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General Exalted Thread

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I'm not getting into a four-person argument on this so I guess I'll just drop it.
 
Aleph said:
*snippity snippin'*
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Kuciwalker said:
I don't disagree, but the real problem seems to be in actually writing those in-depth systems. It's not hard at all to just delete the combat system and write up a difficulty table (or just make it based on a single opposed roll, or whatever). It's much more difficult to write a good, fun, tactical combat engine (and easy to screw up).
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It's a cool idea, but the big problem would, I think, be on the production end of it rather than the writing itself (though that isn't easy). This approach would really want a lot of those books to be launched in short order from the start of the line, so you'd need to work very far ahead. If you're cool with writing 6 books ahead of time then that's one thing but...
 
Kuciwalker said:
The problem with #2 is that generally if you are using the simple subsystem for a campaign that's because its mechanics aren't a significant focus of your story
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Or you just want a rules-light system. That is a thing.

SerGregness said:
It's a cool idea, but the big problem would, I think, be on the production end of it rather than the writing itself (though that isn't easy). This approach would really want a lot of those books to be launched in short order from the start of the line, so you'd need to work very far ahead. If you're cool with writing 6 books ahead of time then that's one thing but...
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I think that you could standardize a lot of the quantitative Charms across all splats. That would cut a lot of necessary effort and leave more space for interesting, qualitative effects.
 
SerGregness said:
It's a cool idea, but the big problem would, I think, be on the production end of it rather than the writing itself (though that isn't easy). This approach would really want a lot of those books to be launched in short order from the start of the line, so you'd need to work very far ahead. If you're cool with writing 6 books ahead of time then that's one thing but...
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I'm honestly not sure you do. You want combat to come out pretty soon thereafter (or even at the same time), but 1E got along fine without any real social, craft, mass combat (that worked, anyway), city management, or survival mechanics.

I imagine the core engine would be something like Godbound without the specific focus on combat: you buy expertise in a general space (Abilities generally, this being Exalted) which give you bonuses to the relevant rolls and let you pull out some miracles (minor charm-like effects representing your powers) at will. You can invest more to get a bigger bonus and pull out bigger effects based on your theme. If you introduce the actual Ability-related subsystem then you get charms instead of those miracles.

So, without the combat engine Wu-Wun can describe his character cutting through a volley of incoming arrows with ease, adding his 3 dots invested in Supernatural [Solar] Melee to his defense roll. With the combat engine he can buy Cut Through the Black Needle, which allows a character who has not made an attack action to get a +6 bonus on Parry rolls against projectiles.
 
I had an idea about how to work with Evocations. The basis of it is that Exalted has a bit of lore that has roots in IRL Shinto beliefs. This bit of lore is that there is a god for everything, including objects. The ones in objects are there to make the maintanence of Fate less difficult, and probably make Shaping more difficult. So, Evocations may be the result of channeling one's Essance through the "little god" of the weapon. The amount of Essance infused in Artifacts explained how the little god makes this happen.

The idea is that Evocations would be organized in three ways:
What type of Exalt can get this?
What type of weapon can use this?
What materials can use this?

As an example, a Red Jade Daiklave used by a Fire Aspect DB may be able to let loose a massive "blade" of fire that lingers for longer than any natural flame should, but such a massive expression of Fire can only be used by a Fire Aspect DB using a Red Jade weapon.

A Soulsteel hammer used by an Abyssal may be able to produce a soul shattering effect that creates several Hungry Ghosts by simultaneously shattering the soul and infusing the shards with enough power for each one to turn into a Hungry Ghost, channeling the necrotic nature of both Soulsteel and Abyssals and adjusted by the smashing/shattering nature of the hammer to create a very strange, but powerful, effect.

You could also add a "minimum rating requirement" to Evocations, making Evocations that need particularly powerful weapons to create the effect. For example, an Evocation with an amount of power in line with an Essance 5 Charm may require an Artifact 5 weapon and Essance 3 or 4 user, on top of thematic requirements of what kind of weapon is used and the magical material the weapon is made of, as well as possibly being restricted to specific Exaltations.

A way of streamlining the process of writing up high rating Artifacts could be to borrow a bit of rules text from D&D, with certain effects having costs and the total cost being what determines the Artifact rating. This leads to a potentially quick, clean way to have crafting characters write up the rules for the Artifacts they want to make.

Of course, all this can just make combinatorial hell for everyone.
 
