RPG Soapbox

For reviews and discussion of Heroes of Creation, a 2nd edition Exalted game.

Setting: Haltan/Linowan area
Venues: Abyssal, Dragon-Blooded, Heroic Mortal, Lunar, Sidereal, Solar
Chat Platform: Unknown
Age Requirement: Unknown

Heroes of Creation

This is true here, as well.

The difference between here and Destiny's Forge is that the quality of play here is higher, and the STs can spell. They also have an innovative attitude towards PSTing, which I think is a great idea.

The downside, other than the above, is that they have no programming at all. Nonetheless the character threads are meticulously upkept so it doesn't seem to be an issue as of yet. It just makes the chat look kind of amateurish.

This chat is an okay place to play. The people are nice and fairly polite in the OOC rooms. Getting sanctioned can be a chore sometimes, but it's no worse than on most other chats, and far easier than some. Other than the lack of a database and players often not putting a description in, there's only one big problem with the chat.

Namely it's Storyteller driven. Even when the Storytellers are just playing their characters, the storylines revolve around them. In the short time I've been there, there have been several major storylines, each and every one revolving around Storytellers' personal characters. Characters of non-Storytellers have been involved, but in the periphery, and for us, it's just a waiting game. Getting proactive as a player who isn't a storyteller isn't really an option here; you wait until the big scenes come up, then have fun, earn a few extra XP, and then go back to waiting for the next big scene. The little scenes in between that deal with the big Storylines are played in by the Storyteller's PC's, and maybe a few people who are online at the same time. But mostly, the big scenes where everyone is invited are advertised a week or more ahead of time, and those are the ones you get involved in.

Almost all of the information that pertains to these storylines are held by the storyteller characters as well; it's all new stuff that they find out in those little scenes between the big ones. And unfortunately it seems like much of it comes as extremely personal information for the individual characters or characters are sworn to Secrecy on Pain Of Worse Than Death, but much of which gets revealed at climatic scenes, meaning weeks of watching characters just ignore enquiries into the storyline and other characters ignoring that there even is a world-ending plot going on, until suddenly everyone comes together for the massive climax scenes that gets people great riches just for showing up and sticking around to the end.

It has its' advantages, I suppose. I can only devote a night or two a week regularly to play here, and my times are poor for the high European population on the chat, so getting proactive for me would be difficult in the best of circumstances. Having the big scenes advertised... at all... is a huge step up from the now defunct White Wolf mods, and makes it possible to get involved even in a peripheral manner, which counterbalances the problems I see in the storylines being Storyteller driven, and players just along for the ride. The players who can't control the storylines can at least participate in them, which is more than can be said for many chats out there.

This chat's just reset so I've decided to try and give it another go, especially since they put in some sensible character caps and restricted the venue to one location in the setting.

So far, I've nearly got my character sanctioned and I can't say I'm too impressed. This sanctioning has been needlessly brutal. I'm playing a Solar Exalt, and having heard how strict the sanctionings were I dialed things down a bit, taking only two 5s on my sheet and justifying them fairly well in my background. When I was told I needed more justification for them, I asked for examples and were given some. I incorporated those examples into my background exactly as asked, and was told it still wasn't enough. Then I was contacted by the HST who asked me to please stop criticizing her STs while sanctioning.

I was also told they would be requiring justification in play for Favored Abilities, something that requires no training time and is granted instantly by whatever god holds your Exaltation according to the fluff.

I threw up my hands and told them to change whatever they wanted on my sheet so that I could get into play and see if things were any better there. That report will come.

For what its worth, at least the STs have been very friendly and polite, and seemed truly bummed that I was so frustrated. I was confused why they couldn't see how they were being contradictory, given their apparent reasonability.

