SolarMelee/Gamlain
No Thought Attitude Version 2
Cost: 10 motes, 1 Willpower Duration: One Sceene Type: Reflexive Min. Melee: 5 Min Essence: 3 Prereqs: Golden Essence Block, Excellent Strike, Bullwark Stance
Introspection in combat is the enemy of living through it. Stopping to think while your enemies attack will get you killed, and yet one must also keep one's head, plan, watch and react; Reduceing the division between thought and action is the focus of nearly every combat style in existance. A solar who masters the technique of No Thought transcends any mortal ability to do so; Thought and action, perception and execution become the same, and the solar's transcendant skill effortlessly flows from perception into reality. The solar spends 10 motes and 1 willpower to invoke the trance of no-thought. For the rest of the sceene he adds his permanant essence to all Melee rolls. These dice count against his charm limit.
(So, here it is - A serious stab at the charm, following my own preferences rather than stated rules, since people keep takeing the other one seriously. In general I would never allow any persistant die adder to add more dice than either permanant essence or the ability in question; It trvializes the instant die adders completely, and breaks a noticable trend in Solar charm design. I realize I should probably put that into my house rules, and probably will later. Gamlain )
No Thought Attitude
Cost: 8 motes, 1 Willpower Duration: One Sceene Type: Reflexive Min. Melee: 3 Min Essence: 2 Prereqs: Golden Essence Block, Excellent Strike
Introspection in combat is the enemy of living through it. Stopping to think while your enemies attack will get you killed, and yet one must also keep one's head, plan, watch and react; Reduceing the division between thought and action is the focus of nearly every combat style in existance. A solar who masters the technique of No Thought transcends any mortal ability to do so; Thought and action, perception and execution become the same, and the solar's transcendant skill effortlessly flows from perception into reality. The solar spends 8 motes and 1 willpower to invoke the trance of no-thought. For the rest of the sceene his Dex+Melee is doubled.
Pretty sick. Product of reading through Sidereals again this afternoon, rereading dev comments on charm creation/ballance and getting piqued. So, Solar charms are generally supperior to Celestial charms, and charms of other abilities are generally supperior to MA charms at the same requirement levels.
Then this ought to be just about right for a Solar Melee charm comparable to Blade of the Battle Maiden. Two intrinsic 'this charm should be better' steps and one more prerequisite. Personally, I dislike BOTBM for game aesthetic reasons - it tends to discourage combat creativity in my experience, by allowing players to buff their attack pool persistantly, and becomes something a 'make or break' charm - those that have it will be effective combatants, those that do not will not - but if that kind of buffing is going to be part of the game, No Thought Attitude is how I envision a Solar would play it. - Gamlain
Personally, I think your pre-reqs are a little light. Sure solar charms should be more effecient then siddie charms or martial arts charms, but this is crazy powerful for something so low on the tree. My reccomendation: raise the required melee to 4 or 5, the essence to 3, and change the charm pre-reqs to something like: "excellent strike, golden essence block, and any two other melee charms". And by any charms I actually mean leave it open ended, any two charms will do. - Ambisinister
- Ambisinister If I were creating a charm like this from scratch, me too, which was rather my point. The charm above has more prerequisites than the charm it is based on: Blade of the Battle Maiden has *one* prerequiste charm and is essence 2, MA 3. It costs more in motes/willpower, but it is a MA charm, which susposedly makes it less efficient than an equivalent celestial charm in another ability, and a celestial rather than Solar charm to boot. If you assume that BOTBM isn't broken and build an equivalent Solar charm outside of MA, this is what the charm guidelines tossed around by the devs say it would look like. Yes, it's quite sick and much, much too cheap in terms of prerequisites. Personally I think this illustrates that BOTBM *is* broken, which seems to be a fairly common view, but is by no means universal. I also think that charms which do this sort of thing are a bad idea in the first place - that no charm should persistantly buff combat dice pools to the extent those charms allow - but that's just me and nothing in the rules supports this view. Gamlain
