Difference between revisions of "MoExperience"

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Sure most charms are more useful than another dot in an ability. But does that really mean it should be easier to graduate to the fourth dot of an ability than to learn a charm? Abilities really should require months or years to master, even for exalts. Charms should be learnable in a variable, but often much shorter span. How much a charm costs should depend on how powerful the charm is. I just don't like some of the experience stuff, and if we're gonna play with experience, we may as well get the ratios the way we like 'em. Here's how I'd do it.

Mundane

• Attribute - New Rating squared x 4
• Ability - (New Rating + 2) squared - (XP costs of subsumed Specialties / 2)
• Specialty - [(Effective Ability New Rating + 2) squared] / 2

So for the second dot of a specialty pertaining to an ability at 4, the effective new level would be 6. 6 + 2 = 8. 8 ^ 2 = 64. 64 / 2 = 32.

When an ability is raised, all specialties related to that specialty are reduced by 1, and .5 x the XP costs of those Specialties go into raising the ability.

• Virtues - New Rating squared
• Willpower - New Rating squared

Favored Attributes, Abilities, and Virtues are counted as 1 less for determining XP costs to raise.

So, raising a favored ability to 1 or a caste ability to 2 would cost 4 XP.

• Raise Language - New Rating x 2 -(Linguistics + 1 per language learned to 3 in the same family).(Min 1)

Charms

• Solars - Min Ess x 8 + Min Ability x 5
• Abyssals - Min Ess x 8 + Min Ability x 5
• Lunars - Min Ess x 10 + Min Ability or Attribute x 5
• Sidereals - Min Ess x 10 + Min Ability x 5
  • Sidereals Learning Martial Arts Charms - Min Ess x 8
• Terrestrials - Min Ess x 10 + Min Ability x 5
• God-Bloods - Min Ess x 12 + Min Ability or Virtue x 5

Charms for favored abilities do not add Min Ability or Attribute x 5

Combos - Number of Charms in Combo x 5 + Min Ability, Attribute, or Virtue of each charm x 2

Sorcery

Difficulties

1. Very Easy - Read the White Treatise
2. Easy - Mentoring in the 5 Ordeals. Usually less than a year.
3. Average - Extended learning. 5 year program at the Heptagram.
4. Hard - The Heptagram might not do it. Requires extended attention and inspiration
5. Very Hard - Maybe, in centuries. Requires profound inspiration.

Solars

• Emerald - 2, 1 if favored.
• Sapphire - 3
• Adamant - 5

Abyssals, Lunars, Sidereals

• Emerald - 3, 2 if favored.
• Sapphire - 4

Terrestrials

• Emerald - 4, 3 if favored

Non-Exalts

• Emerald - 5, 4 if favored

Spells

• Solars
  • Emerald - 15
  • Sapphire - 35
  • Adamant - 60

• Lunars, Sidereals, & Abyssals
  • Emerald - 20
  • Sapphire - 45

• Terrestrials
  • Terrestrial - 25

Lunar Shapeshifting

• Deadly Beastman Gift - Total number of gifts x 10
• Deadly Beastman Attributes - Total number of bonus attributes

Sidereal Astrology

• College - New Rating squared x 4
• New College - 20

Essence

• Solars - New Rating cubed
• Lunars - New Rating cubed
• Abyssals - New Rating cubed
• Sidereals - New Rating +1 cubed
• Terrestrials - New Rating +1 cubed
• God-Bloods - New Rating + (4 - [.5 x Inheritance]) cubed

Average time past Exaltation for Essence increase, starting from 1.

