Lunars Playtest

[Monghani]

Oh, you wanted holograms, I was thinking hallucinations.

[Robert Vance]

To potentially save some effort, Lunars don't have anything that works like minor image in D&D.

[Phoenix_Kensai]

After seeing the official preview and the Charms that require a Major or Defining intimacy to use, I'm wondering, how easy is it for Lunars to give intimacies of that level to others? It seems like they'll be good with intimacies in general, but I wonder if a Lunar with significant investment in the right social Charms will be able to use things like Heart-Drinking Allure and Stalking Nightmare Hunter more or less freely, or if they'll be situational or require a non-trivial amount of setup.

I'm particularly interested in what Charms Lunars have that jump right to Defining-level effects, since I like Changing Moons and I'm excited to see what experienced social Lunars can pull off in this edition. I doubt that even elder Lunars can just hand out intimacies of that strength like candy, though.

[Sunder the Gold]

I'm curious if Lunars can do something with their Strength Charms that Solars cannot do, since their Athletics and Brawl Charms are separate.

Does Mighty Ram Practice or any other "knockback" Charm throw a target back according to the number of range bands that a Lunar did or could have traveled?

Like, if the Lunar uses their equivalent of Mountain-Crossing Leap Technique or Godspeed Steps, which would let them cross two or three range bands with a single movement action, but they attack a target who was in close or short range, is the target sent flying away a number of range bands equal to the distance that the Lunar didn't?

One version would be for the Lunar to tackle and grapple the target, continuing to move forward while carrying their victim with them.

The other is simply striking the target to send them flying while the Lunar stops in the range band where she struck the target.

[Sunder the Gold]

Also, would Mighty Ram Practice be a Brawl or Brawl/MA exclusive attack Charm, rather than an Ability-agnostic Charm? Since both Solars and Terrestrials both lack Charms to inflict knockback with Melee weapons, and Sidereals also never had such a trick.

[The Wizard of Oz]

I'd think that's just an advantage of Lunar charms. And it makes sense to me to use it with tetsubos, etc.

Might be reasonable to say it doesn't work with non-unarmed light weapons though.

[Sunder the Gold]

If Lunar Strength Charms can inflict knockback/down without a smash attack but with a weapon, why can’t Dragon-Blooded and Solar Melee Charms do the same?

[The Wizard of Oz]

Probably just because knockback/down were already in Brawl and they didn't want them to feel too similar. What I mean is, I think there's some deliberate avoidance of putting similar effects in Melee and Brawl. There's no particular reason why Solars have a bunch of Melee charms that do Holy stuff, but not Brawl.* Nor is there a particular reason why Brawl has the charm for rushing towards people really fast and attacking them before they have time to act (after all, that seems pretty appropriate for a duelist or knife-wielder).
*Other than Paladins are generally depicted with swords. But there's no real reason why a Solar brawler shouldn't be good at punching demons with his sun-blessed fists.

As Lunars just have the one tree, they don't really need to worry about it. There's no need to make Lunar melee and brawl different, when you're concentrating instead on making Dexterity and Strength different (and I'm very sure Dexterity won't have any knockback/down).

[Aliasi]

If Lunar Strength Charms can inflict knockback/down without a smash attack but with a weapon, why can’t Dragon-Blooded and Solar Melee Charms do the same?

In theory? No reason at all. But the corebook wants to keep the different abilities feeling different and that's respectable.

Wizard of Oz already mentioned holy anti-creature-of-darkness stuff in one and not the other. To a certain point that's a reasonable domain for custom charms and/or evocations.

[The Wizard of Oz]

In honour of the Lunars' new ability to access Labyrinth Circle of Necromancy, I thought I'd bring this back.

PneumaPilot, now you've had some more time with the playtest, are there any charms you didn't pay much attention to before, but now think are really cool?

[prototype00]

In honour of the Lunars' new ability to access Labyrinth Circle of Necromancy, I thought I'd bring this back.

PneumaPilot, now you've had some more time with the playtest, are there any charms you didn't pay much attention to before, but now think are really cool?

I didn’t know the Labyrinth circle thing was confirmed.

My word, was it in one of the previews and I just missed it?

[Monghani]

Nah, it was just something Vance said as a current set-up for it. But considering we won't see Necromancy for like 2 years its just a neat idea at this point. It can easily change in the mean-time.

[Epimetheus]

Nah, it was just something Vance said as a current set-up for it. But considering we won't see Necromancy for like 2 years its just a neat idea at this point. It can easily change in the mean-time.

2 years is a generous timetable.

[ReshyShira]

I kind of feel that Legendary Size, particularly if it's accessible at Essence 1, needs to be expensive to be balanced. The benefits of Legendary Size are pretty extensive:
1) You can't be crashed except by very big attacks (10+ post soak damage pools),
2) You can't take more than (attacker's Str)+3 levels of damage (before charms).
3) You can't be grappled, and your own grappling attacks are made unopposed, barring special magic that makes the opponent capable of grappling huge creatures.
4) You don't take onslaught penalties to your defense from smaller creatures.
5) You can't be smashed or knocked back.

