How to fix Soak?

[Kyeudo]

We all know about the problem: You can't take a hit in Exalted. At least, you can't take a hit and still expect to beat a matched opponent. It doesn't matter how much armor you pile on, you're still gonna take damage because of Essence ping and that's going to start causing you wound penalties and it all goes downhill from there.


But if you get rid of Essence ping, all of a sudden armor becomes god. Anyone in a decent suit of armor could then almost ignore anyone with a knife or other small weapon. This clearly is also horribly bad (probably is even worse than normal).


So, how do we find a happy medium? Anyone have some sort of elegant idea for making a suit of Orihalcum Superheavy Plate worth its 5 dot Artifact rating without making the lowly knife a worthless weapon?

 

[Plague of Hats]

Fix damage scaling and the number of attacks granted by magical flurries.


Despite all the moaning about ping damage, a given instance of ping is not the problem. Ping scales extremely poorly compared to health levels, because every purchase of Ox-Body Technique nets most beings two or more health levels, while each dot of Essence gets you no more than one level of damage. It's the volume of ping attacks that are incoming that makes ping a potential problem, because you can sustain a reliable amount of damage over a short amount of time, which ends up being identical to a single application of a large amount of damage. And this is the uncomplicated version before most Charms come into play.


The separate issue of "one hit, one kill" comes from the opposite end of the spectrum from ping damage. Damage values can be inflated so high and armor is relatively easy to mitigate that you can expect to do significant chunks of damage with any single hit unless your target is a massive soak monster.


A related issue, that helps to mitigate how quickly damage can climb thanks to high Accuracy pools, is the value of short-duration DV boosts. Long duration boosts are too plentiful and powerful, mostly due to poorly designed martial arts. A single 5m-7m commitment can often allow you to hit your DV cap for the entire scene. These effects need to be scaled back, and the value of instant and action-length +DV effects should be enhanced. For instance, changing the First and Second Excellencies to provide double their normal value for DVs is a good start. This places more emphasis on the middle-ground areas between no Charm use and the use of a perfect defense.


Of course, perfect defenses might need to be rescaled if you go whole hog, particularly longer duration perfect defenses like Cobra and Mongoose Method or Flowing Body Ascension. Their relative value would skyrocket when standard, instant perfect defenses become more expensive or otherwise less attractive.


Then, of course, after all this you need to rescale all the effects that manipulate damage values.


So, really, soak doesn't need to be fixed. You just need to rebuild everything else.

 

[Briartone]

every purchase of Ox-Body Technique nets most beings two or more health levels

I take issue with that reference simply that I HATE the idea of supposed 'Mandatory Charms'. I don't like that in order to survive, I am FORCED at character creation to invest in Ox-Body or some equivalent. I have so longed for a rework of the relationship between Essence Ping, Soak, Armor, and Health Levels.


I have always found it strange that Exalts could not increase attributes or abilities above the human level until Essence 6+, and yet they can permanently increase their health levels beyond the human/mortal norm at creation. Really. How does that even remotely track in the logic of Exalted rules?


In my Story I felt that was ridiculous. So I made Ox-Body Charms Higher essence and ability requirements. Also, I juiced them up and had them stack according to the puchase # not a choice of what kidn of health levels or fixed one. This way those who wanted to invest in Ox-Body really felt like they were getting what they wanted but it wasn't easy to just buy 3 of them.


To balance this out for newbies I made armor's Hardness rating (Yes. The joys of that trait. Sigh.) capable of negating that auto ping. This way that ping could still romp on extras but didn't make other fights a matter of who hits who first.


Also, just in case Armor wasn't a big purchase: the ping occurs after armor but before natural soak is applied. Therefor, a Ess 6 Exalt against an Ess 5 is still going to be close depending on Stamina ratings and Armor. But if the Ess 6 has invested in Ox-Body at that point, he's clearly got even more of an edge beyond that of his essence ping. In this way I nerfed the ping to be very over the top against extras, as with all charms, but against major characters it is still viable without being the winning factor EVERY time just because X hit Y first.


