I Love It When a Plan Comes Together
Even when it is largely improvised.
The group has entered potentially-unfriendly territory to get a magic sword. Simple enough. Things are complicated, though, by finding a village/town near the goal to be destroyed and a rampaging big-evil-guy-in-soulsteel making his way toward the party. One human survives, having been found on the brink of death and tended to with magical medicinal needles (as Alexi has the makings for an insta-healing combo, but hasn't had the time/XP to actually do it).
So as the session opens, Alexi isn't sure how big a threat this guy is. She dispatches two (highly-mobile) people to find and retrieve the sword, just in case they all need to bug out, and sics the others on the warrior spilling purple lightning all over the place. Yay, delegation of duties.
The pair after the sword find it in a well that turns out to be home to some sort of ooze monster. After some messy swimming and clawing out, and a couple impressive rolls, it's retrieved.
The fight takes longer. Naturally, combat slows things down. In Exalted, the number of dice involved makes things look even worse than usual, but I'm not convinced rolling 20+ dice really slows things down any more online than 1. So there's some good beating-up going on. The group's big-bad wolf gets to finally get in a few hits. Essence cannons are involved. Then the baddie charges up for what looks like an area effect lightning attack. Alexi goes at the same time and, with a hand wave, delays his nasty-looking attack long enough for the group to get at least one more pass at him (two or three in some cases). The new "treasure hunter" proves again that she's far more use in combat, dropping the guy before he even gets off one attack. Anticlimactic, but not really unexpected.
So they check him over, start to retrieve his hearthstones, and Alexi takes a closer look with a Medicine charm, determining he's actually still alive. What do they do? Kill him, of course! ... Nope. Though others pushed for that, Alexi would have some issues with killing a defeated opponent. His being responsible for the murder of others might warrant it, but a better idea came to mind. Thus, he's being kept unconscious and hauled off to Lytek, Shogun of Exaltations. The PCs just dealt with and received blessings from him. When asked, he explained that he knew death knights/abyssals to be a corruption of normal exaltations, but said he couldn't really discern much more without one to examine. What better opportunity? Instead of the satisfaction of killing a death knight, there's potential to learn about their weaknesses, their nature, how to free them of Neverborn influence, and even understanding of the Great Curse. Now, I don't expect all those answers by any means, but even the chance to learn some of that is worth snagging the opportunity. And this way, Alexandra can stick to her compassionate nature by not just offing the guy. Sounds like wins all around to me.
Of course, afterward I'm told the Storyteller was planning to turn this death knight into a recurring villain. The party was expected to kill him, then he'd be reborn in a slightly weakened state and pursue them. Well... let this be a lesson: there is nothing a GM can conceive that players cannot derail if allowed freedom to do so.
Analysis:
- Reminder: If you expect to survive Exalt-Exalt combat, you need to have (and be able to use) a perfect defense of some sort. The death knight relied on high soak levels and was still beaten down. Of course, he was "supposed to die," so that's not so bad.
- Selina scares me when she attacks all-out. Or maybe I'm just scared that she does attack like that. A 56 mote magical flurry attack... I do hope that leaves something for defense.
- Distracting Finger-Gesture Attack strikes me as unbalanced, like many things from Scroll of the Monk. The book is a second-edition compilation of first-edition charms from multiple books, and it seems very little effort went into rereading/rebalancing anything so the charms are all over the place in terms of design quality. DFGA isn't an auto-kill or anything, so it's not exactly broken. You can't even include it in a combo. But there's really no defense against it (short of, perhaps, some way to cancel the charm when it's used) and it delays a target's action what usually amounts to one full turn. With the ruling we have going, it can basically be used to halve a person's number of actions and it's potent at that, but it could be interpreted as being able to push back a person's action repeatedly and indefinitely. When the target is outnumbered, this really, really sucks for them. It's a perfect "support the group" charm for characters not as into combat.
- Dang that was a short trip to the West. Hop out a celestial gate, walk an hour, fight and find, travel back at flight speeds, return to Yu Shan. ... The fete that the group opted out of (one member only grudgingly) might still be going on.
Otherwise... Ugh, more allergies. Starting to stress over next week's trip to Tucson, though I have reservations for a room and a rental car. Gaming tonight in which I get to play a less morally-inhibited character.
