Try Qwixalted which is a rules light version based on the Exalted 1e quickstart with things from 2e added in. It's been streamlined and here are some other changes that have been done:
If they wanted to take a different direction back then, it seemed to me that this direction was away from the sort of details that shapes societies, particularly low-tech ones.
You will get wildly different answers. Second Edition is non-functional without houseruling it heavily, I've heard terrible things about 1e combat, but can't speak personally. My primary experience is Second Edition and Third Edition. Third Edition is actually functional, but veered away from a lot of the stuff in previous editions, is fairly complex, and has serious PR issues because the Devs have no idea how to talk to people, resulting in a lot of hate for it. Having played it for awhile now, I can say Third Edition is the most mechanically functional and least annoying to play, unless somehow everyone lies about how bad First Edition was in actual play. But if you're looking for stuff like the tail-end of 2.5, look for good houserules in 2.5, because 3e dropped a lot of the sci-fi trappings and removed some of the more prominent metaphysics (rightly so, in my opinion, because some of those ideas were friggin' toxic). Third Edition is also more low-powered, in 2.5 the only beings that matter are the Exalted and certain immensely powerful beings do to how its combat system and persistent defenses work. 3e has the Exalted still being very powerful, but less 'only Exalts matter'.
I deleted that post, actually, because I realized I didn't want to have that discussion.
Could you expand that? I vaguely recall mentions of Infernal powers being conceptually toxic* (not sure if that was your post), and the recent talk of misapplying Little Gods for making high[er]-tech equipment, but you seem to have more to say on the topic than you did?
Honestly, not really. I don't like Little Gods because they were always handled badly and I feel like they're likely to just veer into the same stupid directions of 'if my sword has a god in it, I can wake the god of my sword and have a powerful god friend making my sword awful'. It would be an interesting bit of background of Creation if people wouldn't metagame it. But they do so, in very consistent and obvious ways. And so I think that the idea itself is unsalvageable, because something about 'there is a god inside my sword' encourages people to want to 'wake it up'. Now, a living spirit of a sword isn't a bad thing. But the little gods are not supposed to be that. You can get the same 'I wield a living weapon' from artifacts in 3e. My Night has a paranoid starmetal dagger that is constantly whispering paranoia and sadness to him, and this is a thing I support people doing, having their artifacts with personality. But I dislike the idea of the way to get this being that there is a little god inside your weapon telling it to be a sword, and you can somehow wake it up. I think it's super dumb, and has weird effects in the fanbase, it's not worth the wordcount that would take to make it clear that it's just a quirk of Creation's laws of physics and not a thing that you can game, and I'm glad its gone.
I think Wonders of the Lost Age is the case in point here.
I think it's telling that so many people couldn't tell you the difference between the two without looking it up
(I'm one of them)
I always did figure it was mostly a 2e problem, but I guess 'unsalvagable' may be an overreaction. It could probably, with proper presentation, go back to how it was. I can't quite want it to, I'm very negatively disposed to the idea still, but I'll grant that my reaction is perhaps overly negative, and assigning blame a bit broadly.
I think there are some versions that do get MM bonuses, but they tend to be one dot higher without affecting attunement cost. (As does "Ha Ha, I don't have to muck about with maintenance/repair")
Are we talking OWoD, NWoD, NWoD2/Chronicles? Because MES runs one game that involves every splat as playable, but it's a separate continuity from everything else and there's a huge list of patches to get everything playing nice. On the other hand you've got the other games that focus on a single gameline and generally assume that that gameline is correct, because all the PCs and most of the NPCs are Lost, or Forsaken, or Awakened, or Created, or Sin-Eaters, or whatever., and it's kind of assumed that the other splats exist, they're just off doing their own thing somewhere else.
Unless there's a magitech equivalent of a Citroen 2CV or VW Bug, which were designed so that any idiot with a wrench, hammer, and screwdriver could repair them.
Is it beyond the capacity of the locally-oft-praised writing team involved in Exalted back before it was given over to the locally-oft-derided Ink Monkeys?
Low-rating Ally seems the most straightforward across all editions.
Does it? An Ally 1 is described as a character roughly on the level of a starting character. Seems a bit too powerful for a Half-Caste.
Backgrounds can be variable. Like Mentor, Ally is a balance between how powerful they are and how willing they are to help. If your child is weaker than a chargen character but a lot more willing to help, and you don't need to do as much for them in return as you would for a normal Ally, that probably balances the scales.