That's just my take on it. I probably bastardized the whole system and threw who knows how many Lunar charms out of wack based on those new rules.... But hey. I don't use Lunars.

 

[Plague of Hats]

every purchase of Ox-Body Technique nets most beings two or more health levels

I take issue with that reference simply that I HATE the idea of supposed 'Mandatory Charms'. I don't like that in order to survive, I am FORCED at character creation to invest in Ox-Body or some equivalent. I have so longed for a rework of the relationship between Essence Ping, Soak, Armor, and Health Levels.

In the realm of ensuring your survival in Celestial combat, Ox-Body Technique is pretty low on the list of priorities. I would not call it "mandatory."

I have always found it strange that Exalts could not increase attributes or abilities above the human level until Essence 6+, and yet they can permanently increase their health levels beyond the human/mortal norm at creation. Really. How does that even remotely track in the logic of Exalted rules?

I can understand an aesthetic preference, but calling it out as some sort of failure of internal consistency or logic doesn't really fly. It's like having Willpower 6 and Strength 5. They're not the same kind of trait, they don't do the same thing, and it was never a goal that they be very similar.

 

[Kyeudo]

Despite all the moaning about ping damage' date=' a given instance of ping is not the problem. Ping scales extremely poorly compared to health levels, because every purchase of Ox-Body Technique nets most beings two or more health levels, while each dot of Essence gets you no more than one level of damage. It's the volume of ping attacks that are incoming that makes ping a potential problem, because you can sustain a reliable amount of damage over a short amount of time, which ends up being identical to a single application of a large amount of damage. And this is the uncomplicated version before most Charms come into play.[/quote']
So, if I understand what your saying, the problem is that you can take 3 or 4 attacks in a single turn doing ping without the aid of Charms and this is like getting hit with a singe attack without the benefits of your armor?

The separate issue of "one hit, one kill" comes from the opposite end of the spectrum from ping damage. Damage values can be inflated so high and armor is relatively easy to mitigate that you can expect to do significant chunks of damage with any single hit unless your target is a massive soak monster.

So you are saying that when you try to pump raw dice of damage, the numbers go up so much faster than the Soak value of armor that you may as well not be wearing armor?

A related issue, that helps to mitigate how quickly damage can climb thanks to high Accuracy pools, is the value of short-duration DV boosts. Long duration boosts are too plentiful and powerful, mostly due to poorly designed martial arts. A single 5m-7m commitment can often allow you to hit your DV cap for the entire scene. These effects need to be scaled back, and the value of instant and action-length +DV effects should be enhanced. For instance, changing the First and Second Excellencies to provide double their normal value for DVs is a good start. This places more emphasis on the middle-ground areas between no Charm use and the use of a perfect defense.

If I understand this correctly, you are saying that Dipping Swallow Defense/Shadow Over Water/Other Charms that are not perfect defenses become useless far too quickly?

 

[Plague of Hats]

So, if I understand what your saying, the problem is that you can take 3 or 4 attacks in a single turn doing ping without the aid of Charms and this is like getting hit with a singe attack without the benefits of your armor?

No, actually, I think the potential for mundane flurries is fine, though certain weapons have too much of everything with no meaningful drawback (the serpent-sting staff comes to mind). Magical flurries, however, are cheap and too efficient. But that's a separate issue from what happens after you hit.
Because there's functionally no difference between being hit for Essence 3 ping five or so times and being hit once for 15+ raw damage, both potential outcomes remain largely the same in comparison. However, the latter is exacerbated by magical flurries, because now you can attack just as many times as any other weapon and still get the full benefit of large post-soak pools.

So you are saying that when you try to pump raw dice of damage, the numbers go up so much faster than the Soak value of armor that you may as well not be wearing armor?

Basically, yes. The devaluation of soak starts early and builds steam very, very fast.

