Extras were not below enlightened mortals. It was, in fact, possible to be both at the same time. Merely having access to Essence channeling was not enough to make you a Not Extra. A pack of Blood Apes attacking your party were as much Extras as a pack of brigands, just with higher base stats. …
Continue reading “On Extras versus Heroic, And Problems With 2e Rules Regarding Them”
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “On The Problems With Summoning Elementals, and Solutions”
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 …
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 …
I guess my question is, how do you take into account “my character is smarter and better prepared than I ever could be, so she would have thought to take measures against this even though I, the player, did not” without having retcon mechanics like DMG and so-on? tzar1990 By letting the PCs win. No, …
Continue reading “GMing when characters are smarter than players”
D&D 4E did not have any mechanical problems that caused its relative failure. As I said above, its problem was not mechanically inept design: it was a failure to understand the allure of the older system, and an attempt to fix it that instead aggravated a lot of players. See, playing a Fighter in D&D …
The fundamental problem with 4E was that it increased player burden/complexity. Because all the complicated thinking and decision making was moved to actual play rather than character creation. You create a Pathfinder fighter and it’s a very complex process. But in actual play it’s “I move to closest enemy and hit with (preferred attack method inserted here)” …
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 …
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 …
