Hey all! DrLoveMonkey here! Last time we had a big exalted kickstarter, I wrote this*. Because Dragonblooded have, over the years, become my favourite splat of Exalted, even as my appreciation for all of them grew. It started out analyzing combat differences between Solars and DBs and it became a thread reviewing DBs in general and particularly contrasting them with Solars. Why would you want to play a weaker exalt basically. Over the course of that thread people seemed to appreciate it, summarizing the different abilities and the elements, their personalities. Fire aspects being powerful but fragile if they started losing, ect. It makes it easier to read through the charms yourself when you do go through them, and gives you inspiration for your characters, I think anyway.
I got some requests to do that again when Lunars/Realm came out. So here it is. I'm going to break things down into headings because I feel it helps people absorb information and it makes it clearer to read in general. I'm also very open to being corrected, love to fix any mistakes, and I'm open to discussion, but if it starts to pollute the thread TOO much, I will ask people to take it elsewhere.
This guide is both for new players just getting into Exalted, and wanting to know what the deal is with Lunars, as well as veteran players getting into 3e Lunars who want a summary of their changes and what's dope about them. (Hint: it's a lot. A lot is dope.)
Housekeeping
Why Wouldn't You Want to Play a Lunar?
Attribute Exalted
Lunar Exalted are what's called Attribute based exalted. This means that instead of basing charms off of their ability values, they base it of of their attribute values, and that, in turn, changes everything. For one, there's only 9 attributes, and 25 abilities, which means that, all things being equal, each attribute covers almost 3 times as much as an ability. So that means that they have 3 times the number of charms in each attribute as other exalts have in an ability right? Nope, not really. Actually what's way more common is that their charms just do 3 times as much.
Take their decisive multi-attack charm for one, Octopus and Spider Barrage. It lets you do up to 5 decisive attacks, based on essence, and even switch between abilities for each attack! Comparing that to the Solar decisive multi-attack...well...which one? Brawl and Melee have kind of similar ones, Martial Arts is all over the place, and Thrown and Archery don't have anything comparable. Dragonblooded even less so. So a Lunar can do with OaSB in Archery or Thrown or even MA something that Solars and DBs just can't, and then they turn around and do it for Brawl and Melee just for fun.
This diversity in power, and wide applicability is HUGE and shows up all over the Lunar charmset as, I think, their greatest strength. Forget shapeshifting, shapeshifting is just an aspect of this broad power expressed in it's own special way. Lunar spearfighter loses her spear? No worries, hands are almost as good. The foe takes to the air? Whatever, pick up a bow, the charms work there too. Don't have a bow? Throw the spear then. The freedom to pick isn't absolutely limitless, but because the Lunars don't even use abilities for their excellency caps, the absolute most you're losing is 5 dice, and likely closer to 3.
This is especially true because even their excellencies are exclusively attribute based. Either adding up to (Attribute) dice or (Attribute + Other-Attribute) with a proper stunt. So any ability that you have less than 5 dots in is really not losing you many dice in comparison to your pool. Going with a fully maxed out mundane light attack on a 3 dot ability vs a 5 dot one is going from 24 dice to 22, that's hardly anything.
Character Freedom
This freedom is almost mind-boggling coming from an ability exalt. Do you defend yourself with evasion most but get hit with an undodgeable attack? Who cares! Your parry is almost as good anyway!
It doesn't just give you freedom within your character creation though, it gives you freedom to change your character on the fly. A bit anyway. Say you're a Full Moon Lunar and you are a sneaky stealth archer, you hide in the shadows at the edge of a forest and pepper Realm caravans with lightning fast ambushes. Then let's say you've been playing this character for a while and you really kind of like the idea of just getting in there and mixing it up with a pair of daggers instead. As a Solar or a DB you'd either have to start trucking down a path of huge xp investment, or change characters, or just wistfully imagine how cool it would be. For a Lunar that's like, maybe 9xp, which can be Lunar xp, and bam, you're ready to go mix it up in melee. Happy hunting you newborn master of all things blade.
It's totally pervasive, every charm purchase, every attribute dot increase, makes you better in a thousand different ways. The only time you would ever need to diversify your investment, or make a new character, is if you wanted to be good at talking, or thinking, instead of fighting. Even then unless you really wanted to be mega good at talking it wouldn't take much investment to be awesome at it.
Unfortunately this post is already so long that most people probably won't read it, so I need to stop before talking about Shapeshifting and get into a little more numbers. After that I'll go down each road of say, Influence or Heart's Blood, or War, and see how they do each compared to the other exalted. It's going to be a big chunk each time so it'll take a while between posts, but hopefully this can help out aspiring Lunars as well as some older Shahan-yas. This thread is not starting out nearly as focused as the last one but maybe that's fitting? Hopefully it isn't MUCH worse anyway.