If I understand this correctly, you are saying that Dipping Swallow Defense/Shadow Over Water/Other Charms that are not perfect defenses become useless far too quickly?

No, it's that there's a middle-ground that remains largely unexplored for short-duration, efficient DV boosts (not penalty negators).

 

[Tsuranis]

To be honest, my group has had a lot of mileage out of houseruling that hardness stacks. Any effect that clearly adds hardness I just allow on top of armour straight off. Something like durability of oak that "sets" hardness I allow expansion charms for to allow them to stack with other hardness effects.


I'm sure some people out there won't like this, but its worked for us so far.

 

[HowlingCoyote]

To be honest, my group has had a lot of mileage out of houseruling that hardness stacks. Any effect that clearly adds hardness I just allow on top of armour straight off. Something like durability of oak that "sets" hardness I allow expansion charms for to allow them to stack with other hardness effects.
I'm sure some people out there won't like this, but its worked for us so far.

I really like this, personally. I don't really understand why hardness doesn't stack while soak does.


One thing I've often thought about hardness is that it should be 'minimum soak', not just a threshold. That would counter ping spamming if you have artifact armor, but not overly unbalance combat. It would act something like armor should.

 

[wordman]

Random idea: ping damage decreases as you flurry. First attack in flurry, ping is Essence. Second is Essence - 1, third is Essence - 2. Or some variation thereof.


I haven't thought about this that hard, but it seems to change some incentives in (at least) some obvious ways. All of which would seem to encourage behavior in ways I like, at least at first blush.

 

[Ker'ion]

To balance this out for newbies I made armor's Hardness rating (Yes. The joys of that trait. Sigh.) capable of negating that auto ping. This way that ping could still romp on extras but didn't make other fights a matter of who hits who first.

One thing I've often thought about hardness is that it should be 'minimum soak', not just a threshold. That would counter ping spamming if you have artifact armor, but not overly unbalance combat. It would act something like armor should.

IIRC, Hardness does negate auto ping and if you don't roll enough to break the Hardness rating it acts like a minimum soak and nothing gets rolled at all.
And as for a knife becoming worthless when you make Superheavy Plate worth it's five dot rating?


If you're using a knife against someone with SHP, you deserve the beating you're about to receive, as a knife IS worthless against Heavy and Superheavy Artifact armors and mostly worthless against pretty much all artifact armors with a Hardness rating.

 

[Gylthinel]

IMO, flurries are the problem. Both mundane and magical are too over-powered.

 

[Tsuranis]

One thing I've often thought about hardness is that it should be 'minimum soak'' date=' not just a threshold. That would counter ping spamming if you have artifact armor, but not overly unbalance combat. It would act something like armor should.[/quote']IIRC, Hardness does negate auto ping and if you don't roll enough to break the Hardness rating it acts like a minimum soak and nothing gets rolled at all.

I think he's saying that hardness should be a seperate rating apply after soak. If I understand right, the idea is that if soak reduces you to minimum damage, this new "hardness" rating is then subtracted from the minimum damage dice inflicted? It sounds like a fairly solid idea to me, although you'd need to lower the values of hardness quite significantly.

 

[HowlingCoyote]

One thing I've often thought about hardness is that it should be 'minimum soak'' date=' not just a threshold. That would counter ping spamming if you have artifact armor, but not overly unbalance combat. It would act something like armor should.[/quote']IIRC, Hardness does negate auto ping and if you don't roll enough to break the Hardness rating it acts like a minimum soak and nothing gets rolled at all.

I think he's saying that hardness should be a seperate rating apply after soak. If I understand right, the idea is that if soak reduces you to minimum damage, this new "hardness" rating is then subtracted from the minimum damage dice inflicted? It sounds like a fairly solid idea to me, although you'd need to lower the values of hardness quite significantly.

