General Exalted Thread

[Blaque]

Also to last chain-post. That Solars have had Charm issues and the 3e corebook has its issues...yet still are a popular splat says there is an appeal to them. Not everyone has it, and i think they still could be refined, mind.

I think the 3e general emphasis of them as First Amongst Equals, and Essence's focus on light, Intimacies, and tactical efficiency I kind of like. Where they outgrow higher power through the utilization of tools and methods around them is neat to me and fits a bit more the Genre Hero vibes they have in inspiration. The biggest thing I think 3e was hesitant on until it wasn't was letting Solars Go Weird. I think more stuff like Glorious Solar Saber, Null Anima Gloves, Faster than Self, etc.) I think also there was some 1e and 2e thing where "Solars just were so good they ignore systems" which I think if written more with long term game health in mind, we'd get better esults from.

Kind of put simply I like the omni-Resonance, MA access, sorcery access, and good dice cap as the base. But I think that this should have been then been used to allow Charms to be intersting without just winning/best or ignoring systems. Morke was ultimatley still thinking in a 2e mindset of everyone else bieng ultimatley an NPC/optioanl extra game, not osmething to actulaly interact with future Charms in ways tha were meaningful. ANd less I Win buttons and mroe stuff like in Lunars or Sidereals with empahsis on again, light, leadership, and Intimaices would have probalby doen a lot there. Not every splat needs to be everything. Lunars showed that with focusing on being a particular kind of shapeshifter. Solars could do that with bbieng a particular kind of genre hero.

 

[Kingfisher]

this, yeah. Dropping the Exalted from the corebook would be a pretty ridiculous self-own for anyone involved with such a project to make. The pitch is the Exalted, not the edgespace of mortal play. If you sell me Vampire: Requiem and it's just the World of Darkness corebook, I'm gonna be pissed lol.

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I get what you're saying -- I absolutely do -- but at the same time you're very nearly describing the CoD Blue Book and I frequently hear that cited as one of the best works that White Wolf produced.

I do sometimes wonder how things would look if Exalted were setting first rather than player first in that respect. If rather than playing Exalted as one the many types of exalted, you were playing Creation as one of the many types of demi-god or semi-devil.

 

[Lioness]

I suspect if you had a mortal centric corebook you'd struggle not to end up catering to people who don't want their character to Exalt or be upstaged by Exalts.

 

[Kaiya]

I suspect if you had a mortal centric corebook you'd struggle not to end up catering to people who don't want their character to Exalt or be upstaged by Exalts.

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yeah, it'd easily get pretty obnoxious. You'd need to start from a first principle of making clear that, even if a mortal hero can matter, an Exalted hero is always going to do it better. It's Exalted. That's the point. The power disparity is real, and you cannot overcome it.

 

[HalfTangible]

A mortal splatbook might be more workable. But you still run into the assumption that you're meant to Exalt later.

 

[Lioness]

yeah, it'd easily get pretty obnoxious. You'd need to start from a first principle of making clear that, even if a mortal hero can matter, an Exalted hero is always going to do it better. It's Exalted. That's the point. The power disparity is real, and you cannot overcome it.

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I think it's a damned either way situation. If someone really wanted to play that character I probably wouldn't care as long as everyone at the table was into it, but broader scale mortal empowerment has a tendency to poison the discourse by manufacturing a conflict between mortals and Exalts.

The inverse of this would probably be not unlike the situation with Ragara Myrrun in 1st and 2nd edition. If the gameline goes to the trouble of saying that Dragon-Blooded can't use Sidereal Martial Arts and how this one Dragon-Blooded will explode from attempting it, people get tempted to defy it on principle when they might otherwise be like "of course Dragon-Blooded can't use Sidereal Martial Arts, they also can't learn solar charms or shapeshift into any animal that they sacred hunt either but I'm not crying about it" but if you frame it as an exclusive club they're not allowed into there's going to be people who want to kick down the door because it exists.

 

[Blaque]

I get what you're saying -- I absolutely do -- but at the same time you're very nearly describing the CoD Blue Book and I frequently hear that cited as one of the best works that White Wolf produced.

I do sometimes wonder how things would look if Exalted were setting first rather than player first in that respect. If rather than playing Exalted as one the many types of exalted, you were playing Creation as one of the many types of demi-god or semi-devil.

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WW and OPP has done three corebooks like that: World of Darkness 1e, Scion 2e, and Trinity Continuum Core.