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Nonagon said:
Well that's going to be true even if the designers are outsiders. Probably worse, actually, since outside designers may bring in ideas from other games that nobody who is into Exalted likes. I mean, imagine if Monte Cook wrote Exalted 3e instead.
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We might get something as sweet as D&D 5e? Sure, that would be neat. Heck, I think a class/level system that forced players to invest equally in all levels of potential conflict would be kind of awesome.

It would also be eminently modable in a way @Aleph wants. Want more infrastructure or social mechanics? Just say a 5th level Dawn gets X or Y Charms from the pool of additional Charms you introduce when you expand the system.

The point is to have someone who is willing to do some actual, you know, exploration of what makes Exalted a game of Exalted rather than coming in with preconceived bias.

Morphic Tide said:
I had an idea about how to work with Evocations.
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Ally ** (Awakened Spirit of my Daiklave)
 
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Monte Cook's World of Darkness actually happened, and it lies forgotten, ever to sleep on its stony bed.

If you bring in complete outsiders they will write a game that won't successfully appeal to the existing fan community of previous editions. It will have to build its following from scratch. In today's RPG market, this is not reliable. You might succeed, or you might bury the Exalted line forever.
 
Aaron Peori said:
Ally ** (Awakened Spirit of my Daiklave)
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That would be for unusual Soulsteel Daiklaves and Artifact 4+ Daiklaves. The thing is that the average Daiklave's spirit is sub-sentient, not able to qualify for the Ally rules. The Soulsteel Daiklave in question being a type made from a single, powerful soul.
 
Honestly, for all this quitter-talk of "bias is so bad, why try?" the point of the matter everyone seems to be ignoring is that the suggested ideal state won't ever happen. It is, if anything, reaffirming that the status quo is perfectly fine. There will never be a systematic tear-down and revision of Exalted by Detached Known Professionals, because any detached known professionals who would be willing to work on such a massive, potentially unprofitable project would cost more money than anyone would be willing to pay for it. This is sadly how the RPG industry works, because passion-projects are all RPGs have ever been, and is the reason we have Ex3 in the first place. Exalted was a dying franchise at the end of 2e, and like it or not, people like Holden were the only people still willing to risk shoveling more work into what was otherwise deemed a money-hole.

"Don't do anything drastic, instead stop and think of all the cool ways a hypothetical someone else, far in the hypothetical future, could fix things for everybody!" is not any kind of reasonable solution to the problem. Its at best resignation, and at worst discouraging to anyone who would try, and simply guarantees that no one will ever wholly get the game they wanted out of this setting. This was true even throughout 2e that everyone with a song in their heart was shouted down under the impression that this long-awaited TOME of an Errata would be the savior of the gameline, and none of them ever came back to it. Even if the finished fan-product is so far-flung from what people like and enjoy about Exalted it can only tolerated by a handful, it would still prove that it can be done by somebody, and therefore anyone with an equal amount of drive to accomplish it can make their own version as well. That's not wasteful effort, or chasing a dream, its actually giving a shit rather than throwing up a shrug and an "oh well, maybe someday."

Because for all the handwringing about splitting the fandom across battle-lines between editions and fan-editions, there has only ever been One point where the community was all on the same page, and that was at the release of the 1e Corebook. Every single book after that point which informed more about the setting than we knew previously was a watershed moment, from people who absolutely hated Lunars, folks who thought DBs were massively more interesting protagonists to the setting than Solars, to those who saw the reveal of Abyssals as being secretly-Solars was super-dumb and they'd be having none of it, the nuclear bomb that was Sidereals, and so on. This idea that Exalted has to be everybody's game or nobodies game is flawed not just on the premise that there could be a unified vision of Exalted by the fans, but in the idea that one could be executed at all and would come out coherently in a way which could even be playable when so many, many compromises would need to be made in the process.

So no, I don't see much value in the "wait and pray" stance on Exalted actually going anywhere, and I'd sooner take a half-dozen Exalted-heartbreakers stumbling their way around things like mechanical execution and expression of themes than accept the idea that the one thing which does unite this fandom at all is begrudging indifference and unwillingness to pursue something better than we've been given for over a decade.
 
