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Author Topic: Exalted's setting with your favorite system: what changes  (Read 6661 times)

MeganovaStella

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Re: Exalted's setting with your favorite system: what changes
« Reply #60 on: July 05, 2022, 08:07:23 PM »

World coherency is overrated. Unless the players are playing at national level of power, why does the 1700s french country exist next too 1300s but with steampunk england will come up nearly never.

If one will not travel between 1300's Steampunk England and 1700's Historic France, why do the two need to exist in the same world. The steampunk setting and the historic setting would both benefit form having from having space wasted on the other devoted more development from the former. Jack of all trades, master of none; a little bit of everything is not enough of anything.

exactly

Stephen Tannhauser

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Re: Exalted's setting with your favorite system: what changes
« Reply #61 on: July 05, 2022, 08:07:59 PM »
When kitchen sink not good (i.e: not exalted /s), it feels lazy like you just threw whatever you wanted in without respect for the conceits of the world.

World coherency is overrated.

It depends how much explanation is put into the why of the non-coherence as well as the how, and how much acknowledgement is given to the logical what then. Having two countries with radically different technology levels and/or social structures in the same campaign isn't necessarily incoherent; if the cause of this difference is never explained, or the differences don't make any difference in how the nations interact with each other, or the situations they create for the PCs, then it will feel incoherent in practice.

It often comes in for slanging on this site, but Blue Rose's world of Aldea is actually a reasonably good example of this in action: the two major Good Guy realms of Aldis and Jarzon are radically different in many ways, but the source of those differences is explained in the backstory, the potential effect of those differences on the PCs' situations and careers is noted, and actions to address those differences are suggested as adventure and campaign seeds, so the world in general feels like a single coherent setting. One thing Exalted may have fallen down on is that I don't recall how well it addresses the international status quo on a state/political level: what are the natural alliances against the decaying Empire of the Dragon-Blooded, for example? What kingdoms would be easier for a rising Solar Exalt to conquer, and so on?  If every nation and faction was just described of itself without taking its history, geopolitics and historical alliances into account, it would be easier for the whole thing to feel like a tossed salad of inconsistent mosaic pieces.
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Shrieking Banshee

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Re: Exalted's setting with your favorite system: what changes
« Reply #62 on: July 05, 2022, 10:19:48 PM »
If one will not travel between 1300's Steampunk England and 1700's Historic France, why do the two need to exist in the same world.

Because its fun. Because things can exist under the same sort of umbrella of logic without needing a whole new setting each time with its own foibles and such. And you can have the two interact and its kitche and entertaining.

Because generally, all fake countries lack depth. You can't compete with reality for depth of culture and real differentiating minutia. So fantastical worlds compensate by upping the archetypical. Egypt-Land, Brazil-Land, Elf-Land (Also known as Denmark-Land).
This is unavoidable for clear impressions of stuff thats mostly gonna be add-libbed during play. When people go for 'Deep' instead of a veriety of shallow, they generally just get shallow sameyness. Because you can't work up the same level of depth as the real world.

Then it will feel incoherent in practice.

A setting for a game isn't the same as a setting for a book. The coherency of a world is 99.99999% dependant on the running GM. Stuff that seems out of place (or deep and well thought out) while reading feels completly different in play.
If early Roman Republican architecture is described for a area that was more aiming for a mid Byzantium period the response from the players won't be:
'Why does this architectural stylings exist so alien to the native culture? Didn't you say this settlement was constrcuted recently after the conquest of the Zubalesque horde in the late Tzuma period of 1772BD? Phah flimshaw! My suspension is shattered! I am to qiut the game!'

they will say

'Mm...So what about that Dragon?'

Not only that but they won't even care or apreciate what the 'deep' part even is unless one of them is really into reading lorebooks.

Stephen Tannhauser

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Re: Exalted's setting with your favorite system: what changes
« Reply #63 on: July 05, 2022, 11:55:52 PM »
(G)enerally, all fake countries lack depth. You can't compete with reality for depth of culture and real differentiating minutia. So fantastical worlds compensate by upping the archetypical.

Granted. But you can still muck things up if those archetypes clash too badly; see below.

