Anatomy of Failed Design: Exalted

[Chamomile]

Legends of the Wulin is playable. I don't know if Orion is being literal or just referring to the fact that its dice mechanics take a lot of getting used to and are slower than roll-and-add even when you're used to them, but if he's being literal than he is wrong. It is not especially impressive in raw mechanics and its formatting is atrocious which makes learning its non-standard rules way harder than it already is, but it does a good job of marrying its (fairly shallow) mechanics to fluff and there is very little competition in the wuxia RPG niche. Certainly Exalted is not putting up much of a fight.

[Omegonthesane]

I think a solution would to have each power have both social and combat utility.

So "ultimate golden sword" can both be used to shoot laser beams that burn your targets to a crispAND impress a crowd.

While "clever deduction observation" would have the primary use of noticing lies and discover somebody else's true intentions, but would also allow you to detect a weak point in an enemy that you can strike for massive damage even if you're a weakling scholar.

So basically the scholar would be able to stand up in a fight with brain over brawn, confusing his enemies with complicated speeches while analyzing and predicting their patterns, while the warrior dude would be able to "socialize" by flexing muscles and looking all confident and intimidating, so he doesn't need fancy words.

It's not even like the designers never had this idea - there's already Enemy-Castigating Solar Judgment, which makes your attacks Holy in face-punchy combat and makes you significantly better at shaming or guilt-tripping creatures of darkness into being your bitches in social combat (or would, if social combat worked at fucking all).

(And as of the Scroll of Errata, costs 1/4 of a Perfect Defence instead of 2/3.)

[Username17]

Ah the old Pokemon Contest gambit. If you make there be multiple minigames and have moves do different things in them, then that does indeed tend to make more moves viable. But in Pokemon, the contest builds don't look very much like a battle builds. Making Explosion be a good appeal in constests will get explosion used, but people still won't put it on their capture pokemon.

-Username17

[maglag]

Then it's just a matter of balancing the powers so they're both good in combat and appeal. Explosion also wasn't something you wanted in your battle team back in generation 1.

[souran]

The fractially bad issues with exalted also mean that you can't play the game with a series of gentleman's agreements because it is impossible to get everybody on remotely the same page. The opposition is built by people who have apprently never played exalted. Players would have to have severe head trauma to NOT make characters that break any part of the system they want to interact with.

After everything we have seen for Exalted 3, is there any part of this that would still NOT be true?

[Username17]

Then it's just a matter of balancing the powers so they're both good in combat and appeal. Explosion also wasn't something you wanted in your battle team back in generation 1.

Oh is that all? There's never been a set of abilities that were all balanced. Even 4th edition D&D where every single power is 2[W]+Stat with a one turn stun rider still isn't balanced because it turns out that having two 1[W] attacks is like [$TEXAS] more awesome than having one 2[W] attack.

Explosion isn't something you want because it isn't very good. And it doesn't magically become good if you work on it a little more or get better at math or something. It can be decent in Contest Play because the parameters are entirely different (fixed number of rounds and no penalty for being shrapnel at the end).

But here's the thing: making all moves good is Nintendo Hard. And making completely arbitrary mixtures of two move package deals equally good is dimensionally harder than that. Because even if you miraculously made your game have all the abilities be useful for some build or another, there's no reason at all to believe that any particular move has synergies with the moves that are attached to the moves that have synergies with the moves it is attached to. It's like if every Magic card was glued to the back of a Netrunner card. Even if all the cards were good, it's pretty unlikely the the well tuned Net Runner deck would happen to be a well tuned Magic deck and vice versa.

In more concrete terms, if you have a good social combo and a good combat combo, it's vanishingly unlikely for those to happen to be moves that are appended together. Almost certainly you're going to be building to have good social combat synergies and then being left with some random detritus for stabbing combat or vice versa.

If you want to even begin to go down that route, just give people a pile of abilities to interact with each of the minigames that you intend to be mandatory. Don't pre-glue the abilities from each mini-game together like Pokemon.

The fractially bad issues with exalted also mean that you can't play the game with a series of gentleman's agreements because it is impossible to get everybody on remotely the same page. The opposition is built by people who have apprently never played exalted. Players would have to have severe head trauma to NOT make characters that break any part of the system they want to interact with.

