The Exalted and car talk thread

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So, any thoughts about either of these things that I've casually wanted to know more about given how people seem to go gaga over them?

dxAPujw.jpg


FAX7JgD.jpg
 
So, any thoughts about either of these things that I've casually wanted to know more about given how people seem to go gaga over them?

dxAPujw.jpg


FAX7JgD.jpg
I always loved the idea of the lotus.
 
So, any thoughts about either of these things that I've casually wanted to know more about given how people seem to go gaga over them?

dxAPujw.jpg


FAX7JgD.jpg

Are you referring to exalted and cars in general, or abyssals and Lotus'? I know very little about the latter.

I got into Exalted at E3, not E2, so I don't know much about the Abyssals. I know they're weaker than Solars in E3. I know they're undead, which means their lack of mechanical badassery when compared to Solars is balanced out by the cool factor. Because undead are always cool, and OP Exalted undead are even cooler. :shade:

But no Abyssal book yet. I may see one, someday. *looks hopefully at the horizon*

As for cars, I'm the only guy I know who doesn't drool over high-price, European sportscars. Not a fan.

I favor Japanese cars:

2017 Subaru SVX:

2017-Subaru-SVX-Redesign.jpg


2015 Acura NSX

2015-acura-nsx-concept-front-three-quarters-view.jpg


And for something a little more sensible, the Infiniti Q70:

2015-Infiniti-Q70-0.jpg
 
I think this playing on the idea that Exalted in general start as powerful heroes in their own right, complete with personal equipment of potentially legendary power. There are plenty of memes that compare starting DnD characters as babbling children in the face of starting Exalts.

Abyssals are actually "fallen" or "tainted" Solars, and thus are exceptionally powerful among the Exalted. The transition from Abyssal to Solar is a plot-level event, and often involves one dying, and the reincarnation returning as the other type.

So, any thoughts about either of these things that I've casually wanted to know more about given how people seem to go gaga over them?

dxAPujw.jpg


FAX7JgD.jpg
 
Are you referring to exalted and cars in general, or abyssals and Lotus'? I know very little about the latter.

I got into Exalted at E3, not E2, so I don't know much about the Abyssals. I know they're weaker than Solars in E3. I know they're undead, which means their lack of mechanical badassery when compared to Solars is balanced out by the cool factor. Because undead are always cool, and OP Exalted undead are even cooler. :shade:

But no Abyssal book yet. I may see one, someday. *looks hopefully at the horizon*

As for cars, I'm the only guy I know who doesn't drool over high-price, European sportscars. Not a fan.

I favor Japanese cars:

2017 Subaru SVX:

2017-Subaru-SVX-Redesign.jpg


2015 Acura NSX

2015-acura-nsx-concept-front-three-quarters-view.jpg


And for something a little more sensible, the Infiniti Q70:

2015-Infiniti-Q70-0.jpg
If you're going to go Japanese you've got to go old school
1967-toyota-2000gt.jpg
 
Lotus Esprit is definitely on my loved cars list, though I prefer 96 version to the old bond submarine version and among the 60 or so cars on my loved car list, the esprit is the only lotus I like and only one of 3 cars I like from the 90s.
 
I greatly enjoy Exalted...via the FREE 1e Quickstart.
I found it FAR more fun than the full game. I've run a couple short campaigns just using that booklet.
Some of the best money I've ever not spent on RPGs.

As for cars, I am into used sports cars (I get such great deals). I'm on my 3rd BMW Z series and I've done Mustangs in between. But I live in LA so the car is just for looks. Far too much traffic for speed to matter. Everything goes 0 to traffic jam.
 
I greatly enjoy Exalted...via the FREE 1e Quickstart.
I found it FAR more fun than the full game. I've run a couple short campaigns just using that booklet.
Some of the best money I've ever not spent on RPGs.

As for cars, I am into used sports cars (I get such great deals). I'm on my 3rd BMW Z series and I've done Mustangs in between. But I live in LA so the car is just for looks. Far too much traffic for speed to matter. Everything goes 0 to traffic jam.
That I don't miss at all about LA. Of course I stupidly moved somewhere with only slightly better traffic. But hey at least it's not currently on fire.
 
I greatly enjoy Exalted...via the FREE 1e Quickstart.
I found it FAR more fun than the full game. I've run a couple short campaigns just using that booklet.
Some of the best money I've ever not spent on RPGs.

