I will become God-Harem King of the World! [Highschool DxD/Exalted] (CLOSED)

[Silversun17]

Not to mention part of the Fun of seducing the Harem will be doing it methodial way. a few of the girls in Highschool DxD have ways Issei can win their hearts without Charms. the student council president can be wooed via playing chess for example.

 

[Smuthunter]

Not to mention part of the Fun of seducing the Harem will be doing it methodial way. a few of the girls in Highschool DxD have ways Issei can win their hearts without Charms. the student council president can be wooed via playing chess for example.

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It'll take a little more than a few games of chess to make Sona fall for us. Still, as long as we don't go massively out of character it shouldn't be terribly difficult to get the canon harem together plus maybe a few more on the side. That classmate girl with the pigtails who hangs out with the pervert duo for example.

 

[Pipeman]

Not to mention part of the Fun of seducing the Harem will be doing it methodial way. a few of the girls in Highschool DxD have ways Issei can win their hearts without Charms. the student council president can be wooed via playing chess for example.

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Well Lore is favoured and Intelligence is likely an Attribute we want to increase anyways, but as things stand and with Larcency being unfavoured, I don't see us getting very far in chess without an Excellency at least.

 

[icreddragon]

[X] As you search through your pockets for your phone to call help, you stumble on the scrap of paper that strange girl gave you. Supposedly it is used for a summoning. Well, since the supernatural is appreantly real and you don't have many options, it should be worth at least a try. Not like it's going to take you very long.

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[X]This

 

[Smuthunter]

Well Lore is favoured and Intelligence is likely an Attribute we want to increase anyways, but as things stand and with Larcency being unfavoured, I don't see us getting very far in chess without an Excellency at least.

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Larceny only effects games of chance, not games of skill. For games of strategy, War is probably the relevant skill.

 

[Silversun17]

Larceny only effects games of chance, not games of skill. For games of strategy, War is probably the relevant skill.

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though chess can also be won by virtue of who's memory of all possible moves is better. which is how grandmasters play.

 

[cyberswordsmen]

I think chess would be an intelligence+Lore roll. It would be lore as chess is generally considered an game for intellectuals and academics and chess strategy is often studied as a serious topic. I think that would make it a lore roll. Wits might be a valid substitute for the attribute if you are playing more through gut reactions than thinking it through.

War doesn't make that much sense to me as War is generally more about inspiring troops and helping them fight better than they otherwise would. Not really applicable to chess.

 

[Carrnage]

[X] As you search through your pockets for your phone to call help, you stumble on the scrap of paper that strange girl gave you. Supposedly it is used for a summoning. Well, since the supernatural is apparently real and you don't have many options, it should be worth at least a try. Not like it's going to take you very long.

 

[Robotninja]

I respectfully disagree. And our motivation also says that we want to become worthy of girls' affection. Using a charm to get them to love us defeats that point.

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Well, as per the theme's of Exalted, UMI is not invariably mindrape. Mindrape is UMI, and you can use UMI to mind rape people. But viewing all UMI as mind rape makes a wide range of characters as evil and makes it basicly impossible to play a moral social character.

I don't think you people understand what charms are. They are not magic buttons that you push to do stuff that are seperate from you. They are expressions of how awesomely skilled you are. So he would be just that charming. Saying use of social charms is not valid is like saying using lore charms to make us smarter in a contest is cheating. It is a representation of how charming and personable we are.

 

[Larekko12]

But Lore Charms are cheating. They're using magic Go Juice to do better.

 

[Carrnage]

But Lore Charms are cheating. They're using magic Go Juice to do better.

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Using the Frontal lobe is cheating, It's using brain Go Juice to do better.

Our exaltation is as much a part of us as our body, more so by creation physics.

 

[Robotninja]

But Lore Charms are cheating. They're using magic Go Juice to do better.

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. . . No. You get an F in terms of understanding what an Exalt is. A charm is not something external to a character. A charm is a representation of him being so awesome at something that they do things that are impossible to mere mortals. But it is not cheating. It is perfectly natural skill that is innate to the user.

Using social charms isn't being an evil mind rapist by default. It is a representation of supernatural charm and skill beyond even the best mortal. Can it be abused in a manner that leads to evil mind rape? Hell yes. Every Solar charm can be used for both good and evil. Calling any Solar Charm but the most openly wrong ones, such as Power from Darkness, and similar measures "Evil Charms" is wrong. There are (almost)no evil Charms, just evil people. Even the Golden years tarnished black charm tree, which is pretty much "Mind rape, the charmset" can be used in a moral, positive manner.