After everything we have seen for Exalted 3, is there any part of this that would still NOT be true?

Nope. And actually, since the core book apparently intends to be longer than Atlas Shrugs and has been in development hell for several years, there's every reason to believe all of those particular problems will be worse.

-Username17

[souran]

Nope. And actually, since the core book apparently intends to be longer than Atlas Shrugs and has been in development hell for several years, there's every reason to believe all of those particular problems will be worse.

The real question is while the dialog in the included fiction be better than Atlas Shrugged? Its a low bar, but I am going to guess no.

[Silent Wayfarer]

Nope. And actually, since the core book apparently intends to be longer than Atlas Shrugs and has been in development hell for several years, there's every reason to believe all of those particular problems will be worse.

The real question is while the dialog in the included fiction be better than Atlas Shrugged? Its a low bar, but I am going to guess no.

I actually liked the 1e chapter fictions. The 2e chapter comics were tolerable because comics. If they revert to 17 pages of text (like Scion) I am going to skip it (like Scion).

[TiaC]

One other thing that sets the pitch of Exalted apart from other games is the attempt at scale. It is the intent that a single exalt can kill an army, where even a wizard would have a hard time stopping one in D&D. This also means that to do Exalted right, you would have to allow for massive player effect on the world.

I've also noticed that very little Exalted fiction reflects the in-game limitations of motes and mote recharge. So, I would entirely replace this. One thing the game needs is some more reasonable limit on per-turn mote use.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Exalted should use Rage Meter. Having your health go down/getting knocked around by charms should unlock more powerful combat options and/or give you a cost savings on charm activation.

[TiaC]

Exalted should use Rage Meter. Having your health go down/getting knocked around by charms should unlock more powerful combat options and/or give you a cost savings on charm activation.

Yes, that would work, but it would have to be adjusted to work with non-combat abilities too.

[Dean]

I'm gonna openly mock the idea that Exalted could ever have workable non combat minigames and I assume anyone asking for it is on coke. I say that because the game's idea is that a werewolf, a kung-fu master, and an angel can save the world together and even that doesn't work so asking to have the concept extended to letting people play SUPER GOOD cobblers would require the level of misplaced confidence that only coke gives you.

The bottom line is I will do coke with anyone here

[Orion]

Frank, you're wrong. You're so comprehensively wrong that it took me this long to find time to explain how wrong you are. I'll break your wrongness down into three topics: first, you're wrong about the conventions of fighting genres; second, you're wrong about what plots are appropriate and inappropriate for table role-playing; finally, you're wrong about the direction "exalted-inspired" development needs to go.

If it is your intention that player characters should actually use combat techniques with names like "Cunning Porcupine Defense" and "Stone Rhino Hide" to defend themselves with and "Shell Crushing Atemi" and "Ferocious Biting Tooth" to attack their enemies, you'd better give people a metric fuck tonne of combat maneuvers. Because the idea of having moves that fucking specific and only having three of them makes me want to kill myself.

No. The source material is not on your side on this, at least not the source material I'm familiar with and want to use. Characters in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon have 0-1 named abilities. Characters in Kung Fu Hustle or Shaolin Soccer have 1-2 named abilities. Characters in the Iliad have 0 named abilities. Even Shounen anime doesn't really support your point. I checked the sailor moon wiki and the naruto wiki. The character pages for the protagonists list about 16 named moves for Sailor Moon and about a dozen named powers for Naruto. But you know what? Sailor moon had 200 episodes and Naruto had 400 plus like 10 movies. The description of Sailor Moon's first plot arc mentions about 3 named powers, and first-season shows are the logical model for first-session characters.

An elite NPC needs two moves: an attack and a defense. Peridot Daisy has the Head-Exploding Palm and the Coiling-Snake Gambit. If you walk into your favorite bar and see a pile of bodies with exploded heads, you know P.D. did it. Then you can hunt her or hide from her, depending on whether you know how to beat Coiling Snake. A Boss-level NPC probably needs at least 3 moves, so he can have a standard attack and defense plus some terrifying super move. PCs are expected to have many more on-screen fights than NPCs, of course, so they may need to start with as many as 4 moves.