World of Darkness 1e and Chronicles of Darkness work for mortal games since in part, it kind of assumes you can run a whole mortal game. CofD and the God-Machine Chronicle espeically has a lot for PCs to work with, and characters in CofD don't really have much of an expectation of constant growth like Exalted does. It's a game out the boat that stands on its own without having to reach for other supernaturals. Though notably, for 2e, they went back to having self-contained rulebooks because it turns out it's actually actively harder to sell Vampire to folks with the blue book as required. Especially since CofD while supporting rules comparability, doesn't assume cross-overs.

Trinity Continuum is similar to above. The base line is a game in itself for modern action adventure games involving Talents. Talents can be played in most any Era, or the rules are modified to work for a given Era. The rules are also able to refined to let you play Assassins and you even then can still play a normal Talent if you want. Kind of notably comapred to Exalted, though, it has a splat in it. You don't just get bare bone rules that don't do anything unitl you get Book 2. It is a gmae that lets you have a full blown character that grows and evolves for a full campaign out the box.

Finally there's Scion: Origin. And I frankly think that as much as Scion is a neat game, this is one of the weakest parts of it. It's a book basically about playing your prelude. It has a lot of rules repeated from Scion: Hero simply so that you have a character that can start playing. It wastes a lot of text on Legend 0 characters, the repeated (and contradicitng due to editing) Pantheon lists, and confusing character creation. To me it felt like kind of the worst of all worlds? You ca'nt do a lot like CofD, but it expects growth like Exalted or Trinity do for characters. But you can't run a full game out of the book much either, as it's ultimately a lot of setup to run a per-Visitation Scion and get things going. And the two books combined I don't feel would have been so large to really have justified this split

The issue of course is that to me, of these three Exalted is actually most like Scion if you were to split things. CofD bills itself as an urban horror game, you can do that with mortals. Trinity Continuum is an action adventure game, and gives you a splat to facilitate this. Scion is at its base an urban fantasy game about demigods, and has to hamper itself to give you a corebook of not that. And I feel an Exaltedless corebook for Exalted kind of is in that vein. It's not ag ame in itself and it's a lot ot ask in a market where increasingly the only game that can justify that is D&D.

 

[strange_person]

1e and 2e even had bleeding and infection rules that were promptly something Exalts could ignore.

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Unless somebody boosts the effect with magic. Multiple martial arts styles had ways to make bleeding harder to stanch, there's a fanmade Kimbery charm too. Malfeas's iconic radiation-poisoning effects, Cold Fire Desolation Brand and so on, are based on the infection mechanics plus an extra "supernatural beings can't just laugh this off" clause. Baseline exalted don't fully ignore normal infections, either, so even mundane debuffs can be part of an attrition strategy.

significant opposition for Exalted characters

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Problem is thinking of "obstacle for the PCs" as the only possible relevant role. What happens when the adventure is over? If you killed the bandit lord but forgot to give him a proper funeral, got bored and ran off, will the villagers you saved be able to handle follow-up themselves? Or did their only exorcist see better prospects as your henchman?

 

[Lioness]

Problem is thinking of "obstacle for the PCs" as the only possible relevant role. What happens when the adventure is over? If you killed the bandit lord but forgot to give him a proper funeral, got bored and ran off, will the villagers you saved be able to handle follow-up themselves? Or did their only exorcist see better prospects as your henchman?

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What happens when the adventure is over? A combination of whatever you think would be realistic and what would make a good story if the PCs eventually backtracked.

It's also important to remember that PCs don't necessarily forget so much as players assume when there's time skips that less interesting things (like the funeral of a one-time villain) are handled off-screen. Most groups I find are flexible with this and will take it in their stride, especially if it means they get a reoccurring enemy, but if they come back to find all the villager's heads on spikes and a taunting message from the now undead bandit lord? There's a solid chance they won't be angry at him but at the storyteller for setting up a diabolus ex machina.

 

[strange_person]

There's a solid chance they won't be angry at him but at the storyteller for setting up a diabolus ex machina.

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The advantage of random encounter tables and similarly non-narrative content generation methods is that they're unquestionably impartial. Becomes possible to assess objectively whether some group is prepared to defend themselves against statistically plausible levels of trouble, rather than it being purely a matter of ST fiat.

 

[ichypa]

Kind of put simply I like the omni-Resonance, MA access, sorcery access, and good dice cap as the base.