Quote
The coherency of a world is 99.99999% dependent on the running GM. Stuff that seems out of place (or deep and well thought out) while reading feels completly different in play. If early Roman Republican architecture is described for a area that was more aiming for a mid Byzantium period the response from the players won't be: 'Why does this architectural stylings exist so alien to the native culture? Didn't you say this settlement was constrcuted recently after the conquest of the Zubalesque horde in the late Tzuma period of 1772BD? Phah flimshaw! My suspension is shattered! I am to quit the game!'

You underestimate the anal-retentiveness of players determined not to be taken off guard or miss an apparent clue, especially when the overriding assumption is always, "If the GM is bothering to mention it, it's something important." I've never gamed with anybody who'd quit a game on spotting such an apparent contradiction, but I have gamed with players who'd quite willingly spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to figure out what it meant.

Going back to Steampunk England next to Mediaeval France, the simplest incoherence a GM of such a game would have to address is, "Why not buy our weapons and gear in England and then go kick butt in France? And come to think of it, why hasn't England in general already done this?"
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Shrieking Banshee

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Re: Exalted's setting with your favorite system: what changes
« Reply #64 on: July 06, 2022, 12:37:59 AM »
You underestimate the anal-retentiveness of players determined not to be taken off guard or miss an apparent clue, especially when the overriding assumption is always, "If the GM is bothering to mention it, it's something important."
Happens independantly of setting.

Quote
Going back to Steampunk England next to Mediaeval France, the simplest incoherence a GM of such a game would have to address is, "Why not buy our weapons and gear in England and then go kick butt in France? And come to think of it, why hasn't England in general already done this?"

Thats a game mechanics thing. 'Wait but how can X thing not fail against steampunktech?' is the role of the settings writer. Thats independant of it being a kitchen sink or not. This sort of thing can exist even in the most homogenous setting.

Stephen Tannhauser

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Re: Exalted's setting with your favorite system: what changes
« Reply #65 on: July 06, 2022, 11:57:24 AM »
Happens independently of setting.

True, but one can minimize the excuses that the setting in particular gives for it. To acknowledge you can't eliminate a problem is not the same as to say you can't meaningfully reduce it.

Quote
That's a game mechanics thing. 'Wait but how can X thing not fail against steampunktech?' is the role of the settings writer.

Exactly. And the more heterogeneous elements that are tossed into a setting without thinking through the logical implications of how they would interact (which is the definition I'm using for "kitchen sink"), the more such mechanics questions are likely to arise.
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Chris24601

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Re: Exalted's setting with your favorite system: what changes
« Reply #66 on: July 06, 2022, 01:09:52 PM »
Happens independently of setting.

True, but one can minimize the excuses that the setting in particular gives for it. To acknowledge you can't eliminate a problem is not the same as to say you can't meaningfully reduce it.

Quote
That's a game mechanics thing. 'Wait but how can X thing not fail against steampunktech?' is the role of the settings writer.

Exactly. And the more heterogeneous elements that are tossed into a setting without thinking through the logical implications of how they would interact (which is the definition I'm using for "kitchen sink"), the more such mechanics questions are likely to arise.
Speaking as the one mentioned who had issues, yes, such things can get bad enough that you literally cannot envision the setting. When you have late 19th Century steam ships (screw propulsion, turret-based weaponry) and 15th Century caravels (and frigates said to be the greatest of all warships of the time) and melee weapons and bows supposed to compete with late 19th Century revolvers and repeating rifles… yeah, for me, the setting just completely broke down as something I could coherently envision.

We finally found something workable by pegging baseline technology at early 18th Century; squarely in the Age of Sail, but with the earliest steamboats starting to appear. Similarly, firearms would predominantly be flintlocks with variations like the pepperbox as attempts at multi-shot weaponry… keeping sword and bow still competitive with the firearms of the day (particularly the bow’s rapid fire capability in an era of declining armor).

Nailing down a time period (with outliers; throwbacks in primitive locales, somewhat anachronistic future elements available to artificers and the like) did wonders for me being able to try and grokk how elements interacted; 1800 Techno-magic England vs. 1700 Druid-magic France is something that didn’t break my brain in the way that 1890’s England vs. 1450’s France does.