I do not think that needing to learn water dragon sword technique in order to defeat an enemy is the kind of plot that is in any way appropriate to a role playing game. Novels yes. Movies yes. Even video games. But that's just way too railroady for a cooperative storytelling game to handle.

The default magic weapon you wrote up for After Sundown is the "sword of killing Steve," so it's pretty obvious that you're bullshitting. Anyway, there's no need to limit it to one option; the point is that it's okay for the ability space to break down into "solution" and "not a solution" in a stark and obvious manner. Ideally, there should be a technique, an artifact, a spell, an ally, and a secret that would enable you to fight Leaves-On-Pavement, and the players should get to pick what to pursue.

The players could decide they want to go become leaders of the Jackal Tribe instead or something.

If they're not interested in killing Leaves-On-Pavement and liberating the City of Ennui, then it probably doesn't matter what hoops they would have to jump through to do it. If they want to go somewhere else and interact with different people, they can just do that.

Now the idea of supporting characters who don't fight is more relevant.... if you want fighting to be a thing players can simply not do, the correct number of charms for the game to have is none. Have some entirely simple combat skill + stunt description mechanic for determining how hard you win at combat, and then let the players make up the name of their winning move on the fly.

Again: you wrote After Sundown, so it's puzzling that you're now pretending it can't be done. After Sundown supports fighting and non-fighting characters, and the fighting characters get small numbers of very granular, very powerful abilities off themed lists. The difference between a chump and a monster is as simple as "vigor, alacrity, revive flesh." For Exalted combat, you'd want the charms to conceptually be "moves" rather than "powers", but if they're not essence-limited then they're nearly equivalent to passive bonuses. Devasation says "You are strong enough to repel multiple attackers" and "frantic monkey dance" says "you can make a sweeping strike that repels multiple attackers," but who cares. Your power list basically is going to look like: AoE attack, multi-attack, strong attack, perfect attack, bad touch, multi-evade, multi-soak, perfect evade, perfect soak. Maybe throw in a couple alternate bad touches and a disable, a counter, an escape, and a turtle. Maybe cut AoE attack and fold it into multi. A "diplomat" PC will have about 2 specials, and a "martial arts" PC will have about 5.

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One of the reasons Exalted was fundamentally unworkable is that it was pitched as a deranged hybrid of White Wold sensibility with D&D, and that simply does not work. You cannot have a deep tactical fighting game alongside intensive tracking of each character's mood swings and a majority of game time going to character development and interpersonal wrangling. All of your proposals basically involved making Exalted more like D&D, or like what you wish D&D was. You've basically just pitching me your dead "Gaming Den D&D Edition" aka "Sumeru" with a coat of wuxia paint, which isn't much of a stretch because Sumeru was already in Asia.

High fantasy wargames already exist under multiple popular brands; you could revise those, or pitch a new one, but I don't see any benefit whatsoever to tying a new one to Exalted. High fantasy story games are thinner on the ground, and they're mostly less satisfying than 3.5. I think that if you wanted to do something with "exalted", "it's like D&D, but a Greco-Chinese Crystalpunk fusion" is less promising than "it's like World of Darkness, but high fantasy."

[Username17]

Frank, you're wrong. You're so comprehensively wrong that it took me this long to find time to explain how wrong you are.

You should have spent some more time on it, because your counter arguments are super weak and extremely disorganized.

I'll break your wrongness down into three topics: first, you're wrong about the conventions of fighting genres; second, you're wrong about what plots are appropriate and inappropriate for table role-playing; finally, you're wrong about the direction "exalted-inspired" development needs to go.

I accept these categories as being reasonable fields of battle to call each other cockmonglers about. Please proceed.

Characters in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon have 0-1 named abilities. Characters in Kung Fu Hustle or Shaolin Soccer have 1-2 named abilities. Characters in the Iliad have 0 named abilities.

