Theo Anders and the Black Exaltation[Worm/Exalted][Hiatus]

[Biigoh]

More to the point... the AURA effect ensures that it takes people nerving themselves up to even think of attacking the Dark Prince.

 

[burningclaw2]

More to the point... the AURA effect ensures that it takes people nerving themselves up to even think of attacking the Dark Prince.

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Can we use Armsmaster as a Club?

 

[SwiftRosenthal]

Can we use Armsmaster as a Club?

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This is Exalted. "Can we do X?" is the wrong question. You actually want to ask "What do we need, to do X?" or "Should we do X?" (If you're roleplaying Solaroid or Sidereal mentality hard enough, the answer to that second one is always Yes.)

 

[Anasurimbor]

We are set for combat. Because we are NOT facing other exalts.

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We should be good against the mooks, at least if we can keep the engagements on our terms. Get slightly injured or trapped and things might go bad quickly if we don't have backup. Parahumans are another matter entirely, but it really, really helps that we've got a team. As we are now we'd have some serious issues against Brutes and Blasters.

Dex 5 + Melee 5 + Swords Specialty 2 + Shadow Laser Sword 2 + excellency 3 (minimum for 'free' once mastery is running) up to +10 if we're willing spam motes. Also stunt dice.

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That is pretty nasty. TDP will basically win if it comes down to a contest of swording. Just watch the endurance.

Mortals tend to only get a dice pool of 3 dice, or 6 dice IF a named heroic mortal.

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Maybe for gangsters, but I'd say that's rather low for highly trained PRT Troopers. 10+ accuracy dice is not impossible for them. Not even uncommon if using heavy weapons. Up to 3 additional dice if you stupidly give them the chance to aim. At that point TDP has to win or escape quickly lest he run dry and be overcome.

Elite PRT officers/solders? He laughs... because unless they gang up on him, he doesn't even need to worry about his DV dropping low enough for them to hit him.

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That's their whole game plan, but that's what cleverness and mobility is for.

IF they hit him, they then need to get pass his amazing armour HARDNESS of 9L/9B and a SOAK of 12L/11B. What does this mean?

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It means it's almost as good as Skitter's magic spider silk.

You basically need artifact or GOOD Tinkertech weaponry to really make a dent on The Dark Prince.

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Well, or a lot of mundane heavy weapons with skilled users. Or anti-brute weapons. Or grenades or containment foam or gas.

Basically what it comes down to is that mortals aren't going to beat him without a really good plan and maybe TDP getting a bit complacent.

 

[burningclaw2]

This is Exalted. "Can we do X?" is the wrong question. You actually want to ask "What do we need, to do X?" or "Should we do X?" (If you're roleplaying Solaroid or Sidereal mentality hard enough, the answer to that second one is always Yes.)

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So...anyone want to use Halbeard as a club?

 

[1986ctcel]

[X] Shoot her a quick email from your smartphone to open a dialogue
[X] Purchase:
-[X] Lore ●●○○○ -> ●●●●● (-15 XP)
-[X] Linguistics ●○○○○ -> ●●●○○ (-4 XP)
--[X] Language: Chinese
--[X] Language: Japanese

 

[dasstan]

Well, since my original vote isn't gaining any traction, might as well change it.

[X] Shoot her a quick email from your smartphone to open a dialogue
[X] Purchase:
-[X] Lore ●●○○○ -> ●●●●● (-15 XP)
-[X] Linguistics ●○○○○ -> ●●●○○ (-4 XP)
--[X] Language: Chinese
--[X] Language: Japanese

 

[Biigoh]

We should be good against the mooks, at least if we can keep the engagements on our terms. Get slightly injured or trapped and things might go bad quickly if we don't have backup. Parahumans are another matter entirely, but it really, really helps that we've got a team. As we are now we'd have some serious issues against Brutes and Blasters.

That is pretty nasty. TDP will basically win if it comes down to a contest of swording. Just watch the endurance.