 

[touhou ranfuku]

Since I'm not really good at hardcore RPG, I will just suggest the choices, thanks kinglugia for showing me the link.

[X] The night has come. You try to think up a way, you cannot take her home, your parents will confuse for who she is. You remember there's a mountain where an abandoned church is located, you will carry her there.

We haven't gotten which mode would be? Normal or Easy? If it is Easy then Issei shall see no one on his way and Raynare will wake up when he reaches the church, if it is Normal Issei will meet Dohnaseek on the way and he will fight Issei to take back Raynare.

 

[megrisvernin]

Since I'm not really good at hardcore RPG, I will just suggest the choices, thanks kinglugia for showing me the link.

[X] The night has come. You try to think up a way, you cannot take her home, your parents will confuse for who she is. You remember there's a mountain where an abandoned church is located, you will carry her there.

We haven't gotten which mode would be? Normal or Easy? If it is Easy then Issei shall see no one on his way and Raynare will wake up when he reaches the church, if it is Normal Issei will meet Dohnaseek on the way and he will fight Issei to take back Raynare.

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The normal vote is winning by one. If you haven't already voted, you could vote easy & make it a tie between normal & easy.

 

[touhou ranfuku]

The normal vote is winning by one. If you haven't already voted, you could vote easy & make it a tie between normal & easy.

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Thanks. The canon is good enough, so I vote for Normal, but a tie between Normal and Easy is not bad either.

 

[Pipeman]

Larceny only effects games of chance, not games of skill. For games of strategy, War is probably the relevant skill.

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As far as I see it a very large part of the mid game in chess is about mind games, laying traps, noticing traps, threatening the opponent, bluffing succesfully and generally sneaking something unnoticed past your opponent, which I'd consider Larcency though I admit it's not a perfect fit by far.
Odds are you can just stunt for which to apply here.
The early game and end game on the other hand are purely Lore, since the early game is all about knowing your openings and the end game is manageable enough for it to be rather predictable as long as you're familiar enough with the movesets.

Well, as per the theme's of Exalted, UMI is not invariably mindrape. Mindrape is UMI, and you can use UMI to mind rape people. But viewing all UMI as mind rape makes a wide range of characters as evil and makes it basicly impossible to play a moral social character.

I don't think you people understand what charms are. They are not magic buttons that you push to do stuff that are seperate from you. They are expressions of how awesomely skilled you are. So he would be just that charming. Saying use of social charms is not valid is like saying using lore charms to make us smarter in a contest is cheating. It is a representation of how charming and personable we are.

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While this has some merit, I find it very hard to see arguments for how "use the Charm that makes everyone who sees you doing it fall in love with you so you can build yourself a harem with members of your choice through the least effort possible", which is literally what you suggested, is not mindrape.
There are very good and moral uses for HSDD.
Building yourself a harem out of people you barely know is not one of them at all.

That aside, whether all UMI is mindrape or not is up to interpretation and viewpoint and this is intentionally so.
Just claiming objectively otherwise because you can't conceive that the stark majority of social characters are evil is not a good position, when you can make a very solid case for how almost every Exalted social character that isn't completely ineffective is a nasty bastard and only not absolutely despicable because they live in a crapsack world and sometimes you do have to make these hard decisions.

There are (almost)no evil Charms, just evil people. Even the Golden years tarnished black charm tree, which is pretty much "Mind rape, the charmset" can be used in a moral, positive manner.

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At least until you go insane and start acting like the Ebon Dragon all the time.

 

[Bloodshifter]

Appearance is an Attribute.
There is neither a cap on Attributes nor can you get Specialties for them.

As for Socialize and MA, as you said they aren't favoured, which means using BP to buy them is rather expensive.
Additionally, thanks to the 3 dot limit we wouldn't even get far enough for it to be worth it anyways.
We can get more or less that far with the equivalent amount of XP, so buying those first dots now is kind of a waste.
We'll get by with Presence for social combat and apparently will simply have to settle for not being any/very good in a proper fight.

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Ah my bad Alex also updated the BP rules your spending is no longer vaild.

 

[Pipeman]

Ah my bad Alex also updated the BP rules your spending is no longer vaild.

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Could you tell me where?
I'm afraid I can't find it.

 

[Robotninja]

Because using HSDD to make people fall in love with you is not raping their minds. Even if you do not know them very well. It represents being absurdly charming, to the point where you can induce love at first sight, seduce almost anyone, and such things. Mind rape would be actively spamming it until they run out of willpower to resist.

But I loathe the meme that using social charms is somehow evil or rapage with a burning passion. Using supernatural charisma to gain a harem may be petty, but it does not make you some sort of mind rapist unless you actively deny them the ability to refuse by smashing their willpower down.

