Basic Mechanics

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Time

The world inside a story does not follow the same clock as the real world. Some events might take an hour to play, yet only encompass a few minutes within the game. Conversely, an uneventful journey of several months can pass by with only the briefest description. Owing to the narrative structure of the game, time is broken down into the following units:

Series

This refers to the ongoing game as a whole, a succession of stories revolving around the players' characters and their heroic exploits. For particularly long-running series, the cast can change, with only the Storyteller and the established chronology of the world holding constant.

Story

A complete narrative arc, usually with a primary goal and the possible inclusion of subplots. Most stories are broken into episodes, largely because they are too long to play in a single session or link a set of plot developments.

Episode

An independent section of a story, either containing its own subplot or categorized as the part of the story covered in a single session of play. Each episode strings together a sequence of scenes, possibly linked by downtime.

Scene

A segment of narrative action and events played out as the protagonists interact with the setting and supporting characters of the game. Theatrically, this is the action that happens "onstage." A scene encompasses the time necessary to play it, which can be a three-minute fight or 10 hours spent mingling at a party.

Downtime

The abstract passage of "unimportant" events between scenes or episodes, which isn't actually played. Instead, downtime uses simple narration to explain what happened. Characters use downtime to recuperate or train, or for players to get through "boring" matters so they can get to something more exciting. Theatrically, this is what happens "offstage" or in a voiceover sequence.

Tick

Only relevant in combat or similarly tense situations, this is the smallest measurable unit of time in the game, approximately one second long. See Combat for more information.

Dice and Props

"Ten dice per player works"? NOT. Have 30 or more dice at hand when you're playing a Solar Exalted!

Exalted requires 10-sided dice to simulate the effects of chance, which are available in any game store. Players may share dice, but this will slow game-play considerably. Ten dice per player works, but 15 to 20 is better. The Storyteller should definitely have her own set.

Besides dice, players might also wish to obtain small glass beads or some other form of token in at least two colors to keep track of Essence motes and other fluctuating values. White Wolf produces glass beads for just this purpose, available through its catalog.

Otherwise, the only props needed for play include character sheets, pencils, this book and any other Exalted products used for reference. The Exalted Second Edition Screen, for instance contains many useful tables summarizing key rules from this chapter. The screen also works well for hiding notes and dice rolls.

Actions

Whenever a player has her character attempt anything, the Storyteller can resolve the action in one of two ways. In the first, he can accept the action and simply allow it to happen as described. This works well for trivial matters, such as walking across a room or changing into an outfit—tasks of such simplicity that there is no reason the character should fail. Similarly, when a character engages in conversation, the player speaks as the character.

In many cases, however, characters aren’t assured of success. Uncertainty creates tension, which facilitates the drama that drives stories forward and makes scenes interesting. Properly used, every uncertain action becomes a cliffhanger in miniature. Will the character make it across the narrow bridge over the pit of lava or fall in? Will she rally the ragtag militia against the slavering ghouls shambling from the shadowland, or will her soldiers flee in terror? Wherever the chance of failure exists, traits and dice come into play.

Traits

Every character has strengths and weaknesses, based in large part on her innate aptitudes, learned skills or the mettle of her soul. Within the game, such qualities are measured using traits, each of which has a name and a numerical rating in dots. Most traits range from 1 to 5, although some can have a rating as low as 0 or even in excess of 5. Players record traits on their character sheet by filling in the appropriate number of dots.

Innate competence is expressed through nine Attributes, grouped into three broad categories. The Physical Attributes of Strength, Dexterity and Stamina govern the power, speed and health of the body, respectively. Social Attributes represent a character's force of personality, cunning and looks, through the Charisma, Manipulation and Appearance traits. Mental Attributes measure the acumen, discernment and quickness of the mind, using Perception, Intelligence and Wits. A rating of 1 in an Attribute signifies below-average competence, whereas 5 marks the absolute peak of human accomplishment. See Attributes for more information.

A character's learned skills and knowledge form the basis of her Abilities, of which 25 exist. Without any dots in an Ability, a character has no training in that task. She is not fundamentally defi cient without it, but simply ignorant. Even among the greatest gods and Exalted, very few have dots in every Ability. Most characters specialize according to their interests and background. With 1 in an Ability, a character is a novice. With 5, he is one of the world's foremost experts in that field—at least among mortals.

The qualities of a character's soul and personality are a function of several traits. First, the four Virtues of Compassion, Conviction, Temperance and Valor establish a character’s personality and mores. As with Attributes, 1 marks a character as defi cient. At the upper end, 5 is the realm of saints and heroes. In addition, every character has a Willpower rating, expressing the raw force of her mind and passion. Finally, Essence gauges the overall magic of a being and the power of her soul, with non-magical beings having 1 simply for being animate and higher ratings reserved for spirits, the Chosen and the other supernatural beings. Unlike most other traits, Willpower and Essence follow a 1–10 scale instead of 1–5.

