Request: Raski and Lunar Exalted as villains.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Tue May 24, 2011 6:00 pm

So the argument is that Frank hates games that use biblical inspiration and alternate histories because he is a commie leftie pinko?

Explains his long standing hatred of Vampire and Shadowrun then.

Wait...

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Tue May 24, 2011 10:16 pm

It is not hard to see why PR considers text at the corebook's back the reason of Frank's enmity towards Exalted, as Frank, on the first page of this very thread, stated that said text earned Exalted his eternal ire.

Not that Exalted does not include actual reasons to dislike it.

Wrathzog · Post by **Wrathzog** » Wed May 25, 2011 12:07 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:So, uh, we ever going to get that insane society of arrogant, hypocritical barbaric mass-murderers or do we just have to keep deconstructing works that are already out there?

Yes.

But seriously, what's wrong with using the WH40K paradigm? They've got Chaos, the Dark Eldar, Orks, Tyranids, and Necrons. They're all assholes for various reasons and there really is no issue with killing any of them.

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Sat May 28, 2011 11:33 am

talozin wrote:
You're not kidding.

RSB is a wonderful, sweet, warm, generous person. Her imagination is a remarkable thing. But the way her mind works is so completely at odds with the way mine does that reading her material feels like being on really interesting drugs.

I often love her fluff, but she should not be allowed to write crunch. At all. Ever. She is just competent enough to (usually) write mechanics that do not obviously break on the first touch or do not work, which actually allows her terribad design to harm the gameline more in the long run. Her Charms in 1E Sidereals did more to destroy Exalted than probably any other supplement.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Sat May 28, 2011 3:45 pm

FatR wrote:
talozin wrote:
You're not kidding.

RSB is a wonderful, sweet, warm, generous person. Her imagination is a remarkable thing. But the way her mind works is so completely at odds with the way mine does that reading her material feels like being on really interesting drugs.
I often love her fluff, but she should not be allowed to write crunch. At all. Ever. She is just competent enough to (usually) write mechanics that do not obviously break on the first touch or do not work, which actually allows her terribad design to harm the gameline more in the long run. Her Charms in 1E Sidereals did more to destroy Exalted than probably any other supplement.

How on earth do you figure that? She was instructed to balance them against (non-existent) high essence solar charms, and preserve the philosophy that sidereals have such weirdly limited charms that they have to use crazy martial arts to make up for it. What would you do with those design goals? Remember, that means the other balance point is against "resplendent annihilation of Soft Rain the sidereal prana" a custom 7 essence charm that some solar just made up.
That no-one ever write the other side of the scale isnot her fault.

Look at the 1E fair folk combat section instead.

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Sat May 28, 2011 6:46 pm

fectin wrote: How on earth do you figure that? She was instructed to balance them against (non-existent) high essence solar charms, and preserve the philosophy that sidereals have such weirdly limited charms that they have to use crazy martial arts to make up for it. What would you do with those design goals? Remember, that means the other balance point is against "resplendent annihilation of Soft Rain the sidereal prana" a custom 7 essence charm that some solar just made up.
That no-one ever write the other side of the scale isnot her fault.

I don't really buy the story about developers twisting her arms to extent of demanding weirdly limited Charms or inventing a whole new MA tier with Charms massively better (on average) that existing Essence 4-6 Solar Charms. There is no evidence that they ever gave enough of a fuck. It was a whole edition later when someone wrote more high-Essence Charms.

