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I really think that I'm going to get four posts in four days, so I'm sorry if it seems like I'm spamming all of a sudden. I just kind of want to take this piece by piece.
I sat down about a week ago to write up a character in Exalted and realized that I was having a surprising amount of trouble. I already know the system pretty well, but I was running into difficulties with what I knew I would regret not having if I sat down to the table and what I wanted to buy in terms of skills, Charms, and other interesting attributes. Normally, swimming in a sea of exciting options is a net good, but the problem was that there were also a lot of boring but nearly-requisite options that I felt like I needed to take otherwise the character would be a liability at nearly any gaming table I can think of.
While I didn't give up, I became frustrated. "Why wasn't character creation this tough in WoD?" I wondered to myself. Probably a mixture of expectations from the table, expectations set from the game itself, and the relative difference in transparency of options at character creation.
The core of both games are awfully close, and I would go so far as to say that Exalted is basically just a more baroque Core with lots of additional powers tacked on.
When you make a character, their competency level is important. You probably have an idea in your head about what you want your character to be able to do, and it's important that when you begin playing the game, you're idea and what you've got on your sheet are fairly similar. Game mastery facilitates part of that. It gets messy on RPG.net and, writing this, I realize just now that what seems so obvious to me is something that others would take issue with, for fairly legitimate reasons. But still, what Core offers besides small, important mechanical changes is relative simplicity. So, I'll state what I think is important about Core here today, and probably get into Exalted tomorrow, and maybe follow up and put them together on Monday. (That assumes something doesn't happen in the mean time, which as we all know, is pretty dangerous. Still, I'm on a roll here.)
Core sets the tone for the major templates from Vampire, Mage, and all the rest but what it states is that the skills you have are the backbone of what your character can do. Rank 1 is having some practice. 2 is competent enough to do it professionally but not amazingly well. 3 is a specialist. 4 and 5 get pretty close to master and top of the field. Equipment gives bonuses. Difficult situations take away dice. Anyone operating in decent conditions can usually break even or get a bonus, and you only need one success.
The experience point awards are relatively low, but the costs to raise skills isn't astronomical, either. It's not too tough to imagine someone raising a skill from 1 to 2 or 2 to 3, even. 4 and 5 get a lot tougher, because now that we know what they mean, we can imagine that getting up there must take an awful lot of work. Suddenly having 3 in a skill seems like it's okay, and we don't always need to be packing 4's and 5's. That also means the points you were going to put in there can justifiably be put in other skills. If the expectation at the table is that you'll be using equipment (and you're not called a power gaming nerd for asking for equipment bonuses), then you can get a really good example of how skilled your character is compared to others.
The other virtue of creating characters in Core is that it's done away with Bonus Points and started having characters purchase their starting points in exp. This does away with immediately stacking dots 4 and 5 on top of skills to avoid having to pay the comparatively astronomical points for boring stuff once the game has started. The cost is always the same. The only way to get out of it is to buy 4 and 5 with starting skills, which are pretty sparse. If you're really the best in the world, get it out of your system now, in that case; you can only do so much of that.
I like having merits tied to skill ranks, and there isn't too much about that setup that differentiates itself from purchasing things like Charms. Other powers also often use skills, and that could be made more obvious, but the Core game often doesn't concern itself with that. Where it diverges, I've taken issue in the past. For example, Changeling has famously made me furious with one splat getting bonuses to Contracts that use Occult, where few of them do, and those didn't use dice values. It's like a trick, except it was a simple mistake in what is otherwise a masterpiece of gaming. Regardless, it does create what feels like a sinkhole in character creation - you've wasted a choice on something that looked like a good idea but gives you nothing.
One example of the transparency of the character creation process in WoD Core is the beat cop stat block that made its way into publication in the Core book; it was an utter mess. The exp. it would have required to build that cop was incredibly high, and the estimated number of sessions to get a sheet that looked like the average beat cops, when the exp per session was supposed, was equally high. That's because whoever dashed the cop off was operating on an oWoD mentality that I still see a lot today, at tables - no attention was taken in how expensive he was, they just filled in dots approximating what they thought seemed about right. But the robust nature of the system made it fairly obviously that it was a mistake. Sure, it was egg on the face of the writer at the time, but the system as a whole made it easy to see, and that's the mark of a good system.
