What makes Martial Arts useful is that they are prepackaged combat styles which require little to no thought for players and STs to invest in. Instead of having to buy a cloud of Charms from three to five different abilities, you invest in a single Charm tree with a predefined path that, when complete, gives …
On The Problems With Summoning Elementals, and Solutions
The main problems with Summon Elemental were that a) it wasn’t broken into circles, and b) it was presented as a fact of the nature of all elementals. Thus meaning summoning the Kukla was a valid summon (granted, one likely to get the entire Aerial Legion siced on you before you finished the dozens of …
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On the size of Malfeas
I find that having Malfeas be nice and huge has two very good effects: 1: It allows me to ignore most of it. I mean, there are a lot of Yozi and demons and so on. Not even getting into first circles, we have 23 Yozi, at least an order of magnitude more Third Circle …
On naming things in Exalted
Here is the trick to making cool names and things in Exalted. Start with something cliché, or ridiculous or lame and then disguise it. As my reaction upthread shows, I didn’t realize for years that Death of Obsidian Butterflies was literally a spell for glass cannon wizards, because the spell was disguised. Infallible Messenger was an IM (ie, Instant …
Fate RPG versus Exalted
Fate works great… for theatre students. It’s a narrative game focused on narrative tropes. So it works great for people who have studied stuff like writing, storytelling, advertising and other fields of creative expression. In other words, people who are already trained to think critically about narrative and character, people who think in tropes. The problem …
On the Effects of Learning Yozi Charms
The problem is that getting there is not a journey you will survive intact. It’s brushed over in the text, but getting Yozi Charms is going to change your outlook. Look at stuff like Murder is Meat or Witness to Darkness and so on. By the time you are capable of going Devil-Tiger, whatever you …
On The Costs of Equipping Armies
My rule was similar except it was based on the Magnitude Chart. So if a shortsword costs 1 dot, it costs 2 to equip a Magnitude 1 unit and so on. Made it very easy to track expenses since you just went (Magnitude + Resources cost). Oh, and there was some stuff in there about …
On The Appearance of Exalted Attacks
How do you describe a Lethal attack that inflict damage on the enemy but have it turn into Bashing ? I’m talking about Crane Form converting all your attack damage into Bashing at step 10, easy to imagine if you already use Bashing weapon like your bare-hands, kinda weird if you use the Style’s weapon …
On the Sidereal Great Curse
The trick to understand about the Sidereal Great Curse is that it doesn’t make you do stupid things, it makes it so that you stop listening to other people. The way the Sidereal Great Curse works is that the more Sidereals agree with a particular decision, the harder it is to convince any Sidereal not to support that decision. …
On How Infinite Primordials Can Be Bound
I think people are confusing “infinite” with “bounded”. The set of all numbers is infinite and unbounded. The set of all even numbers, is infinite and bounded. Thus Malfeas is both infinite and bounded. The Primordials and shinma were created by a math geek, so to understand them you have to understand math.