Something, something, disparaging comment about their conduct over public communication channels.
General Exalted Thread
Something, something, disparaging comment about their conduct over public communication channels.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
Professionals do not always act professional.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
If holden was actually answerable to higher authority that wasn't his buddy he'd been fired long ago for the shit he's pulled. it is absolutely unprofessional behavior.
Yeah, to be clear I meant that in the 'something something DANGER ZONE!' sense, not any kind of disagreement with the sentiment.
Yes, it certainly was, but that isn't what happened. Like it or not, that figure was capturing lightning in a bottle, riding high on an unprecedented campaign of (in retrospect, undeserved) goodwill and promising the moon and the stars to all and sundry. Having that kickstarter be so unbelievably mishandled on every level as a result, and continuing to sour people long past that, has unavoidably tainted the game for a lot of people, and its not an unfair assumption to predict no other Exalted book is ever getting that scope of budget again, kickstarted or otherwise.
People are always going to be skeptical now of the name, and not without good reason for being so. Not even other books of the Ex3 line are going to be getting half as much interest as the corebook did, after Holden and co spent so much effort publicly burning bridges and then making a point to say anyone who liked those bridges must have been some kind of asshole anyway. And sadly, that extends to anyone trying to take up the mantle for themselves as well, since they will have to fight every inch of that poor reputation (old AND new) simply to meet the minimum level of "we're not those guys, please believe our sincerity" no matter how well-executed the pitch, or how competent the design team or names attached to it.
If not even the official product can light fires anymore due to being actively undermined by those who claimed to save it, what hope does some "Exalted AGAIN: This Time With Feeling" edition have of hitting the same numbers?
Speaking personally? Probably not, no.
If I could reach back into the distant mists of 2007-2011 or so and ask Then-Me, "Of all of the fans of Exalted, who are the most qualified people - mechanical chops, immersion in the setting, grasp of the game's themes, sense of balance, understanding of what's gone wrong in the past, etc. - to write a new edition?" I suspect the answer would have run something like:
1) Holden (well, HLS, because 2007)
2) TheMouse
3) I'unno, maybe MissMaddy? (She had a pretty good claim at one point to have played more Exalted than any other living human being.)
So. Of those, I have no idea what's happened to Maddy. Mouse is still an extremely sharp guy, but seems to have mostly sworn off anything more complicated than FATE, and that's not really what I'd be looking for. And Holden... well, gave us what we got, with the good ideas (Combat is fun, and does not cause me to gouge my eyes out!) and the bad (Eh, it doesn't really matter how Counterattacks work), and it all showed up three years later than initially expected. I don't think I'd have quite expected that, five-ten years ago.
So no. Nothing against ES - but no, probably not.
Edit: Realizing the list I have here is probably weighted more towards 2007 than 2011 - it omits Revlid, Vance, and other homebrewers I didn't really become aware of until the end of that time range. No insult intended!
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- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Maddy was a regular on the WW then OPP boards but at some point she got a temporary suspension over some infraction I forget, and she made a second account to ask something about the duration of her ban because she couldn't find another way to contact the mods. That got her a sockpuppet ban for some extreme duration and she more or less disappeared.
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Man, I joined during the days where it was more or less assumed that writers being picked out of well-known homebrewers and forum members was the new normal, and your name was pretty much one of the first ones to pop up as someone people assumed would be offered to write for Exalted at some point.
Instead the practice more or less died out after... Plague of Hats, I guess? There are new writers being brought in, they just don't come from the same pond.
Huh. Well, that stinks.
Thanks, anyway!
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I was gonna say, yeah! "Oh man they grabbed Holden and then they grabbed Vance and Hats, Revlid's gotta be next."
(This was the same period when John went from "Morke who?" to lead line developer in the space of about a year and a half - Glories dropping in late 2010, Ex3 being announced mid 2012. Those were a weird couple of years.)
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More likely, we'd probably end up with shit like gendered ability scores.
Lealope
Not yet invincible
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I think it's a demonstration of how differing perspectives can screw design because the idea of classes and levels in Exalted makes me want to vomit.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I think you could make worse decisions than a class/level system for Exalted.
Like running it in FATE, or...
Well, mostly those two.
I'm sure that the way to make a perfect edition of Exalted is to simply get the forums people we keep lavishing love onto unconditionally to write it. Surely their tastes are universally applicable, and this thread has been the gold standard in civil discourse, one that the dev team should emulate.