Essence        2     3     4     5     6      7      8      9      10
Solars:       NA     1     10    75    175    400    1000   2500   7000
Abyssals,    
& Lunars     
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Terrestrials: NA     10    75    175   400    1000   2500   7000   ?
& Sidereals  

I generally would award around 25 XP for a one or two night game, preceded by down-time. Obviously, different groups have different advancement needs. - I'm eager for any comments. Thanks  :) - Morpheus

Comments

If we assume 25 XP for a one night game, let's compare some costs under this to the costs under standard (4 XP per session):

Old: Raising an attribute from 3 to 4: 12 XP, so 3 sessions
Morpheus Style: Raising an attribute from 3 to 4: 64 XP, so 2.56 sessions
Old: Raising an attribute from 4 to 5: 16 XP, so 4 sessions
Morpheus Style: Raising an attribute from 4 to 5: 100 XP, so 4 sessions

Old: Raising an ability from 3 to 4: 6 XP, so 1.5 sessions
Morpheus Style: Raising an ability from 3 to 4: 36 XP, so 1.44 sessions
Old: Raising an ability from 4 to 5: 8 XP, so 2 sessions
Morpheus Style: Raising an ability from 4 to 5: 49 XP, so basically 2 sessions

Old: Solar learning Ten Magistrate Eyes (1/1): 8 Favored / 10 non-favored, ie 2 sessions favored, 2.5 unfavored
Morpheus Style: Solar learning Ten Magistrate Eyes (1/1): 8 favored / 13 non-favored. That's .32 and about half a session's XP respectively.

Old: Solar learning Unknown Wisdom Epiphany (5/3): 8 Favored / 10 non-favored, ie 2 sessions favored, 2.5 unfavored
Morpheus Style: Solar learning Unknown Wisdom Epiphany (5/3): 40 favored / 55 non-favored. That's 1.6 sessions and 2.2 sessions XP respectively.

I would expect this to heavily push people towards never going very deep into charm trees, since it basically punishes specialization and rewards generalization, since you can get 5 1/1 charms for the cost of one 5/3. It gets worse for would be charm buyers if they have high Essence and buy high Essence charms.

Old: Solar, Essence 2 to 3. 16 XP: 4 sessions
Morpheus Style: Solar, Essence 2 to 3. 27 XP, slightly over 1 session.
Old: Solar, Essence 3 to 4. 24 XP: 6 sessions
Morpheus Style: Solar, Essence 3 to 4. 64 XP, 2.56 sessions.
Old: Solar, Essence 4 to 5. 32 XP: 8 sessions
Morpheus Style: Solar, Essence 4 to 5. 125 XP, 5 sessions.
Old: Solar, Essence 5 to 6. 40 XP: 10 sessions
Morpheus Style: Solar, Essence 5 to 6. 216 XP, 8.64 sessions.
Old: Solar, Essence 6 to 7. 48 XP: 12 sessions
Morpheus Style: Solar, Essence 6 to 7. 343 XP, 13.72 sessions.

Did you intend to make getting to Essence 7 much easier under the new system than the old? It takes 40 sessions under the old system to raise my Essence to 7 from 2, while it takes only 31 sessions to do it under this one. (Though I see from the progression that the cost for the last few pips of Essence will be much harsher.)

If your goals are to make charms generally cheaper than high abilities and to make charms very in cost by power, you seem to have succeeded, though I think this way requires more math, and I'm not sure if you have things quite the way you want them in some cases. -- JohnBiles

Wow, thanks for the effort and the comments. I was actually thinking 25 for something more along the lines for a full one-night game, as opposed to a session in a longer-running campaign. I would give less XP for that, probably around 5 per session. But yea, I think this makes it pretty clear. I was basically trying to do just what you said, and I figure I'll do a little playtesting and see how this works out. :) - Morpheus

Hey! Just reminding you to please try and figure out how much you want God-Blooded "oxbody" to cost. Don't sweat it, though.
~ Shataina

For now, consider it a 1 Essence spirit charm with a Min Conviction = the number of times it is bought for XP purposes. So, the first one would cost 17. The second is 22.

