Exalted combat: one year in, what do we think?

[Fata-Ku]

4) Specialties don't make you "twice as good". They give you a grand total of ...... One Die.

1 die is the difference between having 39% chance to roll at least 6 successes and 48%; and it *doubles* your odds of rolling at least 10 successes (10 vs 11 dice). There are games where people would kill for those odds (like Eve Online).

Don't dismiss it so flippantly, it'll save your character one day :P

[BrilliantRain]

In those situations where the combat has started to turn into a grind fest and everyone knows who's going to win, but actually going through the rest of the combat would be an annoying slog, has anyone tried just calling it in favor of the currently winning side and narrating the end of the fight? Or have one side try to run away or surrender?

I haven't had occasion to do this in my game yet, but I was wondering if anyone had and how well it went, especially if the players were the losing team.

[Irked]

In those situations where the combat has started to turn into a grind fest and everyone knows who's going to win, but actually going through the rest of the combat would be an annoying slog, has anyone tried just calling it in favor of the currently winning side and narrating the end of the fight? Or have one side try to run away or surrender?

I haven't had occasion to do this in my game yet, but I was wondering if anyone had and how well it went, especially if the players were the losing team.

I did it, by having a narrative interruption come up (specifically, "Surprise, your manse is being attacked by your Godzilla-sized Lunar mate; maybe stop fighting the demon who also wants to protect the manse"). That worked reasonably well.

I don't think I could use that (or, well, that sort of thing) on too regular of a basis, though. And, well: if you're fighting a guy, you want to win, y'know? Or at least I do. I want to finish grinding him into the dirt by dint of superior mechanical prowess, not cutscene my way to the end - that just feels unsatisfying. YMMV, as ever.

I have no idea how "narrate the players losing" would go. The only time I've ever seen that tried, the players insisted on fighting to the bitter end, even with the OOC knowledge that they were just going to be knocked out.

[putty]

That would be a very different experience, then, yeah. My combat-heavy player's wielding an artifact shield and takes a round for 5BS instead of ISE.

If you can live through his opening strike, yes. That's the problem for my party: the party might win, but someone would likely die in his first volley.

The crippling wound rules have worked well for me in the case of players who were incapacitated by lethal damage. Well...if they don't mind losing an eye or limb.

[Remedy]

And, well: if you're fighting a guy, you want to win, y'know? Or at least I do. I want to finish grinding him into the dirt by dint of superior mechanical prowess, not cutscene my way to the end - that just feels unsatisfying. YMMV, as ever.

You did win by dint of superior mechanical prowess. This just lets you skip five rounds of basically nothing happening.

Though I don't think I'd go for obviously saying "yeah this is gonna take forever but you'll definitely win, let's just skip it," I'd probably say that whatever had put the bad guys into their "definitely going to lose" situation had demoralized or greatly weakened them and that you now had the perfect chance to finish them off. Cue the players pulling their most evocative finishing stunts and ending the battle in a memorable blaze right when they've overcome the main challenge/tension, rather than getting the metaphorical (or perhaps not) response of "well that was fun and tense, great win everyone, now let's- wait, we have to keep rolling attacks before we can move on with the game? Uh, okay I guess."

[Isator Levi]

Irked I don't want this to come across as disparaging your experience or perspective, because this is obviously something that is very significant to you and an issue that would do well with a resolution.

I just want to say that your descriptions, as regards my own taste, sound like they would create some scenarios that I myself would fin compelling. The idea of two sides fighting each other to exhaustion, with the result inconclusive and possibly necessitating a mutual withdrawal, especially considering my own taste for treating Incapacitating damage as "is immobile and dying on an indefinite timespan that lets you get them to a medic (with the associated complications of payment and recovery time" rather than needing to write up a new character sheet. For my part, that would create an organic impetus to draw away from a fight that does not seem as though it can be concluded at that time.

