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

[Irked]

So I've been running an Ex3 game for a good long while now, starting with three entirely new players who are now about halfway through Essence 3. It's not a combat-central game, but we do see a decent number of fights; in a recent session, the players clobbered a scaled-back version of Octavian, so they're progressing nicely in that regard. The characters have widely different combat skill levels, as we have:

• Sil Raveneye, Twlight, focused in Craft and Lore. I think Sil recently purchased a couple of Archery Charms, but he hasn't pulled them out for active combat yet. Most of his fighting is done remotely via his automaton familiar (which has, broadly, the stats of an eagle carrying an Artifact weapon). Sil has the ability to drop a meteor on a small country, which might technically make him the most dangerous party member, but that doesn't see a lot of direct combat application.
• Grayson, Twilight, focused in Craft and Occult. Grayson is a very Night-ish Twilight; he has chunks of the sneakymurder suite, including several Thrown Charms, Dodge up through SSE, and a couple of Stealth enhancers. He's also decided to branch into direct Melee combat via Spring Razor - so he's pretty nasty at Close or Short range, but doesn't have the sheer oomph that monofocus on one combat style would bring. He's still pretty nasty, and probably the most conservative fighter of the group; he hoards his motes for when he needs them, except for a tendency to go big on his opening JB rolls.
• The Caretaker, Dawn, focused in Melee and Medicine. The Caretaker is the big gun of the party; he could probably murder the other two together without too much trouble. He carries a big artifact shield as his primary weapon. The vast majority of his combat focus goes into Melee; he can effectively pull the "I make a Withering attack, follow up via OWTB, and then close with PBT," though he doesn't have the Iron Whirlwind finisher yet. Defensively, he's definitely the strongest; thanks to 5BS, he sits at a passive Parry 7, backstopped by HGD.

So, having wrapped the game for the semester, I have some thoughts about what I've observed in combat so far. I'm curious whether these are other people's experiences as well; they are, of course, general statements, and there will be exceptions.

1. Combat is, overall, a lot more fun than 2e. Fewer stalemates, more chance for swingy things to happen (taking damage, getting poisoned, etc.), more state changes as the game goes on, more interesting decisions to make (even if they're as simple as "Withering or Decisive?"), less of a race to mote-tapping. A lot more fun.
2. Going without armor - and probably the heaviest armor you can get, at that - is pretty darn close to suicidal. You will get tagged with a Withering attack in fairly short order, and when you do you're going to eat 10+ dice of Initiative damage. Now maybe you're crashed, the attacker is sitting at 10+ new Init with the Crash bonus, and the entire party (including the guys in full plate) are risking a pretty lethal follow-up strike.
3. By that same token, armor tends to make Withering damage pretty triival - especially from mundane weapons. My players have about abandoned non-artifact weapons, because they regularly get soaked down to ping damage of a single die. That's a pretty harsh limitation! I'm not sure how I feel on this one; on the one hand, I like that armor is effective, but on the other, we do an awful lot of calculating "raw damage plus extra successes minus their soak" that pretty often seems to end up with "roll your ping."
4. Most of a fight's outcome can be predicted by answering the questions "Does the enemy have an Excellency?" and "Does he have penalty negation?" If the answer to both of those is no, then opponents had better hope they have a major numerical advantage, or this is going to be a real short contest. Unfortunately, this makes a lot of the opposition described in the book relatively toothless - tyrant lizards are scary if they hit you, but that matters a lot less when they can't realistically hit you. The Excellency Line - that point around Essence 4 where non-Exalt enemies start to have dice adders of their own - is a huge change in the balance point. Even then, the lack of penalty negation tends to see big things beaten to death - that was the single biggest weakness of my scaled-back Octavian. Three players plus a bird can stack a -7 Defense penalty, if the Initiative breaks correctly; that's a pretty nasty thing to deal with.
5. Mega-flurries are still pretty common, especially on the player side of the table. Opening attack + OWTB + PBT + IWA + maybe cycling back to PBT is a standard Melee trick, and it makes for a lot of rolling. This is a little bit disappointing, since it's one of the things 3e was aiming to cut back on.
6. Fivefold Bulwark Stance is just a boring Charm. Like... there are no decisions to make with this Charm. If you are fighting at-all serious opposition, you want to take a turn to put it up, and after that, it just happens. You are stuck at a minimum of Defense 7, or whatever your base is, and there are no clever tactics on the enemy's part that will change this fact. It's dull, and it tends to mean (in my game) that people stop swinging at the Dawn, because there's just no point in doing so. That seems not-ideal.
7. One of the biggest problems 3e combat does still have - my periodic harping on its rather poorly constructed rules explanations aside - is that it's frontloaded. It is not hard for everyone involved to start a fight with 10i or more - and if you're sitting on that kind of Initiative, you probably want to unload it into your opponent's face in the opening round. Which makes the opening round of combat really dramatic - somebody's going to die! The fight's going to shift in a big way! - aaaaand then no one has any Initiative to spend. It is far too easy to, relatively cheaply, start with a pretty decent alpha strike, only to realize that building back up to that level is going to be a slow, expensive proposition.
   
