It's that time. For those of you joining us from Kickstarter-land or other forums, welcome
Just a little preliminary before we get started though—I know everyone really wants to see this but for the sake of my sanity as I reply to the thread please try to keep the following in mind:
• The point of this thread is to explain the play dynamic of the EX3 combat engine. I'm not showing off the mechanics of the EX3 combat engine in this thread. The combat rules are 7,000 words long, and I put them all there so the rules would be clear and cover everything. I don't want to show off just part of the rules and leave people walking away thinking we missed stuff! I also am not going to post the entire combat rules section before the book is out because I want you to actually buy the book to play the game
(For the sake of comparison, the EX2 combat rules were about 17,000 words long; this is a much leaner system.)
• This isn't the EX2 combat engine plus slight clean-up. The old paradigm does not apply, EX3 has not been built around it. It's not the nWoD engine either. It is a new thing that should be easy to grasp and use for long-time White Wolf fans (and also for newcomers), but also visibly different from anything they've used before in a WW game. Anyone citing the EX2 combat engine as a reason this or that won't work gets banished to the land of wind and ghosts!
• This thread is going to have lots of people flocking to it to read this post from the Kickstarter and other messageboards, so let's try not to get too much blood on the floor in front of our guests
Okay, that said--
The Philosophy of EX3 combat.
Exalted 1 and Exalted 2 both used what I think of an 'action model' combat engines-- that is to say, when you rolled your dice pool, that represented a discrete action. This dice roll is an attack, for example, and it tells me how good the attack is.
This is a good model in that it feels very textured and involved-- "my roll represents my attack, and because I'm a ferociously skilled swordsman, I get to roll a lot of dice." That's visceral, and good.
The problem of the system was that what Exalted wanted to emulate, when two of its larger-than-life heroes battled, was the martial clashes of cinema (whether this meant Errol Flynn, Chinese wuxia, or Jedi lightsaber battles was largely up to the tastes of the group playing). And Exalted did a fairly faithful job of recreating this! Unfortunately, an action-by-action recitation of such a battle usually looks like this: *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *whiff* *dead*
That's faithful to the source material, but we felt that it had problems as a gameplay model-- as a player, it was frustrating. It felt like you were getting nowhere, until very suddenly you won or lost. But in the epics, and in cinema (again, this is true whether you're talking Shaw Brothers kung fu, Lu Bu vs the Brotherhood of the Peach Orchard, or Luke Skywalker vs Darth Vader), most of the storytelling of the fight is contained in that "dead zone" where every swing is getting blocked or dodged or only banging the enemy around and otherwise generally not accomplishing its main goal of killing or defeating the other guy. It's not just whiff-whiff-whiff-- we can look at that fight and see how the momentum of the battle is running, we can tell who's winning and losing, and we can tell when someone has just pulled a marvelous reversal and is mounting a comeback. When Luke and Vader fight in Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader only strikes a single blow that really injures Luke-- the last one that cuts off his hand-- but we can see that Vader is clearly dominating the fight before that. Luke makes a desperate strike near the end, but only manages to graze Vader's arm and goad him on finish things by battering Luke to the end of the bridge and ending the fight with a decisive blow. That's good storytelling, that's an exciting fight scene-- much more than just the sum of "whiff whiff whiff whiff over."
That's what EX3 aims to capture, by turning the 'dead zone' into something compelling.
In Exalted Third Edition, the majority of attacks heroes launch at one another don't damage the opponent's health track*. Instead, these attacks are used to build momentum, gain the upper hand, and place the character in an advantageous position relative to his opponent(s!). They are also calculated to stymie the enemy's attempts to do the same, to disrupt his tempo, and to confound his efforts to harm you. If an attack of this sort succeeds, then it might force the opponent back, batter down his defenses, push him into disadvantageous position, or even land a blow that rattles him but inflicts no telling injury.
Once you feel you've garnered sufficient advantage, your character can attempt to launch an attack which can damage the enemy's Health Track-- and if you've fought well enough, picked your moment well, and the dice are with you, you might even slay your opponent in a single well-aimed blow, striking off his head or running him through! However, attempting to strike such a blow with undue haste can be quite risky-- it might even create an opportunity for the opponent to turn the tables completely, and seize control of the fight!
This is the battle dynamics philosophy of EX3, and is the result its combat engine has been designed to realize.
*Note: This is a mechanical abstraction intended to represent the ebb and flow of cinematic combat, not an actual thing that exists in the setting. When a Solar and an Abyssal are swinging daiklaves at one another, they very much are trying to cut and kill their enemy with each blow-- even if we, the players, know that all the attacks this round are able to do is to win them advantage.
