OSSR: Exalted: The Infernals

[FatR]

2E: Run a combo each round and perfect defend everything, because passive defenses are pretty much 100% non-viable in the Solar league, your manapool is your health bar.

2.5E: Passive defenses are semi-viable, so use them by default and if your passive defense fails to filter out an incoming attack, use a perfect defense. Your manapool is still your heath bar.

Both were shit and tended to produce combats that were either boring curbstomps or boring prolonged attrition matches where everyone spammed the exact same sequence of actions for an equivalent of 10 rounds, with no inbetween.

Jon Chung accidentally provided best dissections for both of them. I've not seen his commentary on 3E that got him banned, and that's unfortunate, as I myself had no reason or desire to study 3E after initial confirmation that they seemingly managed to find another way to make combat extremely drawn-out and boring, but I'd like to have some arguments against residual Exalted fans on the net that switched edition number in their "but this edition totally fixes all the problems!" mantra.

[Longes]

My memory is flimsy, but I think Holden's breaking point was when Chung dared to rebel against linear chargen coupled with exponential advancement.

[Whiysper]

Chung was a Denner at heart. With a swear filter. He did not take fools lightly, and brooked very little stupidity. He was a goddamn breath of fresh air, and was a joy to read.

I declare War rather than melee! Fight me with my pants made of tiny men!

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

My memory is flimsy, but I think Holden's breaking point was when Chung dared to rebel against linear chargen coupled with exponential advancement.

I still can't believe how stupid the 3E team was over that.

Frank and K:

A reminder of why the names Infernals were named what they are... They're the names for the 'evil' propaganda version of the Solars in the 2E book.

[K]

2E: Run a combo each round and perfect defend everything, because passive defenses are pretty much 100% non-viable in the Solar league, your manapool is your health bar.

2.5E: Passive defenses are semi-viable, so use them by default and if your passive defense fails to filter out an incoming attack, use a perfect defense. Your manapool is still your heath bar.

Both were shit and tended to produce combats that were either boring curbstomps or boring prolonged attrition matches where everyone spammed the exact same sequence of actions for an equivalent of 10 rounds, with no inbetween.

Jon Chung accidentally provided best dissections for both of them. I've not seen his commentary on 3E that got him banned, and that's unfortunate, as I myself had no reason or desire to study 3E after initial confirmation that they seemingly managed to find another way to make combat extremely drawn-out and boring, but I'd like to have some arguments against residual Exalted fans on the net that switched edition number in their "but this edition totally fixes all the problems!" mantra.

I tend to think that Exalted was never intended to be about Solar-on-Solar combat, and that this mind-set is an artifact of the forums.

For the most part, I think Exalted combat is supposed to be the PC Exalted tossing down bigger numbers onto shit like mortal soldiers, Godblooded, zombies and weird beasts and Dragonblooded who don't even have number boosters, much less access to perfect defenses. The rare built-for-combat NPC was supposed to be a puzzle monster that you defeated by putting Yozi poison in his enchiladas or by exploiting Flaws of Invulnerability in their Perfect Defenses.

This means that being combat-ready amounted to maybe two combat Excellencies and a single Perfect Defense, about a third of your starting Charms. That's a much more playable proposition than the expectation that you'd be blowing all of your starting Charms in order to play padded sumo at the expense of literally anything else.

This is spelled out nowhere in the game docs, but the design of the game's combat system really does discourage Perfect Defense wielders from trying to slug it out toe-to-toe. In a lot of ways, I could see Exalted combat being more like Shadowrun where the lethality is such that combat versus serious opposition is a failure condition and not a routine and expected encounter.

[Omegonthesane]

The idea of exploiting Flaws got undermined by the later introduction of PDs where the Flaw is just "this costs more when you do X" instead of "this fails when you do X".

While I trust my GM to have actually accounted for it in the numbers this meant there was no visceral satisfaction from arranging the final battle against the Wyrm to take place in Antarctica to counter his Malfeas perfect defence and using only Holy attacks to counter his Ebon Dragon perfect, since he also had the Swillin' perfect and even if we could counter that one it'd only cause him to spend more motes rather than be unable to block our attacks.

(The details require some knowledge of both Exalted and Wod to understand so I don't care to spell them out here unless someone asks directly.)

ETA: I think it's also worth nitpicking that "the most combaty Solar kills all the others when the Limit bar fills" is a worst case output of the system presented since you can spend a Willpower to get a less ostentatious thing happen and also just get a choice at chargen of various ways you can flip out and be under GM control. Indeed if you're intending to play heroes you're more likely to go Foolhardy Contempt than Berserk Anger anyway. Still a bad design choice overall though.

[Longes]

"Exploiting flaws" really only showed up in the Infernals, where every perfect makes you a Puzzle Boss.

And one of the reasons they got broke is that the changes in 2.5 mechanics made those puzzles trivial and/or irrelevant. For example, SWLIHN's flaw is that she can't block any combo or charm she hasn't seen before. And that kinda worked in 2e because you had to buy combos with xp, so a SWLIHN exalt would eat a dick, and then be forever immune to that dick. That's a popular trope you can see in Worm and shit. But in 2.5 anyone can make up combos on the fly, so SWLIHN's perfect defense just never works.