I hate to admit it, but that is probably the best system for Exalted I've ever seen. The only thing I'd like to add is some sort of guideline for how ridiculously awesome different amounts of successes let you be. Like, five successes is per definition better than anything a regular human being is able to possibly pull off, but how does it differ from twelve successes? But that's something I've felt forced to add to just about every game I've ever run.
 
I couldn't deal with the corruption.
I want to say do tell but really I don't think I want to know. It's more pleasant believing justice is roughly being served.
 
I couldn't deal with the corruption.

Inside your particular popo unit or within the system as a whole?

It's more pleasant believing justice is roughly being served.

It is not.

I've been legal consulting for several years and I am working hard on leaving it behind for a new career direction.

And here's the scary part. I didn't enter the legal arena as Pollyanna with trust in my heart. I was hardened, but I had no idea how amazingly grotesquely corrupt the courts can be (especially in family law where I mostly operate). Civil is also a shitshow, but at least most people settle to avoid the shitshow.
 
I wonder if everyone knows that their own line of work is FUBAR, but they'd really like to believe that every other line of work is better off?

I guess that makes it nice to work in software development. Everyone already knows that there's no such thing as a piece of software that doesn't crash for no apparent reason every so often. Of course, I guess if I was writing programs for, say, automated missile defensive systems I would be having some trouble sleeping at night... :p
 
My car experience has been closely tied to where I lived and what I was doing in my hobbies at the time. When I was a student in Oxford I could not have afforded a car but would not have wanted one anyway because I honestly wouldn't have had much use for one. When I lived in Central London likewise. Now I live on the periphery of London having a car is extremely useful for getting out of town and seeing my friends around the country and is near-essential for going to LARPs given the amount of kit I have accumulated, so having a car is very useful.

As for Exalted, I find it's the classic example of a game which has been progressively hijacked by a niche of its fanbase to the point where if you don't fall into that niche you're probably better off passing it by. Apparently in Exalted 3 they didn't include diagrams of the charm trees, despite how astonishingly useful those would have been, because they didn't have space.

Digest that. They didn't have space in that enormous brick of a book to include charm trees. (For that matter, they didn't have space for all the Exalted types). If that sounds as catastrophic to you as it does to me then you should probably join me in the Exalted refuseniks pool.

As far as the setting/power level goes I find it and imitators to be not to my taste. Ultimately, if everyone and everything is awesome then nothing is awesome - it's the same reason why I find the later phases of Dragonball Z to be unwatchable. Everything gets escalated and cranked up to 11 to the point where nothing means anything any more. I get more excited about WFRP ratcatchers than I do about Exalts because I know that even though that ratcatcher is going to fail horribly, it's going to be an incident that gets remembered and talked about for generations to come, whilst whatever whizzy superhero mega-awesome thing that Exalt just did is going to get one-upped by another Exalt, probably in the next five minutes.
 
As far as the setting/power level goes I find it and imitators to be not to my taste. Ultimately, if everyone and everything is awesome then nothing is awesome - it's the same reason why I find the later phases of Dragonball Z to be unwatchable. Everything gets escalated and cranked up to 11 to the point where nothing means anything any more. I get more excited about WFRP ratcatchers than I do about Exalts because I know that even though that ratcatcher is going to fail horribly, it's going to be an incident that gets remembered and talked about for generations to come, whilst whatever whizzy superhero mega-awesome thing that Exalt just did is going to get one-upped by another Exalt, probably in the next five minutes.

This resonates with me. Ever since returning to RPGs at a more mature age my games have been pending towards the ratcatcher end of the spectrum. I did run Godbound for a short time but nothing's quite as fun as running a game for underdog PCs seeing them triumph on will and wiles alone.
 
This resonates with me. Ever since returning to RPGs at a more mature age my games have been pending towards the ratcatcher end of the spectrum. I did run Godbound for a short time but nothing's quite as fun as running a game for underdog PCs seeing them triumph on will and wiles alone.

There's truth to this.

But I'm the opposite these days. Since retiring Amber from my gametable, I'm constantly itching to run games with a similar power-scale -- Exalted and Godbound being good examples. Low-power scale games bore me; I find it's like eating hamburgers when I really want steak.

The criticisms Warthur Warthur makes upthread are understandable; it's good to balance out the negative with the positive. For me, It's not that E3 doesn't have flaws, I just don't care that much. I'm coming around to the notion that It's okay to like a game system not merely despite its flaws, but because of them. :grin:

Though there's a difference between flawed and broken. E3 isn't broken, IMO, just merely flawed. By my measure, the positives outweigh the negatives.
 
