Exalted General - /exg/

>ALSO as a BONUS we wrote 33 additional Solar Charms
>Solar players should consider these new Solar Charms a must-have for expanded play. These new pinnacle Charms are just too good to pass up.

My War boner is maximum

I feel like the spirit of TAW was in the right place (make Lunars strong independant beastpeople who don't need no Solar) but the implementation was overly colored by certain popular aspects of 2e which, as you say, pushed Lunars in certain directions that made them seem like barely coherent Chimeras than actual champions of humanity.

Going back to Infernals for a moment, I'm less than pleased about Vance's "band-aid" for them since nerfs are the last thing 2.5e infernals need.

Techpriests, c'mon.

That said, speaking as an Infernals enthusiast I pity you guys. I truly do.

If Infernals got a patreon I would submit many, many Shinai ideas but seeing as it's not concrete how Shintais even work I wouldn't know where to begin at the moment

I have no problem with more Charms. I have a bit of a problem with the "LOLOLOL these new Charms are so OP" method of introduction, as if unbalanced power creep is supposed to be a good thing.

I just hope they're more powerful charms like Mountain Crossing Leap Technique, or Knowing the Soul's Price, not more powerful charms like Perfect Strike Discipline, or Mind Manse Meditation.

I think one of the devs said that they're more of the over-the-top type stuff that is obviously miraculous instead of just AND NOW MELEE GETS REROLL 2s!

Guy in the thread said he asked for a charm that makes you so terrifying that 3rd circle demons poo their pants and vanish back to Malfeas rather than face you

Howdy all, my autism continues but I need YOUR help.

I've implemented a system that will conditionally format the Charm Name and the Ability/Attribute cell with the Essence and Ability minimums respectfully. I did this using the follow colors.

>Blue: 1
>Green: 2
>Yellow: 3
>Orange: 4
>Red: 5
>Really Red: 6+

I still need to add a legend somewhere so it's more obvious but I'm currently uncertain if the colors look all right. As you all are the intended audience I'd like to get your feedback on it. Check the Charm tab, I have a few Charms already listed so you can see the colors.

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pfjmZKzcUqAX9mB58IAEUIFkZr8rq4CvdRRM4kzwwgU/edit?usp=sharing

No, he never mentioned 3rd circle demons, just demons in general.

Honestly if you need a specific Charm to scare demons instead of, you know, BEING A FUCKING SOLAR with decent Presence you should really reevaluate your career as a champion of the sun.

That tryhard shit's for Cecelyne.

I prefer the gold scale that charmlist sheet had.
Also having columns for all the necessary information available to the player.

Probably! I'm actually quite looking forward to it.

It might be cool, as long as revisiting Solars doesn't mean ignoring the other Exalted.

You know, for some reason, I've always been confused by the whole concept of Charms.

Like, being an Exalted should be an intuitive thing. Charms feel very rigid in concept, and they're even harder to explain in-universe because most of them are die-modifiers.

I can't help but think that something as simple as Excellencies are more of a way to go. When I try to explain the game to someone, and what they can actually do, I bog down a lot.

If you have the essence and ability requirements listed as numbers beside the charm, you won't need a legend or overly complicated colour-coding system, just a simple scale to look nice and check stuff at a glance.

Yeah I was looking at the gold scale originally but it just didn't seem very readable. Changed Essence to the gold scale, kept Ability the same for comparison, how does it look?

As for more columns, my thought was that the Charms tab is already pretty cluttered, on smaller screens the description and page number get cut off. And the information for Minimums is only relevant when you don't meet them, as soon as you do it just becomes useless. Which is why I set it to go away once you meet the prereqs.

They're D&D Feats - things you can do not spells you can cast

Watsonian hypothesis: Charms exist to represent specific feats and capabilities unlocked as you gradually realise your Exaltation's full potential through arduous enlightenment

Doylist hypothesis: Charms exist to prevent your players from saying things like "My first Athletics excellency which I got at essence 2 allows me nigh unlimited potential to master the art of jumping, therefore I pull a Sun Wukong and jump all the way across Creation from the edge of the Wyld and land right in front of the Unconquered Sun"

Go with rainbow if you won't have the numbers up, differentiating a shade is harder, just make sure to have rainbow colours in a tight order to be easier to remember, roygbiv.

