One thing I wanted was for the Great Curse to be tied to your Essence. As it rose so did your level of potential crazy. It makes no sense to fly of the handle Day 1, as the Solars wouldn't have been able to create the wondrous First Age if they were all bat-shit insane out of the gate. Yet another WTFism from WW/OPP...

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;910140One thing I wanted was for the Great Curse to be tied to your Essence. As it rose so did your level of potential crazy. It makes no sense to fly of the handle Day 1, as the Solars wouldn't have been able to create the wondrous First Age if they were all bat-shit insane out of the gate. Yet another WTFism from WW/OPP...

That's kind of how Aberrant worked, actually.

JG

I'd have like it if it hadn't started to seem like only Solars suffered from the Great Curse at all with other Exalts able to form empires and kingdoms that, while not perfect didn't turn into dystopic nightmares. Hell, the big example of the Sidereal GC, the possibility they jumped the gun in Usurpation has been shelved, the Realm has been getting a steady white wash since 1st and the so called Golden Age of Solar rule keeps getting more and more tarnished until it seems more like a nightmare from the start but at least the trains ran on time.

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;910140One thing I wanted was for the Great Curse to be tied to your Essence. As it rose so did your level of potential crazy. It makes no sense to fly of the handle Day 1, as the Solars wouldn't have been able to create the wondrous First Age if they were all bat-shit insane out of the gate. Yet another WTFism from WW/OPP...

Actually, I found it does work that way, just in a roundabout way. When you are under the effects of the Great Curse as a high-Essence Exalted, your acts of insanity can devastate entire regions, unlike what you'd be able to achieve at lower Essence:).

If you were also acting more crazy-like, that would have been overkill, IME;).

What I've found is that you don't even necessarily NEED the Great Curse. Give your players enough rope and they hang themselves. I've had players:

-Put an entire village to the sword after an extensive bout of torture because SOMEONE NOT EVEN RELATED TO THE VILLAGE ambushed his troops. They just happened to be there for him to vent his spleen.
-Treat Non-Exalts as nothing more than inconvenient scenery to be chewed up and spit out at their leisure.
-Detonate an Essence Nuke that, in conjunction with an Abyssal Artifact, wiped the entirety of civilization in the Southwest off the map.

And that's just what I remember off the top of my head.

The Great Curse is actually a) not that bad in play, b) mostly a bookkeeping exercise/PITA for the GM, and c) not really neccesary. In my opinion. Players get pretty hubristic all on their own.

Quote from: Michael Gray;910220What I've found is that you don't even necessarily NEED the Great Curse. Give your players enough rope and they hang themselves. I've had players:

-Put an entire village to the sword after an extensive bout of torture because SOMEONE NOT EVEN RELATED TO THE VILLAGE ambushed his troops. They just happened to be there for him to vent his spleen.
-Treat Non-Exalts as nothing more than inconvenient scenery to be chewed up and spit out at their leisure.
-Detonate an Essence Nuke that, in conjunction with an Abyssal Artifact, wiped the entirety of civilization in the Southwest off the map.

And that's just what I remember off the top of my head.

The Great Curse is actually a) not that bad in play, b) mostly a bookkeeping exercise/PITA for the GM, and c) not really neccesary. In my opinion. Players get pretty hubristic all on their own.

Admittedly, that's true for quite a few players as well.

Quote from: AsenRG;910223Admittedly, that's true for quite a few players as well.

One success I HAVE had with using the Great Curse is to take the barebones of the Limits (Berzerk Rage, Heart of Stone, etc.) and tell the players: "Guys, every once in a while I want to see you flip out in the manner prescribed by your Limit. If you don't and the longer it goes I'M going to trigger it and it's going to be real, real bad." It takes all the "Did this action go with his Limit? How many points did he get?" bookkeeping aspect of it and also let's it not be as predictable to the players.

Quote from: Michael Gray;910220What I've found is that you don't even necessarily NEED the Great Curse. Give your players enough rope and they hang themselves. I've had players:

-Put an entire village to the sword after an extensive bout of torture because SOMEONE NOT EVEN RELATED TO THE VILLAGE ambushed his troops. They just happened to be there for him to vent his spleen.
-Treat Non-Exalts as nothing more than inconvenient scenery to be chewed up and spit out at their leisure.
-Detonate an Essence Nuke that, in conjunction with an Abyssal Artifact, wiped the entirety of civilization in the Southwest off the map.

And that's just what I remember off the top of my head.

The Great Curse is actually a) not that bad in play, b) mostly a bookkeeping exercise/PITA for the GM, and c) not really neccesary. In my opinion. Players get pretty hubristic all on their own.

That lines up with a time I was running Call of Cthulhu with some old friends. I began to realize that half I invoked the sanity rules, I was cutting off a player who was about to do do something crazy, simply because he got the kind of game we were playing. I quietly decided to stop calling for sanity checks, and PCs managed to freak out just as badly as they would anyway, and probably in more interesting ways than the dice would have provided.

If your players get the Great Curse and think playing a demi-god going mad with power sounds fun, there really isn't any need to quantify that with mechanics.

Quote from: AsenRG;910207Actually, I found it does work that way, just in a roundabout way. When you are under the effects of the Great Curse as a high-Essence Exalted, your acts of insanity can devastate entire regions, unlike what you'd be able to achieve at lower Essence:).