You're actually completely fucking this up. There is a difference between a named ability and a named attack. A character like The Beast in Kung Fu Hustle might only have the name of a few things he does shouted on camera, but he actually makes a lot of attacks. He punches through things, he blocks things, he head butts stuff to death, he jumps through things and people. And all of these attacks have names. Consider This Fight. The only thing which is explicitly named by a character during the fight is "Toad Style." But Toad Style isn't an attack, it's a series of attacks. It's a stance, it's a set of defenses, it's a means of moving around, it's a way to do tremendous damage to people you don't like and the scenery around them.

So does The Beast have "one ability" named "Toad Style?" No. He has lots of abilities. He has an ability that lets him block bullets. He has an ability that lets him jump through buildings. He has an ability that lets him hurl people through walls. He has an ability that lets him get hit so hard that the ground around him cracks and explodes with only minor inconvenience.

But more to the point, even characters who do have a single signature amazing finishing move that is their only real distinguishing feature still make lots of other attacks. They punch and kick and block and throw. And in a game, you would not want to tell the players of those characters that they are making "Unnamed Attack" over and over again until it's time for them to use their "Lion's Roar" or "Tombstone Piledriver" or whatever.

Basically, you've successfully noticed that characters in this genre often have a power or style or ability or technique or something that is special and they like to talk about. And then you apparently didn't actually watch them fight, because you failed to notice that these characters do in fact still punch and kick and grab and block and throw.

The default magic weapon you wrote up for After Sundown is the "sword of killing Steve," so it's pretty obvious that you're bullshitting.

It's actually extremely easy to kill Steve without the sword of killing Steve in After Sundown. You probably thought you had a total trump card there, but you don't. The fact that there exists a means to kill Steve isn't railroady at all if there are also other ways to kill Steve and you don't have to use one of them in particular. You just tried to turn this personal with an accusation of hypocrisy, but really you're just flailing.

If they're not interested in killing Leaves-On-Pavement and liberating the City of Ennui, then it probably doesn't matter what hoops they would have to jump through to do it.

You are engaging in a fallacy right here. The fact is that liberating the city of Ennui is a thing that players have an amount of interest in. They also have amounts of interest in other things. The more bullshit you ask people to wade through before they can accomplish a task, the more relatively appealing you've made the other things, but only by discouraging the first idea. It's entirely possible that the players will want to liberate the City of Ennui, and upon hearing how many hoops they would have to jump through, decide to do something else instead. If you can imagine that happening, and I fucking know you can, you can imagine your proposal making things less fun by being sufficiently annoying that players decide to do their second choice rather than put up with your bullshit.

Again: you wrote After Sundown, so it's puzzling that you're now pretending it can't be done. After Sundown supports fighting and non-fighting characters, and the fighting characters get small numbers of very granular, very powerful abilities off themed lists.

After Sundown doesn't track punches and kicks at all.

Which goes back to my original statement:

If it is your intention that player characters should actually use combat techniques with names like "Cunning Porcupine Defense" and "Stone Rhino Hide" to defend themselves with and "Shell Crushing Atemi" and "Ferocious Biting Tooth" to attack their enemies, you'd better give people a metric fuck tonne of combat maneuvers. Because the idea of having moves that fucking specific and only having three of them makes me want to kill myself.

In After Sundown you straight up do not have individual atemis. That is not a thing that happens. And you claiming otherwise is puzzling and retarded.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

The only thing which is explicitly named by a character during the fight is "Toad Style." But Toad Style isn't an attack, it's a series of attacks. It's a stance, it's a set of defenses, it's a means of moving around, it's a way to do tremendous damage to people you don't like and the scenery around them.

To be fair, the difference there is merely one of bookkeeping. You could treat Toad Style as a suit of related abilities, or you could treat it as one extremely versatile ability that can do many things.


There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

[deaddmwalking]

I recently watched Jackie Chan's Drunken Master . While 'Drunken Boxing' was the style he was learning to master, they show a training regime where he literally uses more than a dozen moves.

Edit - it's not my tags that are broken.

[OgreBattle]

After Sundown's design notes mentioned that if you want a group of people to have a unique theme with mechanical backing, the thing to do isn't to make up a new power just for them, but to just have them all be able to use the same power.

