I like it, I think it's the most solid edition that Exalted has ever had. It's not perfect, it has some fairly significant flaws, but it's still one of the RPGs I like better than a lot of others.

That said, I hope the devs improve their release time for the splatbooks because what the hell.
 
I like it, I think it's the most solid edition that Exalted has ever had. It's not perfect, it has some fairly significant flaws, but it's still one of the RPGs I like better than a lot of others.

That said, I hope the devs improve their release time for the splatbooks because what the hell.

Yeah, I agree with you there. On the upside, there are three Exalted 3E books currently sitting in Second Draft (The Realm, Dragonblooded and Arms of the Chosen) plus the Backer Charms release which is in Art Direction. So once those get out hopefully they DO speed things up.
 
So! Ex3 is officially released, I'm guessing at least a couple of you now own it, and I haven't been keeping up with the thread so I don't the general verdict it has received.

Is it Sol's gift to humanity? Merely an excellent supplement to mish-mash with Ex2? A fairly poor book, but good for setting elements and fluff and such? The second coming of Infernals chapter 1 & 2?

My body is ready. Ply me with your emerald vitriol.

Pros:
It has better mechanics than 2e.
Quicker in a PbP.
Social is not mind control, so you need to actually work for it.
Sorcery.
Expanded setting and new additions.
Interesting merits and other additions.
Mass combat is better.
All in all, better than the previous editions in a lot of ways.

Cons:
Steep Learning curve.
Too many charms and some charms are a waste of xp while others are not a obvious waste of xp.
Needs more polishing in a lot of places, feels like a final draft more than a finished product.
Too many things to keep track of in combat and some other situations.
No GM support and no City building/Bureaucracy support or anything similar. (Devs response? Have the GM wing it)
Too much "Let the GM decide"
Too much handwaves.
Some rules need clarity like test of speed and some rules are mentioned only in charms that remove those rules like off hand penalty.

Neutral: (Some people like it and some people hate it, so these points are debatable)
Too many New Exalted types.
Combat.
Most Charms are reduced to dice tricks.
Evocations.
Craft system.
They murdered Solar theme by giving them sidereal and other Exalted charms.
Not New Player Friendly.
BP/XP Divide. Yes they didn't kill this cow.
Dev Comments on the various forums. (This deserves special mention)
Lowering of the power level.


So better than the previous editions but many people have valid complaints and it is not good enough to justify the development time. Some people have also said that while it makes a good wuxia game, it does not feel exalted.
 
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General consensus I'm getting seems to be "It's much better than the messy pile of steaming shit that was 2e, but that's really not a metric to consider it anything approaching good."
 
General consensus I'm getting seems to be "It's much better than the messy pile of steaming shit that was 2e, but that's really not a metric to consider it anything approaching good."
On a standalone basis its good, just feels a lot less like Exalted. Its fun and very playable. A lot of the resentment comes from the fact that they took so long to make it and the devs pissing off a chunk of the fanbase.

Just don't use some of the Rules as written. If you add in some homerules for the more problematic systems, it becomes a lot better.
 
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It's not good, but it's Better Than 2e, and the flaws are a lot easier to fix. It does have some genuinely good stuff too, like most of the basic systems. Except Craft, which is an abomination, but combat, social influence and sorcerous workings are all pretty great.

Craft is great because of all the systems which need a minigame but didn't get one, they decided to give a minigame to the system which didn't need one. :V
 
So! Ex3 is officially released, I'm guessing at least a couple of you now own it, and I haven't been keeping up with the thread so I don't the general verdict it has received.

Is it Sol's gift to humanity? Merely an excellent supplement to mish-mash with Ex2? A fairly poor book, but good for setting elements and fluff and such? The second coming of Infernals chapter 1 & 2?

My body is ready. Ply me with your emerald vitriol.
It's honestly perfectly functional out of the box as long as you ignore the craft-system and use some other system of character creation (or just don't care about that).

And sure, it has flaws, and we'd all have liked an Exalted-edition without glaringly obvious flaws. I've metaphorically banged my head against the desk about some of those flaws (character creation, craft) several times as well. But at least they're not too hard to work around (for craft, you can simply use simple extended rolls for mundane projects, and the sorcerous working system for artifacts. creating a new character creation system isn't hard either).

