I'm not a major fan of White Wolf, but I've heard good things about Exalted. How is it?

I'm not a major fan of White Wolf, but I've heard good things about Exalted. How is it?

most fans never play it for a reason, you stop being a fan once you do. enjoy it from afar, don't kill the idea of exalted with the reality ;)

So it sucks?

Exalted is one of those games that has a devoted and hardcore fanbase who understand and acknowledge their game is a fucking mess. The setting and ideas are a great spin on fantasy tropes put through a filter of Greek Myth blended with anime. The problems come in first when people start arguing about greek myth vs asian myth vs anime and the proper proportions of. Mechanics are bad in pretty much every edition, you self inflict brain damage to convince yourself the system is playable like you do in D&D. So yes. It's bad to mixed but incredibly fun. Up to you whether it's worth it.

On a scale of fucked up

Are we talking fatal bad? D&D 3.5 bad? Or, Shadowrun 5th edition bad?

Somewhere between. 2e is broken and nonsensical in a lot of places. 3e is okay but still has glaring flaws, and it's barely out. It sucks, because there's not many other systems that tackle this niche.
I hear Godbound is okay, though.

Despite how some people say it's FATAL bad, gonna concur that it's somewhere between 3.5 and SR 5e bad.

As long as it isn't as bad as 5e SR I could probably stand it.

Exalted has a long, colorful history of terrible mechanics, but 3rd edition is the best by far. It's big and over-complicated and messy, but it's pretty playable if you can wrap your head around it. Some subsystems are worse than others, but the biggest offenders (generally considered to be crafting and naval combat) tend to be things you can easily ignore.

Second edition was absolutely terrible, and I'm speaking from experience. Don't play that one. First edition wasn't good either, but it's less of a trainwreck and had some great fluff.

What's actually wrong with the mechanics?

You could get a thousand different answers depending on who you ask. From what I've seen, most people agree that the system has problems, but not where or why.

Personally (assuming we're talking about 3e), I think the biggest problem with the system overall is that it tends to explain itself poorly. Even if something makes sense at a glance, there are a lot of edge cases and interacts with no clear answer on how to handle them, so you're left with making something up or looking for an official answer (luckily, the new developers have been good about giving those).

Playtesting for the system was all but abandoned partway through because of leaks, and the final book feels rough and unpolished in places. I think the core mechanics are usually solid, but there are a lot of little problems that can add up to get pretty irritating.

2e had a host of problems. We could go on for multiple paragraphs, but it boils down to "Bolting godly combat onto a barely modified OWoD engine made perfect defenses necessary. This made combat extremely dull and counterintuitive."

Specifically, combat largely boiled down to "who runs out of essence first" , because then you can't use your perfects anymore and then you get fucking evaporated by the high end combat charms you're both probably throwing around.

>Godly combat charms
Try Grand Daiklaves and Excellencies. Maybe a dozen or so presoak damage dice from basic combat charms if you're feeling saucy. The "Add eight levels of postsoak fuck-you damage" or "Punch target so hard he turns into a duck" charms were superfluous because everyone was made of paper. Which was exacerbated by people just not bothering with any nonperfect defense because why bother, making it yet easier to oneshot people with basic combat charms. As opposed to some chance of the opponent needing a second shot to finish them or to use more advanced combat charms.

Better yet, the new developers have broached the possibility of a revised 3e corebook with a lot of the clarifications worked in.

Let's just hope if it happens it happens sometime before the heat death of the fucking universe

Why don't you wish for a real life grand daiklave while you're at it?

3E is actually pretty good, and not just compared to the previous editions. It only has the core and one equipment book out so far, though.

It's a great setting with a great concept. However, the system is absolute crap. It's quite possibly the worst system I've ever seen, bolted onto the already-clunky Storyteller system.

2.5E was basically unplayable. There's this thing called 'paranoia combat', where - if done right - a PC and any decent antagonist CANNOT BE HIT until they run out of MP. You just sort of kung-fu dance around each other until one guy falters, then he dies instantly in one hit. Don't even get me started on how shit like Martial Arts works.

Its my favorite RPG. However it was a fucking piece of shit until the 3rd Edition rules came out. The setting is amazing and everything looks good. But 2e was nearly impossible to play due to instadeath combat. 3e fixed all the combat system problems and pretty much has that all worked out. Some errata was needed because the original devs believed in putting fluff information and combat information in the same sentence for powers so you were not sure if that is what certain things actually do or not. But the new devs clarified the issues for the most part and I have not run into a combat issue since then. Social combat in 3e is great as it lets you mind rape people but only if you really work for it. Before you could just do one roll and have a slave. Now you need to do a lot of rolls to get a slave and there are plenty of opportunities to stop it as well. Some people bitch about this as Exalted should mind-rape most people but from a mechanics perspective I find it fair. The big problem 3e has are the other systems. Craft they fucked completely. There is no nation running system for a game where most Exalts could conquer a kingdom in a weekend. They give you loose rules which basically boils down to let the GM figure it out. Sail is great as an idea but not so good in application as its then the helmsmen/captain of a ship rolling against the GM for a half an hour while everyone else sits around.

