Difference between revisions of "Paincake"

Revision as of 23:17, 3 April 2008

Exalted Free Form GM, I hate dice.. my players get confused because they think they need them! >.<

I like Exalted the most, but Werewolf lends itself well to freeform. D&D does sometimes, too..

Though I made my most Freeform RP on the AOL as Valerian Talbain, a werewolf sorcerer posessed by a demon.. >.o I was 9, ok, don't hit me.. I stopped at 14 when high school started. People laff atchoo when you RP online nowadays.. =D

Anyhow, that's why I love freeform. Expect new things here.. later. =)

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Hey there, please sign in on your preferences page so that your nick appears next to changes instead of your IP. IPs are ugly. - Telgar

I am currently having a feud with my players, one of whom refuses to return the Core book to me. =\ I would really like a few tidbits of info, and would appreciate someone helpin' me out. o.o Pritty please?

Needed info includes stats for the following: Hungry Ghost War Ghost

as well as info on Heroic Mortal 'Experienced' Background.

I would really appreciate this information, and if anyone has any further patience, there is one last thing I need..

A quick and gritty combat tutorial, because my players refuse to learn how to play fair, and I want to have the small enemy army of 'mere mortals' beat the living !@#$ out of them, running them out of essence, breaking past their defenses and their stupid narrow builds. However, if I do not use the rules (even though they're jerks) they'll merely blame 'ST Playing God.' I cannot count on taking back the Core book, or borrowing the Second core.. so I will ask for this favor from one of you gurus.

I am reachable at (Email or Instant Message) uilnslcoap@aol.com. Thanks again to anyone who tries to help.

P.S. If anyone does help, be sure to note it beneath this message so that others do not waste their time.

Wow. That stinks. First off, merely because I'm supposed to, I should let you know - if you're in a feud with your players big enough to warrant out-right theft of a 30+ dollar book, that's bad. Don't play with people who are that stupid. Having said that, then, let's see... I don't have the book with me (at work), but I can give some advice on how to run-out some Solars. Do they read the wiki? If not, I'll post the general "how to hose Solars" guidebook below. One question, though - how many mortals can you spare, and will they be allowed to ambush the Solars? It's essential that you can control the field of battle, especially in regards to movement - the mortals want horses and archers, in an open area - perhaps rolling grassy hills, for miles on end. Much easier if you've got 100+ mortals to use, much harder if you've got only 10 to use. Any hints on how many mortals you can spare, and if you can spare some grassy hills (or perhaps at sea, on ship) will be nice. -- GreenLantern

No, they don't read the wiki.. the book is not mine per-se, but rather 'ours.' He bought that book personally, but I bought the 5 castebooks, I bought most of the supps like Bo3C, Savage Seas, ToT, GoD, HotBG, RoR, nearly all of them. I think the only one I didn't get was Savant & Sorcerer and maybe Manacle&Coin, and we both don't have Obsidian&Ivory. I acquired Lunars as well. He got DB, Castebook Fire, Abyssals, and Sidereals and Fair Folk, as well as 1st and 2nd ed core books. I acquired a replacement for the 1st core book because a dog destroyed the original while it was under my care. (It was his stupid dog.) Unfortunately, I recently had in my care DB and its already damaged cover deteriorated considerably.. he has all the books under his care except Abyssals (mwuahahaha) and he is being a stubborn !@#$ and considers them all his own property.

That aside, I have an Abyssal Exalt and her Abyssal Command is rated 3. This grants her 200 walking dead and their 20 handlers, as well as 17 Warghosts.

I created a Heroic Mortal character who is being groomed (outside his knowledge) for Abyssal Exaltation. He has been granted Abyssal Command of 3 as an adjunct to the above Abyssal's command group. (Because to grant the above character AC of 4 would be too many soldiers, and AC 3 is too few.) He is her Second.

I want to overwhelm my Solar friends with this small army. 200 walking dead and their 20 handlers, 100 human soldiers, nearly 20 warghosts. There are 3 solars, Night, Dawn, Twilight.

The human army is currently composed of 40 Heavy Infantry, 20 Medium Infantry, 20 Skirmishers and 20 Archers. A small bodyguard is included for the leader, 6 mortals (subheroic) and 2 Warghosts. I can alter this group as necessary. I would prefer using only the 100 human soldiers + its command group to slay them. Thanks for all of your help!

P.P.S. I am also announcing the fact that I *WILL* be using dice.. the top of my page may say otherwise, but I have come around to dice.

