Fundamentally, Evocations were a decent organizational idea that was mechanized badly. Like, objectively bad in context of other good design decisions that could have been made.
This isn't the same thing as how you experience or enjoy evocations in your games- that's a separate thing to assess, but at the end of the day, an Evocation is
just a charm tree thematically connected to a physical object. You still spend XP on it, or some other in-game resource (which you will almost never have enough of, including Time), and it becomes a central point of weakness to your character. Sometimes this is desirable for concept reasons, but right now it's firmly 'inherent in the system'
Exalted has suffered from gear bloat/dependency for three editions now, and Evocation just make it worse despite having some fairly decent thematic grounding.
@Aaron Peori 's Artifact + Ally concept is
much more elegant than what we got with Evocations, for example.
But let's look at the pros/cons here:
- Pro: Evocations have consistent, elegant formatting. Compared to artifact writeups in previous editions, Evocations are readable. They are not dense blocks of powers that you skim once, forget about, and then re-read sessions later and realize "oh shit I could've used that." This is good.
The decision to format the powers of Artifacts as Charms, up to and including timing rules, was great.
- Con: Expanding Evocations into the same format as Charms makes them 'bigger' in terms of pagecount.
- Pro: Evocations create a thematic 'box' to design powers and concepts in: "What is THIS sword like in THIS person's hands?"
- Con: Asking Players and Storytellers to homebrew whole charmtrees out the gate is asinine. I can do it because I've been writing Charms for years- so were Evocations written with the assumption that 1st and 2nd edition veterans would jump right in on the ground floor?
- Pro: Related to the thematic box, Evocations are, dare I say it, Evocative. Their nature and presentation is inspirational, which is a good thing. However, all of the inspiration in the world does not actually make it a well-executed idea.
- Con: Evocations to my understanding force players to split their already limited character advancement resources. It's not a question of allowing a player to eat their cake and have it too- but more that... I almost am under the impression here that 3e was designed with an eye towards shorter games or more characters*. A single character is much more narrow in scope, so you won't have people 'spreading out' into multiple areas of competency over the course of a game.
* I mention this because the 2e Solar game I run is just about to hit 2500xp, and... 3e hasn't been around long enough for people to really GET these long-term games?
At the core, Evocations exist to make Artifacts Special, Meaningful and Unique. The
intent is fine, the
execution fails.