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That's not the issue... remember the aura effect? Blasters get screwed over if they try ranged combat. Brutes get fucked over if they fight up close.

Maybe for gangsters, but I'd say that's rather low for highly trained PRT Troopers. 10+ accuracy dice is not impossible for them. Not even uncommon if using heavy weapons. Up to 3 additional dice if you stupidly give them the chance to aim. At that point TDP has to win or escape quickly lest he run dry and be overcome.

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We're talking dice pools here. Please note that the 6 dice pool I quoted you? That's the ELITE mortal guardsmen type dice pool or the ELITE military soldier dice pool. ie they're pretty damn good... but unless they're the BEST OF THE BEST... ie the guy who will exalt as a solar in the right situation if there is a solar shard available... aka a PC... their dice pool isn't going to go higher than 6 dice without some sort of crazy modifiers.

The regular trooper would have dice pools of 5. While the newbies have dice pools of 3.

Check out the Exalted Core Book, pages 278-280.

Again, they would need to get past his DV of 7 (maybe higher if excellencies get in) in terms of their dice pool if they want to roll an attack, instead of just getting added to the scenery of "bullets flying everywhere as The Dark Prince demonstrated that he truly was an Invincible Sword Prince by deflecting everything".

If his aura effect is up, they need to spend willpower to attack him and possibly risk getting wounded or killed trying to attack him even if their attack goes unrolled and automatically fail. Their health levels are 3 boxes, and TPK's essence is 3, which means that if they successfully spend willpower to attack him, they will eat 3 dice of damage that can't be soaked. Potentially crippling or killing them. And that's assuming that they're successful in having a dice pool that's high enough to be able to think about hitting him.

As it stands, TDP is a scary thing and he's only got the bare basics of swording as an exalt.

Well, or a lot of mundane heavy weapons with skilled users. Or anti-brute weapons. Or grenades or containment foam or gas.

Basically what it comes down to is that mortals aren't going to beat him without a really good plan and maybe TDP getting a bit complacent.

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The rules for grenades exist along with stats. And erm... his artifact armor basically says no.

What is needed to deal with TDP at this point is basically artillery, missile attacks, and tactical nuclear (or similar) weaponry (which is basically an environment type effect as per the rules). And this is just chargen TDP.

If he gets the time to level up in terms of melee charms or resistance charms... those tactics won't even work.

So... what I'm trying to say is that as it is? The PRT needs to fight The Dark Prince as a BRUTE 8+, with sub-ratings of Shaker.

 

[SwiftRosenthal]

If he gets the time to level up in terms of melee charms or resistance charms... those tactics won't even work.

So... what I'm trying to say is that as it is? The PRT needs to fight The Dark Prince as a BRUTE 8+, with sub-ratings of Shaker.

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It gets worse. If we're fighting them as a Brute, something has gone horribly wrong. We're not a Dusk, remember. When we have the choice, we should handle them as a Master instead: Bureaucracy, Linguistics, Presence, and Socialize.

 

[Biigoh]

It gets worse. If we're fighting them as a Brute, something has gone horribly wrong. We're not a Dusk, remember. When we have the choice, we should handle them as a Master instead.

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The thing is... we shouldn't even BE fighting... but if we WERE fighting the PRT and Protectorate, we'd hit the stupid zone of too much protection and insufficient attack power

Otoh, them using nukes and missiles would be hilarious... AURA power doesn't care about range. So that pilot flying the jet about to fire the missiles and drops bombs might actually get killed trying to attack TDP. XD

 

[Lon]

Btw, why are people voting for lore 5? The Language I can sort of understand, but what are they working for with lore?

 

[Anasurimbor]

Can someone tell me the purpose of getting Lore 5? I'm seriously not seeing the utility right now. That XP would be much better spend on a charm purchase.

 

[Biigoh]

Btw, why are people voting for lore 5? The Language I can sort of understand, but what are they working for with lore?

