How do I make Ki Rata

[Isator Levi]

his duel with White Chain was mostly represented by being just plain stronger than her, not attacking her 20 times before she could react (in fact, as soon as he tried to do precisely that, she reacted at the same speed as he did.); it has a very interesting fluff, but its in-story effect is not very different from what you can actually already do with Brawl and re-fluffing certain MAs.

He explicitly spends most of the fight limiting himself to the same styles that she is using, when he actually employs Ki Rata in its lowest level it definitely comes across as hitting her twenty times before she can react, and the capacity to catch up with him when he's stopping time is clearly exceptional, unprecedented, a visible struggle in comparison and still tears her body apart.

[Epimetheus]

Unless Abandon has explicitly said something, I don't believe he's literally stopping time. He's just moving so fast that for all appearances it looks like time has stopped. Ki Rata has been about being so fast and strong that the opponent has no chance. I don't see it going to literally warping the fabric of spacetime is a result of the style.

[Isator Levi]

I think Solomon is going super fast, but on a vibrational level rather than needing to be in motion. We get moments where everything is frozen but he's standing still, and he always seems to casually walk up to targets.

[Organ Boy]

Ki Rata's whole thing is that it's incredibly dangerous because it really is just the One Weird Trick that someone figured out that makes you win at fighting, right? It's h4x. It's like regular karate, like, not much more difficult to learn than regular karate, except if you learn it instead of learning karate, you can blow up cities. Whoops! Unfortunate that reality allows for such a thing, better police the hell out of the whole cosmos to ensure nobody spreads or exploits it!

This doesn't really work in any system that assumes equal XP expenditures will lead to somewhat balanced characters. Which, like, I know, I know, Exalted, linear BP/exponential XP, feel free to laugh. But it's still a problem. You can't make a "balanced" version of Ki Rata because there isn't anything to Ki Rata except how unbalanced it is. Being phenomenally, existentially imbalanced is what Ki Rata is.

(Ironically it'd be easy to do in Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine because.)

I was just about to say: Exalted's martial arts in general tend to be too...extra, for lack of a better word, to emulate Ki Rata. But Aspect from Nobilis/Glitch (or as Chuubo calls it, The Ace)? THAT is what you want: Sublime skill and absolute bodily control with pinpoint precision, plus a lot of "I do this very specific, cool thing by hitting hard enough/in a certain way". At the moment 3e Solar Brawl seems a bit...not really focused on the pressure points Ki Rata implements, but I think you might have been able to approximate something with 2e's Solar Hero Style? Especially Solar Hero Supremacy. Ki Rata really feels like it fits more in the Celestial tier of martial arts than the Sidereal one.

Also, Knave of Hearts gang reporting in.

[Altasaire]

Unless Abandon has explicitly said something, I don't believe he's literally stopping time. He's just moving so fast that for all appearances it looks like time has stopped. Ki Rata has been about being so fast and strong that the opponent has no chance. I don't see it going to literally warping the fabric of spacetime is a result of the style.

While I also believe it's part of it,

Ki Rata really feels like it fits more in the Celestial tier of martial arts than the Sidereal one.

The best way to describe it is Celestial design principles with Sidereal level of raw power. It doesn't, largely, do the weird esoteric stuff Sidereal styles are renowned for, but vastly outstrips Celestial styles in capacity.

Yes, Brawl does not often break the action economy... but neither does Ki Rata that we have seen? Many Charms in Exalted are fluffed precisely like Ki Rata is - Solomon David's ability to just turn a group of people to blood sprays in the span of a single second may as well be represented by a charm that strikes several enemies around you and is just fluffed like you moved fast and hit them all individually (as several multi-target charms are);

As Solomon demonstrates above, his multi-hit techniques aren't limited to hitting many different people or devastating battlegroups, he can strike one target many individual times, and that breaks action economy. For a more play-friendly Ki Rata, as I said previously, you can emulate such techniques via cribbing from capstones of Mantis and Centipede — but that would be a qualitative nerf and arguably remove the core conceit of Ki Rata's multi-hits as a style.

