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Who statted up these things?
2015-Jun-25, Thursday 09:46
In preparation for the upcoming Dragon-Blooded game I'm planning to run (more on that in later posts), I'm going through and pulling NPC, spirit, and creature stats into a single document so I don't have to flip through multiple books to find everything I want to use the same way I did with Charms and martial arts.
Both of those are done, by the way. I don't think I've mentioned that.
What I'm finding is that there doesn't seem to be any kind of rhyme or reason to the stats. Some of the changes I'm making are minor, like updating the weapons to 2.5 standards--knives do less damage and so on--but I'm having to edit the stats in other ways because they just don't make much sense to me.
Everyone familiar with Exalted knows about the Mask of Winters being illiterate pre-errata, but why do mortal exorcists have War 3? Are they going to lead groups of monks against armies of ghosts? Why do elite soldiers all have Linguistics 3? Are they polyglot mercenaries? Those are minor, true, but I've already had to edit them in the mortal opponent stats.
And creature attacks are all over the place. Zombies do 4L damage even though they have Strength 5 and punches usually do +0B. Fakharu's dragon breath attack has Speed 10 (and his Bite has Speed 9) in a system where almost all actions are between Speeds 3 and 6. Buck-Ogres can "split their dice pool," which is meaningless in the timing-based Exalted combat system. Austrechs, which are three-meter-tall flightless birds, do 1L damage with their bite. Claw Striders' claw attacks are Speed 8. Tyrant Lizard's bites do 0L damage + Strength, which is 14, but still.
As near as I can tell, this was all decided by hurling darts at a dart board and writing down the results. And I don't want to just handwave everything because Exalted works just fine at low power levels and I want rational stats for future god-blooded or mortals games. Some of the low-power attacks might be due to wanting to avoid rocket tag, where large monsters miss several times and then kill anything they hit, and I'd believe that if pre-errata Exalted wasn't already nuclear missile tag. We'll see if I can pull order out of chaos here or if the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies and it just ends up worse than the original.
Both of those are done, by the way. I don't think I've mentioned that.
What I'm finding is that there doesn't seem to be any kind of rhyme or reason to the stats. Some of the changes I'm making are minor, like updating the weapons to 2.5 standards--knives do less damage and so on--but I'm having to edit the stats in other ways because they just don't make much sense to me.
Everyone familiar with Exalted knows about the Mask of Winters being illiterate pre-errata, but why do mortal exorcists have War 3? Are they going to lead groups of monks against armies of ghosts? Why do elite soldiers all have Linguistics 3? Are they polyglot mercenaries? Those are minor, true, but I've already had to edit them in the mortal opponent stats.
And creature attacks are all over the place. Zombies do 4L damage even though they have Strength 5 and punches usually do +0B. Fakharu's dragon breath attack has Speed 10 (and his Bite has Speed 9) in a system where almost all actions are between Speeds 3 and 6. Buck-Ogres can "split their dice pool," which is meaningless in the timing-based Exalted combat system. Austrechs, which are three-meter-tall flightless birds, do 1L damage with their bite. Claw Striders' claw attacks are Speed 8. Tyrant Lizard's bites do 0L damage + Strength, which is 14, but still.
As near as I can tell, this was all decided by hurling darts at a dart board and writing down the results. And I don't want to just handwave everything because Exalted works just fine at low power levels and I want rational stats for future god-blooded or mortals games. Some of the low-power attacks might be due to wanting to avoid rocket tag, where large monsters miss several times and then kill anything they hit, and I'd believe that if pre-errata Exalted wasn't already nuclear missile tag. We'll see if I can pull order out of chaos here or if the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies and it just ends up worse than the original.
