BlueWinds' house rules & Simplified Solar Charms

[Primefactorx01]

Hey! I'm that kind person!

I guess it's obvious that I'm going through your write up. I'm planning on transitioning my group over to it in the near future. Only thing stopping me right now is a lack of a Righteous Devil Style. I don't suppose you have any interest in making that conversion would you?

For now I'm planning on maintaining a fork with my own version of it inspired by your style. I know I'm axing 2 charms that are straight up dice adders, and a couple of effects that add dice. But I'm not sure what do with Azure Abacus Meditation. It's a fairly powerful effect with a pretty easy reset condition. I'd noticed that you have gotten rid of most reset conditions, so I was going to either tone it down or just leave it once a day. Any idea on this one?

[BlueWinds]

Thank you to a kind person for submitting a pull request - the PDF has been updated.

• Typo fixed in Force WIthout Fire
• Supernal is now described consistently between Character Creation and the Charms chapter (E+2 in both places).

[BlueWinds]

I has questions, pleaseness?
Archery. Wise Arrow has disappeared. Speedbump? Archery now has no way of dealing with cover.
Also, it looks like there are now hardly any withering-improving charms in archery.
Just started 3rd so not sure if either matters, but am wondering. Feel free to tell me to go read the big thread.

It's true. But Thrown has no ability to ignore concealment / environmental penalties (which can both be applied to withering and decisive in Archery), nor can it flurry attacks against a single target. So they have different strengths! Which is a good thing, IMO.

[Mnemosyne]

I has questions, pleaseness?
Archery. Wise Arrow has disappeared. Speedbump? Archery now has no way of dealing with cover.
Also, it looks like there are now hardly any withering-improving charms in archery.
Just started 3rd so not sure if either matters, but am wondering. Feel free to tell me to go read the big thread.

[BlueWinds]

There's an update about shipping, and my reaction is something like: "Oh, that's nice. The already obsolete edition is finally arriving. I'll be over here playing the BlueWinds Edition." Thank you, BlueWinds.
Now I just have to hope they get the Dragonblood book to you before you lose interest.

I'm glad you and your group getting good use out of it. <3

Dragon Bloods are my very favorite splat, so I doubt I'll be able to resist writing a version that I'm happy with whenever they finally come out. I should probably go look at one of the fan versions one of these days...

[Mnemosyne]

There's an update about shipping, and my reaction is something like: "Oh, that's nice. The already obsolete edition is finally arriving. I'll be over here playing the BlueWinds Edition." Thank you, BlueWinds.
Now I just have to hope they get the Dragonblood book to you before you lose interest.

[BlueWinds]

So I'm curious... Why'd you dump the Anima charms? Y'know, the ones that require Anima levels as a resource. Those're kinda cool, and they don't appear to be on the list of things you consider unthematic.

The anima banner is one of my very favorite things about Exalted. Like, I mean, favorite. I love the imagery of a bonfire of power caused by the mismatch between your mortal soul and divine spark that's attached. The light is waste, a side-effect of channeling too much power. Gods don't have it not because they're not awesome enough, but because they're entirely in tune with their own existence. It helps reinforce the fact that you're still human, no matter how grand you may think yourself.

So I removed the anima charms because they don't fit my vision of what Exalted is. I don't like using it as a resource, and I don't like people hiding their power once they've shown it.

Secondly, why did you go back to the Sorcery charms requiring Essence 3/4/5? Do you just not think that Exalts should be allowed to be sorcerers at game-start? Or does it play into your updated Supernal rules, and you think only a Supernal Occult exalt should be allowed to be a sorcerer? (To that point, do your Supernal rules allow a starting Exalt to buy Terrestrial Sorcery? And then essence 2/3 for Celestial/Solar? That would be a change to the rules as written and isn't specified in the text)

Yep, you can only take sorcery at character creation if Occult is supernal. It must be a big part of your concept, not just a dabble. In compensation, notice that you now have two supernals, and only one of them has to match your caste. This does mean that you only need E2/3 for Celestial/Solar. I didn't see a need to note it specifically - it's right there in the updated house rules.

I've been tempted to make them require 5/7 instead (needing actual E 3 or 5 with supernal) - yes, this would mean non-elders can only take Solar Circle if it's supernal. I may be ok with that. Thoughts and discussion welcome.

Also, don't you think the early essence levels of the charms are skimpy? You'd think people would have trouble unless they spread out an awful lot.

