Experience Awards - Core 272-5

- For character generation, I would suggest getting Ed's Exalted Toolkit. It's free, and it allows for a system to create and share characters. It also has various other toolkits to help Story Tellers
Ed's Exalted Toolkit

- Anathema is a more simplistic program, think along the lines of PCGen, but it is easier for exporting your characters and making a pdf file for him.
Anathema

- Spoiler tags are to Exalted PbP as OOC tags are to DnD. Exalted posts tend to be a on the longish side for players when it comes to combat, and ST combat posts become immense monstrosities.

CotA

- Create for yourself a tick sheet. This is extremely simple to do in Excel and is imperative to running a quick smooth combat sequence.

- Dice tags reset every time you add new ones to a post, put them all up at the same time

- At the end of a combat post, put in a Private tag box for yourself to see players accuracy and damage against the baddies. They can see attacks against themselves, they know their own stats, but you don't want them to see the enemies

I'd give you a link, but you wouldn't see it anyways.

- Start the game with a few cannon fodder battles to work out how you want combat to run. I suggest at least 2. One where you will forgive all motes spent on charms lasting less than a scene to gauge your Exalted at full power, having fun. A second one where you just throw cannon fodder at them in a realistic setting until you're pretty sure you know how you want the rest of the game to work. Doing this with my party took me from a simplistic, primitive battle system, to a neat, elegant system where I am ready to start adjudicating stunts and the more advanced mechanisms of the game in two battles.

Show-off Combat

Technical Combat

- Don't allow the "Barbarian Look" unless the character is equipped with Discreet Essence Armor or an armor replacing charm.
See Combat 2

- Divide starting charms so: 3 Offensive, 3 Defensive, 3 Non-Combat, 1 in your specialty. It's better to have a generalized character in the beginning. Thanks Moonstone Spider
See Moonstone's Post

- Make everyone put at least one point in Awareness. Taking a -2 penalty on Join Battle rolls results in botches on the very first battle ever. Then the character just ends up staring at flowers while zombies gnaw at their necks
See Combat 1 for the rolls

Quote:

Originally Posted by Moonstone Spider Beautiful Garden has always had a strong attraction to flowers of all sorts, and this betrays her now as at a critical moment of zombie attack she's busily examining a particularly nice-looking wildflower growing out of a crack in a stone. Thus it is that a zombie stepping on the flower greatly surprises Beautiful Garden. She sighs deeply at the unwanted interruption and finally moves to get the zombie away from her flower. She saunters towards the zombie almost casually, making neither haste nor waste of time as she does so.

- Disallow the starting backgrounds of backing, followers, and allies. It seems really harsh, but you will thank me later. The Exalted can always gain those as the story progresses.

- Contacts and Mentor are strange beasts that depend on your setting

Quote:

Originally Posted by Moonstone Spider Personally I would drop "Contacts" from the list of forbidden backgrounds and substitute "Mentor" in it's place. The fact that the PC knows a Lunar who knows a Sidereal won't derail the game and may well provide some useful hooks. That fact that Mr. Miyagi has taken a personal interest in the Dawn Solar's training and gets grumpy when the Dawn isn't around is more likely to be problematic

Quote:

Originally Posted by Amnistar Even Mentor isn't a problem if you've worked out beforehand why said mentor isn't always 'up in their business'.

The Rays of Dawn - enoviox
The Circle of the Ages - Dahner
The Northwest Threshhold - Lord Ben