I'm thinking of making a Twilight caste martial artist accountant type character. How well do the new rules work for say, inventing a martial art form that attacks people's credit scores directly?
"Coffee! Coffeecoffeecoffee! Coffee! Not as strong as Meth-amphetamine, but it lets you keep your teeth!"Can anyone help me with a clarification of the Brawl/Martial Arts rules?
"Martial Arts cannot be taken as a Caste or Favored Ability by itself. Instead, if Brawl is a Caste or Favored Ability, then so is Martial Arts"
Does this mean you'd end up with a free favored ability (for a total of 6), but have 1 less initial dot to distribute through your abilities (since all favored abilities require 1 dot)? Or does it use up both one of your favored abilities, and a dot?
"Coffee! Coffeecoffeecoffee! Coffee! Not as strong as Meth-amphetamine, but it lets you keep your teeth!"3e, right? There is an infinite amount of Martial Arts Abilities, so demanding to drop a dot into all of them is silly. Moreover, by default rules you need to drop 1 dot in Brawl to start on any MA.
So basically: caste/fav selection - you get brawl and all MA abilities simultaneously for 1 slot; mandatory favoured dot goes into Brawl regardless of whether you intent to advance Brawl or MA.
It DID seem really, really weird to make "being able to do martial arts in a heavily asia inspired setting" require you to dump SO MUCH of your starting resources into it for like, no real reason.
Looking at the MA in the book, there's no indication of power greater than just "I hit things with my sword impossibly good" to compensate for the higher price. At least not at the same cost as "I have the resources of a successful dynast"
edited 3rd Nov '15 11:25:33 PM by Lanceleoghauni
"Coffee! Coffeecoffeecoffee! Coffee! Not as strong as Meth-amphetamine, but it lets you keep your teeth!"I mean they clearly want Martial Arts to require dedication, but I'm wondering if OOC it's WORTH the hassle considering you can just get /literally any other combat skill/ and be as effective if not moreso with less investment.
"Coffee! Coffeecoffeecoffee! Coffee! Not as strong as Meth-amphetamine, but it lets you keep your teeth!"![]()
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Or rather "doing a couple useful but specific tricks with swords but excluding the use of every other weapon that generalists can easily". That alone is a price enough really.
Yes, they bungled it up and failed the promises of fixing the past issue of how there isn't really anybody actually having those martial arts traditions in the world.
They planned to include mote-less Techniques in the MA Styles, giving mortals a reason to have them, and the merit may have been a price for them, but they got removed during development. Now there is no reason whatsoever for mortals to pay the price of dedication themselves to kung-fu.
edited 4th Nov '15 12:26:14 AM by Adannor
That's why my Eclipse caste accountant has Crane style. I like the idea of him being a sort of official looking, but nonthreatening kind of guy. The kindly sifu who gets attacked by the Wyld hunt in a tea house and fends them off with nothing but his chopsticks without spilling his drink.
My current pencilling out of the character.
He'd be taking Infallible Messenger as his terrestrial level spell
edited 4th Nov '15 3:17:52 AM by Lanceleoghauni
"Coffee! Coffeecoffeecoffee! Coffee! Not as strong as Meth-amphetamine, but it lets you keep your teeth!"![]()
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I've certainly taken non-mechanically-optimal options because they were just that fucking cool, but they weren't mechanically suboptimal because they were gated off behind half my starting background dots.
The promise was to have them actually mechanically exist. As they are now, they don't. The fluff claims are completely unsupported mechanically. Just like in 2e there were "long traditions" and "schools" of martial arts which couldn't exist because any CMA had a scant handful of practicioners in history.
As it stands now, mechanics represent that mortals are able to learn alleged martial art styles, at great cost and effort, which gives them absolutely nothing over a guy that just generally learns how to fight.
If they'd kept in the mechanical clusterfuck that Techniques reportedly turned into, it'd eat a bunch of wordcount and everyone would complain about it anyway. Not having them sounds like the lesser evil to me.
Also, it's not like the dots on a character sheet were ever, or ever will be as long as they keep the Storyteller system, the most super-accurate measurement of how the people in-universe experience these skills. There are, after all, more than five distinct and discrete levels of training in [INSERT SKILL HERE] across the spectrum from "stick them with the pointy end" to "world-class master."
Also also, in the kind of fiction Exalted draws from if you practice a martial art for the sole purpose of being mechanically optimal you're an asshole who is going to get beaten up by the hero while inspiring music plays. So mortal practitioners either take it up at least partly for other reasons or eat a lot of Justice Punches.
And the disciplined soldier has nothing to differentiate himself from the raging barbarian who has nothing to differentiate himself from the crime lord's enforcer. It's not just combat skills, either. A Lore score can represent a classical education, or it can represent decades of experience reading the weather and the signs of game. Performance can be anything from satire to strip tease. Mortal skills being less distinct in the mechanics than the fluff is not exactly a martial-arts-only thing.
>A Lore score can represent a classical education, or it can represent decades of experience reading the weather and the signs of game. Performance can be anything from satire to strip tease. Mortal skills being less distinct in the mechanics than the fluff is not exactly a martial-arts-only thing.
See, those are not separate ranked skills
As it stands, a mortal practicioner of Silver Voiced Nightingale is a just a guy that punches you while shouting, they don't get any actual kiai or anything at all.
Also that. "Being a martial artist" carries equal weight in the world to "being as wealthy as one of the Exalted nobles of the Realm".
edited 4th Nov '15 12:09:17 PM by Adannor

I'm pretty sure that's exactly why they put it in.