Now, some of the other commonly-cited flaws are much more personal preference, and things that are certainly not elegant design. Specifically charm-bloat (there's just way more charms now) and the dice-tricks (re-rolling all 5s for example). Lots of people complain that those are too fiddly.
But honestly? I just haven't noticed the charm-bloat in actual play, and keeping track of the dice-tricks isn't hard either (I've managed with a complete newbie to P&P RPGs). It's one of those things that look worse than they actually play.


The good parts? Have I mentioned that it's a functional edition of Exalted?
Sorcery is now more interesting.
Evocations are pretty nice.
Some of the new charms open up interesting new concepts.
The Social system is interesting to use and just makes sense.
Castes got more interesting stuff, and are now less fixed into a role too.
And so on. There's certainly interesting things to discover in it.

Worth buying?
If you actually want to play Exalted and are not familiar with all the things you have to do to keep 2.5 from imploding? Yes, it's worth buying (at least the PDF) for that.
 
I fail to understand why the devs would look at this in the context of Exalted of all things and consider it a bad thing to be avoided instead of a useful thing to be built around.
Because variety is desired, and One True Builds are annoying and make the game boring?

General consensus I'm getting seems to be "It's much better than the messy pile of steaming shit that was 2e, but that's really not a metric to consider it anything approaching good."
It depends on what you like in a game. I consider Vanilla 3e to be by far the most fun game I've ever played, out of Vampire: Requiem 2e, D&D 5e, L5R, and Exalted Second Edition. I haven't found any need for particular houserules. If you give the system a chance in play, the things that seem counterintuitive in a white room analysis tend to work themselves out.

You also don't have to disregard Craft. Some people actually genuinely like it, it's just a love-it-or-hate-it system. Give it a shot, if you don't like it, then think about disregarding it. A lot of its flaws are very opinion based, and depend heavily on what you value in a game.
 
It's unable to convince me to go find a copy and read it, but that is because in order for it to have done that it would have needed to commit to principles like "write all rules in a clear, concise manner like a well-written technical manual so as to eliminate or reduce ambiguity and lack of clarity whenever possible", "every systemic construct should be examined rationally to see if it deserves to exist", "fuck bloat and combinatorial hell let's not go there" and "it is now time to take sacred cows like martial arts, BP/XP and the rest and eat them alive and screaming" up front, and it didn't.

Oh well. At least I didn't pay upfront.
 
Because variety is desired, and One True Builds are annoying and make the game boring?
For what it's worth, I'm not entirely sure that "take one of a potentially infinite number of combat styles, which can cover almost any conceptual space ranging from emotional judo to berserker singing" really qualifies as a One True Build.
 
For what it's worth, I'm not entirely sure that "take one of a potentially infinite number of combat styles, which can cover almost any conceptual space ranging from emotional judo to berserker singing" really qualifies as a One True Build.
...yeah, that was incredibly stupid of me. I meant everyone being the same like...like everyone using MA and no one using thrown or brawl or melee and just being their own Exalt's Charms would, I think, get old very quick. One true build was completely the wrong term to use.
 
...yeah, that was incredibly stupid of me. I meant everyone being the same like...like everyone using MA and no one using thrown or brawl or melee and just being their own Exalt's Charms would, I think, get old very quick. One true build was completely the wrong term to use.
The part you're missing here is that a game built to actually take advantage of martial arts styles being a thing wouldn't have "just Thrown/just Brawl/just Melee" Charms in the first place.
 
...yeah, that was incredibly stupid of me. I meant everyone being the same like...like everyone using MA and no one using thrown or brawl or melee and just being their own Exalt's Charms would, I think, get old very quick. One true build was completely the wrong term to use.

In a game where you have an infinite variety of martial arts styles which can do anything and that was the whole point of the combat game, your native charms are just another cluster of 4 martial arts styles. As such, they shouldn't exist as a separate category of their own in the first place: all of it should be done through martial arts styles, and each splat would have its own martial arts styles to entirely replace their old ability charms.

eg, instead of Solar Melee, Brawl, Archery and Thrown, you shrug and write Single Point, Steel Devil, Dragon Coil and Thousand Blossoming Flowers Styles and mark them as Solar so you don't need to balance them against the other six to ten or however many splats that exist. Now you have infinite space to write more sun-themed kung fu charm trees and sell books, and you don't have to worry about "martial artist" vs "non martial artist", which is a stupid distinction anyway.

