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Since I posted last on character competency, I spoke with Brent for a decent amount of time about nExalted, which occasionally popped up here again quite suddenly. There's a great example of a project that's been on a cold burner for a long time that we decided to re-heat pretty much out of nowhere.
And because I'm still running WoD Core / Second Sight, this'll probably be it for now on the topic so I can return to working on all the other stuff that's boiling over, to abuse and finish with the oven metaphor. Anyhow, under the cut, as usual. I know I missed a day, but this is probably the most consistent I've been with getting full ideas out in a long time so, I don't know, I guess I'm pretty happy with this anyhow.
So. With that out of the way, I finally get to the thing that kicked off my thought process which was creating a Sidereal in 2.5. Sidereals and Dragon-Blooded have some pre-reqs that come with the job - namely, mandatory skill minimums.
Skill minimums have been a frustrating character design issue for me since oWoD's Demon Hunter X, where minimum skill reqs actually eat into your Bonus Points pool. There's no way to get around it, since the minimums drift into the 4-5 point range. The Siddies and DBs never quite get that bad, but they create frustrating bookkeeping issues. For one, there are two different point minimums - one in general and one for their caste. Lookshy Dragon-Blooded actually require certain Charm purchases, which isn't mimicked in any other splat to date. Realm DB's get off fairly easily, with a series of skill purchases in the 1-2 range to make sure, I suppose, that they don't fall off their damn horse and make their family look like assholes or something.
The way the minimums were done feels weird. Obviously, when it comes down to the table, WW can't enforce it, so they're really recommended skill minimums to begin with. That's probably where I would leave it, and really enforcing it causes minor balance issues for Exalts, because caste skills are different, and the exp. break that you get for favored and caste differs by what's mandatory. I wrote it up once, and I think I determined that Secrets Sidereals get the best deal and either Journey or Serenity gets the worst. And mandatory skills for Sidereals don't always coincide with table-mandatory skills like MA, Melee, Archery, Athletics, and Dodge. I mean, they do to an extent, but you need to buy concept and table mandatory skills at the same time you're spending your BP and initial skill points on fairly meaningless 1-2 point expenditures.
Minimums are good for one thing, which is so that you can take an entire group of people - the Realm, Lookshy, Heaven's spies, and say "Each and every one of these people is highly trained. Each can lead a unit to war, take up a sword, play an instrument, look good at a cocktail party, speak several languages, shoot a bow, ride a horse..." That's a powerful message to take away from Dynastic society, for ex, which I saw written once at RPG.net. Even the most jaded and lazy Dynast can pick up a sword and go to war with credible effect. Every Lookshy DB can shoot elemental bursts from their hands and communicate effortlessly on the battlefield because of their mandatory Charm purchases. That's good to know. It tells us a lot about their society.
It's supposed to tell us what the minimum competency level is for the Exalted host. But all it really does it start us on the road to understanding competency without giving us a full picture. Only the Lookshy DBs start in on that, because Charms are an incredibly important part of the Exalted arsenal of tools. Mandatory Charms aren't really a great idea, because they force the player to buy them, but it's the thought that counts. What Charms are Realm DB's expected to get quickly? Who's considered competent in their field and what does competent look like? What Charms are Sidereal's expected to have when they start out? Mark of Exaltation? Pretty much every Sidereal starts with the chops to buy it, and it's got to be pretty invaluable when in Heaven. Excellencies? Lore's Methodology of Secrets? It pretty much fills in the rest of the gaps left by 1-and-2 dots skills for mundane abilities. What Colleges are expected? Which are you considered deficient for not having? The Sorcerer seems like it would be a common one. Does every elder Sidereal have The Mask? Is it considered mandatory? What Backgrounds are you considered to be worthless without? Sifu is troublesome. Salary, Celestial Manse, Contacts? You start out with a lot of dots, and we kind of get a rough gist, but what are you a pariah without?
So, I'm sitting down, statting out an NPC when I realize I honestly don't know. As gamers, we're used to the specialist team setup, where we pick out a niche and make sure we're good at it. A starting Sidereal has a hard time being good at a niche and also surviving. Martial Arts is said to be something that every Sidereal is pretty innately good at, but it's not favored for all of them, and it's pretty clearly a bad move not to. How does their society react to that? Do people who don't study Martial Arts extensively operate at a societal disadvantage?
