- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Damn straight.
First edition social mechanics are sooooo much better than those of Third.
Right there.
General Exalted Thread
Damn straight.
First edition social mechanics are sooooo much better than those of Third.
Right there.
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
Here's hope's character sheet. I still have 4 BP to spend. Please comment and critique.
Notes:
Hope's sister is the Shoat of the Mire, who died when Hope exalted and went full totemic just before they would have gotten away.
Hope's past life memories lead her to a safehouse, which is where she got the Manse, Armor, Hearthstone Bracer, and lock picks.
The Performace favored is dancing, she's good at it and she likes it, but she hasn't had much time to practice since the Dowager kidnapped her.
Occult and Lore dots are the beginings of a first age education, given by the Dowager.
I am unsure if I should have Hope know about the origin of the great contagion.
Hope is 8 years old at present, and is identical twins with her sister.
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- Pronouns
- They/Them
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
- Pronouns
- They/Them
YOu just did so, so whatever you did worked.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Man, I fucking love "the rules themselves." A big part of my appreciation for Ex3 is the tactical aspect of combat. This is why I picked a game premise that would allow me to throw peer-level opponents at my players one after the other; I just like the combination of individual mechanics, the careful selection of which Charms to combine on any given action, and so on. I mean me and @Fenrir555 will occasionally run non-canon duels between characters we play in various games just for the hell of it.
You have 4 BP left? Raise that Dodge to 5. Also generally speaking you have a lot of Abilities rated 1-dot. I'd suggest re-spreading them a bit to end up with more focus.
This.
I mean, if you like rules light systems, that's a perfectly fine preference to have. But I would absolutely disagree that a) the rules (in good systems) are fun-agnostic, and b) people in general prefer rules light systems.
On the first, I've had a lot of fun with (for a non-Exalted example) Monsterhearts, because it's a carefully crafted game where a character's moves are all designed to encourage inter-player conflict and interesting stories. Characters are mechanically encouraged to behave in hilariously self-destructive ways, and it makes the game more fun. The experience of playing Monsterhearts is fundamentally different from playing Teen Paranormal Romance with Risus or something. The rules make the game better. And, indeed, I've found even white room fights in Exalted 3e to be enjoyable, tense, and mentally engaging. Your mileage may vary, but the rules themselves are, in themselves, fun. (Well. So long as you're actually head-to-heading another human. It's probably about as much fun as playing Rock Paper Scissors with yourself to do white rooms alone.)
On the second, well, look at the industry leaders, past and present. World of Darkness. Dungeons and Dragons. GURPS. Not exactly a bonanza of rules light systems, you know?
- Location
- NYC
D&D's most rules heavy system (4.0) flopped, and 5E is the most rules light. WoD, similarly, has pivoted towards simpler rules as time has gone by. You've also forgotten FATE and the PbtA, which has massively taken off in recent years. Past industry leaders are pretty much all going to be rules heavy, because that was what a pen and paper game was back then. People expected rules, charts, and tables, because that's what Chainmail did and Chainmail was stupid influential. There were some games with different DNA (Amber Diceless being the biggest), but most people were either unaware or uninterested with them.
That doesn't mean that, like, Paranoia needed the stupid, incredibly overly complicated vehicle rules it ended up having.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
I have only read FATE, not played it, and while the Core book is simpler than, say, GURPS with a handful of crunchbooks attached, there's an opinion that it's not as simple as its popular reputation claims. And I think I can agree that there's a significant grain of truth in that observation: while FATE has fewer rules for 'mechanistic' things, it has a significant injection of rules into the 'storytelling' side of things, to the point that I've seen people complain that the concentration of rules is sufficient to break immersion for them.
So yeah, I want to try it out for myself, to find whether it's as rules-light as it claims to be or as rules-intrusive as some people who played it complained.
- Location
- NYC
FATE has a fair amount of complexity, but not nearly as much as any of the rules Nonagon listed. It's also a different kind of complexity, tied up with the core resolution mechanics instead of exceptions, making for a game with much less of a difficulty curve (you either get it or you don't).
