Originally posted by DrLoveMonkey
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Paranoia combat didn't turn 2e combat into something interesting or fun, and didn't make characters better at standing out and shining in their specialties. It just lead to sameness by forcing everyone into buying a set of Charms to deal with common dangers.
They would say "My character is so awesome at resistance, he can walk naked through a magical icestorm, he can devour a mixed salad of poisonous plants, he can swim in a bath of acid" the problem is that the guy who just grabbed an ox-body can too, just because the numbers are so low the excellency makes difficulty levels pointless.
A 3/3 + Excellency + stunt Solar can dip in acid for a turn safely enough. That's nice. Now tell them they have to swim through acid to get a macguffin and it will probably take ~20 rounds to accomplish. Spending 6m a turn, with lots of turns to fail and take damage eventually leading to some wound penalties and then more fails and more damage, and that's not very impressive. Then your high Resistance invested PC does it without any risk whatsoever and actually looks awesome. And didn't blow 120m.
A Sail character can't stand out without, you know, sailing to happen in the game. Resistance character can't stand out if things like environmental hazards don't last long enough to actually be threats.
I don't think it is, at all, an accident that you're avoiding things like combat where it's abundantly clear that you do not want to get into a fight with just an Excellency as your only boost.
Think about it, if nobody had any excellencies how would Solars retain the ability to so easily no-sell challenges? Yes, the charms to do so would still be there, but it would take a fairly significant investment to purchase charms for each and every one of those cases.
Basically Solar with an excellency and nothing else beats the absolute pants off a Vaktri, which is an elemental gemstone assassin. Without that excellency you need, I don't know, at least three or four melee charms to do it, and even then you'd still have an actual fight.
Hell, Attributes at 3, Melee 3, Specialty in swords, and a normal straight sword? It might be a bit of a slog (they have enough soak that if you want to crash them before making a decisive since nibbling risks them using one of their combat Charms more often, it'll take a bit), but that's plenty to beat one. The idea that you'd need multiple Solar Melee Charms without the Excellency is just silly.
I'm sure there's better examples for you in the books.
Even so, the problem is that you're not addressing or refuting the point that Excellencies are a symptom here. If it wasn't Excellencies, it would be Excellent Strike, or OWTB, or whatever bread and butter Charms that would set the baseline of "Solars are badass with little investment" Charms until they're all excised under this logic and then all the deep investment Charms become the new low hanging fruit and get axed and so on until there are no Charms because any Charm impedes characters from being appropriately challenged by whatever NPC QC or example hazard benchmark.
Show me how the problem is actually Excellencies, and not all of the other things in the system that result in what you're talking about already.
That should matter, it really, really should matter, but it doesn't.
I'm really not trying to be a dick here, but how, exactly, does giving every Solar the ability to double their dice cap for 10+ abilities for free not inflate the capabilities of players to roll lots of dice and mess up the difficulty scale?
Excellencies don't mess up the scale, they just acknowledge the scale isn't really for Solars. The game lacks one for them (outside of Feats of Strength anyway).
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