MartialArts/LotusEaterStyle
Lotus Eater Style by garrisod
Background
In the great decadence of the First Age, Lady Burning Feather, Mistress of Intoxicants, was a goddess of enormous power and influence, as verily, everyone was partying all the time. One day, the god of Opium appeared before her, his liege, with a request: to protect his poor worshippers, for they endured so much abuse while enjoying the object of his domain. They would wake up from their dreaming in ditches, covered in bruises; their reflexes were slow and their perceptions clouded with figments, and bandits and thugs would cut their purses or slit their throats without the slightest fear of retribution. Oh Mistress, pleaded the Opium God, save my people!
But Lady Burning Feather was so great in that era that her ambitions were equally scaled. I shall invent a school of martial arts, she thought, (this was not unusual, everyone of consequence was doing such things at that time), not just for the Opium God’s people, but for the drunkards, the dope fiends, and the layabouts, the addled and laggard and the not very ambitious. All of Creation shall tremble before my invincible style! She found the three great Sidereal Masters who had been kicked out of the Heavenly Bureaucracy for failure to show up for work and together, they spent three centuries putting off their project before inventing the entire style in an afternoon.
Training
This style can only be learned by the Celestial Exalted due to its incredible power, and is invariably taught to the Exalt in a dream or hallucination.
Weapons and Armor
Lotus Eater Style has no form weapons and is not compatible with armor.
Charms
Secrets of Future Sloth
Cost: None Duration: Permanent Type: Permanent Min. Ability: 1 Min Essence: 2 Prereqs: None
The Exalt fully realizes, as the three Sidereal Masters did, that any particular action is pretty inconsequential in the big scheme of things, and if it’s worth doing, why rush it? The Exalt’s total Initiative is halved during the first round of any combat.
Counter-Exercise Exercise
Cost: 3m Duration: Scene Type: Simple Min. Ability: 2 Min Essence: 2
Prereqs: Secrets of Future Sloth
The Exalt has learned that, in the absence of all things, in the space between actions, there happens to be a lot of Essence sitting around. Just sitting there. Everyone else just seems too busy to go after it. For the rest of the scene, at the end of each round of combat in which the Exalt neither takes attack or defense actions, he receives motes of Essence equal to his permanent Essence.
Lotus Eater Form
Cost: 8m Duration: Scene Type: Simple Min. Ability: 3 Min Essence: 3 Prereqs: Counter-Exercise Exercise
Truly embracing the philosophy of the Enlightened Lotus Eater, the martial artist takes a stance of dreamy inaction, taking a penalty to Initiative equal to his martial arts rating. Opponents seeking to harm the martial artist find themselves somewhat ambivalent about attacking, suffering a dice penalty equal to the martial artist’s permanent Essence. In addition, in the process of doing nothing, the martial artist is curiously prepared for anything; he may reflexively dodge any attack at his regular dodge dicepool as long as the attack occurs before his turn that round. Martial artists using this form suffer no penalties for fighting prone.
Inertial Armor
Cost: 6m Duration: Scene Type: Simple Min. Ability: 4 Min Essence: 3 Prereqs: Lotus Eater Form
So pervasive is the Lotus Eater’s dedication that, even when struck by weapons and blows, his body loathes to transform its peaceful state towards a more bloody and broken one. The Lotus Eater gains bashing and lethal soak equal to his martial arts rating.
Incredible Negligence Defense
Cost: 1m/health level Duration: Instant Type: Reflexive Min. Ability: 4 Min Essence: 3 Prereqs: Lotus Eater Form
Blessings on the Burning Lady, to innovate near-invulnerability out of sloppy ambivalence! The Lotus Eater may spend 1 mote of Essence per health level to reduce the damage of an attack against him, although he cannot have attempted to dodge or parry this attack. The attack can be reduced below normal damage minimums, but cannot be reduced to fewer levels than the Lotus Eater’s Conviction rating.
Assumed Inconsequence Prana
Cost: 6m Duration: Scene Type: Simple Min. Ability: 4 Min Essence: 3 Prereqs: Lotus Eater Form
Observe the Lotus Eater. He seems the most harmless of martial artists: he yawns and does nothing, sometimes he takes a nap, he stumbles around or maybe stares into space for a little while; all in the pitch of battle. And yet, this facade is calculated! While this charm is active, opponents must make a Willpower roll, difficulty equal to the Exalt’s permanent Essence; if they fail, they must spend a point of Willpower or they cannot attack the Exalt that round as long as another foe exists.
