Okay, so I keep saying Exalted 3rd edition is badly designed. I have been remiss in explaining what
exactly is badly designed about it.
To answer that, I'm going to throw in this fun of principles as described by Dieter Rams. These concepts apply to Game Design pretty effectively, so I'll go over them in closer detail.
I hope you'll take a bit to read that list, it's
very useful.
Alright! So let's start with point one- is Exalted 3e innovative- by the terms described in that article and the more general definition of the word.
My position is that no, 3e is
not innovative and in fact takes several deliberate steps backwards in favor of other design and experience choices.
In general, Exalted 3e appears and functions much more like a throwback set of rules, harkening back to elements of the earlier editions of World of Darkness and the like. The emphasis on base dice manipulation stands out. This is also evidenced in the merit system being closer to how WoD handles its 'external' character traits.
Now, perhaps the removal of 2e-style backgrounds in favor of WoD style merits is meant to be more like a unified 'We're all working on the same game' brand decision. I'm not suggesting cross compatibility at all, but more consistent naming and terminology from design group to design group. You
do functionally change how people treat and cost Backgrounds versus Merits though. Merits have wider design space than Backgrounds, but Merits also start to
lose focus in favor of more free-wheeling, uncontrolled mechanics.
To further elaborate, 3e
does not show any real attempt at researching advances in RPG or even general design. In my opinion, it at time
revels in how much of a throwback it is. It has been a consistent trend, for
years now, that games are becoming
less complex for a reason. Don't get me wrong- complexity waxes and wanes as market interests shift too, and if there is a niche, it will get filled.
But what I mean here by 'less complex', is that more 'modern' games attempt to
do more with less. Whereas Exalted 3e decides to do more with
more. I personally think it tries to do
less with more. A good example of this backwards thinking is the steadfast refusal to tackle character generation disparity and the associated problems.
This I know Holden posted about on RPG.net.
Another good example is how in 2nd edition, people decried the late-system charm bloat and a whole host of other issues. The developers then declared they'd
reduce the bloat… and then we got 3e core with 700+ charms. Now maybe they intended to simply never write another Solar Charm again, deciding instead to just do it all at once and then do splat-only charms later…
Sorry, having a chilling premonition that we have so many solar charms, so post-solar charms can be written in shorthand as 'like that Solar corebook charm, but different!' I
really hope I'm wrong.
Drilling down a bit further into Charms specifically- I've been focusing on wider stuff for now- is that they take Charms that
used to be simple and are now much more complex. This is in reference to the More With More/Less With More design direction I have issue with.
Let's start with Food Gathering Exercise, 2e and 3e. I'll summarize them both.
FGE 2e: Spend 3 motes, spend five minutes to get enough food to feed yourself and up to Essence magnitude people for a small meal. Anywhere. Activate 5 times per day to secure enough food for 1 day.
FGE 3e: Spend 3 motes, spend an hour to roll a pool at ST-defined difficulty and get food for yourself + [threshold] dependents. Waives need for tools. If you use the charm repeatedly, you are guaranteed an encounter with contextually relevant big game.
Now I really stripped the 3e version down, which has a fair amount of fluff text attached to it.
Let's look at Fire and Stones Strike. The 2e version is dirt simple, 1m/die, up to [strength] dice to boost post-soak damage. The 3e version does that,
and must be modular to account for how it interacts with decisive attacks. Modular design
can be elegant, but there is
so much of it.
Now, the definition of 'Innovative' in terms of Rams' list of principles is interesting to me, because it cites technological development. I sadly cannot cite this, but I remember it being made fairly clear that Ex3, and statements made by the writers that they
were not trying to write for IRC or online games- table top was their intended medium from the get-go.
This is a fair and reasonable choice, and we are arguably using a product in a manner other than intended for that reason alone- but I feel the fact that we
do use it this way suggests something deeper and more meaningful about what we want in a game experience or set of mechanics.
So 3e does not actively or even passively reach for new technologies- I don't necessarily mean this literally. I'm not positing that 3e or any well-designed modern RPG
must invoke smartphones or tablets or calculators, but I feel safe in saying that 3e has actively pushed
away from innovations in both tech and design.
Point two! Makes a Product Useful!
As far as I can tell, from my reading of the 3e rules, it functions. There are with a handful of notable exceptions, clear procedures for resolving its presented mechanics and situations. This is a very direct and
binary determination however. I am trying to be very clear. 3e
functions, it does not necessarily function
well.
So, is Exalted 3e useful? Well, people are using it, so that's a mark in its favor. It's clearly satisfying the need of a not insignificant sampling of players who want what it provides. Initiative is the biggest change to Combat, and combat is the biggest 'system' that Exalted has always had, from 1e into 3e. With that in mind, Initiative
works.
Initiative is also
complex. It has various states and sub-states, all intended to communicate various concepts and influence player behavior/decision making. Complexity gets its own place in this list, so I'll get back to that.