Well, you should have little to no problems, as long as you let the Wyld hunt into your heart. The trick with most arrogant combat Solars is that they've got scene-longs that rule, and instants that get them past tight spots. If you're in First Ed, they're also especially vulnerable to running out of defense actions. What you do is break the group up, such that at, say, 6AM, they're ambushed by 20 guys or so, who launch arrows, harass, whatever. Your Solars activate all their scene-longs, and prepare for combat. Maybe even take out one or two. Especially fun if some of your troops are 'dolled up' in Red armor, or perhaps something covered in oil and soot to resemble Soulsteel. Then those guys run the heck away. Successfully. The scene ends. Then come the arrows, from some other direction. The Solars hear the pound of hooves coming towards them. They activate their Scene-longs, and get ready. The horses do a once-by, and continue on their way. The archers make way. The scene ends. Solars, left feeling harassed and confused, know that they're now being taunted into activating their scene-longs for no reason, wasting essence, and more importantly, willpower. If they don't yet feel like that, have some more random attacks that fade away. If you've got a seige engine to spare, drop a diseased cow on them from a remote hilltop. Just because. Their essence pools are a bit lower now, and their willpower, most importantly, is quite low. If these things are occurring every 2 hours or so, that'll keep them from hitting the 'rested' state for the hour, and thus, they'll be making back maybe 4 motes every two hours, without hearthstones. Keep this up. Eventually, when they're getting really frustrated, and considering something like using a Stormwind Rider to just get the heck out of dodge, you bring the pain. Start it like every other one - archers, from a distance, men on horseback, and perhaps dropping a seige blast in the area, just to shake them up. Done especially well, you can afford more archers than not (they're quite key), and can afford to have 10+ archers coming from multiple cardinal directions - you want to surround them with archer points, so that they can't easily pick a single direction to charge at. You can squeeze in at this point with footmen, in a proper line, advancing, with pikes in the line behind (this never lasts long vs. Exalts, but it's how you start). The trick now is that you've got 3 Solars, who, without mad magic, have at most 3 dice actions per round. If they've got persistents up, that's annoying, so focus on the ones without FLB or FFBS up. If you can get more than 10 attacks onto their person, per round, without fudging things too badly, you're doing quite well - at 10 attacks, even a full dodge starting at 13 dice (quite good!) will whittle down to 3 dice, getting some hits in, each doing ping damage, most likely. Still, it means there's no way that they can afford to split their action, because they'd easily take yet more damage. This means they'll be (by necessity) activating things like counterattack charms, extra-action combos, etc. If you can get the ones without persistent defenses down into the -2 (or worse) wound penalties, you're doing well. If there are some with persistent defenses, they're a bit tougher. Keep the guys near them doing their best to defend, be it aborting to parry, full dodge, or whatever. You may lose a few during this time, but that's why you've got hundreds. Just suck down the ones without persistents, and occupy the ones that do have them.

Then run away. Again. Do the Solars follow? If so, keep up the combat, and eventually you'll kill the non-persistent defense Solars, giving you enough to easily overwhelm the ones with persistent defenses. IF they don't, let the scene end (as an ST, let them bandage up, clean up, pack up their gear, whatever), and wait. In an hour or two, archers, from two directions, again. Either they panic, and throw up scene-longs immediately, or they don't. If they do, great, they've just wasted more willpower. (and since this is all one day, they're not getting any back yet!). Your archers fire off for a round or two, and then high-tail it out of there. If they don't activate persistents, keep up the suppression fire, as the men on horseback come by again, for strikes on the characters that normally have persistents up. If you can keep them busy from the moment they've entered combat, they can't activate persistents without getting hit that round for lack of a defense. 7 archers focusing on you every round means that if you stand still to activate a defense, you'll almost certainly get hit by 7 arrows, doing 3.5 ping damage. Can't have that. Regardless, you keep them busy, keep whittling them down, and if they activate persistents, you just leave. Sure, you lose 3-5 troops everytime you leave, from getting hit in the back with thrown weapons, whatever. Who cares? Finally, you keep this up, for a long time, just watching their willpower. Done very well, you should have them totally drained by the evening, and very very low on motes. (It helps if there's not much stunting during all this, mind. Bland open fields really keep Exalts from stunting off of the scenery. If you don't have an open field yet, burn one. Look - now it's open!) Continue until they're screwed.

That's one approach. -- GreenLantern

I spent a long time waiting on replying to this trying to get my reply into a form civil enough to actually post instead of a mad screaming rant. So here's my take on the whole thing. What you are planning to do is completely counter-productive. If you slaughter your players with mortals it's only going to encourage them to try even harder to create unbeatable builds, because you will have demonstrated to them that they have weaknesses they have not attended to. Furthermore, they may well accuse you of taking out your irritation with the player who won't give you access to the rulebooks on them. Killing your players because they ran off to do something suicidal can teach a lesson. Sicking something on them which is going to clearly be intended to stomp them flat because you're irritated with them is only going to cause you more trouble with them and further encourage them to build more invincible characters.

