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General Exalted Thread

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Also, every time someone suggest Fate as a good substitution for Exalted, I feel they're missing the point. Yeah, ridiculous combat stuff is a big part of Exalted's draw, but there's also the nation building side of things, or any of the other bits and pieces. I feel when I hear about fate games, it seems that it either exits solely in the wandering hero stage of exalted, or in the "I'm a Essence 6 Second Edition Solar, so nothing can stand against me except other beings on my level", where the aspects of the game beyond small scale social and physical combat are basically irrelevant.
 
I think part of it's a frustration at the current state of Exalted's mechanics.

I mean, I agree with you, sure.
 
notthepenguins said:
Well, yes. Fate forgoes mechanical complexity in favor of having the player spend time figuring out the story and character they want; Exalted (most crunchy games, really) doesn't really care who your character is, just what they can do. I don't think you need to move from clunkier to simpler to make it work, or anything like that. You just can't explain it to people like a 'standard' RPG. In fact, I think Fate would work better with people who haven't played RPGs at all than with people who have minor experience playing a crunchy system - in my experience, it's a lot harder to get people to think out of the box (to make decisions about what they want to do without a list of mechanical actions they can undertake) once you've taught them to think on it.
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Fate works great... for theatre students. It's a narrative game focused on narrative tropes. So it works great for people who have studied stuff like writing, storytelling, advertising and other fields of creative expression. In other words, people who are already trained to think critically about narrative and character, people who think in tropes.

The problem with Fate is that its not actually a simple game. Exalted is a complex game, but like most complex games most of that complexity is actually front loaded. It's all based around character creation and development. You can spend hours, maybe days, designing an Exalted character (especially as the XP stacks up).

But once you've crunched all the numbers and added up all your totals and have all your Charms accounted for it can play very fast in game. Now, that isn't to say it will, because a lot of people refuse to do that up front stuff. This is why I loved the combo mechanic and a lot of people didn't understand why it was so brilliant.

The thing about Combos was that what it actually did was reduce your tactical options to a handful of useful options. Instead of having a dozen Charms to choose between each round, you had maybe three different Combos. The game forced you into developing a few focused combos because it made using un-Comboed Charms a disincentived strategy (ie, it would get you killed). This vastly reduced the amount of decision making the player has to make at the actual table. By "unleashing" the combo rules the Ink Monkeys actually vastly increased the number of decisions per combat a player has to make to an absurd degree which is one of the reason I think the Ink Monkey's never really understood how the system actually worked...

But anyway! Back to Fate. Fate is a game where the kind of work that Exalted is supposed to encourage during character creation and advancement (front loaded) is instead pushed onto the GM and players in the middle of play. Lacking a specific rule to cover a situation doesn't actually make a game less complex, because complexity isn't a matter of rules its a matter of burden. How much mental burden does actually running the game place on the players of the game?

In Exalted all the mental burden is (supposed to be) front loaded. You can play the game (if you do it correctly) with relative ease because you have all your stats for each situation on your sheet and your choices are actually quite simple. Then its just a matter of rolling dice, with some stunts for flavor (and the wonderfulness of stunts is that the rules basically amount to "always give stunt dice"). In Fate, the burden occurs in play specifically because things like Aspects don't have hard and fast rules. You have ten (or more) Aspects, each of which is nothing more than a vague idea, and you have to figure out how to use them to extract bonuses from the GM, who has to abjudicate the use of Aspects based on his personal judgement of the situation, the utility of the aspect and so on. Further he has to engage in compels and other pushback regularly (meaning he has to memorize or have access to all the player's aspects, so 40+ discrete things on top of his NPCs and setting) in order to keep players supplied with Fate Points. All of this is wishy-washy and requires a lot of ruling on the fly. This increases the number of decisions per action you have to make, not decreases them.
 
horngeek said:
I think part of it's a frustration at the current state of Exalted's mechanics.

I mean, I agree with you, sure.
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I guess I should have said that there isn't anything wrong with playing a game where that sort of things isn't going to come up, and if you do, then Fate can work great. It's just, if you're suggesting it as a complete rules substitution that works in all cases(like the article does), well, you're flat out wrong.
 
C.o.S.a.R said:
I guess I should have said that there isn't anything wrong with playing a game where that sort of things isn't going to come up, and if you do, then Fate can work great. It's just, if you're suggesting it as a complete rules substitution that works in all cases(like the article does), well, you're flat out wrong.
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Yes but 3E isn't going to have many nation-building or bureaucracy rules either from what the devs have said so maybe it's more insightful than you know. Of course making interesting bureaucracy rules which lead to stunts and whatnot is also a challenge in and of itself.
 
