Ask them first. Don't assume they won't be able to do it, or won't want to. Have them take a look, and then offer if people have issues. Plenty of players like having dice tricks, they make you measurably stronger, much more than "doing a new thing" does. They give nuance to your power more than rolling a straight pool can. Just because the loudest people here don't like the way 3e does it doesn't mean your players won't. And if they really don't like how Charms work and you don't like how Charms work, then run a different system. Because clearly Exalted doesn't work the way your group likes to run.
General Exalted Thread
QafianSage
Ascending Ape
- Location
- United Kingdom
I tried that once before with a different group, and maybe it was my fault for not communicating the thing well, but the situation we ended up in was them constantly forgetting what charms they had and what they did and me, as the ST, constantly having to remind them "Hey, you have Graceful Crane Stance, don't you? That could come in handy here." It got better after a while, but it was really quite annoying while it lasted.
One idea I had was to have the game start immediately at exaltation with no charms, and when the players run into issues or ideas that they haven't got a charm for, I say "Hey, you could pick this one," and they immediately learn that, up to the chargen limit.
EDIT: Also, when I say I'm using BlueWind's stuff, one alteration I'm making is that Solars get 5 Excellencies free, 2 of which have to go to their Supernals, because although 10 is, IMO, too much, Solars do need to be able to claim absurd competence in a range of things to be proper solars.
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- Location
- Earth Prime
The trouble rises in two forms: It's less accessible when you have to appreciate fiddly dice tricks to really get into the Charm trees; and the end result isn't really in much difference at all. It's almost the opposite of D&D 4e's problem: despite having distinct differences in HOW something is achieved, the net results are so similar as to be a shrug.
It really needed better editing on a design level, but the designers got hung up on the fun they had with their mechanics.
It's not utterly dreadful, but it's an overreaction to some of the issues of 2e while re-introducing the problems 1e had that 2e fixed. And it loses one of the strengths of using the White Wolf system: it focuses you too much on the mechanics rather than on the narrative of the actions the mechanics support.
The combat system, at its core, though, is one of the most brilliant I've seen.
Azrael
Sakura Saber
- Location
- Throne of Heroes
You realize there are things you can do with Exalted that don't require you to use canon Charms? Setting aside something like a Mortal game, if people have already made custom charmsets that work more to your liking, why not use them over canon? Exalted is not some sacred cow incapable of being divided up and altered to suit a group's preferences, and you saying 'just play a different game' is not what someone typically wants to hear when they come in saying 'hey I want to run Exalted but have a few issues'.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
But what if they play Exalted and... Have Fun Wrong!? Then they'd be having badwrongfun, and that's bad.
If you actually like those custom sets, sure? But this seems more like "I'm worried my group will dislike Exalted at the core level of it having Charmtrees". Exalted is a really complex system. If your group doesn't like complex systems, my advice isn't going to be "houserules to pare it down" it's going to be "Use the fluff and run in a system you like and know more" because cascading house rules to fix fundamental problems with a system seems like it would make for a miserable GMing experience.
As well, if you wanted to run a mortals game in Exalted, I'd...kinda suggest not doing so? The rules are there, but they're not very fun. I have not the slightest fucking idea why you're talking about sacred cows in this context.
Dude, no one is saying that, and I don't appreciate the accusation when I was giving the advice I'd like to be given if it seemed like I was about to make the mistake of engaging with a system that fails to do what I want on a fundamental level.
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The devs and writers have never made a secret of this. Hell, they were saying back when Morke and Holden were still in charge. I was pretty sure I had a post on this topic from a year or so ago in this thread, but my search-fu is failing me. Or maybe it's in another forum.
My issue with this (and I'm not nearly as familiar with all the details of 2e, so correct me if I'm off base here) is that an excellency is often enough to 'filter' out mortals on its own, and from what I remember of 2e, even 'meaningful opposition' didn't have much they could do to respond in a lot of cases, precisely because they weren't written with that in mind, save the odd essence rolloff. Since mortals aren't really going to thwart an essence-burning solar in 99% of cases, I'm perfectly okay with the actual charms having levers to interact with them.