Except, they didn't do that, lol.
 
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So! Ex3 is officially released, I'm guessing at least a couple of you now own it, and I haven't been keeping up with the thread so I don't the general verdict it has received.

Is it Sol's gift to humanity? Merely an excellent supplement to mish-mash with Ex2? A fairly poor book, but good for setting elements and fluff and such? The second coming of Infernals chapter 1 & 2?

My body is ready. Ply me with your emerald vitriol.
Definitely one of the best RPGs I've owned. In terms of how good and well-designed/written it is, I'd rank it in my top three, along with 5e D&D and 2e Requiem. But of all these it's the one I have the most fun with. The setting material in the core is great, the expansion of the Exalted universe (new Exalt types, new locations) is fitting and opens new horizons, the mechanics are solid (if sometimes lacking in rigor of writing). Combat is huge fun, social influence is far more interesting than previous attempts have been, battle groups solve mass combat at last, sorcery is just delightful...

Yeah, this is basically the most fun game I've run as a GM. But then, who am I to say; I have in the past been called a "shill" whose opinions should be discarded out of hand :V
 
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Just look at their traits. Oh, your super duper thief eclipse has larceny four, dex four, of course he can pick this door. Ahh, but he only has lore one, int two, he has no idea how to navigate this giant library. Like, just compare pure stats to a general level of competence. "he's got a total pool of eight, that's more than most professionals, he can do it." Or "This is a very complex task, and he only had three dice in the pool, he can't do it without rolling" kinda thing.
Eh, the question becomes what level of trait is good enough to routinely perform what task, which is apparently a spectrum separate from the difficulty spectrum for more non-routine tasks. Like, is Jet-Propelled Birds 1 specialty (plus most attributes at 2) enough to actually land an airplane routinely albeit with a bit of excess carefulness due to lack of experience? How about doing some more fancy yet tasks that still fall under 'routine'? Ideally, that can be tackled by reviewing/reworking the automatic success rule.

Game design should be expected to minimize the probability of catastrophic failure, not completely abdicate responsibility for this and dump the entire job on the GM, who has enough work to do already. For example, it's not supposed to be the GM's job to try and balance effects of using charms on the fly because the charms are broken as fuck on paper. That is the game developer's job, to build stuff that players can buy without the GM having to worry that pushing the button labeled Breathing on the Black Mirror will break the game, bringing the session screeching to a halt and wasting time with a table argument.

The GM has a limited amount of processing power, attention, patience and time in the game session. Limited resources that should be allocated towards doing the stuff that only the human GM can do, like play NPCs, cause events to occur, cause the setting to react to the players' actions, and so on. From the GM's perspective, a well-designed game does as much work for them as possible: the mechanics should be balanced, the settings should work for whatever the game is trying to do, the players' build choices should be fair and lacking in landmines and spike traps, etc, etc, so as to free up resources to do what only the GM can do. You, the GM, should be able to trust the product you have bought to do this work, else why buy it as opposed to rollin' your own?

To use an analogy, a well-built car cannot stop someone determined to drive off a cliff, but it can and will reduce the likelihood of accidents, and if any occur, raise your probability of survival. A piece of crap built out of scrap and held together with string might be able to drive, but you don't have a rollcage, nor airbags, nor power braking, and your fuel tank is open and exposed to the elements. Which is more likely to have an accident?

Is "anyone can drive off a cliff if they're trying to do so and there's no way to stop them, so we won't bother building car safety features into our vehicles!" a good argument with respect to cars? Should "put fuel, move forward, everything else is the driver's problem" be the principle an engineer cares about when constructing this machine?
Yes, game design should minimize unintentional catastrophic failures. It should produce reasonably clearly written rules. It should provide at least a minimal toolkit for handling unforeseen issues (and 'if all else fails, just wing it', while an advice that deserves one paragraph in 600-page book, should never be the first tool in the kit).