[FatR]

Exalted is a very rules-heavy game. Most of those rules are for combat and activities directly tied to combat, like movement and stealth. Heck, until 2E subsystems for anything else hardly even existed and in 2E swords explicitly trumped words. Combat is not very interesting to roll through for anyone involved, if it is an endless curbstomp, without at least a pretension of risk. A party of practically optimized (that is, everyone at least picked the basic defensive set that is needed to proof yourself against getting instagibbed by accident when fighting other Essence users) solaroids is too obviously not at risk against opponents below Celestial level, unless your GM threw official NPC writeups into the trash and is optimizing shit out of his DBs and spirits. And all those rules and Charms are wasted, if you are only using them to choose what SFX will accompany deletion of mooks this time. Well, they are going to be wasted anyway, due to how shallow and one-true-buildish optimized Celestial combat is, but you can't blame people for trying to actually dig into this mountain of Charms and find out what works against serious threats, and what doesn't.
e

[K]

Exalted is a very rules-heavy game. Most of those rules are for combat and activities directly tied to combat, like movement and stealth. Heck, until 2E subsystems for anything else hardly even existed and in 2E swords explicitly trumped words. Combat is not very interesting to roll through for anyone involved, if it is an endless curbstomp, without at least a pretension of risk. A party of practically optimized (that is, everyone at least picked the basic defensive set that is needed to proof yourself against getting instagibbed by accident when fighting other Essence users) solaroids is too obviously not at risk against opponents below Celestial level, unless your GM threw official NPC writeups into the trash and is optimizing shit out of his DBs and spirits. And all those rules and Charms are wasted, if you are only using them to choose what SFX will accompany deletion of mooks this time. Well, they are going to be wasted anyway, due to how shallow and one-true-buildish optimized Celestial combat is, but you can't blame people for trying to actually dig into this mountain of Charms and find out what works against serious threats, and what doesn't.
e

Like I said, I think combat against Celestial-level opposition is a failure state. The amount of Essence burned and Charms devoted to doing it removes the rest of the game from you.

The most egregious design mistake here is that the rest of the game hasn't been fleshed out enough for people to really see anything but the combat system. Its the largest chunk of the rules in the game by far considering how boring it is compared to the potential everywhere else.

There are parts of the combat system that also just seem to have been made by insane people. I'm not really sure how you use a Perfect Defense against a melee-range attacker with Charm Redirection Technique. How do they not one-shot you when you can't use a PD Charm without it getting cancelled?

[DrPraetor]

Is the non-combat stuff in Exalted any good? Like, I know Celestial Circle sorcery can summon demons; can you summon an army of demons? Can an army of demons wear down a high-level solar exalted?

For my sins, I tried to figure out how the various superpowers in Amber Diceless interacted. If you have Advanced Chaos Sorcery you have death spells, but if you have Rank:1 in Combat you always win fights, through a combination of badassery and tactical genius and you get the most of both. So, as I read Amber Diceless, the guy with the highest combat skill gets to declare that he wasn't in your line of sight, or that you cast your death spell on a decoy, or whatever, and now he's behind you with a sword; but I could never figure out exactly what combination of declarations that would be at table.

So, in Exalted, if I have a bunch of magic spells that do whatever and you have a big pile of combat numbers plus a bunch of I-stab-the-foo charms, who wins?

[Koumei]

in 2E swords explicitly trumped words.

Are you sure that's not just "S-Words"?

[maglag]

Is the non-combat stuff in Exalted any good? Like, I know Celestial Circle sorcery can summon demons; can you summon an army of demons? Can an army of demons wear down a high-level solar exalted?

Demonic zerg rush isn't exactly viable, but the top summonable demons were lategame-boss level stuff that could take on multiple solars kinda like a 3.X spellcaster can gate something like a Solar.

[Omegonthesane]

"Exploiting flaws" really only showed up in the Infernals, where every perfect makes you a Puzzle Boss.

That just shows a lack of imagination/ruthlessness, since Flaws of Invulnerability were emphasised right from the start. Though I guess the Infernal ones were easiest due to being set by external conditions.

And one of the reasons they got broke is that the changes in 2.5 mechanics made those puzzles trivial and/or irrelevant. For example, SWLIHN's flaw is that she can't has to spend slightly more motes to block any combo or charm she hasn't seen before.

This is literally the example I was just complaining about as being impossible to perfectly counter.

[K]

Is the non-combat stuff in Exalted any good? Like, I know Celestial Circle sorcery can summon demons; can you summon an army of demons? Can an army of demons wear down a high-level solar exalted?

For my sins, I tried to figure out how the various superpowers in Amber Diceless interacted. If you have Advanced Chaos Sorcery you have death spells, but if you have Rank:1 in Combat you always win fights, through a combination of badassery and tactical genius and you get the most of both. So, as I read Amber Diceless, the guy with the highest combat skill gets to declare that he wasn't in your line of sight, or that you cast your death spell on a decoy, or whatever, and now he's behind you with a sword; but I could never figure out exactly what combination of declarations that would be at table.

So, in Exalted, if I have a bunch of magic spells that do whatever and you have a big pile of combat numbers plus a bunch of I-stab-the-foo charms, who wins?

The obvious trick seems to be to summon some Second Circle Demons and then make Amalgams with the best Charms of each one. Of course, each Amalgam is slightly weaker than a Solar with the lack of Comboes, but an army seems like a winner to literally accomplish anything in Exalted.

Of course, if you have Solar Circle Sorcery you can just get a Third Circle Demon who is easily a match for many combat Solars.

Then there are just small spells that cause wins. Sprouting Shackles of Doom is a Terrestrial Circle incapacitating spell that has no rolls or numbers and thus can't be dodged or parried or resisted. If someone casts it on you and you can't cast Emerald Countermagic or better, it's over.

[Username17]

Manual of Exalted Power: The Infernals

Chapter Five: Charms


If it were this, that would actually be better.

Your musical selection for today will be Battle Beast, which is probably a bit more awesome than this book deserves, but is thematically on point.

Frank

A story I've been told about The Infernals that I pretty much believe is that most of the Charms in this book are actually written by one dude on a bender and that he produced so many of these fucking things that the material they cut from this book for space was actually later used as much of the text of The Broken Winged Crane. This is so fucking stupid and plausible in equal measures that I give it a veracity value of like 0.8. It's important to remember of course that The Broken Winged Crane came out in 2010, just one year after The Infernals did, but made such a non-impression on even the remaining fans of White Wolf that it is described in the White Wolf fan wiki as “The as-yet unreleased Broken Winged Crane” nine years after its digital release.

