Thoughs on 'Rule Breaking'

[Simon Darkstep]

When I get stuck in one of these, I ask my players why something might not work. "Help me out guys, it'll be a short adventure if you can bypass this already!"

Also, we have a mechanic called Tilt. It's an explicitly cheaty pile of extra dice that evil bosses and the like can use. If we need to use it, Tilt decreases as the Circle completes story sections and dismantles more of the Bad Guy Fun Stuff. The players are aware of it, and I allow something like a dramatic War roll to size up relative power levels, including the present Tilt.

[Aquillion]

What I find so silly about that is that (outside of some stuff in DotFA) Solar Medicine isn't an effective tool for stopping an entire plague and more just saving the people directly in front of you.

Yeah, part of this is scenario writers trying to cram traditional fantasy-RPG quests intended for a lower-power setting into Exalted like a square peg in a round hole... but when it comes to medicine specifically, part of the problem is that Exalted has never really had a clear grasp of what a Heroic Medicine story looks like.

Medicine often comes across as binary in a very awkward way - either you activate one charm and make the entire story go away, or it does nothing and provides no help whatsoever. You can play out the Healing of Éowyn, but that's pretty much it, and even then Medicine's narrative heft is pretty much limited to that one scene "I can heal this, which no one else can." On top of that even that story has serious problems that make it hard to use as a central point of the game (Exalted can't really be full of ailments that strictly require a Solar to heal, because that would sort of suck when you lack a Solar Healer in your circle. Even requiring a Celestial healer or even an Exalted Healer runs into the same problems.)

[Lioness]

Yeah, Medicine's better than it was in 2nd edition but that's because the game moved away from perfect spam and rocket tag rather than any particular insights into its role.

It's weird for Ex3 especially because Craft went out of its way to have a system that made you view every interaction as a potential opportunity for crafting while leaving Medicine focused characters to wait for the next PC injury or plot point.

[Jefepato]

The thing from Dungeon of the Mad Mage doesn't bother me as much because warding against teleportation and whatnot is something you can actually do within the D&D rules.

Warding the entire goddamn dungeon sounds like an unreasonably large endeavor, but it's not strictly against the rules. Apparently Halaster Blackcloak has nothing better to do with his time.

It's obnoxious, and definitely lazy writing (it would be more interesting if there were some ways around it), but nowhere near as bullshit as "no Solar Charm can affect this disease."

The walls, floors and ceilings being totally immune to magic is 100% bullshit though. I'd be fine with it being unusually difficult, or needing to make a caster level check, but it shouldn't be impossible.

(Also, it's not "no magical message can reach those within from without." It's just, very specifically, "Sending spells targeted at Halaster from inside Undermountain get redirected to his secretary." Any other communication stuff, other than that one spell targeted at that one guy from within that particular dungeon, works fine.)