To add to everything else that's been said, I've run the Ex3 jumpstart for quite a few groups and it really nails the execution on the 'get your feet wet with Exalted' mission statement nicely. If you're not sure if your groups are going to like Ex3, run them through that and see if it gels.
Azrael
Sakura Saber
- Location
- Throne of Heroes
I'm having trouble phrasing this in a reasonably polite and clear way, so bear with me if it isn't, but the general idea is that this is what just happened:
QafianSage: "I want to run Exalted 3rd Edition. The charmtrees in the corebook are massive and bloated and I don't think my players will be able to keep them straight. I found this homebrew that fixes that to an extent I'm comfortable with." He then asked if combining the homebrew set with canon was a bad idea, which it is.
You brought up the very valid question of if he had asked his players if the canon charmtrees were too complex/bloated. You then said 'If Canon is too complex play something else', seemingly completely missing the part where he had a simpler alternative to the problematic portion already.
I posted saying that there was no need to ditch Exalted as a system if he already had homebrew that fixed his problem, mentioning the idea of a sacred cow because as far as I could tell, your only objection was that he was playing Exalted wrong or something, since he mentioned altering the canon. Apparently that wasn't the case.
Sure, not putting in work to edit things is a decent idea if he has another system he could run with Exalted flavor, but again, he came in here saying 'I want to run Exalted 3rd Edition with a single change to a single portion I consider problematic', and the change didn't involve him homebrewing entire new charmtrees or anything. Someone did that work for him. So I don't understand this particular objection.
In particular, you seem to think that not liking the canon Solar charmset for being a bloated mess means the base system is too complicated for people. This thread is filled with people who have played Exalted since 1e or 2e, who know those rather complex systems, who read and understood 3e's system and even liked it, but who saw the charmtrees and went 'oh god what is this'. The homebrew QafianSage intends to use was written by someone who did the same thing. Because again, they are a bloated mess. You can disagree with me on that part, but that's what I and several other people think.
I don't agree that having problems with the Solar charmset means the system 'obviously doesn't do what you want it to'. The mere fact that mortals exist in the system and are playable proves that the charmset isn't exactly vital to the mechanics on a baseline level. This is before the common refrain in this post of him already having an alternative to the sole element of the game he mentioned having even potential problems with.
So my viewpoint here is, and remains, 'telling him to use a different system is not helpful in the least when he came in saying he wanted to run Exalted 3e'.
- Location
- Ottawa
Like me!
I wonder, sometimes, whether it would be good to have the mechanical side of the BlueWinds rewrite without the flavour side. I like both halves, obviously, but I know there are people who want flavour text on their Charms that would otherwise appreciate what she did.
Mm. There's a different system and then there's a different system, you know?
You can get a long long ways by tweaking and modding.
QafianSage
Ascending Ape
- Location
- United Kingdom
Just for a little clarification here, when I talked about bringing in some canon charms, I was specifically talking about charms that increase the repertoire of things you can do as a Solar, like Master Plan Meditation or Mind-Scribing Method, not the dice-tricks. In other words, I'm talking about taking the effects of those charms (e.g. Retroactive "Aha, but I planned for this, and therefore the investigator's evidence actually incriminates him!" and writing books in your head respectively) and editing them into a format which fits with BlueWind's houseruled charms.
An example of the kind of editing I'm talking about would be Thousand-Forge Hands, which in the edited version simply allows a Solar to apply Craftsman Needs No Tools' interval-reduction to large-scale projects, directing their workforce with inspired perfection and absolute efficiency.
Sorry, I didn't put that very well before.
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- Location
- Gladstone, OR
So here's one of the reasons why I dislike pushing unnecessary die adders as part of a game design structure- show of hands, who here knows what a Skinner Box is? If they don't, I only need point you at any MMO, lootbox, GACHA or similar 'DING TO PROGRESS' game in the world. Reward structures are hardwired in to our brains and our gaming toolkit.
In context of an RPG- the cooperative kind like DnD or Exalted- this reward structure is rooted in among other things Character Advancement, the goodfeels you get from spending XP. Some games push this harder, making each incremental gain in prowess a hard-fought endeavor. Other games are easier about advancement- in the case of Exalted 2e... Well I can't say with any certainty they intended Charms to be what they are, but the results are as follows: 2e Charms are Big and Chunky, with the expectation that the vast majority of advancement is done with them, followed by [Splat Trait]. Abilities for most Exalts, Attributes for others, Essence for Infernals and so on.
