Okay, I think we finally have enough information to officially call it: The Exigent Exalted are an untenable character type. I know, I know, devastating news, but we have to face facts. Miracles of the Divine Flame was as good an Exigents supplement as anyone is ever going to make (maybe even as good an Exigents supplement as it's realistically possible to make) and it did nothing but exacerbate the fundamental problems with the splat.
Which is to say Exigents: Out of the Ashes gave us a 400-page book that allowed us to play 8 distinct characters, its crowdfunded stretch goal gave us 200 more pages that allowed us to play 8 different distinct characters, and my main take-away from both is that it would be both super cool and super onerous to play a 17th distinct character.
The new characters are amazing. Play the Foxbinder and you're in this magical buddy cop story. You can ride a giant fox! He can turn into a sword, or a hat, or switch places with you to confuse your enemies. He's also a naughty little scamp who will take advantage of your lapses in concentration to play pranks on you. It's wholesome. It's whimsical. It's funny. It's an eloquent demonstration of the strengths of asymmetrical, exception-based splat design.
It's also an eloquent reminder that you're never going to fucking homebrew this stuff, who the fuck do you think you're kidding with that shit? I mean, each of the new Exigents had between 40-50 charms, which is on the far side of realistic, and enough to get you up to a 280xp game, even assuming you spent your xp on nothing but favored charms. That's more than a year of weekly sessions. You could pace yourself. Whip up the first 15 charms prior to session 0, then three more every five weeks. It's not like a full-time job or anything.
But that's not how these things work. You don't build a character around the selection of your first 15 charms. You select your first 15 charms based on your plans for your character. The stuff deeper into the charm tree is the bait on the hook. Nobody's salivating over the phenomenal cosmic power of getting double 9s on a persuade roll that cites a popular aphorism, they're looking forward to the day when they can scribe magical laws on floating scrolls of fire that will burn alive any who transgress against them. This sense of charm sets as, basically . . . shopping lists, that's important. In fact, it's the whole point of the exercise.
So you could probably get away with just writing the first 15 charms, but you couldn't do it without the idea of the shopping list. If you're going to be excited about the character (and you should, it leads to better games), then you're going to have to be excited about the charms you plan to write. It's dangerously close to a circular problem. You can avoid writing a whole charm set by just writing the beginning, but in order to write the beginning, you have to know how it's going to end. And it would be a lot easier to know how it will end if you actually wrote the ending. But if you write the ending, then you haven't actually saved yourself all that much time.
It's not necessarily an intractable problem, but it's something that could benefit greatly from the sort of high level design work that doesn't always come easy. The Chosen of Plentimon, God of Dice gets a cool ability called the "Fortune Pool," where they skim off extra successes from easy rolls to add them back into hard rolls and a lot of their charmset involves expanding the Fortune Pool, coming up with new uses for the reserved dice, and eventually doing tricky stuff like saving failed dice to add to your enemies' rolls. That's a whole-ass vision. It's taking the idea of splat asymmetry and using it to experiment with storyteller system mechanics. Which is wholly great, sure, but it sets a high bar if I ever want to make an Exigent of Iphira, Goddess of Fermented Apples.
Which is why I've come to the reluctant conclusion that Exigents are untenable. They're a splat powered by the optimistic assumption that the fandom's energy and passion is effectively infinitely. I absolutely want to play as Pakpao the puppeteer or Tamako the Foxbinder or, honestly, any of the completed (or mostly completed) Exigents, but the cost/benefit split for literally any of the unrealized options (even the really strong contenders like Five Days Darkness or Madame Marthesine) is simply not there. At least not for me, and I'm about as passionate about Exalted as it's possible to get.
So I guess, overall, I'd say that Miracles of the Divine Flame is a really good book, almost pure value from cover to cover and arguably the most essential of the crowdfunded stretch goal books. The fact that it's the book's high quality that winds up arguing most persuasively against Exigents as a general idea is a fascinating artistic paradox.
Ukss Contribution: Surprise! My favorite thing was Pakpao again! She gets a charm where her shadow swallows up an enemy, chokes them to death, and then spits out a puppet that looks a lot like them.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how Ukss will ever be able to handle double Pakpao, so I have to go with my second choice (which sort of resembles Pakpao's whole deal, but only coincidentally) - the patron deity of the Thousand Venoms Mistress, Whirling Lady Koro-Bana, Goddess of Self-Made Widows.
I don't know what it is, but the phrase "self-made widow" tickles me greatly. It's fun to imagine they have their own goddess.
No comments:
Post a Comment