[Emperors of the Fading Suns] [Emperors of the Fading Suns] OOC Thread

JayTee said:
To Siham, an impotent, festering Neverborn who can only work through Deathlords and Deathknighs is infinitely preferable to a healthy and whole Primordial showing up on your doorstep.
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Kacie said:
Besides, it's not like you can summon a Primordial. Fangs merely asked where she could find Gaia.
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What Kacie said. Fangs' plan is not actually to *summon* Gaia.


Her plan is to disappear into the Wyld and unmake herself in a desperate attempt to save her mate's exaltation. Step 2 of this plan rhymes with "Puma".
 
Fair, in that case Siham will just smack her upside the head for getting irrational and failing to talk to her intellectual equal about the problem to see if the two of them can solve it. :tongue:
 
Not sure what the confusion is about Big K.


Having just woken up in 2014 after quite the night doesn't help either. -_-


Anyway, Happy New Year, may the next one bring more XPs and custom Charms.


Oh, and some good shit for your RLs too.


I love you guys. ^_^
 
Do we get any christmas/new years XP? :D


EDIT: (also, merry christmas and happy new years to everyone else!)
 
My saving grace is that I'm completely aware of my faults and am totally honest about them. Also completely accepting of any and all criticism directed at me because of them.


You can't be perfect unless you're humble about it.
 
Time to spend some Exp to become even more deadly in combat.


Melee:


Thousand Wounds Feinting (Invincible Fury of the Dawn) - permanent upgrade to Time-Scything Tech, now have 8 attacks for 5m 1wp. (Abyssals, pg 129)


Blades Well Blooded (Perfected Battle Array) - pay full attune cost for most expensive weapon, each weapon thereafter is 1m more. (Ink Monkeys ultimate collection, pg 14)


All Blades Call for Blood (Sun-Sword Concentration) - permanent, all melee weapons gain another +2 accuracy and drains motes on doing 1L (or +1m for soulsteel weapons). (Ink Monkeys, pg 15)


Coiled Shadow Attitude (Blade Lair Discipline) - 3m duration 1 scene, -1 external penalty to all attacks made against Mirror. (Ink Monkeys pg 17)


Death's Knight Stance (Guardian Sunfire Catechism) - +3m to Heavenly Guardian on activation, extending Heavenly Guardian's effect for 1 tick. (Ink Monkeys, pg 17)


Elegant Bloodletting Art: permanent upgrade to Hungry Tiger, now all extra successes on hit count 3x for calculating raw damage. (Ink Monkeys, pg 40)


Getting Blades Well Blooded in anticipation of getting more artifact weapons. Might as well borrow that jade bow now, since it doesn't eat into my mote pools like it would have previously.


Permanent addition of +2 Accuracy to all melee, another charm source of making it harder for people to hit her, and Death's Knight Stance functionally obviates the need for a flurry breaker. And two more attacks in my flurry speaks for itself, really.


- -


Thinking of getting Death Well-Remembered, which adds +2 Parry DV permanently, except that it counts as charms, meaning it doesn't stack with the Excellencies. It's still useful in cases where I don't feel like pulling up Infinite Mastery, but honestly, why not just pull up Infinite Mastery?


Manifold Murder Arts would let me spend 1m 1wp, and until DV refreshes, Mirror natively has 5 dots in the five combat skills (because she already has Melee 5). This, coupled with Ash Child's Requiem, means that until her DV refreshes, she is at 20 Accuracy in any combat skill, prior to any weapon bonuses. This seems very useful to suddenly be super-dangerous with a bow, and should give any enemy a nasty surprise when they try to escape from her. (Or try to clench.) Strongly considering this charm.


7 charms (including Manifold Murder Arts) - not quite enough to get the 1st War Excellency and Glorious Carnage (the army breaker charm). Next time. After that, I'll pursue some Integrity charms to gain an Overdrive pool and a way of refreshing it that doesn't horribly clash with being a friend of the living.


Spending 4xp to get Integrity 3. MDV increases by 1. MDV is now 9.


60 xp spent, of 69xp. Remaining 9xp.
 
If I may, perhaps it would be good to increase your movement or even better a range combat ability as well.


That way;


- the Legion can be hit / challenged even through her swarms of ghosts


- you can shoot back at the Void Heart (or close in on him)


- there will be no escaping Mirror even if they somehow manage to run away > :)


Plus there may be interesting combination of effects between charms since you can now share effects through the right keywords.


