Feel free to share a quiet cup of tea and chat with your fellows, away from the action.

Just waiting to see if we get one or two more characters before I open the first in-character thread. Things will hopefully move fast at that point. Please put a physical description of your character up. Art is a plus, but certainly unnecessary. Make sure your sheet is completed and posted in your character sheet tab. I've unlocked that for both players.

Hey folks, glad to be aboard. I'll be playing a Dawn Solar, so one of the resident combat heavies.

I'm starting to look through artifacts and hearthstones. Has anyone made claims to any of either yet? I'm specifically looking at Flying Silver Dream and the Jewel of Swift-Strike, but I don't want to step on anyone else's concept.

Ditto to Martial Arts - I'm looking at possibly taking White Reaper Form, but it's not definite yet.
This message was last edited by the player at 06:19, Sat 24 July 2021.

So, regarding the join battle, which skill would be most suitable? Close Combat? Athletics? Acrobatics?

In reply to Aryn (msg # 5):

Depends on what you're doing to join combat. I'd say that Ranged combat is probably out, considering the situation, but all of those plus the old default of awareness are good candidates.

How are we doing stunts? There's only 1 level of Stunting in Essence, and it looks like the bar is anything more elaborate than "I try to hit the guy with sword", so should we just immediately assume we're getting stunt dice?

Yes, generally you should assume you're getting stunt dice. Unrolled actions won't be stunted (defense), and I'd say that actions like Join battle usually go unstunted (I rarely saw them stunted much in other editions), but attacks, build power actions, etc. should all generally benefit from the plus 2.

OK, that all sounds fine - I've seen join battle stunted, but not always, and in this case I didn't get any successes anyway off stunting, so it didn't make any difference.

@Aryn, you can go ahead and post your action. Your "team" won initiative by virtue of Okaro's roll. In essence, initiative order isn't kept strictly. Instead, the highest join battle roll simply decides which team gets initiative first. Powerful enemies might be able to interrupt a team, but most can't, so you guys can basically go in any order you'd like and I'll post for the enemy actions when it's time.

@Okaro, I added the defensive stats for the Black Tiger Enforcer, so you can go ahead and determine your hit and how much power you gained from the attack. I don't want to make posts responding to each and every action. I'd rather consolidate after multiple player posts.

OK, with the same goal of reducing post bloat, I'm going to edit the previous post with final Power gain. I'm also going to put in some resource tracking at the end for my own purposes - if it bugs you, I can put it in my scratchpad instead, but it's easier for me to keep track on the actual post if possible.
This message was last edited by the player at 09:45, Sat 07 Aug 2021.

In reply to Granite Okaro (msg # 11):

No problem with that at all.

So, what I just put up is my counterattacks during round 1. I'm hoping I'm doing this right - there's some muddled language in the preview - lines in the flurry section and elsewhere about hard limits on maximum actions, only being able to make a single attack per round, and similar stuff - that I'm pretty sure Ready in Eight Directions is designed to bypass, but I could be missing something that would prevent multiple counterattacks in the same round. Let me know if you think I'm misinterpreting anything.

Should I wait a bit longer on Aryn, or just do my post for round 2?

Dropped a quick post, apologies

In reply to Aryn (msg # 14):

Can you add your character sheet to your page here so that I can check it? Lunars don't actually get just a "finesse" excellency. You still have to buy excellencies for abilities, but they get a special mode that can tie them to force, finesse, or fortitude for extra dice.

EDIT: I misread your post and just noticed that you used the sagacity excellency. Please ignore my earlier concern, but please do post your character sheet here on rpol so it's easier to reference.
This message was last edited by the GM at 16:03, Sun 08 Aug 2021.

In reply to Granite Okaro (msg # 13):

You are correct in your interpretation that the solar mode does not limit the number of counterattacks that you can make. I just checked, and it's also not a step one charm, which means you're clear to also use your excellency with it! Seems like counterattacks are a lot stronger than general flurry charms, or at least they can be situationally . . . which is good, because they always lost out to them in older editions. It also means that my dreams of a counterattack-style yojimbo character are alive in Ex:Essence!

In reply to Samsara (msg # 15):

hang on, I must've interpreted the charm incorrectly, I'll make the edit. IIRC one of the four dice provided by the excellency was a 10 and another an 8, so I would've failed the power-building roll.
Also, I was unable to make any edits to my character sheet on here last I checked, otherwise I would've already transferred the information there. Yeah, just checked again and it says "The GM has not given you edit permission for this character sheet."
This message was last edited by the player at 14:54, Mon 09 Aug 2021.

In reply to Aryn (msg # 17):

Apologies! I missed making yours user editable when I went through and added all of them. It's fixed now.

Don't worry about changing the roll results for now. Just note it for moving forward. I don't want to retroactively make you fail because you made a choice for your character on faulty information.

updates applied

In reply to Samsara (msg # 16):

OK, that's what I thought - just wanted to make sure we had the same interpretation.

Counterattacks do seem strong at this first glance, at least for Solar-ish types, though they do have the same obvious drawback that people need to be attacking you in close quarters - which usually becomes less and less likely the more they get hit in the face for trying to do so.

It's also interesting how many charms I decided to ignore just because they shared Step 1 with Excellencies, flurry Charms included. It's really hard to turn down that many extra dice for no mote cost.
This message was last edited by the player at 08:20, Tue 10 Aug 2021.

Ignore my most recent roll in the dice roll history, I have another tab for rolling the dice, and I needed to reload it, which required a form resubmission which inadvertently did another roll-

Been a busy day. I'll get the post up for the enemies tomorrow.

Apologies for the delay on my end. This week is the start of grad school for me, so I've been rather busy between that, family, and work.

Just as a warning, I plan to clear this game out and reboot it by the end of the week. If there's any character information you want to save, do so by then.