And of course the biggest problem 3e has is lack of content. The old Devs took nearly 5 years to get the core book out. And then after it was out the Devs sat on their asses and wanted more money because of dubious contract methods Onyx Path/White Wolf has. So they were fired which further delayed production. We finally got a book that is roughly an armory last month. It was much needed but we still have nothing else. There are 5 main Exalt types and we only have 1 playable.

It's worth noting that in Exalted, 90% of the enemies in the core book are utterly irrelevant to you. The average PC will go through them like a hot knife through butter, if he has a modicum of combat skill. You will fucking fuck their shit up.

The PCs - when they team up - aren't really your typical adventuring party. It's more like the Justice League, really.

I ran a lot of Exalted. The system does have its flaws, as other people say. But it's the only system that lets you play Exalted very well. I've tried conversions and FATE reworks but they never recaptured the feel of the game.

Exalted, for better or for worse, is the best way to play the setting that comes with it. I never found it hard to run - so as long as you set your expectations and have non-shit players, it's perfectly fine.

Any chance that you could expand on the flaws? I'm looking to get into the game and no one really explains these or goes in depth with them unless it's about Craft.

Is there a searchable version of the 1e books? The link in exg has scanned images of a page or that stupid "looks like text, but when you copy/paste it's just squares" thing going on

I think there are on DriveThruRpg. We pirates are lucky with what we can get.

Not that user but I'll jump in.

Basically, the main flaws of 3rd Edition are lack of content (only two books out, for one of the most expensive RPG settings out there, means you kinda have to resort to past editions' books if you're looking for more material) and player/GM overhead.

There's lots of charms, lots of fiddly bits, lots of numbers to juggle. It's all on purpose and works relatively well, but it might prove unfun to people who enjoy more modern/lightweight systems.

Examples include a bunch of "dicetrick" powers that let you do things like reroll a certain result on dice (reroll all 1s until they fail to appear type of stuff) or that rely on an opponent rolling certain results (roll a bonus die for every 1 in the opponent's roll kinda stuff) ; wading through the powers list on your first time creating a character feels pretty daunting ; lots of similar but not identical powers instead of standardized effects sometimes makes it hard to remember exactly what a specific power does.

Combat is full of similarly fiddly bits : dynamic initiative, dynamic defense penalty, dynamic dice caps, four different ressources to manage (Essence, Willpower, Initiative and Health Levels).

I love it to bits, but I can understand people reading the corebook and going "nope".

tl;dr : It's pretty fucking crunchy.

1) Crunch heavy. The basic system of Exalted is actually pretty easy to learn and grasp, and while a bit more detail than DnD's roll for hit then damage, I'd say far less complicated than stuff like ANIMA. Charms are what Exalted use for power, think of them like magical feats. Usually they're straightfoward in their use. Pay 3m when a condition is met and you can attack again. Cool.

Now remember there's 500+ of them in the corebook alone. A normal PC will have 15 at start, at Essence 5 (The "level cap") a PC will have 300 XP and charms cost 8/10 XP each. You'll be having a lot of the damn things.

A lot of them aren't for combat, which actually really makes me like Exalted a lot. Not only are there details for things a lot of other systems gloss over, but things that make you feel superhuman in other areas aside from straight combat or physical might.

If you're used to Fate/Tri-stat? This system will be hell for you.

2) Content. A real issue for most. IIRC there is now a fan translation for every major Exalt type now. 'Classes' if I had to borrow a term, though each Exalt type is A LOT broader than a normal class. As in I can still make hundreds of possible character concepts off of the splat we have right now of "Solar'.

3) Semi-rushed development. The core of the system (Combat and Social) sing beautifully, which is basically 80-95% of the content of games. Other things, such as Sailing or craft, were rushed out the door and the Leadership System was meant to be a placeholder for a more detailed government system (As admitted by ex-developer Holden).

Good news is that multiple craft rewrites exist, either simplifying or giving an alternate take on the system. Sail combat... kinda has a rewrite which involves everyone rather than two sides blandly rolling against each other. Leadership system has nothing, but works for the moment.

