Title. This is how Exalted 3e combat works, if you don't know: you build up Initiative by stealing it from the enemy with Withering attacks. When initiative is fully reduced to 0, the enemy enters Crash, and becomes vulnerable to a Decisive attack, which uses your built up Initiative to attack the health of the enemy directly. After that, your Initiative resets back to a base value- 3.

Quote from: MeganovaStella on October 27, 2024, 05:40:22 AMTitle. This is how Exalted 3e combat works, if you don't know: you build up Initiative by stealing it from the enemy with Withering attacks. When initiative is fully reduced to 0, the enemy enters Crash, and becomes vulnerable to a Decisive attack, which uses your built up Initiative to attack the health of the enemy directly. After that, your Initiative resets back to a base value- 3.

Incorrect.

You can launch a decisive attack at any time, it's just not likely to do much without a lot of initiative built up.

Crashing an opponent prevents THEM from launching decisive attacks or using certain charms. The only advantage to you in crashing them is getting 5 more initiative from the withering attack that crashed them.

Beyond citing the base combat rules, what's your point?

Quote from: Chris24601 on October 27, 2024, 08:15:13 AM

Quote from: MeganovaStella on October 27, 2024, 05:40:22 AMTitle. This is how Exalted 3e combat works, if you don't know: you build up Initiative by stealing it from the enemy with Withering attacks. When initiative is fully reduced to 0, the enemy enters Crash, and becomes vulnerable to a Decisive attack, which uses your built up Initiative to attack the health of the enemy directly. After that, your Initiative resets back to a base value- 3.

Incorrect.

You can launch a decisive attack at any time, it's just not likely to do much without a lot of initiative built up.

Crashing an opponent prevents THEM from launching decisive attacks or using certain charms. The only advantage to you in crashing them is getting 5 more initiative from the withering attack that crashed them.

Beyond citing the base combat rules, what's your point?

I stand corrected. Thank you. My point was that if the base combat system was bad, why so, or if it was good, why so?

Honestly? I kinda wish I didn't have to correct you because I think the system would actually be better if a target had to be crashed before a decisive attack could be launched.

This is mainly because, as it actually works, someone could build up a ton of initiative attacking various targets and then use it against a completely different one, even one brimming with its own built-up initiative. That just feels extremely weird to me... and your own high initiative (meant to simulate your control over the flow of the battle around you) offers ZERO protection from someone's decisive attack.

Exalted 3e's combat system works best for 1v1 duels and even with its battle group rules for masses of mooks breaks down into a complete slog past about 3-4 PCs. When you're only stealing initiative from 1-2 opponents engaged in the same fight the above weirdness is hidden because to have built up enough initiative to make your decisive attack, their own initiative would have been withered away.

The other major issue I have with Exalted 3e that crops up both in the core system and many fan-attempted fixes is that both seem to have the philosophy of "never do in two steps what you could do in ten steps."

 There is a LOT of what I consider useless bloat in resolution. Let's start with the most basic attack in the game, the withering attack. First you make an attack roll using a dice pool that routinely and without charms consists of double digits worth of dice (14-15 dice is not unusual at all even for a starting character). You roll that, subtract the target's defense from the successes scored and add the remainder to your weapons base damage to make ANOTHER roll (again typically with double digits of dice) and compare that to the target's Soak score to determine how much initiative they lose and you gain.

Various charms can come into play at ANY point in those steps; adding dice, subtracting dice, changing which die numbers count as successes, causing some numbers to count as additional successes, rerolling certain numbers once, X number of times, or until none appear, causing other dice results (typically 1s) to produce effects, etc. Likewise, describing your attack or defense in a way the GM finds appealing can add a stunt bonus to either.

In short, resolving just one attack, even without charms, can require rolling and sorting two dozen dice. You then have to keep track of your initiative (including tracking it as a negative number if you've been crashed) and how many times a target has been attacked during a round because "onslaught penalties" will effect their defense score on subsequent attacks. If I weren't playing via virtual tabletop, I'd have walked away because it is well beyond the scale of complexity I find enjoyable.

And then, you have Decisive Attacks, which use entirely different numbers... your weapon's accuracy doesn't apply, Soak doesn't apply, but a complly different stat does, your weapon damage doesn't apply, just your built up initiative which is rolled as a dice pool and subtracted from actual health.

Basically, you're having to keep track of two separate resolution methods for attacks which, per the fluff are visually and from the character's perspective are identical (your PC is still trying to disembowel your opponent when you make a withering attack, you as a player have pre-decided the results of that attack will earn you initiative instead of successfully skewering them).

I can think of numerous ways this could be improved, particularly given the default dice results are literally 50/50 (d10, 7+ is one success, a 10 counts as two successes).

Remove the distinction between withering and decisive. Add a tweaked weapon damage value to the attack roll, add soak to the defense value. Every success steals an initiative... if you're crashed it instead deals damage to your health levels. You're now down to one check per attack and no dissociation between player and PC with withering vs. decisive attacks.