At seventy pages, this chapter is the longest in the book. Indeed, it's just barely (by two pages) longer than the second and third longest chapters combined. But while this chapter is by far the biggest pile of text in this book, I have absolutely no problem believing that it was basically thrown together by a drunk guy in a week. It's basically my Baneguard demonstration five times end to end. I could have done this in a week as an ironic statement, I have absolutely no doubt that someone who actually really liked Exalted could do it in a week for serious.

K:

I could see how you could spit out this section pretty easily. You need to cover all of the tactical bases of the Solar in order to make GSPs usable at all, so half the Charms are going to be parodies of Solar Charms (Hardened Devil Body instead of Ox-body Technique, for example). You make them a little weirder and slightly more specialized, but the real time spent here is the flavor writing.

So after that single day of work, you have six more days to fill out of the Charm concepts of the Reclamation conspirators. You start with conceptual holes in the base Exalted game and then some Charm trees from your favorite anime and hentai, you make sure everyone has the same rough number of Charms, and then knock off for a beer.

A week total for that sounds about right to me.

Frank

What is a Charm supposed to be able to do? What is it supposed to cost? I don't know. No one knows.

The core issue is that while it is trivial to find two Charms where one is better than the other, that fact alone does not tell us whether the first is too strong, the second is too weak, both are too strong, or both are too weak. Either, both, or neither could be in the “acceptable” band of power against whatever standards are supposed to exist – and in Exalted those standards do not exist and never have.

There isn't even a “soft” or “derivable” appropriate power band. In many games, such as Shadowrun or Dungeons & Dragons, there are listed members of the opposition and you can kinda sorta lay down the idea that power combinations that let you roflstomp that opposition are perhaps too good and powers that don't stop that opposition from beating you up and taking your lunch money are probably not good enough. But that's a hard sell in Exalted for two reasons. The first is despite the thousands of pages and millions of words in Exalted there are actually very few presented challenges and members of the opposition. Mostly it's just page after page of ranting about shit no one cares about from four thousand years ago. And what opposition does exist is almost entirely presented as being way more or way less powerful than any Exalted character is going to be no matter how carefully or carelessly they select their charms.

But the second issue is that such as Exalted is a game at all, it's mostly apparently intended as an out-of-control power fantasy. The books spend a lot of time talking about how the player characters can basically use almost the entire setting as toilet paper. And when it's not doing that, it spends much of its time wanking to unstoppable ancient Deathlords who are going to pick their teeth with the player characters. Everyone writing these fucking books seemed to agree that the game was an over-the-top power fantasy, but there was a sharp division between the writers who envisioned that power fantasy as being the players shitting on the storyteller's world with over powered characters and the writers who imagines the storyteller shitting on the player characters with over powered NPCs.


Not sure if this is supposed to be the player or the storyteller. But it's the target Exalted fan demographic either way.

K:

The feeling of Exalted is supposed to be high fantasy epic, so I don't think there is supposed to be another way to write this. The Deathlords are supposed to be uber-powerful plot devices that you solve through entire campaigns and not some fool you can stab on your way to some other mission. By the same token, mortals are supposed to be completely beneath you.

How is this different from DnD? Are we angry because we can't beat Great Wyrms at level 1? But of course D&D gives us Ogres, Hill Giants, and Fire Giants so that there are always things we're “supposed” to be able to fight. Exalted... does not do that thing.

The varying power levels on Charms that show than no version of Exalted has ever gone through a true revision. Even eight years after the original book, everything is a draft. Examples in this book are things like how the Charm for making locusts you can eat has a prereq of Essence 3, as does the Charm that heals a level of damage per minute; clearly, one of these is more useful than the other.

Frank

I'll be honest, I had to read the nested layers of Charm governance three times and I'm not sure I got it.

It's very clear that this is a hybrid document that combines ideas from several different authors. There's genuinely no reason for all this nonsense about whether and when a Green Sun Prince learning a charm makes a charm become available to other demons and Yozis and GSPs and shit. Someone, or more likely a couple of people, had big ideas about radically changing how Charms were associated with character classes in Exalted, and I have no idea whether the idea was good or bad because the implementation is fucking gibberish.

Lunar akuma who favor Martial Arts may learn Sidereal Martial Arts from a Sidereal sifu for a flat 12 experience points per Charm.

This is so fucking out-there that I don't know what the fuck. This is a statement about the experience costs of NPC villains who are so few in number that there might literally be zero of them in the world. I just... I just don't know. Broadly speaking, little sentences like this have huge potential impacts by letting characters from another book get combined with powers from yet another book by joining Team Evil despite Team Evil not inherently having access to either power set from either other book. Now this sentence in particular is noteworthy because the Lunars book from seven years earlier mentioned that there were ancient stories of Lunars who used Sidereal Martial Arts and left it up to your MC whether there was any path to actual Lunar characters learning them or not. So this is stealth errata to a book that came out 7 years earlier where some writer on this book got to retroactively “win” some argument they'd had going since before the second Iraq War. But the book's full of these kinds of statements, and I doubt they are all this petty.

The most likely explanation is that this is all just an incredibly convoluted justification for springing opponents with ability sets the players didn't expect. Like those D&D monsters from the seventies where they look like Undead but are actually plants or just weird hobos covered in sticky jizz. The other possibility of course is that this is all someone writing in a super duper combo and then hiding it from the editor and other authors by making it as a series of function calls to other books that are over two hundred pages long, But I don't know why anyone would bother, because no one fucking checked these books for “game balance” at any point.

K:

I think the stuff about akuma is because you were supposed to be making akuma at the top end of Infernal play, so how much XP they spend on things was supposed to be important. The Lunar thing where they can access Sidereal martial arts seems more like a "well, there is some support for this in the flavor for Lunars, so why not?" and less "haha, look at my secret Lunar backdoor into Sidereal martial arts."

