Stormlight Archive is what Exalted Should have been?

[souran]

So, exalted sucks. We all know that. However, a high adventure game that is built around story telling conventions (like white wolf games) rather than D&Ds module universe style game is not a bad idea.

If you were going to make such a game it would probably look a lot like the Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson.

The knights radiant have 10 orders, each order has access to 2 surges. There is overlap with the surges. The surge abilities grow in power as the person progresses on their in their use with definitive tiers.

So this sounds a lot like a white wolf game. However, a story teller game also has to have a pathos aspect. Vampire had humanity etc. In the Stormlight archive you find out

that everybody who is a knight radiant is "broken". The spren bond by affixing themselves to people with damaged spiritweb. Broken spiritwebs are caused by (or themselves cause) mental illness. Kalladin has severe depression. Shallan was raised in an abusive home etc.

Anyway, the more stormlight archive I read the more I see it as what exalted should have been.

Also, it has diaklaives that make sense.

[Username17]

Honestly when I want to tell stories about weeaboo ubermenchen I don't really want to talk about the long-term psychological damage of having had a drunken and unsupportive mother. To the extent that Exalted should have been playing with dolls, it should have been about bashing them together and going "Whoosh! Pew Pew Pew!" not "Can you show me on this doll where he touched you?"

No one gives a shit about the deep pathos of "The Curse" or whatever. To the extent that people wanted Exalted to be about anything it was about being able to double jump as a starting character.

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

To the extent that people wanted Exalted to be about anything it was about being able to double jump as a starting character.

I agree, that is what people want: I've heard a few people on various forums and even IRL talking excitedly about how great Exalted is, and it was all the zip bang wow stuff and perfect defenses and overblown charm names and bizarre ranting about how the world is controlled by weaving machines.

[OgreBattle]

So how exactly does the combat work in that game? How do they juggle game mechanics and flavor. Are their big swords a flavor thing or a mechanical optimization thing

How does that spirit web and broken ness integrate with gameplay mechanics?

Player progression a thing?

[Grek]

Stormlight Archives is a book, so there are no mechanics. The author just writes whatever he thinks is cool. That said, the author is Brandon Sanderson, so all of the magic systems in his books have well established rules that translate very well to RPGs.

Combat is done using magic weapons called Shardblades (basically lightsabers, if lightsabers were also allowed to be spears) and magic armour called Shardplate (basically magic armour that makes you invulnerable to everything but Shardblades and gives you superstrength) and magic powers called Surgebinding. With Surgebinding, everybody gets two powers chosen from a list of ten. (Not all combinations are valid, so there's not 100 different flavours of Surgebinding.) Windrunners, for example get the Surges of Adhesion (which lets them manipulate the stickiness or slipperiness of people and objects within line of sight) and Gravitation (which lets them change the direction and strength of gravity for people and objects within line of sight). One of them might run through an enemy army, force them to drop their weapons, glue the weapons and the soldiers to the ground, then shoot into the air to go punk another front the same way. The trick to it is that Surgebinding doesn't (directly) work on anyone wearing Shardplate, so while you could use your gravity manipulation to fly around, you can't just launch an enemy Shardknight into space (at least until you peel him out of his armour using your sword.)

[Kaelik]

Actually both those powers are limited by touch, and also each two surge set grants powers that combine the two surges, like the one where you make something you are touching have super gravity and attract everything.

[souran]

Honestly when I want to tell stories about weeaboo ubermenchen I don't really want to talk about the long-term psychological damage of having had a drunken and unsupportive mother. To the extent that Exalted should have been playing with dolls, it should have been about bashing them together and going "Whoosh! Pew Pew Pew!" not "Can you show me on this doll where he touched you?"

No one gives a shit about the deep pathos of "The Curse" or whatever. To the extent that people wanted Exalted to be about anything it was about being able to double jump as a starting character.

-Username17

I get that. However, I also don't believe its completely true.

The "all heroes are broken" trope is both old and good, especially when used opposite characters who are super human.