But I'm not defending sloppiness in terms of defending against unintentional failures, I'm pointing out that defending against intentional failures is something rarely worth the effort of gamedevs, because it'll only stave off the inevitable.

I also think that "Cars shouldn't have cigarette lighters because somebody could burn someone's face with it, or die of lung cancer due to smoking" is not the right way to think about designing cars (though this wasn't your argument). (Also note that I'm saying this despite being a non-smoker.) I'm still all for cars (and 'cars') having seatbelts, though!
 
I think it's interesting to note that the only two people in this thread defending 3e without caveats are the guy who was a closed beta tester who had direct access to dev advice any time problems came up, and one of the guys who plays with him.
Yes, game design should minimize unintentional catastrophic failures. It should produce reasonably clearly written rules. It should provide at least a minimal toolkit for handling unforeseen issues (and 'if all else fails, just wing it', while an advice that deserves one paragraph in 600-page book, should never be the first tool in the kit).

But I'm not defending sloppiness in terms of defending against unintentional failures, I'm pointing out that defending against intentional failures is something rarely worth the effort of gamedevs, because it'll only stave off the inevitable.
Okay. Why are you wasting time on this red herring? The topic started with MJ12 Commando talking about a perspective of "we can't trust players to not be complete fuckups", which is clearly about mistakes, so why are you talking about intentional system abuse?
 
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I think it's interesting to note that the only two people in this thread defending 3e without caveats are the guy who was a closed beta tester who had direct access to dev advice any time problems came up, and one of the guys who plays with him.Okay. Why are you wasting time raising the subject of this red herring?
More like those two guys are one of the few people who feel like that who tend to post on SV. For some reason SV is seen as being somewhat hostile to people who are really enthusiastic about 3e, so a lot of fans sorta steer clear of this thread.
 
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I'm defending 3E, and the only contact I ever had with any of the devs was the one time Holden posted in this thread, and one retweet on Twitter.

Unless you mean "say it's flawless" when you say "defending". But I'm actually doing more than that:
I really like 3E.
I've played it, I used it to get my love partner into P&P RPGs, I had a lot of fun running it, I ran into no actual issues with it so far.
 
Have some homebrew.

Goldweb Copse
5-dot Solar Demesne

Spanning several miles, Goldweb Copse encompasses a thin, strong river and sun-dappled ribbon of trees in the middle-east of Creation. Every leaf, branch and fur gleams some shade of sunlight or gold. It is home to a unique colony of Essence Spiders, more powerful and even yet more insular than their slightly more common cousins. These spirits have lived upon the land for so long, they became a part of it, and the geomancy now reflects that connection.

The river itself is notable, for in the silt lies a fortune of otherwise ordinary gold just waiting to be sifted, but the concentration of Solar Essence is yet more valuable. Sunlight warms the water and fine grains of gold, and the game of the land drinks of the river. Tooth and bone of all that live there become strong gold as the seasons pass, and in some rare cases, Orichaclum. These are valuable in their own right, but only meager part of the land's magic.

The Essence Spiders, intelligent and sage, have taken the name Golden Weavers (they insisted on something urbane). Feeding upon the gilded creatures of the demesne, their silk became heavy and gilt as well. The Demesne's Essence Token is a web of one of these spiders, which normally spans between two trees and is large enough to capture grizzly bear or moose. Simply tearing the silk down provides Essence Silk which happens to be golden and lustrous. Valuable, but not much more useful. To properly harvest the silk, one must convince a spider to take down their own web, line by line as a single strand.

Sought after by Dynasts and Gods for its fineness, the golden silk is useful for almost any textile artifice or enchantment. Wounds stitched with the silk heal perfectly and deny any infection, at the small price of the stitches eventually becoming gilded web patterns upon the injured limb. Sometimes, with great tribute paid, the spiders deign to use the silk to aide others directly, fashioning strange and exotic wonders- though rarely to the asker's precise specifications.

Aside from being a 5-dot demense, Goldweb Copse could provide several instances of Resources 4 and 5 for its gold panning or mundane silk. Alternatively, one could secure the Backing of the Golden Weavers, or a three-dot ally, if a brave soul manages to befriend one of the Essence Spiders.
 
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has 3E solved the problem of all the interesting things being spread out with vast regions of vaguely defined stuff in between?
 
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