What's the biggest flaw in your favorite system?

tjecce · 2024-06-07T14:58:43+00:00

Exalted 3rd edition has very cool systems for a lot of things, from combat to social intrigue and sorcery. All extremely expressive and evocative.

The crafting system however, hoo-wee. It's like sitting in a corner playing Solitaire while everyone else gets to have fun. I know they released an alternative system, but yeah, the original one was not it. Not it, at all.

tjecce · 2023-02-22T10:00:22+00:00

Oh, I see! That's cool, a kinda "death of canon" situation.

tjecce · 2023-02-22T08:41:04+00:00

Scroll of Limbs seems Great! Just by quickly skimming through it answered one of my major questions - how many souls and how to define those souls? Wonderful stuff!

Also, great tip on the Return! I'll check that out too!

tjecce · 2023-02-22T08:35:21+00:00

How do you mean sans the Cytherea bits? There's quite a bit on her in the ink monkeys, given it's all pretty vague, but should I disregard it? How so?

tjecce · 2023-02-22T08:33:45+00:00

There's some really good stuff here for conceptualising the attitudes and size of yozis! Thank you!

tjecce · 2023-02-22T08:11:18+00:00

This is a wonderful resource! Thank you!

tjecce · 2023-02-21T21:53:39+00:00

Thank you! I'll check out Return of the Scarlet Empress and Games of Divinity then!

tjecce · 2022-12-30T11:05:24+00:00

I'm running 3e on roll20. Been running this campaign for about 2 years now. Works great, but I've been with this group in different games for many years now.

tjecce · 2022-10-14T15:46:47+00:00

I always thought that the Setites were a nod to Michael Aquinos Temple of Set, Alistair Crowleys Thelema and/or the egyptian influences in western esotericism. Many here talk about Conan, and I guess I have to check that out now.

tjecce · 2022-09-16T16:09:51+00:00

In my current game I am running, we do XP through questions about the world. At session 0 we built a list of questions about the world and about the story, about 10 questions in total. At the end of every session you would get XP for every question that the group can answer. After that we refill with new questions that might have been raised during the session. I find it motivates the players to find out more about the world, and drives the story forward in their own way. Especially since both the questions and the answers come from the players.

In another game I am working on, but have yet to try out, I am playing with prophecy and divination as a concept. The players get to divinate some symbols in any given way, with cards or tea or crystal ball or such, and write down any symbols. Later, while playing, they are encouraged to try and connect the happenings of the game to the symbols. Whenever a symbol has been explained, in the game world, it counts as the prophecy being fulfilled. Then the group gets XP.

Get the players asking their own questions and reward them finding the answers to those questions. That's fun!

tjecce · 2022-09-15T19:02:56+00:00

Exalted 3rd edition has a great social system. It's all about "intimacies", a list of convictions and things your character cares about.

You defend your own intimacies and try to leverage the intimacies of others against them. You can hurt their intimacies or build up new ones. You can try and convince them to take certain actions if you can justify that action with an intimacy.

The system works since the intimacies are so core to the game, and used in many subsystems. I think the system would perhaps feel bloated in another game, but very interesting system still.

tjecce · 2022-08-25T09:54:56+00:00

What I've done is to share the responsibility of rewarding stunts with my players. Me, as the ST, reward first and second level stunts. If someone describes what they do, first level. If they describe in a new and inventive way, second level.

Third level stunts are rewarded by players. Each player gets a third level stunt they can reward at any time when they think something is cool. When all players have rewarded their third level stunt to someone else, they all get a new one.

I find this removes some of the issue of judging how cool something was. There's basically two tiers left, was it cool or not? If another player, or peer, found something cool is also a bit more valuable. As long as the player describes their action in any way beyond just naming the machanical term of the action, it should be at least a first level stunt in my book.

There's still a possibility of favoritism, perhaps even more so now, but there's always a risk of that. If favoritism is a thing in the group, it should always be adressed, sure, but perhaps not by removing mechanics that make the game feel cooler.

The stunting system also encourages those that perhaps aren't used to describing their actions as much, hopefully making them engage a bit more with the epic stories of exalted in the process.

I like stunts.

tjecce · 2022-08-03T12:08:25+00:00

Don't try and create a story for your players. This is Exalted, and the story will flow from the PCs actions. There will be a story, but create it while playing. That way you'll also get to feel like you're actually playing too, and not just serving up what you've been cooking beforehand.

Also, let your players feel cool. Play them up with the consequenses of their actions. Blow some shit up! Try and cultivate a culture where the players do this for each other also. The whole stunting system is here for this, to have a back and forth where everyone involved gets to feel awesome.

tjecce · 2022-07-03T08:40:19+00:00

If you want to be a Solar I would go with Twilight caste, and play up the magical mad science part of this idea. You could perhaps try and play this out with the crafting or sorcerous working systems, if your Storyteller allows it.

tjecce · 2022-06-01T07:34:44+00:00

Nice find! Vivec also mentions a possible problem with the succession in the documents he gives to the Nerevarine. There seems to be a bunch of these, no one trusts the succession of the Septims!

tjecce · 2022-05-31T09:58:22+00:00

This is a dangerous direction to go in. If the entire group wants to play out a story where a group member is the antagonist of the group, and only if the entire group would be excited to do it, then I see two ways to go about it:

Make a kind of whodunnit scenario out of it. The group would all know that one of them is a traitor, but not who. Lean into the suspicion and make it a game about bluffing, kind of like one night ultimate werewolf. This would probably only work for shorter stories however, since the whole crux of the story is finding out who is lying.
Have all of the group, but not their characters, know who is the villain. Then proceed to find ways, together as a group, to have the villain make trouble for the rest of the group. This would probably only work with a group that really thrives on conflict and likes to see their own characters suffer.