Achilles pouts in his tent, Hercules undergoes his labors to assuage his guilt, Odysseus hubris nearly costs him his family, The monkey king yearns for freedom and has to learn to serve, Gilgamesh has anger issues, The Vanir and the Aesir all have flaws in direct porportion to this powers. Arthur, Lancelot and Gawain are all given this treatment as well.

Modern superheros similarly have this attribute. The x-men, the avengers, spider man, they all have the tragic thing going on.

Now, sometimes you want your session/game to be pure escapism. Then you ignore that and use your superpowers to kick butt. Sometimes you want to humanize you super-hero. Thats when you pull out the character flaws.

[deaddmwalking]

There's a difference between including character personality traits (that can become flaws) and playing Navel: The Gazing.

[Kaelik]

Honestly when I want to tell stories about weeaboo ubermenchen I don't really want to talk about the long-term psychological damage of having had a drunken and unsupportive mother. To the extent that Exalted should have been playing with dolls, it should have been about bashing them together and going "Whoosh! Pew Pew Pew!" not "Can you show me on this doll where he touched you?"

No one gives a shit about the deep pathos of "The Curse" or whatever. To the extent that people wanted Exalted to be about anything it was about being able to double jump as a starting character.

-Username17

I get that. However, I also don't believe its completely true.

The "all heroes are broken" trope is both old and good, especially when used opposite characters who are super human.

Achilles pouts in his tent, Hercules undergoes his labors to assuage his guilt, Odysseus hubris nearly costs him his family, The monkey king yearns for freedom and has to learn to serve, Gilgamesh has anger issues, The Vanir and the Aesir all have flaws in direct porportion to this powers. Arthur, Lancelot and Gawain are all given this treatment as well.

Modern superheros similarly have this attribute. The x-men, the avengers, spider man, they all have the tragic thing going on.

Now, sometimes you want your session/game to be pure escapism. Then you ignore that and use your superpowers to kick butt. Sometimes you want to humanize you super-hero. Thats when you pull out the character flaws.

Literally all of those are literary works instead of co-op games.

There are some places for game mechanics to directly influence the characters because of their brokenness, but I don't think that game is actually better than one where you just let your players roleplay their characters flaws and not hit them with random game mechanic enforcement.

[Chamomile]

Trying to mechanically enforce story beats rarely ends well. You'd be better off just presenting some basic notes on pacing and the hero's journey and character arcs and let people who are interested in that sort of thing figure it out for themselves.

[Josh_Kablack]

Stormlight Archives is a book, so there are no mechanics. The author just writes whatever he thinks is cool. That said, the author is Brandon Sanderson, so all of the magic systems in his books have well established rules that translate very well to RPGs.

Not quite.

Sanderson writes magic systems with rules. But he also writes characters who do not know all the rules, and books where a process of discovering new properties of the magic systems is part of the plot.

That sort of "solve a mystery to gain access to new tricks" can work for an individual RPG campaign, but it doesn't work so well for an entire RPG system where different game tables are trying to use the same rules.

[Whipstitch]

Trying to mechanically enforce story beats rarely ends well. You'd be better off just presenting some basic notes on pacing and the hero's journey and character arcs and let people who are interested in that sort of thing figure it out for themselves.

This. The interesting shit happens in play. Pre-written character backgrounds and themes can help establish your character and communicate some of what you're going for but the most useful tidbits are often bespoke. Encouraging players to jot down two or three hooks for their character is something I can get behind but I dislike the setups where player splats result in everyone in archetype X having pretty similar baggage. There's a lot of White Wolf characters that would be distinctive if only they weren't in a White Wolf game.

[jadagul]

The best thing about Stormlight Archive for an RPG (and a lot of Sanderson books, actually) is that it explicitly has high-level fighters.

Like, Stormlight basically has ten classes that can reach high levels. And they all "have magic", in the sense that they can use Stormlight and they get surges which produce supernatural effects. Everyone gets super-healing/durability, and a magic sword, so they all hit basic marks in terms of ability to survive combat.