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Dif said:
Honestly, for all this quitter-talk of "bias is so bad, why try?" the point of the matter everyone seems to be ignoring is that the suggested ideal state won't ever happen. It is, if anything, reaffirming that the status quo is perfectly fine. There will never be a systematic tear-down and revision of Exalted by Detached Known Professionals, because any detached known professionals who would be willing to work on such a massive, potentially unprofitable project would cost more money than anyone would be willing to pay for it. This is sadly how the RPG industry works, because passion-projects are all RPGs have ever been, and is the reason we have Ex3 in the first place. Exalted was a dying franchise at the end of 2e, and like it or not, people like Holden were the only people still willing to risk shoveling more work into what was otherwise deemed a money-hole.

"Don't do anything drastic, instead stop and think of all the cool ways a hypothetical someone else, far in the hypothetical future, could fix things for everybody!" is not any kind of reasonable solution to the problem. Its at best resignation, and at worst discouraging to anyone who would try, and simply guarantees that no one will ever wholly get the game they wanted out of this setting. This was true even throughout 2e that everyone with a song in their heart was shouted down under the impression that this long-awaited TOME of an Errata would be the savior of the gameline, and none of them ever came back to it. Even if the finished fan-product is so far-flung from what people like and enjoy about Exalted it can only tolerated by a handful, it would still prove that it can be done by somebody, and therefore anyone with an equal amount of drive to accomplish it can make their own version as well. That's not wasteful effort, or chasing a dream, its actually giving a shit rather than throwing up a shrug and an "oh well, maybe someday."

Because for all the handwringing about splitting the fandom across battle-lines between editions and fan-editions, there has only ever been One point where the community was all on the same page, and that was at the release of the 1e Corebook. Every single book after that point which informed more about the setting than we knew previously was a watershed moment, from people who absolutely hated Lunars, folks who thought DBs were massively more interesting protagonists to the setting than Solars, to those who saw the reveal of Abyssals as being secretly-Solars was super-dumb and they'd be having none of it, the nuclear bomb that was Sidereals, and so on. This idea that Exalted has to be everybody's game or nobodies game is flawed not just on the premise that there could be a unified vision of Exalted by the fans, but in the idea that one could be executed at all in a way which would come out coherently in a way which could even be playable when so many, many compromises would need to be made in the process.

So no, I don't see much value in the "wait and pray" stance on Exalted actually going anywhere, and I'd sooner take a half-dozen Exalted-heartbreakers stumbling their way around things like mechanical execution and expression of themes than accept the idea that the one thing which does unite this fandom at all is begrudging indifference and unwillingness to pursue something better than we we've been given for over a decade.
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I think, were we to hand ES a bunch of money and the rights to Exalted along with some magic way of making sure he didn't spend it all on cocaine, that he could make a revamp I'd love, but I don't think that would be the best for the fanbase. A good project needs someone with original ideas, someone who has the spirit the work, and a wet blanket to slap both of those two when they get too up their own asses. You shouldn't be making a revision without all three involved; the Ascended Fanboy tends to laser focus on what they want out of the work rather than what the work stands for in the eyes of its fans. The spirit of the work creator tends to be too scared to change anything major and at best papers down mistakes, creating oodles of legacy code. And the wet blanket needs the other two to give the project a heart.
 
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EarthScorpion said:
Pretty much! I have negative interest in providing a playable Fair Folk charmset - negative because I feel making them playable actually hurts the game - and so any of the people who like them as they are, or gods forbid even tried to play then, is basically shit out of luck if I'm let near the reins.
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I think the issue I'm running into with them is that I don't know which of my ideas for them are acceptable and don't grossly violate their "rules".

Like, could I write up a creepy pseudo-demesne being run by a former Faeblooded who cast off his mortal form in the dying days of the Shogunate, and strives to twist the land and people under his dominion into a replica of the grim police state he grew up in, because it represented the most stable and pleasant time of his incredibly shitty mortal existence? How about a raksha noble who deliberately sires half-mortal offspring and raises the most promising to become members of his court, believing that their mortal ancestry makes them "truer" heirs and associated familial props than if he'd just bullied a common raksha into accepting the role?

Can I have an Exalted Modern campaign where some raksha have taken to "mantling" mortals: stalking them, learning about their lives, and then getting them to accept an offer to "be extraordinary" or somesuch, at which point they haul the luckless bastard out into the depths of the Wyld, cast off their current guise, and return to Creation as "better" versions of their victim, so I can do fucked-up riffs on comic books or anime?

Hell, am I even allowed to write up raksha that can do blatantly supernatural shit like flinging around levin-bolts or making the beasts of the field come to his aid, or is that solely the domain of their nebulously-defined Shaping action?