Kinda... I was just suggesting that soak doesn't drop below whatever hardness was set to. This would apply only to artifact armor, obviously, but it would effectively over-ride 'minimum damage' and the 'overwhelming' tag, and by extension ping spamming, if the hardness rating were higher than either the attacker's essence or the overwhelming value of the weapon (whichever applied to a given attack). I agree that the hardness ratings, as they are right now, are probably too high to use this way... but it's a pretty easy fix to lower them (to half? a third?), compared to re-jigging everything else.

 

[Briartone]

I can understand an aesthetic preference' date=' but calling it out as some sort of failure of internal consistency or logic doesn't really fly. It's like having Willpower 6 and Strength 5. They're not the same kind of trait, they don't do the same thing, and it was never a goal that they be very similar.[/quote']
I was referring to their explanation of why Atts and Abilities can't go above 5. The limitations of Humanity and unenlightened essence blah blah. That was all well and good. Just that that same ruling for physical and mental states doesn't apply to health levels seemed..... out of place. It just always bothered me.


And you are right about health levels. They quickly become useless if not immediately during your average Celestial combat. Just trying to make a replacement system that makes their purchase actually WORTH the experience. As it is, 2 health levels really isn't as sound a replacement for perfect defenses...... but then perfect defenses usually aren't available at character creation. Which may account for the health levels being available that early. Wow, duh.


Apparently this never occurred to me before. I must be high.

 

[Briartone]

One thing I've often thought about hardness is that it should be 'minimum soak'' date=' not just a threshold. That would counter ping spamming if you have artifact armor, but not overly unbalance combat. It would act something like armor should.[/quote']IIRC, Hardness does negate auto ping and if you don't roll enough to break the Hardness rating it acts like a minimum soak and nothing gets rolled at all.

I think he's saying that hardness should be a seperate rating apply after soak. If I understand right, the idea is that if soak reduces you to minimum damage, this new "hardness" rating is then subtracted from the minimum damage dice inflicted? It sounds like a fairly solid idea to me, although you'd need to lower the values of hardness quite significantly.

Maybe a fourth of the soak=hardness? Maybe less?


I like this idea.

 

[Dracogryff]

And you are right about health levels. They quickly become useless if not immediately during your average Celestial combat. Just trying to make a replacement system that makes their purchase actually WORTH the experience. As it is, 2 health levels really isn't as sound a replacement for perfect defenses...... but then perfect defenses usually aren't available at character creation. Which may account for the health levels being available that early. Wow, duh.

*shrug* I'm messing around with the idea that Ox Body isn't a Charm, but instead an innate part of being a character. IE, a character gets as many Ox Bodies a their Stamina or Essence, whichever is lower.


Haven't had a lot of chance to playtest yet...but it was the solution I hit on for the fact that Ox Body is almost vital at high levels of the game, and yet really isn't worth the experience expenditure.

 

[cyl]

Well I have thought about this specific problem for a very long time and I was just about to start a thread about making tanking a viable mode of defense, since it's not.


In my analysis of the problem several factors were obvious:


- weapons deal more damage than armors / charms give soak


- hardness is useless most of the time


- the P tag for weapon increase the first point


- ping spamming and high accuracy cannot be countered by lots of hardness and heavy soak


Basically... what everyone said.


The problem with armor is that it does not reduce damage the way it should. It either keep it to a minimum (in which case you can expect ping spamming), and


There are a number of solutions that can be found:


- reducing the ping damage for flurries so that it can't be spammed over and over again is the first reasonable thing to do: either you reduce ping for flurries decreasingly, or you make flurries add +x (oversuxx and / or the Overwhelming values or strength) to the base attack so that a flurry could eventually wound a heavily armored tank.


- getting rid of the P tag for most weapons increases the value of soak


- increasing hardness so that it matches an average character wielding a weapon of the appropriate type with a single success (light would be around 8 - medium around 10 - heavy 12 - super heavy 15). While this solution gives more power to the tanks, fighters who cannot bring more than 15L to the table should start thinking about other interesting ways to deal with the tank (clinches or runaway)


There can be an interesting synergy between raising the hardness and making flurries adding +x to the damage; treating the flurry as one single attack for the purpose of damage... no more ping damage problems.