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
Fewer Abilities at higher ratings.
It's cheaper to buy lower Ability dots than higher dots with your Solar XP, but these dots cost the same at character creation. Therefore, spend your points on getting your most relevant Abilities as high as you can, rather than spreading them out.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
I don't think the rules themselves are fun agnostic. I have certainly and will continue to read rules systems entirely for fun. A rulebook can, in and of itself, be aesthetically pleasing.
But there is such a thing as designing for purpose. Your game system can be designed for the aesthetic pleasure of reading it. It can be designed for the pleasure of encouraging actual play. The two do not have to be in conflict but they can be. Rules can be designed for ease of houserules or to make houserules difficult. They can be designed to be fun to debate on a web forum. You can design towards basically any goal.
It is certainly the case that 3e seems designed specifically for the kind of play that Holden et al seem to prefer and specifically contrary to the playstyles of myself, @EarthScorpion, @Jon Chung, @Shyft and @DayDreamer prefer. (I say seems because I will never read or play the system because Holden decided treating me like shit was more important that selling to me and my associated circles of players so I can only go based on what is revealed here.)
You can certainly argue that if you prefer a Holdenian style of play than 3e will suit your needs. You can also argue that if you prefer a Chungian style of play or a Shyftian style of play it will very much not suit your needs. Whether the system is 'good' depends on the goals of your playstyle.
But there is such a thing as designing for purpose. Your game system can be designed for the aesthetic pleasure of reading it. It can be designed for the pleasure of encouraging actual play. The two do not have to be in conflict but they can be. Rules can be designed for ease of houserules or to make houserules difficult. They can be designed to be fun to debate on a web forum. You can design towards basically any goal.
It is certainly the case that 3e seems designed specifically for the kind of play that Holden et al seem to prefer and specifically contrary to the playstyles of myself, @EarthScorpion, @Jon Chung, @Shyft and @DayDreamer prefer. (I say seems because I will never read or play the system because Holden decided treating me like shit was more important that selling to me and my associated circles of players so I can only go based on what is revealed here.)
You can certainly argue that if you prefer a Holdenian style of play than 3e will suit your needs. You can also argue that if you prefer a Chungian style of play or a Shyftian style of play it will very much not suit your needs. Whether the system is 'good' depends on the goals of your playstyle.
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
That basically means there's no cost to any indefinite-length Awareness Charm so long as you activate it off-screen and "get in the zone" by having your buddy throw melons at you from behind. Which is, yes, interesting.
It's a mechanized montage training scene!
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
Which you do once and then get Daredevil senses for free forever.
Um.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Even after reading the comments of people who play 3e, some comments by Holden in argument threads (but only a few, as these things spin out of control fast), and trying to read through 3e (admittedly I ran out of interest fast due to various external reasons), I still can't figure out what the Holdeanian style is. When I read @Shyft, I think I mostly grokked his "Exalted (2.0) the way it was meant to be played" stance. When I read @Chung, I get this EvE-ish vision of a world that he wants to run/play in, that while I don't agree with, I can at least imagine. When I read posts by @ES, I see a trend moving away from grand themes and epic/heroic fantasy and towards something different with pettier gods and more Cecelyneanally meaningless moral/ethical 'worldmap'; while I find that his vision of the setting downplays most of the things that attracted me to Exalted, I at least can see the trend and see what he and @Aleph like.
But I still can't figure out @hls' vision of "Exalted (3.0) the way it's meant to be played".
I mean, that's basically how it works in film so we're on thematically solid ground
FaeGlade Plural
Semper Legens
- Location
- Land of Bureaucracy
- Pronouns
- Plural/They
I think this is a clear case of "sure, if your GM lets you do that". Because it's for "revealing hidden enemies, traps, or any source of danger not readily apparent". You can easily say that a friend doing this poses no danger, and doesn't qualify for the charm. Or that any off-screen events don't count since, if they were off-screen, they clearly posed no real danger. But likewise - yes, if you want to give that to your players via a clever training montage, then you can do that as well.