Inside your particular popo unit or within the system as a whole?

I've replied to this on the Real Life and What's Happening thread. I'm happy to continue this discussion there, if you want.

Going off-topic about food is one thing, but going off-topic on noman's popo experiences is another. My original post was about police cars, not police. As dealing with police cars is a part of the American driving experience, the same way dealing potentially dangerous sea-life is a part of open-water SCUBA diving. It's relevant to cars in general, and I thought it'd be interesting to give everybody a brief take on police cars and their importance to the people driving them.

I'm happy to talk about the car and driving aspect of the popo thing, but I don't want to go any further than that.

I know you understand. :smile:

EDIT: Totes respect, Spinach. Just don't want to accidentally derail this thread again. :smile:
 
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Exalted

One thing I dislike about it is dice pools. It's one of the barriers that keeps me away from the WOD games in general, and in E3, you'll often find yourself throwing a lot of dice. Dice pools is one of my RPG pet peeves, so I tolerate it in E3.
 
This resonates with me. Ever since returning to RPGs at a more mature age my games have been pending towards the ratcatcher end of the spectrum. I did run Godbound for a short time but nothing's quite as fun as running a game for underdog PCs seeing them triumph on will and wiles alone.

I think I've kind of gravitated towards games with strictly moderate power level as I've gotten older. Pendragon is a great example - you're part of a warrior elite who can go through bandits and hellhounds like tissue paper, but whenever you fight another knight you're taking your life in your hands, and there's literally armies of other knights out there, many of whom have ancestral grudges against you. And in the same way, your yearly budget could feed an entire village, but you need every bit of it to maintain the lifestyle that's expected of you, and you're one bad harvest away from having to choose from a number of unpleasant options.

In the same way, my favourite Exalt types are Lunars and Alchemicals. Powerful enough to do awesome things on a regular basis, not so powerful that they're not constantly at risk.
 
One thing I dislike about it is dice pools. It's one of the barriers that keeps me away from the WOD games in general, and in E3, you'll often find yourself throwing a lot of dice. Dice pools is one of my RPG pet peeves, so I tolerate it in E3.

I have high tolerance for dice-pool size, but I have heard Exalted is the most ridiculous in that regard. Surely we're not talking actual bowl-fulls, right?
 
My tastes are less about power level and more about system complexity. Godbound is good for me, (Eidolons & Exemplars is even better), but Exalted beyond the Quickstart loses my interest.

I don't find challenging demigods to be overly complex, its just different challenges. E&E was an interesting revelation because even though the Hero can cut a swatch through a dozen goblins, those goblins can wear the Hero down with tiny cuts which make the Hero vulnerable when the Goblin King takes the field.

Also, its not hard to make something bigger / badder than the PCs in any system. In Exalted, I regularly had creatures that existed only to hunt Exalts that were slave beasts of the Dragon blooded.

Also, Exalts have an interesting weakness: the more energy they expend, the more they glow, to the point that your PC is a literally a mote of the Sun on the Earth giving off an energy signature sensed across the continent.

Sure, you're badass. You can chop up 10 Dragon-blooded...but you can't fight 100....and they will march a battalion across the land to get you.

Run demigod, run for your life.

BTW, just in case anybody hasn't checked out Sine Nomine's E&E, its free:
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/144651/Exemplars--Eidolons

I've replied to this on the Real Life and What's Happening thread. I'm happy to continue this discussion there, if you want.

Yes please!
 
Yeah, I'm done with playing the under-powered loser in RPGs. I've been through dozens of 1st level DnD characters who died ignominiously due to some lucky die roll on the part of a kobold. I've been through nearly as many Vampires who just caught the wrong end of an Elder. Having been on all sides of that spectrum, I'm just not interested, and neither end is more "mature" than the other.

I know there are people who find rat-catching fun, and I know I'm not one of those people.

Second edition Exalted had a problem where shaking the pillars of heaven was just too damned easy, though part of that is the fault of poorly considered mechanics. Ex3, I think has recalibrated the setting and the crunch to handle that better.

I have high tolerance for dice-pool size, but I have heard Exalted is the most ridiculous in that regard. Surely we're not talking actual bowl-fulls, right?

