Falling Blossom Style is Retarded

Joseph

Member
A few Charms combine to make this Style just plain stupid.  The first one, of course, is the very first Charm in the tree.  This Charm, for one mote, allows you to redirect an attack against the person you are defending to you.  For an Essence 1 Charm of any variety -- much less one in Terrestrial Martial Arts -- that is ridiculously good if used with any degree of strategy at all.  It essentially constitutes you being able to perfectly defend others, albeit at the cost of having to then deal with the attack yourself.  


The next really ridiculous Charm in this tree is Purity of Purpose Attack, which makes your attack perfect in the same way Accuracy Without Distance is perfect, so long as you roll at least 1 success on the attack.  For a Terrestrial Martial Art Charm, that's ridiculous.  Now, they try to balance this obvious excessive power for its station by making it cost an experience point.  This doesn't balance the Charm, though, it simply ensures the overpowered Charm will never be used, because spending a point of XP on a single attack is just silly, no matter what it does.  So instead of balancing properly, this Charm ends up being both too powerful in theory given its type, Ability, and requirements, AND useless in practice.  Good job on that one.


Next up is Verse of the Martyr, a day long Charm that ONLY costs you 15 committed motes and your LIFE.  In return for this, all virtue channeling done during the day gives you extra successes instead of extra dice, and you twist fate so whatever you're doing stands a chance of success, even if it normally would not.  This is another example the problem with Purity of Purpose Attack, sadly, and perhaps in an even more pronounced fashion.  The effect is RIDICULOUSLY powerful, giving you not only what amounts to a nice chunk of automatic successes on any turn you care to spend a willpower, but the Ability to REWEAVE FATE at a level even Sidereals can't really do without walking up to the Loom and weaving it directly or planning it out in a committee and sending instructions to the Pattern Spiders; that's patently retarded for a Terrestrial Martial Art that's a mere Essence 3.  I wouldn't expect a SIDEREAL Style to be able to reweave Fate like that.  The ridiculous cost of 15 motes and your LIFE doesn't balance this, it once again simply ensures you'll never use it.  Ridiculous effects aren't balanced by ridiculous costs, it just means the Charm is problematic on two fronts.


And finally, the rest of the Charms in the tree pretty much suffer from terminal triteness, not being particularly interesting, useful, or cool at all.  The tree overall has no synergy what so ever, and the only real unifying theme is "suicide for your master," which might SEEM cool, but really, really isn't.


Poorly thought out in almost every way, totally unthematic, and an excellent example of crushing consistency of any variety.  Any Style that lets Terrestrial Martial Arts practicioners casually rewrite Fate pretty much deserves an F, everything else is icing on the cake of its failure.
 
Generally, when people complain about power creep in Exalted I roll my eyes.  The corebook said that Solars were the most powerful, followed by Sidereals and Lunars, followed by Dragon-blooded, and by gum that's the way it stayed.  It perplexed me when people complained that Sidereals were brokenly powerful, for example.


Cult of the Illuminated, however, is the essence of power creep.  It's the only Exalted supplement I'd reccomend disregarding entirely.
 
I'm not seeing how CotI has power creep going for it. Nothing in there really seemed very powerful at all.


I'm not exactly of the opinion that Sidereals are brokenly powerful, but Borgstrom's come out and said things like, "If Solar Charms weren't showing their age, Sidereal Charms would on average cost about 20% again more motes." and "few prerequisites, some missing Charms, and a quick route to the top---but that's all you ever get" goes away. You can simulate this best by giving Solars 1.5x as many Charms."


It kinda implies Sidereals got made more powerful than perhaps they ought to relative to Solars. Her charm design factored in revision of Solar charms we didn't get to see until the PG (which were changes balanced against a whole different combat system).
 
I'm convinced now that actually printing the Style in full is the retarded thing. The Sidereals don't teach that Style to the Solars, they reserve it for mortals and Terrestrials. At the Tabernacle, they don't even teach Terrestrial level styles to Solars, and that seems the most likely place for them to pick it up.


They could have had an aside about it. "Some of the Tiger Warriors and Dragon-Blooded who serve Solars learn Falling Blossom Style. It is a Terrestrial level style that grants the practitioner remarkable power inexchange for giving his life in the service of his Solar master." That would have been enough.
 
Andrew02 said:
They could have had an aside about it. "Some of the Tiger Warriors and Dragon-Blooded who serve Solars learn Falling Blossom Style. It is a Terrestrial level style that grants the practitioner remarkable power inexchange for giving his life in the service of his Solar master." That would have been enough.
Having seen Exalted fanboys out there, I predict that the immediate reaction would have been "zLOL NEW MA STYL3" followed by a demand for a full Charm tree, favored weapons, etc.  Something about MA styles clicks off the brain in some gamers.
 
emhache said:
 It perplexed me when people complained that Sidereals were brokenly powerful, for example.
....