Shallan gets to transmute objects into one of a few simple substances and create illusions and produces a morale-boosting effect, and is thus basically a (flavor of) wizard. But Kaladin flies around and hits people super hard and launches them into space with touch attacks, and gets a squad of magically-enhanced henchmen; he's a fighter/marshal type. (He also gets long-distance flight so has some important logistics powers.) And Lift gets to effortlessly slip through enemy lines and also has powerful healing; she's a rogue-type who is also a combat medic.

You can ask whether these power sets are actually balanced, and I can see a good argument that they aren't. But there's no reason they couldn't be balanced, because they all explicitly have magic powers, the fighters as much as the wizards. So there's no bar to making high-level fighters with high-level powers.

(This scales across Sanderson's worlds, really. The Elantrians create magic effects by drawing mystic runes in the air, and are about as classic-wizard as you can get. But the Derethi monks have superpowers infused into their bones and can beat the shit out of basically anyone, and get things like teleportation. Mistborn is an entire setting built around superpowered magic rogues; there's not really much that looks like classic wizardry. But it's not surprising when they do superhuman things or ascend to godhood or whatever, because they're rogues with explicit magic superpowers.)

[Suzerain]

The idea that all characters should have supernatural powers is not one that will ever make it into a big game again. The last time it happened was probably when VTM was the new hotness, but it's definitely been out of favour since D&D 3rd began to dominate the design space. Now, certain segments of the RPG playerbase are permanently fused to the idea that there should be a non-magical PC option, to the point where they would prefer that high levels are not included in the game to having to gain supernatural power over their career. I don't know where this sentiment comes from, but Fighter is universally the most played class across editions to my knowledge.

While on the topic of Sanderson, has anyone played the Mistborn Adventure Game, perchance?

[Emerald]

I don't know where this sentiment comes from, but Fighter is universally the most played class across editions to my knowledge.

At least in AD&D, part of that is probably due to fighter and thief being the classes you get to play if you don't roll stats high enough to qualify for a "real" class, and of the two fighters are cooler and better at combat, so people are gonna play a bunch of fighters even if they'd much rather be playing cavaliers or illusionists or whatever.

Do you happen to have links to any surveys or articles covering class popularity pre-5e? The only ones I could turn up with a quick googling were about 5e stats reported by D&D Beyond, and even that's skewed because the numbers fluctuate quite a bit every time they take a survey.

While on the topic of Sanderson, has anyone played the Mistborn Adventure Game, perchance?

Yep. Ran one campaign of middling length and a few one-shots.

It has a lot of the usual flaws of trendy rules light games: brags about supporting degrees of success but doesn't give you much guidance on what to do with them, gear rules are very handwave-y and there are a handful of obviously-best weapons, write-your-own traits are a prominent thing with no thought to really balancing them between characters, and so on.

It also has its own unique flaws: the dice pool mechanic is its own new thing and the dice pool caps are too low given the ease of adding dice, there's a huge crunchiness disparity where the magic is hyper-detailed and the rest of combat and such is very abstract, the Spirit attribute doesn't really do anything, and so forth.

If you have a creative group who knows and loves Mistborn and can make Fate, Blades in the Dark, etc. work it'll turn out great, and the expanded Mistborn lore and advice on running campaigns in the setting is invaluable, but if I were to run another Mistborn game I'd probably just write up a Fate hack because the system really isn't anything to write home about and all the good parts are easily stolen/ported for other games.

[Stubbazubba]

MAG is pretty crappy. It was very under-baked, they made a new RNG and had no idea how it was really going to work. Some interesting character/group creation stuff, but the rest of it is pretty lackluster.

[Foxwarrior]

When I read Mistborn I thought it'd make a good computer game (spiritual sequel to Jedi Academy), so I was pretty surprised to hear the people who made a game adaptation thought it'd be suited for something super foofy.

[Dogbert]

There's a difference between including character personality traits (that can become flaws) and playing Navel: The Gazing.

