Eh, really not helping the issue of Abyssals being Goth-Solars but it is an option and probably the easiest way to go I'll admit.
General Exalted Thread
greensun
You shall all burn beneath my light!!!
Honestly, just go have a look at the Infernal's book, take some hints from the Yozi initaitons and then make a goth-y version for Necromancy. Sometimes the simpliest solution is the best.
(Heck, if I recall properly, the book basically tells players to do this. )
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So I've never gotten to play exalted, but I love the setting, and I've heard a lot of people talk about how it is pretty poorly designed on a mechanical level. That said I don't think anyone has really gone to deeply into that. If you people don't mind me asking, what do you think the biggest flaws are in the game? Is combat boring, are there too many trap builds, etc?
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If I was writing necromancy, it'd use the same system as sorcery and share 80% of the spells. But it'd have entirely different shaping rituals, and there'd be some spells that belong to one style of spellcasting or the other.
Also, workings would be different. Not sure exactly how they'd be different, though.
Which edition?
Also, workings would be different. Not sure exactly how they'd be different, though.
Which edition?
QafianSage
Ascending Ape
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Ah, you just reminded me of this: The Necromancy Homebrew Thread - Onyx Path Forums It's for 3e, and they've put together a pretty solid set of Necromancy shaping rituals and spells, as well as a bunch of other stuff.
Second Edition has tons of trap builds, combat is easy to splatter you with no warning, and you can trivially shatter the system on accident. Third Edition is crunchy as hell, with tons and tons of options that can cause choice paralysis, with no trap builds (even a super unoptimized PC can fight 90% of the game without too much difficulty) but the potential for someone who knows the system to end up way ahead of someone who doesn't, power-wise, and combat can easily end up taking hours, though I wouldn't call the combat unfun. Third Edition also has a lot of mechanical complexities kept because it wants to give a certain feel or theme, that many argue would be better served being trimmed down, and there've been multi-page fights over this disagreement with no clear resolution.
1st Edition combat apparently just never ended, but I've only played 2nd and 3rd.
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2nd.
First of all, thank you so much for giving such a thorough overview. Some follow up questions.
Any idea what about the game design causes those trap builds? Why does combat splatter so easily?
Yeah, that's pretty much the solution I went for. Same basic mechanics, but some spells are explicitly only usable with certain types of Essence (such as Necrotic, for death-y spells) and others require certain anchors (for example, Whispers for dark magic calling on the Neverborn).
My end goal was to make "necromancer" a flavour of sorcerer, in the same way as "demonologist" or "elementalist" or "tinkerer of weird techno-sorcerous gadgets" - and encourage players to embrace the aesthetic, baby.
The system at the core is the same as World of Darkness, meaning small health pools and weapons that deal quite a bit of damage. Exalted also has a lot of dice inflation, so it ends up very easy to be attacking with large pools(making hits more likely), and having hits deal more damage. Worse, the HP system includes a method where taking damage means you take penalties, making fighting or fleeing harder. This then also combines with the dice pools needing to be very close together* to mean that a single hit can easily kill you, and even if it doesn't that same hit could render you unable to effectively fight back against your attacker. There are methods in the game to fix this, but they cause their own issues: you can activate a charm as many times as you like per action, but you can only activate that one charm unless you're using a combo. So, the charms that could effectively prevent just dying automatically became somewhat mandatory, and players would need to make massive combos that were largely identical for any character that comprised the charms that could keep them from dying.
* Basically, if you take 2 people who both have 16 dice to to throw at each other they're basically equally likely to hit as to defend. But if one person has 14 dice and the other 16 dice the probabilities mean that latter will hit over half the time while the former will only about a quarter of the time. And that's only a difference of 2 dice.
Okay, so, it's been a long time, but the big things are this: There's a lot of Charms that are just bad ideas to take, and a lot of Charms that are game-breakingly amazing, and also worthless, for reasons I'll explain:
A bunch of extra hit points? Pretty much useless once you get a bit into the game, so much damage is thrown around that it's not worth buying Charms for health levels. Particularly with Lunars around, who can throw absurd amounts of damage via having 15 strength and such nonsense, and Solars, who could pretty cheaply pull a combo of "I double all threshold successes for the purpose of determining damage, and then I double all damage", because Solars weren't even pretending to care.
There were Charms with keywords like Shaping, Poison, and Crippling that do stuff, often uncontested or with a bonus to the rolloff to just remove your arms or blind you forever or break your back, or melt your guts from the inside out, or turn you into a goddamned duck uncontested. One shaping effect Sidereals had was "kill anyone outright" or some nonsense.
