Kyeudo
One Thousand Club
Some thoughts I've had on the effect of Perfect Defenses on the game of Exalted:
I've been spending alot of time thinking about the basic mechanics of Exalted (you've probably noticed :roll
and I've come to think that perhaps the existance of Perfect Defenses are to blame for a good deal of the mechanical bugs that exist in the game as it stands. The thing that got me pointed in this direction was the Ink Monkeys. They have devoted so much effort into new Charms that essentially do at least one of two things: Make existing Charms not count as Charm activations or make existing Charms essentially free. My mostly irrational hatred of the Ink Monkeys delayed the realization somewhat, but I eventually asked myself "Why?"
The only answer I could come up with is: Because they are trying to encourage a play style that is at odds with the natural inclinations created by the rules. The play style they want to push? They want people to be able to throw a ton of Essence into big, flashy attacks and be able to get away with it. That's an idea I can get behind. In a way, that's what Exalted is about - the freedom to go as big as you want.
So, why do they focus on these two solutions? Why free Charm activations and free Charm costs? I can only say because of the existance of Perfect Defenses.
Now, don't get me wrong. Perfect Defenses are an essential part of the setting and so must remain in the rules system. Perfect Defenses answer the question "How did the Exalted stop the Primordials from just killing them outright?" I would posit that taking Perfect Defenses from Exalted would strip away part of the something that makes Exalted the game it is.
Still, the current niche occupied by Perfect Defenses forces the rest of gameplay to conform around them. Not that I'm saying something that we don't already know, but Perfect Defenses have turned motes into your HP guage and your Charm Activation into the most precious resource at your disposal. This of course, leads to the same type of question: "Why is that?"
Well, I see a few reasons, but the most critical reason I see is the origins of the rules system. Exalted was initially an experimental venture by White Wolf. It wasn't necessarily going to sell well, so devoting a huge amount of effort to making a customized rule set just for this new game would have been a stupid move. So, instead they took their existing system, added the fluff and stylistic elements they needed to make the fluff work, drew some cool art, and did enough playtesting that no obvious bugs were showing up and off to the printer the game went.
Why I call this the main reason for the problem is because the system they used as their base was the original Storyteller system, which may as well have been built to punish players from resolving things with combat. Everything I've heard about the original World of Darkness amounts to "Unless you are a Werewolf, even a combat-specced character doesn't know if he'd come out of the next fight alive." Combat was made to be short, risky, and brutal. This is great for games about intrigue and character development. Not so great for a game where a major theme is problem-solving by punching people in the face.
During playtesting, this underlying uncertainty that existed in combat was probably masked by the existance of the Perfect Defense. Because every character essentially has a "No, I don't get hit" button, it doesn't matter how brutal the combat system is. As long as a character has Essence and is aware of the attack, he will not die. And so, things continued onward. The Storyteller system got an update to its combat mechanics, namely the addition of static defenses and a streamlining of turn structure, and so we got Second Edition. However, the additions and streamlining never really addressed the underlying uncertainty because that uncertainty is considered a good thing in the World of Darkness, where most of the playtesting probably went on.
So, Perfect Defenses are essentially hiding the real problems with the combat system. They are potent enough to make up for most of the design problems, but these design problems mean that using a perfect constantly is a necessity against any opponent of reasonable threat level.
Now that I'm through telling you what you probably already know, how do we fix it? Well, we have to attack those underlying uncertainties in an effort to make using a Perfect Defense a less necessary and possibly even a less desirable choice.
The first uncertainty is the uncertainty of survival. As things stand, one hit in Exalted can kill you outright. Most artifact weapons are damaging enough and soak is poor enough that a single hit can kill outright. Even if it doesn't kill you, it still will inflict wound penalties that make further hits more certain and future attacks less likely to succeed, begining a slow spiral into the death of your character. Therefore, you cannot let an attack hit.
The second uncertainty is the uncertainty of a sufficient defense. Suppose we have two mortals, Alice and Bob, duking it out to see who's boss. Alice and Bob on different ticks. If Alice attacks, she compromises her defense. The more attacks she makes, the larger the compromise in her defenses. Because of the supremacy of defense, each attack is more likely to fail than succeed. Unless Alice gets lucky, Bob will get to attack and now Alice's guard is weakened. If Alice was too aggressive, she essentially hands Bob free hits and dies. However, there's not much fun in using Guard actions incessantly and an offense of some kind is necessary to win any fight, so staying on the defensive will not win you a fight. So, Alice is stuck either making single attacks or maybe a small flurry and praying that her opponent doesn't get lucky or launching large flurries and hoping to kill her opponent fast. In the end, using the best offense availible to her is stupid as it denies her any hope of maintaining a sufficient defense.