Doesn't seem too bad beyond, "Not enough books yet (give it time)" and "Micromanagement (Different stokes for different folks)." What about subsystems mentioned such as Naval combat? What's that like and what are other parts of the game like? I've looked at Wyld Shaping in the core and I felt it weird that a single charm would have an entire system inside it.

Craft is the Micromanagement point brought to a whole new level, taking the crown as the most complicated subsystem in the book along with the ability with the most charms. It's got three ressources, 65 distinct charms with intricate synergies. There's a post on the official forum that details the process of a Craft Supernal character making an Artifact, I'll try to pull that up. It's quite eloquent.

It's built so players have to engage in their craft regularly in play through small but significant acts of craftsmanship (making gifts big and small, offering maintenance, stuff like that) to fuel their grander projects (legendary magical storm-demon swords and stuff).

I like it in principle, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Most people don't even like it in principle.

I don't know much about Naval Combat. It's really a small part of the game, and my players always tend to find creative and entertaining ways to blow up entire fleets before they get to engage. Haven't had the chance to run a naval battle yet.

(Continued)
The rest of the subsystems is perfectly fine. Sorcery is one of the best systems I've seen in any RPG. Combat and Battle Groups make for exactly the kind of fighting Exalted needs, which is a blessing in itself considering the main problem of all past editions was that the combat engines were busted from the get go.

Navel combat has issues. At base level two captains with the same ship takes over a hundred rolls to finish it on average (Someone wrote a macro to test this). This is because sail works by needing more successes over your opponent to get enough points to attempt a maneuver and when you get enough points to make a maneuver and fail... you start the whole thing over again.

But wait! Solar charms are really strong! They can easily crush mortal captains!

...Which makes me fear what'd happen if you had another supernatural captain of how long that'd take.

This problem can be somewhat fixed with a single quick houserule. "You gain momentum equal to the successes on your roll, not over your opponent." This also makes sail combat move by much, much quicker.

Sail also has the hacker problem of Shadowrun, where the hacker does his own thing while everyone else plays cards in the meantime. Other PC's are not written with the assumption of interacting with navel combat at all. Want to run across the water and hop onto the enemy ship as a one man boarding party? Want to swim up to their hull and use your He-man Strength to pry it open? Cool! What roll do you use to get to that point? Who the fuck knows!

The thing with Sail now is the Cyberpunk 2020 Decker problem: you end up with the captain playing vs the ST for awhile while everyone looks around, maybe throwing spells or waiting for a boarding action. The spaceship system for Heaven's Reach I think fixes it a good bit, since now you have the Captain, Gunnery Officer, Sensor Officer, so on, with always a task or another that someone has to do, Damage Control, operating ship traps against boarding parties, boarding in general.
About Wyld Shape, it's a pretty big effect. With a good army, even a weaker Exalt can raise a brand new entire region for his kingdom, draw money or raw Magical materials or even complete artifacts from nothing. It's necessary to have it really well explained.

Wouldn't you just use the water running Charms or a flying one for it? And the strength feat table? I don't think it's necessary to write the interaction of character and naval combat, but maybe examples of exalt vs ship would be good just to make people realize they can even do that.

Normally yes, but the ship rules excludes everyone else that isn't a Captain. I feel like a FoS shouldn't automatically destroy all ships, but how good of a roll does how much damage?

Basically I feel like they didn't think such a thing through at all. There's no accounting for other characters outside the bubble of navel combat.

The others explained and naval combat pretty well, I think, from my experience. Fortunately, the game works perfectly fine if you never use those systems.

Wyld Shaping Technique is definitely an unusual case, but that is how the system tends to approach power design. It's usually not nearly that extreme, but there are a bunch of Charms with long and detailed explanations of their effects, and characters can have a lot of Charms. It's not too hard to remember something like "gain three dice on social rolls as long as this Charm is active", but then you have things like Ascendant Battle Visage, Brawl's totally-not-Saiyan-transformation, that takes up almost half a page, or pretty much any spell. It's a lot to keep track of, and even though most are simpler there are literally hundreds of Charms.

This isn't necessarily BAD. Exalted 3e gives players access to a lot of cool abilities, and the sheer number and variety of them means the game has mechanical support for a huge variety of character concepts. It's just crunch-heavy, as was said; more burden on the players to remember them and the GM to plan around them.

Regarding the other systems, I agree that they're pretty good. Exalted 3e is the only game I've seen with a social system that actually gives strong, mechanics-based guidelines for what you can convince someone to do and how to do it, and you can build an entire character around it. Combat is fun, even if it looks a little weird on paper (it's basically multiplayer Dissidia with abstract movement where everyone is equally fast, unless they're trying to catch or escape someone). Sorcery, as mentioned, is great.

Most of the other systems are smaller and simpler, but they work pretty well from what I've seen, and the game lays out rules for every Ability in a variety of situations.

