So, this is the core concept of the house rule:
The game's mixing of narrative time units (ticks, turns, actions, scenes, sessions, stories) and chronological times (hours, days, weeks, months, seasons, years, etc.) is an inherent cause of a lot of other issues in Exalted's systems. What started this specifically was the "slow" mote regen out of combat still generally being fast enough that the PCs can just rest for an hour or two between scenes and top up motes. This leads to a difficulty challenging PCs because they have no need to ration motes unless you constantly intrude on scenes with chronological time constraints. Charms might have a reset of "once a session." Two sessions might each cover a day back to back in-game time, allowing you to use the Charm once a day, while another session might have a 3 month hand-waved sailing journey that means you only get to use the Charm one in a season.
You can also see this in things like training times (yes, a lot of us aren't fans of them in general, I don't use them as they are) and house rules to them. Fast paced games where multiple sessions cover a very short period of in-game time either allow minimal to any character advancement, or the training times need t just be house ruled out. Slow paced games with massive down times can mean the training times are largely superfluous as your character's will regularly have months to train.
The proposed solution start's simply:
No mechanics reference chronological time units. Obvious in-character the characters experience days and hours and so on, but the rules only use narrative time units. Any current rules that reference chronological time units will need to be redone to use narrative units instead.
Some secondary solutions necessary to implement that successfully:
1) Session is replaced with "Act" as a narrative unit that isn't tied to RL time. An Act is a series of Scenes that resolve a significant part of a Story. Normally an Act takes a game session, though sometimes an long session might allow for two Acts o be covered, while shorter sessions might spread an Act over two or three game nights. I feel this is a fairly self explanatory change (also, it helps stress that a Chronicle is supposed to have multiple Stories in it as the three act and five act structures are relatively well known ideas of how many Acts should make up a Story even without setting a specific number).
2) Downtime needs to become more rigorously defined in the rules to make it easier for STs and players to communicate how much narrative can happen during a downtime, and to keep make sure time-gated systems functional. As such downtimes would get divided into different tiers based primarily on narrative on-screen time, with a guide to what sorts of chronological time unit mechanics they'd be used for (so Exalts naturally regen 5m per short downtime as regen is normally done over an hour, or 10m with a medium downtime if they spend it resting). If a mechanic specifies it requires a given amount of downtime, on-screen time does not count towards the requirement (if it takes two medium downtimes to travel between two cities, five scenes of events along the way do not reduce it to one medium downtime to get there); though some sub-systems might make an exception if it suits the purpose (enough action scenes that a crafter can work their current project into and make significant progress towards such as finding rare materials to include in an Artifact, or helpful diagrams in a First Age lost library could reduce downtime requirements).
The current proposed expansion of downtime stands as:
Short Downtime - 2 Scenes worth of non-downtime mechanics (such as mote regen), or replaces an a few hours.
Medium Downtime - 5 Scenes worth of non-downtime mechanics, an Act, or replaces a few days.
Long Downtime - 15 Scenes worth of non-downtime mechanics, 3 Acts, a Story, or replaces a few weeks.
Possible addition (instead of just stacking X Long Downtimes to fairly high numbers to cover a year):
Extreme Downtime - 50 Scenes, 9 Acts, 3 Stories, a seasons worth of time or longer.
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Obviously a lot of work would need to go into editing all the books to fully implement it this. Though I feel each individual edit is simple enough that it would be more time consuming than brain wracking. I also feel its worth it because having all mechanical time units working on the same type of time smooths out the mechanical experience, while making the game more flexible to different playstyles.
That said, I'm still very much spitballing the numbers based on my own impression of what the system tends to value, and how games seem to run.
The game's mixing of narrative time units (ticks, turns, actions, scenes, sessions, stories) and chronological times (hours, days, weeks, months, seasons, years, etc.) is an inherent cause of a lot of other issues in Exalted's systems. What started this specifically was the "slow" mote regen out of combat still generally being fast enough that the PCs can just rest for an hour or two between scenes and top up motes. This leads to a difficulty challenging PCs because they have no need to ration motes unless you constantly intrude on scenes with chronological time constraints. Charms might have a reset of "once a session." Two sessions might each cover a day back to back in-game time, allowing you to use the Charm once a day, while another session might have a 3 month hand-waved sailing journey that means you only get to use the Charm one in a season.
You can also see this in things like training times (yes, a lot of us aren't fans of them in general, I don't use them as they are) and house rules to them. Fast paced games where multiple sessions cover a very short period of in-game time either allow minimal to any character advancement, or the training times need t just be house ruled out. Slow paced games with massive down times can mean the training times are largely superfluous as your character's will regularly have months to train.
The proposed solution start's simply:
No mechanics reference chronological time units. Obvious in-character the characters experience days and hours and so on, but the rules only use narrative time units. Any current rules that reference chronological time units will need to be redone to use narrative units instead.
Some secondary solutions necessary to implement that successfully:
1) Session is replaced with "Act" as a narrative unit that isn't tied to RL time. An Act is a series of Scenes that resolve a significant part of a Story. Normally an Act takes a game session, though sometimes an long session might allow for two Acts o be covered, while shorter sessions might spread an Act over two or three game nights. I feel this is a fairly self explanatory change (also, it helps stress that a Chronicle is supposed to have multiple Stories in it as the three act and five act structures are relatively well known ideas of how many Acts should make up a Story even without setting a specific number).
2) Downtime needs to become more rigorously defined in the rules to make it easier for STs and players to communicate how much narrative can happen during a downtime, and to keep make sure time-gated systems functional. As such downtimes would get divided into different tiers based primarily on narrative on-screen time, with a guide to what sorts of chronological time unit mechanics they'd be used for (so Exalts naturally regen 5m per short downtime as regen is normally done over an hour, or 10m with a medium downtime if they spend it resting). If a mechanic specifies it requires a given amount of downtime, on-screen time does not count towards the requirement (if it takes two medium downtimes to travel between two cities, five scenes of events along the way do not reduce it to one medium downtime to get there); though some sub-systems might make an exception if it suits the purpose (enough action scenes that a crafter can work their current project into and make significant progress towards such as finding rare materials to include in an Artifact, or helpful diagrams in a First Age lost library could reduce downtime requirements).
The current proposed expansion of downtime stands as:
Short Downtime - 2 Scenes worth of non-downtime mechanics (such as mote regen), or replaces an a few hours.
Medium Downtime - 5 Scenes worth of non-downtime mechanics, an Act, or replaces a few days.
Long Downtime - 15 Scenes worth of non-downtime mechanics, 3 Acts, a Story, or replaces a few weeks.
Possible addition (instead of just stacking X Long Downtimes to fairly high numbers to cover a year):
Extreme Downtime - 50 Scenes, 9 Acts, 3 Stories, a seasons worth of time or longer.
-----------
Obviously a lot of work would need to go into editing all the books to fully implement it this. Though I feel each individual edit is simple enough that it would be more time consuming than brain wracking. I also feel its worth it because having all mechanical time units working on the same type of time smooths out the mechanical experience, while making the game more flexible to different playstyles.
That said, I'm still very much spitballing the numbers based on my own impression of what the system tends to value, and how games seem to run.
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