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General Exalted Thread

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Normal Target number as 9 makes it almost impossible for anyone, Exalted or Mortal, to get anything done.

And lowering target number by your rolls according to your Essence feels like it's going to make Old Exalt's even more impossible to fight forc Younger Exalts.
 
Dif said:
Actually, the Devs have shot themselves in the foot here and here is the reason why: You're defending non-technical writing for something they have already insisted are meant to be Game Pieces, and not statements about the game or setting at large. There is no reason for Charms, having now been utterly stripped of the storytelling element, to have non-technical writing standards placed on them.
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Sometimes I have a feeling that the authors (both old and new) want to put in even the storytelling elements into the books in such a way as to avoid making statements about the setting. Consider: "The Great Forks military counts a number of spirits and elementals amongst its ranks" (Scavenger Sons, page 79). In the same sentence, one could write "Out of Great Forks' legion-strong military, there's X% spirits and elementals" or "Out of Great Forks' X-strong military, there's Y spirits and elementals". I guess it has something to do with them being arts-oriented, eh. ^_^ (Edited to strike that out, because I shouldn't be so snarky-vengeful, but not deleted because hiding my misdeed would be wrong too.)

Omicron said:
And yet, "thank god the steps are gone" is a fairly common praise of Ex3 I encounter. The clearly defined combat steps of 2e made a lot of people's skin crawl. Now, there is definitely a level of emotional investment in there; the step system is more rigorous and thus mechanically better, and its trade-offs are not on a mechanical level. But if you're dismissing "players look at this, their eyes glaze over and their interest goes down 20%" for the sake of "objective" mechanical superiority, then you don't know what the fuck you're doing.
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Sucal said:
I was considering running 3e exalted at my local gamestore when the non-backer copy is finally released. I showed a few guys that might be interested the corebook on my tablet and their eyes glazed over when they saw the sheer size of the charms section. Admittedly most of them were veteran dungeons and dragons players with memories of 3rd edition, but still.
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I'm not sure if there's any objective way of predicting whether a person's eyes will glaze over. I used to glaze over the Charms section of 2e, but in time I got acquainted with most of it. Yet I don't think I've heard other people rant about glazing over 2e's Charms; likewise, for all the numerous flaws of GURPS Magic, I don't remember anyone ranting about there being too many spells. Even though it's a 240-page book with several hundreds of spells. In fact so many that prerequisites require 37 pages of charts to visualise. Let that sink in. 37 pages of prerequisite trees alone. Then again, people do criticise GURPS for being too technical. To the point that one player I know ranted about another GM's 7th Sea campaign where a certain foreign culture was described in great technical detail . . . and the complaint was "Too detailed, too realistic, too technical, as if he was describing them for GURPS and not 7th Sea".

So I'm not exactly surerised that people complained about Ex2e having 10 Steps. I think they're very useful and clarifying. But technical clarity (as provided by the officially-described 10-step front-end) does serve as a turn-off for some people. In a perfect world, one probably just wouldn't have the backend that was the reason behind describing 10 explicit steps. Except oh wait, Exalted has lots and lots of fiddling with this or that stage of an attack resolution as a result of its CCG-like mechfest (even more so than, say, GURPS), and so not having that backend would make things worse. While also being a White Wolf project, which means that game mechanics are not their strong point. I don't think those things can be reconciled. It's essentially trying to live mech-heavily in a niche where people often feel turned off when they see the technicalities, while not having the (qualitative more than quantitative) person-resources that could enable a powerful-yet-elegant game system.
 
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vicky_molokh said:
Sometimes I have a feeling that the authors (both old and new) want to put in even the storytelling elements into the books in such a way as to avoid making statements about the setting. Consider: "The Great Forks military counts a number of spirits and elementals amongst its ranks" (Scavenger Sons, page 79). In the same sentence, one could write "Out of Great Forks' legion-strong military, there's X% spirits and elementals" or "Out of Great Forks' X-strong military, there's Y spirits and elementals". I guess it has something to do with them being arts-oriented, eh. ^_^
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I would consider your version to be significantly worse and less useful. The as-written version tells us that the military has a minority of elementals and spirits among it, but they're not the mainstay. The idea that giving a percentage or hard numbers is automatically more useful is completely groundless. And the idea that saying "they have a few spirits and elementals" isn't making a statement about the setting is just plain hilarious in its wrongness.

Also, your constant sneering about "arts-orientated" and the like is pretty amusing in its hypocrisy, considering that you also complain about so-called "personal attacks". Might want to look for that plank in your own eye, old chap.
 
