So I read Exalted

[Josh]

I finished reading over exalted, here are my impressions:

-I was pleased to see that the writers appear to have removed their heads from their rectums while writing this book.

-The book seems to be pretty good, best WW book I've seen.  Probably good enough to fix rather than throw away and replace.

-It is Incredibly complicated and does quite a bit to suffocate all creativity. 

-I would compare it to a poorly done limited version of Burning Wheel. 

How to fix it:

-Describe the world in a few pages.  Leave the rest as a reference or just remove it.

-Get rid of dots

-No "on the fly" calculations

-Attach a number to a power, use it.

-be honest that this is an action adventure game OR make it not an action adventure game

-Radically simplify combat/social combat in some way.

[tsuyoshikentsu]

-I would compare it to a poorly done limited version of Burning Wheel. 

There are games you don't compare that to?

If you say "Burning Wheel," "Burning Empires," or "Mouseguard,"  I will cause you a NI amount of pain.

[veekie]

How to fix it:

-Describe the world in a few pages.  Leave the rest as a reference or just remove it.

-Get rid of dots

-No "on the fly" calculations

-Attach a number to a power, use it.

-be honest that this is an action adventure game OR make it not an action adventure game

-Radically simplify combat/social combat in some way.

The first one I always found to be a charm of the WW systems, very tightly integrated with their settings. Probably one of the reasons people fall in love with their systems despite mechanical inferiority.

Second, Dots, numbers, yeah, comes out the same in the end. Possibly theres some benefit to having attributes in a recognisable on sight format(since a dot can be checked off boxes pretty fast). Just use numbers

Third, the absolute, biggest pain of Exalted, I'd find it difficult to get anyone who would object to fixing this. Particularly for combat stats, mass or individual, regular or social. It seems to be otherwise functional with the wide range of possible uses of each ability and attribute though, adding 2 numbers to figure out the dice to roll for something is faster than hunting through an exhaustive list of combinations that might apply.

The rest, I either don't get or don't see the need. Well, the combat timing system is a bit more suited to a computer than a human....

[Josh]

-I would compare it to a poorly done limited version of Burning Wheel. 

There are games you don't compare that to?

If you say "Burning Wheel," "Burning Empires," or "Mouseguard,"  I will cause you a NI amount of pain.

You miss the point.  The game tries to be something that BW does well.  BW is the only comprehensive character driven game.  Hence always comparing.

It is my vast hope that Dresden Files will be a second example so I can start to offer two games as representitive.

How to fix it:

-Describe the world in a few pages.  Leave the rest as a reference or just remove it.

-Get rid of dots

-No "on the fly" calculations

-Attach a number to a power, use it.

-be honest that this is an action adventure game OR make it not an action adventure game

-Radically simplify combat/social combat in some way.

The first one I always found to be a charm of the WW systems, very tightly integrated with their settings. Probably one of the reasons people fall in love with their systems despite mechanical inferiority.

Second, Dots, numbers, yeah, comes out the same in the end. Possibly theres some benefit to having attributes in a recognisable on sight format(since a dot can be checked off boxes pretty fast). Just use numbers

Third, the absolute, biggest pain of Exalted, I'd find it difficult to get anyone who would object to fixing this. Particularly for combat stats, mass or individual, regular or social. It seems to be otherwise functional with the wide range of possible uses of each ability and attribute though, adding 2 numbers to figure out the dice to roll for something is faster than hunting through an exhaustive list of combinations that might apply.

The rest, I either don't get or don't see the need. Well, the combat timing system is a bit more suited to a computer than a human....

-There is too much info that is required to understand the setting.  Besides I would rather help people be creative rather then telling them how to play.

-dots are actually less useful than numbers most times because you are always converting them to numbers.  The only place you should use dots is for willpower.

-just give the skills a number.  Roll that.

[Halloween]

I love the Exalted setting.

I buy the books -because- of the setting. I appreciate it as a work of art.

As a setting to game in... it's not so good. The setting is designed to make your PCs irrelevant(despite their earthshaking power).

There is an idea amongst players of Exalted that the PCs are in some way special. That because they are PCs they are different or better then OTHER super-powered demi-gods. They'd have to be, otherwise they'd just get flattened.