Finally, Backgrounds cover a character's social ties, possessions and other unique advantages specific to her upbringing or nature. The degree of privilege and accomplishment follows the usual 1 to 5 scale as explained for the specific Background.

Pools and Dice

Whenever a character attempts an action where success and failure are both possible, her player rolls a number of dice equal to the dots the character has in the appropriate trait or traits. Most rolls couple an Attribute with an Ability, representing the combination of innate potential and learned skill that best applies to the situation. Unless otherwise stated, no roll pairs two Attributes or two Abilities. The Storyteller selects this combination when he asks for the roll. For instance, crossing a narrow bridge over lava would require a roll of (Dexterity + Athletics). The sum of all the traits used for a roll is called a dice pool.

When rolling a dice pool, the player considers each die separately to see if it contributes to the success of the action. By default, every die always has a target number of 7. If the number rolled is equal to the target number or greater—7, 8, 9 or 0 (10)—that die adds to the overall success of the roll. Certain rare magical effects can occasionally raise or lower the target number of a roll, changing the likelihood that dice will succeed. For instance, at target number 5, a die succeeds on a roll of 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 or 0. The total number of successes generated on a roll determines the overall success of the action.

Difficulty and Success

The difficulty of a task equals the number of successes required to achieve it. Many tasks have difficulty 1, succeeding if even one die in the dice pool rolls a success. Because this is the norm, difficulty 1 is also called standard difficulty. (Rolls without a listed difficulty are always assumed to be difficulty 1.) The harder the task is, the higher the difficulty is. On average, characters have a reasonable chance of success when they have a number of dice in a pool at least double the required difficulty (so two dice for diffi culty 1, eight for diffi culty 4, etc.). A difficulty above 5 is possible, but such Herculean feats are usually beyond the reach of mere mortals (who seldom have dice pools larger than 10).

Often, the difficulty of a task is immediately evident to the character. In such cases, the Storyteller should provide the difficulty along with the required dice pool for the action. In other situations, the diffi culty is not apparent. Perhaps the character is under stress or has never attempted anything remotely like the action in question before. Maybe revealing the difficulty could give too much away (such as alerting players to the presence of something well-hidden by calling for a high-difficulty [Perception + Awareness] roll). In these cases, the Storyteller calls for a roll without providing the difficulty and has the player state the number of successes rolled. He then compares the successes to the secret difficulty. On hidden-diffi culty rolls where failure could result in a character's injury or some other unpleasant fate, cautious players can usually take a moment to “look before they leap.” Doing so requires a successful roll of (Perception + the Ability used for the task). Obviously, common sense applies. Characters cannot try to look ahead to figure out how far they might have to look ahead (i.e., no guessing the difficulty of basic [Perception + Awareness] checks).

Difficulty Rating Degree of Difficulty
1 Standard
2 Difficult
3 Challenging
4 Nearly Impossible
5+ Legendary

If the number of successes generated by a dice pool is less than its difficulty, the action as a whole fails. If the number of successes matches the difficulty, the action succeeds. Should the number of successes exceed the difficulty, the character succeeds in a more thorough or dramatic fashion, with the size of the excess (called the threshold) governing the overall impressiveness of the feat. For some tasks, the number of bonus successes has a measurable effect built into the rules of the game. For instance, the more skillfully a character throws a punch, the harder it is to avoid the blow and the more damage inflicted if the strike connects. In other cases, bonus successes are simply cosmetic, rewarding players with better descriptions of their triumph.

Failure and Botches

If a roll does not generate enough successes to meet its difficulty, the action fails. Depending on the nature of the action, failure can have a wide range of consequences. If a character cannot decipher a set of ancient glyphs, he can always try again later. Of course, if he has to translate those runes to find the secret weakness of the Deathlord advancing on him with her soulsteel grand daiklave, later might not be a luxury he can afford. In a similar vein, some failures have immediate consequences. Failing to climb a cliff probably means the character can't find a handhold, but failing to hold on to the handholds at 100 yards up in the face of a sudden gust of wind means something altogether different.

Threshold Degree of Success
0 Adequate
1 Competent
2 Superior
3 Remarkable
4 Astonishing
5+ Phenomenal

Simple Failure

In most cases, simple failure should not lead to inescapable ruin, at least not for protagonists and major Storyteller characters. If the character falls from a great height, she might only scrape 50 feet down the cliff before receiving another roll to snag a protruding ledge.

