Which I guess just means that I need to judge Crucible of Legend by a different standard. I can't sit back and reminisce about all the trash it shoveled down my gullet, like I would with a normal Exalted book (because, by that standard, I'd have to give it a mournful "not enough"). Instead, I have to take a personal inventory and ask myself whether I feel like this book improved me as a human being.
I want to say, "Sorry, Onyx Path, but I'm already too much of a GM for your silly little Storyteller's Guides," but I don't think that's true. To be perfectly honest, I've been running a semi-weekly Exalted game for a while now, and while I think my players are enjoying it, I have not been operating at 100% as a Storyteller. There were parts of this book that gave me a kick in the pants, reminding me that there's a lot more I could be doing with the game.
For example, we haven't had a combat in, like 2 months, and it comes down to the fact that by my eyeball estimations, the Dawn caste can absolutely steamroll the elder sidereal villain, and I'm extremely reluctant to ruin her mystique by revealing the fact that she's a paper tiger. And look, Crucible of Legend really made me look hard at what I was doing. I've been playing her as a "smart villain" who, realizing she's outmatched, will just ingratiate herself with the heroes by agreeing with whatever they say, waiting until they leave, and then going back to what she was doing, more sneakily. And that's not fucking thematic at all. It doesn't fit in with any of this book's campaign frameworks - "Creation as Stage," "Creation as Threat," or "Creation as Cost." It's just bad GMing. Instead of resorting to fucking anti-plot, I should just pull the trigger, have the big fight scene, and let the PCs triumph.
So, thank you, Crucible of Legend, for that. Just a quick follow-up question. Having resolved to let the dice fall where they may, how exactly do I run this fight and not have it devolve into a pathetic anti-climax, like it did six months ago when the much weaker PCs squared off against a by-the-book Mara? Like, I'm okay with the idea that the PCs are going to come out on top every single time. That's intrinsic to any episodic storytelling medium that follows the same characters over multiple adventures. But I need to create the illusion that the victory wasn't inevitable. And towards that end, the suggestion that Quick Characters' "rarely need magic that adds dice or otherwise adjusts numbers . . . their dice pools are already assumed to account for the customary use of basic Trait-boosting powers" is . . . misguided.
I think, if you interpret it as "Exalted Quick Characters have a bland parenthetical next to their dice pools to indicate the cost/benefit of using an Excellency, so you don't have to give them Excellencies" then that's basically fine, but it's a little misleading, because you are giving them Excellencies, you're just not calling them that. On the other hand, if you interpret it as "Quick Characters don't need dice pools higher than 14 because in the long run that outpaces the mote economy" then that's just dead wrong. If an antagonist can't tank a full excellency from an optimized solar and survive to punish an ill-conceived alpha strike, then it's basically just scenery.
I love Exalted, but one of the things that frustrates me about it is the weird, unmerited assumption it makes that you can count on PCs hanging out at the center of the power curve for the sake of setting verisimilitude. "A dice pool of six is the mark of an experienced expert, who stands out from the crowd by having above-average talent (attribute 3) and advanced training (ability 3)" is something we pretend to believe in the fiction layer, because when White Wolf created the scale back in the 90s, they defined a rating of 2 as "respectably average," but on a practical level it was always so fucking easy to blow past that, especially in arenas that would mean the difference between life and death.
In the real Exalted that actually exists, six dice for a combat dice pool is deliberately de-optimized. It might emerge spontaneously, in the first session, by someone who didn't understand the rules at all ("oh, you can only put 3 points in an Ability without spending bonus points . . . that's fine, I'll just buy my primary combat Ability up to that level, it'll probably be fine,") but for anyone who's ever played a Storyteller family game, that is a choice. It's really a 4 point scale, because you're always going to reserve one of your favored slots for a combat Ability (assuming you didn't get one for free as part of your caste/aspect) and you're always going to spend the two bonus points to raise that Ability to five. Unless it is your goal to be threatened by the city guard, this is basically automatic because the system very clearly telegraphs to you that a rating 5 is important for your character's long-term development (According to the Exigents book 40% of all charms have Ability 5 as a prerequisite). This leaves the scale as:
8: Not really interested in combat (this rating will only happen if the player takes Physical Attributes as secondary or tertiary, and then decides to keep Dexterity balanced with Strength and Stamina for roleplaying reasons - there's basically never a reason to put your 4th attribute point anywhere but Dexterity, even from an rp-maximalist perspective). (This, incidentally, is where my Sidereal villain should realistically be, considering she's more of an infiltrator-mastermind type).
8: Not really interested in combat (this rating will only happen if the player takes Physical Attributes as secondary or tertiary, and then decides to keep Dexterity balanced with Strength and Stamina for roleplaying reasons - there's basically never a reason to put your 4th attribute point anywhere but Dexterity, even from an rp-maximalist perspective). (This, incidentally, is where my Sidereal villain should realistically be, considering she's more of an infiltrator-mastermind type).
9: Someone who is interested in combat, but doesn't want to nakedly optimize with an unbalanced distribution of Attribute points (for Physical secondary characters, you're avoiding the 2/5/2 spread, and for Physical primary, you're intentionally picking 4/4/3 or 3/4/4 which are not optimal, but do at least have something to recommend them).