At the core, my position regarding Exalted 3e combat and initiative is 'It works, uninspiringly'. It is an arbitrary abstraction that insulates characters from each other, until one can create a situation in which they can take advantage and inflict lasting consequence. I tried to express this dissatisfaction in a previous post, but let's see if I can summarize my view.
2nd Edition Model: My motes keep me from dying, and I spend my motes to fuel PDs. If an attack is big enough need a perfect, I spend motes. If I spend more motes than my attacker does, he's winning. This is the summary of the 'Motes as HP' model we all don't like.
3rd Edition Model: My initiative keeps me from dying, and I take in-game actions to build more initiative while reducing that of my opponents. I spend motes to make myself more effective, or to prevent my opponent from taking my initiative. When I have enough initiative, I attempt to inflict lasting consequences upon my opponents, risking my initiative in the process.
So to my mind, the main difference between the two models, is that in 2e, you do not have any build-up period. It is safe to assume that you can, from the start of combat, attack with sufficient mechanical force as to force a perfect defense and mote attrition.
In 3e, you spend in-game time and actions building
up to that point. We cannot underestimate the psychological impact of this buildup. The other integral element, is that initiative gives a clear,
fluctuating number that does not have a frustrating mechanic associated with it. (The frustrating mechanic being motes/PDs in 2e, where all you can do is make motes go
down until they're vulnerable).
Initiative clearly goes up and down and it is designed in such a way as to incentivize or enable dynamic swings in fortune. I can't judge the quality of those swings however- I can't say that players will see Initiative Crash or other dramatic reversals. If they were common, they wouldn't be dramatic.
This is what people are
enjoying. I'm happy you're enjoying it! Speaking as a game designer,
that's great. It's all the elements
surrounding that core which drags the rest of it down. I am
unhappy that people are not trying to communicate these failings so that
we will not make the same mistakes in the future.
I personally still believe that functionally, Initiative as a mechanic is identical to Raw Damage in Exalted 2e, save that it's been decompressed across an entire combat. I've generally come to the conclusion that one of 2e's problems, is that it lets you attack too often- both on a per-action basis with flurries, and with the tick system. 3e's advantage with the initiative system, is that the isolation of Withering and Decisive attacks creates an artificial buffer between 'attacks that deal damage' and 'Attacks that don't.' Yes, I know that sounds obvious on the face of it, but the fact is, sometimes things
need to be stated clearly.
3e's
disadvantage lies in it's overwhelming complexity and poor design decisions.
The last point of this criteria is that good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could detract from it. My impression of 3e is that the vast majority of the design time was spent
adding, and not enough time spent removing or streamlining elements that detracted from the core intent.
Before I move on to point three, I'll ask of 2e 'Functions' according to the same definition. It in fact
does not. I personally know enough about the system and have read between the lines enough to handle most of 2nd edition a certain way, avoiding pitfalls like MDV fist, but death spiral and
mote attrition are specifical aspects of the game that
do not function properly. It is a deleterious state.
Question three: Is Aesthetic?
Oh boy, this is a tough one. I'm actually not going to be able to answer this satisfactorily for 3e, but I'll try to offer
something insightful.
Aesthetics, at the core, are how something makes you feel. It's the philosophy of art, essentially. I haven't played 3e, so all of these thoughts are based on my mental projections and 'grasp' of the system and setting while we're discussing it here.
How a game
feels is very difficult to explain- it can be a sense of engagement or investment, a desire to see something actualized. To attain success with the tools provided. In competitive games, the aesthetic is rooted in the competition, of matching one side against the other in a contest of skill or whatnot.
1e and 2e succeeds in aesthetics in the vast majority, outside of combat, because of the good and evocative writing we enjoy from that period. I crow about Borgstromancy
all the time for a reason. Mind you, I
enjoy Borgstrom's writing and her development style, that's not the same thing as saying it's
good. It created a nigh impenetrable barrier to entry for quite a few players, which is actually a design failure outside of certain situations.
So, with 3e, what does the game feel like? The 'main game' is combat, so as I mentioned with initiative, it is intended to and seems reasonable to assume that it models 'cinematic encounters' and essentially functions to build towards 'climaxes' in terms of
combat pacing. Designing for this is fine! The issue is, among others, how
disconnected everything seems from a mechanical perspective.
Related to Aesthetics, is how 3e has sacrificed usability in favor of being read. Not
readability, but being read, like a narrative or a story. Instead of legalistic, formal and mechanical writing, 3e uses natural, unclear language, the unwieldy-long Charm texts, lack of codifying Keywords, and so on. It is snubbing categorization at the cost of improved Feel, making it less useful as a Game and and more an art piece that lets you think about the things you could do with it.
Let's move on to point four now: Makes a product understandable. Is it self-explanatory?
According to Ram's metric here, more games than I have played, more games than I can
count have failed miserably. They have failed, because even now, the science and art of modern game design is not even a hundred years old. Yes we've had games
longer than that, but the modern conception of game design and the methods we use to make them are much different.
2nd Edition and 3rd edition have both failed this metric, for the record. Moreso 3e, because it continues to, consistently and ardently
insist that the
storyteller must fix everything. If it is broken, if it's not working the way
you want it to, the ST must fix it.
