Talk:Craft (Ability) - Revision history

Storyteller: /* Expanded musings and concerns. */ new section

2015-10-19T20:11:36Z

‎Expanded musings and concerns.: new section

Storyteller at 18:46, 19 October 2015

2015-10-19T18:46:51Z

Storyteller: Created page with "Some design notes, on changes and clarifications. As a general principle, Exalted 1e had too many Crafts, and many writers mistook Craft for the same thing as Profession in..."

2015-10-18T16:39:34Z

Created page with "Some design notes, on changes and clarifications. As a general principle, Exalted 1e had too many Crafts, and many writers mistook Craft for the same thing as Profession in..."

New page

Some design notes, on changes and clarifications.

As a general principle, Exalted 1e had too many Crafts, and many writers mistook Craft for the same thing as Profession in DnD, if there wasn't an Ability for it, or if 'it' required a combination of Abilities and you didnt want to have to put dots in a bunch of different ones, make it a Craft. 2E attempted to clean this up with consolidation: everything fits into one of five elemental Crafts. But then further books expanded this back upwards: Sidereals had Craft Fate without ever explaining what it was exactly in terms of 2e rules, WotLA added Magitech and Genesis with an array of exceptions for maintenance and different sets of prerequisites and caps from other Abilities, Abyssals tried to avoid creating a new Craft Ability by making Necrotech just something derived from already extant Abilities, Graceful Wicked Masques needed something new for crafting Glamour from the Wyld, other books had Craft Reality to represent the Solars going out and also crafting with the Wyld. and Underworld copy-pasted a lot of 1e ideas to add in a whole array of different Crafts for each little variation on manipulating spirit and magical material. Maybe Craft should work like Melee, be massive in breadth, but I lean towards it being the exception, making different things being more difficult and divergent than hitting things using different variations on shape and sharpness of implement. But I like the objective of simplicity that 2e promised, and I don't like the massive expansion from it brought on by later books. So, this is an attempt to pare things down, to simplify and combine as much as seems reasonable.

- Calligraphy gets moved from Craft Air to exist entirely under Linguistics

- Textiles get moved from Craft Wood to Craft Air

- A lessening of the priority of the material versus the scope (building a house is Craft Earth, even if that house is made of wood, weapons and armour are Craft Fire even if they're made from bone, etc)

- Clarifying agriculture and livestock under Craft Wood (sometimes they'd been linked with Craft Earth, sometimes just ignored).

- Fate is not a Craft, but knowing how looms work is directly applicable to knowing how the Loom works (Occult may cover understanding what it does, but Craft Air is key to knowing how it does it. See [[Esoteric Crafting]] for further information.

- Magitech, Necrotech, Necrosurgery, and Genesis are not Crafts, they are crafting fields which require synergy between several different Craft Abilities to accomplish [[Esoteric Crafting]].

- Jadecrafting and Soulforging are not separate Crafts. Both fall mostly under Craft Fire, though large works of [[Jade]] fit under Craft Earth. Occult is likely required to take advantage of the properties of a magical material, and to be able to alloy souls into [[Soulsteel]].

- Craft Moliation, Craft Glamour, Craft Reality, Craft Pandemonium, etc. are all variations on a theme, too narrow to match the breadth of Craft Air/Earth/Fire/Water/Wood. But TOGETHER they end up similar, and they all land under the umbrella of mucking about with the stuff of the Wyld, the stuff of spirits. So they all get combined into one, as [[Craft Moliation (Ability)]].