Also can't be bothered checking, but have you updated the charms for the minor changes in the final pdf release?

>Going back to Infernals for a moment, I'm less than pleased about Vance's "band-aid" for them since nerfs are the last thing 2.5e infernals need.

The vast majority of TDO's fixes in the Infernal bandaid were buffs for Infernals that made them more viable in 2.5e, giving them additional methods of burrowing through the issue of absurd soak and dealing guaranteed damage. Playing a Kimberian Scourge, I absolutely welcomed these changes. If you want to look at nerfs, then the Infernal artifact edits in Ink Monkey Bones by... StephenLS, I believe, were much, much more detrimental to the splat.

That said, the only thing I recall being anything remotely close to a nerf within the bandaid had to do with Adorjan's round-long PD having a glitch where it'd cost less to use than her regular PD (something a sane, reasonable, and invested ST would never allow) resulting from the initial 2.5 edits. Not only was this patched, but the Charm received new functionality. I'm not sure what you could be referring to, otherwise.

The Charm descriptions I took straight from the Charm List the other kind user posted and they're pretty vague.

As for costs and stuff, did any Charms change costs, keywords, or what have you? Some page numbers might be off.

If they had at least a rough difficulty table for all the abilities like they do with feats of strength, it'd be far easier to judge how capable someone is of pulling of particular feats through successes alone, charms could be used purely for going beyond successes and breaking physics, or doing something exceptional more consistently.

I'm charmlist user, I stole most of the short summaries from Irked's let's read of 3e, filled in a few gaps with my own.
The specific rules in descriptions changed a few times, and there have been a few other changes like keywords, I was going through the pdf a few threads ago with the differences, I should finish that up now and update my list.
Also this has some of them:
forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/exalted/869500-final-pdf-what-s-new?p=869629#post869629

To add to this actually, I think you should have the book's description text somewhere in there, even if it's squeezed to the side as an optional thing to open up and read.
The charm text is where you'll get your important rules information, much easier than opening the book each time, and those summaries are more like reminders than full text.
But yeah, double rainbow for abilities and essence, much easier to read.

I was thinking of Sweet Agony Savored being completely replaced by charm that fills the overdrive pool off "Acts of Depravity" instead of just using LBE on people, which smacks of slipping back into the worst stereotypes of 2ebby on top of restricting playstyles yet more

Scorpion-Tailed Mirage does NOT have its' cost reduced in a place of desolation (granted the whole place of desolation thing turned me off from playing a Malefactor ever, fuck you Cecelyne we aren't all deserts)

Cold Fire Desolation Brand's most cost went up

MHM still feels like a light tap on the shoulder in practice for combat purposes; granted I just remembered Illimitable Boundaries Assertion which I'm admittedly unsure of how much of a difference it makes to my hypothetical 33 dice pool, (Essence) bashing damage Defiler build's combat viability

The BME counterattack against Holy effects is cold comfort since it seems to me stunts can easily allow a Solar to force the hit in through anyway.

I'm not disagreeing, but another thing I just thought of is while this setup works well for Solars and Abyssals, splats like Sidereals, Dragonbloods or Infernals whose powers tend to be more "weird" like Shintais might be harder to quantify in an interesting way under your proposed system.

*mote cost

Oh and Laughing Gust Denials' E5 effect now costs 3m1wp more

I was originally hesitant about adding full descriptions from the book due to copyright nonsense but added the vague descriptions that provided mostly because they were vague and similar to the descriptions in Anathema for 2E. You couldn't really use the Charm without them but they were helpful reminders if you already knew what they did.

He misunderstood. Here's the actual quote:
I literally asked for a War charm so goddamn powerful that demons looked at Solars using it and NOPEd out of Creation and back into Malfeas because that was safer for them. I figured if I was going to spend $200 on a custom charm, it would be better to request a charm that delivered something fucking awesome to the community as a whole and that pushed the boundaries of what the corebook offered.

