The Gaming Den

Since there are a number of illicit copies of a draft of 3e Exalted floating around, does anyone have any thoughts on the new combat system?

I haven't actually looked at it, because I have 0 fate left in Exalted, but I'll make a wild guess that it's a convoluted, easily breakable shit.
I'll try to read the book when I have some time though.

Beta Review: Exalted 3E combat
The entire "Systems and Conflict" chapter is 100 pages long, so I'll do it in small pieces as I go.

It opens up with the "three most important rules" which can be summed up with "Oberoni fallacy".

The Golden Rule: If you don’t like one of these rules, change it. If a rule is getting in the way of having fun, throw it out. If you have an idea that would work better for your group than one of the rules here, go with that. Nobody knows better than you what you’ll find fun.
The Orichalcum Rule: This is a big game with lots of rules, set in an even bigger and more complex world, and players are endlessly inventive. If you ever find that by following the letter of the rules, you get a result that doesn’t make sense in the course of the story, the rules are wrong, the story is right. If the rules suggest something dumb or nonsensical or just plain not fun, ignore them or change them. Story comes before adherence to the rules.
The Storyteller’s Rule: A lot of the rules in Exalted, especially the combat engine, are heavy abstractions rather than faithful simulations. Storyteller, if it seems to you like a player is using the letter of the rules to muck up the spirit of the game and the fun of the story, then that particular rules loophole doesn’t work. You are explicitly empowered to call shenanigans whenever it seems necessary—the rules can’t account for everything, and any interpretation of a Charm or other mechanic away from its intended function isn’t legal unless you say it is.

Then we get references to subsections, which are "page XX" at the moment, and a three pages long glossary.

difficulty: The number of successes required on a roll for an action to succeed.
goal number: The total number of cumulative successes necessary to complete an extended action.

Why do they need different names for those?

terminus: The number of rolls allowed during certain extended actions

It's... uh... nice to have a special name for that?

The book claims that there are five measurements of time, except the first four are Chronicle (campaign), Story (piece of campaign finished in several linked sessions), Session (session), and Scene (part of a Session). So really there's only one real measure of time, and that is Round, which is 3 seconds long (unless the MC says otherwise). Of course 3 seconds is too damn little, so you have the old Shadowrun and Exalted problem of fights beeing too fast for the environment to change.

Then we are told that Exalted uses d10s, and that you can buy those in a shop! Or you can use a dice roller, you know, whatever, Exalted devs don't judge.

Then we are told that everyone has Traits, which are things like Strength and Basketweaving, and that they were explained in detail in previous chapter. I'm starting to see why this book is a 1000 pages long.

Then we are told about Exalted using dicepools and are given difficulty numbers.

As great heroes, Exalted characters are assumed to possess abundant confidence and competence. Tasks which run-of-the-mill individuals in Creation would consider challenging (such as picking a lock or removing a patient’s appendix without killing him) are ordinary fare for heroes. Such tasks are appropriate for difficulty 1.
Performing challenging tasks under significant duress (such as picking a lock or removing an appendix in the dead of night, without sufficient light, in the midst of a howling storm) is appropriate for difficulty 2.
Tasks which might daunt even heroes, by contrast, are appropriate for difficulty 3. Examples might include plucking a gem from a nest of writhing serpents without being bitten, or breaking a man-eating horse born in the depths of the Wyld so it accepts the hero as its rider.
Performing such tasks under significant duress (such as plucking the aforementioned gem while the temple collapses around the intrepid thief, or breaking the man-eating horse in the midst of a raging forest fire) are appropriate for difficulty 4.
Near-impossible feats, even by heroic standards, are appropriate for difficulty 5. Examples might include reading a letter in pitch blackness by feeling the texture of ink on the paper, leaping over the rail of a sorcerer’s flying chariot to land safely in a hay cart hundreds of feet below, or running for three consecutive days and nights without succumbing to exhaustion.

I sincerely hope that Ex3 is nothing like Ex2 was, because TN5 in Ex2 is something you reach while blind, tortured, and full of drugs.

