In my opinion, stunting in Exalted is a very cool game mechanic that can encourage some really great roleplaying. Unfortunately, it often encourages behaviour that is not so great. A quick run-down:
1) Descriptiveness. The stunt mechanic encourages players (and the GM) to go into more detail about their actions than just "I hit him". However, on the flip side, it incentivises lyrically describing even quite mundane actions, which are not deserving of extended description. The same problem can arise with non-trivial actions which nevertheless end up with way more attention than they need.
2) Epic action. The stunt mechanic encourages players to take risky, daring, unusual or otherwise entertaining actions. This means that, like the anime which Exalted emulates, the action is epic in scale, not to mention awesome cool. The flip side of this, again, is that every action becomes a major palaver.
The above two problems are exacerbated by the very high reward received by players who put the effort in to stunt regularly. In general you will be getting a third to half or even more of the motes you spent on an action back if you stunt successfully. Alternatively, you get some XP, which is worth its weight in gold. In turn this can lead to the equivalent of a Monty Haul D&D campaign, with ever-increasing XP and free motes handed out.
My suggested remedy is to explicitly encourage stunting that is pitched at the right level for the action at hand.
One Dice Stunts[*]. You should be getting a one dice stunt for every action that is sufficiently non-trivial to be worth rolling dice for. A one dice stunt involves describing what you are doing, probably in no more than a sentence or two, in more detail than just "I pick the lock". The GM should only not award a one-die stunt for an action if the player didn't bother to properly describe it.
Two Dice Stunts. A two dice stunt involves describing an action in a vivid fashion that is either unusual, or particularly daring, or entertaining in some other way. The GM should only award a two-dice stunt for a description that is significantly above-par. In addition, the GM should only award two-dice stunts for what I term "major plot actions". There is no hard-and-fast rule for what constitutes a major plot action, but it should be something which makes an important contribution to moving the plot forward - not a minor action, not an incidental action, but something which, if this was a movie, would get some serious camera time.
You will have noticed that it is impossible to get more than a one-dice stunt for the majority of actions. This is deliberate. I would go so far as to suggest that the GM should consider not awarding stunt dice when a player makes a two (or more) dice description for something that is fairly clearly a one-dice action. At any rate, this is aimed at encouraging well-described epic actions, but only when you'd expect to see them in a movie or story.
Three Dice Stunts. A three dice stunt is an action which is highly memorable. This action should not merely have been cool, not merely awesome, but one of those actions which you remember a year later, and which is one of the highlights of the campaign. The GM should only award a three-dice stunt if he genuinely believes it will meet, at the very least, the "one week test" - i.e. will you still remember this (without trying) a week later? Further, three-dice stunts should only be awarded for actions which are critical to the plot and, if they were in a movie, would merit some kind of montage or slow motion action sequence, or similar. The opportunities for three dice stunts should be very limited - the killing blow in a major fight scene, for instance.
The above may seem a bit harsh. However, the underlying motive for the stunt mechanic is to create an exciting, epic game - not for every single action a character takes to be exciting and epic.
There is one tweak I would make in the opposite direction - and that is to allow three-dice stunts to provide bonus motes *and* XP. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to work out why.
[*] This should be one-die stunts. Shouldn't it?
Comments
*Likes*
Yeah, I agree. I've been thinking about this for a while, because stunts are such a big contributor to combat being SO SLOW. (There are other contributors, of course - but I digress.) It's great to have a really awesome stunt described, and it doesn't really matter how long it takes, but it's a shame when a merely quite good stunt takes several minutes of description. I think dice should be awarded based on how entertaining it was - which increases as the coolness of the action increases, but decreases if the description becomes too long-winded. Then the very best stunts (for which you'd get three dice) are the ones that are brilliantly described throughout - so that even if it takes ten minutes you've still got people grinning at the end.
I like your system, though I'd like to expand on this sentence: "You should be getting a one dice stunt for every action that is sufficiently non-trivial to be worth rolling dice for." I think that's absolutely right, but I think many more actions should not be considered worth rolling dice for. I think we can speed things up a lot by the GM going "Oh, Larceny 3? Yeah, you pick the easy and not terribly important lock." This would of course speed things up twice - firstly because no roll, and secondly because no stunt-attempt description.
This will mean in turn, I think, that when an action is worth rolling dice for, people are more tempted to describe it well (because they won't now be doing it every minute) and therefore increase the "cool factor" for everyone. And get stunt dice.
> [*] This should be one-die stunts. Shouldn't it?
Yes. In fact, I think they should all be that, so "one-die", "two-die" and "three-die" stunts. If it seems weird that they're all singular, compare e.g. "five-finger discount", "ten-pin bowling".
In addition, you lose 10 XP for the title.