Sure, it was kind of embarrassing when John indirectly pointed out that I'd completely misread Ideal Battle Knowledge Prana in a really bizarre way that made my request much too powerful to write, but I'm extremely curious about the alternative he suggested.

(In b4 my e-mails got lost in a vortex of confusion and the devs went with my backup request or something.)

Ah, I just assumed we weren't worried about copyright shit because this would be shared amongst fans and not on the official forums, plus we have all the books pirated here too.
Keep the descriptions out for your public sheet if you want, but I'll keep them in for my private games to help players reference it.

Oh, fair enough. What alternative did he suggest?

Figured I'd play it safe because it's not like the link for it is hard to find, always being posted in the OP, and they are certainly aware /exg/ is a place even if there's only a little cross-posting between here and the official forums.

Sure, I understand watching your back.
I'll post the full list of pdf changes here and update my sheet.

The way I always saw Charms in Exalted's setting had to do with how I've always felt reality works in it. Bear with me for a sec.

Creation and, indeed, basically all things are expressions of a pervasive universal energy - that is, Essence. Call it qi, prana, odic force, spiritual energy, it doesn't matter, but it is the underlying cosmic power that sets reality in motion, the power to exist.

The setting of Exalted, from Creation itself to the Wyld to Yu-Shan and Malfeas and the Underworld, is at a fundamental level an expression of a narrative. All things presently in existence ultimately arise from the Wyld, a seething and endless cauldron of narrative possibility.

The Raksha are "living" phenomenal stories (setting, characters, plot devices and all) that are able to shape their narratives on a whim. The Primordials - once called Deva - were similar beings who set their world-narratives in stone as it were and accepted rigid consequence, shape itself, into themselves. In doing so, their natures became fixed and vulnerable to long-term consequence - for example, an Unshaped Raksha can simply recreate one of their Emanations, but a Primordial has singularly more difficulty in replacing their souls - but their stories also became more meaningful, and that gave them greater significance and therefore power over their Raksha cousins. The importance of consequence is a core theme of Exalted.
Shinma also play into this, but they're just sort of there unless you have some magical bullshit in mind, so whatever.

The Loom of Fate would eventually be constructed by the Primordials to establish causality within Creation. Each strand in the Loom represents a person and the Loom's weaving is how they're interconnected. Manipulating Essence allows an empowered being to alter the course of the strands/destiny, which is incidentally why Sidereals are able to track Essence usage in the Loom.

(cont)

Dunno, he doesn't mention it

All-Encompassing Sorcerer's Sight allows one to look "into the Essence of the world and sees the patterns of magic that make up Creation." Before 3e, this allowed one to see the "wavelengths" associated with specific Charms, thus learning the specific way a person manipulated Essence to wield a Charm - in other words, what pattern of Essence was used to change the "story" of Creation, directing destiny based on the Essence expenditure. In 2e, this was especially useful for determining when an opponent was enhancing their actions with non-obvious bad touch Charms, which was valuable in determining when was the best moment to throw out your Perfect Defense of choice (especially post 2.5e).

That said, it seemed the case in previous editions that this understanding of a Charm's essence pattern allowed them to be categorized and named, and that's why they have a designation at all. Also presumably why Lytek had an archive of charms of the Celestial Exalted that could be referenced for training purposes (if you ever managed to get an audience with him in the first place, that is). But in 3e, AESS specifically says "This Charm does not reveal the working of the Charms of the Exalted" because the devs wanted to make Charms more abstracted, hence that whole blurb at the beginning of the Charms section about how "Charms don't exist in the setting."

Which, in my opinion, is strange and obviously a divergence from the original presentation of Exalted. Charms had a thematic name like Charms rather than, I dunno, "techniques" because they were meant to fit into the setting as a particular sort of magic. IIRC, Charms are even mentioned as a particular thing Exalts are aware of in the 1e opening fiction as the Solar uses them to fight off her Terrestrial pursuers. Well, I guess I understand why they decided to take this direction, though.

I just got an email from Onyx Path telling me Exalted 3e is out.

