User:Olaf

Basic Info

Name: Dan (Mun)
Age: 21
Concept: Storyteller
Political Affiliation: College of Mathematical and Physical Sciences
Anima: The Shaper (see the John Gardner novel, Grendel)
Motivation: Learn to play Dancing Mad on a pipe organ

Weapon of Choice: Freshly cut rhymes
Armor of Choice: Articulated Turn-table plate
Fighting Style: It is like ice dissolving in water.

Background

Dan is usually the group's primary storyteller, but is currently on a bit of a hiatus, as he's turning more into a writer than a storyteller. He's also currently hooked on Age of Conan (27 ToS on Stormrage), and plays a bit of TF2, DotA, and EleTD every now and then (CS:S has fallen out of favor). He's pursuing a major in Chemistry with a minor in Computer Science. Scientifically, his biggest interests (presently, anyhow) are photovoltaic cells and quantum-tunneling enzymes.

His major influences include Cowboy Bebop, most Final Fantasy games (especially Tactics), Kenshin, Inuyasha, and old epics (Odyssey, Iliad, Beowulf, Gilgamesh, etc.). His favorite game is Exalted, though he is of the opinion that the combat system could use a little streamlining. He'll be writing a program to do just that.

Grievances

(Revised)

• The mass combat system doesn't handle troop-splitting or within-magnitude mismatches that well (i.e. 12 vs. 75 -- if all other factors are equal, including identical commanders, the 75 should crush the 12). Dan had a pretty good thing going with the suggestion to figure in size difference to the wound penalty of the force, though this could get hairy if the match-up is across magnitude. This is all in the vein of a rigidly defined system -- If it were up to me, I'd talk out the battles and decide which army should win (most likely, the cooler one), then write a narrative about it.

• Combat is very calculation heavy for storytellers hoping to run legitimately cool fight scenes. The Exalted system of minimum damage being based on Essence heavily disfavors single opponents of a higher power level than the players. This is fine, but managing a larger number of NPCs of similar power-level to the players gets really messy, and things get bogged down on both ends of the screen. There's no way to fix this if the game is to retain its almost video-game like feel to battles (I mean this in a good way -- it feels like you're really gaming when there's so many mechanically-defined things you can do), though an automated combat calculator would do wonders (working on it).

• I still don't think piercing damage should have a sliding scale -- I understand that it's Exalted, and it's magic, and it's epic, so my begrudging compromise would be that piercing damage deals 50% soak damage when piercing weapons are in the hands of Exalts. In the hands of a mortal, there's no excuse for a target arrow penetrating only 50% through breastplate if it pierces 50% of the way through chain-swathing (presumably much sturdier and thicker). If I were to implement this rule, it would be a fair number, so as not to make these weapons useless for mortals -- most likely, it wouldn't do much good against articulated and above, but might completely negate low-level armors such as chain shirts (Yes, I'm aware that this would force mortals to do more damage with piercing than Exalts against poorly armored opponents, which doesn't make a lick of sense, so Exalts might have a minimum piercing damage that corrects this, or something).