   This is the thing that makes Ahlat such a terrifying opponent: he can realistically start the fight with 20+ Initiative and murder someone with his opening swing. After that point, I suspect a party like mine might be able to pick him apart by degrees... but do I really want a fight that's going to lead with a member of the party dying? This isn't an NPC-only proposition, either; after the errata in Miracles, a Solar Stealth build can start with 30+ Init without trying hard, as long as they have some warning that a fight is coming up in the next day.
   
   Initiative isn't the only contributor to this problem, either. The system as a whole seems designed to create breakdown fights, that start out large and impressive and then progressively get... less so, maybe with intermittent spikes back up. Initiative, the declining mote pool balance, stunt exhaustion, and the existence of wound penalties all contribute to characters rolling fewer dice, with fewer flashy displays, and fewer big hits, as the battle goes on. Several recent fights have had a tendency to devolve into boring five-motes-a-round slugfests where the characters gradually grind each other down, once those dramatic opening exchanges are done.
8. The preceding point is much, much worse with battle groups in play, because a battle group can slurp Initiative out of the entire opposing side at once and gives almost nothing back in return.

I think #7 is my biggest complaint, right now, and it's not one I saw coming. For the first dot or two of Essence, fights ended in about two, maybe three rounds tops. Now that the players are up against beefier things, the fights start to stretch out... and as they enter their last half, they just become boring. Certainly I can call an early end and have the characters narrate how they slaughter their remaining foes, but it's irksome to have that as a recurring problem.

Do these map to your experiences? What's worked well, or hasn't, in the games that you've run? What's done better than you expected? What's been an unanticipated problem? The only thing I'd ask is that this be primarily a thread for actual play, with a minimum of theorycrafted "I don't think that should be an issue" - pointing out overlooked rules is one thing, but I'd like to focus on how things have gone at your actual table.

[Solar]

There are lots of ways to fight Ahlat effectively in, say, Solar Melee. That said there is a degree of hard countering in the game that can be painful to encounter (or rather, encounter and not have a way to deal with).

I've run a five player game for a year now, with four very combat capable characters (Dex 5, relevant ability 5 etc). One of these has focused to the point of being nearly unstoppable; he's killed Octavian solo, killed Fakharu too (well, something with his stats).

I find the core system to be great and, with hard work, Exalted combat to be very evocative and cool. Love the core mechanic, and find the charms and such to be really flavoursome and awesome. Problems really stem from the struggle as a GM to keep track of everything, the complete lack of useful antagonists beyond a certain point, and the massive variation in capability which can make balancing a combat while making it interesting very difficult. As a player with a good GM, I'd probably adore it. As a GM, it's a struggle.

[Irked]

There are lots of ways to fight Ahlat effectively in, say, Solar Melee. That said there is a degree of hard countering in the game that can be painful to encounter (or rather, encounter and not have a way to deal with).

Yes, I'd agree with all that. If you have, let's say, Excellent Strike + Hail-Shattering Practice + Over-and-Under Method + Rising Sun Slash, you can reliably counter Ahlat, steal his Initiative, and murder him in the face. Or if you're wearing heavy armor + lots of Ox-Body + Adamant Skin Technique, you could potentially tank it, Crash him the next round, and take the fight from there

If, on the other hand, you built heavily into Dodge + ranged combat, or a Martial Art, or if your Melee investment runs primarily towards Iron Whirlwind, you're probably going to die - even with comparable amounts of XP invested in combat.