I'll rework Ox-Body in general at some point. - Morpheus

So ... how many health levels come with that? I'm assuming you don't get to pick any health level for 17 experience ....
~ Shataina

For now, it'll be one -1 and one -2. You get both when you buy the charm. - Morpheus

Actually, I think I'll say that they're all 2 Essence charms. Sorry about that. - Morpheus

Hey. Looks interesting, two thoughts. (sorry if they seem like tough love, I've done a lot of this myself, largely for d20.)

• 1, I think you can do this with much less math. I've spent a lot of time fiddling with numbers like this for work with d20, its possible to get almost any effect you want with less math if you stare at it a little. Either way, you need to make a table with the costs, host it as a spreadsheet somewhere if you don't want to type it in.
• 2, You're going to encourage characters to take lots of lower powered Charms and to put fewer dots in Abilities. I did something simliar for a game where the intent was to give the characters lots of powers, but make them kind of ordinairy in their mundane abilities. (although I didn't escalate the cost of "Charms" as much.)
• 3, Basically, you're going to change the nature of the game a fair bit. You'll have less specialized characters, probably with one good skill and a lot sort of all over the place. Personally, I think this is desirable.
• 4, if you do do this, you probably want to remove some speedbumps in places, since they're effectivelly built into your system. This would be a major advantage of your system in ways, but it would require a lot of rewriting.
• 5, you might want to fiddle with bonus point costs to discourage minmaxing between bonus and experience points.

Anyway, good luck, tell me how it goes if you use it! -MeiRen

Um. You realize that given 1 game per week with 5 XP per game you're looking at four months to go from Strength of Stone to Defense from Anathema Method, assuming that is your ONLY XP expenditure? Not to mention how dementedly complicated your normal trait raising system is. What's the *point* of making it so ornerous and insane to get Charms? This is a game about people who take over nations on lunch break. - Telgar

If you want them to generalize, then:

• 1, make Essence decrease the cost of raising an Attribute on a 1 to 1 basis up to a limit of how high the Attribute is being raised. (Makes characters raise Attributes until they equal the Essence score, and then raise Essence when they're ready to move on)
• 2, make charms decrease the cost of raising Abilities on a 1 to 1 basis. (Makes characters buy all the charms they can before raising an Ability)
• 3, no retro-active XP discounts for things like buying a charm after raising an Ability if using suggestion 2. (Too much of a headache and it decreases the incentive to generalize)

~ Qzujak49

Hey guys. Thanks for the comments. I haven't gotten a lot of feedback lately, and I really appreciate it. I don't really appreciate the negatative tone of some of the comments, but I realize that that's what you usually get when you post on this kind of wiki, so I can deal. Anyways, the Essence limits are an interesting idea that I'd never thought of, and the charms idea is a good one too, but using certain stats as a basis for the XP costs of other stats feels a little manipulative to me, and I think my players would prefer for there not to really be an interpretation which could lead to saying that there's a right or wrong, or more or less efficient way to spend XP. Mostly because I don't ever want a player to be able to say that if he would've grown her character in a different way, then she'd be a lot more overall powerful now, and she screwed up then. Because these rules are really for my players, and my players seem to like the changes that I've made to the system, espicially regarding XP. It works well in my games. Of course, players tend to receive comparatively higher XP rewards, because, as you've noticed, the costs to raise things are higher. But then again, a lot of the time, I play a game every night, and if you give characters tons of XP every night and make everything really cheap, then by the end of the first 2 weeks, everyone has spontaneously learned their fifth dot of Essence. So, there needs to be the ability to customize XP rewards from one game to the next, which there is, so it works out.

