Anatomy of Failed Design: Exalted

[Longes]

Search, including find all posts by user, has been disabled on rpg.net for as long as I remember.

It works, but in an arcane way. Login into the forum, find a post by the user you want, click on his name, click on "Posts by this user"

[schpeelah]

Oh, hey, that didn't work the last time I was trying to find my own posts. Neat.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

Fucking hell guys, is your google fu that shitty?

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?725 ... les/page44

-Username17

Thanks Frank - I read through at saw the debate on BP vs XP didn't really start until page 50 or so. I still can't believe they don't have Jon Chung on the playtest team - WTF.

They're keeping a broken chargen system on purpose! That is so easily fixed!

Makes me crazy.

[FatR]

OK, thanks for helping lazy me.

Thanks Frank - I read through at saw the debate on BP vs XP didn't really start until page 50 or so. I still can't believe they don't have Jon Chung on the playtest team - WTF.

But then they might be forced to actually FIX shit, and that means work, and that is just not acceptable.

They're keeping a broken chargen system on purpose! That is so easily fixed!

They're marketing to nostalgiafags. Not like anybody else is interested.

There are lots of other things in Exalted that can be fixed pretty easily, without any deep design insights or hammering their math. Off the top of my head:

- The three-requirement (Essence, Ability, tree placement) Charm system. Just eliminating trees entirely would actually REDUCE their work!

- Similarly, standardizing costs and effects of basic Charms for every splat would only reduce work.

- There are various bizarre subsystems like the Tell or the Arcane Fate that offer no gameplay benefit whatsoever at best.

- Just making Essence 5 the ceiling would remove a big chunk of the problems with the game!

- Simply treating mook squads as single-statblock swarm creatures would eliminate the need for their clusterfuck of the Mass Combat rules.

They are clearly unwilling to cut off the bad parts of the game because they clearly aren't confident in their ability to make anything decent (if they can even make anything finished at all...), so they aim at people who want more of the same.

[Archmage Joda]

I've reached the point where I don't believe in the existence of Exalted 3e, and won't until it is actually released as a thing that exists. So it's like Duke Nukem Forever that way. Basically what I'm saying is I expect it'll take 15 years to make and be a huge flopping disappointment when it does come out.

[FatR]

After skimming the more recent threads with dev comments on rpg.net today I do think that 3E is going to be released one day in not too distant future.

I just don't think that devs know what they're doing any better than authors of 1E and 2E. It is not like the latter wanted their games to be clusterfucks. They just vastly overestimated their design talents and based their work on a set of schizophrenically contradictory assumptions. Those assumptions are still in place and judging by work of those same people on 2E their design talents still leave very much to be desired.

[Laertes]

I think you hit the nail on the head, FatR: Exalted can't be changed because it's marketed at its own fans. People know what Exalted is by now and they're either going to buy it because they like that, or not buy it because they don't like that. There's relatively little room for new design work there.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

I'm hopeful the game is at least more playable, the 3rd team is composed of the ink monkey/ team errata prime guys. Of the 2E material I did enjoy their work.

I agree with others that expecting he game to be "fixed" is probably too much.

[Daztur]

I think you hit the nail on the head, FatR: Exalted can't be changed because it's marketed at its own fans. People know what Exalted is by now and they're either going to buy it because they like that, or not buy it because they don't like that. There's relatively little room for new design work there.

Yes but Exalted fans are generally fans of the setting far more than the rules, I think there's pretty wide latitude for the devs to change the rules to make things less headache-inducing. Whether they'll do that...

[FatR]

There are fundamental assumptions in Exalted mechanics that are bad and wrong. Conscious decisions like "you are almost mortal-level squishy without active defences going" or "the Charm structure is complicated and byzantine" or "buying resources at chargen is completely different from buying them during the game", for that matter "straight number-adders are an incredibly vital part of your core competence (as if our pointbuy system didn't produce enough divergence between character dicepools already)" were conscious. And from various tidbits about 3E rules that devs were willing to share and I've found yesterday, I'm very sure that these decisions are still in effect, because they are seen as a vital part of the game's flavor.

