OSSR: Exalted: The Infernals

[Longes]

Exalted is worse than Vampire because every single one of its mechanics is dysfunctional. Literally, anything you can bring Exalted mechanics in for makes your session worse than just MTPing it. Unlike Vampire where it's only mostly the case. At least in Vampire you can make a social check without the game exploding. In Exalted "Social Combat" is so absurd that the only reasonable response to people having a bigger social dicepool with you is drawing your weapon and either attacking or running away. The combat is far worse than Vampire too.

That’s a simplification that’s only true if you don’t have social Charms, won’t stunt or spend Willpower or channel a Virtue, and are too cowardly to roll off against someone with more dice.

So yes, at a mini-game where you are terrible, you have limited options. I’d honestly love to hear what you think should be the ideal. Should your PC be secretly good at something they have chosen to be bad at?

If your social dicepool is smaller than the other guy's dicepool, then in social combat they will rapidly burn through your Willpower (which is your health track) and then you auto-suck against anything they want you to do which may or may not involve charms on their side. Exalted 2e is extremely deterministic and no amount of bravery will help you in winning social combat against a bigger dicepool guy. Which is also why social charms don't help. They generate effects, but those effects won't stick because it's a binary test that you fail because of your smaller dicepool.

The ideal should be a social system that doesn't skullfuck me for daring to engage while not being Cicero. It's fine when combat has the implication that people sucking at combat should probably just run away. It's not fine when running away is the only reasonable response to being bad at the dinner conversations.

[Longes]

Unrelated: I found the thread where Holden defends keeping linear chargen geometric progression by claiming that "We have a policy not to give people bad rules just because they think they want them."

[K]

Exalted is worse than Vampire because every single one of its mechanics is dysfunctional. Literally, anything you can bring Exalted mechanics in for makes your session worse than just MTPing it. Unlike Vampire where it's only mostly the case. At least in Vampire you can make a social check without the game exploding. In Exalted "Social Combat" is so absurd that the only reasonable response to people having a bigger social dicepool with you is drawing your weapon and either attacking or running away. The combat is far worse than Vampire too.

That’s a simplification that’s only true if you don’t have social Charms, won’t stunt or spend Willpower or channel a Virtue, and are too cowardly to roll off against someone with more dice.

So yes, at a mini-game where you are terrible, you have limited options. I’d honestly love to hear what you think should be the ideal. Should your PC be secretly good at something they have chosen to be bad at?

If your social dicepool is smaller than the other guy's dicepool, then in social combat they will rapidly burn through your Willpower (which is your health track) and then you auto-suck against anything they want you to do which may or may not involve charms on their side. Exalted 2e is extremely deterministic and no amount of bravery will help you in winning social combat against a bigger dicepool guy. Which is also why social charms don't help. They generate effects, but those effects won't stick because it's a binary test that you fail because of your smaller dicepool.

The ideal should be a social system that doesn't skullfuck me for daring to engage while not being Cicero. It's fine when combat has the implication that people sucking at combat should probably just run away. It's not fine when running away is the only reasonable response to being bad at the dinner conversations.

I guess that's the contradiction that I don't get. Being forced to retreat from a mini-game that I'm bad at doesn't count as "skullfucking" in my opinion, especially when there is another mini-game like combat where being bad at it means the GM can take your character sheet and rip it up. The stakes are so much lower in Exalted's social combat.

Willpower drain from natural mental influence caps at 2, so dinner conversations where you get schooled by dice-pools aren't that bad. Unnatural mental influence, on the other hand, is being hit by Charms and Spells, so at that point you are in a straight magical battle and retreat or attack seems reasonable.

What consequences would you accept for losing a social combat mini- game? Why is being forced to leave the dinner table worse than total character destruction?

[deaddmwalking]

Because I'm still hungry!

May I have some more, please?

[Omegonthesane]

I was gonna say no, but I botched on 20 dice, so you get all the leftovers.

[EightWave]

I guess that's the contradiction that I don't get. Being forced to retreat from a mini-game that I'm bad at doesn't count as "skullfucking" in my opinion, especially when there is another mini-game like combat where being bad at it means the GM can take your character sheet and rip it up. The stakes are so much lower in Exalted's social combat.

