As I begin, I should state that Exalted 3e is explicitly not borgstromantic. If I start reading things like that, I'll call myself out on it.
Secondly, for the purposes of this analysis, Charms do not matter. I'm sure I'll touch on them eventually.
Anyway, I am starting with the Systems Conflicts section, Chapter 5.
So we have Rule Zero, Rule… Not sure what to call it, the Orichalcum Rule, and the Storyteller's rule.
These firmly create a pretense or 'theme' of Exalted 3rd edition. One which has pros and cons. The Ori Rule is, upon my reading, intended to empower for the story over for the rules. That's patently obvious from how it's phrased, but it bears stating. It also bears stating, that if the story is what truly matters, why is there so much extra mechanical complexity? It can be easily read as 'if we the writers broke it, you must fix it.'
The Storyteller rule almost seems like a refutation of the 2nd edition fanbase- I say this because I've interacted with the developers often enough on the forums to understand that they really do not like how a lot of people treated Exalted 2nd edition.
More seriously, the ST rule is something that can be used as a means of Authority- an explanation of the social contract that is inherent to most RPG experiences. Nothing wrong with codifying it.
Moving on, we're starting to see some method to 3e's organizational madness; It doesn't have a Storytelling Chapter. It has bulletpoints that call out things players and Storytellers need to know as they come up.
So here's the pro to this arrangement- if you put your ST advice right on the heels of a given subject, that helps fix it in your mind as to how to integrated it quickly. The con however, is that to understand the game, you must read the whole book. Now we've not had any great success with ST chapters beforehand, I agree, but demanding one digest the entire tome for game comprehension is questionable, to say the least.
Now we see the glossary. I'm not gonna lie- I'm gonna nit pick the shit out of this book, because it makes some terrible formatting decisions that in the long run would have made our lives so much easier. First issue? The double 10s rule; Not that it's Double 10s, but that they needed separate entries for Double 9 through 7. Is this a small issue? Yes.
Goal Number is an interesting nomenclature change- it feels like a throwback to World of Darkness Terminology (but that's probably not accurate). It is however much easier to grok than 'Cumulative successes', which is a problem 2nd edition had.
Guile/Evasion/Parry/Resolve: Generally this is a good change for what 2nd edition laid the groundwork for. Any nomenclature that makes it easier to grok character traits and interactions is a positive.
Now in the glossary, we have five entries that describe the various Initiative states, and they are fairly well articulated.
Now, I want to be clear about something. Initiative is a good idea. I personally believe that 3rd edition implemented it badly. We'll get to that.
Inspire/Instill/Persuade: Mechanical terms for social actions that summarize their intents with a single word- good work here. I want to point out though, that functionally, 2nd edition did the same thing, it just didn't use these words. I don't mean that 2e and 3e have identical social resolution mechanics, just that the differences aren't as big as they might seem.
Lethal (damage): Ahh, this is where I start to see the cracks in the initiative system. My fundamental argument as to why it's flawed, is that it creates an arbitrary and unnecessary stop-start in the flow of combat. Now- amusingly I actually support start/stop in combat with the idea of action-economy, but my issue here with how 3e handles Decisive/Lethal damage, is that it forces you to juggle calculation and complicates character advancement with obfuscating math/charms.
Related to this, is that we now have a forked defensive strategy- Soak for Withering (the narrative advantage attacks) and Hardness for Decisive damage. Amusingly Hardness is described as Magical, so that's a borgstromantic statement- only magical things get Hardness?
Terminus/Interval: We had 'intervals' before, which is not a new thing and I'm glad they gave us a clear description of it. Terminus is is new, and also a useful mechanical concept.
[* * *]
So now we move on to stuff like units of time, most of which is identical to previous editions, except for the 'Round'.
I haven't seen the 'Join Battle/Initiative Order' mechanics yet, so I can't compare/contrast to the tick system either way.
Now we look at Difficulty.
Hmm….
I think this has been brought up before, but this scale was not written by anyone who understands how difficult some of these examples are. Alternatively, it's meant to be an illustration of what the writers think is 'Important' or 'Dramatic'.
Like, they're saying that for Exalted, removing an Appendix is Difficulty 1. I… disagree with this.
Contrasting to 1st edition and 2nd edition, Difficulty was used a lot more as examples for feats, and became less and less clear as the editions wore on. I'm not sure if 3e will hold to my theory of 'reducing apparent difficulties', but we'll see.
