Talk:Huitzil

On the Appear Charm: The ability to incorporate mundane things into your regalia is an updated version of Kiai 1, a power I don't want to lose ... and Appear seems like the logical place to put it.

The idea I want to capture in Fuego is spectacle -- Swords uses Appear not to avoid attention like Spades, but to draw it, like a bonfire on a hilltop. I admit becoming a beautiful flashlight doesn't quite measure up to that ...

I want to model much of Aqua on psychic powers; so an Aqua illusion isn't so much an objective thing, as a psychic projection. Hence "Chameleon" turning you into what your audience expects to see. MichaelBrazier 08:02, March 9, 2010 (UTC)

But still, having everything limited to your own appearance is just too limiting. Aqua's illusionary images could exist only in the target's mind, while Terra's are for everyone but simpler?

The problem with having Fuego's Invocation draw all attention is that depending on how you interpret "attention", it's going to be somethign that either overlaps too much with Legno, or something that Champions would want to have but Troubadours wouldn't. Perhaps something like a social version of the old Cry Havoc Kiai Charm, where you cast it and people take a penalty to interact with people other than you? But being the center of attention still feels like something more in Legno's field.Huitzil 09:20, March 9, 2010 (UTC)

March 17
On the notion that "all the cool and useful effects shouldn't be in Invocations": Basic useful effects go into the general Charms, as in fact they have; but the cool effects are Invoked, because that's why buying Invocations is worth doing. The Restore Charm is a case in point: healing damage is the most basic thing you can do with it, and the thing everyone will want to do, so it goes in as the base power. Cleaning out toxins and curing madness are more specialized and cooler powers -- which is why they aren't in the general Charm; they are perfect examples of things Invocations unlock. (Indeed, curing madness is powerful enough to be an apex power. At the moment, in my private draft I've placed Balm's Mesmerize as the Restore/Aqua variation, and Reclaim as the Restore/Aqua apex.)

As for Excel, EarthScorpion's objection to it is, I think, decisive: the concept of "athletic feats" doesn't Invoke well, and if you generalize it to "excelling in one's chosen field" it overlaps with Bless, Protect and Restore. So Excel is not distinctive enough to be a full Charm. It's an indicator that it's fairly easy to find good Invocation variations for Banish, the narrowest of the 10 present Charms as a concept, but not nearly as easy to find them for Excel ...

I have noticed that you tend to want Princesses to have big powers at a small cost -- as here, the suggestion that they be able to heal aggravated damage for only 2 Charm dots, and your earlier desire to keep the Circle of Lights roll at Inner Light + Empathy + the Merit, despite the way that this basically gives the Hopeful a never-ending supply of Wisps. I really don't think it helps the game to turn the Hopeful into the munchkin's favorite splat, but that's the tendency of a lot of your ideas.

I do admit that the Protect/Legno upgrade is weak, compared to the rest, but combat-time regeneration would be far too strong. I'm thinking now that I should follow the "friendship" theme instead -- the armor makes it hard for others to attack you, provided that you haven't attacked them yet? MichaelBrazier 20:37, March 17, 2010 (UTC)

I completely disagree about putting all the "cool" effects in Invocations, and doubly so for Balm. We can't make all of your cool powers dictated by your Queen, it's just too limiting. It's absurd to say that putting cool powers in the basic Charms will mean that people won't want to buy Invocations -- people will still want access to the Invoked powers! And we don't want to force people to dabble, since their element is a reflection of their philosophy of the world, so we don't want to make it so each person only gets one cool power per Charm tree before they get to the 5-dot level. And curing toxins isn't "cool", it's a baseline ability.

And if your problem with Excel is it's hard to make Invocations for it, that would become moot if I finished the Invocations for it. If I did that, would you put it in and make Fight universal-affinity? I've already said on the 12th that the current Charm set is not picking up the slack it was alleged to in giving other Callings combat ability.