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Can someone tell me the purpose of getting Lore 5? I'm seriously not seeing the utility right now. That XP would be much better spend on a charm purchase.

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The only thing I can think of is hacking. ALL THE HACKING....

 

[burningclaw2]

The only thing I can think of is hacking. ALL THE HACKING....

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Doesn't Lore control Academics?

 

[SwiftRosenthal]

The thing is... we shouldn't even BE fighting... but if we WERE fighting the PRT and Protectorate, we'd hit the stupid zone of too much protection and insufficient attack power

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Check the edit.

Btw, why are people voting for lore 5? The Language I can sort of understand, but what are they working for with lore?

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We want Lore 3 ASAP for Dream-Slaying Defense and the primary set of draining charms: EDT, WFO, FDH. Lore 5 lets us learn Essence-Engorgement Technique in the short term, extending our peripheral pool via either the bite attack or terrorizing people. (Though I'm not sure how a non-Lovecraftian character is supposed to terrorize people with knowledge outside of blackmail or something, the charm is also available in War, Performance, Larceny, and Bureaucracy.)

In the longer term, I want either HAM or a homebrewed Mirror for both self-training (PER, INT, Craft, Investigation, Performance) and our mooks (also Conviction, Temperance, Lore, Linguistics, Socialize).

Using Teaching Incomprehensible Truths on Lisa would probably be a fun bad idea.




Also, holy shit RTLM is even harsher than I thought:

REGIME-TOPPLING LORD OF MISRULE
Cost: 8m, 1wp; Mins: Bureaucracy 4, Essence 3;
Type: Simple (Dramatic Action)
Keywords: Combo-OK
Duration: Instant
Prerequisite Charms: Accursed Overlord Authority, Caustic Hatred Diatribe
Empires fall when the Abyssal wills it so, and they die by suicide. Through a week of interaction with selected members of an organization, the Abyssal curses that social group to sloth, corruption and ineptitude. The Abyssal's player rolls (Wits + Bureaucracy) at a difficulty equal to its leader's Dodge MDV plus half of the group's Magnitude.

If the roll succeeds, the time the organization takes to complete any project increases every week thereafter. It doubles on the first week, triples on the second, and so on. At the same time, every project of the organization whose success could be represented through a dice roll suffers an internal penalty that increases by one per week (-1, -2, -3, etc.) The time multiplier and internal penalty increase until they match the Bureaucracy rating the Abyssal had when she laid the curse. At that point, the time required to complete even the simplest task—one that people in the organization would normally finish in minutes—increases to a number of hours equal to the Abyssal's Bureaucracy rating. A military unit cursed by this Charm loses Drill instead of taking an internal penalty, to a minimum Drill of 0.

The level of corruption instilled by this Charm is brazenly obvious to everyone who interacts with the afflicted organization. How individuals and other organizations respond to this vice depends on their personality or policy as normal, though a backlash of some kind is almost inevitable.

The organization's leader can force the organization to work faster on one specific project by spending Loyalty: one point to counter one increment of time delay and internal penalty. Only after spending a number of Loyalty points equal to the Abyssal's (Wits + Bureaucracy + Essence) and the organization's Magnitude can the leader restore the organization to its previous efficiency… whatever that was. Fortunately, effects of Regime-Toppling Lord of Misrule do not stack.

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[Tsotate]

[X] Shoot her a quick email from your smartphone to open a dialogue
[X] Purchase:
-[X] Lore ●●○○○ -> ●●●●● (-15 XP)

Yes, but there's a line between 'once in a generation genius non-parahuman polyglot' and 'obviously a parahuman given the incredible fluency he has in a multitude of languages and dialects' and if crossed it would send up all sorts of red flags. And it would be like hella overpowered for the language families to be counted at so high in the family chain for this quest.

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That assumes we tell people that we speak those languages. No one has to know that the white boy standing across the rooms understands their planning to kill him in Chinese.

Hungry Darkness Prana:
Oh no, Grue! Nazis are stealing your superpower!