After the Reset of 8 months ago, the biggest problem I had with this chat has gone down. Namely that the plotlines revolve around Storyteller's, both of their NPC's and PC's. That's a good thing. It's a "No Antagonist PC's" chat, even though it allows Abyssals, Fair Folk and Infernals as PC's, and as open PC's, which leads to quite a lot of one or two day paranoia, followed by Gossamer weapons and armour popping up on Solars and Lunars, Infernal's creating the city Defenses, and Deathknights impregnated by Dynasts. There's a lot of what we used to call "Care Bear" stuff on Old World of Darkness chats popping up on this chat, thanks to the No PC Antagonists rule, and people finding ways to make "Antagonist" characters into "Protagonists".

But I'm not sure how long this chat is going to last. Over the past couple of months, the chat has stagnated badly. There have been less and less people logging in, and there has been less and less IC activity. Some of it is attributed to a plotline that has been dragging on for months, where the city has been in a state of "Hurry Up And Wait!" while waiting for an extremely powerful enemy to actually attack. (This SL started under a previous Storyteller group, and when that group of Storytellers left the chat in mid-storyline, new Storytellers had to pick up the slack, instead of just dropping the SL entirely. Sometimes I think it might have been better to have an anti-climatic climax for the SL and get it over with than to let it drag on for so long, but it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.) This seems to have lead to a stagnation in the chat setting, both IC and OOC. There's no sense that anything can be changed anymore, or that anything will be changed. However, there's no feeling of oppression, like the Storytellers are saying that players can't change the setting, don't even try it. It's just plain ennui, both from Players and from Storytellers. The Storyteller team used to be 10+ members, and technically still is. And many of them are around the chat regularly, as their PC's. Which isn't a bad thing, it's just that there's no more open scenes, off the cuff scenes, or even planned open storylines beyond the one mentioned above. There are a number of scenes still going on, but each of them are quite private, for a group of select players, and are by invitation only. They're fairly easy to request, however, so it's not like the Storytellers are just avoiding running anything. Everything being run, however, is focused entirely on the individual characters. Manse quests, artifact quests, gain a personal ally quest, etc.

At times it feels like there are 70+ chats on this one chat, where every individual character has their own personal chat where they're the star, and other people guest-star. And your character goes off to guest star in someone else's chat. But there is little apparent motivation for anyone to do anything on the chat between individual and personal scenes, as players aren't required to choose what it is they'll get involved with; my character was able to be in the far North, in the North-East, and the Scavenger Lands all in the same week because each scene was bubbled independently. Each scene had 3-5 days of handwaved travel-time in the scene itself, which was hand-waved to a dismissive post or two in the scene, along the lines of "Make a (roll), don't botch or fail. You see lots of ice and snow, and you pass a herd of majestic Mammoths. And oh! The Mammoth Avatar was with them, everyone wave. Three days later, you arrive at..." In fact, I was still able to be in the chat's city proper at the same time as several of those Scenes due to scene bubbling. Quite literally I had my character logged on twice, once with (questing) at the end of their name, and one with (in ET) at the end of their name. I've seen characters involved in two bubbled scenes simultaneously, where they are off fighting a Darkbrood or an army of Hungry Ghosts or a Goblin Horde in one scene, and are trying to disarm ultra-dangerous traps in another scene. No concerns about being in two places at once, about having everything happen in a nebulous "scene-time", no one even questions it.

I used to enjoy this chat, even if I disliked how it was so centred on the Storytellers. Now I'm just bored with it. Hopefully when the current major SL is over, and that weight is off of everyones shoulders, than the chat can go back to the way it was for the Summer and early Fall. If not, there's probably going to be another Reset of this chat to shake it out of the monotony and ennui that plagues it.

So, as someone who used to come here regularly (I've largely drifted away, as you might have guessed from this response being two weeks later) and one of the STs over on HoC, let me see what I can do about addressing some of these points. First, as a note, there's been a change in leadership as of somewhere around the beginning of this year (I forget the exact date); Shasta stepped down because trying to do a good job of running the chat was having a negative impact on her health, and Marie (some of you may remember her as Melindrea from here as well as IV, among other places) took over as Admin.