The power curve in Exalted is not straight, it's not even really mappable.  Power level jumps in fits and starts, and those jumps are steep. A 'high level' character isn't merely able to slay the several dozen to several hundred low-level characters like they can in D&D. In Exalted, high powered characters can effortlessly murder entire nations. Considering the gigantic number of high-level npcs, the world breaks into bits.

This is bad setting design.

If they wanted to make the "modern" era of Exalted actually playable they needed to pull all the pillars of power down. The playing field has to be... modulated, if not flattened, to make the PCs relevant.

Why do I care? Because a lot of the ideas in Exalted are exceptionally awesome and filled with delicious win.  I want to play in that world where what I do actually matters because I am important, not because some Essence 9 character, who can flatten me with a whisper, wielded me as a weapon.

Am I exaggerating? Not even slightly. You could grab every singe existing Solar exalt, stick them in a room in front of The First Forsaken Lion or any of the other "Super" npcs, and he could obliterate ALL THREE HUNDRED OF THEM in a single round. He could do this with printed charms, he doesn't even have to go into theoretical rules territory. In a game about playing the ultimate bad-ass, this is unnacceptable.

"Ah," says the Exalted Apologist, "But that's why you have to gain experience in order to beat him! You can't expect to fight the ultimate bad-guy and win right off the bat!"

Doesn't matter. No matter how much experience I get, my character MUST be over one hundred years old to exceed Essence 5 (half the maximum Essence, the Lion has Essence 10) and the game is not correctly designed to allow me to do that. While there are rules for extended downtime, the focus of all of the vast majority of game rules, and the assumptions built into the setting, is that everything important will happen very quickly, within a decade at most. Spending a century dicking around to even have a chance to spend the experience necessary to offer a challenge to one of thirteen (THIRTEEN!) ultimate bad asses in one GROUP (there are many groups) of ultimate bad asses is ridiculous.

There is one (precisely one) moment in their history as written where an Exalted game could be played straight without hand-waving away the super-fate-death-ninja-god-ghosts-of-chaos, and that's the one point in history when they're all dead, even the fateninjas. Even then the Deathlords are still around, though they would have been less powerful then their modern incarnations.

The period JUST after, or during the Great Contagion is the most interesting point in the Exalted time-line. This is the only point in history where low-essence PCs can actually make a significant difference (observe: The Scarlet Empress) because all the high-essence PCs died of the super-plague.

Oh, and asides from the setting problems, the system is broken and doesn't work. The few areas that it does work, it takes to long to do anything. Also, should you min-max your character, you will be so gigantically better at your area of expertise then the other players who have min-maxed their character for other areas of specialization, that anything who could possibly survive challenging you will immediately obliterate the other PCs.

To make matters more annoying, the statistical flaws of WWs system is exaggerated to an huge degree in Exalted due to the large numbers of dice you are tossing around.

I love the ideas that exist in Exalted and I enjoy reading the books, but it does not work as a game. In order to make it work as a game, it needs to be rebuilt from basic concepts, both the system and the setting.

TLDR: I like Exalted but I don't think it is a good game.

[veekie]

TLDR: I like Exalted but I don't think it is a good game.

Sums things up pretty well.

I'm playing in a game of it, and built the other 2 characters, to different levels of optimisation(leaving mine at the lowest, as an experiment). The Melee/Resistance optimised guy is a good deal more powerful than Martial Arts/Dodge optimised guy and they can both kick my Occult/Archery ass to hell without breaking a sweat.

Well, until I summon up something for a bodyguard. The classic elementals and weak demons would be able to cheese the typical low essence Exalt that can summon them.

It's extremely neat and fun. It's not balanced or well designed.

[Dionysus]

-The book seems to be pretty good, best WW book I've seen.  Probably good enough to fix rather than throw away and replace.
-It is Incredibly complicated and does quite a bit to suffocate all creativity. 

How to fix it:
-Describe the world in a few pages.  Leave the rest as a reference or just remove it.
-Get rid of dots
-No "on the fly" calculations
-Attach a number to a power, use it.
-be honest that this is an action adventure game OR make it not an action adventure game
-Radically simplify combat/social combat in some way.

Interesting - I was hoping you'd take a look at this.

The complexity is, i think, from the lists of damn charms. Essentially its a list of ways the characters can temporarily break the rules.