Ahlat's just an example, anyway; he's one of the most stark instances of someone being frontloaded for face-beating, who trickles off pretty hard afterward. Party-vs.-one-big-bad tends towards that anyway, since the big bads will be outspent several-to-one on motes (and very rarely have any kind of penalty negation outside of "is a big thing"); once their mote pool starts to bottom out, the fight's over no matter how many health levels they have left.

[The Wizard of Oz]

I find it generally good, and I don't find it being front-loaded to be a big problem, because I find people very rarely start with high enough initiative to actually kill someone in one hit. But no-one in my group went in big for Awareness charms, maybe that's why.

My main issues (and this is partly because the PCs in my game are Essence 5), are:
It's quite complicated to keep track of all the NPCs' charms (initiative and motes are not too bad)
I really wish more of the players would learn what all their charms do rather than stopping to look them up. And write down their Defences and attack pools rather than have to work them out every time.
There are essentially no pre-made suitable antagonists for Essence 5 characters. Unless they're Solar NPCs, there's not even tools to make such antagonists (I mean, if you want to have Essence 1 Solars fight enemies not from the book, like say a big monster or some different Essence 1 Dragonblood, you can probably copy or chop/change stuff from book characters to make them).

If I wasn't running an Essence 5 game, I think these problems would be much less significant.

So... actually the combat system seems fine. These problems are all about charms or the support or stuff like that.
And unlike others, I have found that 3rd ed has far, far less multi-attack spam than 2nd ed, so the combats are much quicker to run (when the players remember what their charms do).

[SaintedPhysician]

I have a house rule that Excellencies cannot be used on Join Battle, and you can only use a single non-Excellency charm on it. This does make certain builds or charms weaker, but it makes combat a lot more fun so I'm willing to eat that cost.

[putty]

I actually have not found #7 to be much of a problem, for Player Characters in particular, anyway. I am careful to NOT include "initiative batteries" (weak enemies relative to the other opposition for players to farm init), but my players have no problem rebuilding initiative quickly after a decisive attack. There have been quite a few times that the initiative shift mechanic has produced a dramatic turnaround either for the players or antagonists, and I've been pleasantly surprised to discover that even fights that seem onesided one round can shift the other way fast. The classic Solar Circle vs Dragon-Blooded Shikari fight is always interesting and fun to play because the corebook shikari are well designed as enemies. However, I do find that when designing other fights the burden is on the ST to make them interesting and fun to play. Like if you make a fight with 3 size 5 BGs and a 24 soak legendary size monster with thirty health levels...thats likely going to get boring fast.


My experience is based off our party Melee Dawn who has zero problems dealing with soak-monsters, your own party may have a different playstyle. She uses an artifact Grimscythe with Increasing Strength Exercise, so her base damage is either 19 (14 + 5 strength) or 22+ if she spends a simple action on ISE. Combine that with the piercing tag (4 damage), threshold successes, and Fire & Stones strike, and she usually smacks people for 30+ raw damage

[putty]

Yes, I'd agree with all that. If you have, let's say, Excellent Strike + Hail-Shattering Practice + Over-and-Under Method + Rising Sun Slash, you can reliably counter Ahlat, steal his Initiative, and murder him in the face. Or if you're wearing heavy armor + lots of Ox-Body + Adamant Skin Technique, you could potentially tank it, Crash him the next round, and take the fight from there

If, on the other hand, you built heavily into Dodge + ranged combat, or a Martial Art, or if your Melee investment runs primarily towards Iron Whirlwind, you're probably going to die - even with comparable amounts of XP invested in combat.

Ahlat's just an example, anyway; he's one of the most stark instances of someone being frontloaded for face-beating, who trickles off pretty hard afterward. Party-vs.-one-big-bad tends towards that anyway, since the big bads will be outspent several-to-one on motes (and very rarely have any kind of penalty negation outside of "is a big thing"); once their mote pool starts to bottom out, the fight's over no matter how many health levels they have left.

"is a big thing" is the best penalty negation in the game tho. Its onslaught immunity, rather than simply onslaught penalty negation. But yeah, mote economy is why I don't do 1 big bad vs a circle fight.

Iron Whirlwind is fine against Ahlat if you have Armor-Eating Strike and high strength.

[TheCountAlucard]

Don't forget that ping damage is two dice for most mortal swords thanks to the Balanced Tag. Also you can boost damage with options like the Chopping Tag.

