Completed Chronicles

magnificentmomo

magnificentmomo

That Guy
Just trying to spark some interesting conversation here. How many Exalted campaigns have you actually finished? What were they and how did they end?
 
The last one I finished was my game in the west which featured the liberation of a small kingdom from the dragonblooded while being used as a pawn by a certain deathlord. It ended in a gigantic limitbreak fest in which a city was razed and a legion shattered just before the eclipse caste of the circle broke with deliberate cruelty and soul breaker orbed an encroaching imperial fleet with another legion to hell.


Before that I had quite a few campaigns, some longer some on the short side.


Let's see, I did the Lookshy Special Forces Vs. The Mask of Winters thing that probably everyone has run at one point or another. That was good fun and featured actually a few warstrider battles.


Like everyone I have seen the river province liberated and the blessed isle conquered... several times. Often with summoned demons or once with the ebon dragon returning.


We did the wandering heroes thing in first edition where people just investigated their past lives and did cool shit (reclaiming treasures, fighting rivals, being a dark and broody demigod etc.)


There was a failed campaign about intrigue on the blessed isle and murder attempts on the empress... but one person couldn't get into exalted so we switched the system.


I am probably forgetting quite a few here, but those are the ones that stand out/the classics and the most recent ones.


These days I am not actively playing exalted anymore, because I came to think that the system is crap and there are a lot of other very cool games out there that deserve to be played. I think about running exalted one of those days with PDQ... but perhaps I will just run a 12 kingdoms campaign instead.
 
I had one campaign end. Actually, it was our first and I gave an average of 17 experience per session, every other week for about three years. Needless to say, they were rather powerful.


So powerful that they decided that the UCS needed to stop playing the Games of Divinity and basically waged war on Yu-Shan, getting a bunch of Abyssals and Shadowland Exalted (my creation) into an army, finding one of the Primoridal War weapons, and basically breaking into the games to attack the UCS. Much destruction that tore apart Creation at the same time.


They won the best they could. One player (uteck's actually) is now in charge of the Sidereals, the two First Age Solars are guarding the actual Games from ALL gods, one of the Solars became a Deathlord proxy, another took the sacrifice way out. One of the Lunars went to Castle Vania to become a level boss (yeah, I had an adventure based on Castlevania) and the other went to a Fae Freehold to be with his father.


That and finding that the Empress was actually a Sidereal (the real Empress "retired"). Killing off most of the First Age Lunars, a hidden city, flowing invisible platforms, the Elemental Dragon of Air becoming the concubine of a First Age Abyssal who rewrote the calendar and time itself since he stole Gaia's piece from the Games of Divinity.


Oh, and they trapped a Deathlord in a pocket dimension Elsewhere for all time.


The next arc was set 300 years later, in the Fourth Age. :)
 
Yeah, that ending also pointed out much the power scale on Solars ramps up. It can quickly get out of control since they have SO much impact on the world. And at a certain point, it gets really hard to create a challenge for them.


I mean, how do you beat almost killing the UCS? Breaking into the GoD and convincing Yu-Shan to ban the game for ALL gods?


I talked about that over at the White Wolf forum, and the fact that the Dreams of the First Age just expands that huge power levels of Solars. They were saying that a ST who doesn't want those powers in their game is basically being a wimp because Exalted (Solars in specific) is about just this thing. Massive destruction and following a the power increase until you get bored.


As a minor note, our gaming group decided it was too much power and we needed to tone things down a bit. :)
 
If Solars get that recockulous then Abyssals do as well. Then there is also delicious in-fighting. But going to the insane Creation shattering extreme is good, fun, and what I understood the end of the "Vanilla Exalted" was supposed to be.
 
I've been repeatedly told by the TFS and the WW groups that I should just except Exalted power curve. :) I just don't like it. I like a bit more balance, but it gets really frustrating to ST when you have people throwing perfects and Speed 2 attacks at you with starting characters and "5 is legendary" when I got a player who averages 14. :) And that's with a skill he doesn't have. So, according to the book, he should be able to dominate the entire bureaucracy of the Realm. Okay... what happens when there are three of them?


Okay, done ranting. I think.


But, it was a very fun campaign, but it also got to the point where we all knew it was over. There was no question that they didn't really want to go on. Too much power, too fast.
 
Trust me, I know what you're talking about. Players of mine bitch that no one runs for their high power characters anymore. Well...everything has been done. What the hell else do they want to do with those characters? You can only fight so many Incarnae or Yozis or Primoridals that were never captured or what the fuck ever. There's only so much you can do before the ST says fuck it.
 
Couldn't you just give them less xp? Or try and prolong the growth in some other manner? Then again most games if they go on long enough the PC's get rediculous, even DnD. At least that is my understanding.
 
Meh, you have to understand that you simply cannot challenge exalts with obstacles. Repeat that a couple of hundred times then come back.


Ok, what do you do?


Morals.


One of the characters involved is the unassailable demigod, he sees the truth in everything, you cannot make a conspiracy story without him uncovering it.


Well, why make one then? For the fallout.


What will happen if his spouse is in the conspiracy? His children? Friends?


How does he deal with it? And if you want to be mean (and you should want to) then make it a just conspiracy. Perhaps he slaughtered a lot of dragonblooded and they want to help the innocent ones. Or whatever.


So, what about combat monkeys?