This isn't even touching on the idea of there being no guidelines for homebrew content in the corebook, and that there must be an
entire separate book dedicated to this feat.
Touching back on aesthetics- 2nd edition used formal language, keywords and categorization to try and create manageable, almost TCG-like interaction with its various mechanics. If it had the keyword, you knew what would and would not interact with that keyword. 3E by contrast goes out of its way to
repeatedly declare with its Charms, that they have unique interaction mechanics or
no such mechanics whatsoever- Dogstar Ruminations, I'm looking at you.
Dogstar Ruminations would've made a wonderful 2e Sorcery spell, because I would have known
exactly how to interact with it as per the conventions of that system.
Point five, is it Unobtrusive?
This is a tough one. According to Rams, a product fills a purpose- it's not decorative or a work of art.
Thinking about it, my assessment of 3rd edition on this metric is this: There's an almost schizophrenic design ideology in the 3e book, where numerous mechanics like the sorcerous shaping rituals and the merits all exist to let you play the game
your way, to do things unique to
you. But I can't help but note a subtext of the game telling me that only a certain subset of options are actually available or supported.
Is 3e's design neutral and restrained, allowing for user self-expression?
Well, we're all creative people, or at least we like being creative, so it certainly provides enough of a framework for us to hang our ideas on. I personally don't think it's design is at all neutral or restrained though. Neither is 2e's for that matter, but as mentioned, I cannot help the impression that 3e is very
insistent about how people engage it. I'm aware this is a nebulous impression.
Point six- Is the product honest?
Hmm.. I'm going to say
no. Emphatically at that. Because they
promised reduced charm bloat. They
promised a great glorious thing of next generation design, they
tried to do something. 3e is not honest, at all.
Now, I do
not for one second believe or declare that these promises were made or broken with malice. The writers did not sit in a room with piles of kickstarter money going "how are we going to break them of their delusions?"
A good example of this lack of honesty how 3e deliberately obscures most of its math "for the player's own good". It actively tries to avoid being understood, with this kind of idea that being clear about its intentions will cause people to codify it faster, despite the way it keeps insisting for the ST to adapt the game how they see fit.
I'm sure people are going to come back and tell me that 3e is
working for them, and I'll point back up to the earlier paragraphs, which covers most of those arguments.
Point seven: Is long lasting. home stretch! I'm aware most of these are getting more succinct as I go down.
This here is interesting, I hadn't realized 'fashionable' could mean
temporary. But in hindsight, that makes perfect sense. So let's ask the question: Is Exalted 3e long-lasting?
Well, we sure as hell hope it is, because we're not getting another one for another six to eight years. More seriously, this comes back to the earlier points about how functional the game is. Exalted 3e isn't even a year old yet, so time will tell.
Point eight: Is thorough down to the last detail – Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.
Here, along with points one and two, I feel is 3e's greatest failure. It consistently and adamantly
refuses to engage in superior contemporary design practices and modes of thought.
Want to know my proof? Solar Experience. Exalted 3e is
full of new and
bad terminology. Three distinct forms of Martial Arts, Solar XP which is not actually used to buy Solar traits, non-Charm dice which are gained ONLY from Charms, the list goes on.
The fact that this kind of thing lasted to
print infuriates me to a degree I have trouble conveying with any accuracy. It is
confusing, and that is a
death knell for any kind of game design goal! Now believe me, I'm aware with a slight adjustment period, something like Solar XP
can be accounted for, but it is
still a base failure in good design.
Let's touch on Initiative again. Why are
any of the numbers set the way they are? Some can be gleaned from observation. The absolute lowest initiative any character can start with is 3, due to how the join battle system works, and you always reset to 3. Why 3? Is there some behavioral or gameplay fact that starting at initiative 3 grants you?
Well, one obvious point, is that everyone must
start with initiative in order to serve as targets to gain more of it. Further, the way initiative works, by attacking, you add more to the shared pool of initiative as it ebbs and flows. Successful withering attacks drains your opponent and gets you Successes over DV +1 initiative, which means you are
always profiting when attacking, and as mentioned, adding to the potential pool of initiative until it gets spent on a Decisive attack.
But these questions are
important, and 3e did not answer them satisfactorily. It simply told you to trust the numbers and
go. 3e
did tell you what Ability ratings meant, 2 was average, etc, same as 1e and 2e. But not for Initiative.
Point nine- Is it environmentally friendly?
Well, it's a luxury product, and fortunately, the
one place that 3e does embrace new technology is PDFs and print-on-demand. I can't speak much to this further- though the metric does ask 'does it add to visual pollution'?
Well, visual pollution isn't something that happens in a
book. That's sadly where these metrics don't always apply.
Lastly, point ten. Is it as little design as possible.
Not in the least.
Now- don't get me wrong, there is a time and place for complexity. If you make the system too simple, it stops communicating anything meaningful and becomes an abstraction. You could
easily reduce Exalted 3e into something unrecognizable, so please don't assume I mean that.
But, by the metric outlined here, Exalted 3e fails. "Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity."
