(what's wrong with Exalted, WW stuff in general)
applies here
You know watching this, I was honestly puzzled. I mean, Exalted, on the whole, does try for what he talks about here, and in a few places actually succeeds pretty well (1e more then 2e).
But then I remembered that Exalted fans, and White Wolf fans in general are
extremely practiced at picking out what we like and discarding the rest. Honestly, its something of a good skill for Storytellers and players alike to master: its pretty much impossible for every supplement to be good. And as
@Aleph once said, there is immense freedom in realizing that no, you don't have to adhere to stupid canon, or to canon you don't think fits your game/story.
Now all that said, Exalted is a role-playing game. Getting players on board with proper concepts for the game is the Storyteller's and players job more then the lines job. You hear a lot of crazy gonzo stories from Exalted because well... their fun. Fun to play, fun to tell. Same issue with a lot of WW games in general: a lot of people don't want to engage the darker themes, morality mechanics or the punishment mechanics. It takes a certain level of trust and working with the Storyteller to really get those working well, but when it works its a blast.
Speaking more generally about making people care about the setting and its people, one thing I've noticed about 2e in general is a distinct lack of NPCs. You tended to get a lot of very dry information about X place, but not a lot about any individual living there. There are books that bucked that trend, mostly the later 2e stuff, but for a long time all we got NPC wise were either spirits or Exalts, while the mortals were a faceless mass that's next to impossible to care about without your storyteller filling in all the blanks themselves (and how good your storyteller is at that will vary). Something I've found in general while running is that players tend to engage the roleplaying aspects massively more when they have NPC's to talk to then virtually anything else, so that was a significant problem. It's probably not a coincidence one of the things that I've pretty near seen universally praised from the 3e leak was the NPC write ups in the antagonists chapter: it gave us some idea who the people on the ground were, as opposed to nameless faces.
Also, I think if I was introducing someone to Exalted, I'd give them Caste Book Dawn to read through, then something like Scavenger Sons or the Core. Because that gives you on the ground context for a lot of what you'd see in those books, and not just the broad overview that makes it hard to care, as well as giving a good idea of the theme and tone of Exalted.