That said, I could see more radical differences working if your setting had something like “reality zones” where certain things didn’t work and others did… if passing into the 1300 France zone caused most gunpowder firearms to fizzle and steam engines to fizzle out then putting the two into the same setting could work.

Similarly, a very high magic 1300 France where magic largely subbed for technology (but was incompatible with technology) vs. a more technologically advanced area would be something I could grokk; you have two mutually exclusive tech bases each with their pros and cons and different societies have different preferences between them. The French may not have steam engines, but their harnessed water elementals allow their ships to match speeds and their ironwood enchanted hulls are as good as the steel plate of the steam ships and they have enough trained war wizards to substitute for cannons.

Which basically goes back to your comment that consideration of how the interaction of the various parts added to a kitchen sink setting are important to how well it hangs together.

As an example from own setting, my decision to allow various flying creatures as PCs led in turn to both other means of flight (various flying beasts, airships and magic), but also into monster design (ranged attacks are extremely common because flyers are common) and PC starting gear (most of the default starting equipment packages include a ranged weapon). Islands and castles that float in the sky are similarly things which exist.

Flight allows bypassing certain threats (ex. hazardous terrain en route to a ruin), while increasing others (everyone in the ruin can see you coming from miles away and probably has ranged attacks, if not flying assets of its own they can use to intercept you).

But, I also mitigate some of flight’s advantages mechanically… requiring greater concentration for flight makes certain tasks while flying difficult without burning resources (flight in combat being more useful for repositioning than remaining out of reach at lower levels, particularly when ranged attacks and indoor encounters make outright evasion of attacks difficult or even impossible).

Sure, if you want to hit PC’s with various overland encounters such access to flight might be a complication; on the other hand flight is usually tiring so you have to land periodically anyway (if you want them to find something in the ground), flying threats and ranged attackers exist (so combat encounters aren’t rules out) and the different vantage point can let you reveal sidequests even more easily (in a way that allows heroic PCs to feel more proactive… you don’t just stumble onto a burning homestead in the wild; you see the smoke rising in the distance and what PC isn’t going to look into that?

The point is, flight could have been something very unbalanced and disruptive, but by considering the ways it could affect things and leaning into them it added all sort of interesting things to the setting (because if you want your setting to allow PC dragons, saying “oh, but they can’t actually fly until they’re level 10” actually feels more lame to me than just not having dragon PCs at all).

Jaeger

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Re: Exalted's setting with your favorite system: what changes
« Reply #67 on: July 06, 2022, 01:23:24 PM »
Exalted's setting, Creation, is really fucking good. Really, really good. But the system sucks ass!

So, I ask a question. What if...Exalted's setting used your favorite system? Would it be better to play? Worse? Do tell!


I don't think anyone has brought up the two Qwixalted-Exalted hacks yet...

Some guys took the early d6 based Exalted quickstart rules and expanded them into complete RPG's with far less rules crunch.

You have Qwixalted Diaklave which runs about 55 pages, and Qwixalted Jarvis which runs about 32.

They are still available for download free on the net with a bit of google-fu.
« Last Edit: July 06, 2022, 01:30:36 PM by Jaeger »
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Shrieking Banshee

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Re: Exalted's setting with your favorite system: what changes
« Reply #68 on: July 06, 2022, 02:27:34 PM »
As an example from own setting, my decision to allow various flying creatures as PCs led in turn to both other means of flight (various flying beasts, airships and magic), but also into monster design (ranged attacks are extremely common because flyers are common) and PC starting gear (most of the default starting equipment packages include a ranged weapon). Islands and castles that float in the sky are similarly things which exist.

And in a countertwist I found myself finding the commonality of flight in your setting to not really take into account the kind of world that would develop from it.

But that to me speaks to the impossibility of 100%-ing a setting that won't be incongrous to SOMEBODY. Some people throw a fit if there is any sort of magic, or isn't 1600s England.

