I have spent a lot of time criticising Exalted. Like. A lot of time. I'm actually kind of afraid to try and estimate how much. But while I've extensively hacked Kerisgame and spent long rants describing how certain parts of the setting are terrible and awful and no good, I haven't... okay, I guess that does technically count as "offering an alternative suggestion". But not in full.
So. How would I have written Exalted? From scratch?
I've put quite a bit of thought into this, and how - for example - I would deal with the way that some people love the complex in-depth mechanics of fights and other people want to skip them and get straight to the consequences. In general, there are two ways to resolve any roll; process-based determination (PBD) and results-based determination (RBD). Exalted uses a mix of the two. A navigation roll to find your way to a house in an unfamiliar city, for instance, is probably going to be RBD - make one roll against a set Difficulty, and if you pass it, you get there. However, the combat engines have always been very, very much oriented towards PBD; they're very granular and you resolve every action individually. Which takes ages.
As I said; some people love that and enjoy PBDing their way through fights. Other people dislike it and prefer to go "okay, a demonic assassin tried to kill me and failed" in four or five quick rolls before moving onto "so who sent them and why?" And naturally, in both cases, the players in question will be dissatisfied with a system that caters to the other.
My solution to this dilemma is to make the system modular. This also turns out to be an easy way to solve the fact that there is no existent governing system and not much in the way of social influence, too! Essentially, to use combat as an example; I'd write the corebook chock-full of simple RBD systems. As many as I could pack in, all designed to be done with an example action (and there would be lots of examples) in five rolls or so. It would be basic mechanics, an introduction to the system, an introduction to the setting, and lots of suggestions and "how to use" bits.
And then the other sourcebooks would plug into this core system based on what you wanted out of your game. Now, the corebook alone would be functional - and in fact it would be pretty good for a more narrative, rules-light game where the mechanics matter less than the story. You could sit down and play with just that, and have fun. But say you wanted more out of combat. Say you liked that RBD fighting where you roll out every thrust and parry and roleplay manoeuvring for position and dealing with range bands and cooperating with a group to dogpile a single opponent and all that jazz.
If that's what you want, you buy the combat sourcebook; Blades and Battles. The first half of this book contains a PBD system; a Cinematic Combat Engine that plugs into the Simple Combat Engine rules in the corebook and expands on them massively, probably in something similar to the basic 3e combat system. It would have Charms that interface with these expanded rules, suggestions on using them, etcetera. If your group wants to play a game whose focus is in the actual process of combat, you use that.
If you want to play a game whose focus is still on combat, but on the wider scale of warfare and military campaigns and so on, never fear! That's what the second half of the book is about. It has a Mass Combat Engine - again, one that plugs into the Simple Combat Engine of the corebook and expands on it. It gives you rules and fluff for why and how warfare happens, how to model troops and armies, special assets and sieges, morale and drill, etcetera. If you want to play a nation-state game where instead of swording things yourself you send or lead your armies to do it for you, this is what you use.
This idea of modular design based on game focus is the best solution I've been able to come up with. The players and ST collectively decide what they want to model in-depth, and what they want to just represent with a basic resolution mechanic to get onto the good stuff. If combat is largely incidental to the stuff they all want to do, they can use the corebook combat system but the in-depth project and governance mechanics in the respective sourcebooks. This essentially allows the system to be customised to suit the game - and since the plug-in sourcebooks are fairly thematically restricted and your combat mechanics are all in Blades and Battles, it makes it easier to cross-check for combinational hell. A lot of them would basically be split half and half between a character-scale PBD engine that expands on the RBD corebook rules and a "Magnitude" engine that gives rules for city- or nation-scale games.
The plug-in sourcebooks would have Charms for all splats, hopefully, so potential sourcebooks would be:
Corebook: Basic mechanics, simple Systems for everything, introduction to the setting. Solar simple charms too, since they're the default splat.
Leaders and Logistics: General Project mechanics and fluff for large-scale actions of any kind. A lot of other books would reference this one.
[Area books]: Cultural information fluff and plot hooks for different setting locations.
[Splat books]: Introduction to each splat; chargen, plot hooks, mechanics, suite of simple Charms.
Pacts and Politics: In-depth social influence mechanics, PR and propaganda, background sociology.
Blades and Battles: Cinematic and Mass Combat Engines. Fluff on setting up and running warfare.
Forges and Factories: Artifact crafting and mass production. Tool sophistication and infrastructure.
Monarchs and Merchants: Governing and trade and empire-building. Laws, diplomacy, Anno 1404 stuff.
Salt and Sorcery: Occult knowledge, thaumaturgy, Sorcery, example rotes/spells, Workings (Sorcerous Projects).
Gods and Monsters: Spirit mechanics, the differences between gods, elementals, ghosts, demons and raksha. The various realm-of-existence "area" books would go into more detail on these, but the basic spirit mechanics and the unique hooks about each type (like the "how did they die?" ghosts and "what tool are they?" demons) would be here.
There might be various other ones I haven't thought of here. Terrain and Travel, maybe, for a game about being Marco Polo or Francis Drake? Or Crops and Cattle for agriculture? They would all fit the alliterative naming scheme, naturally. You can't stop me doing that. In fact, no-one can stop me! Ahahahaa!
... shut up, Gods and Monsters doesn't count.
