Whereas turn order in 2E is a flexible, transient thing that can change moment to moment, rather than at any reliable interval.
Are you still trying to defend E
? Because your words apply equally well to it.
However, there are fewer things that change turn order in Ex2. Once an action is taken, the number of ticks until the next is
set.
Further, the only thing necessary to keep track of turn order is to simply write down one's current initiative. Ticks, meanwhile, involve an extra element of math that complicate things further: you don't only need to know a person's speed, you need to know what tick their last action occurred on. That by necessity involves far more book-keeping than a simple score-board.
"My sword is speed four. When I make an attack, it will be four ticks until I can act again."
This is not dependent on any other factor.
"My Initiative is 12, which tells me nothing about my place in the turn order. It is entirely relative to the Initiative of every other combatant, and is quite likely to change several times during one round."
This is.
Initiative is not a number like Speed, it is a number like Motes. It is paid, it is earned back, it changes with most attacks.
Second, any system where a person can take more than one action (even before flurries are a thing) has issues, just like Wired Reflexes in Shadowrun had issues.
True in some ways, but you're missing the point. There are no turns in Ex2's tick system, only actions. Some actions should be faster.
Action Economy is meant to balance out wielding a hammer that can shatter a city wall. This failed due to Mote Recovery being linked to Stunting and due to heavier weapons being given low Accuracy and Defence, to balance them with lighter blades.
Ex2's tick system is flawed, yes. That doesn't redeem E
's Initiative system.
In 3E, initiative provides incentive to be aggressive, and to target enemies with the most initiative. In 2E, ticks provided incentive to use jade weapons regardless of your exalt type.
No, Soulsteel. Mote recovery and added Accuracy. Of course, paying twice the commitment cost was something of a discouragement to using the wrong magical material.
Or 3, if they're aiming. Or four, if they are using jade. Or six, if they want to do a misc action.
If you'd looked up a matter of centimetres, you'd have see my words. You quoted them. "between 3 and 7".
You might pick out Aim, Guard, or Dash, if you're trying to poke a hole in that. Of course, all three of those can be cancelled on any tick, so I wouldn't call them actions as such.
Now I'm tempted to be rather sarcastic here, but I'll try and tone it down. Yes, actions have differing Speeds. That is the intended point, and it's not hard to keep track of the differences.
Remember also, that Long Ticks and Short Ticks are different things, and operate on different timescales.
And never the twain shall meet, but should they then it'd be rather simple to remember that a long tick is ten short ticks. Of course, Ex2's mass combat was a mess and social combat was a mistake.
Also, Jesus help you if you want to do an action on a long-tick scale in a short-tick combat.
Why would you want to? Some kind of sorcery? Activating an ancient First Age defence system?
That sounds to me like a set piece, with most of the Circle defending the one who's busy for a period of time.
The complicated, difficult portions contribute to a much slower combat experience, wherein a fight will typically grind an entire session to a complete halt. In 2E, the threat of having to join battle is what gets players to overwhelmingly prefer diplomatic solutions or lateral thinking, not out of preference but simply for the sake of avoiding combat. This is, frankly, bad.
Yes. This is why Ex2's combat system is a poor choice for new players, who can't recall what their character can do out of hand.
E
's was supposed to be better.
Incorrect. As stated before, any situation where one character gets more turns than another character inherently has issues. It's certainly more complex, and more gameable, but it is not a fun thing.
No, that's where the fun comes in. This is a niche system, unsuited for general use.
That's an extremely flawed argument. Is tracking initiative slower than tracking ticks? You have not established this at all, leaving this argument as sophistry.
You're trying to draw one argument away from the point it was aimed at, but sure. Is two higher than one?
Initiative changes more often. More changes mean more notekeeping, mean more time spent tracking turn order.
If two is higher than one, then E
is slower than Ex2.
It does not, unless you involve charms.
Oh, yes, I forgot all the people who're going to play Exalted without any Exalted. Or Spirits. Or mortal martial artists- Oh, yeah. Those aren't a thing in E
, are they?
And players may or may not wish to use those charms.
Already covered that.
Further, this does nothing to establish that ticks are somehow faster than initiative, it merely makes the argument that doing something like rerolling ones would slow down the game.
Perhaps you missed the thrust of this argument, then. Or maybe you didn't recognise it.
Then at the very least, spend some time putting together a more solid argument. The system is not broken to its very core, even remotely.
Craft.
Consider also that during the debut of Exalted 2E, everyone realized very quickly that perfect defenses were cheap and easily exploitable resulting in an elaborate combat meta-game and paranoia combat. It had issues with lethality. It had issues with the fact that fights would drag on nonstop because aggression was suboptimal and turtling behind scene-long charms and effects was the way to go.
Yes. It did. Fixes for that have been considered, attempted, and reworked for years. It's still an ongoing problem with the system.
Of course, over at the other end of the system is D&D, with scry'n'die.
Either Players should have ways to defend themselves, or not. If players can protect themselves, then NPCs can too. Finding a solid balance is something very difficult for a system, and E
has not achieved that.
3E has been out for nearly a year now, and while people can have personal gripes with different aspects of the system, scenarios where the entire game simply breaks down as soon as Join Battle is rolled do not exist.
The game's most notable flaws are visible from character creation.
But how is this, in any way, more complicated with initiative rather than ticks? All you do is find your current initiative, and see where you rank when the next turn begins.
I'll step in to repeat: Action, not turn. Your way of thinking may have something to do with the difficulty you're having. It's not "the next turn", but "the character's next action".
And it's less complicated because nothing will change the number of ticks until that next action. Counterattacks won't, enemy attacks won't, charm costs won't.
A lot of it is that the element of ticks themselves are perplexing and counter-intuitive. You start at zero, and count up from there. Where a person goes after zero depends on their join battle results relative to each other, and where they proceed from their starting count depends on their action. For some reason, a lower speed is more optimal than a higher one. You count down tick by tick (creating situations where 'is anyone going on tick 5, anyone anyone? Okay tick 6?') until a player gets to go.
Which E
does at the beginning of every turn? I mean, certainly, if the players are too bored to keep track of their next action tick, the system won't work. It kinda relies on every player wanting to play.
Tick combat has a lot more moving parts than a simple 'count down from highest initiative to lowest initiative per turn.' Yes, your initiative can change. But as established, so can your speed, and that becomes a lot more complicated especially when one's players keep forgetting to declare the speed of their action.
This is, of course, equivalent to forgetting to declare their initiative. That aside, speed can change once between a characters actions, and only once: When they pick their action. Initiative changes more often.
Initiative, regardless of what action a player takes, only requires simple addition or subtraction to determine what the final values are for the next turn. They change depending on the results of an attack or defense, or whether a charm is used. By contrast, one's order on a battle wheel in tick combat depends not just on the final results of a roll, but also what actions are taken, what actions are not taken, and who gets to act before or after you, which again is a transient and confusing thing.
No. Only one of those things determines tick speed: What actions are taken. Speed is not affected by rolls of any sort after Join Battle, Speed is not affected by any other character's action, and Speed is not affected by any character acting before or after the character.
Unless, of course, you were talking about the order of acting characters, in which case you just said that one's place on a list is dependent on one's place on that list. Such insight.
Having played both? I've spent far less time tracking a single shift in initiative than I've ever had tracking my players' entirely unique progress down a ladder of ticks.
Yes, a
single shift in Initiative.
