Difference between revisions of "SolarAthletics/FluffySquirrel"

Latest revision as of 01:17, 6 April 2010

A change to the Athletics tree, as I found myself thinking, solars really need a cool way of jumping off of really tall things without getting injured :)

At any rate, the charm will now fit in between Graceful Crane Style and Feather-Foot Style, effectively taking Lightning Speeds place as the prerequisite for Feather-Foot.

Height Negating Jump</b>

<b>Cost: 1 mote
Duration: Instant 
Type: Reflexive 
Min. Athletics: 2 
Min Essence: 2 
Prereqs: Graceful Crane Style

The character can jump from any height, safe in the knowledge that he shall survive unharmed. When the character activates this charm reflexively as he nears the end of a fall, he lightens his body, and by cleverly diverting flows of essence around him with a specific pose, he may focus all the energy of the fall into the ground he landed on rather than himself. The character's position as he lands is stylized and the character may choose it, but without fail will look suitably impressive. If the character has jumped from a great height, damage may be caused to the surrounding ground, cracking and rippling stone into a small crater.

Speed Tree I was interested in a way to improve my initiative through charms, without having to go into martial arts or such, so decided to make a speed tree based on athletics (which contains reflexes).

Lightning Reflexes</b>

<b>Cost: 3 motes
Duration: Instant 
Type: Reflexive 
Min. Athletics: 2 
Min Essence: 1 
Prereqs: None 

The character can charge her body with essence and become able to react quicker and faster. During the turn when this charm is activated, the character adds their athletics score to their initiative. This charm can only be activated once per turn.

Reaction Heightening Technique</b>

<b>Cost: 3 motes, 1 Willpower 
Duration: Scene 
Type: Simple 
Min. Athletics: 3 
Min Essence: 2 
Prereqs: Lightning Reflexes 

The character floods his nerves with essence, and his reactions act at a greatly heightened level. For the rest of the scene, the character may add his athletics score to his initiative.

Speed Enhancing Muscle Bursts</b>

<b>Cost: 1 Mote per action, 1 Lethal health level 
Duration: Instant
Type: Extra Action 
Min. Athletics: 4
Min Essence: 3
Prereqs: Lightning Reflexes, Reaction Heightening Technique, Lightning Speed(Exalted)

The character enfuses his muscles with essence, allowing him to make short but incredibly powerful bursts of motion, at the expense of causing considerably strain to his body. Roll dice equal to the characters athletics, and for each success, the character may move up their normal running rate. The character cannot attack or perform any other kind of attack action during the turn through charms or otherwise, but this may be combo’d with other motion enhancing athletic charms. The character automatically takes 1 lethal level of damage after all his actions during to the exertion.

Ultimate Quickness Prana</b>

<b>Cost: 7 motes, 1 Willpower
Duration: Instant
Type: Reflexive
Min. Athletics: 5
Min Essence: 3
Prereqs: Lightning Reflexes, Reaction Heightening Technique

The solar exalts form glows with golden essence, and his movements seem dizzying to the eye. When this charm is activated, the character will automatcally become faster than another other being with a permanent essence score lower than his own. The character automatically beats the initiative scores of beings not using perfect initiative charms, and against beings who are using them, he instead doubles his initiative.

Perception Altering Essence Sheath</b>

<b>Cost: 7 motes
Duration: Instant
Type: Extra Action
Min. Athletics: 5 
Min Essence: 4
Prereqs: Lightning Reflexes, Reaction Heightening Technique, Ultimate Quickness Prana

The character surrounds herself with a glowing sheath of essence, through which the paths of time seem slower to her. During the turn when she activates this power, she may perform two actions without having to split her pools in any way. This charm can be used explicitly with charms outside of Athletics. This charm does not allow extra charms to be used without a combo and it can only be used once per turn. The character can still split her pool as normal, and the extra action will be at full dice pool and outside the standard penalties.

Eg. Jareth activates his Perception Altering Essence Sheath and then splits his standard dice pool 3 ways to attack 4 guards. His first attack is granted by the sheath, and uses full dice pool, and his following attacks are at -3, -4, and -5 as per the normal rules.

• back to SolarAthletics

Comments

I'm interested what people think about these... for example... is speed enhancing muscle bursts a bit too lunar?. FluffySquirrel

Hm. I'm not sure if I'm totally comfortable with Perception Altering Essence Sheath allowing die pools to be split, but as an Essence 4 Charm, I can see "allows actions to be split, unlike most Extra Action Charms" to sort of be its schtick. Also, how does Ultimate Quickness Prana interact with other "you win initiative" Charms like Thunderclap Rush? My call would be "highest permanent Essence wins," but I don't know. (Also, shouldn't Ultimate Quickness Prana require Essence 4, since one of its prerequisites has Essence 4 required? This is a nitpick, but I've always been bugged by Charms with lower Essence or Ability requirements than their prerequisites.) -- AntiVehicleRocket

It was my understanding that the vairience in requirements is ment to modulate training times and vary the cost to add a charm to a combo, where relevant - Malikai

This sounds fairly accurate, but I dunno, I guess it's a design-elegance thing for me. If the Charm trees represent further refinement and improvement of the same basic principles of Essence use, why should a more advanced technique require less mastery than one that preceded it? The moral of the story might be that I'm twitchy about strange, random design things, though. -- AntiVehicleRocket

I'd flip the charm-order around, personally... there are quite a few perfect-init charms in other trees, this one is just a general one. There aren't many do-anything extra action charms around
-- Darloth

Quite liked Darloth's fix.. and I had a rejig of the perfect init charm, as it brought up weird issues of, what happens when a lower essence enemy has a higher initiative than the greater one?.. you maybe can't act before the greater, but you should automatically beat the lower.. weird paradoxes there, so just simplified it completely. (Plus, got pointed that Lightning Speed is a fairly sensible prereq to add to Speed Enhancing.. FluffySquirrel

Since I'm beating up on FluffySquirrel today, about that essence sheath... how about giving it a scene-long duration and saying it instead reduces multiple-action penalties by one or two (or some increasing number based on some stat or another, like Essence/2 or something). That seems to fit what you're going for a little better: a charm that makes action-splitting easier. - Seraph BTW: I don't actually mean to beat up on you, Squirrel. Actually, your stuff just caught my eye and I'm trying to avoid work.