On Strife-Drawing Tactic

On Strife-Drawing Tactic

This Charm was the beginning of a very serious effort to bring Solars with a solid ground game up to the level of opponents who preferred to fight at range. It led me to invent engagement range as a concept for helping opponents deal with the nigh unassailable efficiency of certain ranged builds. It spawned all the other engagement range Charms which you see here.” —Ø

In real combat, the best advantage a fighter can enjoy is reach. If you can hit your opponent and he can’t hit you back, the only thing that can make you lose the fight is screwing up and letting him get close to you. Range is a similarly dominant advantage in Exalted, and as a result, Solar Archery in combination with Solar Athletics has always been the game’s undisputed top dog battle build. While we didn’t want to pull Archery’s fangs, we did want to give short-ranged fighters some tools to help deal with long-ranged fighters, so that they didn’t ‘lose at the select screen,’ as it were. We also wanted to reduce the necessity for all Dawns to favor Athletics, to mitigate the Caste’s ‘one true build’ issues. Engagement range as a system concept was codified to help solve these problems.” —H