I think this is what he means:

Exalted 2e is extremely deterministic and no amount of bravery will help you in winning social combat against a bigger dicepool guy.

Being forced to leave the table because you lost is fine, but losing because you decided to play at all is not.

[K]

I guess that's the contradiction that I don't get. Being forced to retreat from a mini-game that I'm bad at doesn't count as "skullfucking" in my opinion, especially when there is another mini-game like combat where being bad at it means the GM can take your character sheet and rip it up. The stakes are so much lower in Exalted's social combat.

I think this is what he means:

Exalted 2e is extremely deterministic and no amount of bravery will help you in winning social combat against a bigger dicepool guy.

Being forced to leave the table because you lost is fine, but losing because you decided to play at all is not.

So you want a game where your choices of stats and Charms doesn't mean that you can't win?

[EightWave]

That is an ugly straw man argument and you know it.

[K]

That is an ugly straw man argument and you know it.

I wish. I'm honestly confused here.

[Shiritai]

Being forced to leave the table because you lost is fine, but losing because you decided to play at all is not.

I have to agree with K. What does this sentence even mean?

[EightWave]

So you want a game where your choices of stats and Charms doesn't mean that you can't win?

Honestly, I may have misinterpreted this, the double negative made it confusing.

Longes said the social combat minigame is deterministic, meaning if I have a 9 and you have a 10 then my loss is inevitable, even if it is hidden behind a death march of opposed rolls.

A common straw man to "I don't like how lower stats mean I almost always lose opposed rolls based on that stat" is "Oh, so you don't want characters with worse stats to be worse at things?" Which is a total straw man because there is a great distance between "almost always" and "usually", which is what the complaint is actually about.

So losing the social minigame because I rolled two hits on 5 dice and you rolled three hits on 7 dice is fine. I was the underdog in that but, statistically, I had a chance. Losing because because we're going to make that exact same opposed roll ten times is just a deterministic regression to the mean. My loss was a pre-determined death march the moment I decided to engage in the social minigame, and obfuscating it through a bunch of opposed rolls is just insulting.

[Koumei]

As opposed to physical combat, where you only make one roll?

[EightWave]

*shrug* WoD mechanics aren't exactly shining examples of quality, but in general there are at least enough combat options that you don't automatically know someone with STR 5 DEX 2 is going to lose against someone with STR 2 DEX 5. That's the whole purpose of the charm webs, magic swords and shit. You bust out the flying crane technique to bypass their rock smashing water fist so they counter with flowing salmon dashes upstream so you... etc etc.

My understanding of Exalted "social combat" is that you pretty much just roll the relevant social skill vs. resolve with some circumstance bonuses until you convince them to do the thing or Mr. Cavern doesn't let you try anymore.

[Koumei]

There are two ways the social combat can go: you don't use charms, in which case you have a few options and you pick the one that simply uses your biggest dice pool, and you have a few defences and always pick the bigger one, and then successful attacks either cause things to happen to you or you lose Willpower (until you hit a limit where things stop affecting you, if your opponent isn't using charms). Maybe you run away from the debate or apply an armbar as a solution.

Alternatively you have an array of charms that can obfuscate who is "obviously" going to win, that can sometimes make an obvious victory happen quicker (if the better speaker also has a charm advantage) or sometimes flip results (if the worse speaker is the one with an array of charms to help), and also throw semi-interesting effects into the mix.

Now, most of what I said there basically applies to regular combat as well. You have a couple of bland options if you're not using charms and stuff, and it's all very by-the-numbers deterministic superkicks, but charms let you obfuscate things, make an inevitable victory happen faster, or indeed make a seemingly inevitable victory evitable. I don't think that's a word but you know what I mean. And maybe you run away (if you're faster or use charms) or suddenly declare you're actually fighting a Mass Combat (low mass) and they have to use a different rule system.

The subsystem itself is a shitfight, but only insofar as the entirety of every White Wolf game, system and subsystem is. This isn't unique to Exalted social combat, this isn't unique to "all of Exalted", the only advantage Vampire has is that Vampire goes "use your mind control Discipline, make one non-opposed roll, win, the rules part is over". So the advantage is that there isn't as much of the shitty thing to deal with, but it is still there so you're already admitting "man, WW should have been banned from writing rules".