Bottom line it for me: Good or shit?

It's been out for over a year

Good

>It's been out for over a year
Then how come they're just shilling it to me now?

Grudgingly good. They're still a bunch of hipsters who now have no sense of scheduling, but it's better than 2e and 2e was playable.

If by "a year" you mean "a week", yes.

The backer preview has been out for a long while, but they've only just now released the final version, and up for sale.
There's only a few minor changes between those versions, so we've had pretty much the same rules for a long time to go over them.
Consensus is that's actually pretty solid mechanically, far better than 2e, and some are saying better than other systems.
Still has a few minor issues people like to bitch about though, plus it was late as fuck.

>minor issues

MA merit and Craft are not minor issues

>far better than 2e, and some are saying better than other systems.
It's a sad fact that being better at Exalted than other systems is higher praise than being far better at it than previous editions of Exalted.

Craft is shit, but the MA Merit is about as minor as issues can get while still reaminign issues.

Which specific and general issues did 3e fix from earlier editions?

>Bottom line it for me: Good or shit?

Its shit.

Combat isn't ass anymore. Social influence isn't ass anymore. Charms have levels of function between "completely obliterate the problem with no roll and no interactivity" and "don't do shit, lel." Power gap between the strongest and the weakest Exalts is smaller. Craft is dragged kicking and screaming into doing things on-screen (the Craft Charmset is overbloated shit, but the chassis itself accomplishes a noble goal).

>Solar power defines Exalted. We're not done with them—not nearly! We will revisit them eventually. The core book and the backer PDF is not the end, just the beginning.

Brave words after being over 3 years late with the core and 1,5 years late with the first splatbook.

What is the most busted ability I can use with the assloads of initiative I can get from using Awakening Eye and Fate-Shifting Solar Arete together for initiative?

Could you elaborate on which flaws of 2e combat and social have been improved? I mean general issues it hass solved, not the specific mechanical changes.

>Craft is dragged kicking and screaming into doing things on-screen (the Craft Charmset is overbloated shit, but the chassis itself accomplishes a noble goal).

The noble goal being to introduce grindquest mechanics to a tabletop RPG? Go craft five rats so you can craft a wolf, then craft six wolves so you can craft a bear, finally craft eight wolves so you can craft your epic mount.

Thrown really likes going first.

Combat has actual pacing now, so it's not "repeat the exact same thing I did last turn until one or the other of us runs out of motes and is therefore dead." The mechanics force moments of weakness even in strong combatants, and simple timing can make the difference between an attack that does jack shit and an attack that completely turns the battle around.

Social influence is driven completely by the target's Intimacies, so walking up to someone who ardently hates your guts and convincing him to do something for you is not just mildly more difficult, but flat out impossible until/unless you can find a different Intimacy to justify the favor and/or perform the long series of social influences needed to reshape his Intimacies towards liking you.

>"Solar players should consider these new Solar Charms a must-have"
That's why we didn't include them in the core book
t.Morke

If you're grinding with Craft, you're already literally wasting your time.

That's the whole point of the basic objectives: if you aren't solving an on-screen, relevant problem, you don't get rewarded.

The goal was to get Craft characters to think about problems the same way the Melee character does: "Here's an obstacle in front of the party. How can I help?" instead of the way crafting worked in 2E, which was more "Sits on the character sheet doing nothing until a week of downtime happens, then I outfit the party with a warstrider each."

>The goal
Too bad that's not what they accomplished then.

It's okay. Definitely not god's gift to gaming like Holden and Morke would like you to think. It's a pretty overwrought system for better or worse and, in my opinion, doesn't feel overwhelmingly stronger than 2e (post 2.5) in practice. Granted, there are definitely improvements, without a doubt - the social influence system is infinitely better than 2e's asinine social combat system, for example. Mass combat is significantly more sensible. I dislike certain directions they went with regard to things like languages and Martial Arts, which demand too high a cost. I also think Sorcery is, by comparison, too cheap. There's good, there's a lot of okay, but there's also some bad, basically.

