#mechanism design

[samueldays]

Reminiscing about the silliness that was Chungian Paranoia Combat in Exalted 2e, and the context for it. Long story of niche interest.

Dungeons & Dragons, and many RPGs that copied it, have a concept of "level up" once a character accumulates enough experience. Narratively, this is usually an expression of training and skills accumulated over time, and the Dungeon Master may enforce some required downtime and costs involved, but mechanically, the level up happens as a bundle of new character skills and powers packaged together when crossing a threshold. One day your character is level 6 with so-and-so many hitpoints, and the next day your character is level 7 with more hitpoints, a new feat, more skill points, a new spell known, a new class feature, and so on. These are packaged together for player convenience of bookkeeping. Games often have convenient abstractions like this.

Many D&D-like video games veered in a direction of even more convenient abstraction with the level up being a much-mocked "ding!" mid-combat immediately upon accumulating enough kills, sometimes refilling the health bar of a wounded character, raising stats and clearing status conditions. There were strategies designed around exploiting the mechanical abstraction of instant full healing.

The Exalted RPG went in mostly the opposite direction, unpackaging character improvements and skills to be separately bought and paid for in a modular pointbuy system, abolishing the abstraction of a character's "level", and specifying training times for learning new skills and capabilities and powers. It was enforced that characters needed to work at specific skills and spend time to improve themselves in that skill.

Exalted also took the worldbuilding route that character abilities were not simply mechanical abstractions of training, they existed in-universe, as discrete specific powerups. The mechanics are in a sense "true". There were powers to let you read other people's power level. There were powers to hide your power level. Powerups could be taught, you could gain hitpoints faster if someone with more hitpoints was teaching you How To Hitpoints. (One hitpoint improvement took 1-4 days.) On the character sheet, you'd have one or more "Favored Skills" that were faster to train and cost less XP, and in the setting, astrologers could read a child's fortune and determine what Favored Skill a child would grow up to have. This worked by association with one of the 25 in-universe constellations that were a 1:1 match to the 25 skills on the out-of-universe character sheet.

I think this was a bad decision, but it was an intriguingly original decision which led some interesting places at least.

So that's important context item #1: the stance that character powers are not abstractions but exist in-universe and affect the setting. This forfeits a lot of the "it's just a game" and "stop exploiting" defenses when someone exploits certain combinations of powers, more so because this was Exalted Second Edition, and the devs had plenty of opportunity to learn from First and avoid or patch exploits.

Important context item #2: the high lethality of Second Edition before massive errata and overhauls. Sometimes called "rocket tag gameplay", it had significant problems of design and balance.

Starting characters had 7 hitpoints, and gaining more hitpoints took time and xp that was not part of a levelup package, xp spent on hitpoints was xp you couldn't spend on becoming a swordsman or craftsman or whatever.

Starting weapons went up to damage rating 16. (Add wielder's strength, subtract target's armor, etc. Modifiers abound.) Damage was rolled, so a 16 damage hit meant grab 16 dice and each one that shows X or better results in hitpoint loss. This meant instant death by 7 hitpoint loss wasn't entirely guaranteed, but it was very much possible for starting characters to one-shot each other.

In D&D, hitpoints generally grow faster than damage; in Exalted, it was the reverse. Combat superpowers included a dozen kinds of "more direct damage" and another dozen of "more accuracy" (extra accuracy auto-converts to damage!) and "multiattack" and so on. Hitpoints could be bought at most 5 times, adding 1-3 hitpoints each time.

Add in the various Baleful Polymorph style effects that kill a character on contact while bypassing hitpoints, and you get a game with an annoyingly high chance of dying from a single attack in peer combat. It doesn't even require optimization, simply picking a 14L corebook starter weapon against a 7HP character. And Exalted is a setting with no resurrection spells.

The solution: Perfect Defenses, one of the standout gimmicks of the Exalted franchise. Spend 3-4 motes (spell points) on a Perfect Defense power and it completely nullifies a single attack against you.

This means your character's hitpoints are not your real hitpoints, your motes are your real hitpoints. When you run out of motes in peer combat, then you die in the next hit. The same motes are used to power your super attacks, so don't overcommit.

There were more problems, like the fact that you can't use the basic Perfect Defense against a surprise attack, so you need a surprise-negator power too. Skipping over several pages of similar mechanical minutiae, here's the approximate "Paranoia Combo" build described by forum poster Jon Chung (hence "Chungian") and his friends, in mechanics/name format:

Perfect Defense (Seven Shadow Evasion)

Surprise Negator (Reflex Sidestep Technique)

Step 7 Filter (Adamant Skin Technique)

Excellency (Dodge and/or Melee)

Defense Number Keeper (Shadow Over Water)

Multiattack Interruptor (Leaping Dodge Method)

This powers list is for Solars, but similar loadouts exist for other character archetypes. This renders peer combat in Exalted 2e pretty much solved, reducing the fun of the game a bit.