[maglag]

The subsystem itself is a shitfight, but only insofar as the entirety of every White Wolf game, system and subsystem is. This isn't unique to Exalted social combat, this isn't unique to "all of Exalted", the only advantage Vampire has is that Vampire goes "use your mind control Discipline, make one non-opposed roll, win, the rules part is over". So the advantage is that there isn't as much of the shitty thing to deal with, but it is still there so you're already admitting "man, WW should have been banned from writing rules".

The bigger question is, is it really worst than D&D 3rd edition "pump diplomacy/bluff/intimidate up until you can make people obey you regardless of what either of you roll and there's no way to defend short of killing them first"?

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

Good analysis.

One thing that gets me about the rape in the intro is that when it came out in 2009... I was on the Big Purple RPG.net a lot. I don't recall anyone complaining about it.

And then circa 2014 it became this taboo "too far" thing. Maybe I remember things wrong. But it's funny to me how offended everyone is *now*, but no one was *then*.

The most charitable explanation of course is that people usually don't read the fluff in splat books at all. Like, there's big sections of The Silver Marches that I have never read and I'm never going to read. If there was some part of that book where it just went off on a homophobic tirade or tried to educate us on the difference between pedo- and hebe- I wouldn't know. Because I've never read through the long boring fluff sections of that book. The usual way that players of a game read an RPG supplement is by skimming to find the crunch, then going back and reading the fluff if they are still interested. It could take quite a while for people to notice horrible shit stated in sidebars in the middle of a boring fluff chapter.

That being said, I don't think that fully covers it. For fuck's sake, The Infernals has a pornographic comic in it. You notice that shit just flipping through.

A more likely explanation is that in 2009, RPG.net had a very explicit "don't talk smack about White Wolf" policy. Multiple people who freelanced for White Wolf were also mods at RPG.net and talking shit about White Wolf could get you a warning, a time-out, or even a perma ban. This was about the point that I matter-of-factly pointed out that the New World of Darkness was a failed project and was in the process of being discontinued as a supported game. I was told point-blank that if I didn't drop the subject that I would get smacked with an official warning and banned from the site.

So it's very likely that people were as horrified by the contents of The Infernals in 2009 as they are now. But in 2009 White Wolf was treated as a "real company" that major forums wanted to suck up to. And as such, people did not feel free to levy complaints about officially branded White Wolf content on RPG.net or similar sites. A few years later, CCP dropped the pretense of supporting White Wolf pen-and-paper RPGs.

It's very interesting that you'd say that you noticed people come out of the woodwork to condemn The Infernals in 2014, because that's the year that CCP discontinued work on the Vampire MMO and the entire body of White Wolf RPGs became recognized as abandonware. That would of course equally be the point at which all the RPG.net mods would stop trying to suck up to the White Wolf "establishment" as they would have then realized that they no longer existed.

-Username17

I wasn't aware at the time of how biased the moderation of RPG.net was in 2009. It wasn't until I left the RPG.net and went to other sites that brought up the corruption there that I realized how bad it was. And yes, it IS interesting that by 2014 is the year I noticed that.

Unrelated: I found the thread where Holden defends keeping linear chargen geometric progression by claiming that "We have a policy not to give people bad rules just because they think they want them."

Didn't John Morke even come here to defend this dumb design decision? I think it was in the thread about the 3E kickstarter.

If you subtract out the mountain of squick, how much is left that you might use in an actual game?

I would say that roughly 20% of this book is worth reading and discussing from the perspective of game design and setting design. There are five authors, and I feel that one of them had some interesting ideas about how to improve the setting and game from a playability standpoint. Of the remaining four authors, two of them are just doing paint-by-numbers Exalted crap that is exactly as worthless as anything else made during the twilight era of the White Wolf late aughts shovelware period. And the last two people were just trying to offend the reader by going more edgelord than other White Wolf products.

But while I think that the idea of having your dice pools be tied to your ability to narratively tie the current situation to the legendary stories of setting characters is interesting, I would not say it's sufficiently fleshed out to be really playable in this book as-is. One of the people had a vision for a really different and much more free-form game, and if someone else hadn't constantly been riveting that idea back onto the unworkable skeleton of Exalted, that might have gone somewhere. But instead this book has like one person asking "Wouldn't this be better if we..." and then four other voices rear up and say "Shut up! I don't want to play a character who sucks!" It's kind of tragic, because only the guy who was trying to make a game about creating epic tragedies with semi-competitive Scheherazade as the primary conflict resolution mechanic is in any way worth reading. And he would have needed a numbers guy. which White Wolf conspicuously did not have in 2009.

