I think if you’re going to rewrite the Craft system you should rewrite the Charm system at the same time to supplement it. Basically, the point of Craft in a purely gamist1 perspective is to give your characters Cool Stuff that does Neat Things. Those neat things can be simple (“I get a +2 to hit!”) …
The Role of Perfect Defenses in Game Balance
What perfects did was effectively cap the power level, or at least they were supposed to. You could never get a better defense than Heavenly Guardian Defense/Seven Shadow Evasion, and no attack could pierce them. The idea, I believe, was to force the scale to stop growing. Basically once you got to ‘parry landslide’ there was no …
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Exalted Combat Charms versus Primordials
The ultimate goal of the Exalted combat Charms should be to force all combat to occur on the scale of human combat; i.e., resolvable by individual heroic human action and the movements of armies. It should basically no sell anything above that. The Exalted Host wasn’t stronger than the Primordials by any objective measure of …
Why Perfect Defenses Exist
The point of perfects isn’t to render you immune to extras or weak opponents. Even in 2E just having a high enough DV will do that. The point of perfects was to render you impossible to destroy to things significantly outside your weight class. It was to justify the Exalted host slaying the Primordials and …
Fixing the Overpoweredness of Stealth Attacks
A stealth attack should basically be a normal attack except you roll Stealth and the opponent defends with Awareness. You don’t make a “surprise roll” and then a second attack roll after that. It’s much easier to just treat it like any other attack roll vs defense; with extra successes adding to damage and so …
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Sidereal College-Based Charms
I’ve been running Sidereals with College-based Charms for years with ease. The trick was I basically turned Colleges into Excellencies. Basically if you had a College you could spend 1m per dot of College. It costs 1m per die, 2m per success which you could add to your own action or the action of anyone in …
What High Levels of Lore Represent
Keep in mind that Lore doesn’t max out at 5, it maxes out at 10. At least in pre 3e world. So you kind of need space for 5 more levels of “knows things not available to everyone.” The way I work it is by orders of magnitude. A person with Lore 1 knows things …
Redesigning the Infernal Charmsets
If you absolutely had to assign the five Yozi to the Castes (you did not, but let’s assume you did) it would be better as this: Adorjan – Dawn – because murderMalfeas – Zenith – because kingShe Who Lives In Her Name – Twilight – One out of five was rightEbon Dragon – Night – because he is …
Solving the Problem of Lopsided Attributes
We could probably solve this by enforcing a rule that required all Attributes in one category to be within one dot of another attribute. For instance, if you had Dexterity 4 you could have Stamina 5 and Strength 3 but not Strength 2. This would answer the problem of people with olympic-level Dexterity not having …
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On Balancing Artifacts
The thing about balancing artifacts (or whatever you want to call magical equipment) is that they should be balanced with the other ‘non-intrinsic’ character resources that a character can develop over the course of play. And should have as much investment required and limitations imposed as those resources as well. Looking at it solely from …