I don't know, apart from it being an image of epic personages battling that I'm actually attracted to, it also feels like something that could entail some extended feuds.

I don't have an answer yet regarding what would need to be changed so that the battle has a satisfying resolution at whatever round is appropriate (probably often the second, occasionally as high as the fourth or fifth for somebody very important).

I don't know; this is a very technical discussion that I can't contribute much to, partially from the lack of experience (getting anything more than the occasional practice skirmish is difficult at the moment), partially from it being an area I don't have much of a head for. I just wanted to relate some of the images that your descriptions gave to me.

[Sorcerous Overlord]

The crippling wound rules have worked well for me in the case of players who were incapacitated by lethal damage. Well...if they don't mind losing an eye or limb.

psssh. Medical charms will have you back to normal in like a week. or two. or after finding the flower that only blooms at on the crown of the king of flame, in his caldera lair.

Also, I'm confused how combat turns into a "slog". with 5m back per turn, are you just not having enough motes to pull of charm combos? are there low mote cost charms that build up sufficient initiative?

[Katana1515]

The sheer lengthiness of some combats can make things turn into a slog if they go on too long. Thats just inevitable if the same fights been rattling on for a few hours, players are struggling to think of stunts, victory looks inevitable so theirs no tension, but Its still gonna take a round or 2 to mop up the remnants. It happens in all systems to one extent or another, Exalted might be worse than normal due to the relatively high cognitive load on players (they get tired and drained faster.) I would recommend trying to twist things around as the ST once that sets in, enemies try and disengage, or pull off some bigger plan that requires rapid/sudden action from the PCs.

[Irked]

Irked I don't want this to come across as disparaging your experience or perspective, because this is obviously something that is very significant to you and an issue that would do well with a resolution.

I just want to say that your descriptions, as regards my own taste, sound like they would create some scenarios that I myself would fin compelling. The idea of two sides fighting each other to exhaustion, with the result inconclusive and possibly necessitating a mutual withdrawal, especially considering my own taste for treating Incapacitating damage as "is immobile and dying on an indefinite timespan that lets you get them to a medic (with the associated complications of payment and recovery time" rather than needing to write up a new character sheet. For my part, that would create an organic impetus to draw away from a fight that does not seem as though it can be concluded at that time.

Also, I'm confused how combat turns into a "slog". with 5m back per turn, are you just not having enough motes to pull of charm combos? are there low mote cost charms that build up sufficient initiative?

Let me see if I can field both of these at once, because they seem to run to the same basic theme.

So let's talk about that fight the other day with pseudo-Octavian. He wasn't, really; he was a big tentacled pentapus that sprayed acid whenever the players cut down into another wound level, whose die-adder was capped by the number of legs still attached (and whose legs could be severed with a Gambit). The early stages of the fight were very dynamic; people pumped attacks with Charms, busted out their once-a-scene powers, charged up to full anima and then unloaded Peony Blossom Attack, and so on. As well, the demon had interesting things to do: big spray attacks that hit an entire range band, counterattacks that also grappled the target, etc. If nothing else, everybody had lots of Initiative to throw around.

And that worked for maybe three rounds, I don't remember now. And then we hit the following situation:

1. Everybody was either Crashed, at minimum Initiative, or at best slightly up from just Crashing someone else. That last was a pretty finite resource, though - for the players, there was just the one thing that could be Crashed, and only about every three rounds at that. Given the amount of armor it had, they couldn't otherwise milk a lot of Initiative from it.
2. Everyone was mote tapped. Immediately, almost all of the interesting decisions went away; there was, for instance, nothing more clever for the Dawn to do than to say, "I'ma pop Excellency Strike, plus 2m for dice" every round.
3. The outcome of the fight was not in question in any way. If the demon had started successfully beating on someone, that person could have turtled while the other two kept up the attack, but really, given that they could just re-crash it at will, it had no meaningful chance to deal further significant damage to them. They were going to beat it to death with sticks. Except...
4. It still had about ten health levels remaining. Maybe ten is the wrong number, but it was a fair few; again, look at Octavian for reference.