← Older revision		Revision as of 20:11, 19 October 2015
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	- Craft Moliation, Craft Glamour, Craft Reality, Craft Pandemonium, etc. are all variations on a theme, too narrow to match the breadth of Craft Air/Earth/Fire/Water/Wood. But TOGETHER they end up similar, and they all land under the umbrella of mucking about with the stuff of the Wyld, the stuff of spirits. So they all get combined into one, as [[Craft Moliation (Ability)]].		- Craft Moliation, Craft Glamour, Craft Reality, Craft Pandemonium, etc. are all variations on a theme, too narrow to match the breadth of Craft Air/Earth/Fire/Water/Wood. But TOGETHER they end up similar, and they all land under the umbrella of mucking about with the stuff of the Wyld, the stuff of spirits. So they all get combined into one, as [[Craft Moliation (Ability)]].
		+
		+	== Expanded musings and concerns. ==
		+
		+	Craft in Exalted is awful. White Wolf seems to have long embraced a design philosophy chooses to make crafting bad in their games, so no surprise. Anecdotally I empathize, crafting adds a lot of temptation to exploit loophole and game systems, but it means that when craft is being used honestly, the toolset is a steaming pile of shit. In a football field of shits.
		+
		+	One step at a time, though. We've just stepped in a big steaming pile, no need to stride into another one. At least try to clean some of it off, make sure it doesnt build up. So, the first thing to do is to to sort through something glaringly problematic and yet of significant import to SotT: the esoteric crafts.
		+
		+
		+
		+	The Esoteric Crafts are Craft Magitech Craft Genesis, Craft Necrosurgery, Craft Fate, Craft Glamour, Necrotech, Craft Reality, Craft Moliation, Craft Pandemonium, Craft Soulforging. There are actually a few others printed in 2nd Edition, but I don’t want to sift everything to find them. This is still a massive and revolutionary simplification from the Craft diaspora of 1e.
		+
		+	However, even much reduced, the 2e esoteric crafts are… well, poorly designed and completely uncoordinated. Each one represents a Craft outside of the basic elemental 5, something more obscure… working with strange materials or advanced techniques, requiring specialized tools and materials, and a different perspective on the nature of reality.
		+	In 2e, each book with an esoteric craft has a different way of presenting that Craft, how it works, how it interacts with, how it relates TO, other Crafts both mundane and esoteric. And that really isn’t ok. The system should have common ground a framework for the mechanics of these crafts that stays consistent, a cost in XP to master them that doesn’t let the village idiot become a necrotechnician at 20 and a magitechnician only after sixty years of study. What each craft DOES should be unique, but what it looks like on the character sheet should be recognizable one to the next, on common ground.
		+
		+	…
		+
		+	If you look over the crafts published into, a few problems jump out.
		+
		+	The first two are issues of 1st Edition bleeding into 2nd due to copy-pasting and inattention. The design philosophy for Craft in 1e was very loose. Blacksmithing was a Craft, the techniques for working metal into useful shapes. Soulsteel was a craft, to pound souls into iron and make a magical material. Glamour was a craft, working with wyld potential to form specifics. Fate was a craft, for filling out the right forms with the pretties calligraphy and sending them through the correct channels. First Age tech was a craft, for working with 'First Age stuff' (usually, but completely unbound to, magitechnology). War was a craft, because there was no ability to roll for fighting wars.
		+
		+	Blacksmithing here is a specific technique.
		+	Soulsteel here is, canonically, blacksmithing with the added ingredient of souls, making a magical material.
		+	Glamour is a strange material which cant be shaped by any of the usual techniques.
		+	Fate is a way to condense a number of different rolls and actions into a single roll with a single Ability.
		+	First Age tech is a bunch of different techniques and devices from a broad historical period.
		+	War is a way to fill a perceived gap in the Ability set (which one could argue is really just another attempt to take a bunch of different rolls and actions and condense into a single action & Ability).
		+
		+	There was very little consistency on what a craft actually was. Was it actually crafting things? Usually, but not really. Craft Fate is a bunch of Lore and background dots and Bureaucracy and Linguistics and on and on.
		+
		+	In 2e, the Craft system had at its core a desire to stop. that. shit. War isnt a Craft, but it IS a thing, it got its own Ability. A thousand different little techniques are too small to be Abilities, they were all mashed together into five broad elemental categories. The aim is to make sure people dont proliferate crafts everywhere for every little thing, and to make sure that they dont fall back on Craft as a crutch for something that isnt represented or exists as a complex interaction of numerous extant Abilities.
