sit around and do jack shit for the last year.

yes it is worth it, why would it even bother you?

Anime mecha bullshit, with no brakes. Warstriders have been Not-Escaflowne's for years, but always had the shittiest rules in every edition.

I want an edition where Warstriders are actually good, and don't require your own private mecha facility powered by burning gold dumptrucks full of money just to keep it powered up for more than 10 minutes every 3rd Tuesday of alternating months.

>Those last two points mixed in on some prime level bait with all the right buzzwords
Excellently done, an easy 9.5/10

I just thought it was a bit outdated at this point. Plus 2E was a mechanical clusterfuck.

If any of this was wrong, they wouldn't be fired right now, would they?

I know how you feel, but I'm also afraid of a single Warstrider immediately recontextualizing any game it's in. "That guy has a Warstrider, and I'll never be able to keep up unless I have one, too." Amd then everyone and their dog has one because that's the way the game is now. It's like the ST throwing nothing but Solaroids in as enemies because he can't conceive of anything else that can challenge a circle of Solars.

I suppose, most importantly, I want Warstriders to be fun.

What does 10 years of Exalted look like, user? Have you completely broken the setting over your knee?

Translating Dissidia's mechanics to pen and paper effectively is a lot harder than just copy pasting things. It is a non argument to say the engine isn't an accomplishment based on Dissidia because there were still a thousand different ways for the mechanics to be translated. 2E used FF's ATB system for tick combat, so why was 2E's combat shit while 3E's was good?

The Charm bloat argument is another non-argument. What precisely does it mean, how does it harm the game? Beyond potential options paralysis, the charms functioned well while having no trap choices or essential charms like Perfect Defenses.

Lateness is the only legit criticism, and that more than anything else is why Vance and Minton are in charge

Funny part is, even with anime bullshit style mecha, if they follow the tropes of them, it'll still allow completely normal people to take them on.

why does anybody even particularly *care* if solars are demons? demons aren't all that bad in the setting, dragonbloods certainly aren't shy about summoning them to do random pointless things that are mildly inconvenient to do themselves or hire human servants for. except the fucking anathema which must be cleansed with fire immediately

No. The only credible arguments are lateness and slowness: if the other two were even remotely plausible they'd have been fired much, much sooner. It's a pathetic argument

>so why was 2E's combat shit while 3E's was good?

Because 2E's was based off Power Combat, a notoriously shitty and broken "upgrade" of 1E's combat. And it somehow managed to be even more fundamentally broken than even Power Combat, and introduced an incredibly dull combat paradigm.

>The Charm bloat argument is another non-argument. What precisely does it mean, how does it harm the game?

Clutter is what it means. Bloated book sizes, potentially redundant Charms (remember how people keep saying parts of the Craft tree are shit?), and parceling out tiny mechanical benefits for little gain, but you still have to know a bunch of random junk for that little gain. Basically, it just slows everything down and adds tons of extra little rules to memorize rather than trying to parse down the mechanics to make everything smoother.

can you share homebrew links and thoughts on what works?

>Translating Dissidia's mechanics to pen and paper effectively is a lot harder than just copy pasting things.
Alright, imma take you up on that challenge and translate Dissidia's mechanics to Exalted, right now. SO, you have your attack rolls like regular exalted, but you also have a Brave pool. You make a normal Exalted attack roll, but instead of doing damage, you take points from your opponent's Brave pool and add them to yours, equal to your successes. Then you can do an HP attack, We'll make it a little harder to hit with one of these by not getting any accuracy from your weapon. Then, if you hit, instead of doing the normal Exalted damage calculation, you roll your Brave pool and deal damage equal to your successes. edit: testing shows that damage is a bit high, we'll nerf it by making it so that tens don't give double successes on damage rolls for HP attacks.

WOW I did it, that was SO HARD, you have no IDEA!!

As a Dawn-Caste, how many combat charms should I have before it's 'too much,' and I get some utility charms?

There is no way to answer this without knowing the campaign you're playing.

Depends on how hard you want to murder everything/not die. Personally, I just go balls deep into whatever my Supernal is, and if that Supernal doesn't offer some sort of defensive option, I then pick up some Charms from a defensive ability.

You literally just copy pasted Exalted's interpretation of Dissidia. Why not do an original interpretation if it's so easy. Show the math.

We have pretty much crushed the setting, yes. Our characters started off 100 years before the Time of Tumult, and our goal was to build the largest kingdom/empire possible in preparation for the "game start." The GM made it clear he wanted a high power game. We are currently Essence 6-7 and most of our antagonists are in the 8+ range.