Unconquered Slumber
Cost: 4m, 1w Duration: Special Type: Reflexive Min. Ability: 5 Min Essence: 3 Prereqs: Inertial Armor
The Lotus Eater is able to focus his Essence to restore his body to perfect health, but only while in the most passive of states. Sometimes this results in the most inconvenient naps, but it is also responsible for the Lotus Eater’s unparalleled battle-readiness, for after even a short period of sleep he is ready for yet another combat full of frenzied inexertion. This charm can explicitly be used while the Exalt is sleeping, unconscious or incapacitated, but only when he is in those states. The Exalt heals one unaggravated health level per round until fully healed of all unaggravated damage, and then wakes.
Death’s Convenient Postponement
Cost: 4m, 1w Duration: Reflexive Type: Instant Min. Ability: 5 Min Essence: 3 Prereqs: Incredible Negligence Defense
A gem of the style’s Sidereal designers, this charm enables the martial artist to show up late to the afterlife’s impending appointments. If the martial artist has taken more damage this round that he has remaining health levels, he may activate this charm to negate the damage and become incapacitated instead.
Affrontery to Ambition Prana
Cost: 6m Duration: Scene Type: Simple Min. Ability: 5 Min Essence: 3 Prereqs: Assumed Inconsequence Prana
Observe the Lotus Eater. He is the most irritating of martial artists: he avoids your attacks without any effort, he hardly bothers to fight back; your soldiers trip over him as he sleeps and bump into him as he stumbles. He ruins the entire rhythm of battle and dampens one’s feelings of bloodlust, and unless he is eliminated he turns the glory of combat into a farce. While this charm is active, all combatants except the Exalt must make a Willpower roll, difficulty equal to the Exalt’s permanent Essence; if they fail, they must spend a point of Willpower or they cannot attack anyone except the Exalt that round as long as he is still alive and conscious. This charm explicitly effects both allies and opponents of the Exalt.
Implied Futility of Everything Enigma
Cost: 10m, 1w Duration: Scene Type: Simple Min. Ability: 5 Min Essence: 4 Prereqs: Unconquered Slumber, Death’s Convenient Postponement, Affrontery to Ambition Prana
Fighting a Lotus-Eating Grandmaster is a terrible prospect, because one quickly forgets why they bothered in the first place. You attack him and your weapons meander; you attempt the coup-de-grace and he rolls over in his sleep at the last second. You punch him and he doesn’t seem to care, your grappling becomes a most disconcerting kind of cuddle; and that horrid yawning is so infectious! The grandmaster can enhance these feelings of uselessness and despair with this most powerful charm. At the end of each round of combat, any combatant within a range of the grandmaster equal to his Essence in yards becomes drowsy (equivalent to stunned) unless they have dealt or received at least one health level of damage that round. This drowsiness lasts until the end of the scene, or until the target takes at least one health level of damage. Any combatant within the grandmaster’s Essence range who is already drowsy and fails to deal or receive damage that round falls to the ground, asleep until the end of the scene.
