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View Full Version : Exalted: please, please i surrender just don't make me roll Melee+Dexterity!



OracleofSilence
2011-12-08, 01:18 AM
Okay. I recently came into possession of an Exalted 2e Core book, and by hook or by crook, have read most of the rest of them, at least in part.

Now. i am fairly familiar with Whit Wolf systems, i have actually played some World of Darkness, and even a little Scion, but Exalted is on a whole other scale.

for teh love of any divine, elder, or preternatural being you choose to worship/honor/obey/disbelieve...

how the hell does combat work? Honestly, it seems fairly different (mainly due to charms) from any other White Wolf game i have ever played.

any help would be appreciated

golentan
2011-12-08, 01:46 AM
This will likely be thoroughly unhelpful.

It's tick by tick. The basic way it works (after settling initiative), is when your tick comes up you decide on an action, note its speed (which is the number of ticks before you can act again, basically), note its DV penalty (which is the amount your defenses drop until you next act), and resolve the actions according to the rules given. If it's one of the basic actions in the combat section, follow that, if it's a simple action charm, the charm text should have the rules.

If you're resolving an attack, things get complicated. I'll give a detailed version first, and then the quick rundown.

The attacker gets to announce his attack and any supplemental charms he's using (note that if the attack is generated by a Simple charm using additional charms requires a combo activation).

The defender then gets to announce how they're defending (parry or dodge) and if they're using any defensive charms (specifically ones marked Reflexive or Reflexive (step 2), note that this can only be done with a combo if other charms have been used since their last action).

Next the attacker rolls, attempting to beat the opponent's defense value (some charms, called perfect attacks, ignore this and automatically hit: they are noted as unblockable and/or undodgeable based on which defense they ignore)

Next the defender gets to roll if applicable (typically when using an Excellency to increase their DV).

Next the Attacker gets to reroll if applicable (typically only with the use of a Third excellency), followed by the defender rerolling if applicable (the same).

If the attack beats the DV, it's time to settle damage. First, add successes above the DV to the damage provided by your attack. This is your RAW DAMAGE.

Next, compare the Raw Damage to hardness (if applicable). If the hardness is greater, the attack deals no damage.

If hardness is lower or is not available, subtract the relevant soak value from the raw damage. In addition, reflexive soak charms may be applied at this stage if you choose to activate them.

If the new value for damage is lower than minimum damage (typically Essence, though some weapons have their own minimum damage), final damage equals minimum damage. Otherwise, final damage is Raw Damage - Soak.

Roll dice equal to the final damage. 10s do not count as two successes for this roll. Count the successes, and mark off an equal number of health levels on the defender.

Counterattack charms may now be activated if applicable.

Whew! Short version now!

Roll attack.

Apply DV/Roll defense.

Reroll charms.

Apply hardness and soak.

Roll damage.

Counterattacks.



Bear in mind that stunts are core to this: the more elaborate and impressive the description the more bonus dice the player gets, and they also get motes, or possibly willpower and even potentially bonus experience.

OracleofSilence
2011-12-08, 01:52 AM
Most of that i had gathered but...


The attacker gets to announce his attack and any supplemental charms he's using (note that if the attack is generated by a Simple charm using additional charms requires a combo activation).

The defender then gets to announce how they're defending (parry or dodge) and if they're using any defensive charms (specifically ones marked Reflexive or Reflexive (step 2), note that this can only be done with a combo if other charms have been used since their last action).

this. Its the parry dodge thing that is screwing with me. in particular, what is the difference. i sspect i just missed the section in which this is actually explained, but i can't find it.

secondly, why can't reflexive charms be used unless they are part of a combo? isn't that their entire point? that they can be activated even when you don't have actions?

Reynard
2011-12-08, 02:02 AM
Most of that i had gathered but...



this. Its the parry dodge thing that is screwing with me. in particular, what is the difference. i sspect i just missed the section in which this is actually explained, but i can't find it.

secondly, why can't reflexive charms be used unless they are part of a combo? isn't that their entire point? that they can be activated even when you don't have actions?

1: Yes, you did. They do the same job, but generally one will be much higher than the other.

Your Parry DV is decided by your skill with the weapon you are using to block, as well as the stats on the weapon. Dex + Melee/Martial Arts + Defense /2 is the formula.

Dodge is decided by Dex + Dodge + Essence /2.

There are artifacts and charms such that boost one or the other, or both. If it doesn't specify in any way which it boosts, it boosts both.

