Well, Here I Am

I return! It's six months later, and not much has really changed. Time marches on, as does entropy. We're that much closer to the eventual heat death of the universe, and I still haven't gotten my fucking copy of CthulhuTech. But such is life, and so it goes.

I have gotten a copy of the Sailor Moon RPG put out by Guardians of Order in 1998. For, like seven dollars. Why yes, I am a huge nerd. Was there ever any question? I was actually surprised at how well-assembled it was. I got it for a chuckle, but now I'm seriously considering running a game with it.

That, though, will have to come after the Serenity one-shot I'm going to run in the next couple of weeks, and the Exalted 2e one-shot I fully intend to run sometime after that. It's been way too long since I've had an Exalted fix--since I've had a tabletop roleplaying fix of any sort, really. But that'll be rectified soon.

During my absence I've done a ridiculous amount of writing (some of it good, some of it bad, some of it poetry). My most recent endeavor has been in league with a friend of mine, and it is a webcomic called Fancy That. There's a big friendly banner for it in this blog's sidebar now, if you'd like to take a look. It updates Monday/Wednesday/Friday, like Penny Arcade, which I love so very much. Unlike PA, though, Fancy That suffers from, to borrow a phrase coined by Jerry Holkins, dreaded continuity. I hope you'll enjoy it anyway.

I'm going to try to keep this blog updated on a fairly regular basis. There are no guarantees, though the possibility of there being a post any given day will probably go up sometime in May. Just because. I'm also going to try to keep this blog closer to its stated topics. I was rather lax about that in the past, but no longer. If it's not about writing, gaming, or geekery, it will not appear in these hallowed pages.

I'm sure you'll sleep better at night knowing that.

----
I'm going to run away to the lesbian circus!

Review: Exalted, Second Edition

Imagine for a moment that you're in the frigid north, the coniferous forest drear with the pallor of winter. In a clearing, you see a circle of fire. Inside that circle of fire a one-eyed sorceress glowing like the noontide sun and wielding a golden seven-section staff fights a losing battle against an imposing man in heavy armor wielding a massive sword forged of jade. Then, looking beyond them, you find two massive armies clashing in all-out pitched battle, blade to blade. On the left are the forces of humanity, the military might of a small frozen kingdom, and on the right are the terrible and beautiful armies of the Fair Folk, resplendent in armor of gossamer spidersilk, some mounted on shrieking birds, others on griffins screaming as they swoop through the air, and others still shepherding six fierce, bellowing dragons with jeweled scales.

Then the ground erupts beneath the faerie army as a twenty-foot clockwork suit of power armor piloted by a demigod martial artist bursts from an age-old hidden chamber below, uproots a tree to use as a club, and attacks the dragons single-handedly.

Sound insane? Sound awesome? Sound both? That was a selection from the climax of the only Exalted campaign I've ever played in, and it was insane over-the-top magical kung-fu fun. So when I went to read Exalted, Second Edition, there was a lot of good will for it to draw upon. Happily, it didn't disappoint.

For the uninitiated, Exalted is a game in which players take on the role of Exalts--the chosen of the gods patterned after great heroes of old like Heracles, Perseus, and Gilgamesh--and go forth to save Creation and bring the awesome. Bringing the awesome comes easily to Exalts, and is even mechanically supported by the game. It's the part about saving Creation that's going to be tricky.

The world of Exalted, or Creation as it's known, is beset on all sides by terrible foes. You have the Fair Folk, who are fairies and elves rendered old-school style as dream-devouring glamorous terrors that hail from the unshaped Wyld outside of Creation. Then you have the various fallen Primordials, the original shapers of Creation usurped by lesser gods with the help of the original Exalts, who are divided among the Neverborn, those Primordials killed and eternally imprisoned in the Underworld, forever seeking to bring the rest of the world to the same oblivion they have found, and the Yozis, those banished to the demon-world of Malfeas and perpetual torment. The Yozis don't tend to set foot in Creation often, but their cousins the Neverborn have powerful ghost-lieutenants called Deathlords that enter the world of mortals and do their bidding, spreading death and decay wherever they walk.

On the more mortal end of things, the largest organized government in Creation is on the brink of collapse due to the sudden disappearance of its head of state, the Scarlet Empress. Their once-powerful defenses now useless without a powerful potentate to operate them, thieves and brigands are growing bolder, as are the darker things beyond Creation's veil.

And the gods who exalt mortals in the first place? They're not going to do anything about any of this because they're hopelessly addicted to the Games of Divinity, which they play at all times in their Jade Pleasure Dome in the celestial continent-city of Yu-Shan. So it all comes down to the Exalted to set things to right in Creation, which will obviously be no easy feat.

So obviously the setting is one of the most notable aspects of Exalted, presenting a broad array of locales and potential conflicts for the players to get involved in. The chapter that covers Creation is basically candy for any GM who likes to have fluff and pretty visuals to use, which certainly includes me.

Mechanically, the game seems to be constructed pretty smoothly. Exalted uses White Wolf's Storyteller System, in which a player attempting an action rolls a number of ten-sided dice equal to the character's appropriate attribute score plus their appropriate ability score, counting those that come up seven or greater as successes. If enough successes are rolled to meet or exceed the difficulty number set by the GM, the action succeeds. It worked perfectly well for its previous edition, and I'm sure it will continue to serve elegantly.