The combat isn't much more challenging than the burning wheel scripted fight. Diffferent, but both equally complex i feel. The tick system is really nice when you get the hang of it. Its just described in an overly complex manner I feel.

The how to fix it though seems pretty spot on. Our group has played about 30 sessions now, and the game really flows along.

Social combat 1v1 is really really simple, basically describe what you do (charm, manipulate, investigate), create die pool, roll vs opponent Mental dodge or parry. If you beat obstacle then you get to make the other guy act the way you want for a limited time.

My beef with the system is that the imtimacies/motivation/virtues need to be more central to the game....

And it is an action/adventure game... very much so.

[Radijs]

[Halloween]

You're not correct.

He could kill everyone.

According to his stat-block he has every charm available to solar and abyssal exalted, all ghost arcanoi, as well as mastery of multiple siderial martial arts forms. This means he has Citrine Poxes of Contagion Style, as well as the Charcoal March of Spider Form.

He also has "many high essence custom charms" as well as "hundreds of combos".

He wins. He can destroy everything he perceives without access to the high level, essence-efficient perfect defense charms, in a single supernaturally assisted flurry. He can perfectly defend himself from sorcery while doing it with Spell-Slaying Palm. As his combo continues, he drinks the lower souls of his victims automatically through his ridiculously powerful artifact weapon (or any number of similar Abyssal melee charms), and uses his innate abilities as a death-lord to chow down on their ghosts. Using the essence he gains from this he can continue his combo indefinitely. Quite literally, he can slay nations in the blink of an eye.

If you're interested in seeing a round-by-round combat with him (without using some of the synergistic nightmares available to high-level Sidereal combat chains) check out the old Exalted wiki. It should still be up there.

Regardless of the precise level of his bad-assery, I stand by my stance on Exalted as awesomeness executed poorly.

[Tetsubo]

I often read RPG books as entertainment. I consider them works of meta-fiction. I can generate hundreds of campaign or character ideas from a single game and occupy myself for days with speculative thoughts. Some games I revisit regularly for this reason, such as the Palladium game After the Bomb. Yes, I know Palladium's system sucks and their owner is a loon. But the game in question rocks.

I *tried* to read Exalted. I just couldn't do it. The bloated prose, massively over complicated rules and use of, apparently intentionally, obscure and arcane terms was a complete turn off. I don't regret owning  a copy, I am a RPG collector after all. But I doubt I will ever open the book again. I did like the art by Obsidian.

[veekie]

One thing though, poorly written as they are, a lot of the charms and martial arts make very good inspirations as additions to mid and high level non-caster types.

[Psychic Robot]

Exalted sucks.  Too many dice to roll, overly-complicated powers system, too many ways to break the game, too many ways to insta-die if you don't have Awesome Defense Charm.

I love the idea of Exalted.  It's fun and it's a nice change of pace from D&D when you're wanting to play epic heroes.  The only thing keeping it back is its bad system.

[gtroc]

I agree with most of the gripes with Exalted. I really do like the game, and I have run it a great deal throughout the years, through all it's incarnations. the setting description in the first edition was what I was looking for, it was very generic and it put the players in the roll of heroic champions reborn to fix the world. and it was generic enough for me to do whatever I wanted to. second edition has a great deal of white-wolfisms, it has such a massive and static setting filled with hard to change meta-plot. it also moves more toward deprotagonizing the player characters. I think that, mechanically, second edition has moved in the right direction, but I have had to house rule the social mechanics every time I've run it. combat is a bit clunky, and there are definite power tiers that once you reach you are obviously more powerful than the other players characters. however one of my biggest issues with the game is a lack of size level mechanics in the game. there are a great many creatures and devices that are far larger or smaller than average human and there is no discernible mechanical difference. I think I have gotten off the track a bit though. I think that the game is very salvageable, and it has a lot of merit(for a white-wolf game).

um...yeah...

[Psychic Robot]

Exalted: Awesome game; terrible, overcomplicated, incredibly broken system that has far too many dice flying everywhere.

[gtroc]

Exalted... has far too many dice flying everywhere.

but I like lots and lots of dice. and flying everywhere? really? I think you need to work on your rolling skills, because that is some serious dispersion you've got...everywhere...heh!