Thus Spake Zargrabowski/Stunts

On 18 Jan 02, at 15:20, Joe Murphy wrote:

Ok, but... one doesn't necessarily succeed at the stunt. I'm not that happy with the paragraph advising GMs to fudge the characters success (fudging = broken rule that should be fixed).

The rule is not "fudge the characters' successes," it's "don't punish people for performing stunts". If you want people to do wild and crazy wuxia stunts, the situation has to be such that they think they /may possibly/ get a nice bonus out of it, rather than /will probably/ get killed for doing something daring. Noithing's getting fudged; "don't kill characters because the player tried something wild" is just as solid a rule as a Grand Daiklave doing 12L damage, it just doesn't have mechanical trappings.

My other comment, mostly in response to MattJ, is that for the tent pole thing, you might want to look on page 268 ("Stunts and the Impossible") -- at least according to the book, you can do crazy stuff without Charms, Charms just make it certain.

About the nature of stunts in-game, I think people in the setting have a sense that some folks can do them and some folks can't -- they're like little miracles that some people can perform. I always think of it as a "genre field" -- for these people, life is a Hong Kong martial arts adventure, for everyone else, it's real. I guess a more WoD-like way to look at it would be that everyone with a certain amount of spiritual power can perform them at no cost as a form of coincidental magic, but that sounds so lame. Anyway, they were always intended to be a magic/genre edge -- that's why heroic mortals can usually do stunts and normal people can't. That's a real and percieved gulf of capability inside the setting.

So if stunts just give bonus dice, then there's a fair chance at losing.

No, because they're not a wager in a zero-sum game. I mean, you're right that it's broken from a purely number-crunching mechanical standpoint. Performing a stunt not only means you won't die, it makes success more likely and it rewards you with scarce resources. There is no reason not to perform a stunt with every action, and mechanically, that would suggest the system is broken.

But this isn't a resource allocation wagering-strategy game. It's a cooperative effort whose win conditions that are participant-defined. Payoff/risk doesn't need to be evenly balanced across all play choices, because there's no competition to "balance". The Willpower and Essence are mechanical rewards given to encourage a certain kind of roleplaying behavior. The act of /describing/ the stunt (and not the wager staked on the outcome of the roll) is what the stunt bonus is rewarding. In short, stunts get rewarded because stunts make the game fun, not because they're very dangerous and thus commensurately more rewarding.

Geoffrey C. Grabowski\\ Exalted Developer, WWGS\\ raindog@white-wolf.com

---

(Joe Murphy wrote:)

I absolutely agree that a game set in this genre should reward over the top actions and encourage certain descriptions. I'm still not convinced that the rules as written support that. 1-3 dice seems a small bonus. And allowing a character to roll (or reroll) to, say, catch the tightrope before the PC falls doesn't feel like a solid solution to me. Simply, what if they fail *that* roll?

Lots of falling damage? The contract is that the stunt won't produce instant death, because unlike in computer games, we can't have you do it 20 times and reload until you get it right. Bad things may happen to your character, though, unless the group doesn't kill folks.

Concern that the stunt bonus isn't high enough has vexed me from time to time, but I think from play that it's not too much. The 1 WP reward is a very big deal, and the actual dice can be somewhat secondary. Also, stunts aren't central to the game, though they are central to the game's /feel/. What's central to the game is Charms. If I wanted stunts central to the game, Charms would have given 1-3 dice and stunts 7-10, or I would have done like Dragonfist (which everyone should read, because it RULES) and just penalized you if you didn't perform a stunt.

I absolutely agree that rules don't have to involve mechanics, but rules as written don't feel right to me, y'know? Partially, I think that's because the Storyteller system can offer remarkably unlikely results for rolls.

Yeah, this is probably the big issue, I'd like to have a more concrete bonus, but I haven't really found an adequate solution and it really does seem to work well, at least in my game, so I'm not agonizing over it.

The paragraph goes on to explain how stunts in combat don't come with 'insurance', the way stunts out of combat do.

What I mean is that if you attack someone with a well-described sword flourish, and miss, you don't get to attack again. If you're sprinting along a slick ledge covered in frozen blood while you do it, I'd probably let movement stunts act as insurance. This may contradict the rules? I'm really just speaking as a GM here.

It's a shame more RPGs (I can think of only three or four offhand) don't have essays on 'How I designed this game' by the author.

Many designers don't have the vocabulary to discuss design issues, others guard them as 'trade secrets' or don't think anyone cares. There are also ususally space and time concerns. They are useful, though -- much of what I know about game design I learned at the knee of essays by Chris Crawford, Sid Meier, Greg Costikyan and Jim Dunnigan.

