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General Exalted Thread

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Honestly, I like the Doombot Charm as a concept, but the execution definitely leaves something to be desired. It opens up a gigantic amount of roleplaying opportunities (being in two places at once is a seriously nifty power) but as it stands the Charm is broken beyond belief. It needs a hell of a lot more restrictions as it is - at the very least having it be something prepared in advance rather than a retcon power.
 
At one point in time, every great Charm you see was a crappy Charm. Someone had a burst of inspiration and wrote it down. They eyeballed the resource costs. They gave a quick thought, or no thought at all, to synergies, especially synergies combining powers from different books or artifacts. They had a vision in mind, a creative insight, and they adored it and put it to paper.

It is very rare that the first draft of a work is excellent. The first draft of anything is primarily proof-of-concept: it's to establish whether the idea is suitable or not, evocative, compelling. If it interests people or has the potential to occupy a neat place in the system or story. It is through editing it -- through testing it, through exploring it, through trying it out in play both white room and narratively rich -- that it is changed from raw material to masterpiece.

When you gripe about these Charms, you are yelling at a lump of molten metal because it's a crappy sword. Yes, it's a crappy sword. It is in the process of becoming a good one. Please come back and look at it when it's done. At the very least, don't fall to your knees and scream in rage and defiance at the Heavens that life is ruined forever.

This goes for anything at all in life, really.
 
…..You know what, I'm just gonna abandon thread for a few days, maybe this'll all clear up by the time I get back.
 
Theion said:
At one point in time, every great Charm you see was a crappy Charm. Someone had a burst of inspiration and wrote it down. They eyeballed the resource costs. They gave a quick thought, or no thought at all, to synergies, especially synergies combining powers from different books or artifacts. They had a vision in mind, a creative insight, and they adored it and put it to paper.

It is very rare that the first draft of a work is excellent. The first draft of anything is primarily proof-of-concept: it's to establish whether the idea is suitable or not, evocative, compelling. If it interests people or has the potential to occupy a neat place in the system or story. It is through editing it -- through testing it, through exploring it, through trying it out in play both white room and narratively rich -- that it is changed from raw material to masterpiece.

When you gripe about these Charms, you are yelling at a lump of molten metal because it's a crappy sword. Yes, it's a crappy sword. It is in the process of becoming a good one. Please come back and look at it when it's done. At the very least, don't fall to your knees and scream in rage and defiance at the Heavens that life is ruined forever.

This goes for anything at all in life, really.
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The problem is that the playtesting version shouldn't be the first draft. It should be the second draft, at least, where the most obvious issues have been patched and you're looking at less obvious interactions. A good example is Exalted 2E, where the obvious independent problems are gone (perfect defenses, attack charms, etc. are all fine on their own) and Paranoia Combat results from the interaction of these fine-on-their-own subsystems going in unexpected ways.

Nobody would be complaining as loudly if there was this weird interaction between defenses and attacks that made people invulnerable, because that's what external playtesting should be trying to catch. A single charm that by itself negates most of the backstory of Exalted is something that people are complaining about because it implies that they haven't even gotten to Phase 2 testing yet, where things aren't broken at first glance and now someone needs to try to break it to fix all the bugs that'll pop out in play.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
The problem is that the playtesting version shouldn't be the first draft. It should be the second draft, at least, where the most obvious issues have been patched and you're looking at less obvious interactions. A good example is Exalted 2E, where the obvious independent problems are gone (perfect defenses, attack charms, etc. are all fine on their own) and Paranoia Combat results from the interaction of these fine-on-their-own subsystems going in unexpected ways.
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None of those things are fine on their own, man. The playtest is all of the drafts, except the very last one, because at that point it's no longer a playtest and it's released.

Nobody would be complaining as loudly if there was this weird interaction between defenses and attacks that made people invulnerable, because that's what external playtesting should be trying to catch. A single charm that by itself negates most of the backstory of Exalted is something that people are complaining about because it implies that they haven't even gotten to Phase 2 testing yet, where things aren't broken at first glance and now someone needs to try to break it to fix all the bugs that'll pop out in play.
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You cannot reproduce the backstory of Exalted in the system. You never could, in any edition, but in 3e they've explicitly gone on record saying they're not even trying. That time is done, and over, and such as its like shall never again grace Creation. "Does this fuck up the Usurpation Y/N?" is a very useless metric in 3e. No one in power cares. Nor do the testers, frankly.[/QUOTE]
 
Theion said:
You cannot reproduce the backstory of Exalted in the system. You never could, in any edition, but in 3e they've explicitly gone on record saying they're not even trying. That time is done, and over, and such as its like shall never again grace Creation. "Does this fuck up the Usurpation Y/N?" is a very useless metric in 3e. No one in power cares. Nor do the testers, frankly.
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[/QUOTE]
Well, thats an interesting attitude to take, and I'm honestly not sure how I feel about it.