Lots of people forget the DC school of "superness" happens to be a thing. Many people actually like their superheroes, well, SUPER, and it happens to be enough of them for DC not to be in any danger of bankrupcy.

In addition, when someone sells a pitch like "an alternative to Exalted," chances are, people's first question is not gonna "Oooh I can't wait to have my character act like a little bitch, what are the rules for that?" Their first question when sold "Exalted" is gonna be "On the scale of Samurai Jack to Son Goku, how over the top can I take things?" Because that's what Exalted sold.

The idea that all characters should have supernatural powers is not one that will ever make it into a big game again.

I really hope you're wrong. It would be sad perpetuating the asinine concept that PCs must be divided in "haves" and "have nots" just because that's how dnd does it.

[Josh_Kablack]

On the subject of MAG and it's RNG: here's my own nested quotes review of a review from 5 years ago:

There is an Mistborn RPG...

Mistborn uses dice pools to determine whether an action is successful or not. Success is accomplished by rolling matching numbers. The matching numbers rolled become the Result, and must be equal to or higher than the required Difficulty (rated 1-5) to succeed at a Challenge. In Contests and Conflicts, success goes to the character with the highest Result. All sixes are ignored when determining Results, meaning the best roll will have matching fives.

Sixes are set aside and become Nudges. On a success, Nudges add a little pizazz and flair or quicken the attempt. On a failure, Nudges can help mitigate Complications.

Sometimes you may want to know not just who wins, but by how much. If you want to emphasize how badly one roll beat another, Outcome can be used. Outcome is figured by subtracting the lower roll from the higher roll. For example, if I roll two ones and my opponent rolls two threes, my opponent wins the contest with an Outcome of two (3 - 1 = 2). The Outcome can also serve as a guide when narrating what happened. An Outcome of one is a much narrower victory than an outcome of three or five.

Creating a dice pool is pretty straightforward. The base number of dice used is the rating for the most appropriate Attribute, Standing, or Power. This base number is modified (up and down) by Traits, Tools (sometimes Props), and Circumstances, and will lead to a player having between two and ten dice in a pool. For example, someone with a Physique of 4, a Natural Climber Trait, and a rope and grapple Tool would have six dice (4 + 1 + 1 = 6) in their dice pool for scaling the walls around Luthadel.

Ah, but isn't it possible to have less than two or more than ten dice in a pool? Yes, but those are handled a bit differently. Any dice beyond ten in a pool become automatic Nudges. If, for some reason, a player wants to use an Attribute, Standing, or Power that has been reduced to one die, they get to roll two, but the Result is automatically reduced by one. This means that a Result of three is reduced to a Result of two.

Yeah, that's the sort of shit that makes me auto-reject dicepools, even when they are probabilistically sound.

That's not narrative nor rules light, that's "I have no fucking clue what my character's chances of success are ever, nor does the MC". And I encourage anyone who ever meets Mr Sanderson at a convention to ask him what the odds of at least triples on 6d6 are when you don't count the 6s as part of those triples, and then follow up with how that changes if you need those triples-or-better to be of a face that's say 3 or higher.

[Suzerain]

I don't know where this sentiment comes from, but Fighter is universally the most played class across editions to my knowledge.

Do you happen to have links to any surveys or articles covering class popularity pre-5e? The only ones I could turn up with a quick googling were about 5e stats reported by D&D Beyond, and even that's skewed because the numbers fluctuate quite a bit every time they take a survey.

Not an edition of D&D, but here's one for Pathfinder, which places Rogue at 1st position (when combined with it's Unchained variant) by 0.1% over Fighter.

I'm not sure where my impression came from for non-5e WOTC games - I may have just mixed up this information and the 5e data. I would not be shocked if it's true, but I don't have the stats to back it up at the moment.

The idea that all characters should have supernatural powers is not one that will ever make it into a big game again.

I really hope you're wrong. It would be sad perpetuating the asinine concept that PCs must be divided in "haves" and "have nots" just because that's how dnd does it.