2: ...Because they can be used out side of a combo? The combo rules are just saying that if you use a combo that has Reflexive charms in it, they MUST be used. Supplemental ones are optional.

golentan
2011-12-08, 02:03 AM
Okay, so your Parry is (Dex + Melee + Weapon Parry bonus)/2 and can't be applied vs. Unblockable attacks. Your dodge is (Dex + Dodge + Essence)/2 and can't be applied to undodgeable attacks. So typically you have one which is higher and rely on that, but *sometimes* you have to use the other or use a defensive charm to avoid getting hit.

And you can use a reflexive charm without a combo, but you can't use more than one charm in an action without a combo. So, for example, if you're acting on tick 3 and again on tick 8, you can activate a simple or supplemental charm without a combo on tick 3 but can't use any other charms (simple, supplemental, or reflexive) until tick 8. Or you can not activate any simple or supplemental charms on tick 3, then, when you're attacked tick 4, you can activate a reflexive charm without a combo and use it as many times as you want until tick 8, but no other charms. Or you can activate a combo with a simple charm and a reflexive charm, in which case you can use the simple charm on tick 3 and then (if you need it) use the reflexive charm as many times as you want until tick 8.

Dragonblooded are a special case: they get to use any reflexive charm at any time without needing to put it in a combo, but they have much weaker charms and much smaller mote pools to balance that fact.

Does that clarify?

Edit: Reynard, Supplemental charms in a combo must be used, Reflexive charms do not *need* to be, as I recall the combo rules.

OracleofSilence
2011-12-08, 04:43 AM
Thank you profusely. That is the first good explanation i have heard anywhere. It was of great help.

Jerthanis
2011-12-08, 11:40 AM
2: ...Because they can be used out side of a combo? The combo rules are just saying that if you use a combo that has Reflexive charms in it, they MUST be used. Supplemental ones are optional.

Other way around, Reflexive charms in a combo can be used or not used at your option, but Supplemental charms must supplement all appropriate actions you make on that action.

So you could make a combo of Reflex Sidestep Technique and Cascade of Cutting Terror and on your action you have to use Cascade of Cutting Terror on each thrown attack in a flurry, but you don't need to pay for Reflex Sidestep Technique until you need to use it to negate a surprise attack.

One other thing about combat is that it is enormously complicated, stupidly lethal, and takes forever and ever to resolve. It's like... if D&D had weapons that scaled from 1d6 damage to 14d10, and fighters had the ability to trade 5 hit points to triple their damage and automatically hit, but can also trade 4 hit points to ignore attacks entirely. So now attacks can't do more than 4 damage, since everyone's just going to ignore everything, but then fighters can get hit points back essentially by begging the DM for them by trying to impress them with...

...Okay, this is dangerously close to becoming an enormous rant. Let me put it simply: I love Exalted more than any RPG setting, but after running only two long games in Exalted I basically had to promise to never use the 2nd edition rules if I ever wanted to run another game in that setting.

Arbane
2011-12-08, 02:29 PM
This might be worth reading: Exalted 201: Second Edition Combat (http://wiki.white-wolf.com/exalted/index.php?title=Exalted_201_Second_Edition_Combat) .

I love the world, I really really wish it had a different set of rules...

Sception
2011-12-08, 03:12 PM
Same thing, but in a nicer PDF format with charts and diagrams:

http://www.bazzalisk.org/exalted/201X.pdf

I'm not the hugest exalted fan myself. Kind of wanted it to be a fantasy setting of the nWoD ruleset, something relatively streamlined and fast paced. It isn't that. Also, the setting, while interesting enough, seems too eager to dictate the character concepts to the player, rather then setting a world which players can bring characters of their own design into.

But yeah, it's the combat ruleset that really kills it for me, way too complicated and heavily broken, turning all too frequently into a game of attrition where everyone has awesome abilities that they never use because they need to save their essence to 'perfect' away attacks that would otherwise kill them, no matter how tough they make their characters.

If you can get past the combat mechanics, and if you're happy playing the roles that the game gives you, then it can still be a lot of fun. But that's a lot of 'if's.

Hiro Protagonest
2011-12-13, 03:01 PM
One other thing about combat is that it is enormously complicated, stupidly lethal, and takes forever and ever to resolve. It's like... if D&D had weapons that scaled from 1d6 damage to 14d10, and fighters had the ability to trade 5 hit points to triple their damage and automatically hit, but can also trade 4 hit points to ignore attacks entirely. So now attacks can't do more than 4 damage, since everyone's just going to ignore everything, but then fighters can get hit points back essentially by begging the DM for them by trying to impress them with...

...Okay, this is dangerously close to becoming an enormous rant. Let me put it simply: I love Exalted more than any RPG setting, but after running only two long games in Exalted I basically had to promise to never use the 2nd edition rules if I ever wanted to run another game in that setting.

Are you sure you're playing with all the rules? Perfect defenses are only usable in certain situations, and you can only take up to two virtue flaws no matter how many PDs you have. Although I guess compassion flaw in a "don't split the party" game is highly abusable.