		+
		+	And then, this principle established, they proceeded to abrogate editorial responsibility while several writers went tl:dr to the material and kept on doing the same shit.
		+
		+	WotLA tried to come up with a system for the advanced stuff, the complex magical crafts. Make new Crafts for the complex stuff, with minimums to show that they've grown out of the original elemental Craft Abilities. Its not a bad approach, and a good framework for all such Crafts, without changing too much.
		+
		+	You want to look at someone who probably understood the principle the best of them all, its in Abyssals. Read that section again, if you didnt catch it. There ISN'T an necrotech Craft Ability, instead crafting necrotech is a mechanic which pulls in existing Craft Abilities. Very different from the norm.
		+
		+	RoGDII ignores this existing mechanic completely and invents a Craft for necrotech, Necrosurgery. It also creates a whole bunch of other Crafts, each of which seems to have been written as if this was still 1e, not acknowledging the change in what Craft is and how it works, flagrantly pissing a stream of new Crafts all over the wall.
		+
		+	MoEP Sidereals doesnt really acknowledge its Craft at all, again a treatment as if we were still in 1e. Better because the less they talk the less they give me to be infuriated by? But that also makes it worse.
		+
		+	GWM sees another 1e holdover, but its a little different... while the elemental Crafts are broad and cover much, crafting reality from chaos is something all its own.
		+
		+	Scroll of Heroes states that mortals cant normally use esoteric crafts at all, that they're the purview of Exalts. The books above cover other examples... gods use them, ghosts use them, fair folk use them. The Merit itself is kinda forgettable, but it offers up something that I think might be of use.
		+
		+	Alright, thats a bit of critique, but there is more to discuss.
		+
		+	…
		+
		+	The first thing I would do, before looking at the details of how esoteric crafts work, is pare this shit down.
		+
		+	Craft Jadecrafting = gone, thats Craft Earth
		+	Craft Soulforging = gone, thats Craft Fire, plus some sort of thaumocculting, maybe.
		+
		+	Craft Moliation, Craft Glamour, Craft Reality, Craft Pandemonium = these are all turning spirit stuff, imaginary stuff into real stuff. Dream stuff is weird. Chaos stuff is weird. Gods are made of weird. But the breadth of the Elemental Crafts tells us something, and 2e is lookin on at that long list and shaking its head. Fucking with corpus should absolutely be in the same group as fucking with the Wyld, toss Glamour toss Reality toss Pandemonium. Whatever it is mechanically, another Element or something esoteric, there is only Craft Moliation. That is all.
		+
		+	…
		+
		+	So, that still leaves us with a set of esoteric crafts: Magitech, Necrotech (Necrosurgery?), Genesis, and Moliation.
		+
		+	The first 3 are advanced crafts... they use the tools and methods and materials of the Elemental Crafts, plus some new things, plus things from other Abilities, for very complex crafting that draws from a broader base than any singel Elemental Craft, to reach a very specialized end.
		+
		+	Moliation, working with Wyld and spirit, is a little different. It is crafting using an entirely different, and rather broad, set of materials and techniques... it is comparable to an Elemental Craft.
		+
		+	Each of the esoteric crafts also has something that the Elemental Crafts do not. In Exalted, the world LOOKS like ours, and on the surface it seems to work like ours. The ingredients and temperatures and tools and timing to bake a loaf of bread there and here are the same. Elemental Crafts approach the world at this surface level. But beneath the surface the pillars of support exist barely seen, for us we have the study of physics pushing deeper and deeper, through atomic particles and quantum and things that a blacksmith or baker or jeweler doesnt know anything about as she does her work, even if those things are behind everything they do.
		+
		+	In Exalted, there is also an underlying set of systems... a system of theology, gods and purviews and bureaucracies administering reality, and a system of motes and essence and flow. What for us needs a quantum physicist, in Creation needs a sage of the Occult. Those who practice the esoteric crafts are marrying the surface building of Craft with the deep understanding of Occult. The magitech artificer is a quantum engineer.
		+
		+	I think seeing that is the key to making these crafting fields work correctly in Exalted.
		+
		+	…
		+
		+	So, what do these things look like, fixed?
		+
		+	Craft Moliation is an Ability, and functions as a peer of the Elemental Crafts, but working with a different material. In order to learn it or know it, a character must have some way to shape the stuff of spirits or the Wyld.
		+
		+	For the remainder:
		+
		+	Option 1: The WotLA Approach.