Anyway, in 1e, the description of Performance included a Difficulty 5 action of 'sway the crowd to disrupt your own execution by hanging'. In 2e, they said a character with performance 5 was capable of a given feat. I haven't seen how 3e handles ability descriptions yet.
Back to 3e Difficulty- So it's clearly writing the idea of Difficulty as almost being synonymous with External Penalties- it's a flattening or abstraction of the previous system. External Penalties are hard to keep track of I admit, even to this day in the games I run, I have my players ask me "Which ones are dice and which ones are successes?"
Failure and botches are described well enough- though I think they could have been elaborated on more. This is one of those places where Storyteller sidebars are crucial, because no edition of Exalted has ever properly taught STs how to run the game.
The automatic actions/difficulty zero sidebar is mechanically interesting, though I am curious and concerned about how the game handles modifiers. Even if no one used it, (and 2e did not account for doublers), it had a very robust system for handling the order of dice and successes.
Now we move on to Stunting!
So, the major problem with 2nd edition stunting was how crucial it was to combat resource management- you got your motes and WP from it, and it became obligatory. Even if a 2-die stunt is extremely easy to attain, it still can be a burden on PCs.
3e immediately did away with Mote resource rewards for stunts, focusing them purely on dice and successes- and Willpower.
Now, the interesting thing is that they firmly declared that a 2-die stunt should happen 2-3 times a session, not all the time. This is due in part to it being +2d+1s; that's effectively four dice. I'm a little surprised at this actually. This expectation plus the willpower regain to me suggests that the system was balanced around the idea of a character regenerating 2-3 WP a session outside of Charm mechanics or other means.
I think this was intended to be a kind of 'hedge' against the more common 2e behavior of 'If you stunt, you aren't going to fail depressingly'. Like in my experience with 2nd edition, if you try something gutsy, you're assured by your stunt bonus that you won't be unduly penalized for flubbing the roll.
Here in 3e, they're almost implicitly waiving that agreement by simply giving you More Successes to achieve your goal.
Now, the downside is that 3e does not describe the qualities of a 2 or 3 dot stunt, which 2nd edition attempted more effectively. I can't ascertain what a 2-dot stunt looks like based on the examples.
So having mentioned the 'Hedge' concept, I read the next paragraph and find that the book explicitly tells the storyteller not to jerk their players over for trying to do awesome stuff. I've got no problem with this.
More critical- why are stunts labeled 1-3 dot? The rewards are now fairly arbitrary and non-sensical. To be fair the original rewards of [1m x2 stunt die] was not hugely superior, but calling them 1-3 dot stunts seems to be a legacy issue.
Bonuses and Penalties….
Alright, so they describe Situational Modifiers, Equipment Bonuses, and Charm Modifiers. Makes sense so far. This section to me suggests that External Penalties are gone. So far all I can see are dice being subtracted from the pool, with Difficulty being an unchanging element. That's fine.
So, in the good sense, this simplifies the system and reduces the need for an order-of-modifiers sidebar, but I have to point out that lack of work now could make more work later.
There is yet more ST advice woven into the main rules. Again, pros and cons of organization.
Extended rolls don't need much in the way of commentary.
Hmm, Opposed rolls however have a very clear 'game-runner' statement with how you're supposed to handle ties. The Storyteller declares the best stunt the 'winner'. There's positives and negatives to that approach, but one thing I can say is that trying to judge stunts objectively is difficult.
[* * *]
And now we get to combat!
So as I said earlier, Initiative is not a bad idea.
The core premise as I understand it, is to make Withering Attacks to generate Initiative. Withering does not actually usually cost initiative- it does however cost actions during your round, motes and willpower.
Initiative itself also determines your order of actions in the turn- who goes first. This is actually similar to how 1e handled it, save that in 1e you essentially re-rolled join battle at the start of every round, and the way the rules were set up, you wanted to be 'last' so you could use the Late Mover Advantage.
In 2e by comparison, actions had independent speeds as we know from the tick system, and that was intended to be a much more granular, second-to-second combat system.
So here's the first criticism of the system. Functionally, the exact same goals from the previous editions exist, merely obfuscated by Initiative- Massive 'destroy you' flurries still exist, artifact weapon primacy still exists, more attackers means you win because of more attacks, and combat is still won through brute-forcing huge damage pools onto a debuffed enemy.
Initiative is essentially a buffer for motes, which are a buffer for HLs, and if Lethality were 'truly' fixed, we wouldn't need these layered damage systems to prevent things from actually hurting you. Remember, 2nd edition had systemic/defensive layering as well, the only differences were your attacks weren't modular, (Withering/Decisive).
