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Exalted 3E Discussion

Reader mode
Darkened said:
These do not seem to be in the current draft that was leaked as far as I can tell. What this suggests is that there's either material missing, they were cut for some reason or that they'll be pushed into a later book.

IE: I strongly suspect that either the martial arts being as split up as craft is either because originally techniques were there to validate that purchase of dots and it's badly patched, because techniques will be there and they're going to validate those dots, or because they did this in place of techniques as an odd last minute fix.

As is, I'd hold off on patching it at all until 3e drops and the devs can be asked.

If you must patch it, count the number of charms in each style and then figure out a rough equivalency in XP, or just cut out the ability, keep the merit and make it a bit cheaper to invest in MA.

I can't yet tell how the actual charms hold up balance-wise.
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Techniques were cut, they made a post on the Kickstarter about it today.

They simply couldn't get it to work out with everything else, so Ex3 isn't going to have techniques for mortal MAs.
 
tehelgee said:
Techniques were cut, they made a post on the Kickstarter about it today.

They simply couldn't get it to work out with everything else, so Ex3 isn't going to have techniques for mortal MAs.
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A shame.

I liked the idea of mortal level martial arts, even before they announced techniques.

Probably because I read this.
 
Darkened said:
These do not seem to be in the current draft that was leaked as far as I can tell. What this suggests is that there's either material missing, they were cut for some reason or that they'll be pushed into a later book.
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Techniques were cut.

Apparently, they drastically increased word count, made things way too complicated, and could be better simulated through the Gambit system.

Now, here's a message from Holden about a part of the book not affected by this whole proofing process:
Hello, everyone. The final pieces of art are showing up, layout is happening, and Exalted's PDF release to you backers draws nigh. As we gear up to push this book out the door, I want to revisit one of the things we talked about during the Kickstarter: Martial Arts, and some of the changes they've undergone during development.

When we started developing Third Edition, we wanted to simplify the idea behind Martial Arts and use a holistic approach that emphasized that Martial Arts styles were rooted in schools and traditions across Creation. Thus, a mortal practitioner of Snake Style who Exalted as a Solar would find that his kung fu was suddenly as awesome as all his other aptitudes, as opposed to the old way of doing things where most of the styles in the setting were invented and practiced by a pool of 700 guys spread across the world yet somehow had schools and traditions anyway. This goal we accomplished to our satisfaction.

We also wanted to give Martial Arts styles additional depth with the inclusion of "techniques" – special maneuvers in each style that anyone could use, even mortal heroes. This excited a lot of people, including us—it sounded like an obviously good idea.

As it turns out… well, there's a reason why all the backer previews start with "this is a preview of a work in progress and may not match the final product." Unfortunately, techniques won't be appearing in Exalted Third Edition. The more we iterated them, the more we realized that they sounded like a great idea, with only the small problem that they didn't actually work. This was a result of several factors. First, in practice they were basically Charms, but Charms which couldn't be balanced with mote costs, and instead had to rely on timing restrictions, secondary resource costs, and the like. This was easy to deal with at first, but got progressively harder and harder with each additional style. By the time all the corebook styles were done, we were dreading the thought of trying to pile in another 100+ of the things over the course of the edition.

Second, once they were in place, we discovered that they made the old styles like Snake and Tiger and Dreaming Pearl Courtesan look archaic, since their Charms had been constructed without techniques in mind. If Snake (for example) had some fancy technique attached to it, why didn't it have Charms to enhance and work around that technique? We tried a new round of drafts that wove Charms around the new design space of the techniques, and while this was interesting, the resulting styles felt very complicated and bloated.

Third, martial arts styles have always been an easy content booster for Exalted because they add a lot of value with a relatively small wordcount footprint (historically, a Martial Arts style can be done, and done well, in one to two thousand words). The new styles not only gobbled up far more wordcount, they were much more difficult to write. Fourth, we realized that gambits (which you'll get to see soon), which were invented halfway into the iterating of the core rules, accomplished much of what techniques were supposed to do but in a more flexible and easily-balanced package.

Finally, other balance issues that cropped up during playtesting, combined with getting more and more distance from working on previous editions, convinced us to adopt a Martial Arts model that was more straight-forward and intuitive for new players, rather than a complex solution based around problems from prior editions (many of which no longer applied because of underlying system changes). At that point, we realized that not only did we not need techniques, but that they had become a problem rather than an asset for the game.

So we cut them. Everyone had something cool in their imagination when they heard about techniques—including us—but imagining a thing working is, sadly, not the same as actually making it work.

We apologize for any disappointment this may create, but we'd rather lay this design shift out for you now, rather than waiting until the book drops. The good news is, sans techniques, Third Edition does have martial arts that are stylish, available to all characters, effective (a Solar martial artist is not giving up power for coolness any more), affordable, well-rooted in the setting, and fun to use. This was our ultimate goal at the end of the day, not reaching that point by any one particular road.

As always, thanks so much for your support and patience!
 
So they were.

In which case martial arts being buyable with solar XP is basically all that separates them from normal charms and apparently they're meant to be at around the same tier of power. This is worrisome in some ways.
 
Darkened said:
So they were.

In which case martial arts being buyable with solar XP is basically all that separates them from normal charms and apparently they're meant to be at around the same tier of power. This is worrisome in some ways.
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Maybe cut their power and reduce the XP cost for them?
 
Martial Arts styles have strong synergies with other abilities, unlike... just about everything else. Take Ebon Shadow Style and Stealth, for example.

I think we'll end up seeing MA styles for every ability before it's all over with, maybe multiple styles for some.

I wonder what a MA style that synergized with Craft would be like? Break all the things?
 
