The Gaming Den

Thing with Essence is, sure you waste some XP by starting at Essence 3, but you also get to take better charms for your free ten. If there aren't ten Essence 2 charms you really want, then you're actually coming out ahead by jacking essence.

Plus, XP comes really slowly by default and so it takes a *lot* of sessions to get the tier 3 charms you want if you have to buy your essence first and then each charm or spell.

Most Exalted games don't last long enough to really buy anything, let alone everything. Slow default character advancement and a corrosive intra-party dynamic combine to dissolve most Exalted games long before players have bought much stuff.

Worrying overmuch abut long term cost/benefit analysis is basically pointless. There usually won't be a long term.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:Most Exalted games don't last long enough to really buy anything, let alone everything. Slow default character advancement and a corrosive intra-party dynamic combine to dissolve most Exalted games long before players have bought much stuff.

Worrying overmuch abut long term cost/benefit analysis is basically pointless. There usually won't be a long term.

-Username17

This times 1000.

If you start with standard characters, your game will end before you ever get the XP to get to essence 3.

If you start with standard + 100XP, sure, use XP for your essence 3 instead of BP.

Gnosticism Is A Hoot wrote: With the Grand Goremaul and a normal flurry, you can make him perfect several times for no motes at all. Seriously. Heavenly Guardian Defence is the best perfect defence Solars have access to, and it costs 2 motes. The Sidereal, Abyssal and Infernal equivalents don't cost much more. Spending motes to attack other Celestials is almost never a good idea, because at best you will generally be spending as many or almost as many motes as your opponent.

Of course, fighting Dragonbloods and Spirits and other enemies who don't have perfect defenses is entirely different, and many Exalted campaigns will focus more on these enemies than on Celestials. Nonetheless, as soon as the really hardcore enemies show up, the combat system just becomes a simple game of mote attrition.

Statted spirits are either mooks whom you can kill using exactly the same tactics but with less effort, or overpowered uber-NPCs, who require basically the same paranoia tactics (although because their perfects are very expensive and their normal defences very tough, you might actually get some mileage out from attack-supplementing charms against them). Dragonbloods as of 2nd Edition are mooks whom you can kill using exactly the same tactics but with less effort. (Badly-written text on one or two of their Charms can be used to screw you without save, but if the GM is willing to resort to such cheap moves, he'll find a way to screw PCs.)

FrankTrollman wrote:Most Exalted games don't last long enough to really buy anything, let alone everything. Slow default character advancement and a corrosive intra-party dynamic combine to dissolve most Exalted games long before players have bought much stuff.

Worrying overmuch abut long term cost/benefit analysis is basically pointless. There usually won't be a long term.

-Username17

I don't know what you mean by corrosive intra-party dynamic (unless you mean that games using different splats are made deliberately difficult for some incomprehensible reason), but yes, character advancement is really fucking slow. Decent GMs ignore the official tables and give 10 or even 15 XP per session.

But anyway, in my experience Exalted games tend to collapse swiftly for another reason. In Exalted, unless you play Dragonbloods and therefore suck, it is really fucking easy to curbstomp the mortal world, sweep your poorly-built NPCs Exalted peers away, bitchslap smaller gods into submission... and then run straight into true movers and shackers of the setting who are lightyears above everyone else, including you, so overpowered that the GM need to think hard how PCs can possibly survive their mild annoyance, and so mechanically complicated and badly written, that even actually figuring what exactly sort of shit they actually can pull off is an exercise in sadomasochism.
In other words, there is no power curve (or very little of it), most things with official stats in the world fall into one of two categories, as far as Celestials are concerned: they can be beaten right from the chargen, or they cannot be beaten at all.
This means, that staging games past the initial sessions, in which PCs haven't yet stopped enjoying the role of SWAT in kindergarten, requires ungodly amount of effort from the GM. I tried to cheat past it by using simplified asspull stats for enemies, but found that this only contributed to killing my interest in the system, because I no longer could enjoy the process of building NPCs either way.

Ergo, builds should be self-sufficient from the chargen.

Why do you suck if you're a dragonborn dragonblood? It seems like Dragonblood would be the best way to rock such a setting--mortals are still a threat, combat hasn't gone into crazy-town perfects yet, and the cooler parts of the setting are still a challenge to you.

Given everything I've heard about the game, it seems like being a dragonblood is not only the best way to play, but the ONLY way.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Why do you suck if you're a dragonborn dragonblood? It seems like Dragonblood would be the best way to rock such a setting--mortals are still a threat, combat hasn't gone into crazy-town perfects yet, and the cooler parts of the setting are still a challenge to you.

Given everything I've heard about the game, it seems like being a dragonblood is not only the best way to play, but the ONLY way.