 

[uteck]

I am using a number of rules to balance things out and to make Exalts more survivable in combat. (And given my tendencies to kill characters, this is needed even more so in this system.) The first is to add your permanent Essence to 0 Health Levels, Stamina to -1, and Resistance to -2, with Essence capping the others. Ox-Body works as normal if you want to make a sponge, and recalculate things as your Essence increases. Now you can take more damage as your Essence increases which is needed since the damage being done is grater.


Another is that I reduced the cost of artifact armor form the core book by half, minimum of 1, since it is just shaped metal with no other enhancements. (Does not address damage or soak, but brings the cost in line with what it does and now the cost is similar to the weapons in the same book that are dealing about the same amount of damage as the armor protects against. For a game were defense trumps offense, this inconsistency was annoying.)


And I halved the damage of all impact weapons that do Bashing damage, since it is obvious that the damage was doubled because it is bashing and not lethal as if that balanced it out. Instead it produced one-shot kill weapons for anything not wearing super-heavy plate or using perfect dodges. Knocked unconscious in combat can be just as bad as being killed, they just need to take one more action to finish you off.


And the main rule it to limit Ping damage to once per tick, so you can not ping spam.

 

[cyl]

As Plague said, the problem comes with the flurries and ping.... yet not allowing flurries to take at least some sort of effect renders flurries useless against armored foes.


If you limit ping to once per action, then no one is going to pick up speed 4 weapons with low damage rating, and they're probably not going to go after the extra action charms.


You need to keep some sort of way for the guy with the quick but not so deadly weapon to overcome the big tank relying on nothing but his armor through the use of a magical / non magical flurry.


Tis why I thought of considering a flurry as one single attack (only for the purpose of damage) with a formula adding a defined value (str+oversuxx seems fair) to the damage of the first attack.


Consider a Melee 5, Str 2 PC with a regular short klave +4L, assuming he'd get all of his 5 attacks with +1 oversuxx each, that gives us:


(1st attack) 2+4+1 + (2nd attack) 2+1 (3rd attack) 2+1 (4th attack) 2+1 (5th attack) 2+1: total 19L incoming, -15L, 4 dice of post soak damage.

 

[uteck]

I forgot my other house rule to make combat more survivable; you only count half of your extra success (round up) for damage. This helps ease the over importance that Dexterity has in combat since it is a factor in every formula and skews the game balance.


Overcoming the tank is easily done if you use the called shot rules (page 158) to target an unarmored section of the body, or allow a stunt to hit the joints and do Piercing damage to them or to maim the armor and thus reduce the mobility and use of that limb. Get creative and do something Jackie Chan would do.

 

[cyl]

Hmm... IIRC called shot has the opposite philosophy.


You can't hit people on unarmored locations through called shots (forget decapitating).


My problem is that tanking is not an option while it oughta be.

 

[wordman]

I've been thinking more about the "degrading ping" idea (mentioned on the first page) some more. I think I like it, provided you really push the notion as far as it will go.


Works like this:


By default, ping = Essence (just as canon).


When flurrying, ping is reduced by the number of attack rolls made so far.

Example: Two Schmendricks (Essence 4) are fighting. Let's say the defender has a soak of 6L. The attacker flurries three attacks. First one ends up with five damage dice before soak. Ping would be 3 (Essence - 1 attack rolled), damage exceeding soak is 0, so three damage dice are rolled. Next attack winds up with seven damage dice before soak. Ping would be 2 (Essence - 2 attacks rolled), damage exceeding soak is 1, so two damage dice are rolled. Also five damage dice before soak on last attack. Ping is 1 (Essence - 3 attacks rolled), damage exceeding soak is 0, so one damage die is rolled.

Ping can reach zero, and this just means that you can only do damage by exceeding soak.

Example: Same as before, except the attack flurries four attacks. The last one, he rolls really well, and gets eight damage dice. Ping is 0, damage exceeding soak is 2, so two damage dice are rolled.