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I LOLed.

Can someone tell me the purpose of getting Lore 5? I'm seriously not seeing the utility right now. That XP would be much better spend on a charm purchase.

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The Charm tree which lets us get both Essence and Willpower from our enemies is in Lore.

We want Lore 3 ASAP for Dream-Slaying Defense and the primary set of draining charms: EDT, WFO, FDH. Lore 5 lets us learn Essence-Engorgement Technique in the short term, extending our peripheral pool via either the bite attack or terrorizing people. (Though I'm not sure how a non-Lovecraftian character is supposed to terrorize people with knowledge...)

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I still say USD is better than DSD, but I wouldn't kick DSD out of bed for eating crackers.

 

[SwiftRosenthal]

The Charm tree which lets us get both Essence and Willpower from our enemies is in Lore.

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The last one even lets you steal Virtue channels (extremely limited normally).

I edited in EET's Merged status and what HAM trains. We'd need to get the fifth dots in each attribute or ability the hard way, but it saves more time than it costs.

 

[Lon]

We want Lore 3 ASAP for Dream-Slaying Defense and the primary set of draining charms: EDT, WFO, FDH. Lore 5 lets us learn Essence-Engorgement Technique in the short term, extending our peripheral pool via either the bite attack or terrorizing people. (Though I'm not sure how a non-Lovecraftian character is supposed to terrorize people with knowledge outside of blackmail or something, the charm is also available in War, Performance, Larceny, and Bureaucracy.)

In the longer term, I want either HAM or a homebrewed Mirror for both self-training (PER, INT, Craft, Investigation, Performance) and our mooks (also Conviction, Temperance, Lore, Linguistics, Socialize).

Using Teaching Incomprehensible Truths on Lisa would probably be a fun bad idea.

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Hmm, is Lore 5 really that important? Seems really excessive considering we only have 19 exp.

 

[SwiftRosenthal]

Hmm, is Lore 5 really that important? Seems really excessive considering we only have 19 exp.

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Keep in mind we've been Exalted for less than 24 hours. We can't buy Charms, Attributes, Out-of-Caste and Non-Favored Abilities, Specialties, or Essence without putting in the training time. Our only options right now are Virtues, Willpower, and Favored/Caste Abilities. Of that last set, only six of are worth purchasing that we don't already have maxed: Lore, Athletics, Bureaucracy, Socialize, and Linguistics. Ride/Drive and Sail/Pilot are useless to us in the long run thanks to Athletics or Adorjan (or both) and Presence and Melee are maxed.

The next dot of Willpower (#7) costs 12 XP, the same as dots 4+5 of Lore. If you don't want to max Lore, go ahead and vote for that instead because we'll definitely want to max Willpower. The vote would look something like this:

[] Purchase:
-[] Willpower ●●●●● ●○○○○ -> ●●●●● ●●○○○ (-12 XP)
-[] Lore ●●○○○ -> ●●●○○ (-3 XP)
-[] Linguistics ●○○○○ -> ●●●○○ (-4 XP)
--[] Language: Chinese
--[] Language: Japanese

 

[Anasurimbor]

The Charm tree which lets us get both Essence and Willpower from our enemies is in Lore.

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Right, but those only require Lore 2 and 3.

Keep in mind we've been Exalted for less than 24 hours. We can't buy Charms, Attributes, Out-of-Caste and Non-Favored Abilities, Specialties, or Essence without putting in the training time. Our only options right now are Virtues, Willpower, and Favored/Caste Abilities. Of that last set, only six of are worth purchasing that we don't already have maxed: Lore, Athletics, Bureaucracy, Socialize, and Linguistics. Ride/Drive and Sail/Pilot are useless to us in the long run thanks to Athletics or Adorjan (or both) and Presence and Melee are maxed.

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That doesn't mean we actually need to spend all the XP right now. There's plenty of charms that only take a day or two to train.

