Anamia banner dawn twilight min one damage unless it
Perfect effects cost a health level
Cap on energy regen
Combos can be made freeley but with some restictions
New houserule stuff
Out there somewhere there is a Tarrasque eating delicious epic corn waiting to start a journey...
To address this less... briefly. We stood around outside IHOP for more than an hour talking Exalted and ways to fix it. This is some of what we came up with.
Anima banner fixes:
Proposed Twilight fix: The Twilight banner reduces incoming damage by Essence down to a minimum of 1 damage, optionally also add a 1-2m cost per use, even at 11+ Peripheral spent. Attackers that are only capable of dealing a single die of ping damage (Essence 1 mortals, mostly) can still have their damage reduced to 0.
Discussion: This gives a marginal cost to the ability which is otherwise arguably the most powerful, and also gives it a slight nerf in the direction of the game balancing mechanic we decided on, that being that Health Levels should be what you're fighting your attrition war with, not you Essence Pool. Still lets you ignore low-damage mortals.
Proposed Dawn fix: +2 to DVs ALL the time. Also gain an additional DV bonus based on the difference between attacker's Essence and your own, in your favor. In other words, a starting Essence 2 Dawn Caste gets a +3 DV against Essence 1 Mortals, and a +2 vs everyone else. An Essence 5 Dawn Caste Badass gets a +6 DV against mortals, a +4 against anyone with Essence 3, and a +2 against anyone with Essence 5+
Discussion: Turns Dawn into the combat monster they are supposed to be. Dawn banner gains a scaling bonus, just like all the other Solar anima banners. Dawn Caste becomes desirable as a unit leader and as a big-bad killer and is able to largely ignore low Essence or mortal opponents.
Perfect Effects
Proposed fix: Perfect effects all become late-Step charms (probably Step 7 or 8) whose intended function is to be the last resort. A perfect effect is used to narrowly escape certain death in some fashion, and thus effectively costs a health level (this is actually you being barely hit or nicked by the incoming attack).
Discussion: Makes perfect effects a last-ditch, "well, I'm going to die if I don't" effect that is still extremely useful, but which also shifts the mote attrition from the Essence Pool to the Health Levels. Makes other early Step DV boosters and generic Soak and Hardness enhancing charms more desirable because they are actually able to entirely prevent most damage. Whereas the perfect soak/parry/dodge effect are skin-of-the-teeth avoidance of certain death that you still suffer a health penalty for. Works best with proposed combo rules, see below.
Essence Recovery Caps
Proposed fix: All Essence recovery effects should have a global per-turn cap of whatever the solars get. Best examples are the Lunar and Sidereal charms that allow mote recovery per attack either made or avoided with caps only per-attack. These would be capped with a per-flurry/round/action/something penalty (probably actually defined in terms of "until next DV refresh").
Discussion: Essence recovery is less of a concern if attrition is shifted from Essence to Health, but is still a big problem for some charms which allow virtually unlimited Essence recovery. A per-turn limit helps to limit the overall attrition game. After looking up this limit, the limit is 20 motes of Essence recovery. The terms listed on the Solar charm do not stipulate this in terms of DV refresh, but the global recovery cap probably should.
Combos
Proposed Fix: Combos no longer cost experience to buy. Combos must still follow all Combo rules as-written (ie: be Combo-OK or Combo-Basic, apply all Supplemental or Simple charms to every action in an Extra Attack charm, etc). Combos must be declared upon the activation of the second charm in a given turn (ie: you can still use just one charm with no problem, but the moment you want to activate another, you must spend a Willpower point and all charm activations, including your previous one and any subsequent ones, must conform to the Combo rules and restriction).
Discussion: Helps move attrition away from motes, specifically to Willpower (and health if a perfect defense is used). Doesn't change any mechanics, simply saves boatloads of player XP, as a player technically has access to every possible combination of the charms that they have on their sheet. Mechanically, they could have done this anyway, at great cost, but nothing is really lost from the game as a player must still spend Willpower to use more than a single charm and must still confirm to normal rules covering combined charm effects.
Anima banner fixes:
Proposed Twilight fix: The Twilight banner reduces incoming damage by Essence down to a minimum of 1 damage, optionally also add a 1-2m cost per use, even at 11+ Peripheral spent. Attackers that are only capable of dealing a single die of ping damage (Essence 1 mortals, mostly) can still have their damage reduced to 0.
Discussion: This gives a marginal cost to the ability which is otherwise arguably the most powerful, and also gives it a slight nerf in the direction of the game balancing mechanic we decided on, that being that Health Levels should be what you're fighting your attrition war with, not you Essence Pool. Still lets you ignore low-damage mortals.
Proposed Dawn fix: +2 to DVs ALL the time. Also gain an additional DV bonus based on the difference between attacker's Essence and your own, in your favor. In other words, a starting Essence 2 Dawn Caste gets a +3 DV against Essence 1 Mortals, and a +2 vs everyone else. An Essence 5 Dawn Caste Badass gets a +6 DV against mortals, a +4 against anyone with Essence 3, and a +2 against anyone with Essence 5+
Discussion: Turns Dawn into the combat monster they are supposed to be. Dawn banner gains a scaling bonus, just like all the other Solar anima banners. Dawn Caste becomes desirable as a unit leader and as a big-bad killer and is able to largely ignore low Essence or mortal opponents.
Perfect Effects
Proposed fix: Perfect effects all become late-Step charms (probably Step 7 or 8) whose intended function is to be the last resort. A perfect effect is used to narrowly escape certain death in some fashion, and thus effectively costs a health level (this is actually you being barely hit or nicked by the incoming attack).