Graceful Wicked Masques botches the whole thing up so badly that I can't even begin to hammer something comprehensible out of them, and without that I'm just completely adrift.
 
I'm with @Dif on this. A hypothetical Aleph/ES/etc rewrite wouldn't be perfect, and definitely wouldn't fit everyone's fluff preferences, but it would work. It would exist and inspire. I would trust them to to do a damn good job with mechanics, and to make an interesting, engaging setting. I would also trust them to take feedback and not be aloof assists like the current team.
 
Bursting Eagerness Soul said:
I'm with @Dif on this. A hypothetical Aleph/ES/etc rewrite wouldn't be perfect, and definitely wouldn't fit everyone's fluff preferences, but it would work. It would exist and inspire. I would trust them to to do a damn good job with mechanics, and to make an interesting, engaging setting. I would also trust them to take feedback and not be aloof assists like the current team.
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Would you, though? Would you really?

This discussion is going into something of a weird direction as it shifts from broadly debating various approaches to developing the game line and hiring writers to the specific merits of given forum members in doing so.

I guess that's all irrelevant for me anyway since what little time I have to give thought to and write long posts for Exalted goes to my Quest. Haven't contributed to this thread in a while.
 
Eh. I think Aaron is 100% right. Exalted can't be rewrite at a proffesional level by fans, no matter the quality of their writting. Too much baggage involved.

Anyway, if Exalted ever has a new edition (And let's be honest, it never will) i think it should take a page from nWOD and explicitly be a make-your-own-Creation toolkit. Because really, that would be the only way to (hopefully) get everybody in the same page.
 
TAAANNNGEEEEENNNNT.

So, in 2e there's some Sorcery that's basically Thaumaturgy+, so how would a spell that transforms a demon into chalcanth / azoth be built / work?
 
Dif said:
Exalted was a dying franchise at the end of 2e, and like it or not, people like Holden were the only people still willing to risk shoveling more work into what was otherwise deemed a money-hole.
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$684,755 is a pretty decent budget for a project the scope of Exalted. That's enough to hire at least four professional writers for a year of work with some money left over for a limited print run.
 
Andoriol said:
TAAANNNGEEEEENNNNT.

So, in 2e there's some Sorcery that's basically Thaumaturgy+, so how would a spell that transforms a demon into chalcanth / azoth be built / work?
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I'm not sure if that's valid design space, tbh- we already have a means to do it with thaumaturgy, after all.

I can safely say that a 'render down' spell should be more generalist than 'Make Chalcanth' though. It also should not touch on anything to do with mental influence or convincing the demon to get in the vat and stay put. (There are other spells that can go in that direction).

So this hypothetical 'Render Down' spell should be about transmuting/purifying materials, and Demons happen to count for the purposes of the spell. Past that I imagine it would be some kind of int+occult roll contested against the object's Resource Value or say, Essence/Other Relevant trait in the case of characters like demons.
 
Shyft said:
I'm not sure if that's valid design space, tbh- we already have a means to do it with thaumaturgy, after all.

I can safely say that a 'render down' spell should be more generalist than 'Make Chalcanth' though. It also should not touch on anything to do with mental influence or convincing the demon to get in the vat and stay put. (There are other spells that can go in that direction).

So this hypothetical 'Render Down' spell should be about transmuting/purifying materials, and Demons happen to count for the purposes of the spell. Past that I imagine it would be some kind of int+occult roll contested against the object's Resource Value or say, Essence/Other Relevant trait in the case of characters like demons.
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Honestly, my initial thoughts were actually along the lines of a variant / mechanical modification of banishing.

But you do bring up a good point, making it broader by making it a purification / refinement spell. Like, the spell is just a better version of all those Alchemical Thaumaturgies that turn non-magical materials into magical materials.... hrm...
 
Chloe Sullivan said:
How does it work then?
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They set up a kick starter to pay for a deluxe edition of the book, with stretchgoals like "more artwork" and "more spells." That's what the 600k paid for. Could they have set up a different kind of KS aiming at paying for different things? Maybe, but that's pretty theoretical. The specific scenario @Aaron Peori outlined, to "use the money as budget" to hire "four professional writers", would have required a completely different set-up in which Ex3 didn't have a team yet and crowfunded itself from scratch, which wouldn't have gotten 600k in the first place.

It also rests on some bizarre definition of "professional writer." I assume Aaron really means "not freelance," since the Ex3 team are in fact professionals. And were hired for way more than "a year."
 
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