I think this indicates that your charm is broken, and not nessesarily BotBM. I agree that according to the guidelines, Solar level charms should be cheaper than the equivalent MA charm, but note that yours is significantly cheaper. In fact, excepting the wp point, using your charm is cheaper than boosting a single roll for most Solar Meleeists. That is broken. Compare a solar using the two charms. Assume both are Dex 4, MA 5, Essence 3 and Willpower 7. For the Martial Artist to gain the maximum benefit from BotBM, she has to spend over a quarter of her willpower, and to commit approximately one third of her total pool (not including any commitments she might have). Using your charm they have to spend a seventh of their willpower, and commit under a sixth of their total essence. This is is too much improvement for 1 pre-req and being a Solar Charm. I think a far more resonable pricing for it would 12-14m, 2wp, which still saves the solar meleeist 6-8m compared to the Martial Artist, which does make the charm a lot better than the equivalent MA charm, without it being silly - Kraken
- The discount was figured relitive to the amount of discount BOTBM offers over all previous die adders, Kraken - and then I doubled the charm cost because 4m 1wp would have just been insane. Note that I had no intention of createing a 'reasonable' version of No Thought Attitude; my personal house rule is that BOTBM does not exist. This is just an etrapoliation of what the charm creation rules we've been told of would create relitive to BOTBM. Reguarding the math - I could go into that in depth, but I won't, because doing so would take more time than I have at work. Bottom line, BotBM itself offers a 'just silly' amount of discount - on the order of 45 motes or more over the course of a single turn, and an insane ammount of willpower over a sceene - compared to the previous die adders printed at the celestial level. Gamlain
So... does No Thought Attitude describe the Charm or your authoring process? - Moxiane
Nice idea, way too powerful. You should always compare new Charms to those of the same splat before you start bringing in others. So balance this against other Solar Charms, not against Sidereal Charms! Consider:
- Assuming a maxed-out starting character (which isn't much of a stretch -- we're talking Solars here), Excellent Strike costs 10 motes to provide this bonus to a single attack action, as compared to 8 motes, 1 WP for *all* combat actions for a full scene -- which could be dozens of rolls. At an extra ten dice per roll, we're looking at hundreds of extra dice over the course of a scene.
- The character can split his dice pool six ways and still have even the weakest action be at 10 dice -- equal to the character's full, undivided dice pool! This is a far superior effect to, say, Iron Whirlwind Attack.
I'd say that this is st a Melee 5, Essence 3 or 4 effect, requiring several prerequisites. One of these should be a Charm to double the character's pool for a single round. You should look at how expensive that Charm should be by comparing it to other Solar Charms (not Sidereal Charms), and then built this one off of it. - Quendalon
- Er...okay. At this point It's obvious that I need to say again: This is sick, evil and I would never allow it. Although I'm not sure how I could possibly have been more explicit about this not being a serious charm idea, and also not being something I would ever possibly allow anyone to have in any game I should run. Do I have to dress up in a chickensuit and dance in the street screaming 'NOT SERIOUS!? OKAY!?' or something? That being said...
- According to the rules we have been given for Martial Arts this *is* a comparison between Solar charms. Or rather, between a Celestial MA charm, which should be inferior to a Solar ability charm at the same level and is universal, and a custom solar ability charm based on aformentioned MA charm. I think this is BS, personally; I do -not- buy into 'Martial arts is universal!' because that's stupid, schtickbreaking and annoying IMHO. But that is what the rules are. What I did was illustrate by useing those rules just how stupid the rule is. So. People don't seem to get that and are takeing me seriously dispite my commenting to the opposite effect before anyone else could ever have the opportunity to. And stuff.
- Yes, the charm is broken, Sick and Wrong. I know that perfectly well. That is (Again) precisely the point of this exercise, as I noted in my first note. Gamlain is starting to get a little eyebrow twitch thing going here.
Yes, I understand your proposition that BotBM is broken, and so your charm can be broken too. What I was saying is that while BotBM is debatably broken, yours is clearly broken. "Solar charms are better" does not translate to "In charm with less restrictions than the same MA charm, it is reasonable for you to pay less than half the cost." The fact that you have a limited selection of weaponry (though I will admit the VBoS selection is not that limited) and the fact that you cannot be armoured while using it both count against BotBM's power level. In addition, you are massively underplaying the cost of having fully 16-20m committed, which (on top of the other commitments you often need to fight) is enough to kill you when someone taps out your limited mote reserve before you can stunt it back.
