How popular is Exalted 3e compared to earlier versions? I feel as if when I first learned about it in the mid 2010's it was much more talked about in the SB/SV sphere and the RPG.net/other rpg forum sphere. Now as I actually get into buying the books and playing it, it seems like its much smaller than it used to be. I even got Exalted Essence ordered from my Local Game Store because they thought it was the 3e Core book, according to their computer system and no one who works there knows what it is. They don't even stock WW Vampire books anymore but a couple years ago in their old store they occasionally had one or two available. Essence is the only book they can even order online while everything is POD.
I worry that 3e is literally safer but lesser than previous editions and this is just the start of Exalted becoming the equivalent of Glorantha for Millennials as a long running cult legacy game with a very well thought-out world that very few people play while the owning company sells another far more popular product.
It's probably at least as popular, in absolute terms, but it's difficult to get hard numbers to be sure.
Two things have probably changed, though: first, the larger hobby is bigger. There's just, like... more people who are more plugged into more TTRPGs. 5% of 20 and 1% of 100 are the same absolute number, but one of them is a much larger relative slice.
Second, a lot of the earlier online discourse in 2e was kind of... second-hand. This is actually way more common than it feels like it should be. Do you know the memes about Paranoia, the TTRPG featuring Friend Computer hunting down the commie mutant traitors? I sure do. I've heard an
awful lot of them. Do you know how many games of Paranoia I've played in? Zero. A lot of the old Exalted discourse when 2e was the current edition, at least as far as I saw, was people who would talk
about Exalted, and hold it up as glorious or deep or cool or edgy... and talk confidently about things that were straightforwardly outright incorrect. I don't mean getting some details wrong or misreading a rule or Charm. I mean only the most tenuous connection to the material I was actually reading carefully because I ran and played a fair chunk of 2e Exalted.
This last one hasn't fully gone away. There's some people in the community who like to hold forth with imagined authority about exactly what the gameline is about and what it's like who... don't seem to have
ever read the 2e corebook, the 3e corebook, or the Essence corebook. Just no firsthand knowledge at all. But modern Exalted is way easier to play, and is much more fun in actual play, so more people actually do play it as opposed to enjoying the franchise by talking
about it second-hand.
Combine with a lot of talk moving to Discords and people talking about Pathfinder and Lancer and Fate and PbtA/FitD games and so on, and it can
feel like it's not talked about as much, but, honestly? I think it's talked about at least as much. What we don't see as often is forums with people parroting second-hand takes that have been warped by the game of telephone that they went through.
By all means try to bring new people in to enjoy Exalted. I try, too. But the game line is doing fine unless there's something kept secret from the players, and that literally can't ever be disproven about anything.