Notice that A) you only start with 10 and B) you get two supernals and C) you don't get free excellencies. The players in my game haven't had any trouble building themselves a whole big wishlist right off the bat.

Give it a try - if you have a character you wanted to make and can't find enough interesting/thematic choices, let's see the concept and work through it.

[Jetstream]

So I'm curious... Why'd you dump the Anima charms? Y'know, the ones that require Anima levels as a resource. Those're kinda cool, and they don't appear to be on the list of things you consider unthematic.

Secondly, why did you go back to the Sorcery charms requiring Essence 3/4/5? Do you just not think that Exalts should be allowed to be sorcerers at game-start? Or does it play into your updated Supernal rules, and you think only a Supernal Occult exalt should be allowed to be a sorcerer? (To that point, do your Supernal rules allow a starting Exalt to buy Terrestrial Sorcery? And then essence 2/3 for Celestial/Solar? That would be a change to the rules as written and isn't specified in the text)

Also, don't you think the early essence levels of the charms are skimpy? You'd think people would have trouble unless they spread out an awful lot.

[BlueWinds]

Holy crap, it's... it's beautiful.

Can I ask why you went back to having to purchase Excellencies separately?

Basically it boils down to the fact that players were rolling too many dice and not failing enough. Given the difficulty scale in presented in e3 where 5 is 'legendary achievement,' attribute + ability + excellency + stunt + willpower means that it's hard for characters to fail rolls within their caste/favored/out-of-caste-but-bought-one-charm-in purview.

There's a definite tension here. A lot my inspiration for Exalted comes from mythology - I'm a big fan of ancient epic poetry, and in there, heroes basically don't fail. Anything they could possibly be good at, they're good at. Free excellencies are an excellent (pun intended) match for that, and feeling powerful is a very fun thing as a player.

On the other hand, epic heroes (I mean epic literally, is in 'from epics') don't usually run around in groups. Not having free excellencies gives characters more weaknesses, and thus more reason to stick together. Also, I tend to enjoy playing and running games for very human heroes. 10+ free excellencies tends to make Solars feel too 'big' for me, good at too many things.

I could see it tipping either way - I'm not upset about free excellencies the way I'm bothered by a lot of other development decisions in 3e. For me, it tips to the "players are rolling too many dice all the time and succeeding at everything always" a bit too much, and makes the ST's job harder.

[Grod_the_giant]

Holy crap, it's... it's beautiful.

Can I ask why you went back to having to purchase Excellencies separately?

[BlueWinds]

The house rules+charms link isn't working for me.

Fixed! I renamed the pdf, so naturally the link broke.

[notanautomaton]

The house rules+charms link isn't working for me.

[BlueWinds]

Thanks to Alex for fixing an overlooked bit of charm text. I've also simplified the build - no longer depends on pdftk or splitting the Ek3 pdf into one-page snippets.

The new version is linked in OP, because being in git, the same links always point to the most recent version. Hurrah!

[BlueWinds]

I have to say I'm torn between being impressed at a second charm rewrite and (as a software developer) being pleased with your build process.

The build process is pretty lazy. I couldn't get the "pdfpages" package to work right, which is the "correct" way to include pdf page ranges. Instead I just pop Ex3Final apart into one-page PDFs and include them via \includegraphics. That makes the final PDF way bigger than it needs to be - the background image is saved separately for each individual page, for example.

Also, I just realized that I can do \includegrahpics[page=123]{Ex3.pdf}. Wow. The whole splitting the PDF apart is 100% unnecessary. Will probably fix that at some point just because it's embarrassing.

[BlueWinds]

How did you get the Ex3 Page number box perfectly set on the bottom of the page?

Trial and error. The code that does the page background and number is here. To paraphrase:

If the page is odd, and the "left" background to 0,0 (bottom left corner). If even, add the "right" one to 0,0.
Add the "page number background" picture - the little black box - at 292,19. I extracted this directly from the Ex3 PDF - it's the actual same image used.
If pg < 10, put the page number at 305,37.
else If pg < 100, put the page number at 302,37.
else, put it at 299,37.

The coordinates are from trial and error - I must have alt-tabbed back and forth between my PDF and Ex3 a thousand times. It's also not perfectly aligned still - the font of my page number is of a slightly different size than that on the copied pages.

I considered trying to overwrite the page numbers on the copied pages so that I could renumber the whole PDF from p. 1-400 rather than p. 1-650, but :shrug:, I was tired of working on the thing. Maybe later. Editing PDFs is much, much harder than re-creating them from scratch