Those are easy. For one, the cannot be everywhere. A barbarian horde/wyld hunt/imperial army invades an area he/she cares about. So our invincible sword princes sets out to kill a couple of thousand invaders/assassins/whatever.


What do you do? Design a couple of million NPC to challenge a solar? Really? No, that takes fucking ages and the combat afterwards will take until we are all too old to see what we rolled.


There are a lot of challenges to be had though. What if they split up? Let's say one part of the invading army heads for the village the character was born in... to plunder and rape... and the other part heads for a major industrial hub/important first age site, that is absolutely essential for the character's plans.


How will she decide? What if old friends are on the other side? Friends who now thinks she is a demon or even worse, friends who think she should join their cause and actually have good arguements instead of the old "or I kill you!!!".


Exalted is a game about flawed heroes, give them reasons to make bad decisions and the thing will run without prep time.
 
My characters usually don't have morals. So there goes that idea :P
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And Compassion 2 is the top of our group's Compassion virtue. Just because of the one time with the demons and the children teasing the high compassion people. *sigh*
 
My characters usually don't have morals. So there goes that idea :P
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No screentime for you then ^^


With compassion you buy storyarcs, with conviction you buy the right to be the fierce looking dude in the back :P


The following is not aimed at CW, but he reminded me about something I wanted to say.


Many roleplayers suffer from the "my guy" syndrome. They don't like to have bad stuff happening to their characters or character's assets and friends. That's bad for good stories, if people don't feel challenged they have to get rid of that habit first. Yes, your orphan swordsmaster who is a loner and mistrusts everyone is invincible, but he is also fucking two dimensional and basically you have written yourself out of the story. I worked with my players to get them rid of that habit and we have much more fun now (well, we did have fun before, but now our games have a more movie/novel like and less computer game like quality).
 
Safim said:
Many roleplayers suffer from the "my guy" syndrome. They don't like to have bad stuff happening to their characters or character's assets and friends. That's bad for good stories, if people don't feel challenged they have to get rid of that habit first. Yes, your orphan swordsmaster who is a loner and mistrusts everyone is invincible, but he is also fucking two dimensional and basically you have written yourself out of the story. I worked with my players to get them rid of that habit and we have much more fun now (well, we did have fun before, but now our games have a more movie/novel like and less computer game like quality).
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Yeah, but that comes from some D&D DM whose idea of a "plot" was to trash the character's background with a deus ex machina.  I always liked having believable backgrounds and characters who were tied into the world and setting, blahblahblah.


I learned to be very careful about doing that with certain STs when I had a character with a backstory tied into a city (second son of a minor merchant house).


The DM blew up the city and overran it with zombies at the same time, killing everyone the character knew.


As the BEGINNING of his plot, without any real ability for the characters to influence it.


I really felt like it was a huge flaming waste of time to work out the background.


Next PC for that campaign was an antisocial orphan.
 
dmoonfire said:
I had one campaign end. Actually, it was our first and I gave an average of 17 experience per session, every other week for about three years. Needless to say, they were rather powerful.
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Emphasis mine. But, therein lies part of the problem, as I see it. 17 XP per session? No wonder things blew out of proportion.....
 
magnificentmomo said:
Book says 4 per... how long were the sessions?
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Assuming adults with jobs, your average game session isn't going to be much over four hours presuming you don't schedule an entire day on a weekend.  If you've made schedules work out that well with 6 adults, I'm simply amazed, since we have done it perhaps once in the six months we've been playing.  Our ST gives out 4-5, maybe a couple bonus if there was good RPing and plot resolution going on.


Oh, and we're running mortals so our XP costs are exaggerated.


So a 16 hour game session with good roleplaying would justify 17 XP.  But that's  basically 2 charms per game session.  And starting with Solars?  Wow.
 
In that case it's better to give both annual xp (as in the corebook) and a lower xp per session.


17 xp per session means I can take 2 charms per session, and +1 Essence after the second session. That's just a bit too much xp I think.


Well, it depends on what you intend to actually do with the game, but it clearly and quickly qualifies the pcs as deathlord killers.
 
I give out 2XP per hour, which usually works out to about 8xp per session. I only run every other week, so even though progress may be fast in game-time, I think it's pretty reasonable in real-time.
 
If you understand the implications of it, there is nothing wrong in giving more xp then standard, but giving three times the amount the rulebook suggests should be tied into ingame events.


For example. At the beginning your characters get beaten down by something ancient and then they get their training time, rescue a mentor etc. and come back. Sped up XP can help you facilitate a typical from zero to hero story this way, though in my eyes that's more suitable for short campaigns. Tastes vary though.
 
10-14 hour sessions every two weeks on a Saturday. There were a couple of times I did 30+ for the end of an arc. But, I had a reason. When we first started the game, none of us really knew what the game would play out like. So, I suggested we give way too much experience, see what we like and don't like, then full expect the world to blow up.


They didn't disappoint in that aspect. :)
 
My guys get 1 xp per session, usually 4 a scenario. They start as demigods, no powercurve is needed.


However Combos were a problem. Costing so much that the token xp I gave them would be swallowed up. So they only have two Combos, their Combat Combo and their Non Combat Combo. It costs one XP to add a new Charm to one of these Combos. All starting Charms were put into the two Combos by me for free.


I do give some extra XP out in a game themed quiz which occurs about once every three scenarios. They can all earn up to an extra 4 points in that.
 
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