House Rules

As of this edit, all house rules on this page have been edited and approved by me. McLeith 10:18, September 3, 2010 (UTC)

The following are all official house rules for our campaign. Please use the talk page to discuss and suggest house rules.

Charm Activations
Charm-users may activate any number of charms per action, and even per tick, but no more than one per instant without use of a combo. For the purpose of this house rule, 'instant' is defined as the period in which one action's mechanical jiggery takes place. This includes all steps of an attack, including the steps of any counterattack.

For example, in one action River Phoenix could leap over a building with his Athletics Excellency, smite his enemies with Hungry Tiger Technique, and then dodge their blows with a mixture of Shadow Over Water and Seven Shadow Evasion, and not need a combo. If he wished to use an Excellency or other charm in addition to HTT, they would have to be comboed together, just as if he wished to use 7SE to defend against any counterattacks his opponents might make to HTT.

Only Combo-OK charms may be activated this freely. Combo-basic charms may only be used during the same action as reflexive charms, and non-Combo-OK charms may not be used during the same action as any other charms.

Activating multiple charms per combat action using this house-rule produces a display of Essence similar to a Combo display, as does activating any set of charms including any Obvious charms. This display is not a unique signature like a Combo display, though it does tend to remain the same for similar sets of charms. Observers may not use this display to deduce the set of charms being used, as they could for a combo display.

XP Debt
Characters may, with ST approval, enter into XP debt (see Core pg 183). Training effects function as normal.

Thaumaturgy

 * Degrees are reduced in cost to 8xp (6 if occult is favoured), or 3 bonus points (2 if occult is favoured)
 * Knowing a Degree no longer confers knowledge of all subordinate Procedures: thaumaturges must learn a Procedure (for the standard cost) before they can use it.
 * Per the standard rules, upon learning a Degree a thaumaturge is refunded the cost of all Procedures learned within that Degree.
 * Once a Degree is learned, subsequent procedures with that Degree cost no XP to learn, although still require the normal training time.
 * If the thaumaturge has Occult 1+, Apprentice Procedures cost no xp to learn. Otherwise, they cost the normal amount to learn. Once a thaumaturge gains a dot in Occult, the payment for their Apprentice Procedures are refunded, as if they had learned an appropriate Degree.

Essence spent in lieu of Resources for tools/workshop and expended components is committed for the duration of a Procedure.

Combos
Reflexive and Supplemental charms may be added to an already existing combo for a surcharge of 1xp each time the combo is amended. Multiple charms may be added to the combo at this time. Charms may be removed from a combo at this time for no cost.

Combos and Mass Combat / Social Combat
In any context measured in long ticks, charms must still be in a combo to affect the same action, despite the rules about reflexive charms on Core 166. This does not prevent the use of other reflexive charms outside a combo independent of that action (For example, in boosting your DV).

Half Price Excellencies.
Excellencies are half price. During character creation, if you really want an odd number of Excellencies, round the bonus point cost up.

Infinite (Ability) Mastery
Infinite Masteries are learned as separate charms for each Ability as normal, but activated as one charm that reduces the cost of excellencies for all Abilities for which the Solar has learned an Infinite Mastery.

This charm may not reduce the cost of Excellencies by more than the Exalt's Essence; the Solar may not commit any more motes to it than twice their Essence.

(Ability) Essence Flow
Keywords: Overdrive

This charm also provides the Exalt with a 5m Overdrive pool, and allows them to add motes to it each time a non-perfect action enhanced through use of their (Ability) Essence Flow-enhanced Excellency is countered by an enemy's perfect effect. The motes spent on that Excellency activation are added to the Solar's Overdrive pool. This Overdrive effect does not occur if the Solar's action succeeded despite the opposing perfect effect. This includes, for example, the successful application of bad-touch effects despite an opponent's use of perfect soak.

Phoenix Renewal Tactic
Replace this charm's text, starting at "Whenever the Solar would otherwise recover one or more Willpower" with "Whenever the Solar would otherwise recover one or more Willpower from a stunt that resonates with their Motivation, and the Virtue associated with Phoenix Renewal Tactic, they may forego the Willpower reward to regain one channel of the Virtue instead. A Solar may recover no more than one Virtue channel per day from each version of Phoenix Renewal Tactic they know."

In other words, no Virtue channels on waking, and only from stunts that resonate with Motivation and appropriate Virtue. Note the wording on page 123 to the effect that Motivation-resonant stunts must directly further the character's goals and require effort and risk. For the purposes of this Charm that wording should be interpreted very restrictively.

All other Virtue-channel-regaining effects are removed from the game. They may be re-included at the request of players, probably with some modification. See the talk page.

Cosmic Transcendence/Epic Zeal of (Virtue)
As noted above, this charm no longer restores a virtue channel each morning. However, all its effects that cost a virtue channel have that cost removed. Additionally, the Compassion version carries the following additional effect: "Whenever mental influence pushes the Exalt into behaviour that would undermine their Greater Good, through Compulsion or Servitude to a conflicting ideal, the Exalt may pay one Willpower to perfectly dodge that effect. The Exalt may even dodge the effect retroactively, by using the charm in the instant the mental influence turns out to prompt such behaviour."

Fury-Inciting Presence
Is a trap. The righteous fury instilled by this charm also provides the target unit with +1 Might, to a maximum of Might 3.