Comments
Your martial arts truly rock - while you might need practice in the game balance department, no one does funny flavor texts quite like you. I´ll be back with a thorough, Charm-by-Charm look - but until then, welcome to the wiki. - Argent
Totally agreed. Hilarious. I love the permanent initiative penalty as well. The only problem I see, is that as a power-twinker, I notice that in Exalted, having a low initiative is a /good/ thing. A permanent halving of your initiative for a first-level charm can therefore really change combat. Be careful, ye storytellers! - GregLink
Thanks everyone for checking it out! Argent, I appreciate you looking it over - your charm by charm on Desert Spurs helped me a great deal in making it more reasonable while keeping the flavor of what I was looking for. GregLink, you've got a point - and for a Lotus Eater, low initiative is especially good, because the form charm gives a reflexive dodge that only occurs before your initiative. However, since Secrets of Future Sloth only occurs the first round of combat, it is still somewhat of a speedbump, because it's probably preventing you from putting up a scene-long immediately, such as the form charm or Inertial Armor or one of the Pranas. -garrisod
Somewhere out there, at the cost of two wasted charms, there will be a Lotus Eater / Violet Bier of Sorrows dual-practitioner, a perfectly balanced savant who is always on time and finds joy both in and out of adversity. No one will believe he's dangerous even though he'll wield Blade of the Battle Maiden, and sometimes he'll make everyone try to hit him out of frustration, just so he can fill his entire essence pool in a round or two. -garrisod
I love the flavor and humor of this style, but some of the effects cause some serious mechanical problems. But before I get to that, a question. In the Form-Charm, is the penalty to all opponents' attacks a dice penalty or a difficulty penalty? In other words, does it subtract dice before the roll, or successes after the roll? You need to specify this. Now, about those mechanical problems I mentioned. When creating a Martial Arts Charm with an effect based on the user's permanent Essence, it's a good idea to consider what would happen if it was used in conjunction with Soulfire Shaper Form, which increases the martial artist's effective permanent Essence to 10 for the scene. In conjunction with Assumed Inconsequence Prana or Affrontery to Ambition Prana, an opponent has to make a nigh-impossible Willpower roll (10 successes with a maximum dice pool of 10 dice!) in order to attack. Worse yet, the two pranas can be active at the same time, meaning a martial artist who knows these three Charms can completely prevent his opponents from attacking anyone in as few as three turns. SFSF is supposed to make effects based on permanent Essence super-powered, but this is just downright game-breaking. My other criticism is that, in a style composed of 10 Charms, you have 1 permanent, one special-duration reflexive, 2 instant reflexives, and 6 (!) scene-length simples. You need more variety in the types and durations of your Charms. Let me reinterate that I absolutely love the theme of this martial art and the humor you inject into the Charms' flavor-text. It's just that the mechanical effects of the Charms could use some refinement. -catmandrake
I have a few comments, some of them in response to the questions you ask, some not. Comment the first, the form charm is probably a dice penalty just judging from the sheer number of things it does. I'd use it as such, it seems far to strong with the reflexive dodge. For the second, I rarely consider the effects of Soulfire Shaper Form because the charm is game-breaking. This is not directly because of the charm, I admit, but comes from the fact that high essence is game-breaking. Say you're Essence 7. Got Mental Invisibility Tech? You can be assumed un-noticed in nearly all situations. Ebon shadow Style? It's difficulty 8 to hit you. Ten Magistrate Eyes makes Sherlock Holmes look like an imbecile at high essence. Also, I don't necessarily see anything bad about the effects of combining those charms together. For a while everyone just gets so lazy that combat just stops. If you think there's the possibility that this will be abused massively (it only affects enemies so I use both of them and we slaughter the enemy army to the man!) then feel free to disallow using both charms at the same time. That's an easy fix if you want to make it. Or, if you're feeling particularly evil houserule that everyone can only whatever instead of just enemies. Then everyone just stands there, gets lazy, lies down and takes a nap. I'm sure the talk afterwards would be. . .interesting. Addressing the odd distribution of charm types, that does seem rather odd for a MA style. It seems somehow appropriate for this style though. Why activate something every few seconds when I can do it once and get it over with? Then I can go back to napping. In any case, these are just my thoughts on the matter, and while they seem to make sense to me, I haven't slept for 22 hours. I'm sure garrisod has his own comments to make about the style. I'm off, ciao –TzalFlameforge
Catmandrake and Tzal, thanks for your comments. Regarding the form charm, that is a dice penalty, making it a similar but slightly inferior effect to Snake's form charm die reducer. I had not considered Soulfire Shaper Form in the context of this style, mostly because I rarely deal with high-powered SMAs - I presume, like Tzal, that if you can do that you can pretty much do whatever you want anyway - but it does get rather ridiculous with the Pranas, doesn't it? So I've allowed targets to spend a point of Willpower to ignore the effects for a turn, so no matter the practitioner's Essence, if someone absolutely, positively needs to hit something, they can, at least for a costly couple rounds. Also, I like Tzal's idea about the AtoA Prana, so I am having it effect all combatants, not just enemies; after all, if your buddies have to kill something, they can spend the Willpower too, right? I think this fits the spirit of the charm, because the Lotus Eater mucks with everybody's combat fun with his buffoonery, not just for his enemies. However, the Pranas can still stack together: this was an intentional and specific combination for this Style, and at this point I would say it's even balanced.