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I need a new irony meter, because you just broke my current one.
I need a new irony meter, because you just broke my current one.
When I want to look up an example of civil interaction, I just studiously print out @Dif's posts and file them into a big binder.
I may be something of an asshole, but I've never taken careless potshots at anyone in this thread no matter how many times I've been called an idiot.
Get on my level.
"What an embarrassingly bullshit argument," Dif?
My point is that if the Devs were to post as if they were in this thread, they'd be a thousand times worse in terms of their inability to interact.
EDIT: Another thing that's weird: why do so many people claim to be "out and proud assholes" and then get so worked up when the developers, who were derived from this same stupid fandom, act like assholes?
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- Location
- New York City
I think this has less to do with a complete evolution of practice and more to do with said pond no longer existing.
I lurked on the white wolf boards for a fair while before they got shut down, and I think there was a certain way of doing things and cultural inertia that occurred there, combined with that sort of long death that White Wolf was having that lead to that situation, where one hunting for people to write for the game line might "resort" to tracking down prolific homebrewers to do it.
Onyx Path might not be perfect, but new forums, and new writers acquired through open calls and personal affiliation with the developers and the relative success of ventures like Chronicles of Darkness or the 20th Anniversary Products or even Exalted's kickstarter in a manner of speaking put them in a totally different place. The needs that lead to those folks getting picked up have been replaced by different needs.
Incidentally, I believe Scion got its Down & Dirty Combat rules from the God-Machine Chronicles. Similarly, the idea for XP you can spend on everything but charms (The concept seems sound, if not the name!) in Solar EXP is inspired by Arcane Experience from Mage: The Awakening's 2nd Edition. It's an interesting sort of cross-pollination of quality of life mechanics for systems that are superficially similar. Although I suppose it is worth noting that something like Down & Dirty Combat is sort of in Exalted 3rd Edition too, with the suggestion of just rolling Dexterity + Melee to kill someone if they're so far below your skill level that their ability to fight you wouldn't be relevant.
So that kind of rules-lite stuff doesn't actually seem super hard to implement in some superficial way alongside more complex systems like Ex3's combat. Admittedly part of why I wouldn't be too jazzed about the GURPS approach to mechanics is that systems like Social Influence are exactly what interest me about Exalted beyond any lore considerations, and not having stuff like that or Sorcerous Workings in the core would've probably made it hard to maintain interest.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
Depending on how flexible it is a class/level system can be great for Exalted.
One of the major problems with the system as it stands is the Hacker Problem Everywhere. It is entirely possible, and in fact extremely likely, for players to end up creating characters of such widely varying ability in various fields that any significant challenge to one character will instantly overwhelm any other character in the group. This is bad in combat for obvious reasons but it is also bad in all other areas because it encourages players to not participate in scenes regarding another player's specialty focus.
One character has maxed Craft and nobody else does? Well, now he's playing a minigame nobody else contributes to. One character has maxed Stealth and nobody else does? Have fun playing an entire session of solo play so the Stealth monster can sneak somewhere while the other players twiddle their thumbs. The problem exists in all areas.
A class system forces players to have some investment in every significant area of conflict the game wants to emulate. It also controls the maximum disparity between characters to be within an acceptable realm. So if you play a Eclipse Socialite the system will force you to invest in a certain amount of combat ability (perhaps fluffed as bodyguards or leadership bonuses to other players or whatever) just as much as it forces Dawn McKillstaber to invest in some social skills (perhaps fluffed as intimidation and command based stuff) so if the game switches from battlefields to gala balls neither player is left sitting out in the cold or, worse, being an active detriment to the party.
Now, you could also resolve this issue with templates, but that only helps beginning players. You can also eliminate multiple modes of conflict and focus on only one, which isn't an Exalted I would want to play. You can further force players to invest some of their 'free' points in areas but that's basically just a class level system with a bunch of extraneous crunch tacked on for no good reason.
But hey, if nothing else our disagreement shows that perhaps Ascended Fans are not the ideal you want them to be. Nor is slaughtering sacred cows for the purpose of slaughtering them.
- Location
- New York City
It's largely a thing of mentality because of how Essence works, but I also have to admit that couching advancement in a system of hardcoded levels would be a bit of a bummer in my view. I don't love how it creates a feeling of constraint that I don't get from games that don't have it, and enforced participation in all the systems sounds like it might hurt the feeling of customization.