Honestly, if I were remaking Exalted today, I'd make it a class/level d20-derivative system, where major splats are your classes, and castes/aspects are your class variants, and everyone is a muscle wizard in Bot9S style. If there is supposed to be a quite vertical and steep power level hierarchy in your setting, there is no real reason not to just use levels.

A change this radical obviously couldn't be expected from the devs, but as far as I can see, I cannot see any of the flawed core assumptions of 1E and 2E they would be willing to discard. They merely want to avoid the particular pitfalls of the previous editions because those are too well-known and hated. This means players are just going to encounter new ones.

[Koumei]

They will never use levels. Even if Essence works out as being like level, and Castes/Exalt Types work out like classes, and even if they really locked down who could buy what* ("No out-of-Type Charm grabbing, forced gain of certain in-Caste Charms as you grow in Essence") so that it resembles a class-and-level-based system... they will never go with it. Because that's what that other game does.

*Not that this will happen either.

[Silent Wayfarer]

Yes but Exalted fans are generally fans of the setting far more than the rules, I think there's pretty wide latitude for the devs to change the rules to make things less headache-inducing. Whether they'll do that...

The funny thing is that they've already begun taking a hammer to the setting in the form of the new Exalted (Exigents and Liminals).

I confess I don't know too much about them, but that's because the grognard in me recoiled at the thought. Also because I haven't been reading much about it because the fanbase is actively hazardous to rational thought.

[FatR]

The funny thing is that they've already begun taking a hammer to the setting in the form of the new Exalted (Exigents and Liminals).

Than is honestly puzzling, considering that a constant accusation levied at every splat except Solars and DBs was their concept spaces/setting niches being too narrow.

Also because I haven't been reading much about it because the fanbase is actively hazardous to rational thought.

That's what you get when you work relentlessly on banning people for criticism of whatever the current dev team is, as happened in the rpg.net thread linked above. I noted that, thanks to said relentless work, perhaps, the thread was inhabited largely the same 15-20 people (tops) who discussed Exalted on rpg.net five years ago, and at least two of these people don't even actually play Exalted anymore, but just have enough forum weight and mastery of passive-agrressiveness to not be banned.


By the way, I have read the leak of the alpha version of Exalted 3E rules. With a brief glance, I've noticed that being one-shotted by your enemy's first combat action if you're retarded enough to not have any active defenses to invoke is still very much a possibility. Maybe not a certainty it could be in 1E/2E, but a distinct possibility. But you do have active defences, so I guess, the attrition combat is predictably back already. Based on previous experiences I'm rather sceptical about their ability to set the rate of attrition to the level where fights aren't a boring grindfest. They have pretty much the tabletop version of the Dissidia system, where you gain Brave Initiative by hitting the enemy and lose it by being hit, and once you strip the foe of all of it, you punch him in the dick Hit Points with the strength dependant on how much Brave Initiative you have. Except unless the other guy has Heavenly Guardian Defence or an equivalent Charm that basically makes his Initiative into an extra lifebar, you pretty much can go straight to the second part, because your attack Charms might well be enough to make the opponent explode anyway. The attrition is back because not taking HGD or an equivalent in this system is obviously insane, and with them you have a lifebar that can be rapidly increased just by punching people back, and then you can invoke other defensive Charms to negate an additional number of attacks, and all this is fiddly as fuck and seem to have a huge potential for producing a degenerate state similar to the stacked persistent combat/paranoia combo combat once numbers settle down.

[FatR]

Just wanted to leave this stuff here, for anyone who cares about lulz. Best read these links in order.

http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main ... t-reminder
http://theonyxpath.com/oh-the-humanity- ... ing-notes/

...the relationship of whomever still counts oneself as an Exalted fan and the Onyx Path are the worst sort of domestic abuse, where the victim is systematically blamed for the abuser's misdeeds, at this point.

[RelentlessImp]

"Waah, people are saying mean things about us on the internet, that means we get to treat them like naughty schoolchildren!"

What. The. Fuck.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Exalted should be redesigned from the ground up as a class and level system with an option for minor expansion abilities like feats and spells. That would solve a huge number (certainly not all, mind) of the game's problems instantly.