We began in the Vostok region right on the edge of the Wyld, and have basically conquered everything in the "V" between the River of Tears and the Silver River. Our southernmost holdings are directly across the river from the Black Chase and Sijan.

We spent about eighty or so years building both kingdoms and alliances quietly and ended up being tested when a complex series of events led us to angering the Neverborn, who sent a coalition of DLs to destroy us. The SKS decided to side with us because we had the only known Solar mates at that point, and the DLs were defeated. After we beat them, we just kept marching south as the SKS' star rose and more young Lunars began flocking to them. We also have a huge ghost army as well and have conquered most of the Northern Underworld. MoW and Walker are the northernmost DLs now.

We've essentially replaced the Bull of the North after crushing the Realm at Rubylak in the Linowan region. Cherak is terrified we're going to cross the River of Tears and come after them next. Our GM is doing his own spin on the "invasion from Malfeas" plot. though, so it appears our orgy of conquest has come to an end.

Depends on your planned build. You could easily buy up an entire Martial Art style at chargen, but if you are looking at the other combat abilities, you'll want to know what kind of fighting style you'll have in advance.

Call the Blade is a good utility charm that shuts down disarming.

They didn't do any math, all the numbers for the base system are the same exact storyteller system numbers, 1-5 for natural ability at whatever, 0-5 for skill, 7 not dead yet boxes. they just added the brave system from dissidia as an additional step so that succeeding on a single accuracy check with a big fuckoff two handed weapon isn't instant death.

EX3 is literally just EX2 with an extra layer of health and an ablative defense track.

Option 3, if you please.

I'm thinking of making a SPSitV Style character, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to buy the whole tree or just go up to Liquid Steel Flow.
I'm obviously gonna get Thunderbolt Attack Prana and its prerequisites, plus I was thinking of getting Mendicant Spirit because it fit my character archetype (he's an unnasuming beggar-swordsman based on Meti from Kill Six Billion Demons). I'm not sure if I'd need any defensive charms, or if I can just rely on excellencies.
Is there anything obvious I'm missing? Are the other 4 charms from SPSitV Style worth it?

The most important thing I can tell you is to have at least one person in your group who understands math, especially the GM. I ran a 1.0 game of Exalted prior to our current GM, and he's done a vastly better job than me because he's good at math and can design opposition and challenges competently. This is so, so, important.

We did not use anyone's homebrew in particular. The GM basically edited the system as he went along. About a third of the way into the game, he went through and systematically did edits on ALL the Solar Charms and Lunar Charms that he thought needed work.

A bit later this also happened with MA styles our characters wanted to learn.

He also came up with a sheet of rules for fixing the broken castes and becoming First Age Lunars, a task my character's Twilight mate accomplished together with Raksi near the end of the game.

Finally, he basically invented Hekatonkhire/Deathlord Charms from scratch because he felt that Arcanoi sucked and making DLs 99,999 XP Solars was dumb and uncreative.

The "core" tree a lot of DLs and Heks started from had a Charm that lowered target numbers for rolls for harming/killing/destroying things depending on where they were - Creation, Shadowlands, UW, or Labyrinth. This was followed by a Charm that granted motes based on stunts centered around negative intimacies, and then two or three powerful unique Charms per Hekatonkhire (and more with DLs), with stuff like perfect defenses and what have you thrown in where needed.

IMO the Black Art Charms he did for the Deathlords are his most impressive work, I should see if he'll let me post them somewhere for people to look at.

At least for fluff and mechanical feeling.

How are we supposed to know how to play a Ghost, Dragon King, Mountain Folk, Raksha, DB, Lunar, Sidereal, Abyssal, Infernal, Alchemical when the books about them will be released in ten years from now?

How are we supposed to know more about literally all the world when the books about the world will be released in twenty years from now?

3e is dead. At least 2e lived.

Ok Shyft

All f Single Point i good, as long as you keep its weaknesses in mind. It has little to no defence; you'll be relying on your excellency to bring up your Parry, so maybe you should consider bracnhing out into the defensive trees of Melee or buying up Dodge. It has no accuracy enhancers, meaning you have difficulty gaining initiative or winning clashes. It needs Willpower to power most of its charms, so you can't use them constantly. It relies on a good JB, the form charm can be activated reflexively if you win the JB, which also means higher initiative to start the fight with. Losing the JB will seriously tip the scales against you, so buy up Awareness.