Also, they may not do much damage compared to Artifact weapons, but unless they're secretly all Brawl masters or taking Glorious Solar Saber or you're outright giving them Artifact weaponry, "abandoning" non-Artifact weapons may not be the smartest idea.

[Katana1515]

Having just wrapped up a 7 month game, this thread seems a really useful opportunity for some reflection. I agree with Irked on a lot of points, but our experiences differ on a few points, perhaps due to having different players. I will elaborate on my group then before I talk about my 'take aways' from the experience.

I had 4 players all of whom had some serious combat investment, none of my players are the sort to sit on the sidelines during a fight scene.
We had...

1. Kai the Dawn: a Supernal Brawler. He had little investment outside of combat (Dots in presence and a few other social abilities, but no charm investment). Relied on Resistance and Heavy Armour for defence at first, before branching out later on to mixing in Melee Defence Charms. In terms of charms that made a massive difference, Fists of Iron Technique paired with a defining intimacy for combat makes a massive difference. Paired with Artefact Brawling aids and a high strength and he breezed through most folks Soak like he was using a heavy weapon, without sacrificing any accuracy. Can be hard on a GM, since creating an opponent with enough soak to slow him down will likely make your NPC hard for other PCs to chip. Unlike Irked, my players often felt underwhelmed by armour and resistance as opposed to Dodge. This might be my fault for often using NPC's with Piercing Weapons or high damage though. Not helped by how Durability of Oak Meditation can feel like something of a trap, requiring you to commit motes to increasing your soak before you even know your going to be hit. Spirit Strengthens the Skin and Essence Gathering Temper are stand out charms though, and Iron Skin Concentration saved his life once. Heaven Thunder Hammer and Crashing Wave Throw can also be problematic/alarming at first glance but I am gonna make a general point about Decisive damage boosting charms below. Started out relying on punching, before branching out into grappling. The Grappling mechanics work OK, but take a lot of rolls/time to process. Kai landing a grapple attack was usually the cue for other players to hit the toilet or fetch drinks. He would usually hit as well, their seems to be a lot ofvery cheap accuracy boosting charms specific for grapplers that make them almost unnervingly accurate (even vs other exalts), which is a little worrying balance wise since few NPCs have a hope of surviving such an attack once it hits.

2. Nozomi the Night: An Athletics Supernal assassin character. Was an interesting build and the second most combat invested character, relying on sharp senses, stealth and later investigation charms to assist with non combat challenges. Relied on Melee and Athletics charms for offence, paired with Stealth to get a quick leg up on enemies and Dodge for defence. Blinding Battle Feint and the Rerolling stealth charm meant she could pull off terrifying opening attacks boosted by either Leaping Tiger Attack (Could easily be rolling 50+ damage dice) or Thunderbolt Attack Prana (for instant killing most opponents before they even know your around.) Spice with Fire and Stones Strike for extra damage vs tough opponents. After the opening round charms like OWTB were perfect for letting her bounce back up the initiative track after landing a TAPped Decisive. Defensively Nozomi was a rock, despite wearing nothing but mundane light armour. She would get hit occasionally in the earlier parts of the game, but once we hit essence 2 and the combo of Flow Like Blood and Rumour of Form came online she was basically untouchable. Rumour of Form is a game changing charm once you realise it can be used even if the enemy has flat out missed or solidly hit. Dropping 3 motes in order to reflexively enter stealth in a close fight is a big advantage.

3. Megissa the Eclipse: A social focused character, but a Black Claw Stylist so she had the capacity to apply her skills to combat. Dodge for defence. Black Claw was interesting to run for, but suffered from being dependent on working on only certain enemies. During a story arc in Denandsor and a few other scenarios, poor Meg had no one to Social Fu in some fights, and her bare hands didnt make for very effective weapons. Defensively she did pretty well, seriously penalising attackers with Torn Lotus Defence and similar charms. At Essence 2 she picked up Doe Eyes Defence which made her ridiculously impossible to hit paired with her high guile, thats definitely a charm prospective GMs want to watch out/plan for. Picking up TAP later on made a big difference for her, allowing her to turn her usually modest Initiative values into fatal attacks.