Example: As above, but the fourth attack sucks, getting only three successes. Ping is 0, damage exceeding soak is 0, so no damage dice are rolled.

Ping can go negative. Each point of negative ping reduces the raw damage by one die. The attack is then calculated as if ping were 0.

Example: Same as the prior example, except the attack flurries six attacks. The fifth attack gains six damage dice. Ping is -1 (Essence - 5 attacks rolled), reducing this to five damage dice. Ping treated as 0, damage exceeding soak is 0, so no damage dice are rolled. Sixth attack generates nine damage dice. Ping is -2 (Essence - 6 attacks rolled), eating two damage dice, for a remainder of seven. Ping treated as 0, damage exceeding soak is 1, so one damage die is rolled.

A few things to note:

• Flurries become less effective.
  
• Since the only way to avoid ping being reduced is to avoid flurrying, a slight incentive for making single attacks is added as well.
  
• Against heavily armored targets, as a practical matter, there is not much point in flurrying more than (Essence - 1) attacks.
  
• Someone who manages to hit with every attack in such flurry has a reduced damage expectation. Total damage dice rolled will be a triangular sum of 1 to (Essence - 1), or (Essence - 1)*(Essence)/2. For an Essence of 4, that's six dice (i.e. 3+2+1). Of those, average result per die is 0.4, for an average damage of 2.4 points. Compare to the same flurry under the canonical system, for each of three attacks rolls four dice. This average 12 * 0.4 = 4.8 points, or twice times as much as this "degrading ping" system (and, further, there is no reason for the canonical attacker to stop a three attacks, with each additional one dealing four more dice of damage).
  
• The defender will know that avoiding the first attack in the flurry is more useful than avoiding the last.
  
• Negative ping winds up making Hardness slightly more effective.
  
• As an ancillary benefit, winds up "solving" the "infinite rate problem", as the negative ping concept soon makes additional attacks impractical.

 

[Kyeudo]

So, the problems affecting soak are:

• Magical Flurries are too powerful as they allow you to make lots of attacks with low rate weapons like the Grand Goremaul.
  
• Piercing damage is too common
  
• Damage boosters and soak mitgaters are too common.
  
• Artifact Armors give far too little soak
  
• Ox-Body is necessary for survival yet largely unrewarding to have.

Any that I missed?

 

[cyl]

I don't see the point in going in the negative with ping.


It should be kept just like in 1e before Power Combat, 1 die of damage as the minimum... because, as you noted, flurrying doesn't give any edge at all.


I don't have your math skill, but wouldn't it be simpler to treat a flurry as a single attack only for the purpose of damage, adding a static, or slowly decreasing value to the raw damage ?


The problem with ping is that with your bare fists and a flurry you can roll up to Essence x successful attacks, and that can mean between 2 (ess 2 x 1 successful attack) and 20 (ess 4 x 5 successful attack) dice of post soak damage.

Any that I missed?

Hardness doesn't do squat :wink:

 

[wordman]

I don't see the point in going in the negative with ping.
It should be kept just like in 1e before Power Combat, 1 die of damage as the minimum... because, as you noted, flurrying doesn't give any edge at all.

Using a minimum of one undermines a lot of what I was trying to do, because it doesn't provide any incentive to limit how many attacks you put into the flurry. By letting the ping reach zero, it creates a practical limit on how many can be expected to work against heavily armored foes.


Letting it go negative is more complicated, but does have an effect. One, it makes Hardness (particularly low Hardness) come into play slightly more. Second, it places a practical limit on how many flurry attacks can be expected to work against lightly armored foes.

I don't have your math skill, but wouldn't it be simpler to treat a flurry as a single attack only for the purpose of damage, adding a static, or slowly decreasing value to the raw damage ?

Simpler, perhaps, but it would wind up changing the game more than you might expect. As an example, consider the case where someone is flurrying and using excellencies for each attack. That's a lot of essence burned that wouldn't be if doing what you propose.