Regarding the overwhelming number of scene-long Simples: I noticed this while writing the Style myself, and here is my reasoning: the Lotus Eater is a passive, "lock" style; it is nearly incapable of delivering damage, but the longer it is left unchecked, the more difficult it becomes for any other type of combat. Supplementals in other MA styles are almost always attack-enhancers, and Simples in other MAs are super-attacks. In Lotus Eater, the simple scene-longs are your super-attacks. They just don't do any actual damage, or involve exerting oneself in hitting or kicking things. You're not "powering up" before fighting so much as that "powering up" is your entire fighting style. By the time the Lotus Eater performs all of his scene-longs, there's no battle left: combatants must spend a point of Willpower to attack anything, which will almost certainly be the Lotus Eater, but hitting the Lotus Eater is practically pointless because of reflexive dodges and plenty of soak; but if they don't attack anything, they fall asleep. The challenge for the Lotus Eater's enemies will be to incapacitate the Lotus Eater before he invokes too many scene charms; the challenge for the Lotus Eater will be to stay alive long enough to incapacitate everyone else through sleep.
I'm glad everyone likes the flavor of this style; I imagine it generates some pretty awkward Wyld Hunt stories. "I fought the dreaded werewolf Moonfang, who took my arm and me left eye!" "Well, I was part of the army in pursuit of that Anathema, Shen the Drunkard." "Oh, what happened to you?" "Eh, I don't know, I drifted off, I guess; we were kinda fighting, but he just sort of sat there, and then we got bored and started yawning, and the next thing I knew I woke up next to the Commander and things have been weird ever since. Damn that horrible Shen! Our whole troop got written up for dereliction of duty, and now I'll never get promoted!" -garrisod
- I like the fix to the pranas, and in my opinion it just further adds to the flavor--trying to fight a Lotus Eater saps your will. As far as variety in types and duractions of Charms is concerned, I just thought you might want to mix in some number-of-turns-length Charms, or make one or two of the scene-lengths reflexive. Of course, the last thing you'd see in this style is an extra action Charm. "What do you mean I have to take an extra action? I was still deciding whether to bother with the regular one. Now is that a piano or this just particularly good scotch?" (as spoken by Dudley Moore playing Arthur)
- In response to TzalFlameforge, I think we have different thresholds of "game-breaking." To me, situations like "I'm almost perfectly unnoticeable (Mental Invisibility Technique)," or "I can negate an average of 5 levels of damage from any attack (Twilight anima power)," or "I can automatically inflict an average of 5A damage levels on undead or demons (Zenith anima power)" aren't as game-breaking as "I can end any battle in nine seconds (three turns), period." But now that I think over the combats so far in the Sidereals game I'm running, the average length of the fights was probably only two or three turns each, so. . . take it for what you will. Oh, and to be fair, Ten Magistrate Eyes makes Sherlock Holmes look like an imbecile at low Essence. -catmandrake
- I'm almost certain we have a different definition of game-breaking. One of the things that I love about the exalted system is that the entire thing is broken beyond belief. White Wolf pulled a fast one though, and they made the game broken on all fronts in almost the same level, making it seem much less broken and more cinematic. Many of the players where I live have a very WoD Vampire mentality to them (backstab when they're not looking) so a system that encourages cool people, cool actions and cool moral dilemmas is very interesting to me. Combat being over in three rounds, well, look at the whole of CMoS. IIRC you can attack everyone in sight with that tree at the low low cost of 10 motes. High essence requirement? Yes. Broken? Yes. Cinematic? And how. With effects like this at Essence seven I really don't have a problem with two competing armies being too lazy to fight at essence 3-4. When the scene's over they can get back up and fight again if they want to. I don't see it so much as a combat ender as a combat delay.
- Two more things, then I'm done rambling: One of the problems with MA is that you often need several turns to bring your full power to bear, whereas the brawler need, well, nothing. Three turns to end combat is often two too many. Also, I think you underestimate the power of ten successes on a perception/investigation roll to tell how someone fights from their belongings and posture. It's amazing what good recon can do. I must be off though –TzalFlameforge