I suspect the issue will be less haves vs have-nots and more "everyone is have nots" when it comes to impactful abilities. The OSR movement and its focus on being grounded to the exclusion of the fantastical, 5e and its desire for near-flat competency scaling, and PF2 and its removal of any ability that could possibly disrupt a pre-baked adventure path are all indicators of the current trends. Unless there's some huge revolution in TTRPG design, things look dire.

[souran]

Batman broods, Superman pouts, Aquaman has anger issues, the flash is a jerk to people he thinks are less smart than himself (everyone), and wonder woman has a bunch of totally sexists character flaws.

DC heroes are flawed and their flaws are especially important when they are put in ensemble stories like the justice league.

Anyway, if your rpg is built around a framework of communal storytelling, then players should have flaws and probably should have a mechanical incentive to play to their characters flaw within a scene.

That said, playing to a characters flaw should not be so disruptive or destructive as to derail the story. A character who is a drunk as a flaw who gets roaring drunk before meeting the king and so blurts out party secrets or plans or mild insults that make things more difficult is ok. A drunk who sabotages the entire meeting, threatens murder, and attacks people is not good (unless the party is really generous about rolling with thing like that).

Anyway, I actually think that it is more likely that you would get people to play a game where there is no "normie" option is to make a game that was explicitly "everybody is super of these types" If the premise is no fighters then nobody is going to complain about a lack of fighters.

[Chamomile]

A good character flaw is one that will ultimately destroy the hero unless they overcome it. Anything less potent is a nuisance with ultimately inconsequential effect on the story. There are obvious problems with mechanically enforcing a self-destructive character flaw on every player character. I am extremely skeptical of any character flaw system that would work better than just laying out the narrative purpose of character flaws and how to pace a character arc in a "how to roleplay" chapter and letting people take it or leave it.

[Whipstitch]

oops.

[Dogbert]

I suspect the issue will be less haves vs have-nots and more "everyone is have nots" when it comes to impactful abilities.

The most depressing part is that yes, you're right. Everything moves in cycles, and right now we're back to the origins of odious storygaming. Right now agency is the devil, and chances are by the time the wheel turns back to "rules and standards are good, agency is fun" we'll all be too busy standing in line for soylent green rations and the closest suicide booth to care.

Batman broods, Superman pouts, Aquaman has anger issues, the flash is a jerk to people he thinks are less smart than himself (everyone), and wonder woman has a bunch of totally sexists character flaws.

Just one question... when was the last time you actually read a DC comic? Because you couldn't be any farther from the mark if your name was Zach Snyder. (90s Aquaman was the closest you got).

DC' thing has always been "the superhero as an icon, an ideal, and otherwise larger than life." Sure they may have their highs and lows, but at the end of the day they are still icons rather than people. They'll never, ever be "heroes like you," that's Marvel's school of doing things.

On the flaws' thing: If you ask me, severity of in-game flaws must be inversely proportional to the stakes of any given game's premise. If you're playing a laid-back game of Bubblegumshoe where you're just investigating "the mystery of the cafeteria dessert thief" then players are a lot more likely to be chill about quirks that will cost them an encounter in the best case and the mission in the worst. If, on the other hand, you're playing dnd or Champions and the consequences of defeat range from Gwen Stacy getting her neck broken to losing a character you invested months' worth of XP and treasure or the world ending then chances are the players will be much wary about slapping around their characters' necks anything that could become a potential killswitch under the wrong circumstances, no matter how circumstantial the flaw.

I know you guys hate M&M's guts but I still subscribe to Steve Kenson's criteria for flaws: "Complications are meant to make a situation interesting, not to destroy your players' characters and/or their fun" (emphasis on the latter, since crap GMs tend to assume by default "durr hurr, destroying your character's premise by royal eddict is interesting").

[Username17]

NuWhite Wolf got some pretty accurate data on the most popular clans of Vampires. Turns out it's the Malkavians and Tremere by a huge margin. Turns out most people want to play wizards or disruptive assholes or both.

-Username17