4: Sebasus the Night: A Larceny Supernal con-man/gangster. Relied on Thrown, Stealth and some Dodge for in combat, probably the character with the least combat investment. He had the weakest defensive set up and struggled in a stand up fight with an Immaculate even at the tail end of the game. He definitely had some neat tricks though, the scene-long penalties inflicted by Joint Wounding Attack are the bane of bosses or big behemoths. Also Living Shadow Preparedness deserves a mention, as its the only charm I felt the need to actually house rule, the notion of freely (at the start of the fight) adding +20 successes or something similar to your JB result for little cost seemed out of line with whats on offer in other trees. The once per day limit is akward in Exalted, this isn't DnD after all were you are expecting X many encounters a day. I ended up enforcing charm caps, severly limiting the bonus, but allowed the stock of successes to be applied to Essence rolls per day. This was encouraged using it to occasionally boost stealth or larceny rolls, instead of just being a nuke for JB rolls.

Some general observations I had of the system.

1. I totally agree with Irked, combat is actually fun now! I played a fair bit of 2nd edition, and the old combat was boring and painful. The new system is fun and unique, with enough going on that you can always put interesting new tilts on things, perfect to GM for me. Just wanted to get that across loud and clear before I start nitpicking!

2. Some of my players had problems with the abstractions involved in the system. The nature of initiative and tracking 'combat momentum,' the Withering/Decisive split and Range Bands most of all. I was running on R20 and in larger fights it was hard for players to keep track of relative position as well. This is mostly a matter of taste I think, but its something a prospective GM might want to talk to his players about before running.

3. I have seen some folks complain about how hard it is to keep track of everything. We didn't have this problem thankfully, For my Roll20 game I took this image ( http://i.imgur.com/EFu8XDK.jpg ) and everyone had a token for their PC they could move around. This made tracking initiative really easy, to the point where we would load it on a big tv when we met in person. Credit to whoever made that tracker originally.

4. I might be biased on account of having had 3 Dodge reliant PCs, but lightly armoured characters seem perfectly functional to me. It requires charm investment if you are serious about it, and leads to a more ,'All or Nothing' set up,but is definitely functional and potent. If you take charms out of the occasion, then I am basically OK with being armoured being objectively better than not being armoured in a face to face duel. The unarmoured character has advantages on important dice pools related to combat movement as well as various important skills.

5. Mundane weapons seem to have a VERY tough time vs supernatural/high level opposition. The higher overwhelming value of artefact gear came up A LOT more than I had originally imagined. My Brawler PC laughed at Soak and never had a problem gaining init, but some PCs would struggle at times. It was particularly a problem for Meg (Unarmed) and Seb because Thrown has little support for adding withering damage to attacks. This would make Crash bonuses very valuable sources of initiative to players. This could become an OOC problem, leading to peculiar discussions/arguments along the line of 'DONT KILL HIM YET, I WANT TO CRASH HIM ON MY TURN' or players resenting other players for 'stealing' an 'easy initiative break' by crashing a low init NPC they had been hoping to Crash themselves. I have never seen a system that causes that particular kind of OOC conflict before and had to to stick to a slightly ironfisted rule of 'players will do what they want on their turns' to keep the pace of play going.

6. While we have thankfully evolved beyond the 2nd edition 'Is it a Celestial Exalt? Or should I just stunt killing it' level, Irked is right when he points out that penalty negator's and excellencies are the big advantage the solars have over most opponents. This is OK most of the time (The PCs are supposed to win after all, most of the time), but it can make a lot of encounters/threats seem trivial to the point where it robs your fight scenes of drama. I relied heavily on the antagonist section of the book, but felt no shame in adding a few dice here and there in order to make their attack pools meaningful. I also let any (Non-Battlegroup) enemy stunt, this encouraged me to try and keep the antagonists interesting, made their pools a bit higher, and provided a useful tool for on the fly combat balancing, as I would often stop stunting for NPC's once they had outlived their usefulness.

7. Thunderbolt Attack Prana, Heaven Thunder Hammer, Crashing Wave Throw, and probably a few others I can't think of off the top of my head. These are charms that massively increase decisive damage output, allowing a solar to turn an attack from Init 6 - 12 into a fatal blow vs mortal/near mortal foes, or blitz through the many health levels of your bigger beasts at record speed. These really took me by surprise at first, as they can turn the expected flow of combat on its head easily. Whats more they are available from Essence 1. In the end I started planning for these by either increasing the number of Antagonists in a scenario (Rule of thumb is you should have more NPC actors than the party if you want the fight to last 3+ rounds) increasing the sum of HLs for behemoths/legendary size and the like into the 30-40's. After review and getting over my initial discomfort, I wouldn't remove these effects, they go a long way towards making playing a Solar feel special/powerful and awesome but they do need to be planned around.