But it's like... after all this time, I can't really bring myself to care too much about it. "Oh, it finally came out" was all I thought when the backer's version was released. It's not terrible or shitty or anything. By rights, it does a lot pretty good and now that the art has been changed, its presentation is quite extravagant. I'm just... not impressed, is all.

That's what it comes down to for me. It's okay. It's not bad, but it's not that impressive either.

Just about every person I've seen use Craft in actual play does exactly that. Maybe you're just bad at theorycrafting?

>The goal
>they wanted the system to be good so it is!

But true.
Stay mad.

>(the Craft Charmset is overbloated shit, but the chassis itself accomplishes a noble goal).

Translation:
Implementation is shit, but the devs had a good idea, once, for one or two minutes, though the implementation is so utter shit only a fanboy wouldn't throw up immediately.

Or:
"My country has economical issues I'll fix when I'd be elected!"
Five years later:
"Well, it's worse than before, now everyone is under the level of poverty, 95% of people are homeless, children are dying in groves, dysentery and malaria is running rampant, we are officially the poorest country on earth, the level of suicide is skyrocketing, in two years we'll all be dead"
user: This politician had a good idea, though the implementation is a little flawed.

Master of fucking understatement and ignoring the obvious right here.

>languages
Seriously? How can you fuck up languages?

Agreed. The problem with Craft,and I can't believe I have to reiterate this AGAIN, is that the charmset is designed to acomplish the exact opposite thing the subsystem is designed to do, instead of expanding on it. The charms are there to make the subsystem obsolete, not to make it more fun and interesting.

That's the problem of Craft. Everything else, as much of it as there is, is an afterthought. You want to fix Craft? Either remove the subsystem or remove the charms and replace what you removed with something that works nicely with what's left.

>I-I-I can't possibly be wrong! You must be t-theorycrafting!

They're a merit now, so you can master more than 5 and at a flat 3XP each instead of as scaling cost. I dunno what his complaint is.

>Implementation is shit

The chassis IS implementation.

The Craft Charmset is a separate issue from the chassis, and one i already acknowledged as horrid. It takes all of 4 Charms to be able to craft artifact 5s right out the gate, and everything past that is just wank.

Oh, you're one of those. The craft apologists.

Ok holden.

Yeah, basically this. It's 2e with a new coat of paint. (Which, no, despite the revisionism, is not what I was promised.)
If you thought 2e was good, 3e is good.
If you thought 2e was shit, 3e is shit.
>It's shit.

That's hat you get when you try to represent what in it's concept is a set of broad powers geared to describe unlimited number of different characters, who each expresses their power diffently, but you only have a couple of D&D games as your learning experience.

Exalted system is a relic of the past and the only thing keeping it alive is a zealous commitment to "muh tradition". It would be easier just to let it go and vanish into the sands of time where it belongs.

So what I'm getting from this: Craft is shit but otherwise it's pretty good?

Look, those pictures they have of Richard Thomas in compromising positions aren't going anywhere. So they know they get to keep writing.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Holden specifically said they made Craft heavily convoluted and full of Charms specifically because they hated how players used Craft in 2e.

It entirely depends on what you're looking for! If you wanted Carft to be about trying to wriggle out of having to boring and mundane shit and build world-shaping wonders, by way of taking, like, 15 charms, then it's great!

If you wanted it wo work on it's own and be a fun thing anybody can engage in and didn't care much for making artifacts, it's shit.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the raksha. So they're basically chaos entities that take a form and get really into a storybook-like role in order to capture humans to suck their souls out? Anyone got any good examples of them being used?

>the previous system was dumb
>better make the new one so fucked that nobody uses it!
Is this also how we got 2e sorcery?

So it's shit.

More or less. They don't eat the whole soul, but they drain all the good parts out of it until all that's left is a dull-eyed, brainless husk.

Some clever Guild-traders have found a way to make three times the money: first they sell the victims to the Raksha, then offer to take the useless husks off their hands, then sell them again to people who need dumb-labor slaves.

Or you could read it instead of trusting autists on the internet who would blame Holden for their dog dying if they could.