Chris24601

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Re: Exalted's setting with your favorite system: what changes
« Reply #69 on: July 06, 2022, 06:58:18 PM »
As an example from own setting, my decision to allow various flying creatures as PCs led in turn to both other means of flight (various flying beasts, airships and magic), but also into monster design (ranged attacks are extremely common because flyers are common) and PC starting gear (most of the default starting equipment packages include a ranged weapon). Islands and castles that float in the sky are similarly things which exist.

And in a countertwist I found myself finding the commonality of flight in your setting to not really take into account the kind of world that would develop from it.

But that to me speaks to the impossibility of 100%-ing a setting that won't be incongrous to SOMEBODY. Some people throw a fit if there is any sort of magic, or isn't 1600s England.
I'll own that shortcoming. Its one of the elements that didn't transfer well from the in-play setting to its written form (I only had so many pages and had to prioritize; a detailed campaign world in the core books was definitely one of the hits there) and will probably need to be addressed inside a dedicated setting book as it is very much a feel thing. In the GM's Guide itself the primary setting examples are found in the Blackspire city highlights as part of a default setting;

- The Rookery: the top floor of Castle Blackspire is where you can obtain stabling for flying mounts as well as buy and sell them. Half of the top floor is open to the public while the other half is reserved to the Black Guard’s wyvern mounts.

- The Crow’s Nest: a watch tower that rises another five stories above the Rookery and offers a full 360 degree view of the entire Free Cities region (the horizon is about 21 miles on a clear day, just a bit further than the farthest fortified town from the city of Blackspire). More importantly, the signal towers of the smaller cities of the realm can be seen and, if a warning fire is lit, the Black Guard on their wyverns can reach even the most distant location of the Free Cities in just 30 minutes.

- Aspiro Aviation and the Blackspire Skyport: The floor beneath the Rookery has been fitted with gantries to allow airships to dock. They’re not something that shows up every day, but there’s typically 1d4-1 airships moored there on any given day. Aspiro Aviation is a local airship crew (a family of Sylphs) who takes charter flights (and as a local operation can be booked in advance... whereas it’s luck of the draw to charter ones who just happen to be there that day; there’s a fairly regular one running cargo to and from Riverhold that’s willing to make a slight detour to drop or pick up from Stonepoint Monastery, but any others are probably from much more distant lands).


I only really had to room to give an overview of a single region and really detail a single realm and single city within that realm with any detail in presenting examples for GM's to use in creating their own settings. Had I an infinite page count I could have included more examples in other locations, but I wanted affordable print-on-demand core books and had a LOT of other material to cover.*

So, with luck, as I transition from the rule books (the options of which I intend to NOT bloat with later supplements) and into setting/adventure books hopefully more of the ways in which flight can play a role in society will meet your approval.

* In terms of design I strongly favor the idea that a game's rules are its toolbox and its better to have a tool and not need it, than to need a tool and not have it. If you don't want starting PCs to have flight then its much easier for a GM to say "don't pick any flight options for your characters" or "you can only play humans, elves, dwarves and gnomes for this game" than it is for a GM who wants to run a campaign where everyone is a dragon to have to invent their own dragon species and hope its not broken relative to the rest of the game's rules.

I'll take the hit of insufficiently described cultural dimensions to flight in exchange for players not needing to wait until supplement X comes out before they can actually play the character type they want (and might not be allowed even then because "core only" is a thing I've seen commonly enforced). 4E's botched launch missing several expected traditional races and classes is not a model I want to emulate (conversely if the only options I included in my core were ones you could get from any edition of D&D, why would I bother with my own system/setting?).

Shrieking Banshee

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Re: Exalted's setting with your favorite system: what changes
« Reply #70 on: July 06, 2022, 09:22:53 PM »
I'll own that shortcoming.

Not everything can be for everybody. Flight bothered me, ship make bothered you. The only way to avoid this altogether is something like Ace Combat with its 'Like reality but very slightly different' angle. Which is dull as the only thing that can happen.

Chris24601

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Re: Exalted's setting with your favorite system: what changes
« Reply #71 on: July 06, 2022, 10:22:19 PM »
I'll own that shortcoming.