Also, are you just using standard attacks every round? Can't use two or more charms per action (including the ticks between actions) without a combo, and combos cost willpower.

Jerthanis
2011-12-14, 03:04 AM
Are you sure you're playing with all the rules? Perfect defenses are only usable in certain situations, and you can only take up to two virtue flaws no matter how many PDs you have. Although I guess compassion flaw in a "don't split the party" game is highly abusable.

Also, are you just using standard attacks every round? Can't use two or more charms per action (including the ticks between actions) without a combo, and combos cost willpower.

The flaws themselves are binary, and unbelievably hard to take advantage of in any real sense to deny opponents perfect defenses. The mental gymnastics required to prevent 'saving my own life' from being conducive to completing one's Motivation are boggling on their own. Just figuring out which flaws your opponents have can be a real problem and separating them from being able to access them isn't even an option most of the time either. And if you do deny their ability to perfect, you pretty much splatter the target instantly because you go back to the triple damage attacks which automatically hit. Being able to deny the ability to effectively defend against attacks isn't a solution, but a compounding of the lethality problem.

The issue of combos taking willpower does a few things. It makes willpower one of the very most vital combat statistics, since it measures the number of actions you can spend fighting at peak effectiveness. It also means that the first person the ST decides isn't begging hard enough for willpower back in the form of stunts is the one who loses the fight, since stunts are judged by the ST and so he or she is responsible for dictating who wins the fight. Might as well just ask who they want to win and be done with it.

The reason I find the combat engine to be nearly unplayable is because I tend to think that the goal of RPG combat is to make players feel their characters are in real danger without the odds actually being stacked against them (since, if they really ARE stacked against them, odds are they won't survive that fight, much less the next ten) and to have their tactical choices matter to the outcome. The Exalted combat system is solved. Optimal tactics don't really change and the outcome of almost every fight of consequence is going to be determined excepting a very unlikely margin of luck that breaks the expectations of even the most optimistic gambler. As such, I think it fails at every goal of an RPG combat engine. It also takes forever and ever to resolve.

Ugh, sorry, I don't mean to be a jerk, I just hate Exalted's mechanics like I might hate a cheating significant other. I loved it and it broke my heart.

golentan
2011-12-14, 11:14 AM
That's really not how the conviction flaw is supposed to work. There's an excellent explanation available called something like "the conviction flaw is not the "no flaw" perfect."

Also, I think you miss the point of Exalted's combat engine. It's not the same as other RPGs in the way you describe. It is entirely set up to reward cinematic action and impossibly cool descriptions. Most times you are fighting someone weaker than you: you describe the impossibly cool way you smash them through the wall and then roll to see how well (not if) you succeed. Occasionally you fight someone stronger than you, and give loving detail to the ways that you pick yourself up after being knocked through the wall and come at him again, before either pulling a come from behind heroic victory or getting defeated and locked in his dungeon right next to the kill switch to his doomsday machine while he achieves step 97 of his torturously convoluted plan for world annihilation. If you treat it as an interactive action movie, it's amazing. If you treat it as a tactical combat simulator, it's broken beyond repair, yes. But in this case you've performed what my programming teacher calls a type 3 error: instead of using the tool the way it's intended and making sure you've got the right tool, you've made the mistake of trying to "trick" the wrong tool into doing what you want.

Jerthanis
2011-12-14, 02:19 PM
That's really not how the conviction flaw is supposed to work. There's an excellent explanation available called something like "the conviction flaw is not the "no flaw" perfect."

Yeah, but that one also doesn't work that well in terms of actually being able to take advantage of the flaw, since it's still so difficult to determine what flaws they have, and then upon determining which ones they have, how to force them to suppress a primary virtue when they know it could kill them, or separate them from their friends when they know it could kill them or making it impossible to approach you. And then once the flaws are taken advantage of, the fight is basically decided.

The flaws are just never going to be a solution to the problem of everything being wrong with the combat system at once.



Also, I think you miss the point of Exalted's combat engine. It's not the same as other RPGs in the way you describe. It is entirely set up to reward cinematic action and impossibly cool descriptions. Most times you are fighting someone weaker than you: you describe the impossibly cool way you smash them through the wall and then roll to see how well (not if) you succeed. Occasionally you fight someone stronger than you, and give loving detail to the ways that you pick yourself up after being knocked through the wall and come at him again, before either pulling a come from behind heroic victory or getting defeated and locked in his dungeon right next to the kill switch to his doomsday machine while he achieves step 97 of his torturously convoluted plan for world annihilation. If you treat it as an interactive action movie, it's amazing. If you treat it as a tactical combat simulator, it's broken beyond repair, yes. But in this case you've performed what my programming teacher calls a type 3 error: instead of using the tool the way it's intended and making sure you've got the right tool, you've made the mistake of trying to "trick" the wrong tool into doing what you want.