...Eh, fuggit. Whatever makes the game more fun to actually play.
 
Theion said:
You cannot reproduce the backstory of Exalted in the system. You never could, in any edition, but in 3e they've explicitly gone on record saying they're not even trying. That time is done, and over, and such as its like shall never again grace Creation. "Does this fuck up the Usurpation Y/N?" is a very useless metric in 3e. No one in power cares. Nor do the testers, frankly.
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I find that pretty terrible. For all its absurdities, a main part of the draw of Exalted for me is having a coherent world and history (and one certainly far, far more coherent than most other fantasy settings). Mechanics that make major parts of that history like the Usurpation not just unlikely but actively impossible completely kill that for me.
 
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Theion said:
-snip-
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Yes, how dare people in the thread for discussing Exalted discuss relevant information about the game. How dare they not just talk about how awesome the new edition must be, how dare they speak up in ways that might be less than ass-lickingly positive. How dare they discuss the current known state of the game that is the very topic of the thread. Yes. Those folks with detailed and cogent critiques of the known information are awful people. Very awful.
When you gripe about these Charms, you are yelling at a lump of molten metal because it's a crappy sword. Yes, it's a crappy sword. It is in the process of becoming a good one. Please come back and look at it when it's done. At the very least, don't fall to your knees and scream in rage and defiance at the Heavens that life is ruined forever.
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This. This in specific. This 'wait for the developers to dribble their genius upon your worshipfully upturned faces' sort of attitude. It's stupid. People who sit, wait, and asslick the creators of anything get nothing of value. They contribute nothing. Actually, they contribute less than nothing with their derailing of worthwhile discussion.
None of those things are fine on their own, man. The playtest is all of the drafts, except the very last one, because at that point it's no longer a playtest and it's released.
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Yes, how dare people discuss information-in-hand prior to release. It might influence attitudes, and we can't have anything but company-approved PR doing that.
 
Roadie said:
I find that pretty terrible. For all its absurdities, a main part of the draw of Exalted for me is having a coherent world and history (and one certainly far, far more coherent than most other fantasy settings). Mechanics that make major parts of that history like the Usurpation not just unlikely but actively impossible completely kill that for me.
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It was impossible to have the Usurpation in 1e. The Primordial War, too. It was impossible in 2e -- 2e tried harder, but that was a horrible failure, because you cannot convey those heights of ultimate power beyond all reason without warping the system around them.

It's okay to have Goku in the game, sometimes. Super Saiyan 3 Goku is a bit too far. You can't have him in the same universe as anything that isn't on his ridiculous, grotesquely bloated level.
 
Folks?

Could you either stop the flaming, or take it to PMs?

I come to this thread to enjoy Exalted, not to watch people try to shred each other through the internet over it.

All of you folks have valid points, but raging at each other over them isn't going to do anything but turn this thread into a hellhole.

As I mentioned earlier, the specific Charms in question are likely still in a very early stage in their development, and the only version of them that we have seen is a leaked one that was likely obsolete before it was posted.

So could you please stop deliberately aggravating the situation?
 
Theion said:
It was impossible to have the Usurpation in 1e. The Primordial War, too. It was impossible in 2e -- 2e tried harder, but that was a horrible failure, because you cannot convey those heights of ultimate power beyond all reason without warping the system around them.
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2e at least sorta-kinda worked for it if you pretended most Charms past Essence 5 or so just didn't exist. Indeed that seemed to be the approach the devs were initially advertising for 3e, with higher-Essence Charms not adding the blatantly setting-breaking stuff.

Theion said:
It's okay to have Goku in the game, sometimes. Super Saiyan 3 Goku is a bit too far. You can't have him in the same universe as anything that isn't on his ridiculous, grotesquely bloated level.
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I don't understand the relevance.
 
Roadie said:
2e at least sorta-kinda worked for it if you pretended most Charms past Essence 5 or so just didn't exist. Indeed that seemed to be the approach the devs were initially advertising for 3e, with higher-Essence Charms not adding the blatantly setting-breaking stuff.
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Early 2e, a paranoia-OK Twilight reactor could slaughter an arbitrary number of Dragonblooded on his own. And other Solars. And pretty much everything else. It never really worked. The Primordials, if you use their stats and Charms, have absurdly high pools that skew the mathematical probabilities so far in their favor you'll never hit, let alone hurt or kill.


I don't understand the relevance.
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So there's this character called Goku. Throughout his life, he deals with a lot of various conflicts. As a child, he's a prodigy, claiming victory in martial arts tournaments, murdering ancient demons, hanging with gods and wise old masters. He battles armies and assassins and grows into his own on his quest.