So I figure you want a list of pretty broad powers, and if you have a "Toad Style" of kungfu you just have everyone who practices that style to use a certain power from that broad list like being able to jump really high or secreting poisonous sweat.

Ryu's shoryuken and Guile's flash kick are distinct moves with distinct set-ups and hitboxes in a real-time fighting game, but in a game where turns are abstracted to be 6+ seconds I am totally fine with "Rising Upper" being a special move that Japanese martial artists and US airforce officers can choose alike.

[Orion]

There is a difference between a named ability and a named attack. A character like The Beast in Kung Fu Hustle might only have the name of a few things he does shouted on camera, but he actually makes a lot of attacks. He punches through things, he blocks things, he head butts stuff to death, he jumps through things and people. And all of these attacks have names.

No. They do not have names. We can say that the beast "punches real fast" or "does a barrel roll" but those are descriptions, not names. He takes a lot of actions in that clip, but the ones that can't be abstracted into "unarmed attack" can be abstracted into stuff like "charge," "full defense," "bull rush," "full attack," or "acrobatic dodge."

even characters who do have a single signature amazing finishing move that is their only real distinguishing feature still make lots of other attacks. They punch and kick and block and throw. And in a game, you would not want to tell the players of those characters that they are making "Unnamed Attack" over and over again until it's time for them to use their "Lion's Roar" or "Tombstone Piledriver" or whatever.

See above. You offer a modest selection of style-agnostic tactical moves and call it a day.

So does The Beast have "one ability" named "Toad Style?" No. He has lots of abilities. He has an ability that lets him block bullets. He has an ability that lets him jump through buildings. He has an ability that lets him hurl people through walls. He has an ability that lets him get hit so hard that the ground around him cracks and explodes with only minor inconvenience.

Sure, The Beast has to have a bunch of abilities because he's way, way more powerful than a standard thug and so he needs that reflected in multiple upgrades. He has Vigor, Devasation, Indomitability, Quickness, and probably Alacrity. He also has one ability called "Toad-Style Killing Launch." And that's it. You don't have to write up and name a special "toad punch" and "toad block" and "toad wall-smash" because he can do all those things emergently by having good numbers.

It's actually extremely easy to kill Steve without the sword of killing Steve in After Sundown.

Only if you already happen to have the right powers. If you don't have the right powers to fight Steven, then you do have to run a sidequest to get the sword or get some other skill or resource that will enable you to beat him. It's the same thing here. Water dragon style isn't a plot device the MC invented after declaring the boss immune to everything else; it's a power in the core book that's emergently good against the powers the boss happens to have. Maybe the boss has a perfect defense that will nullify one attack at a time, but he goes down if you have a power that pumps out a multi-attack flurry. Water Dragon Thrashes was a multi-attack printed in the core book, and somebody on your team might just have it and then the fight would be no problem. But if it turns out that no one on your team has a good flurry, then you need to run away until someone can learn one, perhaps by investigating rumors of a reclusive water dragon master in the southern mountains. Or, if they prefer, by completing the lost formula for the elixir of speed. Whatever.

[Username17]

No. They do not have names. We can say that the beast "punches real fast" or "does a barrel roll" but those are descriptions, not names.

Well, that was fun. We are now done with the part of this conversation where we treat it as an "argument" where we "care what you have to say" and consider your points as things that might convince us to change our views. You just said something so mindblowingly ignorant that we're going to move on to the next phase where we fucking tell you shit in an effort to educate you.



Look, Kung Fu, like Boxing, or Professional Wrestling is a martial art. And like most arts, it has a bunch of specialist nomenclatures. All the strikes and blocks and throws and holds in Kung Fu have names. And people who are enthusiasts of the art can tell you what they are. The fight between the main character and The Beast could be narrated on a radio program by Kung Fu announcers and Kung Fu fans who heard that description could imagine all the strikes and blocks as they happened.


This is a short list of maneuvers that all have names in Karate.


Just to give you an idea of how far the rabbit hole goes: Every potential striking surface has a name.

The moves that The Beast uses do have names. Enthusiasts who watch that fight can tell you what they are. That's just a fact. You not knowing that means that you aren't qualified to discuss this genre. This is like when Monte Cook claimed that Goths didn't exist before 1991. It's so amazingly ignorant that once you say it out loud, everyone who has even a passing familiarity with the subject has identified you as not being one of them.