If you add Charms in, the problem gets more complex, but remains there, just in a sligtly different form. Let us assume, for the moment, that both attack pools and DVs are both equally boostable. Now, we have two young Exalts, Alice and Bob, fighting it out for whatever reason. Alice is currently acting before Bob. Both Alice and Bob decide to use their Charm for the action to enhance their attacks. Alice uses Hungry Tiger Technique and Bob chooses to use the Second Melee Excellency. When Alice attacks, Bob knows she won't be rolling more dice than he has in his defense pool, so he has options. He can either trust his DVs or he can blow a few motes on using the Excellency to buff his DV. Either way, Alice needs a fairly lucky shot (a really lucky shot if he used the Excellency) for her tactic to yield any fruit. Meanwhile, she has lowered her DV and removed almost all of her options to add to her defense. Now Bob's attack, even without the Excellency, has a very solid chance of hitting. With the Excellency, it's almost guaranteed. By using a purely offensive Charm, Alice has denied herself any hope of maintaining a sufficient defense (If Alice had used the Second Melee Excellency to boost her attack, we'd be right back to the situation in the preceding paragraph: two characters of equal offensive and defensive potential just waiting for a lucky break or a blunder to capitalize on). This is why that one Charm activation is a critical resource.
The final uncertainty is the problem of resource management. While every game system is going to have this to some extent, each character in Exalted has only X motes at any given time. If you get in combat with another character, the winner of the conflict is the person able to maintain that sufficient defense the longest and the person most able to maintain that sufficient defense is the one with the most resources. However, most characters cannot determine the size of the other character's mote pool, so they can't be entirely certain that they are the ones currently ahead in motes. Each mote diverted away from maintaining a defense might just be the mote that puts you behind the other character and may mean that you are the one to find yourself defenseless first.
Added together, these issues mean that defense is the Alpha and Omega of combat. He who defends best the longest wins, and the best defense is a Perfect Defense.
This is why the Ink Monkeys spend so much time on what is essentially fancy ways to get motes. Motes earmarked for offensive Charms only can't be used on that Perfect Defense anyway, so why not spend them to boost your attack? Charms that don't use up your Charm activation for the round won't leave you defenseless, so why not add a little extra kick to your next attack? This brings back the flashy, over-the-top action that full-on paranoia Perfect Spamming strips from the game.
Such approaches, however, aren't addressing the real issues that lie at the heart of the system. As someone pointed out to me, the Ink Monkeys haven't been given the go-ahead to completely rewrite the system, so they do what they can. However, I'm a guy who likes to homebrew with next to no social life. I've got the time and inclination to at least try and homebrew and houserule a fix to the real center of the problem.
So, I have a few ideas on where to start. In no particularly significant order, here they are:
Make Exalts be able to take a hit and keep on going. If you had a guarantee that a hit wouldn't be the end of the world, you would be more inclined to settle for a defense that was less than perfect. Take D&D for an example. D&D characters do not spend most of their time in combat fighting defensively or running away from threats, because they either have enough hit points (fighters) or enough defenses (wizard) that you are more or less guaranteed to survive until next round. So, you see D&D characters charging into the middle of monsters, taking risks, and using character resources (spell slots, manuvers, etc) on the offense instead of on defense. This doesn't mean they don't take appropriate cautions like buffing, five-foot stepping out of threatened squares, and so on, just that they can put themselves in a position where they might get hurt without having a spare character sheet in their backpacks. To allow Exalts to take a hit, Health Levels and Soak have to start pulling their weight.
Add risky but rewarding defensive options to the Charm sets. Once a single hit is not the end of a fight, having options that defend the character solidly without being perfect will become useful. If those options are less expensive than a Perfect Defense, successfully using one of them instead will put the character ahead in the mote attrition game.
Perhaps loosen up the restrictions on Charm actions. If instead of one Charm per DV refresh, perhaps make it one Charm per dice action. That way, using a Charm to boost your attack doesn't leave you defenseless. You could, for example, use Hungry Tiger Technique to supplement one attack in your flurry, buy a few dice for your other attacks with the First Melee Excellency, and then when you are attacked you could respond with Shadow Over Water or Solar Counterattack. This would still leave Combos useful, as you couldn't use both Hungry Tiger Technique and the First Melee Excellency at once or Shadow Over Water and Solar Counterattack against the same attack.
The last idea I have is to add some of the Ink Monkeys better Overdrive (ug, I hate that keyword) Charms to every Charm set. Having a set of motes that are only for throwing out awesome attack Charms would most definately encourage the use of Charms on the offensive.
So, that's what I've thought about the system. I like picking other peoples' brains, so what do you guys think? Do my suggestions actually address the problems? Any problems you forsee with my solutions? Any solutions you see that I missed?