Then we are told about stunts. 3 die stunts give you 2 dice and 2 auto successes. 2 and 3 die stunts restore your Willpower. And now I need a drink, because this definitely wasn't a big problem in Ex2, no siree.

Some stunt examples:

Not a stunt: I parry the soldiers’ attacks.
Stunt: I swing my daiklave left-to-right, scattering the soldiers’ spears like toys.
Not a stunt: I climb up onto the roof.
Stunt: I run halfway up the wall, leap, grab the edge of the roof, and flip myself up to land easily on the red shingles.
Not a stunt: I try to bribe the clerk to let me in without an appointment.
Stunt: I walk up to the clerk’s desk. “I’m here to see Magistrate Chen—promptly.” I let the coins in my hand ring audibly against the surface of his desk to punctuate my words.

How much are these stunts worth? Fuck you, that's how much.

Longes wrote:Some stunt examples:

Not a stunt: I parry the soldiers’ attacks.
Stunt: I swing my daiklave left-to-right, scattering the soldiers’ spears like toys.
Not a stunt: I climb up onto the roof.
Stunt: I run halfway up the wall, leap, grab the edge of the roof, and flip myself up to land easily on the red shingles.
Not a stunt: I try to bribe the clerk to let me in without an appointment.
Stunt: I walk up to the clerk’s desk. “I’m here to see Magistrate Chen—promptly.” I let the coins in my hand ring audibly against the surface of his desk to punctuate my words.

How much are these stunts worth? Fuck you, that's how much.

So stunting is just describing what you are doing? Those aren't even describing doing anything out of the ordinary to get an advantage. I thought stunting was supposed to be something like knocking an opponents helmet over their eyes to justify the additional dice, but it really is just adding more words?

Longes, those sections you quoted are making me lose my will to live.

On closer examination the difficulty examples are 100% bullshit, because things like "Steal the gem, only the temple is now on fire!" would result in a dice-pool penalty, not the difficulty increase. I'll talk about penalties next time.

Red_Rob wrote:

Longes wrote:Some stunt examples:

Not a stunt: I parry the soldiers’ attacks.
Stunt: I swing my daiklave left-to-right, scattering the soldiers’ spears like toys.
Not a stunt: I climb up onto the roof.
Stunt: I run halfway up the wall, leap, grab the edge of the roof, and flip myself up to land easily on the red shingles.
Not a stunt: I try to bribe the clerk to let me in without an appointment.
Stunt: I walk up to the clerk’s desk. “I’m here to see Magistrate Chen—promptly.” I let the coins in my hand ring audibly against the surface of his desk to punctuate my words.

How much are these stunts worth? Fuck you, that's how much.

So stunting is just describing what you are doing? Those aren't even describing doing anything out of the ordinary to get an advantage. I thought stunting was supposed to be something like knocking an opponents helmet over their eyes to justify the additional dice, but it really is just adding more words?

Stunting is just descibing your actions. The more elaborate and purple your description is, the bigger the bonus. MST3K mocked that shit ages ago:

"The disemboweled mercenary crumpled from his saddle and sank to the clouded sward, sprinkling the parched dust with crimson droplets of escaping life fluid."
Crow: You mean blood?
Mike: Let's not jump to conclusions.

Red Rob wrote:So stunting is just describing what you are doing? Those aren't even describing doing anything out of the ordinary to get an advantage. I thought stunting was supposed to be something like knocking an opponents helmet over their eyes to justify the additional dice, but it really is just adding more words?

Stunting in Exalted is a mechanical incentive to describe your character's actions with flowery language. Basically it's a crude incentive of a minor bonus for players to act like they are engaging with the game's story rather than sullenly rolling the dice and passing the turn. And it does work for that, and is worth considering implementing in other games. If you give D&D players a +1 to their attack rolls for describing their attacks, you get a lot less "I attack, You Attack" crap.