As for the call functions, I really do think that this book is a stealth Eclipse/Moonshadow supplement. The only reason to write up Hardened Devil Body is to take it when you also take Ox-Body Technique and thus double up your Health levels (not a great use of Charms, btw).

Frank

Every Charm is gated by... things. They have costs to buy, they have costs to use, they have prerequisites to have access to them in the first place. Some of these are absolute mechanical prerequisites like having to take Charm A before you can take Charm B. Some are relative prerequisites like if you don't have a good number in Skill C you can't get any benefit from Charm B. Some are roleplaying prerequisites like if you haven't sucked the girl-cock of Demon Lord D you aren't allowed to take Charm B. And various stuff in between and also too.

This is a chain from 3rd edition, which just goes to show that no one ever learns anything in the Exalted community.

That sort of thing is nothing new for Exalted. We had our eyes glaze over when discussing the similar chapter in The Lunars. Where The Infernals really goes out into crazy town is this thing where the Charms you have access to for future learning is defined by what Yozi faction you happen to be associated with at the moment. I think the intention is for someone to develop a ridiculously complicated backstory and train under all the different Yozi and go all Master of the Five Magics (which is a decent book you should read) and do something amazing. I have no idea how that's supposed to work or what it would look like if you did. Obviously no one is actually going to play an Infernals campaign that lasts long enough for that to be remotely related to something that could actually happen, so I don't know what this is all about.

And of course, there's a little rant about how all these power list swaps are supposed to work with the Fiend's ability to straight up take abilities that aren't on her list at all – and the answer appears to be that it doesn't.

K:

It's important that getting access to additional Yozis requires the actual Yozi to teach it and not another GSP, an akuma, or a Third Circle soul because it places a hard limit on the choices of a GSP. Otherwise, they'd just hands-down have the best Charm selection of any Exalted by an inarguable amount through access to all of the Yozi. The fact that there is a plot-device way to upgrade the GSPs charm selection options is interesting, but not more interesting than saying that game-changing artifacts exist in the setting or that some number of snacks handed to the GM will mean some other number of bad events won't happen.

Fiends explicitly circumvent this process and learn other Yozi Charms in a way that doesn't affect the GSPs in the same way they and their equivalents can learn Solar Charms or spirit Charms or Yozi Charms. In a weird moment, you get a balance point where the other Castes don't get broken, but we are still stuck with the truth that Eclipse/Moonshadows/Fiends and Lunars with that one Charm that lets you steal Charms are broken on dumpster-diving principles. (I think that Charm is the source of the "Lunars with Sidereal martial arts" tag, but it could be a secret double ret-con.)

If you really want to complain about Charm access, you start by mentioning that GSPs and akuma explicitly get access to the batshit high-Essence Charms in Return of the Scarlet Princess.

Frank

One of the core conceits of Infernal Charms is that they work differently depending on what Yozi is actually endorsing the Charm, rather than (or rather in addition to) where the Charm originally came from. The example of this is a defense charm that comes from Celecyne and prevents people from attacking you by filling them with an overwhelming feeling of social awkwardness – but when used by and for other Yozis it still stops attacks but does so via different means based on which Yozi it is being used on behalf of. A specific example which I am in no way making up is that the Ebon Dragon's version has people make their attack but swing uselessly at shadows while the Malfeas version leaves people too frightened to make their attack at all.

Now consider that for a moment. If you think about this shit as a video game where the cut-scenes are irrelevant and the next game state is 100% determined by how many motes are expended and how much damage is sustained, then those two things are I suppose identical. But in a role playing game I could imagine it being very important whether other people see a character attempting to perform a lethal attack or not. And even in a purely gladiatorial match scenario there are still lots of attacks in this game that make craters and explosions that do various amounts of damage to scenery and bystanders, so whether an attack happened and missed or didn't happen at all could still be critically important.

This is what K was talking about when he said that the magical teaparty stories about what the various demon gods liked, disliked, and behaved like were actually kind of important to how this book works. Well, to the extent that it works at all. Most abilities are supposed to be interpreted through the lens of a particular Yozi's idiom, and that lens has real (but almost completely undefined) fallout. This is basically where this stops being a game of dice and numbers altogether and starts being some sort of weird competitive poetry slam where the players are actually supposed to refer to First Age Yozi Fanfiction about what various Yozis did and how they did it and then relate those actions and preferences to the charms on the player's actual character sheet to justify getting various rider effects that would be useful in whatever circumstance they happen to be in.

And this isn't just about what rider effects things have, it's about how many dice you roll. Because the Excellencies are all Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. All the way down. Explicitly.

K:

Can I say that it’s the best and the worst part?

Its flavorful as shit, it leans into the themes of the demons as flawed creatures bound by their nature, and it also would be almost unplayable. There is a real argument that you should only be playing a Fiend and just get other creature's Charms for dice-boosts if you want to be good at things, but then I'd feel like you were cheating yourself of the chance to play mytho-poetics as roleplaying game device.

It also opens up a lot of options at the table. There is no single "face" or "skill-monkey" when any GSP character might be able to apply the principle of capricious hypocrisy or wrathful glory to a relevant roll to add a meaningful amount of successes. It's a more fun version of FATE, and that might make it a thing you'd want to do sometime with the right crowd.

Frank

Considering that the First Age stories from previous books are not in fact reconcilable and directly contradict each other all over the place, it's functionally impossible to know what your character's Charms “really do.” There are unspecified effects from stories that resonate with your MC and you won't know what those are unless and until they come up. It's not just that every character is different, it's that the same character using the same powers will have significantly different actual abilities depending on who is at the table. It makes discussions of “power level” somewhat pointless.