So, to your point, Isator - maybe that would be a cool story, but the trouble is that it assumes an inconclusive result. This wasn't; the writing was on the wall. But we had probably another half hour of just grinding before it would have resolved. I am not sure whether my players could tell this was true, but I definitely could.

Now, as with any post-mortem, it's possible to look at this description and say, "Well, but you should have..." - and that's exactly what I did. The good folks at RPGnet said, "Well, you need multiple antagonists, maybe a battle group!" So fine; fine! Last week we had another fight, this time with a big mass of ghosts that one player's past incarnation had tried to smush together in an ill-conceived attempt to revive his son. That hadn't worked; instead, he got a big blob of mouths and hands and unyielding rage. Playing that out, we had a big ghost battle group (the blob), plus three extrusions: a necromancer-ghost, a kill-you-die ghost, and a ghost with a shield who flurried Defending the necromancer and commanding the battle group.

And that was an interesting fight! For about two rounds, maybe three. Then the Dawn dumped his Initiative smacking the battlegroup - which did lots of damage to the BG, and left him entirely tapped out - and everyone ran out of motes. Hitting the BG didn't grant Init, because battlegroups. The BG hitting the players, which it did, accomplished nothing but reducing the total amount of Init on the board. The players could countermagic the necromancer, and basically spent their 5m per turn making sure they didn't get hit back. Result: the ghosts had no realistic chance of hitting the players, the players had a very slow crawl to get enough fuel to kill the ghosts, and there were basically no interesting decisions to make along the way.

Again, I'm sure I could have done something better, but that's multiple very different fights in a row that devolve into, "Well, I guess you're going to win eventually." And that gets oooooold.

[DraMaFlo]

Hitting the BG didn't grant Init, because battlegroups.

I think you're still supposed to get initiative when you damage the battle group

[Synapse]

one year in?
Little news from the start. Mostly the expected flaws. Still lovin' it.

[TheCountAlucard]

I think you're still supposed to get initiative when you damage the battle group

Sorta, you get one automatically for successfully hitting with a Withering attack, regardless of whether or not damage is dealt.

[semicasual]

Sorta, you get one automatically for successfully hitting with a Withering attack, regardless of whether or not damage is dealt.

You also get an initiative break bonus (as if you had crashed them) if your attack causes the group to lose a point of Size.

So, +1 init for hitting them with withering, +6 if your withering attack reduced their Magnitude to zero.

[ParanoiaCombo]

Allowing for the fact that I've essentially been using EX3 combat for roughly 2 years now, my view on it largely remains the same:

Combat in EX3 is only fun when a major complication makes the outcome of the battle not about the outright defeat of the opponent, at least when playing as Solars. Taking someone alive, forcing a surrender, a mob of citizens the Solars don't want to hurt, fighting on the wing of an airship where each knockback hit causes people to fall off instead of grinding them down for 3 rounds, etc. These are all infinitely superior to straight combat, even with minor complications.

It is my opinion that 90% of combats should be glossed over when running a game for Solars if they are even marginally combat competent. Is this a failure of the system (to me)? That question I think is the more interesting one, and my answer is no. As a powered up Dawn, I don't want 2-3 fights per story which are challenging. If that's the rate at which this happens, then it really cuts into the verisimilitude of my Dawn being a badass. I want to steamroll the shit out of people with interesting complications, and maybe once an arc or so, run into someone who is a true lethal challenge. Moreover, combat takes a lot of time to run and it feels unfair to the players who can do their character schticks without taking up a whole session. That's why I STRONGLY support glossing over foregone conclusions in combat.

[Irked]

I think you're still supposed to get initiative when you damage the battle group

As others have said, it appears to be the case that you get a base of one.

This is not as clear as it might be in the corebook explanation.