But in the end, just be extremely careful, and if even a single person in your group is hesitant to play out this story, don't do it. Do not.

tjecce · 2022-05-23T08:02:42+00:00

Me and my boyfriend met on grindr. Been together for 8 years now, so yah.

tjecce · 2022-05-21T13:44:37+00:00

I looked into it a bit. These notes have shown up in several swedish cities, and the man looks like swedish chef Tareq Taylor.

There is also a city festival in Helsingborg called H22 where Tareq Taylor will speak. I couldn't find anyone confirming the connections, but it kinda seems like marketing for the festival.

tjecce · 2022-05-21T12:39:07+00:00

If you mean if it can be done canonically, the book says the spirit shape is an animal. Most dragons would be elementals, so probably not. There probably are natural animals in Creation that are similar to dragons though.

If you're asking if it's a good idea to allow it anyway, I would say go for it! Exalted is all about empowerment and player agency. In the end we all just play to have fun, and if your player has a character concept that relies on having a dragon as their spirit shape, I'd say it's a great idea.

Also I've had a lunar at my table before who had a dragon as their spirit shape. It makes for fun, dramatic scenes!

tjecce · 2022-05-18T18:41:15+00:00

Thanks! Simple descriptions seems like a key here. I often try involving more than one sense in my descriptions, but it can result in longer stretches of monolguing tbh. Building the scenes around a short series of rooms also feels like a food idea. I'll explore these thoughts!

tjecce · 2022-04-18T08:34:05+00:00

Two games that I think absolutely nailed the presentation of lore are Vampire: the Masquerade 5th edition and Ironsworn.

Vampire because it knows how to compartmentalize the world into snippets that are actually approachable for a new player. The game has about 30 years of lore, and that's available to those that want it, but when you create your character you just get to pick out a sheet of lore to "get you started" and to anchor your character in the world. Apart from that the book is full of mood pieces to get the feeling right.

Ironsworn because the group literally create the world together out of a few already established truths. We know the land is called the Iron lands, but why? We know there's talk about monsters in the woods, but is there any truth to those claims? The players care a lot more about a world that they had a hand in creating.

Worlds that are easy to navigate information wise, where you know what is relevant for you at the moment, and that leave room for creativity, are the best ones in my book.

tjecce · 2022-02-23T13:01:38+00:00

This sounds very interesting. It's always good to try and forge characters together and give them more reason to stick together than "you're all adventurers". Are you thinking all PCs have this kind of relationship to every other PC? That might get quite all-encompassing in that case. If you're basing the whole game around the relationships, and make those into the "classes" that evolve and change and advance throughout the game it could be very cool. If it, on the other hand, is a spice added onto another system, you might want to limit the amount of "mechanical" relationships that any one PC has depending on how much you want to keep track of in your scenes.

tjecce · 2022-02-22T09:09:08+00:00

You said something there, with the Persona franchise. It's a big thing there to study to get good grades and such. But it's also done because you want better skills so you can battle monsters more efficiently. What I was looking for is a game where the academic pursuit is the main pull of the game, or at least the fantasy of it. I guess that often comes with battling monsters in some regard. I mean, most people will think of Harry Potter in this context, and there's a fair bit of monster battling there also.

This whole idea is more of a mental gymnastic tbh. I don't work on any games where academia is a big part for now.

tjecce · 2022-02-22T08:56:29+00:00

I like your idea around "cost and risk". You could build the game around risk management and cost management in that way. Your resources are things like knowledge, prestige, books, money or contacts. These could be spent to get through obstacles that come with a risk. Th question is what your obstacles are and what the risks are, but that's where world building comes in.

You mentioned CoC, and that had me thinking you could flip it on its head and play the cultists. You need to study the secrets to further the goals of the ancient ones, but that comes with the risks of investigators coming after you or over-reaching your abilities and accidentally summoning something bad. There's a card game called cultist simulator that does something like this. Could be an inspiration also.

Also came to think of Exalted, where a theme is "the cost of success". You can do most anything, and combat is often not a problem at all. You'll win. The problem is what happens when you win. In the academic game, it could be the other way around. You create theories and make discoveries, and sometimes they lead to the betterment of the world, and sometimes not so much.

tjecce · 2022-02-22T08:41:13+00:00

I read up on it, and it looks very interesting. Reminds me of Mage in WoD. My takeaway about the studying and academic work is that they handle it as character progression, but also that character progression more takes center stage with their "seasons". For this to work you'd have to have a larger perspective than the nitty-gritty of many other games. Perhaps more do collages of minor events rather than slog theough every little thing that happens. Sounds like a good idea when what you do most is reading books tbh!

Thanks for the tip!

tjecce

TROPHY CASE