Your basic problem is that the flow of combat is pretty much the same regardless of whether you're a Celestial or not. You still just declare attacks big enough to scare a perfect out of the enemy and then flurry it two or three times when the target runs out. As a Dragonblood, that dynamic is identical, you just have a smaller dice pool.

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Why do you suck if you're a dragonborn dragonblood? It seems like Dragonblood would be the best way to rock such a setting--mortals are still a threat, combat hasn't gone into crazy-town perfects yet, and the cooler parts of the setting are still a challenge to you.

Given everything I've heard about the game, it seems like being a dragonblood is not only the best way to play, but the ONLY way.

0)Your Charms are ass and therefore you stand quite a big chance of sudden death on a bad roll. Bigger than in DnD 3.X. In a setting without resurrection and with limited access to fast combat healing. Even if GM pampers you and does not employ enemies with grand weapons or ambushing ninjas. This is the main reason, because it is hard to do anything about it without massive rewrites. The reasons below apply to the official setting, but any reasonable GM should scrap/change most of it anyway, particularly if GMing DBs, so they are not nearly as important.

1)Your Charms are ass and everyone of importance hates, despises or wishes to manipulate you.

2)Your Charms are ass and you don't have even a theoretical way of dealing with bigshots of the setting. No amount of experience will allow a party of Dragonbloods to beat Mask of Winters in any field of confrontation he cares about, unless GM tones him waaay down or gives them plotdevice custom artifacts and "I Win" homemade Charms. And by "no amount of experience" I mean exactly that. You can cram every published Charm and enhancement available to DBs into your character, and max out every stat, and you'll not be able to do more than force him to retreat for a scene at the cost of your life. Unless they published something good for DBs in the couple of recent supplements I didn't bother to read, but as Dragonblooded are not allowed to have stuff at all, I doubt that.

3)Therefore you work well for everyday adventures and can actually interact with most of the Creation without rendering most everything written about it irrelevant (even in the official setting, this I should give it), but the world-changing epic stuff that's supposed to be the main lure of the game is above your league.

#1-3 are much less salient in the First Edition, but 2 and 3 still apply if your GM uses Power Combat Charm errata or if you fail to load on Immaculate Martial Arts. Which, incidentally, tend to make combat boring as fuck, if you go for Bottomless Depths Defence, and if you want to be a team player, instead of a solitary ambushing ninja, you probably will). #0 is somewhat less salient in the First Edition and things can even swing in the opposite way with the above-mentioned Bottomless Depths Defense.

4)Also: in second edition your splat's Charm are ass, they allow your ancestors to mindfuck you and punish you hardcorely for not buyng a particular Background to the max at chargen. But no one cares by now.

My build has been modified. I'm without offensive charms, so I'm trying to decide which weapon would be best...


Jade Hearthstone Bracers + Jade Goremaul - Speed 3; Accuracy 10; Damage 19B/4; Defense 5; Rate 2; Tags O,P; Cost 4bp, 18m

Jade Short Daiklave & Jade Bracers - Speed 2; Accuracy 13; Damage 6L; Defense 5; Rate 2; Cost 3bp, 14m

Some other combination of 4bp for offense

Current Stats
Physical: Str 2, Dex 4, Sta 1
Mental: Wits 4, Int 4, Per 1
Social: Cha 3, Man 4, App 4
Abilities: Melee 4, Linguistics 2, Socialize 3, Athletics 3, Awareness 2, Dodge 4, Larceny 5, Stealth 4, Lore 2, Occult 3, Presence 3, Resistance 2
Virtues: Compassion/Temperance 1, Conviction 4, Valor 3
Charms:

• Larceny - First Larceny Excellency, Flawless Pickpocketing Technique, Stealing from Plain Sight Spirit, Flawlessly Impenetrable Disguise, Perfect Mirror
• Stealth - Easily Overlooked Presence Method, Mental Invisibility Technique
• Dodge - Shadow Over Water, Seven Shadow Evasion, Leaping Dodge Method

Backgrounds(No XP required for getting backgrounds in-story)

• Forgotten Blade 5: Daiklave, uses Int instead of Str for damage, erases memories and makes abilities unusable for a scene (random unless taking a -1 accuracy penalty)
• Bracers of Martial Exaltation: 4m attune, ignore penalty for not meeting weapon minimums (still need to be able to carry it), 2m activate to make any held non-artifact weapon perfect quality for a scene or benefits of being orichalcum if already perfect
• Resources 3 - Robbed a very large crowd that included some very rich people while they were enraptured by another player who was telling stories

Standard Combat

• Dodge DV 6
• Perfect Staff - Speed 6, Acc 12, Damage 10B, PDV 6, Rate 2, Tags R
• Forgotten Blade - Speed 5, Acc 11, Damage 10L(1HL = 5 years forever and 1 random ability for a scene), Rate 3

I've spent a total of 3xp so far, raising three rating 1 abilities to rating 2. Due to storyline, I'm spending planning to spend about 14xp to get the 2nd degree in Thaumaturgy Warding/Exorcism (DM house-ruled degrees to only cost as much as a normal specialty for Solars), the Ward Maintenance procedure, & the Second Occult Excellency. This will spend all the XP I've accrued thus far, though I'm allowed to go into XP-debt.