Anyway, the reason we never hold Exalted's Stunting system up as an example of good design is because it doesn't end there. In addition to just giving out a minor but tangible bonus for describing your actions in-character, the MC is also expected to grade your descriptions and give you a variable bonus. Which itself wouldn't be all that bad except that the cutoff between one level and the next is that if the MC gives you a good enough grade you refresh a metagame currency that your character uses to stay alive, and if he doesn't then you don't. This in turn causes many players to attempt to insure that they get the better version by droning on for fucking ever every time they take their fucking turn. And it also causes a lot of arguments and instances of blatant MC favoritism and shit.

Basically the fact that you either get the Willpower refresh or not based on how cool the MC thinks your description was means that instead of being a minor incentive for players to contribute to the game's atmosphere, it's a fucking game paralyzing poetry contest.

And the clowns who took it upon themselves to write up Exalted 3 didn't fix that shit, because of course they didn't.

-Username17

This in turn causes many players to attempt to insure that they get the better version by droning on for fucking ever every time they take their fucking turn.

To clarify, the Exalted charop combat discussions assumed that everyone is making a 2 die stunt on every single roll.

So, when I ran exalted for a long time (to long by far), I basically corrected the fact that storyteller can't handle the dice load that exalted places on it by assuming that there were only 2 levels of "success" in the game.

The first I called "normal" success and it was where you rolled a number of success equal to the difficulty of the task at hand. The second I just called "exalted success" because fuck it its exalted. If you got 5 or more success beyond the target number of success I just seeded narrative control to the player and let the determine what the fuck getting that many success might mean.

However, based on the rulebook there should be granular levels of succeeding for every single individual success beyond the target number. Are we still doing that bullshit in Ex3?

The combat is fast enough to work, varied, and really swingy. The problems with the combat are mostly:

Lack of clarity in the way certain charms are templated: Peony Blossom attack specifies that it grants an attack, but it's a melee charm, so it's unclear whether the attack needs to be a melee attack or if it can be any sort of attack. The intended reading is most likely that it grants a melee attack, but it's ambiguous.

Lack of clarity on charm declaration and timing. The rules for timing when somebody uses a charm during basically don't exist, and with charms like Seven Shadow Evasion that basically exist as a "Gotcha! That attack didn't hit me after all." having a well defined timing engine is important.

There's also a collection of must-have combat charms that you basically need to buy because they're so much better than everything else (for Melee that's Iron Whirlwind Attack and Fivefold Bulwark Stance, for dodge it's Reed in the Wind and Flow Like Blood), and so on.

Really terrible guidelines on how to construct a fight, what a sane fight looks like, and so on. This'll probably be a lot better when all the supplements come out and you know what say, a battle-ready dragon-blooded actually looks like, but for now it's horse shit.

The last problem is that heavy weapons suck. Fuck you Holden.

Also, martial arts suck too. Fuck you holden.

For the good shit, it's fast, like I said, has multiple interesting options pretty much every turn, and the withering/decisive split makes launching an actual attack scary, in a good way.

Jesus, thanks for reminding me why I never post anywhere else on the internet about tabletop gaming.

No one has any thoughts on the Withering vs Decisive attacks? It seems like a pretty fundamental change to combat.

Can someone explain how they work in game terms? Like, I can extrapolate based on the names how they're supposed to play out, but I'm not willing to make any assumptions based on that.

Game-play wise, it seems like probably (haven't tested it out myself) a good thing. I'm not too fond of the decision to insist that D/W is a purely metagame distinction that the characters aren't aware of - to me, that's some 4E bullshit which is completely unnecessary, because there are a lot of ways they could describe Withering attacks IC that would make sense.

But then, I knew I wasn't going to be fully satisfied when the design team made a statement to the effect of "You know that 'the rules are all real things in the setting' thing Ex2 had? Well fuck that shit, we're going as far in the other direction as possible." I mean personally, that was one of Exalted's key distinguishing features, as opposed to just playing high-level D&D or something. But people seem to blame it for how fucked up the mechanics were.

