Damage, expanded dice roll system

    Roll 1D per Dexterity + bonus melee + accuracy

   DV difficulty number parry DV when unarmed is halved against armed opponents
   Injury roll 1D per Strength + damage (weapon + attack bonus successes)

    Existing Excellencies would have to be revised since Attributes and Abilities are more separated.
    Or you could switch everything around and use the Ability as their base dice pool so if they had no points in an Ability they would be unable to make a roll. Attributes would power Ability rolls so they would need high Attributes to have a hope of the roll succeeding more like a traditional skill roll (see Warhammer Quest.)
   Some weapons could ass pre soak successes to the damage roll.
   What if you balanced skill and power by requiring them to make a certain number of successes at a certain difficulty (number) rating.
   Dice poll for injury roll- net successes on attack roll (including basic success) that way a glancing blow wouldn't be fatal.
   What if you roll one trait in dice (possibly with a bonus against a difficulty) and add another trait to the number of successes.
   With 1D per trait with a bonus of another trait you would have to have high ratings in both of them to succeed. Put weapon strength and armour soak into pure numbers, this will eliminate rolling outrageous numbers of dice.
   vs DV need high dice roll and lots of successes to land a good blow.
   I personally prefer rolling number of dice equal to an ability and adding an attribute so if someone has no knowledge or skill they can't succeed. Although this wouldn't work on more intuitive abilities.
   I also like my earlier idea of basing the damage dice pool on strength and adding weapon damage to each dice result. However basing the number of injury dice on the number of attack successes is far more realistic since it determines the severity of the blow by how well it was struck. I also like adding one trait to the dice results with the number of dice based on another trait so a character will have to have high levels in both of them in order to be competent. The only problem I have is that strength and damage will have to be combined and added to each dice which seems a bit impersonal and doesn't put enough emphasis on strength. Exalted has a very streamlined system for dice rolls where you basically just add more dice. That reduces complecations but causes problems with weapons that have very high damage like a Heavy Implosion Bow which has damage of 50 or 60. The two separate elements of damage are severity and probability on injury. How well the blow was placed is the first component of severity which is why the damage pool is based on it. If you attack someone with a Grand Grimscythe and only score a glancing blow it will hardly do a thing. The character's strength and the damage of the weapon determine probability of injury but the size of the weapon is a secondary feature of severity as well. Attack someone with a small knife and the amount of physical injury you can do will always be limited. You could hit them in the neck or something but the actual severity of the injury is limited by weapon size as well as attack placement.

Call of Exalted

    I thought a while ago that Exalted would work best when given an angle, combined with another idea to make it into what the storyteller wants it to be. This resulted in my background for the character the Ghostwalker, and many of my ideas about the Neverborn and the Underworld.
   This game style is a combination of Exalted and not surprisingly the Cthulhu Mythos, including the video and roleplaying games based on it.

   Each player starts with a number of Sanity Points. Having high Permanent Willpower reduces the chance of losing Sanity. As a character's Sanity approaches zero they become increasingly disturbed. When their Sanity reaches zero they become completely mad and lose all Permanent Willpower and gain a derangement. The higher their Willpower was at the time of losing their Sanity the more severe the derangement is.
   There are two possible ways of resolving Sanity loss. Either use the Exalted system of using the character's Willpower as difficulty or a penalty. This is more flexible, for instance you can use Vitues to add temporarily to the character's Willpower but also carries possibility of greater Sanity from especially large threats. It's a more predictable system since low level threats could be ignored by someone with reasonable Willpower. Another system is based on Vampire where the character's Willpower is the minimum number required for a success. This makes a character more resistant to greater Sanity loss but still means they could be affected by minor threats. Another system is where like in Call of Cthulhu each threat has a dice eg. D3, D6, D8 etc. where you could add a fixed modifier eg. +1, and if they score higher than the character's Willpower the difference is the Sanity loss. You may have pre or post roll modifiers where a post roll modifier only applies if the initial roll succeeds. A similar system could be used as an alternative method of damage resolution. Eg. damage 2D6 + 4
   If they suffer further Sanity loss they continue to experience the effect of mental dying health levels. Use the difficulty of the character's highest (their primary) Virtue for difficulty of Sanity loss rolls. Each loss of Sanity in this state inflicts loss of a 'phantom' health level and a -1 internal penalty on all of the character's dice rolls. The madness is now eating away at their psyche. When they lose a number of health levels equal to their highest Virtue their mind is irrevocably destroyed causing pathological suicidal behaviour (killing themselves with the nearest thing possible) or homicidal mania that will inevitably result in death. Only potent mind altering Charms can retore (or more disturbingly reduce) a character's mind when they are losing mental health levels or their mind has been lost forever.
   Abyssals can inflict a similar direct effect on someone's psyche with the Charm Chakra Violating Blow. The difficulty to lose their last mental health level is their Virtue Rating plus all the levels lost so far. This is the difficulty of undoing the last core element of someone's psyche.

Damage

    I thought of a different system for calculating damage while thinking about a Lunar Excellency that was based on the actual numbers of the dice rolled rather than the number of successes. The player rolls one dice for each point of strength they have. They add the weapon's damage to the number on each dice and the difficulty to score a success is their opponent's armour value. The defending player then makes a soak roll with their stamina at standard threshold of seven. Weapon's damage values would have to be re-evaluated and piercing damage would probably be removed from mortal weapons. Another change is that more solid weapons would have an Overwhelming Damage of one where they didn't before. In this system Overwhelming Damage adds to the attacker's strength when making a damage roll so large weapons will inflict more injury. Artefact weapons would massively increase the user's strength under present rules.