All of that is pretty potent. That said, I could see it getting less impressive at higher Essence. PneumaPilot , was there anything in the playtest document you noticed about making the Legendary Size charm cheaper at higher Essence?

It worries me, not that the initial investment is high (warstriders cost 15m), but you can start with a warstrider, sure it's expensive but as far as I know it doesn't penalize your mote recovery heavily for it's use. The only reason that cost makes sense to me is that Warstriders require a Greater Hearthstone to be implanted into them to get them to run, but you're talking a warstrider versus a legendary sized animal. Now I don't know much about Tyrant Lizards, but I don't imagine that they require a greater hearthstone implanted in them to live.

So if it's not because of the hearthstone then it might be to constrict the rate that Lunars gain motes, but it's handled in a weird way. I thought Lunar shapeshifting was supposed to be a one-and-done thing, but it seems that Lunars strain to maintain the size of larger creatures? Thematically it kind of feels like it takes away from things a bit.

I realize that a Legendarily sized creature is great and all, but it sounds like it costs basically all of your charms to do so which sounds like the more combat charms you have the worse of a trade it is. It's a good way to cheaply make say a No Moon scary with minimal investment into combat, but why would someone who has lots of combat charms want to use it? They simply will have no mote economy, and that's a pretty big deal.


EDIT: Someone mentioned using the creatures die pools as a reason for the high cost, but here's the thing: High die pools doesn't necessarily equate to legendary size, there's bound to be animals with really good die pools that just don't have legendary size. So the only thing you can reasonably charge for on Legendary Size is the cost of the merit itself, since a Warstrider gets things like a lot of free damage boxes with minimal investment, devastating actions, and evocations.

It seems really counter-intuitive.


Side question:
Are Lunars still +1personal/+4peripheral per essence still (Same as Deebs)?

[Kelly Pedersen]

It worries me, not that the initial investment is high (warstriders cost 15m), but you can start with a warstrider, sure it's expensive but as far as I know it doesn't penalize your mote recovery heavily for it's use. The only reason that cost makes sense to me is that Warstriders require a Greater Hearthstone to be implanted into them to get them to run,

That does penalize your mote recovery, though, compared to someone who's bought another Artifact 5 and a greater Hearthstone, because the warstrider pilot doesn't get the benefit of the hearthstone while it's plugged into the warstrider.

I thought Lunar shapeshifting was supposed to be a one-and-done thing, but it seems that Lunars strain to maintain the size of larger creatures?

Basically, it seems to me that the devs are having to balance three desires that are, to a greater or lesser extent, conflicting. First, people want legendary-size creatures available as spirit shapes. It's too cool not to be able to say "My real form is a TYRANT LIZARD! RAR!" and blow the roof off the teahouse where someone just spilled your jasmine tea on your new tunic. Second, people want these forms to be useful in combat, and to feel like you're the actual creature in question, not just a cheap knockoff. If you can transform into a tyrant lizard, but you're only 8 feet tall and your bite isn't that much better than someone with a daiklaive, people are going to get upset. And, finally, there's the desire for people who don't choose such an enormous spirit shape to not be completely left behind, combat-wise. It shouldn't be a massive penalty to have a hummingbird as a spirit shape, as opposed to the tyrant lizard.

Given the need to satisfy these desires, something's got to give, mechanically. If maintaining a full Legendary Size tyrant lizard form is something a character can do in addition to a bunch of other Lunar combat charms, well, it's going to suck to be a non-Legendary Size form, because they're getting a bunch of huge combat bonuses that you probably just can't access, in addition to whatever combat charms you've got. So, we get what's been presented: you can turn into a Legendary Sized creature, and indeed maintain it indefinitely, but you can't throw a bunch of other combat charms on top of it and still maintain it forever. Note that you can throw a bunch of combat charms! It just reduces the duration you can maintain the form. And, in fact, since it's slightly less than the mote-regeneration rate, you can actually build up your reserves again, and potentially unleash your fight-ending wombo-combo if you want, you just need to wait a bit to do so, doing "nothing" except being a gigantic beast stomping around the battlefield who's almost impossible to significantly hinder.

EDIT: Someone mentioned using the creatures die pools as a reason for the high cost, but here's the thing: High die pools doesn't necessarily equate to legendary size, there's bound to be animals with really good die pools that just don't have legendary size.

I suspect that you'll be hard-pressed to find animals with the combination of good die pools, good damage, and good soak/hardness that a Legendary Size creature has. In the core book, for example, of the seven creatures with Legendary Size, only three (the ox-dragon, the siege lizard, and the yeddim) have less than 9 dice for their most damaging attack (and those three all have 7 or 8 dice, which is not nothing), and all except the yeddim have damage rolls of 15+, with minimum damage that starts at 3 and goes up. All of them have soak of 10+ (20 in the case of the siege lizard!). And all except the emperor sloth, ox-dragon, and tyrant lizard have hardness 10.

Compare all that to the other animals - some get comparable dice to roll for the attack, or damage, but very few get minimum damage (I only count two that do), and soak rarely goes above about 6, and hardness is usually limited to about 2 or 3, if they get it at all.