10: You understand the rules of the game and are interested in combat.
11: You do actually want to optimize, and you don't care who knows it.
That's Exalted as it actually exists, and if it's not the case at session 1, it will be the case no later than 4-5 sessions after the players experience their first peer-level combat. And it's a real problem with the game's Storytelling technology that the developers can't seem to bring themselves to acknowledge this. There are basically two types of Exalted antagonists - speed bumps and mechanically complex arms races and if you're going to give actionable Storytelling advice, you need to be able to distinguish when each type of antagonist is most useful. Quick Characters are, theoretically, a solution to the problem that arms-race style antagonists are nightmarish to create and run, but in order for them to be anything other than speedbumps, they need an answer to Excellency-driven spike dice pools, they need an answer to the action economy, they need to be able to credibly threaten hits.
Crucible of Legend does suggest answers to some of these questions (like giving a boss enemy multiple Initiative tracks, which is pragmatic, but doesn't really map to anything in the narrative aside from perhaps esoteric magic), but then it gives bad advice like "Multiple individual combatants can be fun to give each player someone to interact with, but avoid outnumbering the group to keep rounds from dragging; large combats are what battle groups are for."
And it's like, no, that's not what battle groups are for. Battle groups are for demonstrating the conservation of ninjitsu. If you actually want the villain's back-up to increase the danger faced by the heroes, you need to stat them as individual combatants for two reasons - to get more chances to hit improbable die rolls (if you assume elite mortals, with 11 dice pools, against difficulty 7, then 3 individuals, making 3 attacks, have roughly the same chance of landing at least one hit as characters with the same stats do when organized into a size 3 battle group . . . but a size 3 battle group is approximately 100 foes, and is not as accurate as 4 individuals) and to impose onslaught penalties that can be exploited by more dangerous characters. That Size 3 battle group is only imposing a -1 onslaught penalty, but the three individuals will pass their boss the equivalent of 6 non-charm dice in the form of a -3 onslaught penalty.
This has long been a bugbear of mine, because Crucible of Legend is not wrong. Confronting a 5-person solar circle with a single boss enemy and 10 individually-statted minions would be a nightmarish encounter to run, but simplifying those 10 minions into a size 1 battle group would, essentially, be the same as sending the boss in there alone. It is unthinkable that 5 PC-level combatants could not do 8 levels of withering damage in a single round. Whenever enemies are lumped into battle groups, they lose all the mechanical widgets that make fighting multiple opponents dangerous.
Here's my proposed house rule for "Creation as Threat" games - Battle Groups automatically impose an onslaught penalty on all engaged enemies equal to their size x 2 (both to aid hero characters and to give their ridiculously inaccurate AoE attacks a chance to hit) and the maximum amount of Magnitude they can lose from any single attack is capped at the attacker's Size + 3, allowing them to at least theoretically act as a health-damage buffer for their leader, like they would if they were statted individually.
Now, I'm getting pretty far afield. Combat advice is actually a very small part of the book. It's much more concerned with mood and themes, which I will concede were a much-needed booster shot for my GMing technique, which I'd let slide from "open sandbox" to "simulationist wool-gathering." However, it wouldn't be a new Exalted book if it didn't inspire me to hack the mechanics. It's an impulse the book shares - offering new systems for crafting, experience points, travel, naval combat, and more. So I feel very seen, enough that I will acknowledge that I've been avoiding the "Exalted and Orientalism" conversation that the "Storytelling Exalted" chapter bravely tackles head on (though I think the suggestion to "Introduce formally trained fighters who don't have magic powers, even if you keep formal schools of martial arts" . . . might be missing the forest for the trees. I think a better suggestion would have been to more mindfully lean into the cultivation genre that very clearly inspired this setting element, so that it's a respectful stylistic choice rather than an unthinking expression of "the western gaze" . . . and perhaps a professional company like Onyx Path might be interested in paying someone from an appropriate background to consult on how to do that and then write what they learned into a book . . . ).
Overall, I'd say Crucible of Legend definitely fits into the GM-focused supplement tradition of being more about the work of running a game than the fun of playing a game, but that's okay, because that work is necessary. It reminded me of some important things I love about Exalted and inspired me to put a bit more effort into my GMing. At the beginning of this post, I said that writing this sort of book was a thankless task, so let me rectify that - my sincerest thanks to all 16 credited writers. I appreciate what you've done here.
Ukss Contribution: Most of the book's setting material was presented from a pretty high level of abstraction, which means there is a lot of stuff that I know for a fact is super cool when it's not being viewed from 30,000 feet. So, instead of picking any of that, I'll pick a piece of information that is still relatively new to me - the Getimian Exalted are not humans who were empowered by the gods. Rather, they are heroes from alternate timelines whose births were prevented by Creation's various destiny-planning committees. There's a certain amount of Exalted-specific esoterica that I'm going to have to trim, but I think Ukss can have a sort of manifested spirit that was a hypothetical hero from legends never told.
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