EarthScorpion said:
I would consider your version to be significantly worse and less useful. The as-written version tells us that the military has a minority of elementals and spirits among it, but they're not the mainstay. The idea that giving a percentage or hard numbers is automatically more useful is completely groundless. And the idea that saying "they have a few spirits and elementals" isn't making a statement about the setting is just plain hilarious in its wrongness.
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I don't consider "a number" to be informative enough to comprehending the order of magnitude, e.g. whether it's 1%, 10% or 0.3%. 10% is more-or-less appropriate to put them in charge of all squads (Fangs); 1% is about good enough for a per-Talon deployment etc. That changes the composition of the military force. In fact, that section gives me very little idea about the whole military strength of Great Forks as compared to some other city-state, or to a large group of mercenaries hired by some character. That's the problem. A sentence is used up to describe GF's military, while providing only dramatic but not factual information. What good use is obtained by being deliberately vague?

EarthScorpion said:
Also, your constant sneering about "arts-orientated" and the like is pretty amusing in its hypocrisy, considering that you also complain about so-called "personal attacks". Might want to look for that plank in your own eye, old chap.
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Mostly because that's one of the terms by which people seem to self-identify when they bash the technical and the factual as 'lacking soul' and the like. But you are right, I shouldn't be so pettily vengeful and two-faced. I apologize, and am crossing out that section of the post.
 
vicky_molokh said:
What good use is obtained by being deliberately vague?
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Discretion for the ST. This way an ST can say 'Great Forks military can call upon elementals and other spirits in sufficient numbers to field them as a full Legion' or 'Great Forks has maybe one to two hundred elementals and other spirits in its muster, which it must husband carefully indeed to best effect.'

This increases flexibility for the ST without complicating the situation.

Giving hard numbers can actually make the situation more complex, mostly because now the ST has to deal with dispersing those supernatural troops in a sane manner across Great Fork's military without having any room to shove around some numbers to better effect for his campaign.
 
Hazard said:
Giving hard numbers can actually make the situation more complex, mostly because now the ST has to deal with dispersing those supernatural troops in a sane manner across Great Fork's military without having any room to shove around some numbers to better effect for his campaign.
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Also, bluntly, I don't trust most fantasy writers to provide hard population numbers.

When we get hard population numbers, we get Halta.
 
Hazard said:
Discretion for the ST. This way an ST can say 'Great Forks military can call upon elementals and other spirits in sufficient numbers to field them as a full Legion' or 'Great Forks has maybe one to two hundred elementals and other spirits in its muster, which it must husband carefully indeed to best effect.'

This increases flexibility for the ST without complicating the situation.

Giving hard numbers can actually make the situation more complex, mostly because now the ST has to deal with dispersing those supernatural troops in a sane manner across Great Fork's military without having any room to shove around some numbers to better effect for his campaign.
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That's a reasonable goal, though it can be executed in a much clearer manner. Personally, I like the example of how it was done with the Emissary of Nexus in Scavenger Lands. Because the line in Scavenger Sons basically doesn't give any answers on the topic, whether for players ("So what's the situation if I offer Tiger Warrior Training to their army, for free?") or for GMs ("Okay, so it's up to me, but I bought the book, so can I please have a menu of options that are reasonable in this context instead of having to make it up on my own despite already paying the authors to get a setting done for me?"). In fact, a heavily gutted mortal force in that context can mean either lots (because it was way bigger before Mishaka), or so-so (because it was never all that significant, Great Forks being totally, and not just primarily, a city of culture, not warfare), or in-between. Compare to how much interesting stuff is packed into concise statements of the CIA factbook.

EarthScorpion said:
Also, bluntly, I don't trust most fantasy writers to provide hard population numbers.

When we get hard population numbers, we get Halta.
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Do you trust most fantasy GMs to do it right when given a vague statement in the worldbook?
 
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Omicron said:
And yet, "thank god the steps are gone" is a fairly common praise of Ex3 I encounter. The clearly defined combat steps of 2e made a lot of people's skin crawl. Now, there is definitely a level of emotional investment in there; the step system is more rigorous and thus mechanically better, and its trade-offs are not on a mechanical level. But if you're dismissing "players look at this, their eyes glaze over and their interest goes down 20%" for the sake of "objective" mechanical superiority, then you don't know what the fuck you're doing.
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Interesting. The reaction I've bumped into from veteran players has been more, "They've made me miss the steps. I hated the steps. How have they made me miss the steps?"

I think the heart of the issue is that the steps aren't gone; Exalted's combat resolution sequence isn't actually any simpler than it ever was. (Arguably, it's more complex - I love Clashes conceptually, but they are a whole other layer of combat timing/resolution issues to resolve.) There are still effects that trigger at "roll attack" or at "after rolling attack, before comparing to defense" or at "after comparing to defense, before determining damage," or etc. etc. Plus rerolls, and bonus dice, and rerolled bonus dice, and then somewhere in there you pick up an Onslaught penalty.