I'd consider that a feature.
- Location
- NYC
I had a similar issue: I couldn't really figure out what 3E was supposed to be. There are a lot of systems with apparently contradictory design philosophies: Lore let's you make declarations about the world, which is very narrative. Craft is pretty much the opposite. The mechanics of Stunts imply some kind of narrative, rule-of-cool thing going on. But then it has an extremely complicated combat engine with a ton of moving parts. It's supposed to be a game about ressurgent God-Kings, and yet there are no rules for the King part of that. For a game where actions are supposed to have consequences, there are no rules (or even good setting stuff) on explaining what those consequences should be.
Like, after reading it, I wasn't sure if the GM's job was to be a collaborative storyteller with the PCs, their antagonist, or just a referee, because given subsystems seem to have different interpretations of what the GM is supposed to be doing.
I don't think there is any one way that 3E was meant to be played, because I suspect it was designed piecemeal, with discrete subsystems written without much thought for how they fit together.
- Location
- Ottawa
This seems only dubiously connected to what we were actually arguing about...
Anyway, I think everyone here can agree it's bad to be unclear. But if you have a game with interesting mechanical choices to be made, you're gonna get system mastery. That doesn't make the game bad, even if you don't like it.
Still hoping to hear what gave you the idea that Solars will be able to stomp everyone at everything this time around.
That's not really true. 3 is probably heavier than 4, rules-wise, and I'm told 5 is heavier than some of the older editions.
Also, I don't think 4 actually flopped. It was very controversial, and WotC chose to change directions after making it, but that's not the same thing as flopping.
- Location
- NYC
5 is heavier than Chainmail/red box, although I'm a little bit hesitant to make that comparison because of how incredibly unfinished a lot of those rules were in the first place. Not including rules for something that would be encountered in gameplay doesn't make a game rules-lighter, it just makes it more confusing to play.
I would assert that 3.5 PhB is easier than 4 PhB: there are fewer rules, fewer exceptions, and the early game is much, much simpler. 3.5 just had a shitton of extra stuff piled on top of it that 4 did not. In terms of 4E flopping, you're probably right. It at the very least did not have the reception that WotC wanted, and they decided that to massively reverse direction. The overall point was that the market seems to be trending towards games with simpler rules, with the successful newly developed games (as opposed to sequels) being rules-light ones like FATE or PbtA.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
Ahahaha what?
3.5 PHB was better edited than 4 PHB, making it a less confusing read, but easier? 3.5 has a pile of legacy code that should have been weeded out and wasn't, absolutely no consistency or coherency in class design, and a glaring lack of proper keywording and standardization of effects. Not to mention all the fiddly subtypes and components that no one could ever keep track of competently. I don't find 4 as fun a game as 3.5, but from the DM perspective it's far easier to run.
- Location
- NYC
Depends on what level of PC you're talking about. Low level, 3.5 was way easier to GM, because NPCs didn't have as many powers, there were fewer things overall to keep track of, and things were shorter, making it easier to fudge things. High level you're probably right, but high level D&D was so completely broken in 3.5 I'm not sure how to evaluate the ease or difficulty of GMing.
And things like the lack of consistency or coherency in class design aren't really relevant if you just wanted to make a character and play: you weren't going to be interacting with the rest of the system, so the random weirdness you needed to learn was fairly small, just the bits that effected your own class. Someone who wanted to play a mechanically simple class could easily just pick up a fighter or barbarian, while someone who wanted something more meaty could go for a caster. That opt-in was missing from 4E, where every class was pretty complicated. Also missing from Exalted, but that's a different subject.
I think you're overestimating the market penetration of FATE and PbtA. They've got some popularity but they're more in the space that, say, the various Warhammer games occupy today, rather than WoD or GURPS in their respective heydays or D&D for all time.