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[Sunder the Gold]

In previous editions, some characters became sorcerers through cutting off a part of their body as a sacrifice. Do you plan to bring that back in a Sorcerous Initiation in the future? For the Sidereals or the Abyssals?


Does the Lunar Charm Shadow-Mind Meditation create a new, temporary persona each time, or does the Shadow-Mind permanently retain its Intimacies? If the later, does it always share the Defining Intimacies of the original mind, even if the original mind developed a new Defining Intimacy since the Shadow-Mind was born?

[Sunder the Gold]

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[Sunder the Gold]

The existence of nations suggests otherwise.

If nationalism didn't exist, people would be merely tribal (which is just ethnic nationalism) or associate only with people who held the same ideologies (which is virtually impossible without an internet that enables you to communicate with people across the world more often than people within your own local community)....

[Sunder the Gold]

Definitely, I'm fed up with the Storyteller system. Specifically its Attributes and Abilities, and how those relate to Castes/Aspects, and how Ability-based Charms ruin the game's attempt to evoke the Martial Arts genre.

As long as most Exalted base their Charms on Abilities, and as long as Archery, Brawl, Melee, and Thrown remain Abilities on which Charms are based, and those are all somehow separate and distinct from "Martial Arts", you're never going to have a proper Martial Arts game.

The fact that Exalted is firmly a game designed around playing demigods...

[Sunder the Gold]

Flesh Aspects should have something useful for combat that helps them fulfill the fantasy of being Alex Mercer from the [Prototype] game. Maybe they're just stronger or tougher, or maybe they can better avoid ruining body-parts for Charms that carry sacrificial costs, or maybe they have the easiest time replacing ruined parts with new parts (especially parts taken from the refuse of the battlefield).

They're the Aspect meant to represent the Frankenstein's Monster who is unstoppably violent. The uncontrollable and relentless abomination that destroys everything in its path. That is,...

[Sunder the Gold]

No, and never....

[Sunder the Gold]

Find and read Embalming: The Another Tale of Frankenstein.

It's made by the same man who made Rurouni Kenshin and Buso Renkin. The gimmick of that universe is making Frankenstein monsters with freaky new biological features, many of them taken to a supernatural extreme.

You've got characters who harden their skin into armor, characters that treat their flesh like rubber, characters that dangerously accelerate their heart-rate for super-strength or to pressurize cutting blasts of their own blood, and characters that leave extra eyeballs all over the place as security ...

[Sunder the Gold]

Third Edition is specifically intended to avoid giving any official stance on exactly what kind of person the Sun is, what he’s doing, or how much he’s paying attention.

He is whatever your storyteller wants him to be.

[Sunder the Gold]

But basically, getting away from a battle-group can be really hard.

First of all, you need to Disengage if they're at close range. If they're spread out enough to surround you, you suffer a -3 penalty to the disengage roll, while their countering roll is not inherently penalized in turn.

If they Engage you, you cannot even try to Disengage until their rounds of control are exhausted.

If they knock you prone, you cannot even try to Disengage until you rise from prone, which becomes a rolled action and counts as your movement action for the round.

[Sunder the Gold]

How does Disengaging and Rushing work within difficult terrain?

[Sunder the Gold]

Could I knock someone prone with a disarming gambit then?...

[Sunder the Gold]

That's not what you said earlier: http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/m...64#post1346764

Unless we're miscommunicating. By "retreat from the battlegroup", I meant moving from close range of the battle-group out to short range from it.

If the battle-group isn't surrounding the character and imposing the "difficult terrain" penalty, the character can simply use a Move action without penalty or special cost.



So, a Size 1 group with enough room to spread out and no reason to be in...

[Sunder the Gold]

Penalties to movement actions could be important if the battlegroup is fighting together with an individual character ally, but otherwise the BG's individual character target doesn't need to disengage to retreat from the battlegroup, yes?

What do you see as the minimum Size battlegroup that can cause an individual character such problems, and how easily could they do it?



Okay, but I see a "compromise" that follows the rules as written.

Unarmed savaging attacks treat the victim's Defense as 0, not Melee attacks by the grappler. But...

[Sunder the Gold]

Ah, but I remember that moving through a battlegroup counts as difficult terrain.

A large enough battlegroup might fill multiple range bands, and if it can move so that a single character is a close range of the group's center, so the character is obviously surrounded on all sides, the character's ability to retreat could be slowed even if they avoid being engaged or knocked prone.



I don't think that's good, and Vance might have contradicted it.

But I understand this might make savaging attacks more powerful than intended, especially with a...

[Sunder the Gold]

Can a battlegroup grapple/engage only one character at a time? One character for each dot of size?

Logically, there has to be some limit.

[Sunder the Gold]

Yes, sorry.



I would definitely give a battle-group of beasts the ability to knock someone prone with at least the initial savaging attack following the grapple, to facilitate dogpiling and devouring people alive.

No need to give Grimm a special restrain action, since that's not what they do, but battle-groups of other creatures...


On that note, do you ever use Might? Or, when you use a battle-group of Blood Apes, do you just let the battle-group use the Blood Ape Charms?

Rather than using Might to abstract the mixed abilities...

[Sunder the Gold]

Do characters within close range of battle-groups not become "embattled", and thus can retreat without a Disengage action?



So a battle-group of javelin-throwers or stone-slingers could "grapple / engage" entirely with their Thrown rating.



Didn't Vance rule that characters could make Melee-savaging attacks in a grapple? Like shanking someone with a knife, or choking someone out with the haft of your goremaul that you're holding against their throat....

[Sunder the Gold]

Not every tackler will have a weapon with the smashing tag, and it shouldn't be necessary to have a cestus.

Increasing the cost of the grappling gambit could be seen as substituting for the need (and cost) of using a cestus or hammer to make an immediate savaging attack count as smashing.

And the idea is that this custom gambit WOULD require the attacker to go prone as well. NOT needing to go prone was a factor of using a normal grapple and then using the savaging attack itself to knock the target prone by whatever means.


But however you pull it off,...

[Sunder the Gold]

As a RWBY fan, I've recently been exploring how THIS is the thing that makes Grimm really dangerous.

That is: Almost any Creature of Grimm has at least as much mass as (and frequently more than) a human being, and Grimm usually try to tackle and pin targets to the ground.

This is why I've been asking about how to model that capability.


In the Red Trailer, Ruby Rose made exterminating battle-groups of Beowolves look easy because she avoided all but one attack, and that attack only knocked her back rather than down. Since she consistently avoided getting...

[Sunder the Gold]

Really? Is that from a later version of the backer documents?

But it doesn't refute what I said about the smashing tag being incompatible with gambits.

I will concede that succeeding at a grappling gambit and using a cestus, or Stone Fist Strike, or Rolling Boulder Blow, or (apparently) Force of the Mountain on an immediate savaging smashing attack (Raging Tiger Pounce wouldn't need the attack to be smashing) WOULD sufficiently model tackling an opponent to the ground with a clinch.

And it wouldn't even require the attacker to go prone as well....