Talk:House Rules

ST notes on house-rules
There are a few major departures from Exalted core rules.

You can now use several charms per action. Infinite Mastery now affects several Abilities at once, but has a cap on how much it can reduce the cost of Excellencies. Excellencies cost half XP. The goal is to encourage more adventurous play by allowing players to combine various Abilities into a cohesive style.

Virtue channels are the expensive resource, compared to motes as the cheap one and Willpower as the bottleneck one. Overall it is harder to regain channels, but I'm also working to reduce the umber of effects that require them. Virtue channels ultimately will be for being awesome at things you're passionate about.McLeith 10:19, September 3, 2010 (UTC)

Suggested House Rules
Please put your suggestions for house rules here.

Overdrive charms
Everyone gets all Overdrive-type charms for which they qualify, automatically and costing no XP or training time, the instant they meet all prerequisites to learning the charm. This includes Essence-Gathering Temper.

Custom Overdrive charms and probable canon Oh Peas excepted.

Eclipseys get only their own type of Exalted charms.

My rationale is, Overdrive is essential, and basically a patch on the core combat system, hard to convince anyone to sink XP in given the nature of our campaign. Yeah. McLeith 09:14, November 2, 2010 (UTC)

zomgwtf, really? Might as well make Integrity Protecting Prana, as well as the generic Survival and Resistance charms all free as well as they are all also essential to combat while almost completely useless in our campaign unless they are squeezed in. Actually I was just making a hyperbole but now that I think about it that would totally work and be preferable to having them exist as a void of "either you waste XP on this in a non-combat campaign or somebody may arbitrarily kill you for not taking it because certain charms are OP as fuck". VictorW

Cascade of Cutting Terror
The bonus successes gained from this charm are dice bonuses gained from a charm. It affects every target within a radius of half the exalt's Essence (ie. diameter = Essence).


 * Doesn't fit with the rest of thrown. AoE effect is a double-edged sword - what if you are, say, a deadly and efficient assassin as reflected by the rest of the Thrown tree? You may well not want to slaughter everything within range when you use your powers. If you did want to slaughter everyone, why didn't you pick Archery? Archery does it a hell of a lot better as it has more damage, better weapons and combos that pump out OVER NINE THOUSAND extra attacks of ultimate spikey death, at a range of ANYTHING YOU CAN SEE. Incidentally, Archery is hardly overpowered, since (like all offensive trees) it pales in comparison to defensive charms. This was a point which you made yourself only recently.
 * Leads to absurdities. Charms that grant extra successes are verboten. What about the perfect archery charm, which grants exactly the right number of successes required to hit unless you roll better yourself? Is that "dice bonus from charms" too? If not, why? Is it because doing so would be excessively complicated? Differences in technical charm implementation are a very weak reason to say that one charm is okay and another isn't when the two are nearly identical in effect. Does this also mean that DV reduction charms count as dice bonus from charms? If not, why, since they are functionally identical in any number of ways. And what about extra-action charms? They grant extra dice well in excess of what CoCT gives you, spread across multiple attacks, and the dice are granted to both attack and defence. Finally, how do you account for the fact that charms are priced with the charm dice adder caps in mind? Are you going to go through every charm and adjust the costing to account for the fact that charms which add dice are now superior due to lower costs and the significant benefits of third excellency combos? Cutting short here because the tl;dr is that every charm in the game is broken because it's power fantasy, not Hello Kitty's Happy Armory Adventures.
 * Isn't actually broken. Seriously, who are we kidding? There are a bazillion charms like this one that have similar effects. They may be stronger or weaker in different situations. Yet, you're the first person I've ever heard who has complained about them in any sense other than "these are a complete waste of XP and motes because of the way Exalted prioritises Defence over Offence". In fact, I've actually heard you complain about these charms in this exact same sense. You actually stated the supremacy of defence leading to turtle strategies being the main factor in wanting to house rule the game. I challenge you to provide me with any actual example of this charm being overpowered.
 * Seriously fucks with game balance. Yes, you like DV and Soak builds. Making it so that these builds are competitive (outside of being a Twilight) is fair enough. Making it into a whiff-fest where nobody gets to do any more than bashing ping is bullshit. And that's certainly where the game is heading when you eliminate the ability to punch through soak with weapons and then additionally make it incredibly difficult to throw on a few bonuses to your weapon damage. This effect is amplified since there are HEAPS of ways to boost your DV but only a few which boost attacks, few of which are comparably strong and most of which you have already house-ruled out. Even in 1st ed, you couldn't be an invincible turtle ALL day long, you at least had to pop a PD here and there to survive when your enemy pulls out their best moves. If you're willing to throw the party into a horrible pit of fail and suck and broken glass as punishment for being silly enough to not take a Shaping defense, then you should be prepared for NPCs who don't have PDs to die when the players use their best powers.

Door-Evading Technique
Is a trap, and is replaced in its entirety by the follows:

Castle-Entering Stance

Cost: 5m or 10m, 1wp

Mins: Larceny 5, Essence 3

Type: Simple

Keywords: Combo-OK Duration: Scenelong

Prerequisite Charms: Lock-Opening Touch

Few obstacles in Creation can bar the justice of the Lawgivers. The Solar may activate this charm for a cost of five motes to enable the ability to move through any portal or ward unobstructed. In addition, he may also activate it to pass through any physical obstruction that is no more than (Essence) yards thick, although he must pay 10m, 1wp to do so. At Essence 6, the Solar need only pay five motes to bypass any obstacle.

Most Other Larceny Charms
May also need a going over, but this is the primary one I'm suggesting for the moment since this fills an important niche for my character.

Green Sun Nimbus Flare (Infernals, 114)
Is Reflexive (Step 10) to make it a bit more scary, because as it is that entire tree is kind of overpriced and unthreatening.