Beta Review: Exalted 3E combat
Modifiers. They exist. They modify your dicepool. That's explained on two pages. The exception are environmental modifiers, which modify your difficulty (I was wrong before), which means they are the worst and are equivalent to getting a -3 difficulty modifier.

Extended tests exist to measure the speed of execution, not the result. That's a nice thing to admit. You only fail the extended test if there's a time limit.

Ties on opposed rolls are broken by the MC awarding the best stunt.

Finally, Combat.

So, you have two attacks: Withering and Decisive. Withering attacks fuck with Initiative, Decisive attacks deal damage based on the current Initiative scores. The book claims that quality of weapons doesn't matter for the Decisive attacks, so the entirety of combat is a weird abstraction.

For Withering attacks you roll Dex+Skill+Weapon_Accuracy+modifiers vs Defense and then roll Str+Damage+Extra_Successes_From_Previous_Step and substract the soak. I seem to remember that Dexterity being the god stat was a problem in the previous edition, but I guess Ink Monkeys decided that it's not worth fixing. Also weapons have an Overwhelming value, which is the minimum damage below which you can't be soaked, so pinging is back.
If you got any successes past the soak (and you did), then you reduce enemy's initiative by 1+Successes, and increase your own by Successes.

For Decisive attacks you roll Dex+Skill+modifiers for attack, and your current Initiative for damage. No soak here. If you failed, you lose 2 or 3 points of Initiative. If you succeeded, your Initiative becomes 3.

The writers say they got the idea of Withering vs Decisive Atttacks from the PSP versus game Final Fantasy Dissidia.

In Dissidia you have a stat called "Bravery", the higher it is the more damage you'll do with a hitpoint (HP) attack. You have Bravery attacks that raise your Bravery while reducing your opponent's but doesn't do HP damage. You have HP attacks that add your current bravery score to hitpoint damage. HP attacks tend to be big flashy moves that are harder to land.

You also have a meter for super moves (EX) so you're encouraged to use them when you have high Bravery. You can have a fight in Dissidia consist of building up Bravery to the point you deliver a single 1 hit KO HP attack.

If your Bravery drops to zero you have "Break" status and deal 0 HP damage, you have to survive long enough for your Bravery to recover or try to land a Bravery attack of your own.

(tutorial video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMTgN3fqZWk )

Dissidia's system works for a fast paced action game where one second= a flurry of hits already exchanged. For a tabletop game... well Exalted tying it to initiative is interesting but I don't know how Exalted 3e's initiative will work and how time consuming it is to monkey around with it. TGD has discussed a similar idea before with "Combat Advantage Numbers".

For Decisive attacks you roll Dex+Skill+modifiers for attack, and your current Initiative for damage

The damage is entirely dependent on initiative and nothing else? I'm guessing that DEX raises initiative too eh? Does it also interact with non-physical attacks, like magical blasts?

...also anyone else think "withering" is a kind of oddly specific name for such a general concept? It makes me think of life-draining magic or being bed ridden with illness. "Setup" and "Finishing" seem like a more obvious set of words to use. I can describe muscly warriors and mystic mages using "setup" and "finishing" moves but saying I'm 'withering' my foe with an axe sounds odd.

The damage is entirely dependent on initiative and nothing else? I'm guessing that DEX raises initiative too eh? Does it also interact with non-physical attacks, like magical blasts?

1. Yes. It's a strait up Initiative roll, and all successes turn into damage. I'm going to make a wild guess that if your armor/dodge is good enough, then you can just skip all the Withering attack stuff and just roll your 3 dice until the enemy is dead from pings.
2. No. Initiative is Wits + Awareness roll.
3. The charm chapter is like 300 pages long, so I don't feel like reading it. But I'm going to guess that yes.

Longes wrote:

Not a stunt: I parry the soldiers’ attacks.
Stunt: I swing my daiklave left-to-right, scattering the soldiers’ spears like toys.
Not a stunt: I climb up onto the roof.
Stunt: I run halfway up the wall, leap, grab the edge of the roof, and flip myself up to land easily on the red shingles.
Not a stunt: I try to bribe the clerk to let me in without an appointment.
Stunt: I walk up to the clerk’s desk. “I’m here to see Magistrate Chen—promptly.” I let the coins in my hand ring audibly against the surface of his desk to punctuate my words.

