CorrectedZeal
Corrected Zeal
- back to Stebtabulous
- back to My Integrity Charms
- "Dreams of the First Age", "Lords of Creation", "Exalted" and the original charm "Zeal" are all property of White Wolf
Background
When Dreams of the First Age came out, it included Lords of Creation, which included all kinds of First Age treats. Some of those treats were Solar Charms. Zeal (Lords of Creation, p 58-59), an Integrity Charm, was one of those Solar Charms. According to a group of my friends (and I agree) this charm was an attempt to create prefects that trump prefects (that trump prefects, that trump prefects...and on and on) and there was some oddness with it being a Mental Influence. So we decided that it was a good concept but failed because of its poor write-up. I looked at it a while, played around with the mechanics a bit and finally settle on a version that is just as powerful, fit's the creator's original intent, and is actually clear, while still not creating a prefects arms race.
Zeal (Lords of Creation, p 58-59) revised
Zeal</b>
<b>Cost: - Duration: Permanent Type: Permanent Keywords: Emotional Min. Integrity: 7 Min. Essence: 7 Prerequisite Charms: Sun King Radiance, Supreme Perfection of Integrity
The Lawgiver’s will is power; her passions are inevitabilities. This charm creates a permanent unnatural Mental Influence on the Solar that enhances her Virtue channels. This Mental Influence is so strong that her passions permeate reality and make Creation bend to her will. Whenever she channels Willpower through a Virtue to perform any action, that action succeeds perfectly, completely negating the possibility of effective opposition. She achieves a threshold success, on her action, equal to her Integrity, regardless of circumstance.
In the case where her action is opposed by another perfect, this charm follows the rules of Unstoppable Force, Immovable Object (Exalted, p 179). If this charm is the “attack”, it fails. If it is the “defense”, it succeeds. In the case where an opposed role is necessary, this charms succeeds as the Lawgiver automatically achieves a threshold success, on the opposed role, equal to her Integrity. If the opposed role is against another use of Zeal, the opposed role occurs normally, with each player adding their appropriate bonus from the channeled Virtue and adding additional success equal to their Integrity, before comparing the results.
Comments
Welcome mate!
I actually like the fix, to the point where part of me thinks this charm could be read that way by default if you take it leniently.
Your wiki fromating is a bit off though. The charm should be under SolarIntegrity/Stebtabulous
Thanks Azurelight. I fixed up the formatting a bit, this still has its own page but it at least is filed properly.
I very much like this change to the original charm, which had a good heart but not a good writeup. A question, so I can make sure I am reading it right, when you say you achieve a threshold success equal to Intergrity, that means that if you have Integrity 7 its like you achieved seven extra successes beyond the base difficulty level. So if something was a Difficulty 3 action, its like you achieved 10 successes. If that is so, then yeah, that works very very well. All in all I like this, think that it is quite improved and better than the official version, and it is something that I will think very hard about implementing. -Heru
Thanks for the interest Heru. I'm glad this is getting a decent reception. Like Azurelight mentioned, I see this change as a clearer interpretation of what the original charm was. I think they just got a little lazy (and possibly ambitious) and didn't explain the Emotional keyword and summarized the second paragraph with "-even perfect defenses."
As for your question, yeah it'd be like you said if the "opposition" (ie Difficulty, MDDV, PDV, opposing successes, etc.) was 3 and you had Integrity 7 you would "achieve" 10 successes. It works like any other perfect, just instead of you getting 0 extra successes, you actually get extra successes equal to your Integrity.
For situations that have an "opposition" and then look at the "achieved" successes to determine the effect (there's none in the core but there's always custom charms and specific situations) that's a call for the individual games.
- Then, after reading your response to my response, I must say I absolutely love it. It makes a lot of sense. Even more, I agree with you on your point about White Wolf and Keywords, they need to use them more really. They also need to read their Charms a little bit more I think. Basically, what this Charm says is that you cannot fail at a task, but even more, the task is achieved with better than average success. Here is a question, maybe we could say that instead of it being the Integrity score its the score that the character has in the related Ability - so if he uses the Charm to enhance acts of Occult then he gets extra successes based on his Occult Rating. Just a thought. :) In addition, the way you have this Charm set up could also be used to set up Ultimate Mastery and Supreme Perfection, i.e., you automatically start at Threshold 0 successes and then add (Ability) to that amount above and beyond the normal amount. It might make those otherwise mostly useless charms actually worthwhile. hehe -Heru
You bring up some interesting points Heru. Though first I just want to clarify that the charm does require a Virtue channel to be used. It is essentially a perminent enhancement to Virtue channels, which I will add.
As for changing the extra successes to the rating in the applicable skill, I like the idea but I don't think it would work in this particular charm. There's 2 reasons for that:
- The original charm intent. My goal for this wasn't so much to change the Charm as just basically give it an errata. If read side by side, this version just seems like a more verbose version of the original.
- The charm flavor. The perfection achieved by the charm has nothing to do with the skill of the Solar. They can just because they want to do it that badly. Their mind is basically strong-arming the rules of Creation, making it do what she wants, which is why it is Integrity.
I like your idea, it just sounds like something better implemented as an Excellency. Possibly an add-on to Ultimate Mastery or Supreme Perfection, which can be useful (they are afterall perfects) in certain situations. It's just really, really expensive.