So basically the ST is just always responsible for planning whether the PCs win or lose? Nothing I do during combat is going to affect that? So Combat scenes are little breaks from interaction and all I can do is describe myself doing whatever the ST planned to have happen to me? They're scenes where I can't have useful input, only colorful input? That sounds awful. If something is determined without my input, why should I even bother spending time during a session on it?

Also, it doesn't reward cinematic action and impossibly cool descriptions; it sets as baseline that these will be your minimum expectation and so if a player fails to live up to them they become frustrated and resentful. I've seen this happen. Besides, what IS cinematic action? Is it the 'keep eating your popcorn' Michael Bay action or is it the Plinkett style 'walking down a hallway' where even the most mundane of activities are invested with tension because of their role in the story? Because to my estimation, they don't combine well and the visual style of the former doesn't play well into the dialogue heavy, purely mental picture formed in an RPG. It's just a personal preference, but for me, I think the stunt system is a huge distraction and one of the key problems with the game as it is written.

Hiro Protagonest
2011-12-14, 02:34 PM
So basically the ST is just always responsible for planning whether the PCs win or lose? Nothing I do during combat is going to affect that? So Combat scenes are little breaks from interaction and all I can do is describe myself doing whatever the ST planned to have happen to me? They're scenes where I can't have useful input, only colorful input? That sounds awful. If something is determined without my input, why should I even bother spending time during a session on it?

Also, it doesn't reward cinematic action and impossibly cool descriptions; it sets as baseline that these will be your minimum expectation and so if a player fails to live up to them they become frustrated and resentful. I've seen this happen. Besides, what IS cinematic action? Is it the 'keep eating your popcorn' Michael Bay action or is it the Plinkett style 'walking down a hallway' where even the most mundane of activities are invested with tension because of their role in the story? Because to my estimation, they don't combine well and the visual style of the former doesn't play well into the dialogue heavy, purely mental picture formed in an RPG. It's just a personal preference, but for me, I think the stunt system is a huge distraction and one of the key problems with the game as it is written.

It's one, maybe two dice!

Also, you seem to be forgetting how it works in every other RPG. Fudging dice can be done in every RPG, as can giving a monster thirty extra points or five PC class levels.

Finally, the ST can't be some tyrant dictator. If the ST's being unfair, No Players Means No Game.

lightningcat
2011-12-14, 03:58 PM
I like the Exalted combat system. I've even been using the system to make a Transformers RPG.

As for how long the combats last, at least in my group, the combats for Exalted are nothing compared to how long they last for other game systems. We ran a combat with 3 different POVs with two new players and the combat lasted maybe a half hour. With most of that time explaining stuff to the new guys, and one of them even tried a stunt, (it failed, but that is besides the point). Of course, we also rarely use the perfect defenses, prefering to use the motes for other actions instead.

But the game discribes itself as "over the top action" so you should be able to figure out what type of cinamatic flavor it's going for.

EDIT: On the flip side, social combat has not seen much use in our games, so much of that system is still outside my understanding.

Jerthanis
2011-12-14, 07:43 PM
It's one, maybe two dice!

Also, you seem to be forgetting how it works in every other RPG. Fudging dice can be done in every RPG, as can giving a monster thirty extra points or five PC class levels.

Finally, the ST can't be some tyrant dictator. If the ST's being unfair, No Players Means No Game.

The insidious aspect of stunts comes not in the dice rewards which are negligible, but in the willpower and mote reimbursement. Getting that willpower back every turn is essential to continuing to power your fighting prowess. As such, any turn the ST judges you fail to live up to that expectation is one round closer to being spent and largely helpless.

The issue with Exalted is that as I see it, the ST is forced to do one of three things: present threats which everyone at the table knows are utterly incapable of defeating the PCs by the numbers and have them win handily; present threats that the PCs have no hope of overcoming by the numbers and have them lose terribly; or present threats that the PCs normally would never overcome, but choose not to stunt for their actions and thus run them out of willpower, in which case it's often obvious that the ST decided the enemy was going to lose.

This isn't so much of a problem with 0 - 25 xp games or so, when they still don't have a combo at all and four buck ogres can actually be halfway intimidating, but when you run a long game and xp totals are shooting north of 200 xp, they are inescapable aspects of the system. It's not impossible to patch the game and get it running, or discover these pitfalls and find ways to delay their negative impacts on your game. I would describe the system as nearly unplayable, not totally unplayable. I just don't see the point in trying to salvage this system when there are so many better systems out there which can do a much better job running Exalted's phenomenal setting.