 

[Dark Lord Bob]

[X] As you search through your pockets for your phone to call help, you stumble on the scrap of paper that strange girl gave you. Supposedly it is used for a summoning. Well, since the supernatural is appreantly real and you don't have many options, it should be worth at least a try. Not like it's going to take you very long.
[X] Easy

Also, some quotes from the devs on the UMI issue:
[quote author=Stephenls]
It's the difference between "Superpowers you never have to feel guilty about using, no matter how wantonly you use them," and "That other set of superpowers that are awful and never okay to use, which are part of a category of superpowers called out as its own thing to throw the good superpowers into contrast." As long as there are clearly mind-rape superpowers, then all non-mind-rape superpowers are okay to spend your XP on because not being mind-rape-superpowers makes them okay.

It's a false dichotomy created by those portions of the fanbase who can't handle either a) moral ambiguity or b) the thought that sometimes spending XP on something doesn't put you in the moral right to spam it relentlessly on everything in sight.

My contention at this point, sadly, is that as much as we try to create a social influence system that doesn't support this dichotomy, there will be some point of division the fanbase at large will settle on, with Mind Rape on one side and Not Mind Rape on the other, and this interpretation will spread far and wide, lo, as unto T-Rexes in F-14s, and within two years we'll be back where we started. But we are aware of the problem and its nature and are trying to prevent its reestablishment.
[/quote]

[quote author=Plague of Hats]
Any influence system that provides any amount of real mechanical support for ensuring your "convince a guy" roll actually convinces a guy will leave a foothold for someone calling it mind rape. Therefore it's kind of hard to care about the issue beyond "don't fuck it up hard like 2E did."
[/quote]

[quote author=Stephenls]
Yeah pretty much.

The problem here is that "What's the moral difference between supernatural mind control and just being really convincing while talking to someone who is not very good at not being convinced of things?" is both a profoundly uncomfortable question and something that has direct bearing on our real lives. (Also, "What's the moral difference between learning methods of supernatural mind control and learning to be more persuasive?") Exalted in particular tackles it head-on by just straight-up declaring that there's no meaningful difference between having a Convince That Guy dice pool of 8 because you've got 4s in your relevant attribute and ability, and having a dice pool of 8 because you have 2s and are boosting your competence with a dice-adder effect.

People as a whole will invent a way of looking at this that prevent them from having to think about it. There's very little you can do.

Well. We can come online and bitch at people who insist on trying to make stupid interpretations dominant within the fanbase, I guess. That's a storied tradition.

EDIT: I should clarify my motives here. Somewhere there is a human being whose first introduction to Exalted is going to be Exalted's section of the Mind Rape entry on TVTropes. I would like that person not to come away with the impression that Exalted is idiotic and not worth further perusal. If a dumb interpretation of Exalted's social influence paradigm is dominant within the fanbase, the chance of Exalted's entry on that TVTropes page being dumb increases.
[/quote]

 

[Dark Lord Bob]

Further quote, on the nature of charms:
[quote author=John Mørke]
I am saying Charms, as in Solar Charms, don't exist. They're descriptors for different characters.

Investigation is Sherlock Holmes, Athletics is Hercules and Jubei and Kenshin. Melee is also Jubei. The entire Night Caste set is Batman.

When you pick your Charms, you are picking traits you want to attach to your character in order to describe him. Every Charm in there is derived from a character in literature or myth or anime. You aren't using a power to make you Batman, you are using a power because you are Batman.

The first example is a guy who doesn't really deserve his power, because he didn't earn it, and the second is a guy from whom the power is derived. The essential difference undercuts several arguments posted earlier in the thread, and if you don't understand that, then you probably missed the point.

They aren't discrete techniques because they do not exist except for us to interface with them. Everyone who experiences such a thing in-game can experience them as a matter of absolutely no outside influence, including training.
[/quote]

 

[Alexander]

Right, for those who haven't noticed I made some modifications on the Sheet after I considered pro and con.

-First Presence Excellency is now Second Presence
-The cap with the Bonus Points is no longer 3

However, it would be unrealistic for Issei to suddenly gain knowledge after you raise an Attribute or Ability. Thus there will be specific times where Issei will gain IC them with help from a certain someone, the one who will become your mentor so to speak. So you can vote to raise them, but Issei would not acquire them until the right time.

And Easy/Normal are tied again. The first to reach a majority again will be the winning vote since I can't update without it. The rest, from Anima Banner to Virtue Flaw, is decided.