If you were also acting more crazy-like, that would have been overkill, IME;).

That reasoning is silly. Out-of-the-gate, Solars are beasts (at least they used to be). If they stubbed a toe and went on a murder spree, or got butt-hurt over man's inhumanity to man and ran away and hid under a bed for years, the First Age never would've occurred. Plus, the first Exalts were presumably more powerful in order to you know, do their jobs. The devastation would've been enormous. The Great Curse doesn't mean shit to anyone else, in practice. It's a crap mechanic and James Gillen's correct that Aberrant did it, which by its very existence means it did it better.

I see Solars as divine representations of everything SJWs hate: power and being the best. I'm surprised they weren't written as religious Conservatives who fought daiklave control. They're the fall guys for everything.

WW/OPP has a near-masturbatory lust for punishing power for the sake of it being power and it's utter garbage.

Quote from: Baulderstone;910230That lines up with a time I was running Call of Cthulhu with some old friends. I began to realize that half I invoked the sanity rules, I was cutting off a player who was about to do do something crazy, simply because he got the kind of game we were playing. I quietly decided to stop calling for sanity checks, and PCs managed to freak out just as badly as they would anyway, and probably in more interesting ways than the dice would have provided.

If your players get the Great Curse and think playing a demi-god going mad with power sounds fun, there really isn't any need to quantify that with mechanics.

That's a great way to do it as it doesn't take away a player's control in dumb-ass ways. It's obnoxious to say, "Oh, you're feels have been hurt. You slay your honor guard in a fit of rage" while the player sits by helplessly. Guess they should've taken the "I shave my head, give away all my shit and eat berries on a mountaintop" choice...

The Great Curse always felt like a ham fisted way to make you sure you were playing the game right according to the developers wishes and keep the all important WW/ST angst levels high. Like others have pointed out either your players are on board with the idea of playing hubristic passion driven demigods, will end up oing much the same thing just being PCs or aren't really into the idea i the first place. Whipping them with semi random bouts of insanity doesn't really help or even enforce the genre. The epic rages, grand sulks and other fits of passion happened for reason not just as random.

Most the anecdotes I've heard about the GC involve it ruining a session or even a campaign with few exception. It also bugs some players in a verisimilitude sense. One one of their friends flips out and slaughters a village or strips naked and walked the streets lashing themselves with nettles and wailing over the follies of mankind.. its kind of hard to ignore. Even if you're playing amoral pragmatists that kind of instability is dangerous. It's not dramatic, its not genre enforcement and, IMO, its not any fun.

Fortunately, in most editions is also been very easy to ignore.

I've actually always been a fan of the great curse, at least the first edition version which affected everyone. The whole usurpation was the fault of the sidereal Exalted.

The more of them which work together for vision, the more devastatingly inaccurate the vision is. They saw the Solars going mad and had their big meeting.

They saw 3 outcomes.. The world ending, the world continuing in a lesser format if they kill the Solars and raise up the dragon Blooded.. Or the Golden age continuing if they did their job and advised and helped the Solars deal with their madness.

Naturally the curse muddled the vision and they chose wrong.

I also found it an interesting plot point the great curse was unknown to all the Exalted. It would be an interesting plot point if the great curse was discovered as being a thing affecting all Exalted.

Edit : On my phone, so grammar is bad.

We have also had a positive experience with the GC, provided the player has chosen an appropriate GC. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does it is the cumulative result of the PCs actions and has almost always been memorable and tragic. We found that the GC added a sense of growing tension to the game, which helped make Exalted less of a superheroic affair and more mythic fantasy.

There were so many different "interpretations" of the Sidereal Great Curse floating around after awhile it was difficult to determine if it did anything at all. Unless they're planning on some big "reveal" later, the Usurpation was definitely the right choice as of 3rd Edition, no Solars escaped becoming tyrants and monsters and they were going to destroy Creation unless stopped. IIRC (and I don't feel like wading back into that tome to find out) even most of the destruction during and after the uprising was due to the Solar's madness; their unstable devices going haywirse or hidden revenge booby traps going off more so than the battle itself. I guess they'll be going with 2nd edition version where it was mostly over in a day or so with some extended mop up mission to hunt down the few stragglers and murder their families and children (out of necessity of course).

Quote from: Nexus;910320There were so many different "interpretations" of the Sidereal Great Curse floating around after awhile it was difficult to determine if it did anything at all. Unless they're planning on some big "reveal" later, the Usurpation was definitely the right choice as of 3rd Edition, no Solars escaped becoming tyrants and monsters and they were going to destroy Creation unless stopped. IIRC (and I don't feel like wading back into that tome to find out) even most of the destruction during and after the uprising was due to the Solar's madness; their unstable devices going haywirse or hidden revenge booby traps going off more so than the battle itself. I guess they'll be going with 2nd edition version where it was mostly over in a day or so with some extended mop up mission to hunt down the few stragglers and murder their families and children (out of necessity of course).

I may be remembering incorrectly (and I really could, I'm asking if anyone else remembers this) but wasn't there this online community that REALLY loved the Sidereals?  To the point that even some of the devs felt 'obligated' to respond to them in some fashion?