		+	Each esoteric craft is its own ability. To learn these abilities requires prerequisite abilities, and certain abilities cap the esoteric craft.
		+
		+	Ex: In WotLA, Craft Magitech requires Craft Fire 2, Craft Air 2, and one other Craft at 1, and its rating cannot be higher than Lore. Craft Genesis' rating cannot be higher than Lore. Medicine, or Occult.
		+
		+	This is already mixed up: Magitech is capped by one ability, but has a trio of prereqs. Genesis has no prereqs, but is capped by three Abilities. REPAIRING Magitech devices is entirely different, requiring Craft (with a penalty if this is not Craft Magitech), Lore, and Occult. The system is extremely inconsistent.
		+
		+	The best way to salvage this might be to make each esoteric craft Abilities have a Craft prerequisite and a cap from another Ability. There are lots of abilities that could fit, but I find that Occult really should be required far more than it is (though this also comes down to me feeling that understanding the nature of the divine is Occult, the bureaucracy of the divine should be entirely moved to Bureaucracy).
		+
		+	Craft Magitech requires Craft Air 1, Craft Fire 1, one other Craft 1. Cannot exceed Lore (or perhaps 'Lore or Occult').
		+	Craft Necrosurgery requires Craft Fire 1, Craft Water 1, one other Craft 1. Cannot exceed Medicine (or perhaps 'Medicine or Occult').
		+	Craft Biogenesis requires Craft Wood 1, Survival 1, Medicine 1. Cannot exceed Occult (or perhaps 'Medicine or Occult').
		+
		+	Option 2: The Necrotech Approach.
		+
		+	This would involve looking at esoteric Crafts and saying 'no, thats not right. We arent talking about Esoteric Craft Abilities. We're talking about Esoteric CRAFTING, these are verrrry different things'.
		+
		+	I actually like this approach quite a bit, but you can see how messy it can get. There are not extra abilities added to the base of 5+1. Instead, esoteric crafting requires a character to bring to bear several different Abilities in order to understand the crafting they are attempting... its methods, materials, rules. This also means that instead of highly specialized Craft variants, characters put their dots into Abilities that are much more broadly applicable, while the esoteric crafts themselves become valid Specialties.
		+
		+	The issue here is that esoteric crafts could become easier to access... more commonly reached, depending on what Abilities are counted as qualifiers for crafting. Three seems a number that works well with what has been written in terms of canon prereqs and qualifiers, but I think it leaves the esoterics within too easy reach to fit with where I'd like them to be in the setting, something that only the most skilled and dedicated savants can understand at an elevated level. Five is way too many, despite fitting Exalted well thematically, so I'd lean towards 4.
		+
		+	Magitech Crafting uses the lowest amongst Craft Air, Craft Fire, Occult (and Lore?).
		+	Necrosurgery Crafting uses the lowest amongst Craft Fire, Medicine, Occult (and Lore?).
		+	Biogenesis Crafting uses the lowest amongst Craft Wood, Medicine, Occult (and Survival?).
		+
		+	…
		+
		+	Another divergent point. The Linguistics vs. Craft Air/Craft (Air)/Craft: Air/Craft-Air Issue. Should Calligraphy actually just be shunted entirely out of Craft Air and into Linguistics? It fits the current Social Combat system better than putting it in Craft, but I hate the current social combat system. Linguistics, if you take my line that it is incomparable to our own understanding of languages because in Exalted the first language didnt evolve but was created, programmed into the people who regulate the universe, and then used as the base for immortal god-kings to design five new languages whose grammar and syntax incorporates both lessons to make directional life more tenable* and prayers to the important spiritual figures of the locality.
		+
		+	If there aren't that many languages, Linguistics doesnt do much if its just 'the Ability for understanding languages'. Its also got 'expressing yourself with language and making art with language', and thats good, but calligraphy should probably fit whole into its aegis and not be shared with jewelrymaking and electronics. Though I might move weaving and tailoring out of Wood into Air as compensation, freeing space in Wood for agriculture to fit more comfortably alongside woodcarving.
		+
		+	*This is probably the biggest argument against linguistic drift. Say original Firetongue incorporates a lesson in finding water into expressing that one is thirsty. What do you think the survival rate of people in a desert who continue to obey those original forms exactly looks like compared to a different group who lets their language drift off in different directions?
		+
		+	Exalted languages are constructed not evolved, based on an original root that was also constructed not evolved and is spoken by immortals whove been there since day one, and which have built-in incentives for speakers to not let them deviate from the original construct. Fuck dialects, that shit makes no sense and also kills you.