In other words, the one game that the d20 craze didn't touch was the one that needed it the most.

[Username17]

...the relationship of whomever still counts oneself as an Exalted fan and the Onyx Path are the worst sort of domestic abuse, where the victim is systematically blamed for the abuser's misdeeds, at this point.

Well, the worst sort of domestic abuse is the stuff from the Quiverfull Movement:

You must ask yourself whether your brother is molesting you because of your immodest dress or your evil friends. Both totally valid and not-at-all completely bullshit excuses.

The dynamic is of course similar: victims get blamed for the actions of the abuser and the outside world of reality is kept away as much as possible. But they don't get the police records of the abusers destroyed by police working for Mike Huckabee. Also, they are just ripping people off while failing to meet deadlines while making shitty products. They aren't, for example, raping children over a period of years while getting convicted sex offenders to cover up for them and then becoming the spokesman for a hate group that ironically claims we have to deny basic human and civil rights to gay people in order to protect children.

Now that you've been forced to bleach out your brain and reminded that the Family Research Council is in real life like Handmaid's Tale levels of fucked up, let's consider the situation that Onyx Path actually finds itself in:

We are human and we make mistakes, have personal lives, strive to do what many have claimed is impossible and refute the “White Wolf is dead!” crowd, and have pride in our work. We’re human beings and we do not deserve spite. We are all human beings embarking on a creative journey together with each project.

I mean, that sounds like a joke, right? White Wolf is dead, and nothing Onyx Path is going to do or could ever do is going to "refute" that. It's just a fact. White Wolf was a company that made products, I use the past tense because it no longer exists. That company is dead. Onyx Path has the license to use some of White Wolf's intellectual property in certain ways, but White Wolf is dead. It just is.

And the thing is that Onyx Path has already failed to make Exalted 3 "on time," they've already given up making it "to specs," and there's no way in hell it's going to be "released in stores." Heck, it's legitimate to question whether even by the extremely generous standards they've set for themselves that it's going to be finished "at all." And that's weird to me. It should be weird to everyone, since Onyx Path set themselves a paradigm where they were just a licence intermediary: they sold fans the potentiae of other fans writing a manuscript and having it be printed on demand. Onyx Path Publishing didn't do anything, so how could they fail?

The answer of course is that their Mummy and Demon and shit were able to be completed at all because they were paint by numbers bullshit. Getting a bunch of fans and hacks to write together is like herding cats. None of them share a vision, so you're never going to get any real world building. The nWoD revisitations were able to be completed with this "fans pay us to be allowed to write material" model because there wasn't any world building and everything was self contained. If someone went off on a rant about Nazi torture devices or murderous snow nymphs or something, it didn't matter, because every other person's writing was just going to ignore all that shit.

But when you're making a fantasy world, you actually have to tie it all up in a bow. You can't just default to "It's the modern world, but shitty" the way you can for a World of Darkness splat. There are like beastmen and gods and shit, and the things people rant about actually matter to what other people have to and want to say.

And that's why Exalted 3e is kind of grinding to a halt. The particular scam they were running with their fake nWoD titles and fake oWoD reboots and shit was simply incapable of actually making a fantasy world. You actually need some Gygax or Greenwood like figure to put his foot down from time to time when you're letting fan rants stand in for world development or everything falls apart.

-Username17

[virgil]

It feels like RPG Kickstarters don't do very well at actually fulfilling their promises. Or is it a Kickstarter thing, and the fact I only hear about KS in an RPG context biases my exposure? Or is it just a perception bias in general, since failures stand out more?

[Lago PARANOIA]

It feels like RPG Kickstarters don't do very well at actually fulfilling their promises.

They do, actually, it's just that White Wolf and their dregs gives the idea a very bad name. Blood/Jade/Silk, Numenera, and Feng Shui were RPG Kickstarters and they managed to at least fulfill their pledges and put out a complete fucking product.

