So remember when I said I am Done with Ex3? Well I am. I don't want to talk about it.
What I want to talk about is how to hack Exalted into a useful game system and avoiding the mistakes of the past and taking the strengths. So I will take some time in here to expound on what I would like to see in Exalted without really trying to go too far into creating an entire Not!Exalted game system. (Most of this is brainstorming, I'm far from wed to it.)
First: Storyteller or not?
Well, frankly, the problems with Storyteller are well known. The game system was originally designed to make shiving homeless people in a back alley a potentially dangerous encounter, which kind of falls apart when your system is supposed to emulate surfing down an avalanche fighting a volcano god as a low level encounter. I don't think the randomizer is really the problem, however. The d10 dicepools with target numbers and required numbers of 'successes' is as good a randomizer as any, the problem is a lot of unexamined legacy code from earlier forms of storyteller that have been assimilated in without examination. Scale is a big one, but other stuff is also in there. For instance the action economy has always been a big deal in Storyteller because in the very early ones you had to choose between attacking and defending.
So I have no problem with keeping the basic dicepool system, but other than that we can drop everything else and only include parts that make sense.
Second: Simple roll determination.
The basic idea of Storyteller is you add two (or more) traits to get your dicepool. This isn't bad and is relatively fast to figure out appropriate dicepools. However, after many years of playing the game I have discovered a fundamental truth. Rolling more than 10 dice sucks. It's possible to do it quickly, but most players don't want to have twenty or thirty dice, and counting successes on more dice is annoying unless you are trained for it. For that reason: No dicepool should be higher than 10 dice.
How do you accomplish this? All dicepools should be a combination of two traits, rated one to five. We'll use the standard Attribute/Skill split here, its a nice and simple one.
Okay, so how do you modify such rolls? This is usually where the heft of a game system comes in. Well, here is a where a lot of cruft of the last few editions has sneaked in. This is where I call No Stupid Dice Tricks. This is going to be pretty absolute. I hate stupid dice tricks. So no rerolls on getting a certain value, no double successes on a certain value, no botches on a certain value. Make the roll as simple as possible: If a die comes up equal to or greater than the target number, it is a success. Otherwise it isn't.
So modifiers; how should they work? Here I want to steal a bit from the new Sardonyx system stuff. In effect, all positive modifiers to a roll are applied as Bonus Successes. This is all modifiers. Charms? Equipment? Environmental? Bonus successes. The trick is that when a character rolls they have to score at least one success on their dicepool. If they do, add any Bonus to the roll. If they fail to do so? No bonus successes. To keep those bonuses from becoming overwhelming a character may not add more bonus successes to a roll than their dicepool for that roll. Dicepool of 7? Max 7 bonus successes from any combination of effects. Multiple Bonuses of the same basic origin do not stack; you get one Charm bonus, one equipment bonus and so on. Always use the highest that applies.
No, what about penalties? I'm willing to allow two types of penalties; penalties to the dicepool and penalties to the success total. This is the old internal/external divide from 2e and I kind of like that. Specifically a dicepool penalty should be referred to as an Internal Penalty. Internal Penalties are meant to represent afflictions that have been applied to a character; wounds, emotional/social influences, stress, fatigue and deprivation can cause internal penalties. Each internal penalty would reduce the dicepool by a certain amount. To prevent having too many modifiers apply I would use a simple rule: Only the highest internal penalty applies, ignore all others. Have a -3 wound penalty and -1 fatigue penalty and -5 emotional penalty? You get a -5. If your dicepool is reduced to 0 you automatically fail.
External penalties are meant to represent the Difficulty of an action. In this effect they completely replace standard difficulty. There will never be a term used as Difficulty in the system. Only external penalties apply. You subtract an external penalty from the rolled successes after applying bonus successes. If they reduce the result to 0 successes or less, you fail. In some cases, if you have a sufficiently 'negative' success you fail really badly. Like Bonuses you apply any that apply to the roll. Like bonuses, multiple penalties of the same type do not stack; you get one Charm penalty, one environmental penalty, and so on.
I'm up in the air about having a fixed target number or allowing some effects to influence it. I prefer reducing complexity as much as possible, but futzing around with TNs shouldn't be so major a change on a roll by roll basis.
Coming soon whenever I have spare time to expand on it:
Why Exalted suffers because it is designed to emulate fighting games and should instead be based on MMORPGs and how to make every activity a Group Activity.