My two cents.


Also - and I'm sorry to bring the bad news - you want to look at 2.5 since some of the Monkeys charms have been altered there.


All Blades Call for Blood for example does absolutely nothing like the IM collection says it does... so you may still change your mind about those charms you picked.


edit: nevermind that, I checked and it's the only one that got changed ! :D
 
Forgot to check the Errata, thanks for the heads up.


Good grief. All Blades Call for Blood is far nastier and more interesting than it used to be - that's a Lunar killing charm right there, what with Piercing and ignoring Hardness. Please, Lunar folks, correct me if I'm wrong on this and it doesn't affect Lunar armor.

If I may, perhaps it would be good to increase your movement or even better a range combat ability as well.


That way;


- the Legion can be hit / challenged even through her swarms of ghosts


- you can shoot back at the Void Heart (or close in on him)


- there will be no escaping Mirror even if they somehow manage to run away
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This is worth discussing strategy and doing a bit of exp efficiency crunching.


Mirror already has high movement for a melee based character. She has armor that enhances her dashing speed, as well as Monkey Leap. Furthermore, she has a mirror of Iron Raptor which lets her throw her weapon. Closing is an issue, but short of going up the non-favored Athletics tree, she's done what she can to mitigate distance from the melee side of things.


On the archery side, it would cost her 16xp to get to Archery 5. By taking Manifold Murder Arts, for 8xp and 1m, 1wp, she has Archery 5 until her DV refreshes. Ash Child Requiem lets her use her Melee excellency in place of an Archery excellency. So for 2m 1wp, she's at 20 dice before weapon bonuses, plus I have enough xp for another charm, *plus* I can pull the same charms and have 20 dice in MA (for clenches) or War or Thrown.


Basically, I'm betting that in the majority of cases, 5 rounds of attacking via spoofed archery is going to be 1) doable, and 2) I can't count on too many more rounds of archery anyways. If Mirror can force one perfect, the enemy is going to try and hide, then run, because Mirror just proved that running alone isn't going to work.


Beyond that, stylistically, it's more fun to demonstrate to Legion that her armies are a joke, and that Mirror is coming for her anyways. Glorious Carnage is an army-killing charm, and carving up her army does good things for everyone else on our side in the battle, too. After going through a chunk of the army, Mirror should be close enough to initiate a chase; with support from Flicker's tracking, or Siham's shooting, Mirror should keep running down Legion's motes. (Mirror has Iron Raptor to assist with damage during chases.) If Legion pulls ahead, then Mirror pulls the bow - it should be a nasty surprise, used when Legion is already very low on motes.


I don't see much use in going deep into the Archery tree; nobody wants to risk getting tagged by them, and they end up perfecting if you get over their DV's.


Void Heart has Essence 5 and a deeper mote pool. He's got to be taken with a group or else his mote pool will win out; a straight up archery contest is in his favor, simply due to his extreme specialization, major artifact bow (guessing he has a nasty artifact bow), but mainly because more motes. Siham's supporting fire is a must. The only other option is to crowd him into tunnels where his movement is cramped, and even then that doesn't get over his deeper mote pool.
 
Do not forget the legion is a melee specialist and a sneaky one. She can fight back and make unexpected devastating attacks... on top of being surrounded by swarms of ghosts.


Archery allows you to go straight to her from the get go... if you can spot her.


As for the VH, he may be even more problematic now with the cloak of escape.


He had range, forepower, and now a quick way out.. the only things we can do to kill him is drain his motes through archery, and or kill his guardian, which too will require archery.
 
Mirror is also a Melee specialist - she's better up close than far away, and Legion has one unavoidable disadvantage - she's not a Dusk caste. Mirror is. Legion's already at effectively +3DV to hit Mirror, and Mirror has no such problems with Legion. Keeping right on top of Legion so Legion can't disappear is the best bet for Mirror.


Mirror is designed to take on an army and its Exalted commander by herself and to win. Legion doesn't have ranged attacks, and Mirror is going to make her pay for that.


Mirror would very much like to have the other combat Exalts backing her up - Siham has the range, and Flicker has unshakeable tracking. The three of them are a good team.


Void Heart is going to take creativity, there's no doubt. We know he has a thing for Lunar women, however, and we can use that to our advantage. He goes after the lunar women exclusively; if they can act as fighting decoys long enough, the rest of us can gank his guardian -- and said guardian seems to be the only one who can get Void Heart to disengage and run when he should.


