Friday, February 24, 2006
Dice Timing, Redux
Brian raised some interesting points about timing, and low-cost risk-taking. Let me think about them.
Kung fu that buys dice. To me, this is clearly a “declare before roll” technique. If it isn’t, it makes Xia Joss an order of magnitude less useful than Corrupt Joss; and I don’t think that a game of naught but Corrupt Joss is as in-the-spirit as I’d like.
Result-dice adder. Should totally be bought after you succeed on the roll; functionally, they are buying dice before the next roll. Some for Armor boosters.
Revealing Results. I can go either way on this one. Clearly, a contested event (e.g., Initiative) is a simultaneous reveal. But what about direct opposition? Is it more over-the-top for the defender to know how the attacker did before defending, or not? In D&D, you rarely know what your opposition rolled, even after the fact, for any sort of dynamic opposed roll; in Exalted, you generally know your opposition. I don’t like either one, and was aiming for something in the middle. I think for ease of play, I’ll relax this one, and attacker will reveal before defender decides, thus tipping advantage to the defender.
Boosting modifiers. This one I thought was very cut and dry, but seems to be not. To me, it seems obvious that you’d say, “Hey, I’m attacking Dominion, so I’d better use by Strike +15 tech if I even want to hit him”, and then roll dice. Rolling dice, and then only having to pay for the Kung Fu when it is useful feels a little non-heroic (”Oh well, fate wasn’t going to let me hit Dominion this round anyway, so why should I bother using Kung Fu?”).
Visibility of Chi Expenditure. I think that most, if not all, Kung Fu has a visible effect, unless it explicitly says otherwise. Perceptive observers should probably be able to decipher a technique; maybe a reflexive Awareness roll; Everyday difficulty to recognize that a tech is the same one you say two rounds ago that took your left arm off.