And since we're at the point of educating you, let's talk about what an Atemi is. An Atemi is a strike. If someone does something called "Shell Crushing Atemi," that is like one punch or kick. It's the kind of thing you might have instead of Ryu's "shoryuken" or Sonya Blade's "leg grab." It's exactly that specific. That's what the name means.

-Username17

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Exalted is neither the phone book-sized list of maneuvers you'd need to build your own Street Fighter character completely from scratch, nor the efficient, streamlined rules you'd want for having Jackie Chan defeat a werewolf via stunting bonuses, and contains insufficient phlebotinum to build Guilty Gear supers. Too long for Dick, too short for Richard.

[Omegonthesane]

Frank - remember when you wrote After Sundown? Remember when you said that the very fact it was even theoretically possible for a person to name every combat move in existence with every weapon in existence meant that no form of Combat was different enough from another form of Combat to justify splitting them into different base skills?

Your rant about how the .1% of the audience who are actually martial arts enthusiasts who could literally name all of the moves that are mechanically "basic unarmed attack" doesn't hold water as advice for marketing to the 100%. The fact that - to bring this back into the context of "how could Exalted ever have been done other than badly" - charms in Exalted tend to have three words is probably bad because it makes them hard to remember, but it in no way requires that they be as specific as a three-word technical term move would be normally. Regardless of arguments about what's "normal".

I mean, Seven Shadow Evasion isn't a specific technique in which you faceplant and roll in a particular direction in order to avoid a particular class of defense, it's a fucking Perfect Dodge that dodges any attack that could possibly miss. Integrity-Protecting Prana isn't a block against one kind of brain-affecting punch, it's a 24-hour no-sell to all shaping effects. Steel Sunbeam Radiance isn't a very specific dive and roll where you can double tap slightly faster, it's a magical flurry that ignores things like how fast you are physically able to reload your gun. Nothing about "is 3 words long" implies that a technique/power/whatever has to be narrow in application.

And if all phrases ending with "Atemi" are one punch or kick, that just means that specific word is off the table. Hell, if I got something like "Shell Crushing Strike" I'd expect it to boost a normal attack such that armour and buildings are broken by it.

[Username17]

Frank - remember when you wrote After Sundown? Remember when you said that the very fact it was even theoretically possible for a person to name every combat move in existence with every weapon in existence meant that no form of Combat was different enough from another form of Combat to justify splitting them into different base skills?

Remember how After Sundown is a game in which people have zero abilities that represent specific atemis? Because it totally is. If you want the game to seriously support characters who don't know martial arts and pretty much sit out major battles, then the correct choice of how many special combat maneuvers people know is of course zero. After Sundown is such a game, and the number of abilities called "Precision Atemi Strike" or anything remotely like that is zero.

If you commit to having individual Atemis being things we care about characters having and using, then you have by definition committed yourself to a very much larger number of combat maneuvers to choose from and also committed yourself to being really quite D&D like. Both in the extent of having all those martial adept maneuvers to choose from, and in the sense that "combat" is necessarily something everyone has to do at that point.

There just isn't a middle ground where "Seizing Coil Atemi" is a thing a character can invoke and there aren't a metric assload of other combat maneuvers to use instead. At least, not a middle ground that isn't made entirely out of bullshit. If combat maneuvers that specific and granular exist, combat has to be both greedy and bloated. It has to be.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

Frank - remember when you wrote After Sundown? Remember when you said that the very fact it was even theoretically possible for a person to name every combat move in existence with every weapon in existence meant that no form of Combat was different enough from another form of Combat to justify splitting them into different base skills?

Remember how After Sundown is a game in which people have zero abilities that represent specific atemis? Because it totally is. If you want the game to seriously support characters who don't know martial arts and pretty much sit out major battles, then the correct choice of how many special combat maneuvers people know is of course zero. After Sundown is such a game, and the number of abilities called "Precision Atemi Strike" or anything remotely like that is zero.