That's what I can think of off the top of my head. I may edit in some more thoughts later

[Irked]

My experience is based off our party Melee Dawn who has zero problems dealing with soak-monsters, your own party may have a different playstyle. She uses an artifact Grimscythe with Increasing Strength Exercise, so her base damage is either 19 (14 + 5 strength) or 22+ if she spends a simple action on ISE. Combine that with the piercing tag (4 damage), threshold successes, and Fire & Stones strike, and she usually smacks people for 30+ raw damage

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.

Iron Whirlwind is fine against Ahlat if you have Armor-Eating Strike and high strength.

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.

[Irked]

Don't forget that ping damage is two dice for most mortal swords thanks to the Balanced Tag. Also you can boost damage with options like the Chopping Tag.

This is a good point - Tags have just been a level of complexity too far for my players, to this point. I recognize that's throwing some power away, but that's just not where we are.

Also, they may not do much damage compared to Artifact weapons, but unless they're secretly all Brawl masters or taking Glorious Solar Saber or you're outright giving them Artifact weaponry, "abandoning" non-Artifact weapons may not be the smartest idea.

Well, two of them are crafters, they've finished a tomb raid, and they mugged a Wyld Hunt. I don't just give them artifacts, but they're still pretty well stocked - everybody has at least one.

[Isator Levi]

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.

Heh, that reminds me of a bit in Discworld in which a newly graduated assassin is accosted by a bunch of muggers, and when they point out that even an assassin can't kill all of them when outnumbered so, the assassin cheerfully agrees that he'd only be able to kill one of them, and asks the group if they're eager to find out which would be the one. The muggers back down.

I'm very interested in this thread.

Speaking of, that post you made on RPG.Net about the characters being all battered and poisoned after a fight against a demon? I would have Liked that post if I could.

[Nemo_Oceansoul]

i agree with the most part, however, number 4, at least in what little experience ive had in the game may not necessarily be true, as a 3 mortals, 2 were at -4 and the third was unharmed and combat focused in melee/dodge/resistance, are fully able to win a fight against 2 essence 2 exalts (it happened twice in my game earlier this year, we were running a pre-exaltation game), note at the time our GM had ruled that due to our exhaustion we would have to halve our dice pools before any additional penalties applied. as i recall if the GM hadnt said 1 of the exalts had retreated when he realized they were beat, he probably would of died (crashed vs a init pool of 10).

it was still a pretty damned epic fight to say the least.

[Irked]

Heh, that reminds me of a bit in Discworld in which a newly graduated assassin is accosted by a bunch of muggers, and when they point out that even an assassin can't kill all of them when outnumbered so, the assassin cheerfully agrees that he'd only be able to kill one of them, and asks the group if they're eager to find out which would be the one. The muggers back down.

I'm very interested in this thread.

Speaking of, that post you made on RPG.Net about the characters being all battered and poisoned after a fight against a demon? I would have Liked that post if I could.

Thanks! It was a really good fight.

The part I didn't say there, and that ties into my critique above, is that we stopped the fight about halfway through once everyone was tapped out. There were narrative reasons for this, but it was also pretty clearly all over but for the rolling - and there would have been a lot of rolling, with not a lot of suspense en route.

[Irked]

i agree with the most part, however, number 4, at least in what little experience ive had in the game may not necessarily be true, as a 3 mortals, 2 were at -4 and the third was unharmed and combat focused in melee/dodge/resistance, are fully able to win a fight against 2 essence 2 exalts (it happened twice in my game earlier this year, we were running a pre-exaltation game), note at the time our GM had ruled that due to our exhaustion we would have to halve our dice pools before any additional penalties applied. as i recall if the GM hadnt said 1 of the exalts had retreated when he realized they were beat, he probably would of died (crashed vs a init pool of 10).

it was still a pretty damned epic fight to say the least.

That sounds pretty sweet, but it's a bit hard to picture. Do you know any details about the characters you were fighting - i.e., what did their pools look like, did they regularly use Excellencies, etc.? What kind of Defenses were you rolling against? What was the key to your victory?

Like I said in the original post, there are always exceptions, but I've found a mix of penalty negators and dice-adders to be devastating to mortal opposition, especially during the first few rounds.