The group has entered potentially-unfriendly territory to get a magic sword. Simple enough. Things are complicated, though, by finding a village/town near the goal to be destroyed and a rampaging big-evil-guy-in-soulsteel making his way toward the party. One human survives, having been found on the brink of death and tended to with magical medicinal needles (as Alexi has the makings for an insta-healing combo, but hasn't had the time/XP to actually do it).
So as the session opens, Alexi isn't sure how big a threat this guy is. She dispatches two (highly-mobile) people to find and retrieve the sword, just in case they all need to bug out, and sics the others on the warrior spilling purple lightning all over the place. Yay, delegation of duties.
The pair after the sword find it in a well that turns out to be home to some sort of ooze monster. After some messy swimming and clawing out, and a couple impressive rolls, it's retrieved.
The fight takes longer. Naturally, combat slows things down. In Exalted, the number of dice involved makes things look even worse than usual, but I'm not convinced rolling 20+ dice really slows things down any more online than 1. So there's some good beating-up going on. The group's big-bad wolf gets to finally get in a few hits. Essence cannons are involved. Then the baddie charges up for what looks like an area effect lightning attack. Alexi goes at the same time and, with a hand wave, delays his nasty-looking attack long enough for the group to get at least one more pass at him (two or three in some cases). The new "treasure hunter" proves again that she's far more use in combat, dropping the guy before he even gets off one attack. Anticlimactic, but not really unexpected.
So they check him over, start to retrieve his hearthstones, and Alexi takes a closer look with a Medicine charm, determining he's actually still alive. What do they do? Kill him, of course! ... Nope. Though others pushed for that, Alexi would have some issues with killing a defeated opponent. His being responsible for the murder of others might warrant it, but a better idea came to mind. Thus, he's being kept unconscious and hauled off to Lytek, Shogun of Exaltations. The PCs just dealt with and received blessings from him. When asked, he explained that he knew death knights/abyssals to be a corruption of normal exaltations, but said he couldn't really discern much more without one to examine. What better opportunity? Instead of the satisfaction of killing a death knight, there's potential to learn about their weaknesses, their nature, how to free them of Neverborn influence, and even understanding of the Great Curse. Now, I don't expect all those answers by any means, but even the chance to learn some of that is worth snagging the opportunity. And this way, Alexandra can stick to her compassionate nature by not just offing the guy. Sounds like wins all around to me.
Of course, afterward I'm told the Storyteller was planning to turn this death knight into a recurring villain. The party was expected to kill him, then he'd be reborn in a slightly weakened state and pursue them. Well... let this be a lesson: there is nothing a GM can conceive that players cannot derail if allowed freedom to do so.
Analysis:
- Reminder: If you expect to survive Exalt-Exalt combat, you need to have (and be able to use) a perfect defense of some sort. The death knight relied on high soak levels and was still beaten down. Of course, he was "supposed to die," so that's not so bad.
- Selina scares me when she attacks all-out. Or maybe I'm just scared that she does attack like that. A 56 mote magical flurry attack... I do hope that leaves something for defense.
- Distracting Finger-Gesture Attack strikes me as unbalanced, like many things from Scroll of the Monk. The book is a second-edition compilation of first-edition charms from multiple books, and it seems very little effort went into rereading/rebalancing anything so the charms are all over the place in terms of design quality. DFGA isn't an auto-kill or anything, so it's not exactly broken. You can't even include it in a combo. But there's really no defense against it (short of, perhaps, some way to cancel the charm when it's used) and it delays a target's action what usually amounts to one full turn. With the ruling we have going, it can basically be used to halve a person's number of actions and it's potent at that, but it could be interpreted as being able to push back a person's action repeatedly and indefinitely. When the target is outnumbered, this really, really sucks for them. It's a perfect "support the group" charm for characters not as into combat.
- Dang that was a short trip to the West. Hop out a celestial gate, walk an hour, fight and find, travel back at flight speeds, return to Yu Shan. ... The fete that the group opted out of (one member only grudgingly) might still be going on.
Otherwise... Ugh, more allergies. Starting to stress over next week's trip to Tucson, though I have reservations for a room and a rental car. Gaming tonight in which I get to play a less morally-inhibited character.
Selina was trusting in her new friends to protect her if she needed it. Then again, it's also her style to take risks.
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