P.S. Don't get me wrong. I love critical comments. I would point Telgar to the many players who have given me rave feedback on MoExperience, even though they have to ask me how much everything would cost before they can buy it. It's not so bad, take my word for it. And if you don't like it, don't play with it. And it's okay to point out why you don't like these things, it's important to know what players and other STs outside your circles think, but I just got very nonproductive and highly negative feedback on a handful of my pages from the same person, and I don't really need all that cluttering up the comments sections. Not meaning to be offensive, just consider that before further posts, please. - Morpheus

This is going to sound crass . . . but other than your players liking these changes . . . how does it actually change the game? What kind of results have these changes had, and in what kinds of games have they had said results. Have you actually done something to actually make that fifth ability worthy of the high pedestal you've put it on? Point me to some of the "rave feedback" from your experience system. Because, you know, it really seems weak to say, "my players like it, they're the ones who it's for, so don't say mean things about me when I have secret unprovided evidence in my corner!" ~ Andrew02

I can't but agree with Morpheous - say what you want about the systems and ideas themselves, but if you feel the need to go ad hominem on someone it's a good sign to click the Back button and read something else. Nothing here, regardless of how stupid or pointless it is, affects you or your game unless you choose to. Leave it, don't be silly and attack people personally and chill. This goes for some of Morpheus' critics (yes, Telgar, you too - sorry buddy, just being honest) as well as some of the people on #WoD who are very happy to declare people idiots or worse over some disagreement over an aspect of the game. Resplendence

Most of the results I've found my MoExperience has had on my games has been to refine the realism factor. It also changes the dynamic of character growth. Having high XP costs for abilities means that characters tend to have a lot of lower level charms, and the Ability level becomes a more common limiting factor for what charms a character can learn. Of course, since I play that players can learn non-MA charms as long as they have a specialty that brings their abilities up to the necessary level and can use that charm as long as their ability applies, it also encourages specialties, which I feel makes for more interesting characters. I do tend to run more detailed, high precision sort of game, less on the anime side and more on the high fantasy side. But in my opinion, the fifth dot of an ability should be difficult to learn because it is difficult to learn. That really is a good enough reason for me. - Morpheus

Interesting. Various thoughts that havn't been covered before.

1. Have you noticed a exponential improvment from higher abilities? I.e. is Melee 5 more than 20% better than Melee 4? I'm just just curious, as I havn't noticed that effect.
2. There is a huge discount for favored vs un-favored charms. This tends to encourage more spreading out, vs depth. (Edit: ARG! Should be depth vs spreading out, like Mo said.)
3. Did you change characther creation also? Because this makes "linear during creation, geometric afterward" situation much worse. I.e. people would tend to make specialists at charachter creation and generlized afterward. The normal system does this, but this one REALLY does it. This effect would also apply to charms to a degree. Basicly, it's realy hard to master something with XP.
4. What is the "Difficulties" section. Just confused here.
5. I note that spells are cheap compared to what you expect(If you consider them Occult */* charms. I.e. an Occult 3/3 charm would cost 24 vs 15 for a Terrestrial spell for a Solar. ) It basicly is half cost for non-(solar/abyssal)s. Personally, I agree with this, spells never seemed as generally usefull as charms. Any reason why Sapphire spells cost 35, vs 30 like one would expect?

Just out of curiosity, does anything favor virtues? Raksha maybe? My evil side would probably allow Solars to count their "Curse" virtue as favored, just because. Anyway, interesting system. -FlowsLikeBits

Thank you! Mmm...comments. I shall answer them presently.

1)I think that Exalted's dice system often creates a powerful illusion of the linearality of ability growth. It's the scale of Effect vs. # of successes that makes it non-linear (perhaps badly). For instance, you can run a shop with 1 larceny, a real business with 2, and a country with 5. Also, I think that charms are a good way to highlight the power of 5s. Because if you want the really good charms, you need to have 5.

2)I disagree. I think that making powerful non-favored charms much more expensive and favored charms relatively cheap encourages characters to learn only so much from non-favored abilities and concentrate the major thrust of their power toward the favored ones. It makes powerful characters likely to only have really really powerful charms in their favored arenas, more specializing the very powerful. And the PCs will spend the extra XP for, say, Monkey Leap or Body-Mending, but they're not gonna want to spend a great deal of XP to go farther. I just like that dynamic.