Botch

Real catastrophes are reserved for when none of the dice in a pool show successes and at least die has a result of 1—called a botch. While every botch is bad, sadistic Storytellers might opt to increase the severity of a botch according to the number of 1s rolled (much as a threshold determines gradations of success). Storytellers can also make botches worse for characters unskilled at the task at hand, so that a skilled character with an eight-dice pool doesn't theoretically suffer a worse botch than a character with two dice in a pool (who cannot roll more than two 1s).

The Rule of 10

By luck, divine providence or dogged determination, heroes can sometimes achieve the impossible. Unless specified otherwise, every time a die shows a result of 10, that die counts as two successes rather than one. This benefit applies to all magical beings and to heroic mortals.

Penalties

In an ideal world, a character would act without any sort of hindrance. If she sought to climb a mountain, it would be a clear, sunny day after she had a good night's sleep and a balanced breakfast to boot. Of course, such conditions seldom manifest in the high-action epic setting of Exalted. Heroes climb sheer cliffs in the middle of raging typhoons with lightning exploding around them, chipping handholds with their fingertips while shrugging off the pain of seven critical wounds to reach the summit. In short, adversity allows heroes to prove themselves. From a rules perspective, any circumstance or obstacle that interferes with a character's ability to perform an action is called a penalty. Every penalty falls into one of two broad categories based on how it provides a hindrance.

Internal Penalties

Anything that directly impairs a character's ability to perform a task is called an internal penalty. Most often, these penalties involve some sort of adverse state within the character's own mind or body, caused by pain, fear, drugs, poisons, exhaustion, entropic magic and the like. Lacking appropriate tools also counts.

One common penalty is for acting without the proper Ability. The player of anyone who is not Exalted loses two dice from any roll based on an Ability in which she does not have any dots. Sensory deprivation is always internal regardless of source, so impaired vision qualifies, be it a result of congenital defect, injury, darkness or fog. Internal penalties remove dice from a character's pool before a roll, effectively reducing her competence. The number of dice removed depends on the specific penalty, and most of these conditions stack with one another for cumulative effect. The total penalties afflicting an Exalt or other magical being with Essence 2+ cannot reduce a dice pool below her Essence rating, but this benefit can only offset internal penalties. It does not provide bonus dice in situations where a character's Essence rating exceeds her actual dice pool.

Wound penalties and multiple action penalties are the explicit exceptions to this rule. If a character ever has a dice pool of zero dice or less after applying all bonuses and does not benefit from bonus successes, she cannot even attempt that action.

External Penalties

While internal penalties make a character less capable in some fashion, external penalties are conditions that make a task more difficult. Most often, these conditions are environmental factors of some kind, such as slick terrain interfering with acrobatics, knee-high muck inhibiting dodges, cover protecting opponents and so on. In other cases, external penalties arise from a deliberate choice of the character. If she wishes to slice her initials into a rival's face with her sword during a duel instead of simply slashing at him, a penalty applies. External penalties do not subtract dice from a character's pool. Instead, they subtract directly from the number of successes generated by a roll.

One notable penalty is the retry penalty. Every time a character attempts to perform an action at which she has already failed, she generally accrues a -1 success external penalty to the attempt due to frustration, and to simulate the fact that the character has already tried the obvious solutions.

In some cases, the same condition may create both types of penalty:

Example: Lorn sits astride his mount as a raging maelstrom buffets him from every side. He hears a roar over the thunder and turns to see a claw strider rise from the grass and charge him. Without hesitation, he draws his bow and fires into the gaping maw of the beast. The winds and rain do not make him any less effective of an archer, but instead, make the task itself more difficult as an external penalty. However, the thick rain also impairs visibility, which counts as an internal penalty. The Storyteller increases the difficulty by one and imposes a -2 penalty.

Storytellers should remember that keeping the game moving is more important than wasting time agonizing over the nature of a penalty. If a condition could belong to either category, pick one and apply it. Generally, every point of difficulty increase is equivalent to losing two dice.

Resisted Rolls

Sometimes, two characters compete directly with one another, as in a game, a battle of wits or some form of race. In these cases, both characters' players roll what's called a resisted roll at the same difficulty using the dice pool appropriate to the contest (assigned by the Storyteller). The character with the most successes wins the contest, with a threshold equal to the number of successes by which her player's roll exceeded her opponent's. Of course, not all contests are evenly balanced, and each party can suffer different penalties depending on the situation. If a visiting Immaculate monk chases a street urchin pickpocket through the back alleys of Nexus, his unfamiliarity with the area would almost certainly cost him a die or two. Moreover, some resisted rolls involve each character acting at a different diffi culty, in which case the thresholds of each roll are compared to determine the victor and the gradation of victory.

Static Values

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Rounding Static Values

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Extended Rolls

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Bonuses

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Automatic Success

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Order of Modifiers

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Multiple Actions

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Dealing with Interruptions

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Reflexive Actions

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Diceless Actions

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Dramatic Actions

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Teamwork

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