TL DR version: Perfect Defenses hide mechanical problems by being so awesome. I've got some ideas on how to fix them. What do you think?
and I've come to think that perhaps the existance of Perfect Defenses are to blame for a good deal of the mechanical bugs that exist in the game as it stands. The thing that got me pointed in this direction was the Ink Monkeys. They have devoted so much effort into new Charms that essentially do at least one of two things: Make existing Charms not count as Charm activations or make existing Charms essentially free. My mostly irrational hatred of the Ink Monkeys delayed the realization somewhat, but I eventually asked myself "Why?"The only answer I could come up with is: Because they are trying to encourage a play style that is at odds with the natural inclinations created by the rules. The play style they want to push? They want people to be able to throw a ton of Essence into big, flashy attacks and be able to get away with it. That's an idea I can get behind. In a way, that's what Exalted is about - the freedom to go as big as you want.
So, why do they focus on these two solutions? Why free Charm activations and free Charm costs? I can only say because of the existance of Perfect Defenses.
Now, don't get me wrong. Perfect Defenses are an essential part of the setting and so must remain in the rules system. Perfect Defenses answer the question "How did the Exalted stop the Primordials from just killing them outright?" I would posit that taking Perfect Defenses from Exalted would strip away part of the something that makes Exalted the game it is.
Still, the current niche occupied by Perfect Defenses forces the rest of gameplay to conform around them. Not that I'm saying something that we don't already know, but Perfect Defenses have turned motes into your HP guage and your Charm Activation into the most precious resource at your disposal. This of course, leads to the same type of question: "Why is that?"
Well, I see a few reasons, but the most critical reason I see is the origins of the rules system. Exalted was initially an experimental venture by White Wolf. It wasn't necessarily going to sell well, so devoting a huge amount of effort to making a customized rule set just for this new game would have been a stupid move. So, instead they took their existing system, added the fluff and stylistic elements they needed to make the fluff work, drew some cool art, and did enough playtesting that no obvious bugs were showing up and off to the printer the game went.
Why I call this the main reason for the problem is because the system they used as their base was the original Storyteller system, which may as well have been built to punish players from resolving things with combat. Everything I've heard about the original World of Darkness amounts to "Unless you are a Werewolf, even a combat-specced character doesn't know if he'd come out of the next fight alive." Combat was made to be short, risky, and brutal. This is great for games about intrigue and character development. Not so great for a game where a major theme is problem-solving by punching people in the face.
During playtesting, this underlying uncertainty that existed in combat was probably masked by the existance of the Perfect Defense. Because every character essentially has a "No, I don't get hit" button, it doesn't matter how brutal the combat system is. As long as a character has Essence and is aware of the attack, he will not die. And so, things continued onward. The Storyteller system got an update to its combat mechanics, namely the addition of static defenses and a streamlining of turn structure, and so we got Second Edition. However, the additions and streamlining never really addressed the underlying uncertainty because that uncertainty is considered a good thing in the World of Darkness, where most of the playtesting probably went on.
So, Perfect Defenses are essentially hiding the real problems with the combat system. They are potent enough to make up for most of the design problems, but these design problems mean that using a perfect constantly is a necessity against any opponent of reasonable threat level.
Now that I'm through telling you what you probably already know, how do we fix it? Well, we have to attack those underlying uncertainties in an effort to make using a Perfect Defense a less necessary and possibly even a less desirable choice.
The first uncertainty is the uncertainty of survival. As things stand, one hit in Exalted can kill you outright. Most artifact weapons are damaging enough and soak is poor enough that a single hit can kill outright. Even if it doesn't kill you, it still will inflict wound penalties that make further hits more certain and future attacks less likely to succeed, begining a slow spiral into the death of your character. Therefore, you cannot let an attack hit.
The second uncertainty is the uncertainty of a sufficient defense. Suppose we have two mortals, Alice and Bob, duking it out to see who's boss. Alice and Bob on different ticks. If Alice attacks, she compromises her defense. The more attacks she makes, the larger the compromise in her defenses. Because of the supremacy of defense, each attack is more likely to fail than succeed. Unless Alice gets lucky, Bob will get to attack and now Alice's guard is weakened. If Alice was too aggressive, she essentially hands Bob free hits and dies. However, there's not much fun in using Guard actions incessantly and an offense of some kind is necessary to win any fight, so staying on the defensive will not win you a fight. So, Alice is stuck either making single attacks or maybe a small flurry and praying that her opponent doesn't get lucky or launching large flurries and hoping to kill her opponent fast. In the end, using the best offense availible to her is stupid as it denies her any hope of maintaining a sufficient defense.