The decision to allow every splat that had ben published as of that time was made under the prior administration. This policy is being changed somewhat. Alchemicals are being put in their own side-game rather than trying to introduce them to the main setting - at least for now. New Raksha have stopped being allowed due in part to this problem, the over-all lack of knowledge of Fair Folk among the current STs (while many of us know Raksha well enough that we could play one, none of us quite feel up to running it, and it's generally felt that they'd draw too much of our effort away from the core of this chat - which we're trying to strengthen), and the fact that they really aren't supposed to be the least bit welcome in the Haslanti League, though existing Raksha PCs are not being removed. Dynasts - not mentioned on your list, but I'll bring them up anyway - are similarly not seeing new PCs as there really shouldn't be that many of them in the Haslanti League, nor much for them to do to distinguish themselves from Outcastes (which are still allowed). Infernals and Abyssals are still being allowed; there's been some talk among the ST team about doing the same thing with them, but the majority of the team is in favor of continuing to allow them.



And this would be the hard part to address. I hope you'll excuse me if this is a bit brief, but professionalism and courtesy to friends involved prevents me from going into too much detail about certain aspects of this. The Paladin Storyline has indeed grown to a size that the current team all agree is beyond what we really should allow - not that there shouldn't be big storylines, we've even got a rough sketch of what the next one should be, but they shouldn't reach the point where they start choking out other RP. While some of us are now looking back and asking the same question you brought up here - whether we would have been better off dropping it rather than trying to bring things to a close - the feeling is that at this point, we're close enough to an end (we're trying to get the remaining scenes over the next week) that simply letting it drop would be a bit silly; we've already done 90% of the work, we mostly just have the pay-off left.



As a team, we're hoping to get back to running more open and off-the-cuff things once the Paladin SL is over. Indeed, several of the STs already have things that they're waiting impatiently to start once the current SL is over.



We're actually working on figuring out how best to address this point. Bubbling scenes was intended as a way to deal with disparity between the time-frame in which something should be happening IC, and when it could actually be played (A brief storyline I was in some months ago took place over 4 consecutive days IC, but due to schedules, we were only able to get everyone together for it once a week), but has indeed lead to the phenomena that you mentioned. As I said, we're working on ways to address it.



I hope so too. While another reset might help clear some of the things that got brought in while the current setting was being pinned down, I like the setting as it's shaping up, as well as the current set of characters. Even if we do end up resetting (it's not something that's been discussed among the ST team), however, the no-antagonists rule will almost certainly be staying, especially with Trouble in Paradise having opened with a much heavier PvP focus; we feel it's better for us, them, and the over-all quality of online Exalted RP in general if we stick with offering something different rather than trying to go for "the exact same thing only better."


And now, a couple other points that were brought up earlier in the thread:

The number of characters per player has dropped to 3 (one celestial, one mortal, and one anything-that's-in-between).

Also, post-reset the setting is now up in the Haslanti League rather than Halta.

I just wanted to post to let you all know that the Paladin storyline is seeing its' conclusion.

Today the very last scene is ran, and during this coming week (hopefully tomorrow, depends on how quick I get reports), the summaries will be posted for all.

Suffice to say, the good guys won. We've had "How to use Abyssal Charms to destroy an army of Hardened Killer Trained war ghosts and mortals", "Sneaking into a castle with a Chosen of Adorjan running around", "Three men, a woman and a bonestrider", "Nom time for the dragon, or How to kick Hekatonkhire ass", "300, Exalted Edition (more zombies, less dying in the end)", "The Awesome of Exalts, Wherein the Fire Aspect scythes war ghosts as a solo unit, the Zenith sings the Wrath of the Unconquered Sun and the War Gods down onto blasphemers, and the militia are fearless due to Solar Might", "How to rip apart 1000 hungry ghosts in five minutes, backed up by charms, smashfists and 150 well-trained soldiers" and "The Might of the Haslanti: 1000 hungry ghosts led by a nephwrack, spreading out in the city to kill, maim and wreak havoc, with the mortal casualties less than 1000".

Now we should be able to put a lot of this behind us, and go into our next metaplot, which is not threatening the city, and will not be dragging things out this badly.