Like, in most of the games I've played/run, people never bought Attributes unless a sudden surge of XP made it possible. Saving for a big purchase like that- or Permanent Essence, was more useful in the long run than what amounted to +1d and another +1d on an excellency. Traits for most Exalts didn't matter except to define initial competencies and baselines- and to diferrentiate players from each other with their base traits first. Recall also that in 1e but moreso 2e, Charms are written wtih an eye towards 'weight classless'. The much maligned DB charms aside, your Charms didn't care what you fought, they worked, end of story. Lunar PDs worked just as well as Solar PDs at defending- there was no ST-deployable 'gotcha' built in that says 'Cannot be stopped'. like 'Unblockable Except against Primordials'
Remember also that in most storytelling guides, XP per-session is something like 4-6 with a big injection during 'storyline completion'. I want you to think about that environment for the moment- especially those of you who haven't played a game of Exalted any edition. I also want you to understand the brilliant psychology of stunting, despite it's later impact on the fandom. Stunting gets you dice, stunting gets you motes, stunting gets you experience points. In a game that includes and emphasizes character advancement, experience points are good. If not the greatest good.
Now the reality is that Exalted and most WW games are storytelling games first and foremost, progression is a side effect. Charms being big, sweeping comprehensive effects are due in part to how in 'practical play' you get one charm every two weeks. To say nothing of any necessary trait increases. Most games I've been in or run have settled at 8xp/session, because we can't afford to play that slow.
So let's extrapolate a bit with 'Storytelling' as the primary goal of an Exalted game. The advantage of 'Big Fat Charms' as opposed to incremental ones like 3e is that personal competence spreads out and shoots up quickly, enough that you don't need to progress broadly to have a functional character. Now maybe there's an argument to be made for increasing starting charm totals or any number of chargen tweaks, but the core idea, the... I hestiate to say ideal state, is that out of chargen, you shouldn't need to buy anything more. (This is a drastic oversimplification and I do not mean to imply you should cut out advancement systems).
So what about die adders? Or better to say 'Quantitative' effects- to just cover anything that manipulates dice results instead of creates a new action. Die adders are a very obvious skinner box mechanic, because they create a narrow, easy to understand reward of 'I am better at this thing'. I say that this is effective design, but I will fight bloody handed before I say it is good design. Skinner boxes are awful game design tools, and can be downright predatory- Fortunately we're not experiencing such a bad one with Exalted.
Quantitative mechanics and design that includes it with reasonable guidelines is good. The beauty of an Excellency was that it was a one-stop shop of all your die adding needs and it created an expectation that your scale of 'adding dice' ends. Every 'exception' in this already exception-based design adds complexity to an already large and sometimes unwieldy ruleset. This is not an argument against complexity in and of itself, but if a game is going to be complex, I want it to be meaningfully complex.
Qualitative design- that is to say a mechanic that creates a New Option is more evocative, more memorable, more useful in the long run. It's more enriching to the player to get a new thing they can do than it is to only get better at the things they do. In an ideal case you want a balance of both mechanics- and in the case of Excellencies, the templating is ideal because you don't need to complicate charm trees with more complex die adders.
Even at their most basic, the Excellency itself makes a statement on the Exalted and other Essence-wielders. Arbitrary die adders however do not. They just... manipulate the outcome. Do you really want to spend 8xp on something that just changes how dice works, or would you rather spend it on something meaningful ?
In context of an RPG- the cooperative kind like DnD or Exalted- this reward structure is rooted in among other things Character Advancement, the goodfeels you get from spending XP. Some games push this harder, making each incremental gain in prowess a hard-fought endeavor. Other games are easier about advancement- in the case of Exalted 2e... Well I can't say with any certainty they intended Charms to be what they are, but the results are as follows: 2e Charms are Big and Chunky, with the expectation that the vast majority of advancement is done with them, followed by [Splat Trait]. Abilities for most Exalts, Attributes for others, Essence for Infernals and so on.