The only exception is Bureaucracy, which does nothing unless the GM makes something up or a Charm tells you how to use it. Hopefully that will change eventually.

>Basically I feel like they didn't think such a thing through at all. There's no accounting for other characters outside the bubble of navel combat.
Belly buttons are a pretty personal thing, so it's probably best not to involve others when engaged in combat with them.

Sounds like a decent system, all things considered. What's a good way to get started?

That's my major tie

Bad.

Perhaps irredeemably bad.

It's 3.0 bad.

>Better yet, the new developers have broached the possibility of a revised 3e corebook with a lot of the clarifications worked in.
"A big giant fuck you to our most loyal customers!"

Another problem Exalted has. It's a tabletop RPG that's really optimized for 1-2 players per GM, and yet everything else including the game lore says there should be five players per GM.

It's a huge fucking mess.

AS others have pointed out, despite the first few memeposters, Exalted is playable, much more so in 3e. Hell, I'm a rare breed in this but I enjoy the craft system even as I can see why others get bent out of shape by it.
And I should know if it's playable or not I've run games for years, been in a few long term ones that remain my favorite experiences in RPGs.

Go buy the 3e book. Try to absorb it's mighty girth. Or wait for the next /exg/ if you prefer to try that way or are a poorfag. Once you get a decent idea you'll probably have to run a game yourself, because while they do exist, games a rare as fuck. Despite how much love my friends have for it I'm the only one who has had the guts to run a game ever, and I'm usually hard pressed to keep my games to a manageable 5 or less just with people I personally know, much less strangers on the net.

If you do decide to go run a game, session zero to talk about the game helps a ton with this, consider starting new players as mortals to learn the backbone of the system, there's rules in place for Exalting mid-campaign so you can give the same characters the fancy system hacks after people acclimate to the weird but fun battle system, dice mechanics etc.
For campaign ideas, just rid chunks of setting, Exalted gives you a ton of open ended hooks baked into the setting. 1e/2e books work great for setting stuff, also in /exg/ next time it's up.

The lack of material actually isn't a problem. The core book is more than large enough to keep you going forever. The problem will actually be when there are more supplements because that will quickly throw the entire game into power bloat as people whine about how Solars suck because [other Exalt] gets [thing] and then we need a BETTER Solar version of [thing] because Solars are the best.

The initial time investment is steep: it's about 10 hours to read, re-read, and comprehend the rules involved in creating a character. If someone tells this isn't true, punch them in the mouth because they're a fucking liar. Nobody is building successful characters without spending about ten hours figuring the system out. It's simply not happening.

This isn't a crunchy game. It's not. It's barely more complex than Fate, it's just instead of most of your abilities amounting to "add 2 to result" there's a shitload of abilities ranging from "add 0.1 to 2.1 to your result." There's no real crunch here, it's an illusion that will start falling apart quickly under inspection.

Then you have to consider the company you're supporting. OPP is a terrible company run by a terrible person who screws over most of the terrible people (and the handful of not terrible people) working for him.

Yeah, it seems that it'd be difficult to wrangle such high powered PCs. How do stop people from splitting the party and forcing the DM to run so many substories in a single session?

Dunno how I got rid out of read, but obviously meant read chunks of setting material. Take it from a retard who can't english first thing after waking up.

Live games aren't so bad, online games are hard for more than 3 players, yeah.

See, people talk up it's bad like that I can't help but feel they've played at best a single session with an ST who didn't understand the system. It's a complicated mess, yeah, but if you have a sufficient understanding it isn't hard to ease people into the system. If everyone goes in blind as fuck and makes judgments on that experience you get this.

The Exalted 3e rulebook it's one of the worst RPGs rulebooks I've seen, in terms of artwork, layout and length.

I can't understand how people go through that pain... But then I remember that are weaboo shit in the formula and weaboos can eat shit if they think it's great.

>Yeah, it seems that it'd be difficult to wrangle such high powered PCs. How do stop people from splitting the party and forcing the DM to run so many substories in a single session?
Short answer: you don't.

Inevitably players are going to want to do "their thing," which is whatever subsystem they enjoy ramming their dick into to climax. You literally cannot successfully juggle all of these competing interests, so boredom is the typical state of at least half your players.

The only thing most players agree on is combat, and then mostly in order to compete with each other like they're Legolas and Gimli.

I've run Exalted for years with excellent groups and there's simply no way to stop party split. It happens because player interests are too divergent, let alone character interests.

If you know how hard SR3 was to run, that's basically Exalted, but with over-the-top pink mohawk Leeroy Jenkins leading the way.

