Exalted 3E | The Basics Of Combat

[Laughter] [Music] exalted is a game known for cinematic action in a previous video we spoke about exalted stunt rules how they were designed to move to its even at the gameplay few things are more cinematic than a fast-paced fight scene in third edition the franchise tried a new take on combat that was both criticized for its complexity and embraced for actually succeeding to represent the cinematic fantasy of over-the-top action this is the patent spider a YouTube channel about role-playing games and this video would go through the basics of combat in exalted third edition this will

cover the fundamentals of combat as well as some suggestions for how to tackle combat at your table in a way that's simple and won't interrupt the narrative flow too much in a future video we'll go more into depth about advanced combat such as the use of gambits and battle groups I won't cover that in this video also remember to Like comment and subscribe if you liked this video and want to see more if you want me to cover other aspects of the exalted game system in future videos feel free to suggest we do topics in

the comments below if you want me to cover complete the different game systems you may suggest those as well I also have a patreon where a frequent oppose previous about my original role playing a machine born which will be available for free once it's done there are plenty of free previous there that you can access without having to become a patron by becoming a patron you get access to some more in-depth previews before we start talking about combat and exalted I also want to remind you that the realm has recently been released for exalted foundation

it's the first major set a supplement for 3rd edition and it contains a lot of interesting information about the realm that's useful for any campaign and not just for drag of lava games I'm leaving a link to where to pick up this book in the description below so you're about to head into combat you and every other participant in the combat role join battle which is your width plus awareness and then 3 - the result to determine your combat initiative this is a role that cannot be botched and it's typically only world once at the

start of combat with exceptions only some specific power or rule states that you can roll it again if someone joins the battle later they make the role like normal and add the two diminutive order based on the outcome of the like we don't want a difference that they read in later while many games that use initiative all use it to determine the combat sword romance exalted third edition has taken a concept of initiative and turned it into an active representation of the battle momentum where characters with high initiative or controlling the flow of battle and

those with low initiative or hold pasted out a new bird and corner characters take their actions in order of highest initially the lowest where while those would equal initiative act simultaneously initiative can and will changed your combat and different participants will bounce up and down the initiative order throughout the scene but for now when you're on your own battle we only want to determine the initiative order the combat scene is a time when the natural narrative flow is interrupted and replaced with a specific order of events it's structured in order to make sense of events

for the purpose of game balance the combat scene itself consists around an abstract moment of time representing actions of every participant in the battle throughout the round is a series of tics which are a unit of time that measured initiative placements for example a character with initiative 7 takes the turn of take 7 on the route the turn is the moment during the round when the character declares the combat action this term is thought on one take an end on another depending on if the initiative changes as an outcome of the players action however even

if the character is a movable takes in around that they only have a single turn once you've taken your turn and changed your initiative your new initiative will determine your take on the following round if you haven't yet taken your turn and your initiative is increased enough to be higher than others who've already taken their turns will take your turn on the following take for example if you have initiative 7 but someone with initiative 9 attacks you and changes your initiative to two you have to wait for tick 2 instead of take 7 to take

your time in contrast if you have initiative to and someone with initiative self and helps to boost your initiative with 9 you get to take your turn or take 6 instead of take 9 because tec-9 has over the bin and it's character takes I'm sure it all sounds complicated and raises a lot of questions about why the game puts such emphasis on the overcome but the reason is that this initiative isn't as the quarter in which the participants take their turns it's a resource in and of itself the initiative is the abstraction of the battle

momentum and the characters strive towards higher initiatives so that they can take control over the battle once they have that control or once they have enough control to attempt to overpower foe they can spend their initiative in order to deal actual physical harm to their opponents this is represented using two different types of attacks the withering attack inflicts damage to targets initiative in order to raise your own and may decisive attack spells your initiative a way to effect physical damage upon a follow a standard fight scene between two combatants consists of Seir so we're doing

attacks back and forth until one combatant has enough initiative to take out opponent with one decisive attack when the players are well aware that they do two different types of attacks the characters in-game or fighting tequila with every move they make there's no such thing as a withering or decisive attack the imperative terms their own attacks no been withering attacks represent the over-the-top action where the combatants throw each other in the scenery cut scrape and bruise each other until one of them is in such a bad state that the winner swoops in and decapitates them