I didn't want to keep the Circle of Lights roll as IL + Empathy, I wanted to try IL + Merit ; and no, I don't think healing agg at two dots in is as big a deal as you make it out to be. I don't want Princesses to be the munchkin's favorite splat, but I don't want them to be weak, and the power curve is being set by Changelings and Sin-Eaters. Neither of them are really "healers", but Princesses ARE, so Princesses who heal should be as good at healing as other splats are at doing the stuff they are good at. Right now they're as good at healing as other splats are good at healing, and that's no good. Huitzil 21:53, March 17, 2010 (UTC)

On Restore: I have Mage and Changeling, so let's look at when, exactly, they get to heal other people. (I have said this before, but it's worth saying again, once.) Mages can heal bashing and lethal damage to anyone with Life 3, and agg at Life 4, at the rate of 1 box/success. Changelings can heal bashing and lethal damage at that rate with Eternal Spring 3; they can also heal agg damage at that level, but it costs them a lot of Glamour. So for mages and changelings, two high-powered splats, healing is at least a 3-dot power, and healing agg damage is harder than that. Where do the Princesses stand on that scale? Why, they can heal bashing damage with Restore 1, lethal with Restore 2, and agg with Restore 3. That is, they get healing 1 dot sooner than either mages or changelings. There's nothing weak about that.

On the alleged lack of combat ability outside the Champions: you must never have played with a group that could boost Physical Attributes consistently. The Bless Charm does just that; Superb Blessing + Aria can double someone's mundane Dexterity, and Superb + Fuego can double mundane Strength. And Princesses can do one of those with 4 total dots. Throw in adding 8-again, and IMO Bless is actually more useful in combat than Fight is.

I'll put comments on Excel in its talk page. MichaelBrazier 05:53, March 18, 2010 (UTC)

The thing about the way other splats heal damage is, they get other stuff from their powers as well. Eternal Spring 1 and 2 have different effects and the Life Arcana does a whole assload of things. Right now 3 of the 4 upgrades of Restore are locked into "heal damage" and that's no good. Menders need a broader ability to heal "stuff" than that. What if there was a clause on the "heal lethal or agg" upgrade that said you had to have 3 dots in Restore to use the agg-healing ability? That still frees up two slots for other abilities, and we really need those two slots.

And isn't Bless only affinity for Graces right now? (Which is a whole other issue in itself, because everyone should be buffing). My complaints still hold true for the other Callings. They were supposed to get combat utility from their other Charms, and they simply haven't. Oh, and the thing about keeping all the "cool" abilities as Invocations is, at the very least, contentious enough it should be rbought up in the thread proper..Huitzil 13:06, March 18, 2010 (UTC)

The basic problem with the system is that Invocations unlock new variations and upgrades on top of adding bonuses to their use; that creates the incentive to "dabble in every element", which in turn muddles the themes. It's just as much of a problem with Charm dots as with Invocation dots, by the way -- just as the first Invocation dot equals 1 dot per Charm you have, the first dot you take in a Charm is really worth 1 dot per Invocation you have, far more than any subsequent dot in that Charm. Removing the coupling fixes all the problems you have mentioned so far.

"At this point, why bother making them elemental associations and giving out the penalty for having the wrong one?" It means that the Invocation you favor still matters, without dominating the system completely. One's Calling now makes some effects easier to learn, but does nothing for their use; and one's Queen makes some effects easier to use, and does nothing for learning them. Compare this to the interaction of Paths and Arcana in Mage; the ruling Arcana of a Path are both easier to learn (XP discount) and cheaper to use (effects from other Arcana have a surcharge of 1 Mana.)

"Incremental upgrades are good and in-genre for magic attacks and blessings and bad for everything else." I flatly disagree. I see no reason, from either system or genre, to treat attacks and buffs as special classes of effects. You, I suspect, want to pick out those effects and treat them specially because they happen to be the effects directly useful in combat; but magical girls are not about fighting as such, and if the system stresses fighting it'll shortchange a lot of stories central to the genre. 108.3.18.67 13:35, March 23, 2010 (UTC)

Don't suspect my motives. I told you exactly why I want to treat those effects as separate, and I don't understand why you think it is shortchanging to have SOME effects that stress fighting. The "magic warriors" type of show is important to the genre, so there is going to be SOME focus on fighting. But it's not like making a generic Invokable "Attack" Charm is turning the whole game into about nothing but fighting -- putting the magic attacks in their own generic modifiable tree frees up room for us to put NON-fighting Charms in the appropriate trees! If your game isn't about fighting, you don't have to buy up the Attack charm! If your game IS, as we know for a fact that many will be, then you get equal access to magic attacks that are in-genre, and we can make sure they are all balanced against each other.

