PDA

View Full Version : Not a session from Malfeas, but it damn well wasn't Yu-Shan [Exalted 2e, rant]



Fortuna
2011-02-25, 04:32 AM
Well. That was annoying.

A few hours ago, we finished a session of Exalted. Now, at the time it was so-so, and looking back on it from a few minutes was annoying, and now it's actually making me angry. Which is, itself, annoying.

The session began much as I expected it to: since the last session had ended poorly, we made an entirely new circle. The ST then proceeded to deliver us all mysterious notes, including names and descriptions of the others in the circle. Now, I can understand the railroading, but it goes a bit beyond the norm for my character.

Perhaps now is the time to describe the group. There is the ST, obviously. There is me, and I'm probably the second most competent player there. Maybe first, depending on the day. I was playing a Dawn Caste, aiming for the fifth type of Even Blade Style, whose Exaltation was very public and who is therefore very paranoid. There's my brother, who was playing a craft-focused Twilight. There's another player, I'll call him D, who was playing a Full Moon Lunar and has achieved a reputation in our group for spectacularly dumb moves. And the last player, M, didn't even have a character sheet, but was an Abyssal. I think he might have been a Dusk caste.

So, my character has just been found, apparently described, maybe even named, in a Direction that he had thought safe. There's no good option except to play along, so play along he does.

We meet, we get shown a super-spear of Jade that's serving as a MacGuffin, we get told to kidnap someone so they'll look suspicious before we take the spear, blah blah blah.

So we split up, because to get to the spear we'll need to lie in wait where it is, and to get to the kidnappee we need to be outside that area. I volunteered to take the spear, and M joined me. We had a discreet signal prearranged, so we could get a go-ahead. We also had a half-hour window to get the spear.

When the go-ahead didn't come through, we figured 'half is better than none', and so I grabbed the spear. Then, before my character with a Gem of Perfect Mobility can get out of there, three Immaculate monks walk in. Needless to say, that wasn't in the job description. Worse, there seem to be more following them. Grabbing M, I run for it.

So far, so good. If the session had ended there, I would have been happy enough. Then a mysterious metal thing appears in my path, and blows up. I'm told that it's treated as a huge number of successive attacks, so when I use HGD against it it drains my entire personal pool and flares my anima totemic to boot. That's ten attacks. I ignore it, and just keep running.

Now we get to the prearranged meeting-place, where the others have also arrived with a swarm of dragonblooded on their tail. The meeting-place is a cave, so my plan is to hide in the cave until some of the dragonblooded have gone deep into it looking for us, then collapse the entrance and fight off the rest. Naturally, therefore, the DBs just send a massive shockwave through the thing. I run from the cave, see that there are a couple of dozen (!) DBs outside, and run for it.

But apparently, they can keep up with me, and pepper me with arrows until I run out of motes (no input on that point from me, incidentally). So now I'm surrounded by DBs in fairly obvious martial arts forms. I then try to persuade them to do the whole public execution thing (another chance to escape, see?). The ST's response? "STAB. You're dead."

Based on what happened to the rest of the circle, the cave wasn't any better a bet. They were cornered and would have been slaughtered if not for the ST's sudden departure. So Yeah.

That's a bit better. Thanks, playground, for existing.