Difficulty
Determining Difficulty
Exalted Essence All actions also have difficulty. This is the minimum number of successes required to achieve whatever the character was trying to do. Some tasks have a pre-set difficulty, determined by a Charm or Artifact’s effect. Others require the Storyteller to adjudicate on the fly. Here are some guidelines for figuring out just how hard a roll should be:Difficulty 1 and difficulty 2 are beneath the Exalted. Difficulty reducers might bump difficulty down to this level, but if a Storyteller decides that an action requires two or fewer successes, then she shouldn’t call for a roll at all. In corner-case situations, a Storyteller might consider calling for a difficulty 1 or 2 roll if the Exalt has four or fewer dice in her pool if the failure would be interesting. Otherwise, there’s no need to make a character roll for these trivial things.
Difficulty 3 is a suitable challenge for an Exalt. A difficulty 3 task might be something like stealing the keys off the belt of an alert guard, spotting the insignia of the assassin’s guild hired to kill you on a man in a crowd, or breaking encryption with some of the cipher missing. This is the basic difficulty for all tasks in Exalted: Essence. If a roll does not state a difficulty, assume it is difficulty 3.
Difficulty 5 is a challenging feat for the Exalted. Actions at this difficulty might be: climbing up a smooth surface with no handholds, surgically reattaching a freshly severed limb, or counting the whiskers on a fleeing Lunar in fox form.
Difficulty 7 pushes the limits on what the Exalted can accomplish without aid of magic. Difficulty 7 actions might include: instantly punching through a fortified stone wall, sneaking past a vigilant guardian of Heaven, or translating a text in a language lost to time.
Difficulty 10, most of the time, will not be achievable without Charms. To perform a difficulty 10 feat without magic borderlines on impossible. This might be: lying to the face of the Unconquered Sun, swimming through the Wyld and coming out unaltered, or successfully recreating an artifact from a fragment of a First Age manual.
Any successes over the difficulty are called extra successes. Extra successes may be important to obtaining further information or result above meeting the base difficulty. Some Charms may grant additional effects with extra successes, and extra successes are also important to combat rolls.
Remember that two dice average one success. The Storyteller can estimate the average difficulty a character can meet by halving their pool and rounding down. If a roll or an effect does not have a stated difficulty, it is always difficulty 3.
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