Half Price Ox-Body Technique
Ox-Body Technique is half price. During character creation, if you want an odd number of instances of Ox-Body Technique, round the bonus point cost up.

Understanding the Court
Has a Duration of one story.

Observer-Deceiving Attack
A concealed Solar making attacks with this charm is not automatically revealed by attacking, though antagonists who see through O-DA can call attention to them normally. In and of itself, O-DA does nothing to make an attack unexpected, merely conceals its source. A successful O-DA DOES remove the difficulty penalty for making an unexpected attack in plain view.

Heart-Seeking Bolt
Is an alternative version of Cascade of Cutting Terror, which costs 3m, is undodgeable, and doubles extra attack succeses for the purposes of calculating damage.

Cascade of Cutting Terror
Throws a fan of unblockable duplicates across any number of targets within a radius of (Essence) yards. Each target is hit by the single attack. The Solar may pay a 2m surcharge when activating CoCT to also activate either Joint-Wounding Attack or Mist On Water Attack as an innate power supplementing this attack.

Returning Weapon Concentration
Is replaced in its entirety with the word "None".

Spirit Weapons
Functions like its Abyssal Mirror, Crypt Bolt Attack (Ab: 134). The prerequisite is changed to Call the Blade. It's worth noting that most Solars have a pet name for this charm that is better than "Spirit Weapons". Some have one that is worse.

Radiant Holocaust Flare
From Abyssals. The Accuracy bonus is replaced with a +5 dice bonus from charms. It gains the Mirror keyword. The Solar version is called Elegant Nova Progression and has Spirit Weapons as its prerequisite.

Allowed Backgrounds

 * All Backgrounds in the Core Rules.
 * Command (MoEP:DB 106)
 * Henchmen (MoEP:DB 110)
 * Reputation (MoEP:DB 110)
 * Retainers (MoEP:DB 111)
 * Face (Scroll of the Monk 152)
 * Others by Storyteller permission.

Backgrounds with XP
All Backgrounds cost XP and require a degree of roleplaying to gain and to keep. The ST will geerally hand out sufficient XP to cover the cost of BAckgrouds he has decided are 'story-critical', especially if they're not the sort of things players would otherwise pay for.

Merits and Flaws (Scroll of the Hero)
Merits and Flaws allowed with ST approval, purchasable with bonus points or XP as appropriate.

Exalted! Resources
Resources can be increased via the 'Backgrounds with XP' houserules as detailed above. Like many other backgrounds, a successful extended dramatic action will generally be sufficient justification for this increase.

To handle the purchasing power of entities of a national scale, the Resources background will be expanded to a 10 dot scale. As individuals will almost never (read as "never") have a resource rating of greater than 5 personally.

It will be necessary for several of our characters to budget for large amounts of Resources, whether for an army, government department, or simply an artifact-crazed marketeer.

Ignoring the grossly discontinuous Resources:cash rate on page 363, each dot of Resources will be 10x bigger than the last. Your dots of Resources is how many zeroes you got after your name.

Resources 'refresh' every so often. As an initial experiment, let's say the slate is cleaned every season. If that proves too restrictive or permissive, we can change it to a month or a year.

That is, you can make up to 9 Resources 2 purchases in a season without impacting your 3 dots of Resources. Or 99 R:1 purchases, or 999 R:0, or any combination thereof. This does not affect the default rule regarding spending above your means: reducing your Resources because of a large purchase means you have eaten into your capital, and that has to be rebuilt before it can refresh.

However, in an attempt to make bartering functional (not to mention charms like Frugal Merchant Method and Insightful Buyer Technique), making a purchase at the above rate requires a successful haggle; a social attack against the merchant's base MDV (which will generally equal the Resource value of the purchase +2). I'm still playing around with exactly how to run this.

Organisations, such as Followers or Command, have an upkeep cost. The Followers text on page 112 suggests that if you have Resources equal to your Followers, you can pay for their upkeep without impacting your Resource base. This suggests that upkeep for N dots of Followers is somewhere between N-1 and 5(N-1). The ST can use this estimate as a baseline for such Backgrounds if and when we start handling large budgets. Paying extra, whether for better equipment, training, or hiring standards, should be a means to increase the proficiency or reach of an organisation.

Punching and Kicking
Let's change the statlines for these two from "punch" and "kick" to "normal blow" and "strong blow", either of which can be performed with the hands or feet. Wuxia is too full of lightning-fast kick flurries for me to accept a literal treatment of the rules here.

This house rule has no mechanical effects at all, and can in fact be freely stunted for without a 'house-rule' at all.

Weapons
Staves

Staves and Clubs may be wielded as martial arts weapons.

Piercing Artifact Weapons

The Piercing tag is removed from all the 2-handed Artifact weapons in the core book, and probably most others besides. The spirit of the rule is to buff soak and lessen the threat of instant death.

The piercing tag is generally much more rare than in offical published material; target arrows, mundane hammers and clinches are the only things that come to mind that retain it.

Errata
See also White Wolf's official errata.

Flaw of Invulnerability: Conviction
The errata's optional modification to the Conviction flaw of Invulnerability shall be used.

Twilight Anima Power
Ditto the 'optional' change to the Twilight Anima Power.