I ran into the opposite of that when I was making my Exalted character, but I'll tell you about that next time.
I sat down about a week ago to write up a character in Exalted and realized that I was having a surprising amount of trouble. I already know the system pretty well, but I was running into difficulties with what I knew I would regret not having if I sat down to the table and what I wanted to buy in terms of skills, Charms, and other interesting attributes. Normally, swimming in a sea of exciting options is a net good, but the problem was that there were also a lot of boring but nearly-requisite options that I felt like I needed to take otherwise the character would be a liability at nearly any gaming table I can think of.
While I didn't give up, I became frustrated. "Why wasn't character creation this tough in WoD?" I wondered to myself. Probably a mixture of expectations from the table, expectations set from the game itself, and the relative difference in transparency of options at character creation.
The core of both games are awfully close, and I would go so far as to say that Exalted is basically just a more baroque Core with lots of additional powers tacked on.
When you make a character, their competency level is important. You probably have an idea in your head about what you want your character to be able to do, and it's important that when you begin playing the game, you're idea and what you've got on your sheet are fairly similar. Game mastery facilitates part of that. It gets messy on RPG.net and, writing this, I realize just now that what seems so obvious to me is something that others would take issue with, for fairly legitimate reasons. But still, what Core offers besides small, important mechanical changes is relative simplicity. So, I'll state what I think is important about Core here today, and probably get into Exalted tomorrow, and maybe follow up and put them together on Monday. (That assumes something doesn't happen in the mean time, which as we all know, is pretty dangerous. Still, I'm on a roll here.)
Core sets the tone for the major templates from Vampire, Mage, and all the rest but what it states is that the skills you have are the backbone of what your character can do. Rank 1 is having some practice. 2 is competent enough to do it professionally but not amazingly well. 3 is a specialist. 4 and 5 get pretty close to master and top of the field. Equipment gives bonuses. Difficult situations take away dice. Anyone operating in decent conditions can usually break even or get a bonus, and you only need one success.
The experience point awards are relatively low, but the costs to raise skills isn't astronomical, either. It's not too tough to imagine someone raising a skill from 1 to 2 or 2 to 3, even. 4 and 5 get a lot tougher, because now that we know what they mean, we can imagine that getting up there must take an awful lot of work. Suddenly having 3 in a skill seems like it's okay, and we don't always need to be packing 4's and 5's. That also means the points you were going to put in there can justifiably be put in other skills. If the expectation at the table is that you'll be using equipment (and you're not called a power gaming nerd for asking for equipment bonuses), then you can get a really good example of how skilled your character is compared to others.
The other virtue of creating characters in Core is that it's done away with Bonus Points and started having characters purchase their starting points in exp. This does away with immediately stacking dots 4 and 5 on top of skills to avoid having to pay the comparatively astronomical points for boring stuff once the game has started. The cost is always the same. The only way to get out of it is to buy 4 and 5 with starting skills, which are pretty sparse. If you're really the best in the world, get it out of your system now, in that case; you can only do so much of that.
I like having merits tied to skill ranks, and there isn't too much about that setup that differentiates itself from purchasing things like Charms. Other powers also often use skills, and that could be made more obvious, but the Core game often doesn't concern itself with that. Where it diverges, I've taken issue in the past. For example, Changeling has famously made me furious with one splat getting bonuses to Contracts that use Occult, where few of them do, and those didn't use dice values. It's like a trick, except it was a simple mistake in what is otherwise a masterpiece of gaming. Regardless, it does create what feels like a sinkhole in character creation - you've wasted a choice on something that looked like a good idea but gives you nothing.
One example of the transparency of the character creation process in WoD Core is the beat cop stat block that made its way into publication in the Core book; it was an utter mess. The exp. it would have required to build that cop was incredibly high, and the estimated number of sessions to get a sheet that looked like the average beat cops, when the exp per session was supposed, was equally high. That's because whoever dashed the cop off was operating on an oWoD mentality that I still see a lot today, at tables - no attention was taken in how expensive he was, they just filled in dots approximating what they thought seemed about right. But the robust nature of the system made it fairly obviously that it was a mistake. Sure, it was egg on the face of the writer at the time, but the system as a whole made it easy to see, and that's the mark of a good system.
I ran into the opposite of that when I was making my Exalted character, but I'll tell you about that next time.
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