I sat down and tried to map out the steps in a single attack, including all of the points when a Charm could activate, and... it's nightmarish. It's substantially more complexity, I think; it's just not laid out in the combat section so that you can clearly see the complexity.

Which doesn't diminish your point; there are people who don't mind the complexity existing, as long as they don't have to try to look at it in a big table like 2e did. But my sense is that this is primarily kicking the can down the road - it may not lose an audience on first contact with the book, but is that going to last past the point where someone asks a Charm-use question that the book refuses to answer?

I don't know. Or, well, I'm sure the answer is yes and no, but I don't know in what proportion. My suspicion is that "My ST and I interpreted this in totally different ways, and the game ground to a halt" is going to be a big thing for this edition.
 
Shyft said:
I again, cite the fact that 3e made massive steps backwards in good design practices. This is a fairly objective proof of 'This is a horrible design decision. Why would you do this?"

They picked a bad way to implement their vision.
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Shyft said:
In Exhibit A, 2nd edition Exalted, we have charts that explain the order of modifiers and the combat resolution steps. Charms are also marked as to when they happen with Step 1-10 flags.

In Exhibit B, 3rd Edition Exalted, we do not have clear order of modifier rules, and charms are written with "You activate this charm at this time" mechanics.

This is an objective step backward.
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And yet for all of the mechanical clarity provided by the step system, 2e combat was still awful.

More generally, it is entirely possible for one product, manufactured using best practices, to still be far worse than a second product, manufactured by people using objectively terrible processes.

And that's actually sort of what happened! The two biggest and most central systems of 2e, combat and social combat, are both broken, social combat irredeemably so. They are bad systems!

3e's combat system, despite all of the problems brought up in this thread, is still substantially better, and in many ways actually quite good and fun to play.

3e's social influence system is great and solves basically all of the problems that 2e's had. Also, I have never had more fun designing a character than I have in 3e when picking principles and ties - I can end up filling a page with just them.

Yes, they took a bunch of steps backward, but they took even more steps forward. At some point the complaints about what could have been have to fall in line behind what is.
 
landcollector said:
This is a mixed endorsement, at best.
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How could you possibly read my post as anything other than an acknowledgment of that?

The problem is that posters in this thread are constantly equivocating between "this thing has flaws" and "no one should ever play this thing and we should pretend it never existed".

This is the Exalted thread. Presumably the people posting in it are going to be people who are actually interested in playing Exalted, not just people who want to air their grievances against the entire game line.

Now if you aren't going to play Exalted at all, then yeah, it seems perfectly reasonable to look at my mixed endorsement and say "OK, I guess I won't bother".

But if you are going to play Exalted, then "Edition X is flawed, but is less flawed than the other editions" is pretty important!

(If you play something as extensively homebrewed as @EarthScorpion's system, maybe your personal version of Exalted is better than 3e, in which case fine, go ahead and play that. That makes sense. But I'm pretty sure that's not true of most of the folks here.)
 
Kuciwalker said:
This is the Exalted thread. Presumably the people posting in it are going to be people who are actually interested in playing Exalted, not just people who want to air their grievances against the entire game line.

Now if you aren't going to play Exalted at all, then yeah, it seems perfectly reasonable to look at my mixed endorsement and say "OK, I guess I won't bother".

But if you are going to play Exalted, then "Edition X is flawed, but is less flawed than the other editions" is pretty important!
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"It's better than before" doesn't actually mean "it's good enough." The fact that I would like to play Exalted doesn't actually let me magically bypass the things keeping me from liking 3E, you know? Your implication here is that if I don't want to play the 3E we have been given I should shut up, and uh, fuck no.

I would seriously be more comfortable running 2.5 than 3E, because at least I have enough accumulated system knowledge to know what traps are there and how to avoid them. 3E, on the other hand, is such a shittily mechanized obfuscated clusterfuck that I outright refuse to run a game of it.

And it's sad, because the core combat engine is pretty good.
 
notthepenguins said:
"It's better than before" doesn't actually mean "it's good enough." The fact that I would like to play Exalted doesn't actually let me magically bypass the things keeping me from liking 3E, you know? Your implication here is that if I don't want to play the 3E we have been given I should shut up, and uh, fuck no.
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I don't think you guys are actually disagreeing here? I don't read kuciwalker as saying that it's good enough, just that there are substantive ways in which it's better than 2e - among other things that, like you say, the core combat engine is pretty good.
 
notthepenguins said:
"It's better than before" doesn't actually mean "it's good enough." The fact that I would like to play Exalted doesn't actually let me magically bypass the things keeping me from liking 3E, you know? Your implication here is that if I don't want to play the 3E we have been given I should shut up, and uh, fuck no.