So no, I don't think that blame for powercreep, elder creep, MA bloat and Sidereals being almost incompatible with other splats should be laid at the feet of someone else than the women credited for writing those Charms.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Sat May 28, 2011 11:25 pm

You don't buy this?
http://exalted.xi.co.nz/wiki/Thus_Spake ... realCharms

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Sun May 29, 2011 8:20 am

fectin wrote:You don't buy this?
http://exalted.xi.co.nz/wiki/Thus_Spake ... realCharms

There is nothing to buy there, even though her justifications mostly boil to glorified "GM can fix that by fiat" anyway. The whole spiel is about Solar/Sidereal balance. But SMAs are a blasphemy against game design independently of existence of Solar Charms to balance them. Again: massive power creep compared to existing Charms at the same Essence, birth of invincible elders, MAs are teh speshul. Well, add to that making elder games practically unplayable due to adding a new tier of complexity on already intolerably complex character generation.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Fri Jun 03, 2011 4:01 pm

FatR wrote:
EDIT: And there is a ton of people who defend Solar-level combat model (which, if I need to remind, boils down to long-ass attritionfests in which you spam the same optimal move and the stronger character invariably wins) as a deliberate and well-thought out design decision, even though it makes at least half of combat Charms blatant traps. Because they think that it somehow makes PCs hard to kill for superior foes, which are numerous in the setting. Even though it just makes them die tired.

Most of the people I've seen on the official boards agree that the rules suck and need to be torn down, freelancers included.

It's gotten to the point that the Erata practically rewrites entire books from scratch (which is damned annoying since it makes looking up current rules horribly difficult).

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Fri Jun 03, 2011 9:31 pm

hyzmarca wrote:Official boards agree that the rules suck and need to be torn down, freelancers included.

It's gotten to the point that the Erata practically rewrites entire books from scratch (which is damned annoying since it makes looking up current rules horribly difficult).

Well... it's good they saw the light. I guess I'm very out of date with the current state of the community.

Their last round of mega-errata still blows, though. Even if it can't be much more than bells and whistles, as long as the core remains intact, the new errata I studied (for DBs and Infernals) tends to be particularly... pointless bells and whistles. It is between PF chanes to 3.5 (tons of minor tweaks, some good, some bad, that don't amount to much improvement overall) and Tomes (a very extended balance tweak, aiming at dubious balancing points, that does nothing to most of the core gameplay issues). Close to PF in the end, I think

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 2:08 am

FatR wrote:
hyzmarca wrote:Official boards agree that the rules suck and need to be torn down, freelancers included.

It's gotten to the point that the Erata practically rewrites entire books from scratch (which is damned annoying since it makes looking up current rules horribly difficult).
Well... it's good they saw the light. I guess I'm very out of date with the current state of the community.

Their last round of mega-errata still blows, though. Even if it can't be much more than bells and whistles, as long as the core remains intact, the new errata I studied (for DBs and Infernals) tends to be particularly... pointless bells and whistles. It is between PF chanes to 3.5 (tons of minor tweaks, some good, some bad, that don't amount to much improvement overall) and Tomes (a very extended balance tweak, aiming at dubious balancing points, that does nothing to most of the core gameplay issues). Close to PF in the end, I think

From what I understand, they're currently working on a complete overhaul of the core combat system to the point where they might as well just publish it as a new edition. Except that White Wolf doesn't actually pay its freelancers for doing errata so just shoving it into the absurdly bloated Scroll of Errata saves them money.

It remains to be seen whether this will actually work, but they're supposedly reducing basic lethality and de-emphasizing perfect defenses.

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Sun Jun 05, 2011 10:53 am

I don't think they have enough talent to pull a real fix off. Ability to perfect spam is just a bandage on the gaping wound. Just like the stacked persistents were before. Just like whatever way of making characters untouchable they may come up with to replace perfect spam will be. Truly healing the wound itself will require reworking of the entire Charm paradigm, to make massive RNG-fucking spikes in offense not trivial.

Besides, make no mistake, the perfect turtling is not the worst of their system's problem. It is something that really enrages the existing fans, apparently to the point of turning the entire fandom against it now. But Exalted does not have much fans anymore. People who just considered playing the system or dropped it quickly usually mention stuff like "convoluted Charm trees/chargen in general", "buckets of dice", "combat resolution lasting forever" and "splat unequality" as their main problems.