My impression is that the intention was for GSPs to be somewhat weaker than Solars to begin with but have a higher ceiling and more ways to open up new ways forward onto other power lists. I can't even imagine how you would keep a GSP campaign going long enough for the GSPs to “catch up” or why anyone would want to.

K:

That’s a problem baked into Exalted, not just Infernal, There is nothing stopping a Solar player from blowing Charms on really being able to write quickly and that guy is expected to play the same game as the guy who literally reshapes reality and the guy who cuts down city gates with his artifact sword.

Frank

Despite this entire chapter being an incredibly ruleslite sort of setup where the primary meaningful mechanic is telling each other how stories about ancient heroes and demons relate to the current situation, it's still Exalted. And that means the undercarriage of the game is still incredibly rules-heavy and minutiae driven. Attack rolls, dodge rolls, damage rolls, soak rolls, initiative rolls, power activations, psychology effects, power conflicts, and so on. It's easy for a single sword strike to involve ten die rolls. Not a “roll of ten dice” (although it can do that too), but actually taking a counted pile of dice and rolling all of them. Ten times. And there are Motes, Willpower, Limit, and Damage that can all go up or down at various checkpoints through that process for both the attacker and the defender.

I have severe doubts that any of the people who ever wrote any part of this fucking thing actually had enough system mastery to tell you accurately what any of the powers they wrote actually did in the context of the game as written. There is only one person in the history of the world who has done the heavy lifting of really figuring out how all the die rolls and powers and shit work together, and his name is Jon Chung. And even that is based on a series of assumptions that the various “narrative” effects don't do anything or at least cancel out. And for the Infernals, that assumption is very definitely less likely to be true than it is for the other Exalted.

The bottom line of course is that this book is an actual train wreck when it comes to design. The cost on getting more Excellencies goes up very fast, but any Excellency could already apply in any situation at all if you can buffalo your storyteller with tales of how She Who Lives In Her Name did something or liked something or came out strongly in favor of something in some piece of fanfiction you read that is vaguely related to the case at hand. The costs are very high in-game to be allowed to relate your Excellency stories to other Demon Gods, but the costs of knowing more stories about the Demon Gods you are already allowed to refer to is just time spent reading Exalted books out of game.

K:

I mean, RPGs already reward system mastery, so how can I come down hard on a game that rewards story-mastery?

As for the narrative effects, Infernal does a few great things like introducing a few Charms that automate stunts. Straight up being able to say "this effect produces a minimum of a one-level stunt, maybe more" is a flat improvement over Exalted's mother-may-I stunt system.

I've already mentioned that I consider Exalted combat a failure state in the game, so I won't repeat myself.

Frank

Figuring out what you'd need to have in order to get a specific Charm is a horrible ordeal. Each Charm tells you what its prerequisites are, but it doesn't mention what the prerequisites of its prerequisites are, and the Charms aren't in any particular order. And the Charms have names that frequently do not meaningfully tell you what they do. And while Charms that are farther down the tree frequently have higher Essence requirements than ones that are closer to the beginning, this isn't consistently true and sometimes things with Essence requirements are entry level and sometimes Charms lead to other charms that don't have higher Essence requirements.

Basically, if your real mission was to hide some piece of information and transmit it to foreign intelligence operatives in a way that no one who read this book would ever be able to figure out – this book's format would make a lot of sense. Otherwise this is just a perfect storm of terrible layout decisions that create a game reference that is virtually impossible to parse.

K:

Exalted loves the charts that explain all this. This means that picking a Charm is always about flipping to the chart about it, check the list of prereq Charms, then checking all of those. It's more complicated than it needs to be, but this is the canonical Exalted way of organizing Charms.

Here's a “Charm Cloud” from a different book:

The Charm Clouds in The Infernals are considerably simpler. But the underlying issue where the descriptions aren't in any kind of alphabetical order is a continuing issue. At least this book mostly spares us charms that appear in multiple trees and thus don't appear in the same part of the book as other Charms they unlock or are unlocked by. There are a few, but it's not as pervasive as the other books.

Frank

Many times there are things which don't make sense on their own terms. A bunch of the bondage nun powers care whether or not you're in a “place of desolation.” Which is vaguely defined, but then apparently the Underworld doesn't count because it's too desolated. Which um... I can't fully articulate how fucking stupid that is.

K:

I think that’s a game-balance concession making that suite of powers not batshit in the Underworld.

Frank

A core issue of Exalted generally is that Swords Trump Words. That is, there's a horrendously complicated “social combat” thing where people can beat down your willpower with social moves, but if anyone doesn't want to play they can draw their sword and all the social attacks automagically fail forever.

That being said, if for some reason people don't draw swords and invalidate your social attacks, the output of social attacks is that people become your slaves, which is infinity times better than them merely dying. So the big question in your life is whether the MC is going to allow these powers to work at all, and if the answer is “yes” how they aren't just infinity times better than all the stupid combat charms? That's not an answerable question, if people actually tried to play this game it is completely unpredictable which way it would go.

But the social powers are basically binarily the best or worst powers in the book. And on a similar note, one of the key powers of the Bondage Nuns is one where you get large bonuses in social combat against demons with weaker Essence than your own, but large penalties against demons with higher Essence than your own. So depending on what the MC throws at you, it might be the best power in the book and it might literally be disadvantageous to have.

K:

Is this worse than Charm Monster in DnD? When someone has a mind-control effect in an RPG that doesn't suck, give me a call.

I think it's important to note that many weaknesses in the Charm set are really just minor inconveniences that can be offset by another Charm. Losing dice when you tell the truth is not a big deal when you have a Charm that adds flat successes.

Also, none of these Charms are the real draw of the Bondage Nuns [NSFW]:

Frank

One is tempted to wonder how many Charms the authors thought people get. There are a number of Charms in this book which require you to have three other Charms first. There's at least one where you literally have to take six other Charms before it becomes unlocked. I don't think people realize what a stupidly massive chunk of a character's total number of selectable abilities that actually is.