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One of the things that Essence's flattened power curve helped me with was letting me realize that Solars were supposed to be the splat that let you interact with the most cool stuff at the same time and/or without locking off access to other cool stuff. Like it's the only splat where you can learn Sidereal MA's, use 2nd Circle Necromancy, and be resonant with an Adamant Artifact, all at once. I prefer that vibe for Solars, rather than "just da bestest evar" vibe I got from the Ex3 core book.

 

[BossFight]

I support DB-centric corebook, though I have nothing to add to the reasoning for why which hasn't already been stated

 

[elfgames]

I think Essence has proven fairly comprehensively that there's actually nothing inherent to Exalted that would make it a bad idea to put multiple Exalt types into the same book.

A hypothetical 4th edition corebook written specifically to appeal to me and my idiosyncrasies would probably contain rules for Solars, Dragon-Blooded (framed with a focus on Outcastes), and Lunars as well as a short introduction of Exigents in about the same wordcount they get in Essence, and roughly similar rules for mortals+ (God-blooded, etc.) as we're getting in the Essence companion.

 

[Sanctaphrax]

Essence was only able to do that because it had a much lighter system. Personally, I think that mainline Exalted should stay rules-heavy; it's a big part of the game's appeal.

 

[HalfTangible]

I think Essence has proven fairly comprehensively that there's actually nothing inherent to Exalted that would make it a bad idea to put multiple Exalt types into the same book.

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I disagree in the most stringent of terms. Essence does nothing to prove this.

Essence does not have the charm count or word count that 3e does, by design, in part because so much of it is just using the same set of charms and adding caveats for the type of character using it.

Essence was only able to do that because it had a much lighter system. Personally, I think that mainline Exalted should stay rules-heavy; it's a big part of the game's appeal.

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This.

Also, some comments on Essence that some friends of mine made a week or two ago (direct quote):
"One of my big problems with Essence is despite its attempt it isn't really rules light and it cut out a lot of interesting stuff trying to be rules light. Ex3's social system is great and not very complicated at all. Essence's social stuff is a travesty"
"Essence is..... Okay. There are parts of it I like. Mostly the ventures and whatnot. And the various splats are more equal to each other. With Solars still coming out ahead. But only because their free excellency giving them a lot more bang for their buck"

Unrelated:
... I decided to read Obsidian Shards of Infinity again to see if Throne Shadow Form's defend other effect would stack with the clone thing it apparently has and uh

The Koans are goddamn hilarious

 

[The_Reptile_]

Most of my usage of Essence is largely for Ventures and the fact in my book it's much better primer for the setting than the corebook is

 

[alexthealright]

I think Essence has proven fairly comprehensively that there's actually nothing inherent to Exalted that would make it a bad idea to put multiple Exalt types into the same book.

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Essence is much, much simpler than every other version of Exalted, they're very different animals.

 

[elfgames]

Essence does not have the charm count or word count that 3e does, by design, in part because so much of it is just using the same set of charms and adding caveats for the type of character using it.

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Yes! And it's a very good idea that it's doing so, and future editions should keep doing this.

The only part where it goes sideways is that Modes in Essence only ever add bonuses, which makes Sidereals and Infernals harder to do than they should be. Luckily, a new edition could trivially solve this.

Also, some comments on Essence that some friends of mine made a week or two ago (direct quote):
"One of my big problems with Essence is despite its attempt it isn't really rules light and it cut out a lot of interesting stuff trying to be rules light. Ex3's social system is great and not very complicated at all. Essence's social stuff is a travesty"

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I don't think Essence is flawless by any means, but that sounds... excessive?

 

[Blaque]

One of the things that Essence's flattened power curve helped me with was letting me realize that Solars were supposed to be the splat that let you interact with the most cool stuff at the same time and/or without locking off access to other cool stuff. Like it's the only splat where you can learn Sidereal MA's, use 2nd Circle Necromancy, and be resonant with an Adamant Artifact, all at once. I prefer that vibe for Solars, rather than "just da bestest evar" vibe I got from the Ex3 core book.

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Seconded. I straight-up like that as part of their "thing" and it is something I think the prior devs said they wanted (Solars grow weird by the neat things they can pick up) but you know, failed a large part to actually do since theyalso just gave htem a bunch of I Win buttons.