As Goku matures, his power increases. He's got a family now, a son, who is kidnapped! He encounters a new foe, far beyond anything he's ever faced before, and only through sacrificing his life with an enemy-turned-friend can that foe be brought low.

Later still, Goku can annihilate planets with the flick of a wrist and a hernia and he's trading blows with a monster made of gum that killed every single person on the world by himself in a matter of seconds.

There comes a point where the power of something is too extreme to coexist with things beneath its level; everyone in the universe is irrelevant compared to Goku. The universe itself has ceased to matter, for he is a self-contained megaton bomb, indestructible and omnipotent. You can't tell the stories you told with child Goku, or even young adult Goku, with elder Goku. His presence warps things.

The First Age is elder Goku. The Usurpation involved many elder Gokus. The Primordial War was Gokus everywhere. The current story is not about elder Goku, and it's simply not practical to have a system that can represent elder Goku's capabilities while providing a robust and balanced experience for Piccolo, Krillin, Yajirobe, or hell, even Vegeta at times.

Getting my point here? Exalted is not focused on the time of ancient glories; they are myth and legend. You may play a Numenorean, a king of men, but you will never sail against Valinor or walk the shores of Numenorea. Those days have ended. You're telling your story now, and it is different.
 
Theion said:
You cannot reproduce the backstory of Exalted in the system. You never could, in any edition, but in 3e they've explicitly gone on record saying they're not even trying. That time is done, and over, and such as its like shall never again grace Creation. "Does this fuck up the Usurpation Y/N?" is a very useless metric in 3e. No one in power cares. Nor do the testers, frankly.
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So why should I play Exalted? The entire draw, mechanically, for Exalted, is that its core game engine at least tried to pay lip service to the idea that it was how the world worked. If we're abandoning the idea that the game engine is subservient to the setting and a statement made by the mechanics is, in fact, stating something about the game world, why am I playing Exalted instead of D&D 4th Edition reskinned to pretend to be Exalted?

Exalted, for me, and for a lot of people, is about being more mature in D&D, both in setting (and I mean actual maturity, not TITS AND GORE 'maturity') and in storytelling. D&D, like a lot of RPGs of its era, distinctly separate 'the game' and 'the setting', and this attitude means that oftentimes interesting settings suffer because they aren't allowed to acknowledge that 'the game' impinges on the setting. The reason I like games like Exalted is because they recognize that. The game tells you things about the setting. Nobilis, too. Jenna Moran was the absolute master of using the game mechanics to make statements about what the world was like, and although the Ex3E team might not be Jenna Moran they could at least try.

Because if you're discarding the idea that the Usurpation should be at least within squinting distance of the rules-as-written, why keep anything else? Why do you need 25 Abilities? The rules don't need to reflect the setting, so there might be 25 constellations reflecting 25 skills, but why 25 Abilities? Why 9 attributes? Why have training times? Why are Solars stronger than non-Solars? After all, the rules don't need to reflect the setting, you can have all Exalts being of equal power, or Solars being the weakest, or anything as long as you wave your hand and say 'it's fun'.

"The rules don't need to reflect the setting at all" is a rabbit hole that goes very deep, and the end result of looking at the game like that gets you Exalted: FATE or Exalted: ORE.

Theion said:
It was impossible to have the Usurpation in 1e. The Primordial War, too. It was impossible in 2e -- 2e tried harder, but that was a horrible failure, because you cannot convey those heights of ultimate power beyond all reason without warping the system around them.
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Only insofar as 'you needed a ton of attacks to kill someone due to stacked defenses'. It could have theoretically happened because there were no charms for escape-death-guaranteed or the like, and Roadie already mentioned that ignoring most of the Ess 5+ Charms it would probably have been possible in 2E.

Theion said:
Early 2e, a paranoia-OK Twilight reactor could slaughter an arbitrary number of Dragonblooded on his own. And other Solars. And pretty much everything else. It never really worked. The Primordials, if you use their stats and Charms, have absurdly high pools that skew the mathematical probabilities so far in their favor you'll never hit, let alone hurt or kill.
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Yes, and Jon Chung, the guy who invented 'Usurpation-OK' as a term, was on record as calling them bugs, because they didn't allow the Usurpation to happen. The developers acknowledged this and here we are.
 
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Fundamentally, all mechanics tell you things about the game and how it should be played. Something as simple as a dice mechanic choice tells you something about the game and how it should be played and what it is.

Metal Gear Ac!d and Metal Gear Solid, despite having very similar plots, are totally different games with totally different flows due to different game mechanics. Modern Warfare and Quake and Unreal and Crysis are totally different games with totally different feels due to relatively minor differences in game mechanics.