Keyword defenses were super easy to get for everyone but Sidereals and Dragonblooded, and would shutdown the autowin effects 100%. So you have players buying these badass OP Charms expecting to break people's backs like Bane or Avada Kedavra them, and then the ST has to have their NPCs have shaping defenses, turning off the power the PC bought so there can be meaningful fights, and the one PC without a shaping or a Perfect Defense detonates when they get hit by an Exalt's combo, or turned into dust by some stupid shaping effect.
You need to buy keyword defenses so you don't auto-die, perfect defenses for both Step 2 and Step 7 of combat so you have two layers of panic buttons, for when you know something will kill you if it hits (Step 2) and aren't sure until after you see the roll (Step 7). Step 2 also dodges deletrious effects attached to the hit. IIRC if you put a shaping attack on something Adamant Skin blocked, you could have the Solar take no damage from the hit, but still be turned into a duck.
The system is so fragile, so rocket taggy, so poorly designed that every single splat has a one-true build you have to work towards, and IIRC it takes about 150-200xp before you can just buy the powers and effects you want without worrying about the integrity of your character in the system.
Essence regen effects were also scattered around, and having one while your opponent doesn't means you win, because you spend less on the same stuff that they do (This is also why Solars always won, they had much cheaper perfect defenses and much cheaper and better damage, so they could force you into certain mote spending paths, tap you, and then explode you with their four times damage nonsense).
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I've played 1e and 2e, but have no particular familiarity with 3rd. So, maybe they've fixed everything now.
However, I would argue that the fundamental flaw in both versions I've played or run is simply a mismatch between the level of complexity at which the game engine wants to work and the level of complexity at which Exalted, the game using that engine, tries to operate.
Exalted tries to sell itself as a very mechanically intricate system which can model demigods crashing whole civilizations into one another and get reasonable results.
The system it runs on is very abstract, with a lot of hand-waving for common mechanical questions. Almost everything in the game operates off a 0-5 scale, where zero is nothing and five is the maximum a human can achieve. If you want to buy something, your wealth is a ranking from zero to five, and if it's higher than the cost of the thing, you can. That is a compromise that works great for skipping past the boring math of counting copper pieces on your D&D character sheet, but terribly if you're trying to actually do anything interesting with money. It gets you past the awful parts of D&D economics, where you are haggling over the price of a ten-foot pole and contemplating the value of buying a ten-foot ladder and cutting it in half, and also scuttles the fun weird parts of D&D economics, where you can try to make money by having your cooking-oriented wizard cast Stone to Flesh on a granite boulder and opening a steak house.
Exalted tries to eat its boulder and have it, too, by bolting a very fiddly set of mechanical systems on top of that abstract game engine. And that eventually breaks down, in ways that are hard to fix.
The whole charm system, fuelled by individual units of essence/willpower that you track, is very complicated and very bookkeeping-intensive. In a game where you can't be bothered to track how much money your character has on his person, you're required to track dozens of magical powers, effects, and options with detailed mechanical benefits, drawbacks, and costs. And because the underlying system isn't that tightly designed, it all gets very brittle any time the charm effects start to interact directly with the engine underneath, which is frequently, and then it blows up.
So, the game engine works for stories which are high-concept, low detail. The cool mechanical bits, which are genuinely pretty cool in many place, appeal to players who want high-detail, complicated interaction. When those things intersect, either the simpler base system renders the complicated mechanics meaningless ("This charm lets you haggle over prices better." "I have resources 5, I don't have to haggle over anything." "But you'd be good at it, if you did!") or the complicated mechanics snap the base system like a twig. ("He's the greatest swordsman in the world! He's going to throw TEN DICE at you!" "I will block with fifteen dice, all day. The end.")
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They have not fixed this. They have also not added mechanical support for most of the macro-level actions a character can take: it isn't clear, beyond GM fiat, how organizations or politics or large-scale operations should work, or how administration and organizational loyalty function.
This goes into a larger problem with Exalted resolution system: the hideously skewed examples of what excellence looks like across different fields.
When Exalted describes what a lot of successes looks like for most mundane physical actions, there are obvious mythical comparisons. Being supernaturally strong lets you lift far more than a human can, like Hercules on the low end, or certain Anime characters (or Hindu gods) on the high end. Being supernaturally swift lets you run impossibly fast, faster than any living human can.
Being impossibly smart... makes you as smart as various fictional smart characters, like Sherlock Holmes, who were explicitly supposed to be humanly intelligent, and should therefore be represented on the high end of what is achievable with non-supernatural statlines. The same tends to be true for supernaturally charismatic characters: I've heard (if memory serves) a dev throw out Bill Clinton as an example of Exalted charisma. In short, it isn't clear was supernatural talent looks like for most non-physical actions, leaving players and GMs to stumble at a table whenever a player says "I come up with a plan to organize this society to balance interests, and do so with more raw intellect and talent that any human who has ever lived on earth, just like how John Lightweal over there is so talented with his sword he can fight dozens of men at once without taking a single injury"
And that kind of talent is trivially easy to acquire. A Solar can easily get twice as many successes on a roll as a mortal equivalent, and the system doesn't even really explain what most kinds of mundane rolls can really do, baring a specific subsystem for resolving it. The result is that GM's (or the table as a whole) bear the burden of figuring out how the most basic resolution in the entire game works, in a circumstance that the game explicitly and specifically enables and often encourages, without even touching on the complicated stuff once Charms get involved.