>what are other parts of the game like?
I'm going to elaborate on Sorcery, since others have mentioned that it's good, but not why.

In Exalted's setting, learning sorcery doesn't mean spending a few years in a magic school studying under an old man with a big floppy beard. It can - the Realm has an academy called the Heptagram for just that (minus the mandatory old man, I guess) - but this is unusual and de-emphasized by the book. More commonly, sorcerers gain their power in a more esoteric way, and it changes them and the way they use magic: they might make a pact with an ifrit lord that lets them draw power from fire and breathe flame, or have been scarred by an encounter with an otherworldly horror and cursed with nightmares that haunt their sleep but fuel their magic. There are several other examples in the book, and you're encouraged to make your own.

Sorcery is divided into three tiers: Terrestrial, Celestial, and Solar. Mortal sorcerers (rare as they are) and Dragon-Blooded are limited to the first tier. Lunars, Sidereals, and similarly powerful beings can reach the second tier. The third is mostly exclusive to Solars, I think, though there might be other, exceptionally rare beings that can reach that level of mastery. Everyone starts at the bottom, though, and any level of sorcery is a powerful thing.

(cont.)

Splitting the party is a real issue, try to find ways to incentive limiting this to the occasional mid-season thing and ask/find hooks to keep this so it's several PCs per split.

As for wrangling high power PCs, that's not a game you want to try too often in Exalted. One of Exalted's strengths is it works very well as a game of consequences. Railroading isn't going to go well in Exalted, but you give the PCs so much power that it takes very little prodding for them to start writing the campaign for you with their own decisions.

Taking over towns, inventing indoor plumbing, calling attention to themselves in a way that brings the world's biggest superpower to come play fun police. Stepping on enough godly dick to get the Celestial Bureaucracy mad at them, dealing with demons, striking deal with the fae, all things players will do with tiny prodding. All you gotta do is bring some antagonist appropriate to the actions of your player and plan out some epic conflicts based on that.

But don't worry, they might waifu your undead black knight instead of fight and you have that to deal with instead.

One half of sorcery is the spells. These don't use up your own motes to cast, but instead, you take an action and make a roll to gather magic from elsewhere; shaping rituals (such as drawing power from fire) can help with this, but aren't required. Once you have enough, you can cast the spell. As a result, spells in Exalted tend to be slow and powerful things. There's no magic missile; you do have your fireball-like Flight of the Brilliant Raptor at the low end, but sorcerers can also summon powerful demons, conjure a storm of acid rain capable of destroying an entire city, or call up tentacles of living magma out of the ground to aid them in battle (everyone loves Magma Kraken).

The other half is the sorcerous working system. Sorcerous workings are extended magical projects that let you transform the world in lasting ways - crossbreeding animals to create impossible hybrids, enchanting cities to fly, or even making your blood turn into scorpions when it leaves your body. These are all actual examples given in the book, though that last one would require the GM to determine the exact mechanics, admittedly. Sorcerous workings are also tied to the three circles, with more powerful and large-scale effects being much harder (though not impossible) without the appropriate level of mastery. It's a loose system that relies heavily on the GM to judge what you want to do and how exactly it works, but there are solid mechanics and a lot of examples behind it, and it's a cool way to let players do the kind of crazy wizard stuff you'd normally only see in stories.

>Live games aren't so bad, online games are hard for more than 3 players, yeah.
I've run it live with an excellent group of five players. We had party splits, people browsing their phones because they had no interest in Dick-chan's Bureaucracy-fu, and general lack of enjoyment for everyone. Except combat, where as I noted they competed with each other for the biggest kill count.

>See, people talk up it's bad like that I can't help but feel they've played at best a single session with an ST who didn't understand the system. It's a complicated mess, yeah, but if you have a sufficient understanding it isn't hard to ease people into the system. If everyone goes in blind as fuck and makes judgments on that experience you get this.
Been playing Exalted since 2006 and running it since 2008. I have been running tabletop games since 1997. I'm not new to the hobby, not new to the do's and dont's of running games. Heck, this group wasn't even new to me, we'd successfully played through an entire D6 Star Wars campaign prior to Exalted.

The game is bad. It may be irredeemably bad. We'll see. I suspect Vance and Minton will be looking to drop stealth 4e as soon as possible.

Artwork is no worse than many core DnD, there's more of it due to size. And I never know how to get started on "m'layout" people when I have zero trouble finding anything in the book,

But yeah, it's pretty weaboo, welcome to Veeky Forums, everyone is weaboos.

I've run Ex3 live for five players, three of them completely new to Exalted, and it worked pretty well. It would've worked even better with fewer players, there's no doubt about that, but the game works even with larger groups.