Like, in most of the games I've played/run, people never bought Attributes unless a sudden surge of XP made it possible. Saving for a big purchase like that- or Permanent Essence, was more useful in the long run than what amounted to +1d and another +1d on an excellency. Traits for most Exalts didn't matter except to define initial competencies and baselines- and to diferrentiate players from each other with their base traits first. Recall also that in 1e but moreso 2e, Charms are written wtih an eye towards 'weight classless'. The much maligned DB charms aside, your Charms didn't care what you fought, they worked, end of story. Lunar PDs worked just as well as Solar PDs at defending- there was no ST-deployable 'gotcha' built in that says 'Cannot be stopped'. like 'Unblockable Except against Primordials'
Remember also that in most storytelling guides, XP per-session is something like 4-6 with a big injection during 'storyline completion'. I want you to think about that environment for the moment- especially those of you who haven't played a game of Exalted any edition. I also want you to understand the brilliant psychology of stunting, despite it's later impact on the fandom. Stunting gets you dice, stunting gets you motes, stunting gets you experience points. In a game that includes and emphasizes character advancement, experience points are good. If not the greatest good.
Now the reality is that Exalted and most WW games are storytelling games first and foremost, progression is a side effect. Charms being big, sweeping comprehensive effects are due in part to how in 'practical play' you get one charm every two weeks. To say nothing of any necessary trait increases. Most games I've been in or run have settled at 8xp/session, because we can't afford to play that slow.
So let's extrapolate a bit with 'Storytelling' as the primary goal of an Exalted game. The advantage of 'Big Fat Charms' as opposed to incremental ones like 3e is that personal competence spreads out and shoots up quickly, enough that you don't need to progress broadly to have a functional character. Now maybe there's an argument to be made for increasing starting charm totals or any number of chargen tweaks, but the core idea, the... I hestiate to say ideal state, is that out of chargen, you shouldn't need to buy anything more. (This is a drastic oversimplification and I do not mean to imply you should cut out advancement systems).
So what about die adders? Or better to say 'Quantitative' effects- to just cover anything that manipulates dice results instead of creates a new action. Die adders are a very obvious skinner box mechanic, because they create a narrow, easy to understand reward of 'I am better at this thing'. I say that this is effective design, but I will fight bloody handed before I say it is good design. Skinner boxes are awful game design tools, and can be downright predatory- Fortunately we're not experiencing such a bad one with Exalted.
Quantitative mechanics and design that includes it with reasonable guidelines is good. The beauty of an Excellency was that it was a one-stop shop of all your die adding needs and it created an expectation that your scale of 'adding dice' ends. Every 'exception' in this already exception-based design adds complexity to an already large and sometimes unwieldy ruleset. This is not an argument against complexity in and of itself, but if a game is going to be complex, I want it to be meaningfully complex.
Qualitative design- that is to say a mechanic that creates a New Option is more evocative, more memorable, more useful in the long run. It's more enriching to the player to get a new thing they can do than it is to only get better at the things they do. In an ideal case you want a balance of both mechanics- and in the case of Excellencies, the templating is ideal because you don't need to complicate charm trees with more complex die adders.
Even at their most basic, the Excellency itself makes a statement on the Exalted and other Essence-wielders. Arbitrary die adders however do not. They just... manipulate the outcome. Do you really want to spend 8xp on something that just changes how dice works, or would you rather spend it on something meaningful ?
Yes. Yes I do. Because the thing that is meaningful to you isn't to me. Whereas cheaply adding a success and rerolling 5s and 6s is actually very meaningful to me. The big fluff powers are shit I buy when there's not something that will make me immediately better at the thing I want to be doing right now.
The dice adders are not arbitrary, the numbers mean shit. Rerolling 1s make you someone who never botches, in addition to the raw mechanical effect, they imply that your technique is so perfect that even should you fail, you won't do so catastrophically. Reroll sixes implies pushing that extra edge, because a six is so close to a seven, you are within an inch, and give it that extra oomph to try to push higher.
I like dice, I like what my numbers and my dice and my dice-manipulation say about the power I have. Far more than buying a Charm that just turns me invisible, because, to me, that is the boring thing.