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−	As a general principle, Exalted 1e had too many Crafts, and many writers mistook Craft for the same thing as Profession in DnD, if there wasn't an Ability for it, or if 'it' required a combination of Abilities and you didnt want to have to put dots in a bunch of different ones, make it a Craft. 2E attempted to clean this up with consolidation: everything fits into one of five elemental Crafts. But then further books expanded this back upwards: Sidereals had Craft Fate without ever explaining what it was exactly in terms of 2e rules, WotLA added Magitech and Genesis with an array of exceptions for maintenance and different sets of prerequisites and caps from other Abilities, Abyssals tried to avoid creating a new Craft Ability by making Necrotech just something derived from already extant Abilities, Graceful Wicked Masques needed something new for crafting Glamour from the Wyld, other books had Craft Reality to represent the Solars going out and also crafting with the Wyld. and Underworld copy-pasted a lot of 1e ideas to add in a whole array of different Crafts for each little variation on manipulating spirit and magical material. Maybe Craft should work like Melee, be massive in breadth, but I lean towards it being the exception, making different things being more difficult and divergent than hitting things using different variations on shape and sharpness of implement. But I like the objective of simplicity that 2e promised, and I don't like the massive expansion from it brought on by later books. So, this is an attempt to pare things down, to simplify and combine as much as seems reasonable.	+	As a general principle, Exalted 1e had too many Crafts, and many writers mistook Craft for the same thing as Profession in DnD, if there wasn't an Ability for it, or if 'it' required a combination of Abilities and you didnt want to have to put dots in a bunch of different ones, make it a Craft. 2E attempted to clean this up with consolidation: everything fits into one of five elemental Crafts. But then further books expanded this back upwards: Sidereals had Craft Fate without ever explaining what it was exactly in terms of 2e rules, WotLA added Magitech and Genesis with an array of exceptions for maintenance and different sets of prerequisites and caps from other Abilities, Abyssals tried to avoid creating a new Craft Ability by making Necrotech just something derived from already extant Abilities, Graceful Wicked Masques needed something new for crafting Glamour from the Wyld, other books had Craft Reality to represent the Solars going out and also crafting with the Wyld. and Underworld copy-pasted a lot of 1e ideas to add in a whole array of different Crafts for each little variation on manipulating spirit and magical material. Maybe Craft should work like Melee, be massive in breadth, but I lean towards it being the exception, making different things being more difficult and divergent than hitting things using different variations on shape and sharpness of implement. But I like the objective of simplicity that 2e promised, and I don't like the massive expansion from it brought on by later books. So, this is an attempt to pare things down, to simplify and combine as much as seems reasonable, and to make sure that crafting both as an ability and as a process has mechanical consistency rather than being thirty-odd-subsystems.