Nervaqus987 said:
Maybe cut their power and reduce the XP cost for them?
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Sure, if you understand the system well enough and want to put in the work to go through every style and rebalanced them to some unspecified lower balance point.

That said, being buyable with solar XP already makes them really godly, so it's not like you'd really need to cut the cost down much.
 
hatewheel @ rpg.net said:
First, we hold the versatility of shapeshifting to be incredibly, incredibly powerful. In a socially driven, political game like Exalted, all it takes is one dude who looks exactly like the crown prince, who isn't the crown prince, to spin an entire nation into revolt and ruin the plans of the Sidereals. If you need a direct equation in the Lunar power set to an Adamant Circle spell, you aren't going to get one. If you willfully overlook how powerful and versatile shapeshifting is, and how much it matters in a game that concerns itself with the things Exalted is concerned with, that's on you.

It constantly surprises me that people tout myth as a big part of why they play Exalted, and then go about everything in a very unmythical, itemized, mechanical way. I don't care if you think animals suck. Exalted is a game where the bear can stand on the neck of the dragon.
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So, this was posted over on rpg.net by hatewheel, one of the developers.

Lunars confirmed for being focused on their shifting.
 
So I've heard something about an Undersea in the Dawn caste section of the pdf.
Anyone have ideas about it?


More importantly...does it have anything to do with Kimberry?
 
kinglugia said:
So I've heard something about an Undersea in the Dawn caste section of the pdf.
Anyone have ideas about it?


More importantly...does it have anything to do with Kimberry?
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There's only thee mentions of it, the other two in the Directions writeups. One mentions spies from Undersea in the slums of Wu-Jian and the other mentions Undersea Elementals tempting people in the courts of Champoor. Whatever it is, it isn't allied with the Realm.
 
Kiriel said:
Thanks for the advice. I'll go think more on this before I actually do something. Thankfully, I found some poor schmucks friends in school to help me test ideas out. I'll see how it goes while hyping them up and tell them to go buy the book when it eventually comes out.
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Call me when you're done. I'm thinking of making a Pokemon Trainer!Twilight.
 
So, the leaked corebook is going to be the best version of it, since Holden hinted that there were gonna be some serious cuts due to the length of the book.

Something amusing about that.
 
That's not surprising at all. Although, stuff that gets cut from the corebook at this point is probably important enough that it will show up in some other book so it's not much of a loss anyways. The antagonists section seems to be the most likely place for cuts.
 
Smuthunter said:
That's not surprising at all. Although, stuff that gets cut from the corebook at this point is probably important enough that it will show up in some other book so it's not much of a loss anyways. The antagonists section seems to be the most likely place for cuts.
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Like someone pointed out on 4chan, we have the corebook and part of the first splat, and they haven't even released the corebook yet.
 
A bit miffed at the disappearance of the Virtues as a mechanics item. I wasn't actually satisfied with the way they were implemented, but still...

I suppose I'll hack something into the system. Perhaps diversify Intimacies: Goals for Conviction, Principles to Valor, Ties to Compassion, Taboos for Temperance?

With Virtue Channels existing but being regained solely by acting in line with those Intimacies that map to the Virtue?
Possibility of spending Virtue channels instead of WP to resist Virtue compulsion? Or scrap virtue compusion altogether? I think so. Intimacies should dictate "compulsion" but not feel like they are dragging the player down.
 
Bre Karn said:
A bit miffed at the disappearance of the Virtues as a mechanics item. I wasn't actually satisfied with the way they were implemented, but still...

I suppose I'll hack something into the system. Perhaps diversify Intimacies: Goals for Conviction, Principles to Valor, Ties to Compassion, Taboos for Temperance?

With Virtue Channels existing but being regained solely by acting in line with those Intimacies that map to the Virtue?
Possibility of spending Virtue channels instead of WP to resist Virtue compulsion? Or scrap virtue compusion altogether? I think so. Intimacies should dictate "compulsion" but not feel like they are dragging the player down.
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You realize that if you scrap intimacy compulsion, social combat completely disappears?
 
tehelgee said:
You realize that if you scrap intimacy compulsion, social combat completely disappears?
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I meant to scrap Virtue Compulsion, not Intimacy compulsion. Intimacies, being more flexible and less constraining in enunciation than Virtues (nobody agrees exactly to what the limits of Virtues are anyway:p), are not as problematic to me.
 
Eh, I think the system is fine as it is in regards to Intimacies.

The only real problem with them that I could see would be people trying to game them and make Intimacies that can't be used against them.
 
There's that Linguistics Charm that lets you kill people with absconse Intimacies or no Intimacies. No save, you die.

I'm all for this design space :)
 
tehelgee said:
Linguistics has always been horribly OP if people were willing to get creative with it.
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Well they sure as fuck kept up with that tradition. You could take down a good chunk of the Realm some of these things. With just Flawless Brush Discipline, Stolen Voice Technique and Moving the Unseen Hand you're now a secret agent working for anyone you damn well please and you've got the papers to prove it. And with Perfect Celestial Author you can use them all together. I wonder how the Dynasty Heads would react to secret message from the Scarlet Empress claiming that she's being imprisoned by the Immaculate Order.
 
Stroth said:
Well they sure as fuck kept up with that tradition. You could take down a good chunk of the Realm some of these things. With just Flawless Brush Discipline, Stolen Voice Technique and Moving the Unseen Hand you're now a secret agent working for anyone you damn well please and you've got the papers to prove it. And with Perfect Celestial Author you can use them all together. I wonder how the Dynasty Heads would react to secret message from the Scarlet Empress claiming that she's being imprisoned by the Immaculate Order.
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Only one way to find out!
 
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