3)No I have not significantly changed character creation. And I should, but not that much, and here's why I think that's true. While XP is about representing character growth and rewarding the player, Chargenning is about making exactly what you want. And so XP is more realistic. Also, my games usually either involve only 1 player or do not last long enough for XP to make a significant impact on the characters (I move around a lot, and I have a lot of different players). So, characters are balanced pretty well with each other at Chargen (because the players use my brilliant and inspired MoCharacter chargen rules, which I'm sure noone likes), and the characters never have a chance to experience XP minmaxing ingame, and it doesn't matter for 1P games anyways, because it doesn't matter if the character is laughably weak or powerful.

3) This is an ingame estimation of how diffcult sorcery is to learn for characters of various magical power levels. The numbers line up with descriptions and are labeled to the different types.

4) ::Nods at your agreement:: Emerald cost 15, Sapphire are 20 higher than that. Adamant are 25 higher than sapphire.

Raksha definitely favor virtues. Anything else that would would be unique or unprinted. I definitely wouldn't want Dragon Kings to favor Valor, unless perhaps their favoring of it faded once they reached 3 Essence. I'd have to think about that one, and so I wouldn't do that currently. I do like integrating Virtue Flaws into mechanics as much as possible, but I don't think I'd go the favoring route, but it definitely sounds like it could go well in many games, though I suppose only Eclipses would have it matter for them charm-wise. Anyways, thanks! I really do appreciate these comments. I've got to run now, but I'm gonna take a look at your stuff later. Write back if anything I wrote was unclear. - Morpheus

2) ARRG! My bad. I actually agree with what you said, just wrote the comment backwards for some reason. The difficulty I've found is that even for Solars half your favored abilites come from your caste. This tends to force people into highly stereotypical roles(*cough* Dawn). I've found it's difficult to make a concept that doesn't on some non-favored abilities to some degree. I don't think you need such a large difference, as I've noticed that people don't tend to go to far into non-caste abilties under the normal XP system, which has a smaller difference. -FlowsLikeBits

I definitely see what you're saying. It does suck when you realize that you're going to have to start relying on a non-favored ability. It certainly is dangerous for Exalted to have players have to make the important decision of favoring in chargen. I think that my system for favoring, found in MoAbilities, allows for a little bit less stereotyping and more flexibility, while maintaining the castes' integrity, but what you've said is still a very valid concern. Thanks. I've never been that comfortable with telling players "Well you should've favored that in the beginning, then." Maybe there is a better way. - Morpheus

Your creation system is interesting, I like it. I may have to adapt it, as I don't have the confidence to re-write everything. To me it always seemed silly that Solars and Lunars would have such rigid castes(unlike others, who are "chosen" of different entities). It maybe just a result of the solars backstory, but their caste's impressed me the least of all the Exalt types. They just seemed kinda wacky and arbitrary(fighter-priest-mage-thief-bard!) My solution is here, although it's probably more extreme than you want. Essentialy, if you invest heavily enough in a non-favored ability, you learn to favor it. This also gets around the probablem that everyone is probably gonna want MA eventually, as doing it unfavored would be difficult. Also, the Solar castes seemed to lack a well define outlook that other splat had(most other splats got a range of things you could work with. Solars castes seems really, hyper focused on one concept). I also allowed one to pick up other anima effects, which has precedent in Exalt Ways anyway. -FlowsLikeBits

Thanks a lot. I like your ideas for expanding solar powers out of caste and agree with your dislike for rigid stereotypes. I think you're onto something with the charms you've got there. Maybe you actually should go that extra step and do a little houseruling of the castes and stuff - make it exactly how you like it. You don't really have to rewrite everything unless you're freakishly obsessive ::shifty eyes::. I always hope that any of my houserules will prove useful to someone, though, so I'm glad you found something there. Something definitely should be done to balance MA and Occult a little better, I think, and that's just the surface. - Morpheus

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