This is why Initiative is effectively Unsoakable Raw Damage. Specific charms, actions and so on are superficial when these things remain the intended mode of play with new methods to get the same end-results.
Now, the pro of Withering/Decisive and Initiative, is that it creates a very clear and easy to grok 'zone' for cool descriptions and narrative engagement. I'm not debating that the system functions.
The next part of my critique against decisive/withering, is that it forces wild, swinging damage calculation. Initiative fluctuating is fine, but the disconnect of weapons from decisive damage is to me a clear acknowledgement that they could not fix weapons. At the same time, it does allow for the dramatic upset of someone with a meager weapon like the mortal/knife example. That is worth allowing, but it doesn't change the fact that the implementation is awkward.
Withering Damage is intended to be dramatic, to sell the pagentry of the battle.. But it also homogenizes the scene. Suddenly, positional information becomes irrelevant- only relative initiative matters. Oh, a storyteller can make position relevant, but it's generally a non-element once you start dealing with Initiative.
Essentially, this dumbs down tactics and puts you back into the 2e model of 'whiteboxing with a hand full of TCG-charm cards'. You don't win because you forced your enemy to overextend, or caught them in a clever trap, you win because you use a different kind of attack action which can benefit from your huge damage bonus. This is the same kind of "tactics" which revolve around making your final attack in a flurry a Goremaul hit, now that their defenses are tabled by Onslaught penalties.
Anyway, moving on to resolving attacks!
So the first thing I notice, is that they clearly describe an attack roll as being made against a Difficulty equal to the opponent's defensive trait. Now for comparison, in 2nd edition, an attack was Difficulty 1 and you had to deal with the special defense subtracting from your attack roll, strictly speaking, you had to always roll 1 over DV to score a hit.
In 3e, my reading of the rule here basically suggests that you can in fact hit by zero as a default assumption. It says 'Fewer, not 'equal to or fewer'.
Now, one thing 2e got correct, was that it never ever said DV was a difficulty outside of a few quickly errata'd charms. However, this terminology change means that going forward, 3e is either never going to allow magic to reduce defenses as difficulties, or is intending to.
The other important thing, is that 3e has gotten rid of what we know of as the 10 steps of combat- those clearly defined blocks of 'This is when X happens!'
Now, I'll fully cop to the fact that in 2e, the 10 steps are hard to remember and follow. Four steps as illustrated here in 3e look much more approachable, but there is tradeoff.
So Withering Attacks are [Dex + Combat Ability + Accuracy], +stunt and circumstance bonuses. If you hit, you subtract soak from raw damage and roll post-soak damage with double 10s. Your target loses [Successes] Initiative, and you gain [Successes +1]Initiative.
Decisive Attacks by comparison omit weapon traits entirely, so you don't get Accuracy or Weapon Damage. This is to help control how big the dice pools get…for a mechanic that's focused around generating large pools.
Now, Decisive attacks are punishing if failed- and contextual! It says that if you're below a certain initative level, you lose 2 points, or 3 if higher. So clearly this is trying to tell you to either do lots of small attacks for minimal setback, or one big attack. you're being forced into a given strategy. That part actually isn't bad, but the underlying obfuscation and complication of Withering/Decisive remains.
Now, if you do land the decisive hit, the only pool you roll without double 10s is Initiative. That it's (before Charms and other modifiers). You've spent quite a while building up to this point to spend it all on a big hit. That on the face of it is fine.
You deal damage directly to HLs- they do not get soak. Hardness allows a defense against smaller hits, and even if Hardness negates the attack, you still 'succeed' and are reset to base initiative.
[* * *]
I'm going to pause this analysis here.
My conclusion so far is as follows: Initiative adds complexity and obfuscation on top of the legacy system of Exalted 1e and 2e.
Further, there is really no reason for Init damage to coexist alongside Weapon-damage attacks except as a kind of halfway measure. If Initiative is intended to put the focus on the Story and allow low-damage or non-combat focused party members to contribute, there's no reason why this has to be a per-character resource, instead of a party-wide "damage pool" everyone tosses chips into, until one player finds an opening to cash it out, no matter who they are.
But by splitting it up across everyone, it still means that the fightmaster will always be better Ending Combat than the low-combat investment guy, not simply better at giving more resource for everyone to use, which would contextually make more sense with the narrative-first they're pushing.