Remember, the key to being strong is knowing your weaknesses.

Absolutely. I've been part of 3 games so far, and all the games specified 2.5E.
They were houseruled in some way, but it was 2.5E nontheless. Also unlike 3E, it's a complete edition, with other type of exalts than Solars as well.

2.5e isn't a complete edition. 2e is, however.

Vance and Minton will have a good supplement treadmill.

How come? It has all the exlat types, with charms, plus fae.
It has all the worlds fluff and mechanic (Compasses)
It has all the dramatis personae, and mostly statted.

Yes the number is five decimals short of a whole but it's still a completed edition.

So what should damage look like? How quickly should initiative change? How much is a fair expenditure for gambits and charms? What's a good number for starting initiative? How much should be gained on a crash, if anything? What are the penalties for a crash? How much should be lost on a miss, if any? What should be the dice pool for one type of attack over another? How are defenses against these attacks determined?

You act terribly smug with the benefit of hindsight but it's not so simple to translate a videogame into TT. If you disagree then by all means, translate the Total War games into a tabletop war game. Because last I checked Warhammer Total War was a very different game from Warhammer tabletop, even though they had the same units and everything!

If that were true then Paranoia Combat, Perfect Spam, and Rocket Tag would still be a thing. Just like in Godbound.

Not every Exalt splat got an update for 2.5.

>ripped off
The default battle system for like every fucking game is "roll dice to hit a thing," so any source of inspiration outside of dockside tavern gambling is a powerful innovation in the service of universal system growth.

>ridiculous Charm bloat
"Oh, god, guys, it's so terrible having all these...awesome Melee Charms. If only I had few interesting options, and a single viable path of advancement again!"

Many Charms are not good and/or lazy, but the NUMBER isn't the problem, and notably all the combat trees (IE, the foundation of the game) kick ass, as do all the Martial Arts. Performance has a bunch of stupid dice-adders, but Performance is mostly for girls and fake-girls to play fuck-the-newbie over the internet. RL groups, IE the ones that are actually roleplaying in the first place, generally aren't going to be fucking around with the bad trees to begin with - which is why H & M concentrated development elsewhere.

>years late
Exalted 3E should not have been released before 2018's last quarter. Releasing it early was a huge mistake and the biggest contribution to the whining you see spreading like cancer everywhere: unfinished work tainted by the grubby desperation of the entitled. The Kickstarter should have set its end-date at 2020 and let people donate as long as they fucking want.

it really isn't

i don't understand. why were holden and morke fired? what did they do, try to fuck richt's wife?

because of shit like this:

Holden Shearer @HoldenShearer 13h

OPP unfollowed me on twitter. harsh D=

Holden Shearer @HoldenShearer 13h

I'm not saying Mike Pence is a rapist, but Mike Pence sure seems to think Mike Pence is a rapist.

would he feel comfortable sharing all that?

Way to virtual signal there Holden.

Where'd he say RichT was a rapist?

Good lord, how hard is it to not shitpost on your professional channels?

He may as well go hog wild now, he's done anyways.

Oh, he's going hogwild.

Retweet: To be a consumer is to be feminized. The cult fan positions himself against consumption & women. Women "ruin" sacred cult experience

Original: Soon to be the most vandalized attraction in America [about a museum with a mechanical Trump installation]

Original: Speaking as an artist, I used to hold freedom of expression as the highest possible virtue. Then I met libertarians on the internet.

Shortly before he was fired: Sometimes I like to imagine a really heavy truck backing over Steve Bannon's head. Optimus Prime, maybe.

I am satisfied with Ex3's core system, I have a game going with a good group going and we're all enjoying ourselves. I just want the supplements to come out.

I don't have anymore fucks to give about people bitching about Holden's tweets.

>To be a consumer is to be feminized. The cult fan positions himself against consumption & women. Women "ruin" sacred cult experience

What the fuck does that even mean?

I'm not saying Holden is a faggot, but Holden sure seems to think Holden is a huge ass blasted anal devastated faggot with nojob now.

It means that if you virtue-signal hard enough by retweeting loons no one will realize that your support for trans-rights is based entirely on your own fetishized desire to fuck the individuality out of them and you share a soul with people like JonTron Milo, you're just using a different filter over its endless anguished emesis.

What the tweet literally means is something like if you're a casual, you're spiritually a woman, and women are casuals, and the cycle makes the sweaty hamlord gatekeepers of true fandom upset or something. Every side of that debate is such a faggot.