If you add Charms in, the problem gets more complex, but remains there, just in a sligtly different form. Let us assume, for the moment, that both attack pools and DVs are both equally boostable. Now, we have two young Exalts, Alice and Bob, fighting it out for whatever reason. Alice is currently acting before Bob. Both Alice and Bob decide to use their Charm for the action to enhance their attacks. Alice uses Hungry Tiger Technique and Bob chooses to use the Second Melee Excellency. When Alice attacks, Bob knows she won't be rolling more dice than he has in his defense pool, so he has options. He can either trust his DVs or he can blow a few motes on using the Excellency to buff his DV. Either way, Alice needs a fairly lucky shot (a really lucky shot if he used the Excellency) for her tactic to yield any fruit. Meanwhile, she has lowered her DV and removed almost all of her options to add to her defense. Now Bob's attack, even without the Excellency, has a very solid chance of hitting. With the Excellency, it's almost guaranteed. By using a purely offensive Charm, Alice has denied herself any hope of maintaining a sufficient defense (If Alice had used the Second Melee Excellency to boost her attack, we'd be right back to the situation in the preceding paragraph: two characters of equal offensive and defensive potential just waiting for a lucky break or a blunder to capitalize on). This is why that one Charm activation is a critical resource.
The final uncertainty is the problem of resource management. While every game system is going to have this to some extent, each character in Exalted has only X motes at any given time. If you get in combat with another character, the winner of the conflict is the person able to maintain that sufficient defense the longest and the person most able to maintain that sufficient defense is the one with the most resources. However, most characters cannot determine the size of the other character's mote pool, so they can't be entirely certain that they are the ones currently ahead in motes. Each mote diverted away from maintaining a defense might just be the mote that puts you behind the other character and may mean that you are the one to find yourself defenseless first.
Added together, these issues mean that defense is the Alpha and Omega of combat. He who defends best the longest wins, and the best defense is a Perfect Defense.
This is why the Ink Monkeys spend so much time on what is essentially fancy ways to get motes. Motes earmarked for offensive Charms only can't be used on that Perfect Defense anyway, so why not spend them to boost your attack? Charms that don't use up your Charm activation for the round won't leave you defenseless, so why not add a little extra kick to your next attack? This brings back the flashy, over-the-top action that full-on paranoia Perfect Spamming strips from the game.
Such approaches, however, aren't addressing the real issues that lie at the heart of the system. As someone pointed out to me, the Ink Monkeys haven't been given the go-ahead to completely rewrite the system, so they do what they can. However, I'm a guy who likes to homebrew with next to no social life. I've got the time and inclination to at least try and homebrew and houserule a fix to the real center of the problem.
So, I have a few ideas on where to start. In no particularly significant order, here they are:
Make Exalts be able to take a hit and keep on going. If you had a guarantee that a hit wouldn't be the end of the world, you would be more inclined to settle for a defense that was less than perfect. Take D&D for an example. D&D characters do not spend most of their time in combat fighting defensively or running away from threats, because they either have enough hit points (fighters) or enough defenses (wizard) that you are more or less guaranteed to survive until next round. So, you see D&D characters charging into the middle of monsters, taking risks, and using character resources (spell slots, manuvers, etc) on the offense instead of on defense. This doesn't mean they don't take appropriate cautions like buffing, five-foot stepping out of threatened squares, and so on, just that they can put themselves in a position where they might get hurt without having a spare character sheet in their backpacks. To allow Exalts to take a hit, Health Levels and Soak have to start pulling their weight.
Add risky but rewarding defensive options to the Charm sets. Once a single hit is not the end of a fight, having options that defend the character solidly without being perfect will become useful. If those options are less expensive than a Perfect Defense, successfully using one of them instead will put the character ahead in the mote attrition game.
Perhaps loosen up the restrictions on Charm actions. If instead of one Charm per DV refresh, perhaps make it one Charm per dice action. That way, using a Charm to boost your attack doesn't leave you defenseless. You could, for example, use Hungry Tiger Technique to supplement one attack in your flurry, buy a few dice for your other attacks with the First Melee Excellency, and then when you are attacked you could respond with Shadow Over Water or Solar Counterattack. This would still leave Combos useful, as you couldn't use both Hungry Tiger Technique and the First Melee Excellency at once or Shadow Over Water and Solar Counterattack against the same attack.
The last idea I have is to add some of the Ink Monkeys better Overdrive (ug, I hate that keyword) Charms to every Charm set. Having a set of motes that are only for throwing out awesome attack Charms would most definately encourage the use of Charms on the offensive.
So, that's what I've thought about the system. I like picking other peoples' brains, so what do you guys think? Do my suggestions actually address the problems? Any problems you forsee with my solutions? Any solutions you see that I missed?
TL DR version: Perfect Defenses hide mechanical problems by being so awesome. I've got some ideas on how to fix them. What do you think?
R: All it takes is one bad roll for you to become a Glorious Solar Bloodstain.