I've been reading through the 3rd Edition core, and I like what I've read so far. I haven't gone through it cover to cover, but reading chunks here and there that catch my interest, but so far the writing itself is more preferable than second. It has a better atmosphere than the very text booky feel of the previous edition; and though a fan of sequential art, the short stories work better.
This is because it is designed to be read like a book rather than a reference text, and despite how that might sound this isn't a mark in its favor. Because all that extremely dense setting information which seemed so entertaining on the first pass becomes absolutely
buried in there somewhere, critical plot points breezed by in a single sentence and important details tucked away into some long-forgotten paragraph that your eye glides over because it started off editorializing about farmsteading when what you're looking for is anything but.
The Second Edition core had these problems too, but that was more endemic to White Wolf having very strange ideas about proper text organization and formatting (I guess Diseases count as Antagonists?) and trying to condense like 30-odd books into a single phonebook-sized Summarization Tome, and not deliberately going out of its way to seem fanciful for the sake of it. It was largely hamstrung by being not
enough of a textbook, and its half-way-there compromises ended with stuff like Parry DV calculation being mentioned only Once in the entire combat section, and where it was had been painfully word-wrapped around an image so badly it broke apart the formula entirely and became impossible to find for those looking for it in the middle of a session or while chargenning up new characters. Stuff like "natural language" and "necessary homebrew" have all the outward appearance of being user-friendly, but not when you actually try to make use of what they are presenting you with.
Because, when you get a setting and game system both as complex as Exalted is (or likes to purport itself as), what you
really need is a reference text which tells you how things work and how they should operate. Inspiration material is
nice, but that's where source material and a reading list comes in, and atmosphere is for coffee-table books intended to be read alone and imagining all the possibilities of the contents at work. Exalted really
does not need that kind of book, because no concrete examples of how things should go, and only light suggestions where they lie (if they're not breathlessly presented with the assumption of the standard Antagonist-ST who does literally All the work required of running the game) puts an enormous overhead on anyone willing to undertake the demand. This is a Hard game to get people to start, because it as an incredible amount of buy-in necessary even beyond coming to grips with Combat, and the book which favors the side of "Imagine your ideal game" over "Running your ideal game" is putting a very deliberate hurdle in the path of anyone willing to try.
Just look at the previous page of everyone scrambling around looking for a one-sentence note on the nature of how Jade, one of the headlining Magical Materials of the primary antagonist faction, is supposed to be worked in practice. Information is not disseminated well in these books, and if it were, then we would all have
vastly more time to allow ourselves the chance to establish the kinds of things we
imagine happening in this game in an
actual game, rather than digging through reams of prose to find the needle in the haystack we were hoping for.
And I say this as someone who writes reams of needless and fanciful prose as inspiration and atmosphere.