And there's the Sifu background, which implies that there are a fair number of Sidereals who are available to tutor running around with a reasonably extensive number of full Celestial and Sidereal styles known. Even older canonical Sidereals rarely have the styles listed that Sifu implies, and there are only 100. Styles are expensive. I played for almost a year with pretty much double-exp rewards and focused extensively on Performance and Water Dragon Style and never finished WD Style. We ended when I was two Charms away. I'm fairly sure that being an anything stylist is considered to be a decent feat of skill, but the implication is that real competence is actually measure in the 1000+ exp range. That's a heady thought for a starting character. Sure, you've got your circle of specialists, but what's competent when you don't want to let your friends down?
My solution from earlier - free Excellencies - goes a long way, because you're pretty competent for free. Free Excellencies takes us a lot closer to the transparency of WoD Core, where skill is reasonably easy to determine because raw skill is found in the skill levels and the abilities found in the Merits extrapolate from that in a way that's fairly easy to deduce. Excellencies have always existed as something of a crutch, because in 1E, they were boring Charms stuck in the middle of a Charm tree that not even every ability had. They're no less useful in 2E, so honestly, it really doesn't matter if they're in the tree or not. By existing, the function as something you occasionally have to stop your purchase of interesting powers in order to buy. If you're going to have Excellencies it's better to have them be part of the inherent power package one receives at Exaltation. If you don't like how quickly the power ramps up by virtue of being able to buy cheap competency in a chosen field, then remove them entirely.
As I think about it, Martial Arts is, once again, the tough skill to deal with. It allows cherry-picking within certain reason of low-level abilities for those at the Celestial or higher level, but that cherry-picking is all MA has going for it besides being able to go outside splat for powers. For Sidereals, though, it's the only skill they can add to. I don't think this was ever a good idea, except for someone who wanted to push Sidereals into the all-MA all the time bracket, which doesn't really belong in Exalted in the first place, probably.
So, I don't know. It's hard to know if you've built a functional character. Once again, it's probably part of how finicky and lethal the combat can be. The answer is, as always, to buy combat and then occasionally buy a non-combat power that you friends need. Someone needs to be the sorcerer, for ex. The only reason to buy the non-com powers is because there's something weird on that tree that doubles as potent in a fight or if you want to surprise the ST by being surprisingly excellent at the plot bugaboo of the day.
And because I'm still running WoD Core / Second Sight, this'll probably be it for now on the topic so I can return to working on all the other stuff that's boiling over, to abuse and finish with the oven metaphor. Anyhow, under the cut, as usual. I know I missed a day, but this is probably the most consistent I've been with getting full ideas out in a long time so, I don't know, I guess I'm pretty happy with this anyhow.
So. With that out of the way, I finally get to the thing that kicked off my thought process which was creating a Sidereal in 2.5. Sidereals and Dragon-Blooded have some pre-reqs that come with the job - namely, mandatory skill minimums.
Skill minimums have been a frustrating character design issue for me since oWoD's Demon Hunter X, where minimum skill reqs actually eat into your Bonus Points pool. There's no way to get around it, since the minimums drift into the 4-5 point range. The Siddies and DBs never quite get that bad, but they create frustrating bookkeeping issues. For one, there are two different point minimums - one in general and one for their caste. Lookshy Dragon-Blooded actually require certain Charm purchases, which isn't mimicked in any other splat to date. Realm DB's get off fairly easily, with a series of skill purchases in the 1-2 range to make sure, I suppose, that they don't fall off their damn horse and make their family look like assholes or something.
The way the minimums were done feels weird. Obviously, when it comes down to the table, WW can't enforce it, so they're really recommended skill minimums to begin with. That's probably where I would leave it, and really enforcing it causes minor balance issues for Exalts, because caste skills are different, and the exp. break that you get for favored and caste differs by what's mandatory. I wrote it up once, and I think I determined that Secrets Sidereals get the best deal and either Journey or Serenity gets the worst. And mandatory skills for Sidereals don't always coincide with table-mandatory skills like MA, Melee, Archery, Athletics, and Dodge. I mean, they do to an extent, but you need to buy concept and table mandatory skills at the same time you're spending your BP and initial skill points on fairly meaningless 1-2 point expenditures.