It's shit, don't get me wrong, but its really fucking boring to see people just parroting each other.

That.

Holden wanted to make Craft not an autowin button. He wanted.

He wanted.

He had the desire to. Specifically, he once expressed the desire to. Want, desire. He said he wanted to.

But in truth, in the actual implementation, in the hard reality of what actually happens, either by genuine incompetence or malevolence, the Craft system is utter, unrelenting shit.

>So what I'm getting from this: Craft is shit but otherwise it's pretty good?

Rather than "good" "shit", lemme try actually explaining it.

The new craft system tries, as user mentioned, to make you do stuff on screen rather than wait for downtime and then shit out god tier artifacts.

The way it does this is by introducing several new resources and crafting tiers.

You must craft "basic projects" such as horseshoes and arrows to generate "silver points".

You then spend silver points to be able to craft "major projects" such as swords and armor. Completing these generates "gold points".

You then spend gold points to be able to craft "superior projects" such as daiklaves. Completing these generates "white points".

At each of these three tiers you get more color points from finishing a project if you

They didn't really solve the problem, though, because crafting is still a downtime activity. Everyone can participate in a fight or in a conversation, but if you're crafting something then everyone has to wait around for you to finish goldfishing with the abstruse, overcomplicated set of rules and charms. Whatever problem you're trying to solve to earn that crafting xp, a specialist in pretty much any other ability could have solved the problem faster and in a manner less boring to everyone else at the table.

If you're using more than an Excellency and one roll on basic and major projects (which are the ones you're supposed to use to solve on-screen, immediate problems), something has gone wrong.

They didn't fuck up languages, exactly. I said I disliked their direction, which is purchasing a Merit as opposed to tying it to Linguistics as had been the case previously. It's honestly a rather minor gripe, come to think of it, and not something I'd petition the ST to change.

More important things I don't like about 3E:
*Craft. Holy shit.
*Martial Arts buy in.
*BP/XP divide. Actually kind of a minor issue for myself, but I see why people find it a major problem.
*XP-using charms (mostly in Craft and Lore). I recognize the balancing purpose behind this, I just don't like it.
*The excessive charm bloat such that I feel my progress to the charms I actually care about is stilted, especially when there are so many charms that are more about giving minute dice advantages rather than special effects or anything that is playstyle defining. This is a source of much consternation for myself, actually, that rather than having a lot of neat options to select from and be excited about, like being able to choose one among a set of shiny jewels to reward myself with, I feel like I'm being forced to walk a mile, picking up little gold nuggets before reaching the slab they were chipped off of.

That's just my feelings, though. There are also things, however, that I do like, such as the Bridge keyword, social influence, that sort of thing.

I do not think 3e was a fuck-up or anything, exactly. I don't hate it at all. It just... doesn't instill in me a sense of prevailing happiness, excitement, and appreciation.

"Yeah, it's Exalted 3e. It's fine. It ain't bad. Still got a neat setting. Meh. I guess I'll play it. Will be fun with friends." That's how it is.

Are there some examples around for how this Craft system actually works, using a character with stats and certain Charms? I'd like to see for myself if it is as bad as you all say.

Did Holden not realize that the reason you don't craft onscreen is because it's boring, not because it doesn't factor into the party's goals? And the craft xp system makes it even more boring, because unlike every other kimd of character in Exalted a crafter has to do a steady supply of projects that are completely beneath him. The Melee guy doesn't have to kill a certain amount of extras before he can get rewarded for killing serious threats. The Lore guy doesn't have to regularly find a reason to research trivial subjects that any mortal with a library card could take care of. They all get to do the exciting stuff right away, but the Craft guy can't.

>TAW
I literally cannot conceive of anything more awful.

>silver Solars was a serious problem
It's a fucking squirrel shit system. If you don't think Lunar charms will simply rehash everything Solars can do but slightly worse, ha-fucking-ha. The dipshits running the show aren't creative and they'll leash their best writers to their worst standards.