If you commit to having individual Atemis being things we care about characters having and using, then you have by definition committed yourself to a very much larger number of combat maneuvers to choose from and also committed yourself to being really quite D&D like. Both in the extent of having all those martial adept maneuvers to choose from, and in the sense that "combat" is necessarily something everyone has to do at that point.

There just isn't a middle ground where "Seizing Coil Atemi" is a thing a character can invoke and there aren't a metric assload of other combat maneuvers to use instead. At least, not a middle ground that isn't made entirely out of bullshit. If combat maneuvers that specific and granular exist, combat has to be both greedy and bloated. It has to be.

-Username17

You're missing the implicit middle ground that I went into above - in which they aren't using "Atemi" correctly, and "Seizing Coil Atemi" isn't one kind of punch but is instead a magical bullshit method by which you gain ridiculous grapplomancy bonuses including "able to do it when that would not normally be physically possible" or the like.

That, or "we aren't using Atemi correctly and are appending it to shit at least as broadly useful as 'Lightning Bolt', because while we think it sounds cool we want to write something shorter than the Encyclopedia Brittanica" isn't a middle ground and is instead in the model where you're allowed to not have a great deal of investment in combat.

You're getting hung up on the assumption that three-word move titles must absolutely refer to very narrow techniques on very long lists. This isn't the case logically, and it isn't the case in the actual works shown in the actual genre - whine all you like about how a kung fu fanatic could name all the moves that Beast uses, that's 5% of the audience tops, the majority are just going to see "guy what fights good and has one Named Signature Move". When I watched (the first 2/3 of) The Raid, I wasn't thinking "and now he unleashes a long string of very specifically named 3-word Penkac Silat moves", I was thinking "and now he kicks ass".

Again: I see "Shell Crushing Atemi", I'm not expecting a narrow-use punch, I'm expecting a "destroy any object" attack usable with any weapon. Because it's a Named Move and must therefore be your party piece that you spam whip out for special occasions, and not simply a subset of "Basic unarmed attack".

[Username17]

Ugh.



It is very difficult to attempt to have a discussion with people who are going all post modernist and refusing to use words to mean what they actually mean. I understand that language is a shared construct and that by agreement we could use any word to mean anything and that further this construct evolves as people are added and removed from our monkey sphere, and that words will be used in ways and for purposes in the future we can't even begin to speculate upon. But right now, Atemi means "strike" and if you have a combat maneuver that is an Atemi with a couple of adjectives on it, you are talking about a very specific strike and not talking about other things. And if you meant to say something else, but actually said that, then you are at best an idiot and the only other option is that you're an asshole who is being anti-communicative for the lulz.

If you have personally available specific maneuvers that do specific things, regardless of how they are flavored, you are making a specific claim about how detailed the combat system is going to have to be. And it's damn difficult for me to imagine a game in which the choice to use "Kaleidoscopic Disrecognition Atemi" does not imply the following:

• That you have other maneuvers to choose from that aren't a Kaleidoscopic Disrecognition Atemi.
• That each round you are selecting at least one maneuver to use from a list long enough to have Kaleidoscopic Disrecognition Atemi on it.
• That your opponents have enough moving parts during combat that it would be important or meaningful if and when you chose to use your Kaeidoscopic Disrecognition Atemi.

And let's be honest: that really strongly implies that you're playing a character that is at least as complex and combat maneuver focused as a D&D Martial Adept. You can quibble and hem and haw about how when you use the word Atemi you don't mean Atemi, you mean cat-like noises you make when trying to express to your pets that you are applying combat modifiers. But even through your pot smoking veil of willful obscurantism, that doesn't change the fact that you're talking about using specific combat maneuvers. And once you do that, you've committed yourself to having a combat system granular enough to have people selecting and comparing combat maneuvers in it.

-Username17

[Zaranthan]

But right now, Atemi means "strike" and if you have a combat maneuver that is an Atemi with a couple of adjectives on it, you are talking about a very specific strike and not talking about other things.

Come on, Frank. Now you're just being stubborn. What they're beating around is "if atemi has such a specific meaning, then don't use it in your ability names." Also, the fact that an ability has three words in its name does not make it an atemi.