26 October 2008

Back and Forth on Creation is Burning.

Good heavens! November already – how the time flies. I beg you to forgive the unusual gap in my performance, and to please believe that the following has lingered in draft form for many a week. And thus, I begin:

Permit me to take this opportunity to winge about Exalted. This is not without purpose! I winge, dear reader, for Great Justice, and because it is a lead-in to today's commentary/rant.

I may have said (and if I have, I do beg your forgiveness) that Exalted was (and is) one of the best games out there. The sprawling, go-anywhere setting, the East-meets-West fusion, the juicy Campbellian archetypes of the titanomachia, of empires gone wrong...

But the system, frankly, sucks. And with the recent second edition, hard as it may be to believe, the system sucks worse. I know – I too thought new editions were made for the purposes of de-sucking an established work. The corebook is clean, I'll grant you that: but the surfeit of oddness (ranging from cut/paste errors in Charm structure) to what, to an outsider, resembles peenar-waving "LOLZ mah Xalts beter than urs" style power-creep makes the many sourcebooks a) bad investments and b) physically painful to read. The exception is the second edition Lunars book: you may take your old Lunars book and line birdcages with it, and it will probably be of slightly greater use.

So what to do about all this system-suckery? My hypothesis is this: if you take a great system (with a tightly-written yet somewhat run-of-the-mill setting) and inoculate it with a superb setting (where the system is, for my purposes, irretrievably broken) awesomeness will precipitate out on to the gaming table. Thus, "Creation is Burning," which will either imminentize the Eschaton or cause said awesomeness to crystallize out of solution, drifting down like manna to obscure our character sheets.

To that end, permit me to introduce Dr. Odie, to whom all credit is due for his command of Burning Wheel and Exalted: and whose laser-sharp focus and insights of crystalline precision drive the few and blurry thoughts I have about this system-conversion experiment. A draft of Creation is Burning made its way to him, and he responded with a thoughtful critique some several hundred words longer than the original document.

Rather than pour innumerable hours into an attempt to fix each Charm and balance it against the others through a thorough conversion -- an attempt which I suspect would be doomed to futility before it began -- my answer is to devise a system whereby one can reproduce the awesome might of the Exalted without bogging the (already very complex) Burning Wheel rules down with a 400-page book for each Exalt type. Obviously, creating such an approximation involves a certain degree of subjectivity; just as two games of Exalted from two different groups will almost certainly vary wildly on their scope and power level (Essence-5 Solars vs. Dragon Kings in Rathess), asking two different gaming groups "what makes Exalted, Exalted?" will yield vastly different responses. I disagree with the groups who use Wushu or similarly light rules for their Exalted conversions, leaving most if not all variations of Charm and technique to flavor text or simple narration; I desire my games to have more mechanical weight than mere ephemera. Yet it also seems that a Charm-to-Charm, 1:1 conversion of every mechanic in Exalted misses the point as well. If that were our intent, why not simply revise the Exalted rule and Charm set to a more balanced and pleasing version, and perhaps port over the BITs from Burning Wheel -- in effect, a conversion not of Exalted to Burning Wheel, but vice versa? While you're free to undertake such a Herculean task yourself, my interest lies in finding the middle ground between those two extremes.


An incredibly salient point: I admit to the geeky adrenaline-rush instinctive "convert every Exalted charm to Burning Wheel" initial effort, but the good Dr. Odie's near-Socratic dialogue put the brakes on that.

With Burning Wheel's strong focus on Beliefs and Instincts as player priorities, I really don't know that Exalted's Virtues are required. One Belief and Instinct devoted to each would surely be enough; if you want a Compassionate character, a Belief (that, as a bonus, ties into the story at hand!) and an Instinct like "Always help the helpless" would be more than enough to get you in trouble. Limit Break, though. Not sure how we'd want to do that. Not sure at all, actually. An obvious one is that every time you don't follow an Instinct (or maybe a Belief, as well), you rack up points toward Limit, but what does a Limit Break entail? This bears further pondering.