The reason why I like Exalted is because of the detail it has in it. A lot of systems stop at combat and bolt on incredibly basic subsystem rolls (As in "roll something at this difficulty"). Exalted goes far beyond that, making a fully flesh out subsystem in social, crafting (Which while poorly executed, remained a major thing in 2e as well), governing of large organizations, and so forth. I mean there's fate, but the issue with that system is everything starts to feel the same after a while.

But please, continue talking weeabooism.

Why is the art in the first 3e book bad?
I mean I've given it a brief once over and the only good pictures are the ones for the Circle.

Those proportions look really off

>The game is bad. It may be irredeemably bad. We'll see.

My question is what do you want from the system then? You played through 2e judging by the timestamps, so is there anything you want to change involving the system or setting?

I can tell you though that I have also run Exalted for the same duration and with many different groups. I overcame the problem when I learned how to GM by actively engaging the players in nearly all challenges.

>I suspect Vance and Minton will be looking to drop stealth 4e as soon as possible.

If you're expecting a total core rewrite, it ain't happening.

>My question is what do you want from the system then? You played through 2e judging by the timestamps, so is there anything you want to change involving the system or setting?
Well the first major problem the game has is attaching Solars to the core rules. We all know this is stupid. Just attach Dragon Blooded to the core rules; they'll hold up for the ~year it will take to finally release Solars and it will mean GMs have something to actually challenge Solars with when they do get released.

>I can tell you though that I have also run Exalted for the same duration and with many different groups. I overcame the problem when I learned how to GM by actively engaging the players in nearly all challenges.
No you didn't, and no you didn't. Trust me, I've seen GMs claim they've got it figured out, and then I've watched a session. They don't have it figured out, their players simply aren't wandering away from the table out of boredom.

>If you're expecting a total core rewrite, it ain't happening.
Since they're apparently planning a "errata-included" version of the core rules, I'm betting you're wrong. Because they'll get halfway through that and realize it's not worth the effort and just write new core rules.

Sounds like you're just a bad GM desu. You should have spent your six hundred years running games to improve yourself in the field. Also "excellent" players don't pull their phones out unless someone actually calls them.

...

Ok, you make it sound interesting. Maybe it's not as awful as it looks.

>Artwork is no worse than many core DnD
Nigga, pls

>Well the first major problem the game has is attaching Solars to the core rules. We all know this is stupid. Just attach Dragon Blooded to the core rules; they'll hold up for the ~year it will take to finally release Solars and it will mean GMs have something to actually challenge Solars with when they do get released.
No. Attaching a splat that has a fuckton of its own fluff to the core would be dumb as hell.

>No you didn't, and no you didn't. Trust me, I've seen GMs claim they've got it figured out, and then I've watched a session. They don't have it figured out, their players simply aren't wandering away from the table out of boredom.
Yup, other people's experiences don't matter for shit, because you know better no matter what. That certainly sounda like a reasonable person's opinion.

>attaching Solars to core rules

A Scion or nWoD approach would've been nice yes.

>Dragonblooded as first

I should keep a running tally of how often I hear this one.

They were going to do this for the 1e core but decided against it. If the Solars were the strongest then it would be easier to scale down for everything else or have a cap of where charm power could go to, which is more useful than Dragonblooded being first as those you start from the bottom and work your way up.

Narrative wise it would've been shit as well. If Solars were released after DB's in the core people would bitch about mad power creep, how de-protagonizing it was to the 'core heroes' and other such details. Lastly it was because Solars are Exalted's tabula rasa. Solars are whatever you want to make of them virtually as they have no narrative baggage compared to other splats whereas Dragonblooded always do in comparison.

>Issues about GM'ing

If you're talking about a game which involves all players being active all the time then I have never, EVER seen a game system in my life that was capable of doing this. Not even Fate Core or DnD 4e. You may have certain people sitting out or standing aside in certain scenes yes, but what you seem to lack or comprehend is how to make them engaged by a good story. Let me tell ya son: No system in the world can do that for you. That comes from learning how to make a good story.

Now if you mean "Exalted PC's tend to break off and want to do more things solo" then yes, that is a trend I notice because PC's in Exalted tend to be a lot more capable overall. That is a difficulty people need to adjust for.

>errata included book

That will likely happen, but wasn't what I meant

>new core rules

You dodged my original question. What in Exalted do you want to see changed or altered in order to fix the issues that you have? If you cannot list them, I will laugh in your face.

My issue with 3e art is that a lot of it feels generic as hell. 1e may've been saturday morning cartoon and 2e may've been weeaboo manga art, but shit at least it felt like it had style. 3e art feels generic so far.

I still can't get over the cross looking man in the sun-hat.

That's Demetheus.