...They can spend two motes to dodge a fucking battle. Do people still not get this?
 
Stillborn said:
Andrew02 said:
I'm not seeing how CotI has power creep going for it.
Ditto.


-S
Incidentally, my problem with Cult of the Illuminated has little to do with actual power creep.  The vast majority of the book just wasn't very interesting or well thought out, with superficial details that seemed to contradict one another (such as the one I mentioned in my other thread on that Brawl Charm).  


Even this Style isn't what I'd call overpowered overall, just stupid.  It can create a few EFFECTS that are overpowered for its level and requisites, but they're countered by costs that no one would even consider paying for the effects.  The result is simply a Charm that's bad in every way instead of just some ways, and the Style itself doesn't click very well.


In fact, the only thing I'd call "power creep" in this book is the most obvious thing: the chargen rules.  Illuminated Solars, in addition to having the flat out best Charms, simply have a flat out better chargen than any other Exalt type.  It's a power gamers dream, and completely indicative of power creep, catering to power gamers that want to play Solars.  In the end, though, it's not really that big a deal, as chargen rules are the single most easily house ruled feature of any game, and a large portion of games alter chargen rules anyway.
 
one more thing... it said that mortal thaumatages can learn the style... but how could they make USE of it in a useful fashion... since they cant form combos... and they style forbids armor.
 
I do see the life costing charm being used. Namely buy the terrestrial retainer to a solar character. High fantasy has many examples of somebody dying for there master and players are often quite willing to sell there retainers lives. However retainers do need to be built according to the rules so the full charm tree is not just a curiosity for the martial arts nutters, it is also something that could be needed.


I do however not like the “reweave fateâ€
 
Maryuoh said:
emhache said:
It perplexed me when people complained that Sidereals were brokenly powerful, for example.
....


...They can spend two motes to dodge a fucking battle. Do people still not get this?
They can spend two motes to lose the ability to influence a fucking battle.  They trade personal safety for the ability to DO THEIR FUCKING JOBS, which is to influence the direction of the world.


I get that they can dodge a battle.  Do you acknowledge that there are consequences for them doing so, in many cases?
 
I do see the life costing charm being used. Namely buy the terrestrial retainer to a solar character. High fantasy has many examples of somebody dying for there master and players are often quite willing to sell there retainers lives. However retainers do need to be built according to the rules so the full charm tree is not just a curiosity for the martial arts nutters, it is also something that could be needed.
I do however not like the “reweave fateâ€
 
<- Hates CotI as well. But this thread died a long time ago :P Is it some favorite new thing of bringing up old threads where Joseph is writing stuff?
 
I'm going to make use of a variant of Falling Blossom for the "bodyguards" of a main Fair Folk villian I'll be using soon. Basically, the style is mechanically identical, but rather than being based on devotion, it's based on the types of oaths and obligations that run Raksha society. It also makes a bit more sense for raksha, as physical death isn't really that big of a deal for them. Gossamer cloth armor also helps, since I allow it with MA styles in my campaign. It's also a shortish tree, which helps raksha a bit as well.
 
Can FF learn martial arts? I figured they could pretend in the same way as gods, but not truly learn the arts of enlightenment and self-perfection..


And sure, dodging out of a battle prevents them from affecting it.


But don't you think solars would be better off with that ability? They could dodge wyld hunts. The DBs would be screwed because they'd frequently miss their targets because of that charm.


In essence, it's the best defence possible. If things aren't nice, I wasn't there. And that's not broken? If it requires effort to justify, it's not worth justifying. It's like saying that Wyld Shaping Technique wasn't broken because there was a chance you'd turn into a wheel.
 
Samiel said:
Can FF learn martial arts?
They can buy a mutation, Root of the Perfected Lotus, that allows them to learn supernatural martial arts like Terrestrials.
 
Hmmm.. is there a disadvantage to that, being a fair folk?


At least as far as I understand the way the MA works, the ability to learn it means that the FF become, in essence, a part of creation... I'd have thought only the MF could learn MA. I dunno, I don't like that. Unless they change or have some massive difficulty using their old wyld-based charms, I think it's thematically.. asymmetric. That's a good word.
 
Samiel said:
Hmmm.. is there a disadvantage to that, being a fair folk?
The mutation is fairly expensive (4 mp) and MA charms cost twice (or more) xp than raksha charms.


As for thematic problems, I think it works OK. The Fair Folk book contains numerous characters that are specifically mentioned as being blind to the fact that they have started to "take root" in Creation, and that the Wyld they seek to impose on Creation would probably now destroy them.


Essentially, the mutation is basically useless to every raksha except the ones who have given way to creation, at least partially.
 
wich woul be the Raksha u play as. The Raksha who have not been "tainted" by creation are Unshaped.
 

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