EXALTED RETURNS - The Solar "Backer Charm" PDF

[Weimann]

I've repeated that charm name so often that I don't even know which splat it belonged to, even less what it does, but...

WANT BECOMES NEED!

Sounds Sidereal to me.

Edit: Nope, it's an Ebon Dragon Charm from Ink Monkeys. It's an expansion of Golden Years Tarnished Black. Turns out it creates a positive Intimacy of addicition towards the subject of a memory. At E3+, it causes the target to constantly be in a partially controlled version of the Overindulgeance Limit Break for that specific subject.

[LC1984]

Oh, nice and shiny! I'm glad these charms arent't in the corebook. I already have a problem finding a good place to stash the mighty tome without it getting damaged (or my shelf... ).

Good God, just realized, I get the Deluxe edition too, later, my poor shelf.

[Kyman201]

And, like any other sneak peek or preview, over-wrought claims about what it means mechanically for the whole system (I'm looking at you, thread about one spoiler for DB mechanics ending in sky-is-falling houseruling and the wailing of 'brooooooooken') are premature. Wait til you see the thing before you start in on the 'power creep' and so on, hey? Please? For the sake of keeping some semblance of joy about the damn thing?

And that time when they revealed a couple Socialize Charms in the early days of the Weekly Updates, and people started bitching and complaining about how weak the Charms were.

I call that particular event the "Why We Can't Have Nice Things" thread in my mind.

[hippokrene]

Solar power defines Exalted. We're not done with them—not nearly! We will revisit them eventually. The core book and the backer PDF is not the end, just the beginning.

Can we have a taste?

A preview charm maybe?

[Crumplepunch]

A preview charm maybe?

Historically this has gone poorly.

That said, yes please.

[Imrix]

Are you never going to homebrew up your own fun, custom Charms in order to cover a method or image space that you consider fitting for Solars (or have otherwise had inspired by some appropriate fiction), and not really part of the current selection? Between John and Lucy and the fact that this thing was ordered by Backers of a certain level, it sounds a lot more like that than anything. What were they supposed to do; come back to those Backers and say "sorry about your money and your enthusiasm, but it turns out that there are too many Charms, so your fun ideas have to be dropped from their self-contained supplement"?

Sure, and the backer charms are a definite yay. The 33 extra I'm not so sure about.

"Charm bloat" in 2e was not really about there being too many Charms. Charm bloat was the perverse way in which, from a relatively small corebook, the Charmset of certain splats grew by addition after addition in every single supplement, inducing a constant power creep to mechanics that weren't stable to begin with. In the end, the power-set of Exalts was scattered around a dozen different books that veered wildly in nature, theme and power from their original basis, taking the game in bizarre directions and forcing you to constantly cross-reference everything. That was bloat. "Having a lot of Charms" is not bloat, and it's not inherently bad. Neither is "adding new Charms," depending on how you handle it.

Well, that was a big part of it, yeah, but 'too many Charms' was and is absolutely a problem and a form of Charm bloat as well. On the development end it means there's a wider array of effect-packages to consider when balancing anything new, and on the player side it increases the buy-in price of time and effort needed to read and understand the rules before you can start playing.

Exalted has always been a game that asks a lot of that; the 2e corebook wasn't a small volume by RPG standards. The D&D players handbook, with its general rules, spell lists and multiple class progressions, has never topped 320 pages. The Big Three of the World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness, Vampire, Mage and Werewolf, are 312/294, 309/400 and 309/317. The Shadowrun 20th anniversary core is 368 pages. The 2e corebook was 403 pages, and the single biggest section was an 82-page Charms chapter even before the various additions from Glory to the Most High, Ink Monkeys, errata, Dreams of the First Age... And then 3e blows that out of the water with a 176 page Charms chapter, plus about another 40 for Martial Arts. There are rulebooks smaller than that, so, yeah, I call it a problem.

[hippokrene]

I don't want to exaggerate, but I can say with absolute certainty that there's no way a charm preview could go poorly for some values of poorly.

[MadLetter]

I'd love a preview as well.

Also, very happy to hear that Solars will be revisited at a later date!

[John Mørke]

I'll talk to Rich about putting a Charm preview into a KS update. Thanks for the support, all!

[Totentanz]

Thanks for the update, John, and thanks for giving us bonus material.

Can we not poo-poo the developers simply wanting to give us stuff? We didn't know the wider community would have the opportunity to buy the backer charms (I'm sure most of us suspected it would happen), and we weren't promised more charms so soon. All this is good news. Didn't all y'all's parents teach you to say thank you?

[TheCountAlucard]

I'm looking at you, thread about one spoiler for DB mechanics ending in sky-is-falling…

This implies there was only one of them.

[Throne]

To each their own.

What is this blasphemy!?

[MadLetter]

Can we not poo-poo the developers simply wanting to give us stuff?

Holy shit, please, exactly this.

It would be amazing if, for once, we could not turn into a hazy ball of anger about something like this, were the devs add in a bunch of work for free. Please.

[TheCountAlucard]

Thanks for the update, John…
Didn't all y'all's parents teach you to say thank you?

Whoops! Where are my manners? Thanks, Mr. Mørke!

[JohnDoe244]

It would be amazing if, for once, we could not turn into a hazy ball of anger about something like this, were the devs add in a bunch of work for free. Please.

Apart from how they're selling another book for new players to buy.

I look forward to seeing the new charms.