Incremental upgrades are not exciting. And my proposal, remember, is to return to the old system, while moving existing Charms to a new place and making up more non-combat, non-buff Charms to fill the slots they left behind. If you didn't think the old system was shortchanging the genre, and you didn't, there is no reason to think my proposal will.

You and ES are the only ones on board with the new system, and at least three people don't like it. Peopel are reluctant to say anything because you're tearing off ahead with it anyway as if it were already the assumed default, and making it seem like the decision is already made, and making a lot of backlog that people have to go through to comment. You guys pretty much skipped any discussion on whether to go to the new system -- you flatly ignored my protests that we shouldn't do it, only acknowledging me at all when I tentatively agreed to give it a try. And now it looks like you're getting ready to consider people's silence as acceptance when really people just aren't caught up on things yet, or are intimidated from commenting by the amount of work you put in. I think you guys are really getting too far ahead of yourselves. Huitzil 21:23, March 23, 2010 (UTC)

March 29
"I hate the way the new model makes everyone's powers elemental-themed but makes it impossible to be elemental-focused, I hate the way the Invocations don't actually add anything, just restrict what you can get access to, and I hate the idea of making people dabble in them to get access to their good effects." All of this can be answered by creating a decent selection of general Charms and Upgrades in each tree. Basic competence without an elemental focus means you won't need the specialized Charms and Upgrades from every Invocation.

I prefer to think of the stress on the elements that remains in the current proposal as being at least as much a stress on the Queens, each of whom favors an element ... and since the Queens are this game's Y-splat, a stress on them is perfectly appropriate and nothing to apologize for.

The issues with your proposal are more fundamental. Building the powerset this way turns it into a knockoff of Mage's Arcana -- it's the basic feature of the Arcana that a mage can knit all the Arcana he knows together into a single effect, if he needs to. That is, each dot in an Arcanum a mage buys roughly doubles what he can do magically, so mages' power levels grow exponentially as they add dots. Since your metamagical upgrades stack, your system would give the Hopeful the same sort of power curve mages get. Every Invocation a Princess buys enhances a large fraction of her Charms, so her power level goes up exponentially with the number of Invocations she has. It's almost the case that, in this system, unlocking a new Invocation becomes the dominant motive for buying dots in a Charm, which reverses what I'd regard as the proper order of things. And then there's the blaster powers in "Volley", which in my opinion would encourage players to take 1 of each elemental Invocation just to get a variety of blasts. That just perpetuates the flaw in my previous draft proposal, which you yourself were good enough to point out: there is no good reason to specialize in an element, and every reason to dabble in them all.

You have, in short, managed to build a system worse, with respect to your usual objections, than the proposal I abandoned due to those very objections. MichaelBrazier 05:48, March 31, 2010 (UTC)

But the power level doesn't go up exponentially with new Invocations, because Invocations aren't multiplicative on power in that way. The effects of the Invocations aren't a power jump in that manner -- especially because only the FIRST one is free, and after that you pay an extra Wisp for each Invocation you add. At the most, if you took all the +2 bonus Invocations, having more of them doesn't make all your spells more powerful, it gives you the option of dumping more of your reserves into a single all-out spell. Which seems pretty in-genre to me. The cost addition prevents it from going exponential, and each Invocation doesn't double what you can do magically, it's just a smaller bonus -- it's like saying a wizard in D&D3.5 has his power increased exponentially by taking a metamagic feat because now he can take them as higher level (pay more for them) and cause them to deal acid damage or affect a wider area or cast them without moving his hands. It's silly.

And if the ONLY Charm you use is Volley, then getting all seven elemental Volley Invocations does give you the widest variety of blasting powers, but A: if you're totally focused on blasting to that degree, maybe you ought to have a wide variety to choose from and B: you're spending a lot of XP just to add one option to your magical blast. The problem with you old proposal was that the first dot in a new Invocation gave you entirely new powers from ALL of your Charms, and the first dot in an Invocation cost you six XP, it was a no-brainer. It's a RIDICULOUS waste of XP to go into elemental Charms you don't want to use just so you can buy an Invocation JUST so you can get an extra option for your magical Volley.