Green Lantern's advice has a lot of good tactics, but I know if that was done to me, I'd be arguing that the scene isn't really over if my foes come right back before anything else of any importance happens, especially if it happens over and over. I'd probably get pretty pissed and I can expect that your players would to, and moreso than me, as I'm usually pretty even-tempered.

I'd frankly advise saying to them that you just can't run the game if you're not allowed access to the rulebooks and just put it on hold until either you can buy your own copies or pressure the hoarder to cough up.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents. --JohnBiles

What JohnBiles said, Especially about the scene. I would never do that sort of rules mongering to my players. I would consider it beneath me. Then agaion, Yhey are all great people -Azurelight

Oh yes, I'm not saying it's nice - not by any standards. And yes, I'm abusing the concept of the 'scene', slightly, save that that's precisely what Wyld Hunts are known for. It's not nice. It's not good, and in fact, it'll quite likely be bad for the game. But that's not my call - as crunch demon, it's my Yozi-powered job to give people the crunch they need, and perhaps weaken the Yozi prison in the process. -- GreenLantern

I am not entirely hoping to kill them so much as make them stop being rule-retarded. When we traded off ST for the last game, the hoarder was a real jerk. When the ST left the room, he told me he was just going to fuck the guy's game up, and not play right or even in character, and basically threw a tantrum that was two sessions long. Another reason why I simply don't play with them is that there are almost -no- roleplayers down here where I live. I've been playing with the same 3 people for the last 5 years, and every time the games fall apart and don't end. We recently lost one of our 4, so now its just me, the hoarder, and another friend who's not very good at getting his ideas out. (He's an artist, so he's a very abstract thinker) So its just three of us. o.o They are rule-retarded because they think they can say "I take it." or "Naw, man, I'm too cool to get knocked down by this guy." At this point, the hoarder-baby is just using my storytelling as a platform to be a showoff more than anything else. He doesn't care about the other characters or NPCs except as props or backup, he doesn't care about the story except so far as he thinks it's cool enough to support suitably epic backdrops for his stunts. He doesn't care about the rules except that he likes lots of dice, and cheats on rolls when people aren't looking so he can succeed at his constantly self-aggrandizing stuntery. I don't want his whim to rule my actions as ST or the other players' characters. He's chosen a narrow charmset nearly entirely restricted to 4 abilities. (Thrown, Dodge, Lore, maybe Athletics) He has no persistants. He is actually not a munchkin, he's a bad player. He wouldn't survive the first of GL's imaginary salvoes if I went by the rules. He would've already been killed by the Wyld Hunt, and definitely couldn't survive if faced with a pair of starting Dragon Bloods played well or a single starting Abyssal exalt played well. I need some encouragement here and some help bringing these people to get serious and play well, or else just get me some players that understand what a 'scene' is and are actually willing to play the game and not just BS all night.

p.s. I am grateful, however, for GL's support in providing the doom of my players at mortal hands. If I feel like abandoning them finally and choosing new people who aren't jerks, their characters will die satisfyingly humiliating deaths at the hands of a small mercenary company, uselessly and anticlimactically. - Paincake

If anyone has stats for Hungry Ghosts and Warghosts, and will tell me specifics of the Experienced background I would appreciate it. I assume they're not on the wiki due to the copyright infringement; you can mail them to me at broken_patience@hotmail.com - Paincake

Experienced? Never heard of it... -- GreenLantern, who has read a lot of books, and seriously doesn't know what you're talking about...

Paincake, this whole situation leaves me feeling vaguely nauseous. I myself sometimes can forget about the 'g' in RPG sometimes. Game. Games are fun. Your situation does not sound fun. I understand the junkie need to RP, but hell, if you have to work with such shitheads, why aren't you in an RP server on City of Heroes or enjoying some other enjoyable exercise. This kind of stuff can only sour you, make you bitter. Exalted's too fantastic a game to waste on cockmasters. --UncleChu

It can be fun sometimes, I mean.. there've been so many good adventures, they just fall apart as the Hoarder's interest passes. I swear, one day he'll come to me with the greatest support, saying he wants to play and co-ST with me, creates his femme-fatale social elite character. Then after three games, Shinobi comes out, or he reads Romance of the Three Kingdoms.. and then he wants to be a ninja, or in a fuedal-china esque locale rather than Creation. Or the time he played Legend of the Five Rings and wanted to blend the two universes.. blech! I don't have any other people to play with down here, and truly he was once one of my best friends. (other things separated us) I really want to play, and ST, but there are nearly no takers down here. =( For Mr Green Lantern, Experience is the background in the PG for Heroic Mortals. I don't remember exactly how many points of it give how many points of what, but they provide extra bonus points based on the premise that the Heroic Mortal is weathered and tough. I don't know how many BPs per dot of background, however. - Paincake

Hey dude. I just stopped by to say that it's really cool of you to update three relays in one day. That gives me the warm fuzzies. - Han'ya