K:

I'm going to say that this is also the canon for Exalted Charms, Just peak into the core book and you'll find five-Charm prereqs for some Charms.

Frank

Many parts of this book are ways to bypass the storyteller cockblocking you in specific ways. Bestowal of Accursed Fortune is a Charm with three prerequisite Charms, and what it does is allow people around you to spend XP to for Backgrounds at a semi-normal cost. You may ask at this point “Isn't that literally doing nothing?” And well, yes. That power literally has no effect.

Unless of course, the MC is cockblocking you. If you want to spend some of your downtime raising an army of demon monkeys, the MC might just say “Fine, mark off the XP and add a dot of demon monkey army background.” But equally, they might say “Where the fuck are you getting a demon monkey army? This adventure has been entirely set on a casino boat.” There are in fact, a lot of failure points once you start talking about actual games where the amount of control the MC has over how your character can advance is fairly large.

And it is on the background of that where the authors write really quite a lot of powers and rules that just interact with the player's control over their own destiny and advancement. It's almost like they'd just rather be playing a game which inherently had more narrative control in the hands of the players. Like, they could just be playing fucking FATE or something and none of this shit would need to exist.

K:

It's not just GM cock-blocking, but GM retribution as well. When the GM says "yeh, your Ally just got killed so I guess those Ally points are lost," this power exists to give it back without needing to spend XP. The base game would be better if this power didn't need to exist, and this is why this book is so interesting as a kludge of fixes to Exalted.

That being said, I don't actually think it’s a bad thing for PCs to have more direct control over the story elements, which is something FATE doesn't do. It's all MTP all the way down in FATE, but here we have direct story control in the hands of the players, and I'm good with it.

Frank

The Crab Mummies are kind of defined as sorcerers and gadgeteers. Most of these “spell themed spells” are in fact completely fucking useless. Generally speaking, “sword themed spells” are the best unless “social themed spells” are allowed to raise large squads of sword users in which case those are the best. Crab Mummy telekinesis is delivered piece by piece and it takes quite a lot of Charms to string together before you can make a glowing platform to float around on. But I remind you that in Dungeons & Dragons, Tenser's Floating Disk is a 1st level spell and no one fucking cares.

K:

Some of the most interesting Charms are in this Yozi's set, including things like immunity to Shaping effect for no Essence cost, no cost regen, perfect parries that with the right Charm choices can lead to perfect parries that actually net Essence Motes, and Wyld Shaping inside Creation and creating loyal demon armies. Side-effects on some major Charms include creating Resources when you kill mooks and breaking wills of people when you TK smack them. Straight up some of the most powerful and useful Charms.

Flavor points goes out to the perfect Parry (Counter-conceptual Imposition) because parrying through discrete reality-manipulation and leaving the battlefield a mess of warped and weird material is pretty neat.

Frank

The powers of the Adorjan the Silent Wind are all about running really fast and stabbing fools up close like a ninja. Perhaps a Sex Ninja? And I'm pretty convinced that the Air Pirate was supposed to be the Fiend and the Sex Ninja was supposed to be the Scourge and it all got mixed up during art assignments because the faction symbols look almost identical and for some reason this really bothers me.

The thing where the Air Pirate first shown blowing shit up with a giant cannon has the demon patron that gives you the power to run really fast and disdains the use of ranged attacks just rubs this all in. Now that I've seen the error, I can't unsee it. And this whole book looks so much more slapdash because of it.

Let's go back to the cover:



The Air Pirate is holding a fucking gun, and obviously does not live under the demonic geas to only ever kill fools up close. The Sex Ninja crouching next to him obviously runs around like a character in Ninja Scroll and could easily enough have that restriction.

There is a little piece of fuckery that's so fucked that I have to call it out. The Scourges get a perfect parry against mental influences. It costs 5 motes, but if your character otherwise does not talk during the scene, it costs only 1 (which is essentially free). The book gives you real and substantial bonuses for your character being uninteresting and you not participating in the story or the game very much. How do I even?

K:

Adorjan is perhaps the least interesting of the Yozi because she has the combat charms. If you need a cheap perfect dodge, a flurry, or need to turn an unexpected attack into an expected one, here you are.

Stand-outs include actual self-powered flight, a kludge for the Virtue check for killing mortals and also taking their sweet Essence, and the ability to exercise instead of sleep.


Or just work out harder!

Frank

The Ebon Dragon is not the mightiest Yozi, nor the most brilliant. Neither is he the most creative or cunning of the titans. However, no other Primordial approaches his skill at cheating. Among the Exalted, the Sidereals have come the closest to understanding his principle of antagonistic cheating and fashioned Obsidian Shards of Infinity Style in the likeness of his unfairness, but how well they succeeded remains as unclear to the art’s masters as those unfortunate enough to encounter them. The Shadow of All Things disdains their unintended offering as unworthy, but gratitude must never be his nature. Purer understanding of the Yozi reveals that the mirror of adversity does not exist outside the self, but pretends to exist within.

Reading this chapter is fucking exhausting. Because the Charm descriptions just have... stuff. Weird asides. Bits of poetry. Ruminations on ancient history. References to plotlines in other books, fucking whatever. Some Charm descriptions are very telegraphic and just lay out some mechanics. But enough of them wax poetic about shit you don't care about that it's really hard to find the mechanics to even evaluate what they are.

K:

The Ebon Dragon just has the best Charms, because some of his Charms involve stealing other people's Charms. Shit, if you care about fighting Deathlords, how do you think you'd do in a fight as a complete character-replacement copy of one?

Clearly, this is the Charm set people spent some time on. An Akuma with these Charms is an authentically dangerous infiltrator or combatant, so I expect this was the material the writer already had written from his home game.