 

[Blaque]

... Also, some comments on Essence that some friends of mine made a week or two ago (direct quote):
"One of my big problems with Essence is despite its attempt it isn't really rules light and it cut out a lot of interesting stuff trying to be rules light. Ex3's social system is great and not very complicated at all. Essence's social stuff is a travesty"
"Essence is..... Okay. There are parts of it I like. Mostly the ventures and whatnot. And the various splats are more equal to each other. With Solars still coming out ahead. But only because their free excellency giving them a lot more bang for their buck" ...

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So note, Essence never claimed to be rules lite. It's rules lighter than Exalted 3e, but hte devs have on multiple instances tried to clarify it was never meant to be rules lite and often compared it to Mage: the Awakening, which is the most complicated game in Chronicles of Darkness.

I do think the stuff on social is right. I think Essence is still probably better than most Storypath on that, but I do think 3e has the best social system in an RPG to me, hands down.

 

[Blaque]

I think Essence has proven fairly comprehensively that there's actually nothing inherent to Exalted that would make it a bad idea to put multiple Exalt types into the same book.

A hypothetical 4th edition corebook written specifically to appeal to me and my idiosyncrasies would probably contain rules for Solars, Dragon-Blooded (framed with a focus on Outcastes), and Lunars as well as a short introduction of Exigents in about the same wordcount they get in Essence, and roughly similar rules for mortals+ (God-blooded, etc.) as we're getting in the Essence companion.

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I think Essence shows there's room for some Universal stuff, but I'm kind of a view that in a game more complex than Essence and a "Full Game" sense, that the ratio of Universal-to-Splat Charms should solidly be flipped. And that a corebook that had say, the wordcount Essence puts on Universals but the rest put on one splat, would probably be neat, but note that for ease of access, future splats may end up reprinting a lot of Universal stuff anyhow, so what results is more "This is dev-wise the same Charm, different Mode, but for wordcount, it's just a new Charm."

And in general, I think if there were to be Exalts in the coreobok it'd be Solars, Dragon-Blooded (emphasizing outcastes), and Exigents since they as a set probably encompass the mos tismilar stories without needing as much setting baggage. Lunars, while neat and important, do kind of bring a lot to the table mechanically, conceptually, and lorewise that outcaste Dragon-Blooded really don't. It's easier to fit "Concept guy brought from D&D" into a Solar generally, or guy with elemental powers.

 

[elfgames]

And in general, I think if there were to be Exalts in the coreobok it'd be Solars, Dragon-Blooded (emphasizing outcastes), and Exigents since they as a set probably encompass the mos tismilar stories without needing as much setting baggage. Lunars, while neat and important, do kind of bring a lot to the table mechanically, conceptually, and lorewise that outcaste Dragon-Blooded really don't. It's easier to fit "Concept guy brought from D&D" into a Solar generally, or guy with elemental powers.

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All valid points, but I think it'd be very hard to give decent rules for Exigents without doing at least one full attribute exalt type first.

(The attribute exalt charmsets being comparatively anemic and uninspiring is, I think, a notable weakness of Essence).

 

[EarthScorpion]

All valid points, but I think it'd be very hard to give decent rules for Exigents without doing at least one full attribute exalt type first.

(The attribute exalt charmsets being comparatively anemic and uninspiring is, I think, a notable weakness of Essence).

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Attribute Exalts were a mistake for Essence anyway. Shouldn't have been done - everyone should have been Ability Exalts in a system so based around the Ability Universals. Instead, it's an ugly hangover from a different system and a different way of doing the Attribute/Ability split.

 

[HalfTangible]

Attribute Exalts were a mistake for Essence anyway. Shouldn't have been done - everyone should have been Ability Exalts in a system so based around the Ability Universals. Instead, it's an ugly hangover from a different system and a different way of doing the Attribute/Ability split.

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I mean at that point if you try to make Attribute exalts into ability exalts you're just making a different Exalt entirely >.> Which feels like a massive error for a system where the entire point is to *port and simplify*, not *remake*.

 

[Blaque]

All valid points, but I think it'd be very hard to give decent rules for Exigents without doing at least one full attribute exalt type first.

(The attribute exalt charmsets being comparatively anemic and uninspiring is, I think, a notable weakness of Essence).

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Which is fair on that. The first books after any coreobok probably still end up being a Dragon-Blooded Book and Lunars Book because frankly, on the ground, they're who define a lot of Creaiton as blocks (along with Solars in how they're kind of a hand grenade into everything.)