Not everything can be for everybody. Flight bothered me, ship make bothered you. The only way to avoid this altogether is something like Ace Combat with its 'Like reality but very slightly different' angle. Which is dull as the only thing that can happen.
True. But my theory is that it is also very easy for someone to drop discrete elements (ex. particular powers in a superhero game, particular spells in fantasy) that bother them from a larger framework without breaking something vs. trying to add elements to a framework and making sure they don't accidentally break something else.

You could run a game using my system while banning all PC flight options and be assured that everything would work fine; in terms of balance its no different than a game where flight options were available but no one happened to select them. Just because an option is there doesn't require it to be used and GMs are free to outright remove any elements they don't like from their games. The entire first chapter of my GM's Guide is about deciding what elements you want to include and whether you want to remove any character options to fit your vision.

As a further counter example, my default setting makes Astral Servitors, Necromancers and Diabolists (demon summoners) completely unavailable to PCs because they are fundamentally at odds with the heroic assumptions (in the default cosmology Servitors lack free will while the other two involve chaining your free will to a hostile force that would essentially run the character instead of the player). While I could have just left my mechanical systems at that because that fits my own moral preferences, I opted to include both in the GM's Guide as fully PC-balanced options because the GM may want to run a setting with a different underlying cosmology that my default and I don't want them to have to guess at what traits and options would be balanced with the other player character options.

Basically, I feel its better to have options (even ones I'd never use myself) and then disallow those I don't want to use from a particular campaign, than to just leave options out and hope someone who wants them would be able to come up with a viable system to enact it.

Stephen Tannhauser

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Re: Exalted's setting with your favorite system: what changes
« Reply #72 on: July 06, 2022, 10:46:01 PM »
In terms of design I strongly favor the idea that a game's rules are its toolbox and its better to have a tool and not need it, than to need a tool and not have it. If you don't want starting PCs to have flight then its much easier for a GM to say "don't pick any flight options for your characters" or "you can only play humans, elves, dwarves and gnomes for this game" than it is for a GM who wants to run a campaign where everyone is a dragon to have to invent their own dragon species and hope its not broken relative to the rest of the game's rules.

Have you ever run into the experience of players objecting to stuff like this on the grounds of "if it's in the rules it should be allowable in the game"? (One of the things I was intrigued by in the design of the Eberron setting was the explicit adoption of this as a principle, where Keith Baker says in the prologue, "If it's in the books, it has a place in Eberron.")

The Exalted setting might be easier to manage if some of the later books were deliberately excluded, but for a lot of gamers that approach goes against the whole point of continuing to expand the setting.
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MeganovaStella

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Re: Exalted's setting with your favorite system: what changes
« Reply #73 on: July 06, 2022, 11:45:07 PM »
In terms of design I strongly favor the idea that a game's rules are its toolbox and its better to have a tool and not need it, than to need a tool and not have it. If you don't want starting PCs to have flight then its much easier for a GM to say "don't pick any flight options for your characters" or "you can only play humans, elves, dwarves and gnomes for this game" than it is for a GM who wants to run a campaign where everyone is a dragon to have to invent their own dragon species and hope its not broken relative to the rest of the game's rules.

Have you ever run into the experience of players objecting to stuff like this on the grounds of "if it's in the rules it should be allowable in the game"? (One of the things I was intrigued by in the design of the Eberron setting was the explicit adoption of this as a principle, where Keith Baker says in the prologue, "If it's in the books, it has a place in Eberron.")

The Exalted setting might be easier to manage if some of the later books were deliberately excluded, but for a lot of gamers that approach goes against the whole point of continuing to expand the setting.

what later books in specific? the more cosmic themed books?

Stephen Tannhauser

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Re: Exalted's setting with your favorite system: what changes
« Reply #74 on: July 07, 2022, 12:08:53 AM »
what later books in specific? the more cosmic themed books?

Hard to pick a "cutoff point", as it were, but I always thought going beyond the basic five groups of Exalted (Solar, Lunar, Terrestrial, Sidereal and Abyssal) was where things started getting a little overstuffed. I also don't know that a separate book for each Caste or Aspect was necessary. (But of course, there is always the element of making money, which it's hard to blame a company for wanting to do.)
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