At the end of the day, Yozi charms are just more fun to read and play. Celestial and Terrestrial charms are pretty bland in flavor and mechanics with only a few stand-outs, but Yozi Charms will actually make you feel like you are the Chosen of an Asia-inspired spirit entity.

Frank

Martial Arts and Sorcery are extra flavors of spells that are different from other Charms in that.... I'll come in again.

Exalted Charms are variously soft and hard locked to the groups they are supposed to be written for. The “more powerful” Exalted aren't generally more powerful because they have higher stats (although often they do), but because the Charms they have access to are better. There's nothing stopping someone from writing a 1 mote Perfect Dodge as an expansion charm that Water Dragon-blooded Exalted can take and then having those fuckers be the bestest from then on, but for the most part Exalted authors have stayed on point with giving the various Castes from “high power” splats access to Charms that top out at things that are more powerful than what the various Castes from “low power” splats get access to. This doesn't mean that the “high power” splats don't have access to things that don't do anything – you could make a Solar whose every Charm was tied up in writing messages really well. But assuming infinite optimization for every character, a Solar Zenith is going to be better than a Lunar Changing Moon is going to be better than a Dragon-blooded Fire Guy (I forget what they are called and don't care to look it up).

Martial Arts and Sorcery then are Charms that aren't Caste-locked at all. They are soft-locked only by Tier. That is, a Dragon-blooded fucker can get Terrestrial Martial Arts and Terrestrial Sorcery Charms, and a character that actually matters could take those Charms but won't bother because for the same XP cost they could learn Celestial Martial Arts and Celestial Sorcery Charms, which are better and also go fuck yourself.

This book posits the existence of Infernal Sorcery and Infernal Martial Arts, which are just like that except they are soft-locked by team rather than by power level. So these Charms are available to Dragon-blooded, GSPs, and Solaroids alike, provided they are on Team Evil.

For the most part you don't care, but I'm sure there's some reason other than obsessive completionism that you'd want to train under Team Evil for a while in order to pick up one of these.

K:

Dragonblooded are hard locked in that they can't have perfect defenses from their native Charms, though martial arts can circumvent that. That being said, they also can't make combos and need to roll to make Celestial Arts activate, so they suck as Martial Artists.

Infernal martial arts are just martial arts. Only the hero-expansions are by team, but that's the same as all Exalted. Anyone can learn the base charms as a Celestial martial art, and it's only interesting in that it almost mirrors Solar Hero Style and that it has a mechanic where one power can bleed of a point of Limit, so it’s a secret way for Solars to deal with Limit.

Infernal Sorcery is more interesting because it often changes how Sorcery works, and it is available at the Solar level to everyone with the Essence. As a GM, this means that literally anyone can be a viable evil sorcerer villain, and that was something the base game need desperately.

It also means that there are flavors of sorcerer. You know that an Ebon Dragon Sorcerer is not making a light source and that a Cecelyne sorcerer is not manipulating the element of Wood.

Frank

The final comic demonstrates a guy hiding in a barn from some soldiers and then summoning a dumb looking demon to slaughter them when they insist on bringing him in for witch-burning. That sounds cooler than it is. Neither the sorcerer nor the summoning ritual is actually shown.

K:

I think this comic is supposed to illustrate that the Infernal Sorerers have combat summoning at dawn and dusk. They use different mechanics for summoning demons.

Frank

Next up: Chapter Six: Wonders of the Demon Realm.

[DrPraetor]

One of the core conceits of Infernal Charms is that they work differently depending on what Yozi is actually endorsing the Charm... The example of this is a defense charm that comes from Celecyne and prevents people from attacking you by filling them with an overwhelming feeling of social awkwardness – but when used by and for other Yozis it still stops attacks but does so via different means based on which Yozi it is being used on behalf of. A specific example which I am in no way making up is that the Ebon Dragon's version has people make their attack but swing uselessly at shadows while the Malfeas version leaves people too frightened to make their attack at all. (and this is a train wreck)

That is both more awesome and more... completely unplayable? than I had anticipated.

Can I say that it’s the best and the worst part?

It's therefore the best part, because the playability estimate for Exalted was already "ha ha, no", so it really doesn't matter if you make the game "less playable" from a floor of 0; but it does matter if your unplayable game is at least awesome.

Here's a “Charm Cloud” from a different book:

I'm almost afraid to ask
1) Um... the charms with in-degree 0, which are what you have to take first (?), are in a cross around the title of the cloud? Is that right?
2) Do the flourishes on the corners of the lozenges and the little clusters of brown and white pearls convey some kind of information? Essence requirements? Active vs. passive vs... two other categories of charms?

if for some reason people don't draw swords and invalidate your social attacks, the output of social attacks is that people become your slaves,

Does the social awkwardness charm from my first block-quote above force them to let you stay in social combat?

“Where the fuck are you getting a demon monkey army? This adventure has been entirely set on a casino boat.”

Drop whatever you are doing and write this as a scenario for After Sundown. Some mirror goblins are demon monkeys; they don't have to be different, they do have to be monkeys.

[K]

Here's a “Charm Cloud” from a different book:

I'm almost afraid to ask
1) Um... the charms with in-degree 0, which are what you have to take first (?), are in a cross around the title of the cloud? Is that right?
2) Do the flourishes on the corners of the lozenges and the little clusters of brown and white pearls convey some kind of information? Essence requirements? Active vs. passive vs... two other categories of charms?

The convention is that the top pips are minimum permanent Essence and the bottom is minimum score in the skill. This gets wonky with Lunars because you have to remember that they use Attributes and not skills, but is simplified in Infernals who only need Essence.

And that doesn't help at all if the Charm requires points in Whispers, or Cult, or any other weird thing.

I don't know where Frank found this particular cloud, so I can't tell you why some of the boxes are different shapes. I expect it has to do with number of Excellencies as another prereq.

[Koumei]

The only reason to write up Hardened Devil Body is to take it when you also take Ox-Body Technique and thus double up your Health levels (not a great use of Charms, btw).

