The Ghost/Let's Not Play Rocket Tag v2

The Rule in a Nutshell: In normal Exalted one good hit often means death, which makes me wonder why they bother having things like dying health levels at all. With this rule variant your Health levels actually become a meaningful track of taking injuries and you can take a hit from a sword and live. I use this rule in my games to both slow down combat so it is not a matter of 1 hit KOs so much and to make paranoia combat builds less of a requirement.

The Core Rules

In Core exalted you have 7 health levels to start with, 1 -0, 2 -1, 2 -2, 1 -4, and 1 incapacitated. You also have 3 dying levels but I have never seen those used.

Ox Body can provide a maxiumum of 4 extra levels, which with damage ratings of +16 on some weapons is nearly meaningless.

Extras get it even worse with 1 -0, 1 -3, 1 incap and then instant death. This bothers me.

The Issue

Put simply, it is too easy to kill people with a single hit. Exalted is supposed to be about larger than life heroes and one important trope of that mythos is 'bloodied but unbowed', where the hero takes a beating at the hands of the enemy and emerges triumphant anyway. Especially since the 2.5 errata this is not possible, as you cannot use your willpower and essence as an HP bar in place of health levels by using perfect effects to shed attacks like water. Something needed to change.

And It DID. I created the first version of these rules Let's Not Play Rocket Tag v1 and they were a distinct improvement, BUT they went too far in the other direction, combat slowed down too much, people had so many helath levels that it was starting to look like we needed to adjust a lot of weapons damage ratings, and that simply would not do: SO, I decided that instead of adjusting the rules for the weapons: since that way lies madness, I would adjust the health level rules a bit and see if that fixed the problem.

The Goal

Obviously what needs to be done is make combat significantly less lethal yet still have perfect effects be something that you don't have to use against every hit, but HOW? The answer has to be simple, something that anyone can do without mucking up the game too much, but which never the less solves the problem. A secondary result of the change should also be to make Ox Body a worthwhile charm for the dedicated combatant, since as it stands it's effects are not strong enough to be considered a good pick by most players.

The Rules Changes

Like knocking over a row of dominoes fixing the first problem meant I had to fix a few more, but in the end I think I got a fairly simple system worked out which is functional and feasible.

HP

The Answer to the problem is simplicity itself: Increase the number of health levels.

With weapons that can deliver a point of overkill with a single strike at the current health ratings the answer is clear: have more HP that they have to eat through in order to kill someone.

After extensive playtesting with several people I have settled on doubling the normal HP bars as the appropriate degree of change, with 14 health levels fatalities are much less likely from a single hit even with charms and high damage weapons.

This left me with the secondary question of how to improve Ox Body so it was not considered a waste: that proved fairly easy as well: Instead of triple HP Ox Body's levels are multiplied by 4 per purchase from the base rules. So a solar exalt taking max HP gain get's 12 extra levels of health for one charm pick: kinda hard to sneer at THAT as improving your chances to survive a fight!

Damage

OK, so characters don't get 1 hit KOed as easily, but this presents a problem of it's own: fights now take way too long! Well we have a rule that helps with THAT easy enough already: Essence Ping.

Under 2.5 they did away with essence as minimum damage dice, but that was when we still had only 7 levels of HP, if we are playing with numbers up in the double digits why not pull that back in? It means the Exalted can now plink at each other effectively even with Ox Body: not likely an instant kill even at essence 10 but definitely a noticeable hit.

v2: AH, BUT, that has proved a bit too weak when you start stacking on some of the more egregious OX body variants, so we decided to adjust damage just a little bit further. Instead of Just Essence Ping for your minimum damage, we made it (Essence+Overwhelming) as the minimum dice for a strike, which makes artifiact weapons much more atractive again than they were under the v1 rules.

Extras

Now these rules are all good, but they make extras a bit less 'extra' then they were before: which is GOOD, we WANTED to do that, but it leaves us with another problem, there are a lot of charms which key off killing extras for special effects, and extras are now pretty hard to kill. (9 health levels is not easy enough to chew through...) So we have to nerf extras back down a bit, and this was perhaps the hardest part to model.

The fix came to me when looking at the stat blocks: Extras get a -3 health level: they are the only ones that do, what if we extrapolated off that a bit?

Everyone else gets -0, -1, -2, -4 and Incap levels, extras get -0, -3, and incap: so why not blend that into a continual slide?

As we have established 7 levels is still easy to kill: but not quite easy enough due to how Extras are assigned damage: so here's what we do with extras: they get one health level each of -0, -1, -2, -3, -4, and incap: and once they take lethal in that last level they die. Boom, still quite kill-able but not quite as instantly fatal from any real hit, which means you have the ability to throw extras at the PCs as a realistic threat.

Primary Vs Secondary characters

And it also came up that having to apply these rules equally to all characters in the game world was problematic, especially when dealing with large groups of moderately trained mooks: to skilled to count as extras but not even named individuals, more like an obstacle than a serious game event.

The answer to that was simple enough as well: just let the ST ignore these rules for any NPC they feel they don't want to have the enhancements.

Primary Characters: which always include the PCs under this system, gain the full benefits above. Yes even Mooks AKA Extras can be considered 'primary' characters: mostly when they are led by another primary character. You can typically distinguish which characters are Primary by applying the following criteria:

1: Do they have an individual name? If so they probably are primary.

2: Do they have an individual description? No, not one of several dozen pregened descriptions like 'individual' zombies or townsfolk, more like the man who the PCs just spotted trying to assassinate the king. In those cases the ST should definitely consider treating them as primary.

3: Does the character have charms? If a person has managed to awaken their essence and learn a full MA style they almost certainly should be treated as primary.

4: Does the ST want the character to have a good chance of surviving a fight? That especially means they should be treated as primary.

5: Are they "Extras" who serve a Primary Character in the scene? They should probably be treated as primary character extras using the rules above.

Secondary Characters: Secondary characters by contrast Fit none of those categories, they are faceless mooks who are there more as window dressings and speed bumps than actual agents and characters.