A bog-standard starting Solar can rock 21 dice in their starting pool. In some areas, that mostly the limit; more advanced options simply make it more efficient, or make the dice do other things (ex: reroll 10's). In some subsystems, such as Craft, it's possible you will roll 40+ dice in some capacity ( rerolls, if/then statements which add more dice, etc ) for a single resolution.

In second edition it was common for me to toss 30 dice around for a roll.
 
Also, Exalts have an interesting weakness: the more energy they expend, the more they glow, to the point that your PC is a literally a mote of the Sun on the Earth giving off an energy signature sensed across the continent.

Sure, you're badass. You can chop up 10 Dragon-blooded...but you can't fight 100....and they will march a battalion across the land to get you.

Run demigod, run for your life.

I don't know, that sounds good in theory, but it runs into one of the most frequently argued-about parts of Exalted - how much do you have to rock the boat to attract the attention of something scary enough to kill you? One of the few things that are explicitly stated is that the Dragon-Blooded don't have enough manpower at the moment to send battalions after every Solar who sets off an anima flare. Same with all other enemies who can go up against a Solar - they're few and far between, and them showing up anywhere is going to be a big enough deal that it's hard to justify it happening very often.

Nah, I like Lunars and Alchemicals. With them, you can just cobble together a sufficiently badass spirit or monster, the likes of which Creation (and Autochtonia) is full of, and call it a day. ;)
 
In my games, if you go full Nova, you attract attention and the bigger the nova, the more info about you specifically can be discovered. So even if you Nova in the middle of nowhere, your signature is being broadcast and those who can listen, do listen and information is spread far and wide.

Which means traps can be laid...
 
Yeah, if you're running Exalted by attempting to scare your PCs with ever bigger monsters, you're doing it wrong, in the sense that's not the intended direction of the game. What people do at their table and works for them is fine, but Exalted's mechanics and setting actively work against that kind of GM Intimidation stuff.

Creation is balanced on a knife's edge The Empress disappears, and the Houses start pulling resources out of the Hunt and the Satrapies. At this time, the number of active Solars goes from maybe 10 to 150+, and Lunar activity surges in response.

Over the short term, yeah Celestials will get waxed if they show off too much. Over the medium term, the Hunt isn't sustainable, and vast swathes of Creation are open to enterprising Solars, Lunars, and even Abyssals.

This is one of the reasons I enjoy Exalted so much. It has its own geopolitics that underpin the desire play style.
 
Cars related.

Found my dream car: Knight XV SUV

Fully-Armored-Knight-XV-SUV-2.jpg




The thing I really like about this thing is it shouts to anybody and everybody that's paying attention: "COME AT ME BRO! I'VE SOMETHING WORTH STEALING!"

Still. Armored, black, intimidating, all-terrain capabilities...

I still want. :sad:
 
And how many gallons to the mile will that do?

7 MPG on a 40 gal. tank, from what I understand.

Compared to my old Mitsubishi which got something like 500 miles on a 20 gal tank. :shock:

But whatevs. It ain't about efficiency or good choices; it's about cool! :shade:
 
7 MPG on a 40 gal. tank, from what I understand.

Compared to my old Mitsubishi which got something like 500 miles on a 20 gal tank. :shock:
Wow.

For reference, my tiny Hyundai supposedly gets 44mpg with an 11 gal tank, and I consider this to be *low* - my last car was about 60 (But it was diesel).

But whatevs. It ain't about efficiency or good choices; it's about cool! :shade:
Well, I can't argue with that! It's a damn fine looking vehicle.
 
Wow.

For reference, my tiny Hyundai supposedly gets 44mpg with an 11 gal tank, and I consider this to be *low* - my last car was about 60 (But it was diesel).


Well, I can't argue with that! It's a damn fine looking vehicle.
You need to own a bigish boat. The semi displacement hulls over 35' often get less than a mile to the gallon but you are moving a condo at about 15mph for that fuel burn
 
I grew up with GOSPs burning off natural gas that was not economical to collect. Fourty and sixty foot jets of flame make for powerful travel landmarks, day and night. But I never felt all that attached or empowered by motor vehicles or big explodey gouts of fire. I am a defective American,.. :trigger: :cry:
 
I grew up with GOSPs burning off natural gas that was not economical to collect. Fourty and sixty foot jets of flame make for powerful travel landmarks, day and night. But I never felt all that attached or empowered by motor vehicles or big explodey gouts of fire. I am a defective American,.. :trigger: :cry:
Yes, yes you are:wink:
 
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