He's a cool dude. One you'd gladly take out for a drink.

The person that says "trust me" talks about projection, its rich, it is

I think its there in the list with Anima Beyond fantasy, of games that sound cool and fun but the mechanics ruin it

on the topic, is there a way to run games like this?

>on the topic, is there a way to run games like this?
Actually learn the system, get some players who are genuinely into the concept of the game, then just run it.

Except the random gaping holes where you need to handwave things...odd combination, that.

Isn't he the sad drunk?

Is character creation extremely hard in Exalted?
I'll have some help later on but I at least want to have a good idea of the character and some basics down before the game starts.

Not especially, but you'll likely get overwhelmed by the sheer number of charms. Word of advice, invest in combat, even just a little bit. The four main combat abilities offer a wide variety of fighting styles to defend yourself with, Martial Arts fills some powerful niches such as stealth based combat or a way to decimate battle-groups, but they tend to have drawbacks. Dodge and Resistance shouldn't be overlooked either if you want to survive. Ox-Body Technique from the latter will raise your health, one purchase of that at chargen is a good idea. Wear armour, even if it's just light armour. The only reason not to is to is because your chosen Martial Art style forbids it, and even then there's a work around.

>You dodged my original question.
No I didn't. If you think I did, good luck with real life kid.

>spending this much time responding to a troll
Why.jpg

Finding a way to work in a martial art's group into your background can be a bit of a tricky situation.

But most martial arts don't say you need intimacies to them or their ethics, you can just be a practitioner

Accurate but stop spreading lies with regard to this:

> Leadership System was meant to be a placeholder for a more detailed government system (As admitted by ex-developer Holden).

This is bullshit.

>good luck with real life kid.
Don't cut yourself on that edge gramps.

This is the right response to people demanding autist levels of detailed answers in casual conversation

Oh no you did. You just admitted you were a troll and/or have no idea what the fuck you're talking about. I accept your concession.

Clearly I have nothing better to do with my life.

Other people sounded off about other issues, but one of the biggest sins for me is that the game actively rewards hyper-specialization. It does this at character creation / advancement with the BP / XP divide, and via charm trees unlocking increasingly powerful effects. It's even worse in this edition via giving Solars a Supernal ability that they can do deep into the tree on.

The issue with this is that you end up with fights where if you create an opponent to challenge the Dawn-caste that NPC will absolutely paste the other PCs. Same goes for social optimized PCs. Another issue that falls out from this specialization is people engaging in subsystems (i.e. monopolizing the ST's time) where other PCs don't get to contribute (Crafting, Bureaucracy).

The other issue is more of a social one but I feel like the game as strayed too far from its sword-and-sandals roots about troubled, flawed Greek heroes in the last days of a post-apocalyptic Creation. I think this problem has two parts:
1) People who joined up during 2e drawn by the promise over over-the-top action and playing out their power fantasy.
2) Fans becoming the developers and misunderstanding what makes Exalted truly Exalted.

>wading through the powers list on your first time creating a character feels pretty daunting
This can be helped a little as well. You can only ever start at essence 1 and all the charms are organized by essence anyways. So when making a character you can pretty much ignore everything past the first like 10 or so charms and just deal with that. And since essence only raises on its own at a fixed pace you never get dumped into all of them at once, so things keep pretty manageable as you can them at most one per every other session

most people who say it's FATAL bad are angry former fans

Oh god fuck you for making me remember the whole cabal over on SV

>2) Fans becoming the developers and misunderstanding what makes Exalted truly Exalted.

Care to elaborate?

What do the people of the East look like?
All I can remember is that Haltans have a dark complexion and having green hair/eyes is extremely common. I think their skin being actually red is an exaggeration.

Battle groups. Read up on them.

>nWoD or Scion approach
>Not having Exalted in a game about Exalted.

That hardly seems like the prior poster's fault. They exist regardless of that post.

White Wolf (well, Onyx Path now, but this was true even when it was still just White Wolf) has always been too broke as shit to keep that many permanent employees. So, instead (and this was especially true during the 2e days when content was coming out constantly), they'd keep a revolving door of freelancers writing a lot of content and mechanics for them. Among these were the Ink Monkeys, who wrote up a shitload of online content for the game near the back-end of 2e, who were made up almost entirely of long-time fans of Exalted who had gotten into the TRPG industry, and who were responsible for some of the most polarizing content in Exalted's entire run.

What "makes Exalted truly Exalted" is a debate that I don't think is worth having, but "word-and-sandals game about troubled, flawed Greek heroes in the last days of a post-apocalyptic Creation" hasn't been what the game was about for over a decade. Some call it a misunderstanding, some say that giving PCs incomparable power and then telling them that saving the world even this time is explicitly impossible and that even if it weren't it would only be prolonging the suffering of a dying world isn't an engaging concept for a game where PC actions are supposed to matter. For better or for worse, the game's grown beyond its roots and trying to backpedal at this point is only going to piss off everyone.