I would seriously be more comfortable running 2.5 than 3E, because at least I have enough accumulated system knowledge to know what traps are there and how to avoid them. 3E, on the other hand, is such a shittily mechanized obfuscated clusterfuck that I outright refuse to run a game of it.

And it's sad, because the core combat engine is pretty good.
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I hardly think you should "shut up" or anything of the sort - I've spent a decent amount of time complaining about craft etc. on the official boards. And I'd challenge you to find a post of mine carrying that implication. If disagreeing with someone - or even agreeing with someone, but thinking that there is an additional, more important factor they haven't mentioned - counts as "implying that you should shut up", then I'm not sure what exactly there is to talk about besides the weather.

And sure, "Ex3 is / may be better than Ex2 but the transition costs are high enough that I'll stick with the current system" is a reasonable argument, and one I sympathize with. But even there I'd suggest that in the medium term switching is probably a good idea, since IMO 2e is so bad at the basic stuff. And because I don't think it's really that difficult to figure out - it's just more difficult than it needs to be.

(Aside: Ex3 actually has some really helpful changes for Storytellers with the Quick Characters, although IANAST.)

YMMV, of course, and I won't knock anyone for making a different choice.

edit: I do find the "Ex2 is terrible but I've sunk so much energy into it that I'd rather just keep playing that than Ex3 which doesn't offer me quite enough to climb out of the pit of awful" position kind of depressing, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
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Kuciwalker said:
(Aside: Ex3 actually has some really helpful changes for Storytellers with the Quick Characters, although IANAST.)
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Yes. And Exalted 3e's quick character system would have been innovative. In the year 2000. Unfortunately, it's 2016 and the 3e corebook still isn't officially out for general release, but other systems have been statting up quick characters via assigning them dicepools for commonly used rolls for over a decade (including the nWoD - other parts of WW have been rather better at keeping up with the evolution of game design than the Exalted part).
 
EarthScorpion said:
Yes. And Exalted 3e's quick character system would have been innovative. In the year 2000. Unfortunately, it's 2016 and the 3e corebook still isn't officially out for general release, but other systems have been statting up quick characters via assigning them dicepools for commonly used rolls for over a decade (including the nWoD - other parts of WW have been rather better at keeping up with the evolution of game design than the Exalted part).
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How is this relevant to the question "which Exalted should I run/play"?

Why does it matter whether Ex3 is "innovative" or "deserves credit" or any of these things?

I would be happy to concede forevermore that Ex3 suffers from any number of moral defects vis-a-vis originality or any other authorial virtue, if in return no one would ever bring it up in response to my claims of "Ex3 does X well / better than Ex2".

Note: I don't want anyone to "shut up" about this, I just wish this wasn't treated as a counterargument to the things I say.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Yes. And Exalted 3e's quick character system would have been innovative. In the year 2000. Unfortunately, it's 2016 and the 3e corebook still isn't officially out for general release, but other systems have been statting up quick characters via assigning them dicepools for commonly used rolls for over a decade (including the nWoD - other parts of WW have been rather better at keeping up with the evolution of game design than the Exalted part).
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I also have to admit I don't quite get the 'It's White Wolf, so what did you expect' thing as a response when someone says, "The powers and the way anything works doesn't make any sense." I mean, there are mechanical parts of nWoD in general that are pretty dire, or not always thought out, but, say, reading through Vampire 2e Core, I never paused and said, "What does this even mean, mechanically?" for instance. Which apparently is such a common reaction that people aren't even defending it so much as saying, "Yeah, but it's White Wolf."
 
Kuciwalker said:
How is this relevant to the question "which Exalted should I run/play"?

Why does it matter whether Ex3 is "innovative" or "deserves credit" or any of these things?
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Because "simple character statting up via 'writing down the important dice pools and other important traits'" is hardly 3e-specific design tech. It doesn't count to Exalted 3e's credit that it has included something that's been around for a long time that is also very easy to port to any other system as soon as you know that it exists.

And I've seen lots of quick chargen systems for Exalted 2e. I use one myself. Most of them simply sum down to basically the same thing, because it's hardly rocket science.