But my experiences with games that have level systems haven't been bad, worst thing that happened was that I didn't really care about my character because my progression felt gated by level and like there wasn't great opportunity to expand in other directions. Is there a way or a system that's done it but still kept a strong sense of customization that was more substantial than the functional equivalent of dice tricks or +1 hitting? This isn't a sarcastic question, I get the sense a lot of folks here have tried many, many systems, and hearing your feelings about what accomplishes this kind of goal best is helpful for understanding how it can be done well. I only really got into tabletop four years ago, so my experience is fairly narrow, and its mostly been that level systems feel kind of transparent and lame.
But my experiences with games that have level systems haven't been bad, worst thing that happened was that I didn't really care about my character because my progression felt gated by level and like there wasn't great opportunity to expand in other directions. Is there a way or a system that's done it but still kept a strong sense of customization that was more substantial than the functional equivalent of dice tricks or +1 hitting? This isn't a sarcastic question, I get the sense a lot of folks here have tried many, many systems, and hearing your feelings about what accomplishes this kind of goal best is helpful for understanding how it can be done well. I only really got into tabletop four years ago, so my experience is fairly narrow, and its mostly been that level systems feel kind of transparent and lame.
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I've said this before, but "customization is paramount" is usually faulty unless it is customization of Options rather than Resources or Probability. Exalted stumbles pretty hard by making all three of those "customized" traits under the same overall impression of Advancement, when really those latter two are so fundamentally-critical to even playing the game properly you're almost required to spend every effort to max them early and exclusively at the cost of everything else, simply to compete at a reasonable level. The "freedom" given by an aggressively hands-off system like Exalted is usually a plethora of ways to make a character who can't do most of the things you want them too, especially when obscuring how hyper-specialization is needed to accomplish basic tasks.
A choice between an 85% or 50% or even lower chance to Do Anything Meaningful shouldn't be the kind of customization you are required to do, which is something a measure of enforced-consistency among characters (not necessarily Classes) would likely rectify fairly easily.
- Location
- Ottawa
If hearsay and scuttlebutt are to be believed, they were originally planning to hire Revlid. But then Revlid did something to offend Holden (can't remember exactly what) and plans changed.
Anyway, I doubt that non-fans would produce better product than fans. Looking at the games industry as a whole, non-fans are very capable of producing much worse work than Ex3.
Anyway, I doubt that non-fans would produce better product than fans. Looking at the games industry as a whole, non-fans are very capable of producing much worse work than Ex3.
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Okay, just had the time to read through this. So, to use an example from Kerisgame as a test case...
Name: The Isle of Gulls
Size: 500 hectare island.
Features: Hidden harbour, Cult 2 (Riyaah MuHiitiyah), freshwater lake, light forest (food and water sources).
Traversal Difficulty: 0 / Open terrain (habitable island).
Access Points: 1: sargasso jungle (safe path).
Capacity: 4 (Resources to support a small village.)
Name: Sargasso Jungle
Size: 450 hectare sargasso field (300m wide ring that starts 100m out from the island shore - approx diameter 2.6km).
Features: Plentiful food (foraging Difficulty 1), sunk ships (Resources), environmental hazard (-2 external penalty to resist Sickness/Poison from the plants and animals), magical resilience (clearing attempts regrow within an hour, or Essence hours if Holy/fire-based). Sorcerous; can be cleared with Countermagic.
Traversal Difficulty: 5 / Extreme terrain (magically snarling seaweed).
Access Points: N/A, 1: Can be accessed from all sides, but only one safe path through, which is difficult to find and twists back and forth. A straighter and more obvious path exists, but this one terminates in a dead end in the middle of the jungle without space to turn a ship around.
Capacity: 3/2 (Only small ships can fit down the safe path.)
Hmm. My main points here would be how Traversal Difficulty works and Capacity of the island. The former disregards the terrain rules on pg 266 of core and doesn't seem to know whether it's a difficulty for rolled action or dramatic travel.
Capacity-wise, the rules work for the Sargasso Jungle - three ships can be in the safe channel at once, and they have to be pretty small - but for a static settlement like the island the "number of units that can be there" doesn't really make sense, and it seems like it would be easier to just have a single number.
Otherwise, pretty cool!