with one final cut withering attacks also factoring that bandages that combatants bring to the battlefield the might of their weapons and the toughness of their armor for example the more advantages you have the easier it is for you to steal initiative from your opponent and harder it is for them to steal initiative for you because the decisive attacks are represented by turning points and conclusions the battle they are less dependent of the cold who went on an armor and more dependent on the situation stopped by the wind during conflict the weapon damage has no bearing

on incisive attack even though that attack is what's actually harming the target and the armor soak gives some protection against it instead they accumulated initiative is what the thermistor dice pool its role as physical damage and that make you lose or it in order to resolve a withering attack you roll dexterity with the relevant combat which can be archery brawl martial art smelly or thrown and you had your weapons at creating to that role the outcome of the role must be equal more than the targets defense or else the attack fails defense consists of either

parry or evasion with Perry being determined by Horford Xterra to us combat ability rounded up plus your breakfast defense rating animation be home field extent was torch rounded up - to armors mobility palette range to impose cannot be used parry attacks whether your we're doing a tag fails or succeeds target suffers are all slow penalty to vary defense which reduces it by one until their next turn is all slow penalty stacks making it dangerous to fight multiple enemies not represented by the battle group system which we'll talk about in a later video but at last

combat the amount an attack succeeds by is important as well as as they threshold of successes that go above the defenders defense value is added as additional dice to the damage value which is what will be wrong next the attacks who all damage is usually determined by the tagger strength plus weapon damage plus threshold successes though somewhat was a mixed strength from the calculation and have it replaced with a set value this is common for crossbows fire ones and other weapons with them much not influenced by your own physical strength the total damage is done

subtracted by an amount equal to the defender soak which is to represent the extra toughness or where an armored battle the final result is rolled and the targets initiative is reduced an amount equal to the successes on the final roll attack his own initiative increases been allowed to equal to the damage inflicted but they also gain one additional point of initiative for hitting the target which guarantees one initiative even if no damage is being built in some cases a defender may have more soak and attacker has royal damage twice the number of damaged by strongest

and determined by the weapons overwhelming value which is typically one for standard weapons that can be much higher for heavy attract workers this is the basis of withering attacks the important steps to remember is that attack roles include the wet-nosed accuracy the threshold successes are added to the roll damage and the defenders soak subtracts from the rural damage before those ties are all you gain one initiative for hitting a target and increase your initiative by the same amount and damn you damage your target with now if you inflict enough initiative damage to take them down

to initiative zero or below they enter initiative crash this gives you an initiative break bonus which is an additional five initiative on top of what you've already received a character initially crashes on the ropes they are unable to launch decisive attacks because they have no initiative to spend however should the target you crash to crash you back they instantly return to base initiative which is three role young battle again and add the result to their initiative and then get to make an immediate additional attack upon you this is called an initiative shift it's a very

rare occurrence that almost never comes up so I don't think you need to think too much about this if you're just talking out if the crash target doesn't manage to get auto crash they reset the base initiative of the remaining survived three rounds in a crash state there may also be times when your own actions cause yourself to crashed this makes you need you to lose another five initiative that's either lost or given to the opponent that's most closely associated with action requesting but that's not advanced rule that has little to no bearing on the

game if you are it so I wouldn't bother with it as an use to it other if you want to simplify the initiative rules as much as possible I recommend ignoring the initiative shift rules the extra nation loss to crashing yourself and the three runs a crash that you reset truth instead revisit them once you're confident enough in managing combat scenes that tracking initiative becomes second nature to new storytellers may have difficulty keeping track of the fluctuating initiatives especially when there are several participants in battle everyone has their own way of solving this issue I

prefer to keep track of everyone's initiative myself so that I have a clear overview of the battle I do this by writing down I'm a participant in the combat a right there initiative next to their name every time their initiative changes I scratch out a whole number write a new one next to it there are more effective ways of keeping track of things than I tend to do though something I highly recommend is that you place a paper on the table with numbers written from high to low every participant in the battle has a marker

that's placed on this paper on the number representing their initiative score once they made their turn they turn their marker side down to show that they won't attack them this gives everyone a clear view of everyone's place an initiative order and you don't need to make any notes at all the only reason I'm not doing this myself is because I usually sit a bit away from the table where the players are at but I think this is Susan this is a superior system or keeping track of initiative if everyone is around the same table there