Fate sounds like something up my alley since I can't remember half of the rules for Exalted anymore. Not that I'm going to be playing anytime soon.
 
azoicennead said:
I need to use improvised weapons more often.

@Chloe Sullivan, get ready for a fastball special.
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Chloe Sullivan said:
And here me thinking i'd get a way with not buying HGD for a while. Silly me.
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In all honesty, it's still probably better to just chuck my character at the enemy. I think I'm a bit more robust and likely to survive.

Getting me back after sinking an enemy ship might be something of an issue, though. Armor is not the easiest thing to swim in.
 
Winged Knight said:
In all honesty, it's still probably better to just chuck my character at the enemy. I think I'm a bit more robust and likely to survive.

Getting me back after sinking an enemy ship might be something of an issue, though. Armor is not the easiest thing to swim in.
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Chloe is a player in a game I run over Skype.
That was me saying that the demons they're facing are going to start throwing each other at the party.
 
Winged Knight said:
Ah, I see. I was thinking of the game he and I are in here on SV. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
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Horngeek appears to be back, so is that game actually going to resume?

EDIT: also, Sidereals can cheat a lot, but learning Heavenly Guardian Defense is a bit past their ability. Which is why Chloesid is built for "get my allies to protect me"
 
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Chloe Sullivan said:
Horngeek appears to be back, so is that game actually going to resume?

EDIT: also, Sidereals can cheat a lot, but learning Heavenly Guardian Defense is a bit past their ability. Which is why Chloesid is built for "get my allies to protect me"
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From what I understand we'll be starting again soon. Maybe even tonight, if all goes well. Looking forward to gaming with you again.
 
azoicennead said:
:facepalm:
Of course you would.
You are the strangest kind of munchkin.
(Seeing you roleplay those Virtues is pretty cool, though.)
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You should see the silly nonsense I did with my "bards with no levels in bard" series. ALL BUFFING, ALL THE TIME.

landcollector said:
Compassion 6? I...how would that even be described?
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All virtues can be seen through many lenses. Keep in mind, if there's one thing a Sidereal cannot be, it's nice. Chariot has high virtues, because he cares, passionately and deeply. He really, really cares. He kinda has to. Anyone who didn't care deeply would have quit the awful, soul-scourging, unforgivable job that he does by now.



But well, as a book I found entertaining once noted: "Only the truly Virtuous can fully plumb the depths of Depravity" (The Tyrant, Eric Flint and David Drake)

Remember, there were a good number of high compassion Solars just before the Usurpations. Some of them were among the worst monsters that inspired that damned act.
 
Chloe Sullivan said:
All virtues can be seen through many lenses. Keep in mind, if there's one thing a Sidereal cannot be, it's nice. Chariot has high virtues, because he cares, passionately and deeply. He really, really cares. He kinda has to. Anyone who didn't care deeply would have quit the awful, soul-scourging, unforgivable job that he does by now.
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Hey, my Sidereal is a perfectly nice person!

He, uh, mostly achieves this by being very bad at Sidereal-ing and more like some kind of flamboyant kung fu superhero.

But still!
 
I'll admit the acting of the Virtues, from mechanics to fluff, kind of throws me a little bit in Exalted. Let's take my character, Ten, for example. I've been playing him as a soft spoken, gentle person who would very much prefer to talk instead of fight and dislikes greatly to see meaningless suffering.

And yet, he's Compassion 2. Which makes me wonder if I'm roleplaying him completely right...
 
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Winged Knight said:
I'll admit the acting of the the Virtues, from mechanics to fluff, kind of throws me a little bit in Exalted. Let's take my character, Ten, for example. I've been playing him as a soft spoken, gentle person who would very much prefer to talk instead of fight and dislikes greatly to see meaningless suffering.

And yet, he's Compassion 2. Which makes me wonder if I'm roleplaying him completely right...
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The rating of the Virtues in Exalted are weird compared to other games. Rather then being how much you 'feel' the virtue in question, its how much control the virtue has over you. Rather then being a coward, someone with Valor 1 is perfectly able to stand between his party and the big bad to duel him while the rest of the circle escapes... its just that he isn't forced to do so.


(Also, I swear to ST that if you guys start doing the cat thing so you can munchkin... I will go mega social munchkin, even if I need to downgrade the ship!)
 
Sucal said:
Schrodinger's Cat.

You said you were gonna schrodinger yourself into Compassion 6!
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As in dump dots from MA/Dodge or whatev that i bought with BP and put it into merit/virtue instead?

If it doesn't change anything I have actually used in-game, then I'm just 'fixing an oversight from earlier.'

My character is a sid in the midst of solars - that's like the opposite of munchkining.

If it bothers you, though, I won't do it. It's not like I desperately need higher Compassion.
 
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