The most notable event for my character was the Forgotten Blade on a nephwrack-filled corpse by removing its memory of Oblivion, reverting it back to a really confused ghost.

We've got a Sidereal who's apparently working on Mantis form martial arts and planning on getting into Prismatic Creation from the Scroll of the Monk or something; and he has awesome connections to people with regular access to the Loom of Fate.

We've also got a decently armored (15 soak) Twilight with Iron Skin Concentration and Essence Gathering Temper, as well as some basic archery charms and an emphasis on magitech crafting. There's another Twilight in the party who uses a sword and has some investigation charms, but I haven't seen him do much yet. Finally, there's a Dawn caste fellow with a grand goremaul and a number of melee charms (our primary damage dealer so far), and recently picked up a very small cult because of awesome successes with Perform.

We're getting ready to duel a lunar in a martial arts thing, which I suspect will be handled readily by the Sidereal. Afterwards, we're going to try and break into Denendsor, some heavily magitech city that's been mostly abandoned because of a fear-machine constantly filling the place; I can disguise myself as the previous 'mayor' of the city to get past some of the systems who will think I have clearance. Our goal is to get past some of the automata to register our airship, so as to be able to quickly enter the heart of the city and find the central control manse so as to find a way to turn off the fear-machine.

I'm not sure what kind of stuff to start working on buying with XP at this point.

You have a Twilight which will soon become nearly invulnerable (if not already), so I don't think there is any point in learning combat stuff, because your character is going to be extremely outclassed no matter what you do. Just buy Charms in Stealth and maybe Athletics/Survival, to help with inflitrating hard-to-access places, so you at least make yourself equally impossible to challenge in own parts of the gameplay.

Get Dex 5. I don't give a fuck about your concept, you will suck without Dex 5. It is the god stat for everything in combat, and since this is Exalted, there will be lots of combat.

Also, use BP to buy up Essence if you have extra XP to start with. Reason: Essence 3 costs 16 XP or 7 BP. 2 Favored Charms cost 16 XP or 8 BP. This gets extra important as you go up more and more Essence, because the BP cost is flat while the XP cost is scaling.

Charms measure your power, you want to lay the framework to buy as many Charms as you can in your specialty and own peoples' faces off with your gigantic golden hammer. Defense is boring but more important than offense, since you do not die if your attack fails and when he has wasted all his motes hitting you, even your basic 0 mote grand killstick swing can still kill him.

There's some serious errata coming down the line for Dawns in a few days, and Iknow that Twilight have already been errata'd. If you haven't already, poke around on the White Wolf forums. It took a long time, but frankly at this point people who share the Gaming Den approach to rules/setting design are experiencing something close to dominance over that forum culture, and they tend to be way more up to date on developments in Exalted updates and errata.

Also, sounds like a pretty cool game.

Silent Wayfarer wrote:Get Dex 5. I don't give a fuck about your concept, you will suck without Dex 5.

You'll need to elaborate as to why, because right now I don't see how 1 point of Dex will make or break this guy.

EDIT: I'm not terribly certain why you're going into character creation rants when I've already established that I've made my character (with no starting XP) and am several sessions in; as if you didn't read anything other than the title of the thread.

It just maximizes your attack and defense capabilities. Not that huge a deal.

I have strong doubt that people currently writing errata for Exalted can come up with a balanced powerset. IIRC, they were among those who worked on 2E Abyssals and Infernals too, and these charmsets still suck and fail to achieve the balance line set by design goals, despite not being as obviously unworkable as DB and Sidereals Charmsets. Invincibility tricks known due to the forum discussions will be nerfed, otherwise the dominant builds will just change.

Returning to the topic, yes +1 Dex here doesn't matter much. And during the actual play you're generally better off investing in Charms, than in Attributes. The latter are too expensive for their effect unless you're raising them from 1 to 2 or some of your chief tricks benefits from a maximized Attribute (i.e., Solar Melee extra actions and Dexterity).

virgil wrote:

Silent Wayfarer wrote:Get Dex 5. I don't give a fuck about your concept, you will suck without Dex 5.

You'll need to elaborate as to why, because right now I don't see how 1 point of Dex will make or break this guy.

EDIT: I'm not terribly certain why you're going into character creation rants when I've already established that I've made my character (with no starting XP) and am several sessions in; as if you didn't read anything other than the title of the thread.

That's actually correct. Serves me right for skimming.

Still, Charms are power - getting more Charms generally makes you better at doing shit.