Setting Difficulties in Exalted

Setting Difficulties and Extended Actions

The Exalted rule book, particularly the Drama chapter, is in fact full of simple, clear rules for dealing with a variety of situations. What those rules generally don't do, however, is provide concrete or example difficulties for the dice rolls involved, just guidance. Rather than discuss each of those rules and suggest difficulties, we're going to discuss assigning difficulties in general.

The corebook lays out a five-tier difficulty scale:

1. Standard
2. Difficult
3. Challenging
4. Nearly Impossible
5. Legendary

1 and 5 are pretty obvious - most actions will be difficulty 1, whereas there's a simple test for difficulty 5 - "If he pulls this off, can I see legends springing up about the tale?". Where you, as ST, slot 2-4 between them is down to the tone of your game, but do your best to be consistent.

Of course, Exalted characters routinely start out with pools of 10 or more dice, and thus can often average five successes. This is appropriate - Exalted is a game, at its heart, about people who do legendary things all the time (probably one of the reasons why the world is so huge - so there's always somewhere where the locals will be floored by your everyday antics . Unless you're seeking to divert from the normal tone of Exalted, you should resist pushing difficulties to more than 5 for all but the most ridiculously extreme stuff.

You do have two options available for you to get past the diff 5 barrier, however:

1. Make the extra successes over the difficulty important and have concrete effects. This isn't to say treat extra successes as an additional source of difficulty - "Leaping the chasm is only Diff 5, but you'll need an extra success to avoid each of the three First Age invisible barriers" is really difficulty 8. But making each extra success concrete (for example: "OK, you rolled 9 successes on the Diff 5 roll to charm the ice-queen - you've also impressed 4 of her advisors, who will approve of your dalliance with her") clearly differentiates a 6 success amazing roll from a jaw-dropping 18 success Solar effort - and will hopefully encourage the players to start gunning for the extra successes, thus proactively chasing greater challenges without you forcing them into frustrating binary "make 9 successes or fail!" situations.
2. Would the action be appropriately rendered as an extended action? Success or failure might not be at stake, but time can be a huge deal. This can also provide great differentiation between a Heroic Mortal and an Exalted trying the same task - a Heroic Mortal might take an hour of careful investigation to find all the clues at the crime scene, while the Solar with Ten Magistrate Eyes might do it in an eyeblink. You can make the time intervals linear (every fifteen minutes a new roll, for instance), or use another method (halve the time between intervals for each extra success over the difficulty on each roll). Try to resist the temptation to greatly inflate the number of successes needed (more than about 5-10) - you should where possible leave the door open for an exceptional success to do a normally painstaking task in an instant. This is a great option for social tasks in particular.

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Original Author: Kasumi on RPG.net