2 guys that worked on Exalted 2nd edition (can't recall when they joined but they sticked around to see that edition end.) They were put as developers for 3rd edition. Others were freelancers. So these two guys decide to remove stuff they don't like, refluff some things,
and add some shit that they personally think it is cool. It became their own personal sandbox

For example in Exalted you have a society that has male and female roles. Also that society has an option for certain people who don't like their role in life to transfer into opposite role. male to female, or female to male. From that point onward society would treat that individual depending on its new gender. That process is irreversible. New dev missed the point at decided to make a trans character because diversity quota. That was his starting character trait.

>Old Exalted: That kingdom was idea so you can make your Joan of Arc type characters
>3rd Edition: Look at me. I'm trans. Struggle against social norms.

When you specify "the East" you actually aren't specifying very much, because it's about one-quarter of Creation, and has a huge land area. Generally, in the Northeast, you'll find a lot of people who resemble indigenous folk of the Pacific Northwest (North America), the central east is more Mesoamerican going into South America, and the Southeast has large groups of people who resemble South Asian and various African groups (Houses of the Bull God goes into great detail about the five main ethnic groups of Harborhead). The Scavenger Lands has no particular predominating ethnic group, and examples from all over Creation; coffee and cream complexions with orange or pink hair are actually not noteworthy, and in fact somewhat common.

Due to the Contagion, a lot of people pulled up stakes and settled somewhere else. EX3 had a specific note about it not being uncommon at all to have extremely pale European equivalents living across a narrow river from people who resemble sub-Saharan Africans, so there's not much ironclad uniformity.

There's a great idea at the heart of it, but it's always been coupled with a terrible rules-system. And they've gradually added more and more useless, bland shit on top of the good bits of the setting.
Now the 3e dev-team has basically claimed the setting as theirs, to the point where they'll focus on their own retarded pet projects before even covering the important bits.
If you've ever done Glorantha - it has the same combination of totally epic feel combined with the need to do in-depth research and analysis of obscure texts and sifting through 30 pages of dross to find that one gem that will totally blow your mind and power your campaign for weeks to come.

tl;dr - cool ideas, unplayable mess (including the setting);

Worse than D&D3.0, and with ridiculously bad layout and the trademarked WW combo of excessively volinous, unclear language
2e had some cool ideas re: timing and tick-based combat but fell appart as soon as any magic got involved(if you could even decipher what the ability was supposed to do); 3e is slightly more functional, but infinitely blander and just as badly written.

...

It's funny that you mention FATAL.
Not only are some of the rules just as incoherent, some people in the current dev team have some obvious issues that really started showing as way back as the previous edition:
>this charm lets you mutilate people! including ripping of their genitalia so they can no longer enjoy sex! this las part was obviously a very important application, that's why it needed to be spelled out separately!
>you can regain power reserves from movement! sex does not count, unless it's a wild romp going from room to room! obviously this last clarification was very important
>in the depths of the Underworld, the rape ghost brothels infinitely rapes the ghosts of people who have raped in life, let me describe it in some more detail
>when you are infused with your demonic power, you get raped a lot by demons, to get you ready for the literal ass-fucking you'll get from your boss

here. Have another.

Realm
>decadent empire based on warrior culture
>Run by demi-gods bred for war
>strong family ties
>Marriage is for alliances, politics and breeding next generation of super soldiers (because we fight all kinds of shit and die in droves (also backstabing family members help in this regard))
>Homosexuality is accepted. But because they are warrior society they don't tolerate femine behavior in males and kind gentle behavior in females.

Exalted 3rd edition - Empire is okay with gay marriage. Diversity. 2017. Get with the times grandpa. You fucking old timey bigot.

What about greeding next generation of super soldiers? No need to worry. Fans are already thinking about making deals with demons so they can have butt babies.

I'm just here to throw in my word on the "It's shit" side, for the reasons stated

>3rd Edition: Look at me. I'm trans. Struggle against social norms.

It's actually worse. 3e is as self-indulgent as you say, but it also neutered a lot of setting elements to make them more palatable to the casual audience.
>oh, this is based on a Tuareg tradition? We don't care about that, we don't even care how much sense it makes in the setting, it offends our bland suburban asses, so it's out
>You say this follows Asian cosmology? Nevermind, let's replace it with a bland Euro-centric model

Throughout 3e, it's apparent the current dev-teams' only encounter with myth and history was a starter course in college.