My response:

I recognize that BW offers up a buffet of emotional meatiness with BITs. And perhaps a set of Virtue traits is gilding the lily, but it seemed appropriate, given the emphasis on Virtues, and craziness, and the Great Curse... I was strongly influenced by Blossom's Honor/Shame mechanics, though I would certainly not suggest seppuku if a character's Valor exceeded his Temperance. But that balancing act was the root of how I initially envisioned the Great Curse: if you go into Virtue imbalance, you start to suffer the Curse -- when your Compassion is at 6 and everything else is a 3, you get a bit wonky, and start giving away all your gear to the poor -- or you decide to euthanize a nation to end its suffering peacefully and without pain. How this interacts with Limit, eh. I'm not sure. In my foggy initial concept Limit was less important than virtue imbalance...
Maybe just having Virtues reflected in BITs is a better idea after all. Or, just picking up Virtue die traits! They could give you a little bennie, like channeling virtues in E(X)E -- and if your fellow players thought you weren't displaying the appropriate level of Compassion, Valor, etc. then Bam! Off it goes. If you're displaying more, then Bam! You get another one. Maybe suggest characters pick two Virtue traits from, I dunno, 3 or 4 example traits per Virtue. Like: Bravado (Valor) Dt Being outnumbered is nothing -- when the deck is stacked against you, that's when you shine. +1D to all Steel and combat rolls when clearly outnumbered. Advocate (Compassion) Dt You speak for those whom society has silenced. +2S to your Body of Argument in any Duel of Wits when defending or promoting the interests of a disadvantaged social group (slaves, the poor, etc.). So it's kind of like you're automatically channeling the virtue, whenever appropriate.

The jury is still out on that. I must say, though, that after having read the Magic Burner I am sold on using Practical Magic as the basis for Excellencies in CiB, per Dr. Odie's suggestion:

Having had the time to go over the Magic Burner, I note that there's a magic system called "Practical Magic" wherein magic is common and low-key; rather than mighty wizards knowing the spells to end all life, everybody knows a little bit. All doctors know charms to knit bones together and encourage flesh to mend, lawyers and magistrates know minor geas spells, et cetera. The result is that the Sorcery skill becomes highly available, with the caveat that you must purchase (or learn in-game) the ability to use it separately for each skill category. Swap "Sorcery" for "Charms" and you have exactly how I proposed we divide Charm use up (that is, along the broader skill categories). Therefore, I'm inclined to run with that as our base for Charms. First Martial Excellency, Third Social Excellency, Second Crafting Excellency, and so on.


An emphasis of the Exalted game as published is that the character's Virtues (to wit: Valor, Compassion, Conviction, and Temperance) carry an ancient curse, laid down at the close of the titanomachia, when the gods and their Exalted comrades sealed the surviving Primordials in a prison of their own flesh and oaths. The thrust of the curse was that these virtues would incur wicked, foolish, arrogant behavior – that they would carry the Exalts to ill ends through a sort of reductio ad absurdum process. An incredibly Valorous Exalt would be driven to greater and greater deeds of might, challenging mythic beasts, fellow Exalts, and perhaps even the gods in a quest for a worthy opponent. A supernally Compassionate Exalt might choose to euthanize an entire nation to ease their pain, or be driven to destroy death. Yes, Exalted thinks big. The next (or a next, anyway) task is to see where these Virtues fit into CiB. The good Dr. Odie says:

Certainly what will most strongly determine the preferred route for Virtues is what we want to happen for (or in lieu of) Limit Break. If you want to pursue the idea of Virtue imbalance causing trouble, then it makes sense to track each Virtue as its own attribute. If you are more concerned with Limit as originally conceived -- a track that builds up and builds up and then blows up, taking your character's sanity with it -- it makes more sense to focus on tracking Limit, and increment the counter whenever players betray character Beliefs or suppress Instincts. I'm not sure where I think the best course lies. I do know that Burning Wheel very rarely takes character control away from the player totally, and so I'm hesitant to ascribe any compulsions in either form (via Limit Break or through Virtue imbalance). I really like your Virtue die trait idea, though.


With allies such as this in my quest for gaming greatness, how can I fail?

Dr. Madu

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