The best approach to character-building is to get this combo ASAP. The best approach to fights is to activate this combo every single turn, or a superset of it. You can switch out individual elements of it, like swapping Heavenly Guardian Defense for Seven Shadow Evasion (any step 2 PD will do), but using this combo reliably wins fights against people not using this combo. People not using this combo can die in one hit. People using this combo can live until they run out of motes to activate their Perfect Defense with.

Now, the game-mechanical reason for this to happen was mostly

#2: the high lethality of Second Edition

but the thing that threatened to become setting-distorting was

#1: the stance that character powers are not abstractions but exist in-universe and affect the setting

because the biggest and strongest default antagonist faction of Exalted (The Realm) has a lot of people with standardized superpowers and also has a long educational tradition of teaching the new generation to use their superpowers competently before sending them out to life-or-death challenges.

Which means that the default antagonists should know about and use Paranoia Combos if the GM is running them as intelligent actors rather than videogame mooks.

Which means that for PCs, buying the Paranoia Combo is near-mandatory. You buy it, or else The Realm kills you easily, because they have Paranoia Combos and you don't and they want to hunt you down and kill you. (Or The Lunars, Sidereals, Rakshasa, Akuma, or other superpowered peers who can get Paranoia Combos of their own.)

Jon Chung was forceful about expressing how "Paranoia Combo or die" flowed from the game's rules and setting assumptions, and a lot of people got mad at him for it, accusing him of twisting the game to his preferences. He said he didn't prefer this, he merely discovered and spelled out the implications. IMO he was correct and someone else would have discovered it eventually.

Part of what aggravated him over time, I think, was the very many dumb responses from people who didn't understand the problem, or who wrongly thought it was trivial to fix. He got vocal about it, people got scornful back at him.

"It's not a problem if you houserule it." - Your need to houserule shows there is, in fact, a problem. "Just ban baleful polymorph touch effects." - Those are not the only, nor even the primary problem here. "It hasn't been a problem in my game." - Followup questioning showed that this person's game was highly narrative and ignored the mechanics when inconvenient. "Double everyone's hitpoints." - 14 hitpoints still risks getting one-shotted by 16 Damage weapons.

[arriving-at-new-equilibrium]

It's weird that the airline ticket market only has "asks" and not "bids".

Why isn't there a site where I can bindingly offer "I'll buy a round-trip ticket from Seattle for a week in the Bahamas for $250 any time January-October at least 2 months in the future", and where airlines then schedule flights based in part on the seat sales they can make to standing offers?

[xpurplepiex]

Lost Light sillies

[oldfashionedbattlehymn]

Spooky Eldritch N time

Teeth (1/2)

N is is secretly Toothless or something...

i know i know he doesnt have teeth like that in the video, but uhhh its been stuck in my head like this sooo

[deecotan]

yapper x listener in every universe

[idslaboratory]

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[miamaimania]

MAURIZIO CATTELAN / UNTITLED, 2001 Couple of elevators (scale 1:7,5), stainless steel, electronic components 35 x 59.5 x 26.3 cm | 23 1/2 x 33 3/4 x 18 inch

[malone-fanart]

DELTARUNE CHAPTER 4 SPOILERS, WATCH OUT!!!!!

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oml dude that titan fight was so cool ‼️ absolutely loved the design, music and fight mechanic!!

love me a design with lots of wings and eye imagery 🔥🔥 man i really wanna go back and do this fight again, it was so fun

since we never actually see the rest of it’s body, pulled some inspiration from the earlier depictions we’ve gotten of the titans (i think from chapter 1?)

i hope we’ll get to see more/different kinds of titans in the coming chapters!! that’d be so cool

[synthsays]

Monster Falls girlies how we feeling about this one.

Happy Fiddleford Friday Y'all

(Bonus art under cut)

And one for the fiddauthor peeps

[oldfashionedbattlehymn]

so, i had to do the new render with my take on mechanical instinct N uhhhhh-

i know he doesnt have a tail but it looked wrong without it so i added it in, tried to make it look more organic with like, a scorpion stinger at the end idk

I did more art of them smh

Comparison under the cut!

its not as uhhh cheery as the original, but i think its hard for N to show any emotions besides "i will eat your family"

[ninjasmudge]

maid au design doodles bc this au is all i think about. lamb keeps skipping maid classes to go bother goat at work and then they go cause a ruckus in the city

og goat design by @purrpurra !

[shyaringan]

my beloved mouse spouse 📚🐭

[cultofthewyrm]

by 9monkeys

[sunatsubu]

My design for murderbot

[deadbaguette]

It’s mechs hours and I needed to draw the guy who gives me so much gender envy and joy because I am lowkey so stressed rn

[tastefulbean]

Redesigned my N design bc i wasnt too happy w/ it LMAOOO