I'm pretty sure all of the "I can take someone else's Charms" castes specify either "You can't learn more than one version of the same thing" or "You can't learn anybody else's version, you have to use your own". So I don't think you actually can take Ox-Body and HDB (which is a Mirror of Ox-Body).

[Jefepato]

I don't know where Frank found this particular cloud, so I can't tell you why some of the boxes are different shapes. I expect it has to do with number of Excellencies as another prereq.

That's from third-edition Exalted, so there's only one Excellency for each skill, and Excellencies aren't a prereq for anything (at least not for Solars; Solars automatically have the Excellency in all of their "favored" skills, and in any other skill where they know at least one Charm).

As far as I can tell, the box shapes are based on the "Type" of the Charm (which, broadly, defines whether the Charm requires an action to activate, or can just be used whenever, etc.). It looks like Reflexive Charms (like Graceful Crane Stance) have the inwardly curved corners, Supplemental Charms (like Leaping Tiger Attack) have the round bits on the corners, Simple Charms (like Increasing Strength Exercise) are simple rectangles, and Permanent Charms (like Winning Stride Discipline) have the straight cut-off corners.

[K]

The only reason to write up Hardened Devil Body is to take it when you also take Ox-Body Technique and thus double up your Health levels (not a great use of Charms, btw).

I'm pretty sure all of the "I can take someone else's Charms" castes specify either "You can't learn more than one version of the same thing" or "You can't learn anybody else's version, you have to use your own". So I don't think you actually can take Ox-Body and HDB (which is a Mirror of Ox-Body).

I haven't found any rules like that, but it would make sense if you were trying to argue that spirit Ox-body is different from Solar Ox-Body.

That being said, Eclipses can explicitly get different Exalts versions of Charms. The Sidereal books has a section saying that an Eclipse can get the Sidereal versions of Sidereal Martial Arts Charms that use Prayer Strips.

I'd also argue that aren't the same Charm. Ox-Body gives you a choice of extra health levels, while Hardened gives a fixed number of extra levels. They are alike in the same way as two Perfect Dodge Charms or two dice-boosting Charms, and aren't even Mirrors like Abyssal Charms.

[Jefepato]

As far as the Ox-Body thing goes, the Alchemicals book states:

Like all Ox-Body Technique equivalents, this Charm cannot be learned through the Eclipse, Moonshadow or Fiend anima abilities.

You'd think that if the writers had time to write "stealth errata" into new books, they would have had time to write actual proper errata, but that didn't come until quite a bit later IIRC.

(Huh. Wikipedia says that Alchemicals was released in February 2009 and Infernals in April 2009. That can't be right, can it? I could have sworn Infernals came first, and it strikes me as highly unlikely that they released two different major Exalted splatbooks two months apart. Both books do say 2009 on the credits page, though, so maybe I'm just wrong.)

[Username17]

(Huh. Wikipedia says that Alchemicals was released in February 2009 and Infernals in April 2009. That can't be right, can it? I could have sworn Infernals came first, and it strikes me as highly unlikely that they released two different major Exalted splatbooks two months apart. Both books do say 2009 on the credits page, though, so maybe I'm just wrong.)

The Infernals was released with a teaser that says "Coming Next in this Series: The Manual of Exalted Power -- The Alchemicals."

That doesn't mean that the books didn't come out in the wrong order, but it means that even quite late in the editing process the intended release order was Infernals -> Alchemicals.

-Username17

[Longes]

This doesn't mean that the “high power” splats don't have access to things that don't do anything – you could make a Solar whose every Charm was tied up in writing messages really well.

Mind you, that Solar isn't actually the worst. Because from the charms for writing very fast you can branch off into charms for writing mind control texts which can also be subliminal messages. And you can write a million of these "Vote Democrat (No actually Vote Republican)" fliers in a night. Solar writing is one of the best ways in the game to do large scale mind control.

I don't remember if this is in Infernals or in Broken-Winged Crane, but Fiends can one up this with a martial arts style that makes people think you are the victim and should be liked and protected and charms for writing magic books and inverting people's memories. A Fiend can attack the president in broad daylight, go to jail, write His Truth in a popular book that alters memory of everyone who reads it, and come out of jail as the world's most popular hero.

[Username17]

A Fiend can attack the president in broad daylight, go to jail, write His Truth in a popular book that alters memory of everyone who reads it, and come out of jail as the world's most popular hero

I don't recall that being in the Infernals book, so I'd suspect it being a Broken Winged Crane thing. In any case, one of the broad things that the Exalted concept necessitates is some method of tracking popularity.

Like, most of the Exalted "Tell Your Story" concepts that they rattle around with is some variation of "get acclaimed rightful king." Which is a fine story that many fantasy books and fairy tales are based around. But in a game, that achievement needs some kind of underpinning in the game.

Like, this game would be a hundred times better if 80% of the combat shit was jettisoned and was replaced with Victoria style demographic units. A fantasy adventure game that tracked public opinion the way AD&D tracks copper pieces and thus emphasized the fame part of "fame and fortune" would have an obvious niche.

Rescue the Frog Tribe Princess from the Dragon of Bloodbog and you get a reputation boost with the peoples living the Carethor Watershed and also a reputation bonus with Frog Tribe people generally. Collect enough regional and demographic reputation boosts and you can press a claim for rulership over the region. That would be a thing that could be pretty cool. And it's a thing that Exalted does not do.

-Username17

[maglag]

Rescue the Frog Tribe Princess from the Dragon of Bloodbog and you get a reputation boost with the peoples living the Carethor Watershed and also a reputation bonus with Frog Tribe people generally. Collect enough regional and demographic reputation boosts and you can press a claim for rulership over the region. That would be a thing that could be pretty cool. And it's a thing that Exalted does not do.

Is there any RPG that does that thing though?