Welcome, all, to the Exalted OOC discussion thread. Pull up an imaginary chair around my equally imaginary dining room table and feel free to gossip, dispute, plan and discuss the current Exalted game. Any board member can post their thoughts, tips or considerations here and ONLY here. Thanks for swinging by!
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… and so it begins! robert, I’ll have your Prologue up later in the morning once I get some coffee and incorporate the changes you suggested.
I hate chargenning. I especially hate chargenning when I’ve lost my book and have to use a digital copy. (Well. Technically, I know where it is. And who has it. And who isn’t giving it back.)
Anything I can do to help?
Depends. Can you spin forwards the hands of time till about Thursday? Or can you drive to Ithica with a baseball bat?
Nah, this is why I have electronic backups. Just annoying.
So, how crunchy should our declarations be in the in-character thread? Should I post as I did for my response to the prologue post, or do I need explicit declarations of “I make a Join Battle roll”, etc.?
(Kibbitzing) Oooh, bad move. The lady clearly knows what she’s doing. I’da let her do her thing.
Hey, Dhorain is not particularly genre-savvy. One smart-talking lady versus five large, angry violent men has only one outcome, which does not end particularly well for the lady.
Come to that, he’s pretty sure that it doesn’t usually end well for the one lightly-armed and unarmored guy who’s got the lady’s back, either, but he isn’t thinking that far ahead at the moment.
I love First Pulse style. Such good inspiration…
Hmm. So, I am playing Dhorain as though he has spent his entire martial career up to this point essentially beating up Extras. I assume he is about to get a valuable lesson in why it is a good idea not to assume that this is the case.
I think I have a background for ‘Friday’ now. Little involved (not really), but it explains why he’s got an obviously fake name and should give plenty of room to play with.
Friday was once one of the Empress’ soldiers, from a minor branch of a family. He was struck down and left for dead in a territorial scuffle involving smuggling and which side of a family would profit. He was found by peasants and nursed back to health. Normally, he would have left them a few koku and wandered off, if he had not seen a wanted notice with his old face on it. (his new one has a somewhat differently shaped nose and a few more scars than the old. Just enough for a drawing not to quite match.) Apparently, someone had to be the scapegoat and the fates chose him.
Ticked him off a bit, but this is life. So, he grew to enjoy the life of a farmer. Learned a lot. For one thing, he learned to listen. And that there’s a lot of things you have to know to farm. Not as easy as he’d always assumed.
And then one day, he came back from a walk to a local curiosity, a standing stone, to discover his family being herded away. One man against an troop would not save them… so he listened, and he watched. And he learned that the owner of the land, a wastrel who was involved in the smuggling, had lost the rights of the land in a game overnight, and the new owner had decided that he wanted his own sharecroppers on it. The old ones? Well, they couldn’t stay there… and the new owner didn’t care where they went. And so, without even a crime, they were declared disenfranchised.
And that’s when Friday knew what he had to do. Through a series of events too long to explain, the new owner’s money caravan went wandering, and wound up with the displaced villagers, giving them the koku needed to start new lives… as long as they hurried. As for Friday? Well… he loved his new family, but he decided it would be best to be somewhere else.
And that’s how it was for a while. Just a drifter, wandering the land, exploring what there is to see in the world around, and, whenever possible, leaving it just a little bit better than it was before. If this meant dumping the biggest slaver in town in the cargo bay of a black ship he had chartered to go halfway round the world? Well, that’s just poetry, isn’t it?
Friday’s been working on that. Crafting justice as an art form. It does require effort… a lot of it… but it’s interesting, and it seems like a good thing to keep trying.
(On the other hand, the chargen is kicking my tail. Got Anathema the program working. I’m just in the ‘I want it all’ stage as well as the ‘okay, charms work how now?’ stage. Good progress.)
Oh, yeah. are there different names for the days of the week in Exalted? Friday’s just named after the day of the week he was found.
Martial Artist: “So, I have Immaculate martial arts. You have…”
Dhorain: “A stick! And dots in Melee! Now, no fighting in my tavern, or I will be forced to attack you!”
MA: “With your stick.”
D: “Yes!”
MA: “Looks like someone traded off a few too many dots of Intelligence for Valor at character creation.”
D: “In my defense, it’s a very sturdy stick.”
MA: “Oh? Superior or Exceptional?”
D: “Neither. Just not Improvised.”
MA: sigh “You should be very glad this isn’t the Prologue of an Abyssal.”
And why he shouldn’t underestimate tiny, wiry women or wrinkly old monks. [Pratchett] Remember Rule One! [/Pratchett]
Story sounds good so far. If you could hammer out a couple things, it would make my life easier:
One tip I would give you with abilities is “focus down”. While you may think your character needs half the abilities listed, remember that he’s a newly Exalted figure and hasn’t had TIME to develop too many new skills. Focus on the few that he probably already had before and ramp them up to extreme levels (4 or 5 dots) and THEN spread to a handful of others that you need/want to pull up to 3 dots. Anything else is just gravy you can work on as you gain experience points.
I would say the same thing about charms: each charm in a cascade (the tree) builds on another, so consider focusing on 3 trees (plus some sort of resistance/dodge charm).
I can’t seem to find any detail of calendaring more precise than the fact that they use lunar months.
Which would be better for you? I figured a minor branch of a Great House had more chances of him being treated like shit for political gain. “You’re a tool, boy. Be a useful tool, or be discarded.” Plus, it has more points for you. He doesn’t like his parents. He really doesn’t like his cousins. If they’re rich and powerful, so much the better.
That should cover the early years, too. Training, training, futile training in case someone more important died, and then thrown into the army when they didn’t.
As for when he exalted? Well, as of the end of the story I told… he hadn’t yet. I can revise it so he had, but I thought you wanted to run that as the prologue.
Yes, you’re entirely right about the ‘focus down’ bit. That’s why I described the issue as ‘I want it all’. I can and will trim it down once I’ve thrown out all the stuff I don’t want. Trust me, this is progress.
… I just have to read two hundred more pages of this book.
Hah. I’ll see your Rule One and raise you the Code. What happens when an obviously-superior force faces a simple, honest man, wielding a simple, honest weapon, fighting for a simple, honest cause?
Well, if the superior force is an essence-user, she probably spends a few Motes, raises a middle finger in the direction of narrative causality, and kicks the simple, honest man in his simple, honest head and knocks him clean through the simple, honest bar. (Both the actual bar and the building itself).
The Prologue is a series of vignettes letting you play out specific scenes from your past leading through your Exaltation. Backstories help me pull out those vignettes.
… are you peeking at my notes?!
And…updated.
I feel post-emptively justified in walking Dhorain most of the way down the defensive Melee charm tree now.
Also, since I am new to Exalted 2nd Ed, could I see a walkthrough of the (virtual, I assume, since this is the prologue) die rolls, and how this situation would resolve out in actual play? (-2 DV for a non-fight-ending disarm, angling for a stunt bonus or at least making her expend Motes by hoping one of the toughs flanks her, etc.)
All right, so work with me a little here. I’ve given you a setup. Show me something that’d drive a man like this, a man who knows he’s helpless in the world, and all he can do is make other people helpless, to despair and beyond. He started off trying to perform Robin Hood Performance Art… I’m going to assume it all goes wrong somewhere. Somewhere, his selfish actions will make everyone pay. Unless…
Yeah, I think I have the sheet done except for the weaknesses. Working on it.
I hadn’t really considered it that way, since she’s “just” fighting extras who are practically there to be thrown through things Lemme see if I can smooth it out into ticks.