Second Edition's combat resolution works differently from most games I have played in, however, as it doesn't operate on an initiative system. Instead, battle is measured in ticks of time, and each action has a speed in ticks. A character takes an action, and then must wait that number of ticks before they can act again. It seems in some ways to be much more fluid than an initiative system, and perhaps more realistic, but I don't see that it is in any way superior to rolling initiative. Just different. It does fit the high-speed kung-fu style of Exalted, though, and that is very important.

Stunt dice, mentioned earlier as the mechanic that encourages players and characters to bring the awesome, are extra dice awarded to rolls with particularly impressive descriptions to back them up. So instead of saying, "I hit him", the player is mechanically encouraged to say, "I slam my gauntleted fist across his face with such force that nearby trees shake from the shock" because they'll gain an advantage. Interestingly enough, this makes doing awesome things easier than doing mundane things, which seems to work perfectly with the flavor of the setting.

Something else that sets Exalted apart mechanically is its charms, magical techniques only available to Exalts and other supernatural beings that allow them to perform extraordinary feats. Each charm is linked to an ability, meaning there are melee charms, dodge charms, athletics charms, etc. These form the core of the Exalted's power, and creative use of charms can be helpful or even vital to a character's survival. Second Edition adds Excellencies to the mix, three basic charms expressly used for improving dice pools related to the ability they're taken for. Their flexibility is welcome, particularly the Melee Excellencies, which can be used to improve attacks and parries both.

The most significant improvement over its previous edition is in the way dodging and parrying are handled. In Exalted, First Edition, a player had two basic choices when their turn came around. They could defend, holding a dodge or parry in reserve and not acting, or they could attack. A sketchy third option was to split the dice pool between defense and attack, but in my experience that effectively crippled both. Both pools would be reduced to somewhere in the neighborhood of three to four dice, and for several enemies that wasn't even enough to get past the opposition's armor. Which meant that players either defended perpetually and never damaged foes or attacked, leaving themselves wide open to a counter unless they invested heavily in dodge charms, which in turn caused a constant drain on a character's essence (magical power used to activate charms). In short, it didn't work very well.

In Second Edition, a character's defense is determined by static values based on their attributes and abilities that an enemy's attack must meet to land. So there is no longer a defense action that a character must take to avoid getting their ass kicked. Instead, attacks and other actions incur a minor defense penalty that temporarily lowers the DV until the character's next action, modeling to what degree the action leaves the character open to attack. Which means that the player doesn't have to decide whether to defend or not, but how much to compromise that defense by how they act. This seems significantly easier to deal with to me.

There were only a few things that I didn't care for in this new rendition of Exalted, and those were layout-based. As always, any company professionally publishing textbook-sized RPG rulesets ought to hire a proofreader. Aside from the handful of simple typos, there was the significant strangeness of the description of cudgels and clubs in the equipment listing being precisely the same as that of slashing swords. The stat block was still appropriate to the weapon, so this seems an anomaly at absolute worst. The index was not a great help to me, though it does have a complete listing of all the charms in alphabetical order. I could see that coming in handy. There were one or two pieces of artwork that didn't quite live up to the standards of the rest, which tended to oscillate between serviceable and bloody awesome. My particular favorite is the full-body illustration of Arianna, the book's canon example of a Twilight caste Solar. But then again, I've always had a weakness for female spellcasters.

There are a number of other new and interesting things that I haven't the time or inclination to go into (like the social and mass combat rules--both of which are interesting, but I don't see myself using either very often anytime soon). I haven't even mentioned that the setting fluff that segues between chapters assumes the form of well-illustrated full-color comics. It's a full 396 pages without the index and the character sheet in the back, so covering all of it in detail would be damn near impossible. Suffice to say that I am immensely impressed by the setting in particular and the fashion in which the mechanics support it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've a Creation to save.

----
"Would you rather times were better, or simply more boring?"

A Look Ahead

So I now have three things in the queue to write reviews for, if only I could thoroughly finish any of them. Of course one, the core book for Exalted, Second Edition, I only got yesterday, so I at least have an excuse of some sort for that one. Though judging from the setting material I've read thus far (and what little I know of how conflict resolution works in it) I expect I will be treating it favorably.

The second, of course, is Final Fantasy XII, which I have been having great fun with despite running into a few gamestalling moments along the way. The main reason I haven't gotten around to writing a review for this one is because the game is so bloody long. I'm over thirty hours into it and I suspect that that is maybe halfway through. It's positively mindblowing. And epic. I'd try to combine the two words, but I suspect that it would come out sounding like something a particularly gifted courtesan would be able to do after rigorously practicing for several years. Which is awesome in its own way, but not the kind of awesome that abounds in FFXII.

The third is a little Japanese doujin game called Perfect Cherry Blossom I downloaded. It's an incredibly pretty game, aurally and visually, but it's also a hard as fuck vertical scrolling shooter in the spirit of the Raiden games. I really like it, but trying to actually get through the whole thing is practically an exercise in masochism. ...Though it is very, very pretty masochism, which I suppose partially makes up for it.

So those are things I have planned just at the moment. As soon as I finish one or all of these I'll start doing my writeups of them and post them here. It's good practice.

----
Jim thinks you're all pretty fucking lucky he's here.