D&D and REIGN are different games because they have different game mechanics that tell you different things about the game. In REIGN fights are nasty, you're never guaranteed to walk away, etc, you're not inherently special, while D&D doesn't work like that. WoD and d20 Modern have superficially similar settings but the mechanics make WoD much more 'horror' than urban fantasy.

Like "can I escape death easily" tells you something about the game and the setting. Games like Shadowrun or Dark Heresy or Mechwarrior, where you have a limited resource to explicitly burn to escape death ("Edge") but otherwise have no advantage over the other guy, that says something about the world. "If I wasn't lucky I'd be dead right now", etc. Games where you're relatively hard to kill (supers games, Exalted to some extent), the fact that the super-awesome main characters are hard to kill, that tells you something about the setting too. Games where death rarely if ever shows up (supers games, FATE?), that tells you something about the world as well.

Mechanics mean things. And by throwing this into the rubbish bin for 'fun gameplay' I think the Exalted 3E devs are missing the forest for the trees. Yes, maybe this makes combat or crafting more fun, but inherently making a subsystem more fun doesn't automatically make the game better.
 
Theion said:
I'm sorry, Wakka, but I don't speak belligerent conspiracy theorist and victim complexes make my dick too hard to type.
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Oh, but I'm just taking your words as seen in the thread. Are they in pre-playtesting too? Should we not talk to you yet, while you figure out what your arguments should be?
 
MJ12 Commando said:
So why should I play Exalted? The entire draw, mechanically, for Exalted, is that its core game engine at least tried to pay lip service to the idea that it was how the world worked. If we're abandoning the idea that the game engine is subservient to the setting and a statement made by the mechanics is, in fact, stating something about the game world, why am I playing Exalted instead of D&D 4th Edition reskinned to pretend to be Exalted?
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Because you like the idea of pulpy Bronze Age action in an intensely animist setting with an eye for realpolitik, wuxia flavoring, and consistent anthropological consistency and realism? If you only liked Exalted because it accurately modeled battles thousands of years ago that have no bearing on the actual game you play I don't think you ever liked Exalted. Because it never did.

Exalted, for me, and for a lot of people, is about being more mature in D&D, both in setting (and I mean actual maturity, not TITS AND GORE 'maturity') and in storytelling. D&D, like a lot of RPGs of its era, distinctly separate 'the game' and 'the setting', and this attitude means that oftentimes interesting settings suffer because they aren't allowed to acknowledge that 'the game' impinges on the setting. The reason I like games like Exalted is because they recognize that. The game tells you things about the setting. Nobilis, too. Jenna Moran was the absolute master of using the game mechanics to make statements about what the world was like, and although the Ex3E team might not be Jenna Moran they could at least try.
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The rules and the setting do coexist very well! But the game isn't simulationist, the rules are not physics, etc., etc. The rules are here to provide a fun experience for the world as-is, not the world as-was-a-bajillion-years-ago-when-titans-walked-the-earth.

Because if you're discarding the idea that the Usurpation should be at least within squinting distance of the rules-as-written, why keep anything else? Why do you need 25 Abilities? The rules don't need to reflect the setting, so there might be 25 constellations reflecting 25 skills, but why 25 Abilities? Why 9 attributes? Why have training times? Why are Solars stronger than non-Solars? After all, the rules don't need to reflect the setting, you can have all Exalts being of equal power, or Solars being the weakest, or anything as long as you wave your hand and say 'it's fun'.
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I'm honestly not sure how to respond to this sort of meltdown. The things the game has it has because the devs decided to put them in. The things it doesn't for the same reason. Creation is arbitrary fiat based on personal preference.

"The rules don't need to reflect the setting at all" is a rabbit hole that goes very deep, and the end result of looking at the game like that gets you Exalted: FATE or Exalted: ORE.
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It's also not what I said.



Only insofar as 'you needed a ton of attacks to kill someone due to stacked defenses'. It could have theoretically happened because there were no charms for escape-death-guaranteed or the like, and Roadie already mentioned that ignoring most of the Ess 5+ Charms it would probably have been possible in 2E.
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Roadie's wrong. It wasn't gonna happen. The Twilight reactor was invincible.



Yes, and Jon Chung, the guy who invented 'Usurpation-OK' as a term, was on record as calling them bugs, because they didn't allow the Usurpation to happen. The developers acknowledged this and here we are.
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Chung is very good at math and has a specific playstyle that's fun and okay to have. He is not actually deciding anything about 3e. I repeat: modeling the Usurpation (or the Primordial War, or the First Age in general) is not a goal. Modeling the current age is.
 
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