Dude. Imperial Chinese examinations could last between 24 and 72 hours. This is from real-life history. This included knowladge of philosophy, knowladge of rituals and ceremonies, caligraphy, arithmetic and music. All in the same test.
This, the bolded in particular, very much reminds me of Granny Weatherwax in Witches Abroad.
The far more likely problem is (and this is an issue I've run into in both 1E and 2E) that a player wants to play a given splat because he really likes their fluff and themes, and doesn't know much about their mechanics. When he actually tries to roll one up it's substantially more complicated than expected, requiring the player to read basically the entire Charms chapter just to make sure he isn't missing some key power for the relevant build, because combat charms have been assigned to weird abilities. And because there's a lot of mathy bits and complicated interactions, the player needs way more systems knowledge just to ensure that the character is actually good at the things he wants them to be. And then, during the game, he finds out that playing one is even more of a pain because there are more resources to keep track of, more things to check resolving Charms, etc.
Though, its actually wasteful to dump the failures. Most bureaucrats are making checks against static difficulties, which also means your failures wind up as Toiletries Warehouse Scribe #59943(who only ever needs to make a Diff 1-3 check even in a worst case), and only a very few score the coveted Regional Manager and up posts, where they can actually use the massive dicepools thrown in a constructive manner to coordinate their lessers.
Except the Exalted system, in any edition, is not geared to support multiple play-styles. It has two modes: Gain More Succesess to accomplish tasks, and Kill/Remove Enemies. The two methods for maximizing these traits are fairly uniform in execution, and Ex3 even moreso now that the emphasis of combat has been reduced down into "gain resources, apply deathblow."
Except nothing about any of these traits are presented as interesting at all, and are outright described as hoop-jumping compared with using the obvious alternatives. Two resources in place of one is not getting "more game," out of using it. Complexity without immediate purpose or gain is busywork, and modern RPGs have been streamlining themselves away from that kind of excess over time Precisely because of this. Be it ten minutes or an hour, chargen is Not Gameplay, reading systems in a book is not gameplay, it is all prepwork for gameplay. In fact, lengthy chargen times and learning the ins-and-outs on how to not-die instantly are ALSO among the biggest criticisms Exalted faces for being as lethal as it tends to be.
That's the result of a few lucky rolls and good choices, not the DB actually having better options than the Solar. Like, this is not even a debatable point, DBs and Solars will not be peers under this system, even when using the DB niche. It will be exactly the same as before, where the DB focus is "teamwork," but that will simply mean a handful of DBs using their vaunted "teamwork skills" will together be a comparable fight for ONE Solar, not that using teamwork they will now be a match for a Solar party of equal size.
Yes, I have done my own testing on it. Because among other things which I am a total idiot about, hacking 2e into something it was actually intended to be is one of my long-simmering off-and-on projects. So, not being that much of an idiot and knowing that stealing is preferable to reinventing the wheel, I did go through the mechanics way back when it was first leaked months ago and tried to hammer out if any of it was remotely useful to me. After peeling it all apart to see how its bits worked in theory and in-action, it wasn't useful at all and I went back to the drawing board instead.
I have, and I concur.
Well for one thing they're not changes. It's a different system, that's somewhat related to prior Exalted systems.
Well, Keen Sight/Taste and Smell/Hearing and Touch/Technique can all be activated at a slightly higher cost to set their duration to indefinite. You then simply keep that activation running indefinitely - and each time you gain something from Surprise Anticipation Method, you lower the committed cost until it it's at zero. At this point, you never have a reason to drop your commitment of now zero motes, and just keep the charms running until you die (or they're forcefully deactivated by some effect).
Yes, but why are you changing the system and what do the exact changes made give you? Looking at it, I couldn't really tell you what the purpose was.
Right. It's meant to easily scale between untrained dirt farmer and demigod, without needing buckets of dice. The combat system is meant to be less detailed than normal Exalted and not be hyper lethal. The social system is meant to be similar to 3e with increased focus on bargaining.
Well if you don't like combat engines then I guess it would be sensible to describe Ex3 as though the optimal solution is to create the most simplistic hyperefficient combat wombat possible and write a computer program that tells your GM that you're activating Dipping Swallow Defense and boosting Parry to 9 for you while you read news articles on your phone.
Look, most of the time I try to be a reasonable person, but people have been saying "wait and see" since this whole thing started three years ago. People said "wait and see" when the leak came out, and then the second leak, and then the Backer copy, and Now that we have the actual book I'm going to put my foot down and say that if you cannot take what they have been saying for years as what they mean for it to sound like, along with genuine evidence in the Corebook of the edition they are writing (which the Devs have publicly doubled-down on multiple times being their Perfect Vision of the game they wish to be writing) to be largely indicative of their mechanical sensibilities from here on out, then I'm honestly not sure what you're expecting here anymore.
Let me make this as unambiguous as I can then, just so you can quote me right: System mastery and "Feelies-First" trends are a blight on tabletop gaming. Obscuring math functions for the sake of faux-randomness, obscuring resolution mechanics in unclear language, sectioning off whole wings of character options and concepts for "Advanced players only," all of these are about as useful for the health of a game as a console title which comes with persistent tutorial prompts 4 hours into the plot.
Well, so far we hadn't any 3rd Edition vs 1st Edition discussion.