I'll be honest; reading at how little is actually necessary to game Stunt dice; I'm depressed and furious that I went through such extraordinary efforts to get them at all in a Ex2 game. Especially for the paltry amounts of rewarded bonuses that I got for those efforts.

Exalted: making you feel like a chump; despite what it says on the box!

Judging__Eagle wrote:

Longes wrote:

Not a stunt: I parry the soldiers’ attacks.
Stunt: I swing my daiklave left-to-right, scattering the soldiers’ spears like toys.
Not a stunt: I climb up onto the roof.
Stunt: I run halfway up the wall, leap, grab the edge of the roof, and flip myself up to land easily on the red shingles.
Not a stunt: I try to bribe the clerk to let me in without an appointment.
Stunt: I walk up to the clerk’s desk. “I’m here to see Magistrate Chen—promptly.” I let the coins in my hand ring audibly against the surface of his desk to punctuate my words.

I'll be honest; reading at how little is actually necessary to game Stunt dice; I'm depressed and furious that I went through such extraordinary efforts to get them at all in a Ex2 game. Especially for the paltry amounts of rewarded bonuses that I got for those efforts.

Exalted: making you feel like a chump; despite what it says on the box!

The only guarantee is getting a 1-die stunt, and that isn't the level where you refresh your "not being mindraped" mana bar.

Longes wrote:Jon Chung has been banned from an Exalted thread once again, for explaining why Join Battle is the reasonable response to social combat in Exalted 2e

In the other Exalted thread, he was banned from talking about Exalted on the forums altogether.

virgil wrote:

Longes wrote:Jon Chung has been banned from an Exalted thread once again, for explaining why Join Battle is the reasonable response to social combat in Exalted 2e

In the other Exalted thread, he was banned from talking about Exalted on the forums altogether.

The Emperor has no clothes.

Aside from the withering/decisive split, another big change is that Perfects have a per-encounter limit on how many times you can use them, that goes up as you buy more charms. This makes a lot of the combat game trying to guess at how many times your opponent is going to be able to Perfect, based on their Essence. Since Initiative damage isn't even real, they probably aren't going to use on on a Withering attack.

If my character, a basketweaving sorcerer, was dragged into a fight, they'd be all like "grr I wanna kill you!" while doing just enough Initiative damage that the actual combat monsters in the party would send them below 0 (this grants them an extra opportunity). Ignoring the ludonarrative dissonance gave me the stunt bonuses I needed to actually have an impact despite being a basketweaver.

Omegonthesane wrote:The only guarantee is getting a 1-die stunt, and that isn't the level where you refresh your "not being mindraped" mana bar.

Fair enough; but the stunts I had my character perform were things like:

-While facing large amounts of [mooks] with the rest of the party; running to their left flank, throwing fire bombs at their opposite flank; and then diving into them while changing into a [Setting T-Rex] to create maximum confusion; as a single rounds actions; for +1 stunt dice [~yay!~]

-Coordinating my character's actions with other characters so that out PCs would: 1) bunch up enemies (calling columns of earth out of the ground, knocking them over to create kill zones) or 2) layer bunched up enemies with multiple character's AoEs (firebombs and obsidian butterfly bullshit)

The originally quoted examples that gave +1 stunt dice, were single actions that difficult to separate from each other (being officious, and bribing at the same time; what a radical notion!).

While more than once players 'stunting' several seemingly unrelated actions to achieve a specific purpose within the constraints of their combat round also only got +1 stunt dice.

The fact that such detailed description of maneuvers and tactical positions got an amount of stunt dice that I could forget to add to my dice pool, and not notice, made me not really care about doing any more stunting afterwards. The whole game felt like a joke; and my PC was generally laughing at everything that happened; because I was laughing at what was happening at the table, and could barely stop.