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

[semicasual]

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.

Inert Initiative: Because battle groups can’t make decisive attacks and can’t take Initiative from other characters, their Initiative rating is used entirely to determine when the group takes its turn during each round. On the other hand, all withering attacks launched against a battle group instead directly damage its Magnitude (see below). Successful withering attacks directed against a battle group still generate one automatic point of Initiative for the attacker.

Relevant part underlined. How would you suggest this be made clearer?

[Irked]

Relevant part underlined. How would you suggest this be made clearer?

"Unlike normal Withering attacks, however, the attacker does not receive bonus Initiative equal to the damage successes."

[Crumplepunch]

I find Exalted combat so mentally draining that I can only sustain it for a couple of hours before needing a break to recharge. Any combat involving a group or a pair of opponents that don't completely outclass each other will take at least four hours, so this is a significant problem for me and one I can't easily offer a solution for.

[Katana1515]

WIth BGs the crash bonus from dropping their Size is the biggest bonus. Can be tougher with big Fearless groups that have a high magnitude, but you should still be able to get Init off them. Did your Dawn empty the Magnitude of the group with his big decisive? I think the rules are unclear on it, but I still give the PC the Crash bonus AFTER resetting if they do that, I have seen a PC break a group from size 3-1 in one attack with a decisive, and we let her reset at a healthy 13 initiative.

[The Wizard of Oz]

Huh, I think the longest combat I've run (which was the PCs vs a necromancer, a Solar, 2 Lunars, a God-Blood of Ahlat, and some guards) took 2.5 hours.

And my players are pretty slow in combat as well.

[Irked]

WIth BGs the crash bonus from dropping their Size is the biggest bonus. Can be tougher with big Fearless groups that have a high magnitude, but you should still be able to get Init off them. Did your Dawn empty the Magnitude of the group with his big decisive? I think the rules are unclear on it, but I still give the PC the Crash bonus AFTER resetting if they do that, I have seen a PC break a group from size 3-1 in one attack with a decisive, and we let her reset at a healthy 13 initiative.

I don't recall now. I overlooked the Crash bonus - which was my goof! - and that would have helped matters somewhat. I don't think the Dawn fully emptied the track, though, and I also neglected to add the bonus "fearless" Magnitude, so there's some factors on both sides, there.

[Lioness]

but the game's idea that mortals were supposed to matter in 3e is no more true now that it ever has, if we're talking about combat.

Battle Groups are basically the 3e mechanic for extras + mass combat. They're there to create a divide between faceless rabble and mortal heroes without redefining the latter as superhuman or essence users, hence why one of our first examples of that system was a Silent Legionnaire vs. a hundred bandits.

I feel that if an army is supposed to be a major participant there should really be an attempt to flesh out its command structure with a number of individuals who could be considered heroes in their own right. It's easy to fall into a trap of thinking they need to be important to the PCs to warrant solo unit status but then you don't always know who the enemy exalts are or what their deal is, which is good because the Wyld Hunt shouldn't be obligated to introduce themselves like Team Rocket. I mean, if they want to that's great but yeah...

[LazzerusThanatos]

Seeing all the annoyance with how combat tends to stalemate or go into grind mode after 3 rounds, I'm glad I decided to do mote regeneration differently in my game. It adds an extra dice roll each round, but I think it was highly worth it to keep everything from getting too stalemate-ish. The 5m per round is...okay?...but it leaves no room for real variance after the third round if you know exactly what you'll be spending it all on.

[The MG]

Huh, I think the longest combat I've run (which was the PCs vs a necromancer, a Solar, 2 Lunars, a God-Blood of Ahlat, and some guards) took 2.5 hours.

And my players are pretty slow in combat as well.

We play over Skype. Chat-based roleplaying is inherently slower.

[Major]

@Piff : Sounds like your ST has forgotten about the rules for Trivial Opponents.

I am still uncertain how to run trivials so hopefully you have insight or suggestions around this Alucard. [And this is prefaced with saying unlike Irked's group, there are no dawns nor characters with heavy combat investment]

So my conundrum with trivial is that there aren't many circumstances they exist as opponents (usually trivials are normal people caught up in a fracas). The book says a single mortal soldier against a group of supernatural opponents can become trivial, but a battlegroup of of mortal soldiers does not (pg. 208). The mortal battlegroup probably has zero chance (especially if small) against a party of non-combat focused Solars yet combat still can take hours to play out if the mortals are wearing armour.

We have had a couple instances where this was really evident with radically different results. In one fight, 4 PC's vs 2 NPC's and one size 1 battlegroup (with commander) took 5 hours. Most of that time was whittling down the battlegroup. Another fight with a size 1 battlegroup (with commander) lasted only half-an-hour because a social-fu PC convinced the commander to stop the fight.
I am at the point where I am scared of using battlegroups because I don't want combat to last 4-5 hours (the entire session) each time it occurs.

Should I be setting the mortal soldiers to trivial even if they are in a battlegroup perhaps?

In case people are wondering, both of those fights were mostly fun (the fun tends to start bleeding away after the first hour-and-a-half) they just were not supposed to be the focus of the session.

[Boston123]

-snip-

Size 1 Battlegroups are, like ..... 12 dudes, tops. How did it take you that long?

[TheCountAlucard]

I likewise have to confess to confusion as to how it took a circle of Solars over an hour of game time, let alone five, to kill a Size 1 battle group, armored or unarmored; did y'all forget that Magnitude damage applies straight to the health of the battle group in a very similar fashion to trivial opponents, making decisive attacks unnecessary? Was something distracting going on in the background? Did someone lose track of his lucky d10 and had to look under the couch? Were the PCs not particularly specced for combat? Were you playing over Skype?

[PraxisCat]

I'm also confused. What would mortal soldiers in a battlegroup even look like when trivial? Just an init of 0?

[TheCountAlucard]

Battle groups can't really be rendered trivial opponents because they're too similar already; withering damage to a battle group is applied to the battle group's Magnitude track, and withering damage to a trivial opponent is applied to the trivial opponent's health track.

[Caretaker]

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.

To be fair, we're past the lower-essence fights that we can One Punch our way out of and into the ones that now involve some strategy. We didn't exactly fight strategically.

I'm not sure how much of not playing by the numbers to write off as "roleplaying over roll-playing" but we certainly weren't fighting tactically by this system. As you had mentioned, we should have hammered on the named guys for initiative-building, and dumped the initiative onto the BG. That's the best way to build initiative, and we weren't doing that, and didn't do that sort of thing against the Pentapus demon either. As our first real taste of fights like this, as a matter of feeling out the mechanics of extended battles, I'll admit we stumbled and fell short. In the future, knowing this stuff will help!