Mechanically, Exalted is as badly designed as Vampire.

Nah, Exalted is worse. It's tempting to say that Vampire plays smoother just because of the fact that the World of Darkness is low fantasy - that most of the world is our world and that you can look outside or look on Wikipedia to fill in setting elements not expounded upon in the books. And that does help. A lot. But Exalted also has all those layers of Perfect Attacks and Perfect Defenses and Excellencies and shit. And those legitimately make the game worse mechanically in addition to having a setting that is less accessible narratively.

More broadly, Vampire's core mechanic of rolling a modest pile of dice and then doing some viscera reading to determine how well you performed an action is only vaguely passable when actions are within the reach of competent humans. What happens when people get superhumn results on Manipulation or Larceny checks is really anyone's guess. Which isn't a huge problem in Vampire, because mostly players are stuck with 10 dice or less and have specific magic powers that do specific things rather than performing superheroic actions by dint of getting superhuman die results on basic tasks. In Exalted, most characters have significantly super-human dicepools in their areas of expertise and that failure point of the system is trotted out for display immediately and constantly.

Exalted's call for constant superheroic stunts combined with the fact that the core mechanics really don't let you extrapolate what characters are capable of if they significantly exceed the capabilities of normal humans is a real ball ache all the time. It's the old AD&D problem of "what does it mean to have a Wisdom of 21?" except for some stupid reason you've given virtually everyone a Wisdom of 21 or its equivalent. So instead of being a fringe failure point of the rules, it's a core failure point of the rules.

-Username17

I played 1E and 2E quite heavily back in the day. What people have to remember is back in 2003, there was no other mainstream game that had an "anime" feel to it. Many people had played oWoD, which as has been reviewed here, a bit of a dumpster fire when it came to the moving target difficulty - how you had an 18% chance of botching with 10 dice but a 10% with one.

So, the initial change to the target 7, count ten's 10 was so much simpler than the old "reroll 10s,but only if you have the right specaility - which the GM has to decide if it applies" seemed like such an improvement! That alone was a big selling point.

The fluff & art was (is?) very evocative. It got people's imaginations going, as well as being able to make their favorite anime character into an RP character. It wasn't until we got to more complex fights with exalts and social combat (a PC was trying to convince a Dragon blood that solars weren't evil) that the limitations of 1E became apparent to me.

In 2E, it *seemed* to fix a number issues in 1E, at first. Some of my best memories of RPGing of all time are a 6 hour combat where my group tried to lead an assault on a fortress, and had to fight another solar exalt who was allied with a crazy lunar chimera. We were acting out all of the stunts, making crazy saves vs attacks, laugh out loud moments of sheer awesomeness... It was the best, really.

I didn't need mind caulk in 1E, but by 2E it was more obvious over time that you needed to make at least *some* assumptions in order to have a healthy play session.
Honestly, a lot of what spoiled 2E for me was the endless rancour on the internet obsessing over the setting and rule problems.


K's point that Exalted is fine if you fight non exalts is largely true from my experience. Those were honestly some of my best sessions in my memory as GM playing the game.

[K]

So you want a game where your choices of stats and Charms doesn't mean that you can't win?

Honestly, I may have misinterpreted this, the double negative made it confusing.

Longes said the social combat minigame is deterministic, meaning if I have a 9 and you have a 10 then my loss is inevitable, even if it is hidden behind a death march of opposed rolls.

A common straw man to "I don't like how lower stats mean I almost always lose opposed rolls based on that stat" is "Oh, so you don't want characters with worse stats to be worse at things?" Which is a total straw man because there is a great distance between "almost always" and "usually", which is what the complaint is actually about.

So losing the social minigame because I rolled two hits on 5 dice and you rolled three hits on 7 dice is fine. I was the underdog in that but, statistically, I had a chance. Losing because because we're going to make that exact same opposed roll ten times is just a deterministic regression to the mean. My loss was a pre-determined death march the moment I decided to engage in the social minigame, and obfuscating it through a bunch of opposed rolls is just insulting.