Essentially "I can write a blatantly broken charm." proves only that, not that another charm that costs much more to use, and has more restrictions on its use is similarly broken. - Kraken
- I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree that BOTBM is debatably broken, which puts us at an Impasse on that issue. I do not think that it is debatable at all; It appears clearly broken to me, and vastly too cheap itself for the benifit it gives, but at this point we devolve into endless rounds of 'is not!' 'is too!' supported by our own view of how the over all game ballance should work. You seem to have missed the basic point of the exercise - that applying the charm creation rules as stated to a particular MA charm results in createing vastly more powerfull charms than the published charms of other abilities. I do note, however, that you seem to make rather strange assumptions about the restrictions on the charms in order to support your view. I do not agree that the above charm has fewer restrictions than BOTBM - actually it seems to have more, since MA allows all unarmed fighting moves by default, and VBOS lets you violate that basis by stepping on Melee's toes. So, no, it's not 'I can write a blatently broken charm', it's 'The rules require me to write an even more blatently broken charm if I assume other blatently broken charms aren't and use them as a basis'. This is, of course, merely my view, but I would appreciate fewer personal attacks on my opinion for having thrown it out here. Gamlain
- You really should not have compared BotBM, but instead have used CoCT, a dice-doubler in the core rulebook. DragoonDrake
- If I wanted fewer howls of outrage, maybe. *chuckles* But this was my howl of outrage, first, so they can all humor me. I'll throw up what I think would be fair and ballanced once I'm mildly rehydrated, but my version is actually reasonable and hence, looks nothing like this. - Gamlain
Gamlain, the issue with BOTBM is that it commits a huge fraction of your pool. That is a monsterous disadvantage. Monsterous. Titanic. Behemotic. To raise your pool with Supplementals or Simples for a turn, that's fairly expensive yes. But it is NOT a committment, which makes ALL the difference. You can stunt back those motes. You can use Essence-Regaining Charms. With BOTBM, you're down 20 motes. It severely, severely, restricts your ability to use Perfect Defenses, Reflexive Defenses, Soak-boosters and Attack Supplements. This Charm does no such thing. At all. It's at about the same price as a persistent defense. 3 motes committment isn't much of an increase. 12 is. Play test it. Comparing this to BOTBM is like comparing the Liberty Bell to the moons that formed the Rings of Saturn. Both are broken, but one still exists as a technical whole and the other is now cosmic dust and shiney circles.
- Perspective for your perspective, Telgar. I take exception to your saying that BOTBM exists as a 'technical whole'. Yes it is an expensive charm- highly for a sidereal or db charm, fairly for a Solar or lunar charm, and pretty much not at all for an Abyssal charm if said abyssal has 3/4 of a brain left in his rotted skull and has taken Essence Engorgement as many times as he can. However, that is in terms of motes. In terms of what BOTBM gives you, it's hella cheap. It buffs -four- pools persistantly - unarmed attack, unnarmed defense, armed attack, armed defense. At maximum, It doubles all of them. The advantage this gives you in effective, non-twinked combat is so blatently huge that It's difficult to describe, even having seen it used (and used it!). You can split your action easily and still be makeing attacks so powerfull that you force your opponent to use aformentioned perfect defenses every turn - if not multiple times per turn. You can stunt multiple attacks and defenses much more easily and be effecitve doing it. You can gain an effective 'discount' compared to a per attack die adder easily equivalent to more than 50 motes per turn - something no amount of stunting or charm based essence regen is going to give you in all but the most specialized circumstances. In synergy with even one persistant defense, even a weak one, it becomes an evil which will slaughter an entire solar circle untill that circle is essence 4+. Not might. Will, if you don't mess up. Use of BOTBM in every campaign I've seen it used in has destroyed utterly the ballance of power between exalts - once it becomes available there are two power levels in combat: people who have BoTBM and people who do not. Otherwise? I agree with you completely. Which...I think I noted before...was my point and noted in my first post. Gamlain Please, people. The horse is dead allready.
As to Version 2 of the Charm, I'd go with 9 motes and Simple. I feel all persistents should be simple. Fivefold is the only aberration in that pattern. - Telgar
- Absolutely. Only done that way because BOTBM is itself reflexive. Gamlain
I thought you'd moved past the BOTBM fixation for version 2. Ignore BOTBM. The charm should be simple because persistents should be simple. - Telgar
- *chuckles* What 'fixation'? It is the basis for the charm. If I ignore it - there is no charm. Gamlain