>I feel like the spirit of TAW was in the right place (make Lunars strong independant beastpeople who don't need no Solar)
That wasn't what TAW was trying to accomplish. Like, at all. Maybe the "don't need Solars" part but that's ridiculous because you do need Solars on some level. To be foils if nothing else.

My group probed me on where I'd go with Lunars left to my own devices. It's lengthy, so have this pastebin:

pastebin.com/y5RM8pmX

The thing that bugs me about all the craft special rules is how they seem to be completely arbitrary PC-only limitations that represent nothing in the world.

Imagine that you're a sorcerer rather than a crafter, but you still want a custom daiklave. So you buy a workshop and you stock it with relevant supplies magical and mundane. Then you cast Summon Second Circle Demon and call up the ancient craftsdemon Alveua of the Forge of Night. You bind her to your service for a year and a day, point her to the workshop, and say "Make for me a daiklave that will search me out and fly back to my hand if I lose it."

Are we supposed to imagine that Alveua, who has crafted *entire species*, would ever be in a position to reply "Sorry, not enough colorpoints, I gotta make a bunch of horseshoes first" ?

>The Melee guy doesn't have to kill a certain amount of extras before he can get rewarded for killing serious threats.

The difference is, the Melee guy doesn't really have a choice in the matter. If he doesn't bother to kill some bandits because "nuyehh I wanna fight Ligier!" then... he's gonna die, on account of the bandits that stabbed him.

The craftsman absolutely has that choice, and a lot of the time they will choose to not bother with the "bandits" even if that means their Craft skill goes unused until downtime.

>Could you elaborate on which flaws of 2e combat and social have been improved? I mean general issues it hass solved, not the specific mechanical changes.

The system is extensively different to 2E, so it's kind of hard not to get into specific mechanics. At its heart it's still got the same core problem - the ultimate superiority of Dex over literally everything else - but that's not just an Exalted problem, is it?

The rest of the core combat system is vastly superior. Dividing attacks into withering and decisive is initially counter-intuitive for those who have played previous editions, but once you get past that, it completely fixes the central problems of lethality and perfect-spamming that afflicted previous editions. Your defensive powers just drop like a stone when you get Crashed; you're left vulnerable as shit, and you better pray your allies can save you. That's something previous editions couldn't even approach. Even Solars can be vulnerable now. To help, though, the movement system (while fiddly and imperfect) allows for ends to combats other than "one side dead" and "teleport away", due to the whole Withdrawal/Go To Ground ability, while Stealth is also a flipping enormous deal. Night castes are actually really survivable now, arguably more than Dawns depending on the build, since stealthing out is actually workable.

The other huge improvement is Battlegroups, which take the place of mass combat units from previous editions. There is no longer a distinction between mass combat and small-scale combat; BGs act like characters with huge dice pools and some special interactions with the combat system.

And finally, social influence (it's not really "social combat" any more) is now a Misc Action in combat time. Which means you can't use Join Battle as a counterargument any more and intimidation is a valid battle strategy.

forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?770414-Exalted-3e-Crafting-301-a-Tutorial

>4 Charms to be able to craft artifact 5s right out the gate
Which four charms?

>not letting me just make an Imbued Amalgam to shunt all the Craft responsibilities on to
>instead making the Craft system something that I don't want to interact with in any capacity whatsoever

>Bottom line it for me: Good or shit?
The core system is not cripplingly flawed. But it does appear to break down a bit with combat. But you probably already guessed that would happen. This is a Storyteller engine game.

My buddy is playing a Craft Supernal and even with some houserules to tweak Craft he very quickly reached the point where he didn't need to meaningfully interact with the Craft system.

There are Charms to give you a ton of S/G/W XP just for doing random shit. There's ways to shift lower XP to higher XP. So you no longer have to actually worry about Craft XP.

Then there's the speed Charms which make even Superior and Legendary take only a bit of time.

Then finally the Power Charms. He rarely gets asked to actually roll out Craft because it takes me and him about 10 minutes of finish a single roll which inevitably ends up being far past what is actually necessary. He has reached the point where he can finish an Artifact 5 in a single roll which takes about 2 weeks without needing to roll because the average far exceeds 100 successes necessary.