Still Winter
So this morning, I rolled over and looked out my window, the sight causing the formulation of my first reasonably coherent thoughts of the morning:
Fuck. Snow.
As if watching people slide around the parking lot at home recently on the solid patches of ice and packed snow weren't bad enough, everything was deeply blanketed this morning. Thankfully, I later found it to be light powder, but I still spent a good hour and a half of my morning shoveling paths and digging out my truck. Grr. My back likes this not, though I suspect I won't truly feel the results until tomorrow.
Some people are just random. And when one person in particular waves are me on the MUCK, I know the odds are good it's going to lead to something completely out of left field. So when I say I wasn't expecting to be asked "Do you think Jigsaw would be a follower of Mika?" you have to understand that I was expecting something unexpected.
It took me a moment to track, but Jigsaw would be the villain of the Saw movies. Mika would be my demon-blooded sorceress turned goddess of retribution and balance. Now, normally, I might just discard any such conversation about there. I'm not a huge fan of the movies. I have, however, seen most of three of them and they tend to generate a little more thought than your average horror/gore fare.
It strikes me that a character based on Jigsaw in the setting on Furryfaire may very well "follow" Mika in principle, but I don't think I could consider him a true adherent to her ways. While the movie villain seems to keep saying he's trying to better people, to give them an appreciation for life by facing them with death, more often than not his contrived situations are simple deathtraps with no real opportunity for a successful outcome, making him rather hypocritical - especially when he starts placing the life of one person in the hands of someone else. Nevermind that his "lessons" are unnecessarily gruesome.
The Exalted game continues. As per usual, combat slows online text RPGs to a crawl. But then, it tends to slow down tabletop games too to a lesser degree.
The group may be in over its collective head this time. Instead of coming up with alternate plans, or heroes charged a group of bad guys to interrupt a slave auction (involving some followers of one of the PCs). Now, this is a perfectly heroic and Solar Exalted thing to do, really. The problem is that said bad guys are not just chumps led by one or two notable figures, but rather a "full circle" (which would be five) of death knights, AKA Abyssal Exalts. Abyssals are, as a general rule, roughly on par with Solars, though most of their tricks involve hindering opponents in a mirror to how Solars boost themselves. For more bad news, the single death knight of the group we recognize is more of a "boss" than an equal challenge, meaning the rest of the group may be built on several times the XP of our PCs as well. Just to add a little salt to the wound, several of the PCs were not at full strength going into the scene. On the up side, we had surprise and a slight edge in numbers (if you discount the possible mooks).
So far, things haven't gone badly. But then, we've really only covered about the first/surprise "round." As with previous combats, this one has brought up a new element in the game. Exalt-versus-exalt combat is frequently a war of attrition. Most exalts have (or at least have access to) the means to completely negate attacks on their being. This renders single attacks-of-uber-deathness largely pointless. These "perfect defenses," however, require essence. So it rapidly becomes a matter of efficiency and resources: an attacker has to mount a credible offense that forces the defender to use more essence defending himself than the attacker used attacking. Naturally, the person on the receiving end hopes they can bait the attacker into spending more than they do. I'm told that in general a Solar exalt will be able to outlast most other exalts in a one-on-one trade like this, though Abyssals are so close in other respects I wouldn't be surprised if they were equal.
This is where it hurts us a lot that three or four of the heroes (out of seven, if I'm counting right) had already spent chunks of essence earlier without getting time to restore themselves. I also worry that our vindictive Night Caste may be overcommitting in his assault on the death knight who stole his heart earlier (in a magical, literal, and somewhat disturbing fashion). So far she's shrugged off his rather brutal assault due to (technically, near-)perfect defense charms, but I can't say for certain who's depleting their essence faster in that particular engagement.
Alas, my character's lack of actual damage output is also a drawback. If I'd realized just how tough that armor was, I wouldn't have spent a round tapping ineffectually on it. Clearly, it's time to find a softer target. It's also time to be more defensive, as we're getting to the point where all these death knights are going to start hitting back.
Which presents another aspect of the combat tactics that applies more widely, but is doubly-important in dealing with exalts. From the time your character acts to their next action, you can only activate one particular charm. If you use a charm to bolster your attack, you can't use another one before your next action (like when the guy hits you back) to boost your defense. Some charms can be used both ways, and that's good, but they're usually not the most efficient. There are some exceptions, mostly in the form of combos. A combo ties multiple charms together and can include offense and defense, though there are some very specific rules as to how things can and can't combine. Most of our group is without any combo. In my case, Alexandra doesn't have any real good attack charms yet to put in one anyway, and it's been something I've been building toward slowly, but that's still a ways off - possibly another 40 XP and a couple months training, but even that assumes concentrating on combat charms rather than picking up more medical/utility abilities.
Probably continuing tonight, so we'll have to see how things go.
Fuck. Snow.
As if watching people slide around the parking lot at home recently on the solid patches of ice and packed snow weren't bad enough, everything was deeply blanketed this morning. Thankfully, I later found it to be light powder, but I still spent a good hour and a half of my morning shoveling paths and digging out my truck. Grr. My back likes this not, though I suspect I won't truly feel the results until tomorrow.
Some people are just random. And when one person in particular waves are me on the MUCK, I know the odds are good it's going to lead to something completely out of left field. So when I say I wasn't expecting to be asked "Do you think Jigsaw would be a follower of Mika?" you have to understand that I was expecting something unexpected.