Minimums are good for one thing, which is so that you can take an entire group of people - the Realm, Lookshy, Heaven's spies, and say "Each and every one of these people is highly trained. Each can lead a unit to war, take up a sword, play an instrument, look good at a cocktail party, speak several languages, shoot a bow, ride a horse..." That's a powerful message to take away from Dynastic society, for ex, which I saw written once at RPG.net. Even the most jaded and lazy Dynast can pick up a sword and go to war with credible effect. Every Lookshy DB can shoot elemental bursts from their hands and communicate effortlessly on the battlefield because of their mandatory Charm purchases. That's good to know. It tells us a lot about their society.
It's supposed to tell us what the minimum competency level is for the Exalted host. But all it really does it start us on the road to understanding competency without giving us a full picture. Only the Lookshy DBs start in on that, because Charms are an incredibly important part of the Exalted arsenal of tools. Mandatory Charms aren't really a great idea, because they force the player to buy them, but it's the thought that counts. What Charms are Realm DB's expected to get quickly? Who's considered competent in their field and what does competent look like? What Charms are Sidereal's expected to have when they start out? Mark of Exaltation? Pretty much every Sidereal starts with the chops to buy it, and it's got to be pretty invaluable when in Heaven. Excellencies? Lore's Methodology of Secrets? It pretty much fills in the rest of the gaps left by 1-and-2 dots skills for mundane abilities. What Colleges are expected? Which are you considered deficient for not having? The Sorcerer seems like it would be a common one. Does every elder Sidereal have The Mask? Is it considered mandatory? What Backgrounds are you considered to be worthless without? Sifu is troublesome. Salary, Celestial Manse, Contacts? You start out with a lot of dots, and we kind of get a rough gist, but what are you a pariah without?
So, I'm sitting down, statting out an NPC when I realize I honestly don't know. As gamers, we're used to the specialist team setup, where we pick out a niche and make sure we're good at it. A starting Sidereal has a hard time being good at a niche and also surviving. Martial Arts is said to be something that every Sidereal is pretty innately good at, but it's not favored for all of them, and it's pretty clearly a bad move not to. How does their society react to that? Do people who don't study Martial Arts extensively operate at a societal disadvantage?
And there's the Sifu background, which implies that there are a fair number of Sidereals who are available to tutor running around with a reasonably extensive number of full Celestial and Sidereal styles known. Even older canonical Sidereals rarely have the styles listed that Sifu implies, and there are only 100. Styles are expensive. I played for almost a year with pretty much double-exp rewards and focused extensively on Performance and Water Dragon Style and never finished WD Style. We ended when I was two Charms away. I'm fairly sure that being an anything stylist is considered to be a decent feat of skill, but the implication is that real competence is actually measure in the 1000+ exp range. That's a heady thought for a starting character. Sure, you've got your circle of specialists, but what's competent when you don't want to let your friends down?
My solution from earlier - free Excellencies - goes a long way, because you're pretty competent for free. Free Excellencies takes us a lot closer to the transparency of WoD Core, where skill is reasonably easy to determine because raw skill is found in the skill levels and the abilities found in the Merits extrapolate from that in a way that's fairly easy to deduce. Excellencies have always existed as something of a crutch, because in 1E, they were boring Charms stuck in the middle of a Charm tree that not even every ability had. They're no less useful in 2E, so honestly, it really doesn't matter if they're in the tree or not. By existing, the function as something you occasionally have to stop your purchase of interesting powers in order to buy. If you're going to have Excellencies it's better to have them be part of the inherent power package one receives at Exaltation. If you don't like how quickly the power ramps up by virtue of being able to buy cheap competency in a chosen field, then remove them entirely.
As I think about it, Martial Arts is, once again, the tough skill to deal with. It allows cherry-picking within certain reason of low-level abilities for those at the Celestial or higher level, but that cherry-picking is all MA has going for it besides being able to go outside splat for powers. For Sidereals, though, it's the only skill they can add to. I don't think this was ever a good idea, except for someone who wanted to push Sidereals into the all-MA all the time bracket, which doesn't really belong in Exalted in the first place, probably.
So, I don't know. It's hard to know if you've built a functional character. Once again, it's probably part of how finicky and lethal the combat can be. The answer is, as always, to buy combat and then occasionally buy a non-combat power that you friends need. Someone needs to be the sorcerer, for ex. The only reason to buy the non-com powers is because there's something weird on that tree that doubles as potent in a fight or if you want to surprise the ST by being surprisingly excellent at the plot bugaboo of the day.