(An aside -- the game design profession needs some women in it, dammit.)

I hadn't even thought that one could look at the stunt system as a 'wager', thanks for illustrating that.

No problem. If that's a new way of looking at things for you, you're probably about to discover that it applies to a /lot/ of things. =)

G.

---

(Amul Kumar wrote:)

So you're saying that Joe Merchant knows that he can't do stunts, and is pretty much screwed if a Hero shows up in his shop, because that guy is more than capable of pulling some heroic bargaining trick?

Joe Merchant knows he's in a world with people who have inhuman capabilities. This is why, if he can afford to, he probably surrounds himself with magic trinkets and amulets. How screwed is he depends on how good a hero Joe is. Hero with a capital 'H', the way you use it -- he is surely screwed. In the world of Exalted, when you spell Hero with a capital H, you actually spell it with a capital E, because the word is Exalt. Heroes with a little 'h', people who are just a bit more capable than the folks around them and who can perform stunts, won't necessarily beat the merchant. All they have is the /potential/ to roll 3 extra dice. Otherwise, they're still normal mortals.

I mean, there are epic heroes and there are epic villians.

Canonically, it's more like there are epic personalities, which you can label as you so choose.

Speaking of which, are you implying that the heroes can feel this "gulf of capability," as well?

I think that after ten years of training daily as an Immaculate, or a life of walking around with a god's blood in your veins or a powerful star in your birth sign, you may well know you're something special. You're by no means even a Terrestrial, but you have an unnatural degree of luck. I expect a lot more people think they're heroes than really are -- just like the real world. Conversely, some real heroes probably don't know their stature, because it isn't like Exaltation, it doesn't hit you like a hammer and remake you into an overman.

G.

Comments

Has anyone thought about making the bonus, instead of 1, 2, or 3 extra dice, an equal number of automatic sucesses instead? Since stunts will still probably have ridiculously high difficulties, why not give the players this boost? This would also help deal with the "I describe something really cool but the dice fail me and its not quite clear what my character actually did" scenarios. - DigitalSentience

The idea of stunts isnt to make things more difficult. In general when working out stunts, and the difficulties of actions associated with them, I tend to assign them as the simplest mudane action (so generally not that many athletics rolls or whatever) and also (and this might just be because I tend to be lucky with dice) I prefer rolling more dice ^_^ - Kraken

Ah, see, this is what I had always planned on doing, and in fact did, before I read this article. This one, however, taken with the book (which never really pinned it down one way or the other for me) sort of has me convinced that, no, the things are supposed to be as difficult as their descriptions make them sound. The fact that they're even possible is the unique domain of the settings heroes and villains. So my basic take on it is, don't do them if they're not necessary, but when you need to bust out the crazy stuff, you'll have the bonus dice to encourage you to go really crazy, and maybe you'll get a WP for the risk. - DigitalSentience

I tend to translate the fact that only heroes/villains can do the things stunts require is: 'only heroes/villians can do stunts'. But then I do tend to give you the bonus essence when you make the stunt, not pending on its success so...shrugs also if you look at the sorts of things you can do for 3 or 5 suxx, the difficulties are very rarely going to get higher than 3. And just as a minor aside, if your having this for combat stunts, to be fair, you'd need it for non-combat stunts too. And does solar presence or performance really need more of a boost? ;) - Kraken

At the same time that I started playing in an Exalted game, one of my fellow players began a Dragonball Z game based on modified WoD rules with a mix of Exalted in there for fun. The stunts system was much the same. Difference was in the Storyteller arbitration:

Another player again from the Exalted game is playing a Night caste, and he's fond of complex multiple-action stunts which involve many split dice pools. In the Exalted game, the ST makes him split his pools between all of his actions and apply bonuses as he pleases between them. In the DBZ game, however, the ST only made us roll and split for actions that had a significant effect. For example, a stunt involving an unnecessary acrobatic manouver leading into an attack was regarded as a normal attack at standard difficulty.

I agree, the stunts should be given the dice bonus and then attempted mechanistically as the simplist alternative to check for success. More stunts for the stunt gods. - Alaron

Actually- on the extra successes, that's one point I'm considering bringing up with my current GM. I plan to eventually develop a combo built around a core of Distracting Monkey Tail Strike and Leap From Cloaking Shadows Attack, to get an ambush-in-plain-sight combo. I've been considering asking if the Stunt bennies can be applied to the difficulty of the perception roll- after all, the stunt, combo, and action are sort of wasted if that bit fails. Any thoughts? - IsawaBrian

Interesting combo idea, and interisting quandary, too. Isn't there anything else you can combo in that would make their Perception roll harder, other than banking on getting stunt dice/difficulty increases? - DigitalSentience