I guess my question is why you think that this scenario is happening?

If the PC is getting social attacked by an NPC and that attack is not a Spell or through a Charm, the PC's max loss is two Willpower points regardless if the attack is two roll-off losses in social combat or thirty in that scene because its natural influence. It's a rule put in place to prevent nonsense like fruit vendors draining your Willpower and breaking your will.

If spells or Charms are being used, that cap does go away, but motes of Essence are being burned. After the fourth or fifth attempt the NPC's anima is flaring because they've burned through Personal Essence (assuming they had a full pool) and it's obvious that the NPC is using Charms. Attacking or leaving is a completely normal thing to do because you are being attacked by magic. Hell, the PC might even be going into Limit Break from burning Willpower to resist unnatural influence.

In both situations the PC should be stunting on his defenses, so at least some Willpower is coming back.

Where is the deterministic death march at the dinner table against the guy with consistently bigger dice pools? I don't see that scenario being possible.

[Jefepato]

Actually, in the original 2e rules, you're allowed to bypass the limit of two WP from natural mental influence as long as you stunt to try a new approach to your argument. (What the GM will accept as a sufficiently new approach is up to him I guess, but stunting in general isn't supposed to be hard.)

In the 2.5 errata, IIRC they changed it so the limit is just one instance of WP spent against natural influence in a scene, but they also added a clause where you can increase the WP cost to resist if you roll a lot more successes than the victim's MDV.

I dunno. My biggest issue with social combat was that it seemed like you needed to be a social specialist to convince anyone of anything ever. A character's Dodge MDV tends to be a lot higher than their social "offense," so you have to be pretty outclassed before you'll have much trouble ignoring people.

[K]

I don't think Frank and I are going to do a wrap-up, so here are the bits I consider useful from a game design standpoint:

The Yozi

Infernals takes the Yozi from the base game and converts them from bog-standard villains into a really interesting RPG NPC character and a very interesting inspiration for a system of triggering abilities.

It really starts with the Excellencies. While it's almost unworkable to use theme and ideas that are supposed to trigger when you get to use the Infernal Excellencies, they have a lot of narrative power. While I can't tell you when the demonic virtue of indiscriminate callousness should mean that the Infernal Excellency of Malfeas should could be applied to a roll, I can tell you that the idea of applying it is very compelling. I could imagine a better designed system where there is a list of objective conditions where you could trigger the ability. Maybe it triggers when you interact in a negative way with no-contest opposition as determined by some objective metric like DnD's CR. Maybe it would interact with a more complex system for channeling a Virtue. Maybe it triggers when you target enemies and allies/neutrals. Really, the potential objective designs are quite interesting.

I could also imagine a system where you used those subjective ideas as inspiration for objective adventures designed from the perspective of the Yozi. You could design adventures of Cecelyne where elements in the adventure have to correspond to her themes, like the adventure must center on foiling a pre-prepared plot which involves the need to endure unrelentingly harsh conditions. You could set up modular adventure design where each of the themes is a list of potential setting elements and plots, and then plop them into a Yozi mad-lib, offloading most of the trouble of adventure design.

Really, the potential uses for the Yozi as depicted in this book are pretty endless. The fact that this book only uses them as a rough guide for Charm design is only scratching the surface, though they serve as an example of turning these themes into concrete mechanics.

Infernals as a proper inversion/mirror match

Inversions and mirror matches are a fundamental aspect of game design, and this is one of the few examples of it actually working. DnD has examples of failure in the Book of Vile Darkness and the Book of Exalted Deeds, where Exalted has the Abyssals book as its own failed example because both try to do a palette swap and then consider the work done, and that produces a strictly inferior product.

Infernals avoids the flaws of Abyssals by doing things like Charm Incomparables that fills the same tactical and strategic niches as Solar Exalted instead of just changing the flavor text on the same abilities in the way that Abyssals does. It's not done with every niche and there are some mechanics changes that are almost cosmetic, but Incomparables are used often enough to produce a mirror match that feels distinct and flavorful from the mechanics up.