It took me a moment to track, but Jigsaw would be the villain of the Saw movies. Mika would be my demon-blooded sorceress turned goddess of retribution and balance. Now, normally, I might just discard any such conversation about there. I'm not a huge fan of the movies. I have, however, seen most of three of them and they tend to generate a little more thought than your average horror/gore fare.
It strikes me that a character based on Jigsaw in the setting on Furryfaire may very well "follow" Mika in principle, but I don't think I could consider him a true adherent to her ways. While the movie villain seems to keep saying he's trying to better people, to give them an appreciation for life by facing them with death, more often than not his contrived situations are simple deathtraps with no real opportunity for a successful outcome, making him rather hypocritical - especially when he starts placing the life of one person in the hands of someone else. Nevermind that his "lessons" are unnecessarily gruesome.
The Exalted game continues. As per usual, combat slows online text RPGs to a crawl. But then, it tends to slow down tabletop games too to a lesser degree.
The group may be in over its collective head this time. Instead of coming up with alternate plans, or heroes charged a group of bad guys to interrupt a slave auction (involving some followers of one of the PCs). Now, this is a perfectly heroic and Solar Exalted thing to do, really. The problem is that said bad guys are not just chumps led by one or two notable figures, but rather a "full circle" (which would be five) of death knights, AKA Abyssal Exalts. Abyssals are, as a general rule, roughly on par with Solars, though most of their tricks involve hindering opponents in a mirror to how Solars boost themselves. For more bad news, the single death knight of the group we recognize is more of a "boss" than an equal challenge, meaning the rest of the group may be built on several times the XP of our PCs as well. Just to add a little salt to the wound, several of the PCs were not at full strength going into the scene. On the up side, we had surprise and a slight edge in numbers (if you discount the possible mooks).
So far, things haven't gone badly. But then, we've really only covered about the first/surprise "round." As with previous combats, this one has brought up a new element in the game. Exalt-versus-exalt combat is frequently a war of attrition. Most exalts have (or at least have access to) the means to completely negate attacks on their being. This renders single attacks-of-uber-deathness largely pointless. These "perfect defenses," however, require essence. So it rapidly becomes a matter of efficiency and resources: an attacker has to mount a credible offense that forces the defender to use more essence defending himself than the attacker used attacking. Naturally, the person on the receiving end hopes they can bait the attacker into spending more than they do. I'm told that in general a Solar exalt will be able to outlast most other exalts in a one-on-one trade like this, though Abyssals are so close in other respects I wouldn't be surprised if they were equal.
This is where it hurts us a lot that three or four of the heroes (out of seven, if I'm counting right) had already spent chunks of essence earlier without getting time to restore themselves. I also worry that our vindictive Night Caste may be overcommitting in his assault on the death knight who stole his heart earlier (in a magical, literal, and somewhat disturbing fashion). So far she's shrugged off his rather brutal assault due to (technically, near-)perfect defense charms, but I can't say for certain who's depleting their essence faster in that particular engagement.
Alas, my character's lack of actual damage output is also a drawback. If I'd realized just how tough that armor was, I wouldn't have spent a round tapping ineffectually on it. Clearly, it's time to find a softer target. It's also time to be more defensive, as we're getting to the point where all these death knights are going to start hitting back.
Which presents another aspect of the combat tactics that applies more widely, but is doubly-important in dealing with exalts. From the time your character acts to their next action, you can only activate one particular charm. If you use a charm to bolster your attack, you can't use another one before your next action (like when the guy hits you back) to boost your defense. Some charms can be used both ways, and that's good, but they're usually not the most efficient. There are some exceptions, mostly in the form of combos. A combo ties multiple charms together and can include offense and defense, though there are some very specific rules as to how things can and can't combine. Most of our group is without any combo. In my case, Alexandra doesn't have any real good attack charms yet to put in one anyway, and it's been something I've been building toward slowly, but that's still a ways off - possibly another 40 XP and a couple months training, but even that assumes concentrating on combat charms rather than picking up more medical/utility abilities.
Probably continuing tonight, so we'll have to see how things go.
Actually, this is a fairly good assessment of Exalted combat. War of attrition is an excellent way to describe it. Hopefully, though, the PCs will start to coordinate their attacks, thus allowing them to overwhelm their opponents and thus reduce enemy DVs. It should also start giving out the 2-3 die stunts, which is nice for reclaiming spent Essence.
ReplyDeleteYeah, though that's a potential tactic both sides could use in an engagement like this, ugly as it is. We're not actually going to be doing the Coordinate Attack manuever, as we don't have a War-heavy person in the group who would do so. And, frankly, Kashim is probably best at the moment and he's better attacking than telling people where to go. That is really more for making non-exalt units a threat in most cases. Onslaught penalties only build up per person, and only per action/flurry. So if we gang up on someone, they won't suffer that penalty beyond each attack/flurry. On the other hand, focusing on a single target does sap their essence (assuming they use it to defend) faster, so it's a valid strategy in that regard, and we're already using it to some degree: Alexi, Kashim, and Kujath all attacked one guy. Alexi just isn't doing anything productive there as she can't get over his armor hardness without serious effort, so she needs to shift her attention. And while I'm not about to scoff at essence recovery via stunts, it only works if the action is a success. Stunt an attack to have Whispers charm-ignore the damage, and you get essence, sure. Stunt an attack that someone else perfect-parries, and you don't if I understand correctly.
ReplyDelete