So like, yes, we could nerf it enough for it to be applicable in play, and maybe that would be acceptable for non-Exalted and Terrestrial-medium practitioners of the style, true. But Ki Rata practiced on the Mastery (Solar/Sidereal) level would either lose the core thing which makes it unique, or become vastly less powerful than described.

In short, my point is that Ki Rata as described in the comic, on the tabletop should actually let you launch 10k decisive attacks as one of it capstones before resetting you to base initiative, not just fluff-stunt that you're doing so. This is obviously unreasonably imbalanced.

[Astralporing]

Being permissive enough of what counted as people being in line of sight and presuming an accessible vantage point from which to view all of Creation weren't exactly mechanics problems.

You didn't really need to literally go slaying creation-wide for it to be problematic. Even assuming more stringent limits of what constitutes line of sight and eye range (like existence of the "draw distance", inability to climb Mt Meru, and not allowing any form of rentgen vision) still left it with a number of issues.

I mean, i know it wasn't the most problematic SMA out there, not by a wide margin, but that was only because few other styles were broken beyond reason.

Still, getting back to the topic, Grandmother Spider Mastery is exactly what the "mass hit" ability of Ki Rata might look like.

[Exthalion]

Edit: Wrong response

[Mizu]

So, last few updates have made it clear that apparently Solomon isn't literally stopping time. Mottom was able to use magic to magic up a weapon for him to start using while he was in the middle of punching the hell out of someone in 'stopped time' so he is just moving so fast that he might as well be stopping time. Which is just slightly less hax then literally stopping time. Also, link only instead of image because of Mottom's kind of NSFW side boob

https://killsixbilliondemons.com/wp-...1/02/BOI31.jpg

[Sith_Happens]

The basic principle of “Concentrate lots of essence into a pinprick” is premium Exalted martial arts material, the question is what that should do in terms of how to wring ten Charms out of it.

[Zale]

The basic principle of “Concentrate lots of essence into a pinprick” is premium Exalted martial arts material, the question is what that should do in terms of how to wring ten Charms out of it.

So I have opinions about this, but decided to format them in the form of homebrew rather than trying to make a post.

Clear Breaths of Annihilation, A Sidereal Martial Arts Style

[Janissary87]

Hmmm. I love Kill Six Billion Demons and love Ki Rata; but like SLS said I don't think it really fits with the milieu of Exalted Martial Arts of any kind. It's not really a job or an archetype or a concept; it's just a way of channeling essence that's BIGGER and STRONGER than all the others.

That's... not what Martial Arts do in Exalted. In Exalted they gotta be balanced around one another. So even though each has its own niche you can't certify that one is absolutely better than another.

Which, is basically the only thing we know about Ki Rata from the fiction. You could more closely emulate it with a selection of Solar Brawl, Integrity, and Resistance charms turned up so far as to break off the knob. You could certainly make a Brawl Supernal Solar Solomon David in Exalted, and give him a Martial Arts tree that mostly steals evocations from Gnomon; but he's not going to be destroying cities in one blow.

[Gayo]

As people have noted, Ki Rata's whole thing is that it's broke, and the lore of it doesn't lead in a straightforward way to the aesthetic of it, but if you just want a style that captures the general aesthetic of Ki Rata, Charcoal March of Spiders with the poison and shaping bits taken out, and the thread gimmicks replaced with air shockwaves or something, isn't too far off. Of course we don't have a 3e CMoS, but I mean I think that "what you'd do if you were homebrewing 3e CMos" will get you in the ballpark.

All that said, if I were actually going to design a PC-tier Ki Rata meant to be balanced against other styles, I'd probably draw inspiration from Snake Style -- the idea of being incredibly powerful but needing to maintain your discipline or else you become vulnerable or your powers go haywire feels a lot like Snake's "always have tons of Initiative" deal.

[KymmetheSeventh]

So I have opinions about this, but decided to format them in the form of homebrew rather than trying to make a post.

Clear Breaths of Annihilation, A Sidereal Martial Arts Style

Yeah no this basically covers everything Ki Rata is without being 'the boring best martial art ever.' It's stupidly destructive, and the kind of thing you would want to strictly regulate the use of. I think this is it. I especially love that it keeps Ki Rata's thing of being based around a breathing technique.