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2e combat was also made splattery by the bizarrely huge damage numbers attached to many of the weapons. The difference in damage between the weakest man in the world and the strongest is 4 dice; a perfectly normal sledgehammer adds 12 dice to your damage rolls.
But the biggest problem was the classic problem of defence. The attacker gets to decide when and how they attack, so the defender has to prepare to be attacked at all times in all ways. Being 100% invincible 99% of the time and 99% invincible 100% of the time isn't worth much if everyone just hits you with the appropriate attack at the appropriate time. This is an issue for defenders in everything, including real life, but Exalted made it much worse by combining instant-death attacks with flawless defences and extremely restrictive combo rules.
The combo rules were actually kind of amazing in their hostility to defense. They might as well have been designed to get everyone killed.
2.5 helped quite a bit, as I recall.
PS: No discussion of 2e's mechanical problems is complete without mentioning that several entire rulebooks were just plain garbage. Sidereals, Scroll of the Monk, Dreams of the First Age...all so bad that it's a little hard to believe.
But the biggest problem was the classic problem of defence. The attacker gets to decide when and how they attack, so the defender has to prepare to be attacked at all times in all ways. Being 100% invincible 99% of the time and 99% invincible 100% of the time isn't worth much if everyone just hits you with the appropriate attack at the appropriate time. This is an issue for defenders in everything, including real life, but Exalted made it much worse by combining instant-death attacks with flawless defences and extremely restrictive combo rules.
The combo rules were actually kind of amazing in their hostility to defense. They might as well have been designed to get everyone killed.
2.5 helped quite a bit, as I recall.
PS: No discussion of 2e's mechanical problems is complete without mentioning that several entire rulebooks were just plain garbage. Sidereals, Scroll of the Monk, Dreams of the First Age...all so bad that it's a little hard to believe.
Heh, in some ways it's just plain easier and potentially more enjoyable to take another game system and just run Exalted as the setting. Something like Mutants & Masterminds or say Wild Talents, which would be my choice, actually does a pretty good job to be honest.
[Insert Storypath shilling here]
Actually how is Storypath for Exalted? I've not really looked into it as Scion & Trinity haven't really caught my interest.
In my opinion, it loses everything I like about Exalted by lacking Charms, Martial Arts, Sorcery, ect. In the opinion of others, it removes all the things they feel get in the way of playing Exalted, like Charms, Martial Arts, Sorcery, ect. I dislike Storypath for being simplified and smooth to the point of lacking anything to get excited about (wooo yet another character who is almost identical to the last character I made, awesome /s). But it's also, well, simplified and smooth. If you just want to play a demi-god being badass and don't want to worry about tons of magical powers to choose from, or have issues with mechanical decisions made in Exalted, Scion is probably for you, it's super easy to make a mythical badass in.
I wouldn't recommend it, though, because IMO it loses everything that makes Exalted Exalted, and becomes just, well. Playing a generic mythical badass. Not an Exalt.
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Use Godbound. The deluxe edition includes literally everything you need to play Exalted, with every 2E splat except Infernals. It's also got Martial Arts and Sorcery. And rules for dealing with organizations, and running a kingdom.
And it's got rules for using other OSR material for NPCs, which means you don't need to start every enemy from scratch.
And the developer is a really nice guy who gave away all the artwork for free to anyone who wants to use it for their own projects.
And it's got rules for using other OSR material for NPCs, which means you don't need to start every enemy from scratch.
And the developer is a really nice guy who gave away all the artwork for free to anyone who wants to use it for their own projects.
Interesting, though to be honest Charms are one of the things I like least about Exalted. Too bloated with too much of a focus on dice tricks to me it seems which is especially prevalent in 3e.
You'll like Scion more then, yes.
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An Infernal port is pretty doable, though. Just make each Yozi a different Word.
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Mind going into some detail about how Godbound works? Also is it possible to play an Infernal at all? They're the only splat I'm really interested in. (The others catch ku interest occasionally but I always go back to Infernals)
Godbound is a d20 system, which makes me suspect it's not gonna be the best at capturing what made Infernals, Infernals. Their magic was pretty intricately designed to give the feel of a slow escalation and positive-feedback slide into inhuman ways of thought and action. Godbound could easily make something thematically Infernals, but I don't think you could really capture their whole thing without Charms.