He still works at the gas station.

But do you have fuck to give about Holden's tweets?

I mean, I have exactly zero fucks to give about people bitching about people bitching about Holden's tweets, which incidentally you are, fuckface.

Yes, because I'm a fan of this stupid fucking Chinojap appropriation-festival of a weeaboo D&D clone and there is literally nothing better in my life than raging about how devs whose creative output over a ten-year period dwarfs my entire human contribution to the human race sometimes say too-liberal shit that I basically completely agree with but try personally to state less balls-out controversially. In part because that's cringey as fuck, but also in part because I'm kind of a coward about every form of self-expression, and that's probably the bigger factor since my severe autism makes everything I do cringe anyway even if I don't realize a given failure of the social instinct for years at a fucking time.

You may think that I'm parodying the opposition, but I'm being serious. I'm user and I ain't proud.

>people so mad at holden they turn into /pol/tards

So how about that Exalted eh

i don't give a fuck about Holden's tweets. he is what he is, and that's generally fine. he's a natural follower who morke led astray into uncomfortable waters but i have fond memories of how he was before 2.5 and he's still a good writer and developer.

morke made cobra style, though. also this:

John Morke @hatewheel 12h12 hours ago
More
John Morke Retweeted Holden Shearer
Same here. I guess all that work didn't count for anything.

Holden Shearer @HoldenShearer
OPP unfollowed me on twitter. harsh D=

that's what we in the faggot industry call a deliberate escalation

It's decent. It could be better. Not gonna turn it down or anything, but it really shouldn't have tried to reinvent all of the fluff.

>too-liberal shit that I basically completely agree with
>over a ten-year period dwarfs my entire human contribution to the human race

Checks out.

patreon.com/emptyset

patreon.com/Vazkii

fucking looool

Bringing the Fluff back to 1E and adding a whole bunch of locations is not really reinventing.

>Holden Defense Force

So are you paid by WW to defend Holden on an anonymous image board?

Ah, no, I forgot. You aren't because HOLDEN HAS JUST BEEN FIRED HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

>not even Holden getting fired will stop people being butthurt about Holden

I just want to talk about the fucking game you idiot, not pore over some now irrelevant faggot's twitter.

Imbecile.

Things we know about lunars
>Focus on being predators, whether that means physical, trying to outwit someone, or anything else
>Somehow rage is going to be incorporated, might be an actual mechanic
This could maybe turn out okay. Still doesn't fix their main problem in my mind.

What in your mind, is their main problem?

>Moving the goal post.

Of course, *wink*.

We all want to talk about Exalted here and not the ex Exalted writers who were suddenly fired for gross incompetence *wink* *wink*. Talking about fired Exalted writers is off-topic for an Exalted thread *wink*.

So, what about those wonderful new splatbooks this month? Ah, sorry, I forgot. There's none. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Why give a fuck about Holden's tweets? Holden has nothing to do with Exalted anymore.

Am I supposed to care? Why? When he's now at the absolute height of irrelevancy to this thread.

>fluff back to 1E
>dead people can come back to life sorta but now they become this new Exalt type
>new Generic Exalt's running around
>whole new sections of the map added
>Not-Sidereals made by Sidereals added
>Autobot not even mentioned anymore
>back to 1E

It's further from 1E than 2E was.

What goalpost?

What do you want us to discuss about Holden? His tweets? How you apparently want to hatefuck him? Jesus Christ.

Oh, I thought you were just talking about what was in the core.

As long as they don't turn them back into civilization hate retards again, things can only go up, right?

>Not-Sidereals made by Sidereals added

Found, apparently, not made.

>I'm user and I ain't proud
words cannot begin to express the unfathomable hatred I feel for you right now.

I like what 3E gave of them so far, i.e. being a part of the angry have-nots that represent all the Threshold states fucked by the big Empire

Get a fucking twitter and bitch to Holden personally, then. Find an outlet instead of venting your anger on the rest of us.