 

[Selias]

And Easy/Normal are tied again. The first to reach a majority again will be the winning vote since I can't update without it. The rest, from Anima Banner to Virtue Flaw, is decided.

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I'll switch to easy.

 

[touhou ranfuku]

Me too. Switch to easy.

 

[Dark Lord Bob]

Right, for those who haven't noticed I made some modifications on the Sheet after I considered pro and con.

-First Presence Excellency is now Second Presence

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What were the reasons for this? Because I'd have thought that it would be more useful as a First Excellency. I read as part of a help section that:
"Buy an Excellency for the most important abilities to your concept. If you've followed my advice so far, that should be at least one combat and one non-combat Ability - in Sakuya's case Melee and Investigation. I like First Excellency for combat (where swingy high success rolls scale up in usefulness by pushing damage past soak, but below-average rolls that miss the DV are all equally useless whether mediocre or dire) and Second Excellency for non-combat (where I probably don't care about the threshold, I just don't want to fail). The Third Excellency isn't very good."

Also, from the same site:
http://jyenicolson.net/exalted/

I'd recommend everyone check out this site as it has an interactive tutorial that guides you through the most common aspects of Exalted. It was quite helpful to me, and I feel it really boosts comprehension of the rules.
The Sakuya mentioned in the excerpt was the Player Character of the tutorial.

 

[Robotninja]

Unrealistic? Not really. Exalting gives you a superhuman boost of knowledge and potential. To the point where you can indeed get far stronger and faster and skilled instantly.

 

[Pipeman]

Right, for those who haven't noticed I made some modifications on the Sheet after I considered pro and con.

-First Presence Excellency is now Second Presence
-The cap with the Bonus Points is no longer 3

However, it would be unrealistic for Issei to suddenly gain knowledge after you raise an Attribute or Ability. Thus there will be specific times where Issei will gain IC them with help from a certain someone, the one who will become your mentor so to speak. So you can vote to raise them, but Issei would not acquire them until the right time.

And Easy/Normal are tied again. The first to reach a majority again will be the winning vote since I can't update without it. The rest, from Anima Banner to Virtue Flaw, is decided.

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Personally, I'd just have gone with Glorious Solar Magic to explain where the knowledge is suddenly coming from, which is somewhat sensible since this is not really a singular occurence due to all Favoured Abilties lacking training times, but removing the cap on Abilties is more than enough for me.
Will have to do some math before posting my new proposal.

What were the reasons for this? Because I'd have thought that it would be more useful as a First Excellency. I read as part of a help section that:
"Buy an Excellency for the most important abilities to your concept. If you've followed my advice so far, that should be at least one combat and one non-combat Ability - in Sakuya's case Melee and Investigation. I like First Excellency for combat (where swingy high success rolls scale up in usefulness by pushing damage past soak, but below-average rolls that miss the DV are all equally useless whether mediocre or dire) and Second Excellency for non-combat (where I probably don't care about the threshold, I just don't want to fail). The Third Excellency isn't very good."

Also, from the same site:
http://jyenicolson.net/exalted/

I'd recommend everyone check out this site as it has an interactive tutorial that guides you through the most common aspects of Exalted. It was quite helpful to me, and I feel it really boosts comprehension of the rules.
The Sakuya mentioned in the excerpt was the Player Character of the tutorial.

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You can probably argue that how far you get past the threshold isn't nearly as important in Social Combat as it is in real Combat.

 

[Carrnage]

All in favor of using You Can Be More to convince every girl in our harem to go Bi?

The idea of using something designed for glorious speeches for something so perverted amuses me.

 

[Pipeman]

All in favor of using You Can Be More to convince every girl in our harem to go Bi?

The idea of using something designed for glorious speeches for something so perverted amuses me.

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It's hilariously Issei, so I approve, though I must say that buying more Charms at chargen is outrageously expensive, especially since our character is constructed very suboptimally already.

That said, without the cap on Abilties, we're best off boosting a couple of the favoured ones very high.
Still, Appearance is very useful and Attributes are also rather expensive to raise with XP, which combined with the fact that we're likely best off in the short term by boosting social combat makes me want to raise that as well.
Right now I'm thinking:

2 dots of Appearance (8 BP)
5 dots of Occult (5 BP)
4 dots of Presence (4 BP)
1 dot of Resistance (1 BP)

Appeareance I already explained, Occult is still for casting, Presence is our best shot at Social Combat and Resistance is because buying later dots with BP is more cost efficient, Resistance is already at 3, we had one BP left and getting Resistance 5 is our fastest way to getting a Perfect Defense, so that's worth working towards.

 

[Dark Lord Bob]

What are our favoured Abilities?