The next dot of Willpower (#7) costs 12 XP, the same as dots 4+5 of Lore. If you don't want to max Lore, go ahead and vote for that instead because we'll definitely want to max Willpower.

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Considering that will require 60XP, I don't think we'll be doing that any time soon.

 

[burningclaw2]

Why Chinese and Japanese though?

 

[Kerfirou]

Why Chinese and Japanese though?

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For ABB, maybe?

 

[burningclaw2]

For ABB, maybe?

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Why the hell would we want to talk to them? We're more likely to simply slaughter them all like they are more likely to attack us out of the sheer fact that we're white.

 

[Biigoh]

Why the hell would we want to talk to them? We're more likely to simply slaughter them all like they are more likely to attack us out of the sheer fact that we're white.

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More like so The Dark Prince knows what they're saying...

 

[burningclaw2]

More like so The Dark Prince knows what they're saying...

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Why? We'd just be maiming them anyways. Nothing they can say would sway us.

 

[Tsotate]

Also, if we're thinking about having Lisa in our life, Forbidden Data Crypt will be fun for teaching her when to back the fuck off on her hacking her friends' computers. That, and its prereq means our cellphone always has full bars and a full battery.

 

[SwiftRosenthal]

Right, but those only require Lore 2 and 3.

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True. We don't have enough artifacts to make BDP useful, TIT is entirely dependent on our playstyle - I'm morbidly curious about what Lisa could learn with a Whispers rating - and our Underworld access isn't reliable enough for Nightmare-Carving Murmur. At E3, that leaves (up to 3 purchases of) EET, the Infinite Mastery, and Solar stuff (i.e. HAM). A larger mote pool is great, but my opinion is from impatience as much as anything else.

Ghost-in-the-Machine Aggression and System-Seizing Entropy Post only require Lore 4, but I don't want to deal with Dragon before we usurp Kaiser.

That doesn't mean we actually need to spend all the XP right now. There's plenty of charms that only take a day or two to train.

Considering that will require 60XP, I don't think we'll be doing that any time soon.

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If we keep earning 15-20 XP every day, soon will come quicker than you'd expect.

Why? We'd just be maiming them anyways. Nothing they can say would sway us.

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It's not for diplomacy. It's for espionage.

 

[burningclaw2]

True. We don't have enough artifacts to make BDP useful, TIT is entirely dependent on our playstyle - I'm morbidly curious about what Lisa could learn with a Whispers rating - and our Underworld access isn't reliable enough for Nightmare-Carving Murmur. At E3, that leaves (up to 3 purchases of) EET, the Infinite Mastery, and Solar stuff (i.e. HAM). A larger mote pool is great, but my opinion is from impatience as much as anything else.

Ghost-in-the-Machine Aggression and System-Seizing Entropy Post only require Lore 4, but I don't want to deal with Dragon before we usurp Kaiser.


If we keep earning 15-20 XP every day, soon will come quicker than you'd expect.


It's not for diplomacy. It's for espionage.

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I repeat. Why? Nothing they say, would be really useful except maybe where Lung is so we can assert dominance and get us a pet dragon.

 

[Lon]

Don't see benefit of the rest currently. Do see that this is important though.

 

[SwiftRosenthal]

I repeat. Why? Nothing they say, would be really useful except maybe where Lung is so we can assert dominance and get us a pet dragon.

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Okay then, think tactically. The average ABB member can safely assume that any given Nazi skinhead, Merchant, Coil merc, or PRT agent only knows English. Therefore, they can give out orders in their own languages without risking interception. If we know the languages, that's no longer true. The benefits of this are equivalent to knowing Spanish inside Mexican Cartel areas and cannot be underestimated.

In the medium run, we can't take over an ethnically mixed city with just skinheads. When we start pulling E88 away from Neo-Nazism and some former ABB start working for us, being able to speak with them in their own languages will make the shift at least appear more sincere, driving up participation and recruitment.

In the long run, knowing Chinese lets us do the first major Yangban arc since Ryuugi's Zenith fic.