Fangs's flying chariot spell plus Flicker and Fangs playing decoy make a core around which we can build a real strategy for taking down Void Heart.
 
xarvh said:
Dodge Charms.
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Either Legion has costume Dodge Charms, or it's from Dreams of the First Age. The Ink Monkey's Solar's Burning Corona Evasion isn't a Mirrored charm, nor is Reed in the Wind. No other Dodge charms increase DV.
 
If the corresponding ones for Melee are mirrored, I don't see why the Dodge ones shouldn't.
 
Not all the Melee charms are mirrored, not at all. Nor are the Dodge charms mirrored exactly.


Ready in 8 Directions, for example, is explicitly not mirrored for Abyssals. That's the melee equivalent flurry breaker, which means The flipside is that the Abyssal Dodge Perfect is better than the Solar version hands down, since it explicitly places the Abyssal at the back of the opponent, where DV starts at 0 unless charms are invoked.


If you mean that "if a melee charm does X there should be a dodge charm that also does X" -- again, Dodge has honest to goodness flurry breakers, for both Solars and Abyssals. (Leaping Dodge and its mirror.) Melee does not; it has counter-attacks, where if you can't make the opponent want to stop attacking you, then you're stuck eating the whole flurry.


There's supposed to be a difference between the sets. If you want to rule otherwise, that's fine, but in that case I will have some new requests.
 
It's a bit more complex than that.


If a Solar Melee does X and is mirrored, and a Solar Dodge does Almost X, then I do expect the latter to be mirrored.


Why?


First of all, whether the mirror is explicitly declared or not is not much relevant, as we all agree that Exalted and especially the Ink Monkeys are hugely sloppy.


Second, and most important, as far as I can tell the Ink Monkeys add NO Dodge Abyssal Charms, not even a single mirror.


Kacie, do you think that this makes sense?
 
Dodge Charms are a little out of theme for Abyssals in general, though. They're major theme is about inflicting trauma, not avoiding it.
 
Hey, they are also not about jumping, why should they have Athletics Charms? Or Integrity or Medicine or Craft or Bureaucracy?


Hey, Solars shouldn't be about killing stuff, so why do they have damage-enhancing Charms?


Or maybe pigeon-holing Abyssals into a single thing makes them incredibly shitty characters.
 
JayTee is right, from my understanding.


I complained in a different game about Abyssals not having the counter-attack booster, Ready in 8 Directions; the philosophy behind that is that Abyssals charms reinforce that they cause trauma, and they do it better than anyone else - but their defenses are not as good as a Solar's.


A different example is Glorious Carnage, that charm I've gone on and on about that allows an Abyssal to, as a solo unit, destroy large armies. Solars don't have that mirrored charm, because it is considered too bloody, or out of theme.


All that said -- Xarvh, if you want to create dodge versions of the Ink Monkey's melee "Blade Lair/Coiled Shadow" that imposes a -1 external penalty, then I don't have a problem with that. After all, a huge bunch of the Dawn Solution is to make flowing between different combat skills/styles more smooth.


EDIT: and other similar charms - sorry, rereading that, it sounds like I only meant that one charm, not what I meant at all.

Or maybe pigeon-holing Abyssals into a single thing makes them incredibly shitty characters.
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They already are pigeon-holed into Death, Xarvh. Name me an Abyssal medicine charm that does anything so helpful as the Solar medicine tree without causing massive psychological trauma.


I understand the frustration - the logic on the combat charms is really flimsy. But most of the other skill charms are decidedly one note. I believe it's fully possible to make an interesting character even though the Death theme is very constraining, but it takes creativity and flexibility.
 
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Kacie said:
I complained in a different game about Abyssals not having the counter-attack booster, Ready in 8 Directions; the philosophy behind that is that Abyssals charms reinforce that they cause trauma, and they do it better than anyone else - but their defenses are not as good as a Solar's.
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That's a Melee Charm.


You will notice that Abyssals DO HAVE Medicine Charms.


They are twisted and harmful, as are their Melee Charms.


But they have them, and several.


Why do Abyssals have Dodge Charms at all then?


Have you noticed that their Dodge flurry breaker is actually a real counterattack?


So why does it make sense with there being less Dodge Charms for Abyssals?


Why should Melee be expanded rather than Dodge?


Saying that Melee is more important than Dodge for an Abyssal is like saying that Medicine is not important for an Abyssal, or that a Day Caste is less of an Abyssal than a Dusk Caste.
 
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