Discussion: Makes perfect effects a last-ditch, "well, I'm going to die if I don't" effect that is still extremely useful, but which also shifts the mote attrition from the Essence Pool to the Health Levels. Makes other early Step DV boosters and generic Soak and Hardness enhancing charms more desirable because they are actually able to entirely prevent most damage. Whereas the perfect soak/parry/dodge effect are skin-of-the-teeth avoidance of certain death that you still suffer a health penalty for. Works best with proposed combo rules, see below.
Essence Recovery Caps
Proposed fix: All Essence recovery effects should have a global per-turn cap of whatever the solars get. Best examples are the Lunar and Sidereal charms that allow mote recovery per attack either made or avoided with caps only per-attack. These would be capped with a per-flurry/round/action/something penalty (probably actually defined in terms of "until next DV refresh").
Discussion: Essence recovery is less of a concern if attrition is shifted from Essence to Health, but is still a big problem for some charms which allow virtually unlimited Essence recovery. A per-turn limit helps to limit the overall attrition game. After looking up this limit, the limit is 20 motes of Essence recovery. The terms listed on the Solar charm do not stipulate this in terms of DV refresh, but the global recovery cap probably should.
Combos
Proposed Fix: Combos no longer cost experience to buy. Combos must still follow all Combo rules as-written (ie: be Combo-OK or Combo-Basic, apply all Supplemental or Simple charms to every action in an Extra Attack charm, etc). Combos must be declared upon the activation of the second charm in a given turn (ie: you can still use just one charm with no problem, but the moment you want to activate another, you must spend a Willpower point and all charm activations, including your previous one and any subsequent ones, must conform to the Combo rules and restriction).
Discussion: Helps move attrition away from motes, specifically to Willpower (and health if a perfect defense is used). Doesn't change any mechanics, simply saves boatloads of player XP, as a player technically has access to every possible combination of the charms that they have on their sheet. Mechanically, they could have done this anyway, at great cost, but nothing is really lost from the game as a player must still spend Willpower to use more than a single charm and must still confirm to normal rules covering combined charm effects.
Yeah, what they said. I concur.
I approve this message.
(More specifically, there are some specifics that still need to be gone over for all of these rules, but feedback from others would be nice before going further.
For my part, the biggest problem with the RAW is that they turn the game into a game of mote attrition, period. All the cool stuff you do is irrelevant, b/c a perfect will stop anything, with no consequence, right up until you run out of motes, at which point all but the most twinked of characters explode in a fountain of blood and various body parts. Further, like most WW products, the end game can't even function, as characters regain energy so fast that they can effectively never be hit, even by their equals.
Adding in a consequence for using a perfect, and limiting DR to 1d, solves virtually all the problems with the game, while making a great many charms more useful in the process. Perfect attacks and heavy ping builds may re-emerge as slight problems, but seem fixable (and really, is it inappropriate for a 6w, 40+m combo with 7 near-perfect attacks to almost kill someone who only has to spend 21m to defend? I don't think so...) with alterations to the cost of the involved charms.
The anima effects might need some minor tweaking as well, but the general direction of them I like (maybe add a mote cost similar to the one proposed for Twilight to the permanent +2 ability, while the essence diff ability always activates?), and feel that they are needed to balance out the fact that not only are the other castes possessed of better anima effects, they get better skills too (in the case of the dawn anyway; twilight needs nerf stick, which it got).
Out of the stuff that caused game problems, flurries and the time consuming nature of exalted combat was the only thing that we didn't come up with a good solution for. Ultimately they are too much a part of the system as it exists to be removed. Perfects as an outlet for over the top and broken mechanics were also necessary, but by adding extra consequence we were able to keep the core of their utility, without reducing the game to a mote ticker counting down.)
I approve this message.
(More specifically, there are some specifics that still need to be gone over for all of these rules, but feedback from others would be nice before going further.
For my part, the biggest problem with the RAW is that they turn the game into a game of mote attrition, period. All the cool stuff you do is irrelevant, b/c a perfect will stop anything, with no consequence, right up until you run out of motes, at which point all but the most twinked of characters explode in a fountain of blood and various body parts. Further, like most WW products, the end game can't even function, as characters regain energy so fast that they can effectively never be hit, even by their equals.
Adding in a consequence for using a perfect, and limiting DR to 1d, solves virtually all the problems with the game, while making a great many charms more useful in the process. Perfect attacks and heavy ping builds may re-emerge as slight problems, but seem fixable (and really, is it inappropriate for a 6w, 40+m combo with 7 near-perfect attacks to almost kill someone who only has to spend 21m to defend? I don't think so...) with alterations to the cost of the involved charms.
The anima effects might need some minor tweaking as well, but the general direction of them I like (maybe add a mote cost similar to the one proposed for Twilight to the permanent +2 ability, while the essence diff ability always activates?), and feel that they are needed to balance out the fact that not only are the other castes possessed of better anima effects, they get better skills too (in the case of the dawn anyway; twilight needs nerf stick, which it got).
Out of the stuff that caused game problems, flurries and the time consuming nature of exalted combat was the only thing that we didn't come up with a good solution for. Ultimately they are too much a part of the system as it exists to be removed. Perfects as an outlet for over the top and broken mechanics were also necessary, but by adding extra consequence we were able to keep the core of their utility, without reducing the game to a mote ticker counting down.)
Threading the Gerbil since 1982