are plenty of ways to keep track of initiative though so find what works for you and your group once you've accumulated enough initiative to want to go in for the kill it's time for decisive attack these are all using text art plus compatibility but don't take the weapons accuracy into account as long as the role equals or exceeds the targets defense you succeed but the threshold successes won't affect your damage this time around instead compare your current initiative with the targets hardness if they have an A unless initiative is higher than the targets hardness the

attack fails to inflict and damage the action damage roam is equal to recurrent initiative but tends only count two single successes hardness is one of my main gripes for this system it's a trade granted by some magical armor powers to act as a barrier preventing characters with low initiative from afflicting damage upon the one with the wholeness the problem with hardness is that it acts like a barrier not a soak meaning that as long as your initiative exceeds it you get to use your full initiative for the attack increasing your chances for one-shot kill and

reducing the chances of crazing blows one of the appeals of cinematic combat is the idea that you can draw blood from multiple decisive attacks extending over longer fight as soon as the character has a high hardness that's thrown out the window instead you're facing and the movable object up until the point you exceed the hardness of the which you attack will instantly kill them hardness is an activist that survived from previous editions of the game but it's poorly implemented with very vicious combat system I think that the game would be better by either changing hardness

to act as a decisive so or to remove hardness altogether by changing attacked as a soap it retains the idea that you need a high initiative before you can attend to the election damage the problem is that the powers that interact with hardness aren't balanced for this purpose in when dislike the way horn is implemented I've been tolerating it for now and I'm running the game is written but if I would rewrite the game harness would be the first to go and if you'd think about how schooling hardness to act as a decisive soak in

your game I recommend cutting all our disadvantages off to reflect this change hardness is Britain is often too high a member to act as a soak and reducing those numbers is a good first step in balancing the system if you fail to make your decisive attack and your current initiative is 1 to 10 you lose to initiative from the talent this becomes three initiatives if you're at the 11 plus if the attack was successful you reset your initiative to the base value which is typically 3 if the target is still alive after this you'll need

to start winning them again for new initiative now the damage you inflict on the targets health levels can be either bashing lethal or aggravated bashing damage inflicts a blunt force trauma and while it can knock someone out when it fills their health levels and additional bashing damage are converted to lethal is that killing the target outright leave from damage inflicted leading moonstone flesh eruption audience when they targets health drug is filled with lethal damage they die weapons typically inflict either bashing or lethal damage but there's a third damage type call a great damage that's most

commonly applied using some kind of magical power this works like lethal damage but it cannot be healed using magic there are many options support from making attacks that make combat Saints interesting and engaging but these withering and decisive attacks or the fundamentals behind the combat see something you'll notice if you start using this rules as written is that mana fights can tend to drag and necessarily because we're doing face has become too long in order to maintain a narrative flow and prevent the fights from dragging I recommend that you separate imported enemies from unimportant enemies

if you're fighting ghouls let the players finish them off by crashing them instead the waiting for their initiative to get high enough to deal enough damage to kill them instead that save the decisive attacks for the important enemies like powerful supernatural entities important store bosses and dangerous monsters those are the kinds of enemies you want an epic fight against if you're just going to kill God number three to get into the crashing them should be enough to deal with them so that the sea can progress without delay if you're a storyteller who is unsure how

to set up challenging fights keep in mind that this initiative system makes it so that numbers are incredibly important if you've got the full circle of PCs beating on a single lonely boss that posts you've hyped up for several sessions is going to be winded into oblivion with no shot so getting back into the fight if you want to give your ex all to play as a challenging fight make sure that they are outnumbered or give some tools to our lone bad guys to survive against them excellence are powerful and sometimes it's fun to let

those powerful EXO's completely squashed realization but that can also get boring in the long run creatures with legendary size or decent threats because they're difficult to four players to crash making it easier for them to retain enough initiative to be a threat but if you want your circle of Soler's to fight the single a bit so most mind assume that your pistol will be destroyed unless you account for their disadvantage maybe the abyss will most mind us prepared some traps that can be employed to even the scale of battle there are many ways to provide

interesting and challenging fights for PCs and perhaps that can be the topic of future video the next time a talk called exalted combat I'll be going into more advanced tools such as combat movements gambits and if there's time battle groups when we also talk about the weapons armor and their properties in more detail make sure to LIKE comment and subscribe if you like this video and want to see more and until next time see you in creation