Numbers have meaning, numbers have value! You find your meaning and value elsewhere, cool, that's fine! But for the love of God, stop calling the dice meaningless. I assure you, if Exalted worked the way you wanted it to, I would not be playing it, because it would be intolerably dull on a mechanical level to me. This stuff is a matter of tradeoffs, not bad design versus good design.
... But then, sorry, but... why are you playing Exalted?
Why not play World of Warcraft instead? Or Runescape, or something else with a similar number of general skills? A computer can do quantitative nitty-gritty optimization-type games a thousand thousand times better than any human ever could, and it's not like those games don't have plotlines and stories.
The whole reason most people play tabletop games in general is that having an ST around lets you do things the computer doesn't expect - i.e. do qualitatively different things that just what the developers anticipated. Making that easier in the form of functionally different Charms is very much along that line of divergence.
Why not play World of Warcraft instead? Or Runescape, or something else with a similar number of general skills? A computer can do quantitative nitty-gritty optimization-type games a thousand thousand times better than any human ever could, and it's not like those games don't have plotlines and stories.
The whole reason most people play tabletop games in general is that having an ST around lets you do things the computer doesn't expect - i.e. do qualitatively different things that just what the developers anticipated. Making that easier in the form of functionally different Charms is very much along that line of divergence.
- Location
- U.S.
This is probablyt he biggest issue with Exalted in general IMO. The advised progression is fucking glacial, and assuming you play once a week....it takes months for major character change in IRL time which is frankly obscene. My group doubles-ish exp gain and at least one of our players is still annoyed with how slow it is. WW needs to realize that life doesn't easily tolerate people playing your game for months and months without interruption.
Then why play a TTRPG? There are lots and lots of other things that do that so much better. This sort of thinking leads to not being able to do very many things, just one or two very well, which is kind of missing the point. Characters who only have the one hammer are the ones who should really have issues, because when somebody else in the party wants to do something other than the one thing you're good at, you get to sit and not contribute until it's done.
um. You realize that there is no experience, at all, like a TTRPG, right? There is nothing, in all the world, that lets you and your friends sit down and play out a story together, sharing in all the ups and downs, triumphs and failures, on the path to success or doom, like a TTRPG. And also like, I get accused of telling people they're having bad wrong fun a lot, but like what?
I like to play a different way than you, and you tell me to stop playing games altogether. I get shit on for warning someone away from Exalted because it seems like they might not enjoy complex systems, but I say "Hey, I like dice tricks" "Well you shouldn't be playing TTRPGs then".
What, exactly, went through your mind to make you think this was anything but deeply insulting and arrogant, that anyone who doesn't play the game like you shouldn't play any game at all?
We're saying that by your logic, you would have more fun playing a MMO. That's all.
Arrogant condescension, yes, I heard.
Sure, if you like. Do you have a response?
I'm just using your own logic. You enjoy manipulating numbers more than having more qualitatively possible actions; you enjoy building stories with friends. The genre of game that is optimized for both is the genre of MMORPGs.
Tabletop games are generally not designed for the former -- though even among tabletop games, there's still, like, D&D is a better fit than Exalted. Exalted is all about exceptional gameplay; it's an exception based system, after all.
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You're not using my own logic, stop preening and actually look at the words you're saying. You're twisting my words to support a pre-existing conclusion that a certain mode of play is bad and people who like it are doing the wrong thing.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
You kind of started the thing where we tell people to play different systems, so I guess you reap what you sow.
...
....Nnnn....
Well, okay, maybe a little. You're talking more about Borgstromancy than I initially thought.
Still, though, that sort of thing -- D&D Feats do that. MMO's have talents and items and skill synergies. Both of them do "I can pick out some related thing to be X% better in my primary field of interest" way, way better than an exception-based system like Exalted, and still have that underlying story-logic to them.
Exalted, meanwhile, is fundamentally about exceptions and qualitatively different gameplay. It absolutely is the wrong system for that sort of number manipulation.
My argument stands. Why Exalted?
Salty
Shadow Cabal Assumptor Supreme
- Location
- Sun, Moon, Talia
- Pronouns
- I/Me
Because fuck you, that's why. Nobody needs ever answer a question like that with anything but a middle finger.
Now why don't you stop the gatekeeping?