And yes, if there's a wide and decent selection of non-Invoked Charms under your proposal, that lessens the load placed on the elements. But at the time I wrote that, that simply hadn't been done -- it was, in fact, your stated philosophy that all of the "cool" effects should be Invoked Charms. And if there are a lot of useful and cool powers as basic Charms, and then there are multiple versions or upgrades for each Invoked Charm, that's an INSANE amount of rules text for each Charm and we end up needing a goddamned flowchart to navigate the prerequisites. It's something as complicated as Exalted's charm system, and Exalted's charm system is TOO COMPLICATED FOR A NWOD GAME. I don't recall any mechanic in the nWoD that needed a flowchart to explain it, and I know this game shouldn't have any. Huitzil 07:25, March 31, 2010 (UTC)

The dice-adders aren't a problem, but the metamagic Invocations are. Take just one example: the Destiny Invocation that lets you cast a Charm into a token that anyone can activate later. That's actually a major boost in a Charm's power, because it means you can prep Charm activations in a safe place, build up your Wisp stores, and then head into the field; you'll have the tokens even if you're tapped out of Wisps. And as you've written it, if you buy an Invocation once you can apply it to every Charm you have ... so buying that Invocation gives a major boost to every Charm you know, or learn in the future. By itself, that's as bad as a Key in Geist (or the first Invocation dot in the earlier proposal); it is, for practical purposes, a whole new power per Charm dot. And all the metamagic Invocations are like that. The fact that Invocations stack means that 2 metamagic Invocations give you 4 powers per Charm dot, 3 give 8, and so forth -- exponential growth. And no, needing to spend Wisps to stack Invocations doesn't fix the problem; it balances the stacked versions of a Charm against the basic version, but the issue is the number of versions, not their relative power.

I don't see any way in which this could be fixed; it's inherent in the structure of your system. Changing it so that you have to buy the right to apply an Invocation to each Charm separately would remove the exponential power curve, but at the cost of horrendously complicating the bookkeeping.

Regarding the Charm system of Exalted: personally, I never found the flowcharts all that helpful. The prerequisite structure which they summarize is not the really complex aspect of that system; the real headache is the rules limiting which Charms can be used with which other Charms, and the Combo rules that let characters break those limits for specific Charm combinations. I haven't brought in anything like those rules, and I don't intend to. MichaelBrazier 14:28, April 1, 2010 (UTC)

IT is not a whole new power per Charm dot. That is entirely absurd and do not understand how anyone could possibly arrive at that conclusion. The only example you have is based on the assumption that there will be no mechanism in place to prevent abuses, which is as easy as saying "you can only have one prepared Charm ready at a time". Having the ability to PAY EXTRA to make a Charm's effect last longer, having the ability to PAY EXTRA to make a Charm reflexive, is not as bad as a Key granting entirely new functionality to every Manifestation you know. That's a statement that's so absurd I literally have no idea how to approach it. It's wrong on every level. It's a perfect, unbreakable circle of elemental wrongness.

Everyone I've shown your new Charm system to says it is too complicated. It requires ludicrous amounts of rules text for every Charm, and your only objection to my revision is flabbergastingly absurd. Huitzil 05:31, April 2, 2010 (UTC)

April 9
You ask why I dislike the metamagical feat structure so much. Simply put, I dislike it because I tried to implement one just like it, and ran into all the problems I've been telling you about. You should remember that, since it was all on one of the RPG.net threads. All the other proposals I've been working on stem from that bad experience.

As for ignoring criticism: far from it, I've invited intelligent criticism several times. It isn't my fault that I haven't been getting very much of it. For the past several days I've been outright begging the skeptics to come forward and tell me where the sticking points are. And no, I don't count "it's just so complicated" and "there's so much text" as intelligent criticism. All I can conclude from that is that I've expresed myself badly, not that the structure I'm building is unsound.

"Everyone I've shown it to says it's too complex": uh-huh. I remember when you were complaining about the horrible over-complexity of the Goalenu, and you claimed Azunth was of like mind with you. But when I spoke to him directly, it turned out that none of the systems you found objectionable gave him the least difficulty; his hangup was the human-to-Goalenu conversion -- a situation that comes up once in a blue moon, and which arguably doesn't need a rule at all. So I take statements from you that others agree with you with a pinch of salt ... MichaelBrazier 16:42, April 9, 2010 (UTC)