I don't consider things that are already in the 2e fan-content ecosystem to be unique selling points of 3e. Because they're not. So I'm going to object to attempts to claim things which already exist for 2e as unique advantages of 3e. And considering that 3e has massive buy in because of a poorly designed, bloated, inefficient Charm system that makes Exalted 2e look clean and streamlined (especially just compared core-to-core)... well, I'd have to gut 3e's charm system to fix it. And once you're looking at that level of work, it's utterly ridiculous to say that Exalted 3e "does things better" - especially when 2e has extant fan fixes for many of its problems and the locations of the minefields are known and 3e doesn't.

Oh, and of course, the fact that the people defending it are having to go to such lengths is pretty shocking when we're talking about a brand new game which raised massively more than it claimed to need, is massively over-schedule from the estimated delivery date, and had massively more wordcount in the core. The fact that there are such systemic problems with Exalted 3e when they literally had far more resources than they said they needed indicates that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.
 
Kuciwalker said:
I hardly think you should "shut up" or anything of the sort - I've spent a decent amount of time complaining about craft etc. on the official boards. And I'd challenge you to find a post of mine carrying that implication.
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You split the people in the thread into "people who want to play Exalted" and "people who want to air their grievances against the gameline" and then implied that if you say that 3E should not be played you're the latter camp (among other things making your participation in said discussions bad faith and shitting up the thread).

If that wasn't what you meant, sorry for misinterpreting you, but it's what came across.

Kuciwalker said:
And sure, "Ex3 is / may be better than Ex2 but the transition costs are high enough that I'll stick with the current system" is a reasonable argument, and one I sympathize with. But even there I'd suggest that in the medium term switching is probably a good idea, since IMO 2e is so bad at the basic stuff. And because I don't think it's really that difficult to figure out - it's just more difficult than it needs to be.
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"Switching over" has a significant opportunity cost, and so this idea only makes sense if you cut out every option but "play 2E" and "play 3E," which doesn't actually resemble the real world.

Kuciwalker said:
(Aside: Ex3 actually has some really helpful changes for Storytellers with the Quick Characters, although IANAST.)
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Uh no, it doesn't. The Quick Characters advice for Charms is "just eyeball it and figure out something appropriate." Seeing as Charms are the actually meaningful part of the system when dealing with Exalts, this makes it not actually useful.

Kuciwalker said:
edit: I do find the "Ex2 is terrible but I've sunk so much energy into it that I'd rather just keep playing that than Ex3 which doesn't offer me quite enough to climb out of the pit of awful" position kind of depressing, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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You slightly misunderstand my position.

Both Exalted 2.5 and Exalted 3E fall under "Game systems that are shitty but not 100% unusable; I would run them if I and all others in the group knew the system inside and out so as to avoid its faults, and might play them if I was really bored and trusted the GM's system knowledge."

2.5 I have that system knowledge for. 3E I don't. Therefore I will play 2.5 in specific defined contexts, and 3E not at all. I could put aside an enormous portion of my time and analysis to really truly get 3E... or I could just not play it. There are other RPGs, other things I could do with my time. I love Exalted, but it's not the only game in town, and just that isn't enough to make me throw away that much time and energy to play a mechanically mediocre at best game.

Basically no one wants to play 2.5, since by this point people were just holding on in hope for 3E. Which means... I probably just won't play Exalted at all. I want to, but the options I'm presented are untenable, so that's that.

You can understand why I might be a little bit frustrated at how 3E has turned out as a result.
 
The Laurent said:
I also have to admit I don't quite get the 'It's White Wolf, so what did you expect' thing as a response when someone says, "The powers and the way anything works doesn't make any sense." I mean, there are mechanical parts of nWoD in general that are pretty dire, or not always thought out, but, say, reading through Vampire 2e Core, I never paused and said, "What does this even mean, mechanically?" for instance. Which apparently is such a common reaction that people aren't even defending it so much as saying, "Yeah, but it's White Wolf."
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Becase the nWoD is uncharacteristically for WW mechanically sound , ignoring the old grandmother with two handed sword for once.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Oh, and of course, the fact that the people defending it are having to go to such lengths is pretty shocking when we're talking about a brand new game which raised massively more than it claimed to need, is massively over-schedule from the estimated delivery date, and had massively more wordcount in the core. The fact that there are such systemic problems with Exalted 3e when they literally had far more resources than they said they needed indicates that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.
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We're going to the lengths to defend it in response to attacks on it that we often feel are entirely unwarranted, or criticisms that seem to be missing something relevant. I still don't agree that there are 'such systemic problems', I think that the developers had goals and priorities that you don't agree with. It's not the kind of game you prefer. It made tradeoffs in places to pursue goals you don't agree with. You absolutely don't have to like it, you are entitled to voice complaints and concerns. But what bugs me is you claiming that your ways of playing, your preferred methods of design, are the only valid ones.
 
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