It's a fluff problem. They don't really have a role or purpose the way the other exalts do.
I consider solars, lunars, sidereals, and terrestrials to be the 'main four' in a sense. They fought and wont the primordial war, they were largely responsible for the first age, and so on. Each of them has a thing they do that the others simply can't.
Solars thing is having the most raw power. They shine brighter and hotter than anyone else. They fight harder, lead better, think quicker, the whole nine yards.
Sidereals have the loom and general fate planning. Their raw upfront power might be lacking but they have completely unparalleled abilities to gather information about things without even directly having to interact with them, and to manipulate events to go the way they want. They make everything run smoother both by keeping the loom running, and making sure they are ready for whatever is coming next.
Terrestrials have the power of numbers. They aren't fixed or finite the way the celestials are. In a place as big as creation there are simply more problems that require exalted attention then there are exalts to solve those problems. Terrestrials can be everywhere at once doing everything.
Lunars don't really have anything. They can shapeshift sure, but that's just a cool mechanic, not an important part of the setting. There's nothing they can do with shapeshifting that others couldn't do equally as well with some other thing. They have no 'place' no central role. You could swap out every lunar for say more solars and lose nothing.

Speaking as the GM in question, I only edited a few Solar Charms, I edited some more Lunar Charms since PCs used them. Some were more successful edits than others in hindsight. Since all Solars were NPCs and I did their book keeping, I mostly just arbitrarily used Solar Charms from 2.0 or 2.5 and the later supplements as seemed best without really ever explaining myself to anyone.

I ended up doing a lot more work on Martial Arts so people could have some unarmed trees, and I also worked on Sidereal Martial Arts a great deal, which I allowed for Lunars who were not wyld-tainted anymore, though they didn't work as good as for Solars and Sidereals. No sutras hurt a lot and also I required they had to learn Quicksilver Hand of Dreams first, though I extensively edited it to the point the Charms are only thematically similar. I did the same thing with Prismatic Arrangement of Creation.

I will note that I came into this with a presumption of blowing up the planet and I very much do not expect that Essence 8 or 10 enemies are basically Essence 5 characters with a few Charms for obliterating extras more efficiently.

The Deathlord trees are also more specific to individual deathlords. As part of a character subquest, I allowed this person's character some access to similar Charms, but I wouldn't class them as Deathlord Charms. I designed Deathlords as Incarnae class enemies whose powers substantially weakened outside the underworld and shadowlands to about Essence 5 Celestials of middling power (which is why they have not obliterated Creation - lack of means and not wanting to make themselves vulnerable).

The above is part of the reason the deathlords referenced here failed. They were very dangerous, but they were concerned enough about stopping any kind of Solar return on the Solars' terms they felt compelled to come out. They of course took measures so they weren't as badly weakened, but they weren't at their best.

You misunderstand. I'm not angry at anything that Holden said. I'm angry at user for posting on Veeky Forums and/or Veeky Forums and being ashamed of it.

I don't want to see that either, so the talk about barbarians and rage kind of worries me, but the predator theme sounds like it could be cool. I'm a little apprehensive, but looking forward to seeing what Vance and co. will do with them.

But then, I'm a Lunar fan. It's not like I know what I want in the first place.

Ok Shyft

This is a shameful place, user. No one is here because they're okay, or because they're acceptable. If a friend or a colleague saw this window open, I would cry. They'd think I'm a furry or I jerk off to anime traps or I like Nazis. I only even do the middle one but I don't want them to think any of it.

>But then, I'm a Lunar fan. It's not like I know what I want in the first place.

I know exactly what I want. Lunars to be walking, fluid, body horror monstrosities who can swap forms faster than you can blink.

Probably not gonna get that though.

Whatever the Lunar fluff is that they put out I am replacing with my own. Lunars to me will be the Exalts of chaos, adaption, and evolution. They exist to create interesting times and to not allow stagnation to destroy Creation. During the Primordial War they would adapt to whatever a Primordial would throw at them and use their own power against them. Or set up the scene so that a Solar could kill a Primordial and take all the glory.

Lunars were metaphysically paired with a Solar who will act as a means to draw out the Solar's greatness. In the First Age basically acting as either a villain or ally to the Solar to make them achieve and grow ever brighter. Either overtly or behind the scenes.

With the Solars gone they still do this but to the Realm trying to get them to change and adapt and become stronger. They won't outright hate the Realm (although individuals might) but just want it to become better and stronger. With the return of the Solars they may use Solars to this objective or challenge the Solars to become better so that they may rule. Right now many are using a barbarian strategy to both defend against the Wyld and challenge the Realm.

Of course you're going to get that, you asshole. This is what drives me ballistic about Lunar fans, they're fucking retarded and they fixate on these lone, isolated images they think are identies.

This

> Lunars to be walking, fluid, body horror monstrosities who can swap forms faster than you can blink.

Is like two Charms. There's probably going to be at least another 120 and NONE OF THAT is identity.