It should also be noted that there is a lesson to be learned here about ability design. The base Exalted abilities are actually pretty boring and I feel that this was one of Exalted's weaknesses, but this book's abilities are distinctive and flavorful. You are going to remember the guy specializing in Ebon Dragon Charms and you are not going to confuse him with the guy who focuses on Adorjan Charms.

Infernals as potential Exalted fix

Overall, the book is collection of potential fixes to Exalted problems and a wishlist of features. I've referenced most of them in our main review, but here is a quick list:

1. Hellforged Wonders as a mechanic for more flavorful and powerful artifacts, and a way to make non-Exalted NPCs viable. Also, interesting artifact rules like granting Charms and perfect defenses

2. Akuma and Infernal Sorcery as a fix for the creation viable non-Exalted enemies

3. Infernal Limit as model for a Limit fix (the first power of Infernal Style Martial Arts as a direct spot fix for Solar Limit because it bleeds Limit and looks like a Solar power)

4. Yozi Imperfections as a model for an Imperfection fix

5. Charms that take some narrative control from the GM

6. Unwoven Coajudicator as a model for Demon-guiding or Shadow (from Wraith). As a player and as a DM, I've seen this be a lot of fun when done well

7. Charms for Eclipse-type Solars and Exalted with Charms that expand Charm choice that are not obvious down-grades (see Primordial Principle Emulation from the Unconquered Sun book for the method that any Solar can use to get access to Yozi Charms).

[Longes]

Eclipse's Charm stealing is honestly kind of nonsensical. The charmset in Exalted is explicitly not a final set and you are encouraged to make your own. So there's no actual in-game reason to buy foreign charms at a markup instead of saying you invent a new charm that is also better because you are a Solar.

[K]

Eclipse's Charm stealing is honestly kind of nonsensical. The charmset in Exalted is explicitly not a final set and you are encouraged to make your own. So there's no actual in-game reason to buy foreign charms at a markup instead of saying you invent a new charm that is also better because you are a Solar.

Well, the limit would be the themes of the Solar. For example, if your goal was do something generic like gather Essence, a Solar Charm is clearly the way to go.

If you wanted to do something like shape change, however, nothing in the Solar set should be doing that. Even high-level Medicine charms are only letting you do small things like mutations on patients.

The flavor text of Primordial Principle Emulation specifically mentions a Solar who turned into a sea monster with Sorcery and could not develop sea monster Charms.

You are correct that it doesn’t matter in most cases since no one cares if your super-Stealth is weird mind-control instead of wrapping shadows around yourself, especially with Sorcery and Martial Arts as options for letting you use other themes.

[Username17]

Unrelated: I found the thread where Holden defends keeping linear chargen geometric progression by claiming that "We have a policy not to give people bad rules just because they think they want them."

The weird thing here is where he's being a total douche about having made a mechanic that is honestly terrible and totally indefensible on its merits.

-Username17

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

Unrelated: I found the thread where Holden defends keeping linear chargen geometric progression by claiming that "We have a policy not to give people bad rules just because they think they want them."

The weird thing here is where he's being a total douche about having made a mechanic that is honestly terrible and totally indefensible on its merits.

-Username17

I don't fully grok the defense of it myself, but the idea is that it forces specailized characters rather than generalists.

[Orion]

But -- as I said in the other thread about this very issue -- there is no need to use incentives to try to push people toward generalization or specialization because as the designer you have it in your power to force people to be as generalized or specialized as you like. Even if you want people to start specialized and branch out, or start generalized and then develop a specialty, you can just make a rule that forces that to happen. Exalted actually doesn't even need a rule for that because you can pretty much just start with your best skills already maxed out, which means that by definition you are not going to spend your XP to improve your rating in those skills. (On the other hand, it also lets you spend unlimited XP buying new charms for your best skills, so it doesn't actually force anyone to branch out either; Exalted is fractally bad you guys)

EDIT:

If we assume we're talking about some other game that isn't exalted where your stats and skills actually matter (and aren't just there as pre-reqs for charms), you could combine linear costs with any of the following ways to make people widen or narrow their skillset. You can outright cap the number of skills that can be capped, or that can exist at various skill levels. You can increase those caps when Essence goes up. You could try a pet idea of mine where people increase 2 skills at a time, with some kind of rule like "only one of them can be 4+" or "the sum of the skills must =6." The sky is the limit.