[Longes]

And the thing is that Onyx Path has already failed to make Exalted 3 "on time," they've already given up making it "to specs," and there's no way in hell it's going to be "released in stores." Heck, it's legitimate to question whether even by the extremely generous standards they've set for themselves that it's going to be finished "at all."

-Username17

According to the update I recieved a few days ago, they are currently trying to work on the design. Mere 2 years past the deadline.

As I write this, Maria is configuring the text, illustrations, and design elements of individual chapters of EX3 so that each chapter has a distinctive visual look and feel. While I think Maria prefers this approach to her books anyway, it will also serve to help differentiate chapters for easier use of the book- which will be important for a book this size!
While some designers may layout a book from pg1 and work through to the end completely integrating all the text and elements page to page, Maria is working more organically from chapter to chapter and building up the design across the book. So, none of the chapters are done, but all of them are in the process of getting done. Every chapter's text is in but being tweaked as she integrates the art and design elements, with some art having borders, some fading, some bleeding off the page.
Once we have the proof ready for the devs to go through, I will check with them as to their willingness to preview a few spreads from various chapters here.

[Lago PARANOIA]

While some designers may layout a book from pg1 and work through to the end completely integrating all the text and elements page to page, Maria is working more organically from chapter to chapter and building up the design across the book. So, none of the chapters are done, but all of them are in the process of getting done.

Wow, that's very illuminating, Longes. In a horrible way.

Do you got any more foolishness like that?

[Longes]

While some designers may layout a book from pg1 and work through to the end completely integrating all the text and elements page to page, Maria is working more organically from chapter to chapter and building up the design across the book. So, none of the chapters are done, but all of them are in the process of getting done.

Wow, that's very illuminating, Longes. In a horrible way.

Do you got any more foolishness like that?

Maybe? I get those updates every once in a while, since I'm a backer (worst spent money in my life), but I don't really read them. I've stopped giving a fuck about Exalted a year ago.

[Username17]

Projects get canceled or radically reenvisioned all the time. Nick Cage is never going to play Superman and Secret of Mana didn't get its multiple endings.

And RPG products get canceled all the time for all kinds of reasons. D&D 4e is never going to get its DMG 3 or Primal Power 2. Shadowrun 4 is never going to see Cities of Intrigue or Motor Pool.

Kickstarter projects actually come through in some form or another more than do other works, because they get the revenue stream going to begin with. The numerous RPG projects that get canceled because of a lack of development funds or a lack of projected sales are thus analogous to the projects that don't meet their kickstarter goals (of which there are of course many).

Kickstarted RPG materials that go way over time and budget, drastically scale back their design specs, or even just fail to come out altogether are generally because of the usual kinds of crap that makes projects fall apart. Overambitious design goals, personality disputes, and key people getting real jobs. Lately we've talked about a couple of failures for a new weird thing, of people trying to crowdsource game design after selling it to the crowd via kickstarter. That... obviously isn't going to work. And that's why E20 and Exalted 3 were such fuckups.

I mean, it would be like if some people tried to make another Gaming Den game, only this time there was a kickstarter that people pledged money to. The fact that there's money for art and printing still wouldn't make all the people on the forum magically able to work together.

-Username17

[Archmage Joda]

I stopped caring about Exalted back when they failed to meet their first two announced deadlines. Though, I am amused that Onyx Path has released 2nd editions for both nwod vampire and nwod werewolf, and Exalted 3ed, which has been in the pipelines much longer, is still nowhere near existing.

[hyzmarca]

Kickstarted RPG materials that go way over time and budget, drastically scale back their design specs, or even just fail to come out altogether are generally because of the usual kinds of crap that makes projects fall apart. Overambitious design goals, personality disputes, and key people getting real jobs.

Of course, with Kicksrarters put out by actual RPG companies, the more common issue is robbing peter to pay paul, as it were. I know that the Goblins card game failed for that reason. Kickstarter money earmarked for design and production is instead used for advertisement, basic operating expenses, and to pay for the completion of other kickstarted games that have gone over budget.

One very unfortunate problem with Kickstarter is that, once a company gets the money, they can spend it on anything that they want. There's no enforcement mechanism to make sure that any of the money goes towards tohe project.