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Because Exalted gives me a bunch of numbers, so many, with which to build the story of a person. It tells the stories no other game does. D&D doesn't give me Reroll 5s and 6s on tests of speed, showing how I never come within an inch or a foot of failure. It gives me +1 Charisma and a flat number bonus like double proficiency or whatever. That is when numbers bore me. When the story it tells is so limited. I like D&D most when I can get a Fighting Style to reroll 1s and 2s on the damage roll, when I get advantage, when I can do stuff with the dice that say something about how I'm fighting. But that actually limits me to certain concepts pretty hard, and then I get bored because D&D is kind of a progression of More Numbers and Bigger Numbers, and the fights end up being really samey.
Meanwhile, with the Solar I'm playing right now, if you roll any ones or twos to attack her, I can ping a Charm after you've rolled to raise my Defense by that much, showing how I see the flaws in your attack even as it lands and direct it away, because I'm that amazing. If I land a hit, I gain a flat number bonus to make my unarmed attacks hit like artifacts, and double and reroll tens on damage, showing that when I hit hard, it's catastrophic for you, I don't always like the most amazing hit, but if it's good, it's great. I can keep your defense value from refreshing, and have another Charm to take advantage of stacking onslaught.
All of these are super basic numbers powers, but they add together and cascade into this brilliant, shining warrior who strikes with the force of a mountain, whose technique is so amazing that she's tracking the flaws in yours even as you begin to touch her skin, who is so fast, so relentlessly vicious that if you don't end the fight soon, she'll end up tearing you limb from limb from sheer aggressive cussedness. This is why I love Ex3's dice tricks, because with relatively simple effects they let me build and visualize the story of how I fight, how I win, how I gain those small edges that end up being decisive.
This is much more appealing to me than buying the Hadoken Charm that lets me throw a fireball at range, because that, for me, just doesn't really do much. It would be strong as hell, it's a great Charm, don't get me wrong. But I'd much rather have Charms to perfect how I fight now than which give more ways to engage period, because I like using my Charms to build the warrior who practiced one blow ten thousand times, rather than ten thousand blows once.
And, again. I understand why you prefer just grabbing the Hadoken to getting Excellent Strike or Lightning Speed. That's totally fine, and a cool way to play! The best games have players who use both approaches, so you have an interesting variety of how the players engage in combat and a variety of tools to deal with problems!
I just wish you wouldn't actively insult the way I like to play because you find the appeal elsewhere.
*headtilt*
... Fair enough. It's definitely not something that makes sense to me, but I acknowledge that that is irrelevant.
- Location
- U.S.
You imply with things like this:
That you're in this for numbers crunching. Fine. But TTRPG does number crunching badly in general, because it's humans doing probability math which our brains suck at, so usually people do it wrong anyway, and it's fiddly and the math to predict it is an ass. Other games just do the thing you seem to want to do better. Take EU4, which is entirely fiddly number crunching, with a vineer of decisions on top that are entirely pre-decided by how you want to adjust your numbers. It does probability in fucking fractals, and has modifiers for modifiers for modifiers. TTRPG is bad at almost everything, but this in particular, because without something like a computert to handle this it's an ass to manage and even worse to predict. The setup is incredibly obtuse, it should not take 10 minutes to determine how a single action shakes out, that means there are far too many moving parts, too many sources of error, too little predictability. This is coming from a Bloodbowl player, but dice are NOT YOUR FRIENDS. Dice live to fuck everything everywhere forever, and cannot be trusted. The more dice you roll, the more the law of averages comes in, yes. But that only matters if one roll can't fuck you forever, and in Exalted one bad roll can most definitely fuck you forever. Every re-roll, every time the dice move again, is an opportunity for something to go wrong, for somebody to get just enough of an advantage to just kill you, just win the debate. The sheer quantity of dice fuckery is, to me, an attempt to obfuscate an innate issue with the system, the fact that it is, on a basal level, not that well put together. It's a lot of randomness. It's less bad than OWoD, but without a base value in...almost anything but DVs, the system seems to me to be more and more poorly designed on the most basal level, and 3e is an attempt at fixing the issue superficially, without addressing the core problem, which is that the system is too random.