The First and Forsaken Lion vs the animated JLA

[BitVyper]

I'm in the mood for Exalted, what can I say. Include all members from JLU. If they can't pull it off, they can call in Amazo.

[Pendaran]

Until the 3e reboot, the Lion all day and every day. None of them really have defenses to having their souls, you know, wiped out while the Lion otherwise perfect defense bounces their assaults both physical and mental off his face.

With Amazo added it comes down to if Amazo can dupe the Lion. If he can, Amazo does fine.

[BitVyper]

See, I figure Amazo might be able to dupe aspects of the Lion, but he'd probably have trouble with either essence rating or charms. Guy has demonstrated difficulty with magic. Plus he'd be eating death essence, and who knows how that would affect him.

I'm not that excited for 3e, personally. I found a lot of the Ink Monkeys (the guys doing 3e) stuff in second kind of uninspired, and some of it was really obviously just to pad out books, like tacking three charms onto Heaven Thunder Hammer that all do exactly the same thing. Half their errata left gaping holes that caused other problems too, like changing perfect defenses (which I totally agreed with increasing the cost of) without changing attacks like Cascade of Cutting Terror (double sux on a thrown attack and undodgeable for 4 motes, so you're forcing perfects at half cost with one basic charm). Plus they've said a lot of contradictory things about what they're doing, and adding a bunch more Exalt types where I feel 2e already suffered from having at least one too many where it could have done other things instead. The liminals in particular seem kind of... dumb; like they pretty much sound like solars tied weaker gods. It sounds like they want to make the Exalts quite a bit weaker too, which eh, if I want the gritty realism of being killed by a tiger, there's games I can play for that; you don't GM Exalted by setting up level appropriate encounters so much as you throw the players into impossible situations and make them get creative because that's half of what Exalted is all about.

Not to say that 2e isn't a giant mechanical mess. I just feel like they're trying to fix that by changing things so broadly that it doesn't really resemble Exalted anymore.

[Pendaran]

I'm not myself looking forward to the across the board depowering, the apparently likelihood of the Realm and the blooded now basically being cartoonishly evil so that the Solars are more clearly the heroes, the Fair Folk being even further conceptually deformed off everything that made them interesting...

But it's what happens when a game becomes the equivalent of the inmates running the asylum.

To be more fight specific for a moment..

See, I figure Amazo might be able to dupe aspects of the Lion, but he'd probably have trouble with either essence rating or charms. Guy has demonstrated difficulty with magic. Plus he'd be eating death essence, and who knows how that would affect him.

That was more particularly with whatever "chaos magic" is, that's not reaaaalllly what the Lion uses. Amazo's main problem would be that if he can dupe the Lion, he now has a direct pipeline to the Neverborn in his head. That might disorient/make him briefly loopy enough for the Lion to still bust out some "punch you in your metaphysical existence" move.

[BitVyper]

It's true that was a specific problem with the type of magic animating Grundy; I forgot that much, but Amazo also wasn't exactly going around demonstrating an ability to dupe magic in general. I guess if magic-in-general were a huge problem for him, he probably would have noticed with Doctor Fate by that point. Still, even though he's not a Solar anymore, Foffles is still rocking solar charms, and that comes from having had his soul fused with one of the last perfect creations of Autochthon for thousands of years. I feel like it would be fantastically difficult to straight-copy that.

the apparently likelihood of the Realm and the blooded now basically being cartoonishly evil

I hadn't heard about that, although I'm not sure how they could get much more cartoonishly evil than having Deshan (the four drug-slave horror nations). But yeah, it seems like they're just going in really weird directions conceptually; like you know, Exalted has pretty awful mechanics, so the main reason anyone is playing it is for the setting and theming, and THAT'S the thing you change the most? Next they'll be throwing in time travel and resurrection.

I always found it hilarious that, in spite of all the errata, they never got rid of Obsidian Shards of Infinity.