*Check it out if you're interested, but read the "housekeeping" section in this post before you do.
I got some requests to do that again when Lunars/Realm came out. So here it is. I'm going to break things down into headings because I feel it helps people absorb information and it makes it clearer to read in general. I'm also very open to being corrected, love to fix any mistakes, and I'm open to discussion, but if it starts to pollute the thread TOO much, I will ask people to take it elsewhere.
This guide is both for new players just getting into Exalted, and wanting to know what the deal is with Lunars, as well as veteran players getting into 3e Lunars who want a summary of their changes and what's dope about them. (Hint: it's a lot. A lot is dope.)
Housekeeping
Why Wouldn't You Want to Play a Lunar?
Attribute Exalted
Lunar Exalted are what's called Attribute based exalted. This means that instead of basing charms off of their ability values, they base it of of their attribute values, and that, in turn, changes everything. For one, there's only 9 attributes, and 25 abilities, which means that, all things being equal, each attribute covers almost 3 times as much as an ability. So that means that they have 3 times the number of charms in each attribute as other exalts have in an ability right? Nope, not really. Actually what's way more common is that their charms just do 3 times as much.
Take their decisive multi-attack charm for one, Octopus and Spider Barrage. It lets you do up to 5 decisive attacks, based on essence, and even switch between abilities for each attack! Comparing that to the Solar decisive multi-attack...well...which one? Brawl and Melee have kind of similar ones, Martial Arts is all over the place, and Thrown and Archery don't have anything comparable. Dragonblooded even less so. So a Lunar can do with OaSB in Archery or Thrown or even MA something that Solars and DBs just can't, and then they turn around and do it for Brawl and Melee just for fun.
This diversity in power, and wide applicability is HUGE and shows up all over the Lunar charmset as, I think, their greatest strength. Forget shapeshifting, shapeshifting is just an aspect of this broad power expressed in it's own special way. Lunar spearfighter loses her spear? No worries, hands are almost as good. The foe takes to the air? Whatever, pick up a bow, the charms work there too. Don't have a bow? Throw the spear then. The freedom to pick isn't absolutely limitless, but because the Lunars don't even use abilities for their excellency caps, the absolute most you're losing is 5 dice, and likely closer to 3.
This is especially true because even their excellencies are exclusively attribute based. Either adding up to (Attribute) dice or (Attribute + Other-Attribute) with a proper stunt. So any ability that you have less than 5 dots in is really not losing you many dice in comparison to your pool. Going with a fully maxed out mundane light attack on a 3 dot ability vs a 5 dot one is going from 24 dice to 22, that's hardly anything.
Character Freedom
This freedom is almost mind-boggling coming from an ability exalt. Do you defend yourself with evasion most but get hit with an undodgeable attack? Who cares! Your parry is almost as good anyway!
It doesn't just give you freedom within your character creation though, it gives you freedom to change your character on the fly. A bit anyway. Say you're a Full Moon Lunar and you are a sneaky stealth archer, you hide in the shadows at the edge of a forest and pepper Realm caravans with lightning fast ambushes. Then let's say you've been playing this character for a while and you really kind of like the idea of just getting in there and mixing it up with a pair of daggers instead. As a Solar or a DB you'd either have to start trucking down a path of huge xp investment, or change characters, or just wistfully imagine how cool it would be. For a Lunar that's like, maybe 9xp, which can be Lunar xp, and bam, you're ready to go mix it up in melee. Happy hunting you newborn master of all things blade.
It's totally pervasive, every charm purchase, every attribute dot increase, makes you better in a thousand different ways. The only time you would ever need to diversify your investment, or make a new character, is if you wanted to be good at talking, or thinking, instead of fighting. Even then unless you really wanted to be mega good at talking it wouldn't take much investment to be awesome at it.
Unfortunately this post is already so long that most people probably won't read it, so I need to stop before talking about Shapeshifting and get into a little more numbers. After that I'll go down each road of say, Influence or Heart's Blood, or War, and see how they do each compared to the other exalted. It's going to be a big chunk each time so it'll take a while between posts, but hopefully this can help out aspiring Lunars as well as some older Shahan-yas. This thread is not starting out nearly as focused as the last one but maybe that's fitting? Hopefully it isn't MUCH worse anyway.
*Check it out if you're interested, but read the "housekeeping" section in this post before you do.
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