Exalted 3rd Edition?

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

I figured this could be a catchall topic to discuss Exalted 3E and it's various supplements.

So far we have the corebook, "Arms of the Chosen" which explains the new evocation system, a dragon blooded book, and a lunar book.

Of the people left playing 3E, it seems the DB and Lunar books have been received well... But I hardly go on Exalted boards anymore so can't say for certain.

Other thoughts and flames people have on this latest edition are welcome.

[FatR]

In my opinion it solves none of the fundamental setting and gameplay problems and mostly does not even attempt to. I can elaborate later, if anyone cares. I was never motivated enough to dig into mechanics below basic gameplay assumptions.

Also I'd note that it is a walking corpse of an edition, judging by how hard it was to find torrents, compared to 2E.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

In my opinion it solves none of the fundamental setting and gameplay problems and mostly does not even attempt to. I can elaborate later, if anyone cares. I was never motivated enough to dig into mechanics below basic gameplay assumptions.

Also I'd note that it is a walking corpse of an edition, judging by how hard it was to find torrents, compared to 2E.

I'd happily listen to whatever you have to say about 3E. It's hard to get genuine feedback about how it plays now. It's either total haters or it's fanwankers.


I bought 3E hoping against hope that it would be better. I've read the PDF (some) but haven't had the heart to break open the shrinkwrap on my kickstarted copies.

Given your comment about "walking corpse of an edition," I looked up the google trend results:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explor ... lted%20rpg

It's sad: The game over the last few years has 3% to 12% of the interest it did back in the day. It's a game that really resonated with me when I was younger, and still does to a degree now.

[souran]

So, I like some of the underlying themes and concepts of exalted such as

1) A world defined by epics like paradise lost, Norse Sagas, Greco-Roman myth, the Bhagavad Gita, Gilgamesh, 1001 nights, and Journey to the West, and the tale of Hieke - the problem is that the authors claimed these sources but hadn't actually even read the wikipedia synopsis of them.

2) The super-powered soul thing is actually kinda neat - to bad that the authors didn't really have a message about how they are earned.

3) The one sentence synopsis of most of the factions, realms, etc seems really good, but once fleshed out they all were crap.

I have long wondered if it would be possible to build a good edition of exalted. I think you could, heck after sundown shows how you can actually get decent milage out of some of the core SR/White Wolf dice concepts.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Did you miss this thread?

[Lago PARANOIA]

The parts of Exalted that are most fleshed-out are also the inappropriate for most parties to play. Unless you're Dragonblooded there's no storytelling advantage to playing the Exalted setting over, say, the Forgotten Realms. The parts of the setting that are detailed don't mean anything to a typical Exalt, there's nothing for mortals to do (because there's nothing meaningful they CAN do), and the superpowered behind-the-scenes machinations of the setting are too high-tier for PC Exalts to play in.

And even if you are Dragonblooded, Exalted doesn't offer much over a setting like Dark Sun or even Pathfinder's Golarion.

[FatR]

I'd happily listen to whatever you have to say about 3E. It's hard to get genuine feedback about how it plays now.

I won't pretend that I've played it, but upon reading I see that they have still not attempted to fix the following fundamental problems in their approach to system building and gameplay:

- The contradiction between the unlimited power fantasy theme, where specific fantastic abilities you can place on your charsheet mostly serve to give you specific ideas on how you will effortlessly own the world, and extremely fiddly, complex mechanics that seem to require understanding of their synergies to not get shit beaten out of you even by weak-ass muppets from the Antagonists chapter.

- Expanding on that, the book is insanely fucking wordy, running to nearly 600 pages. Most of those are Charms and other crunch. Even though every sane person by late 2E was saying that they need to tone the crunch bloat the fuck down. And even though long Charm trees resulting from that crunch bloat sort of fundamentally contradict the core idea of PCs being movers and shakers of the setting from the word "go", because PCs are not going to have even one tree, much less several, maxed at the start, and the difference between a dabbler and an expert with several combat-related Charm trees fully collected is obviously huge.

- Starting system design with the strongest splat and then working down, instead of choosing the easier way of starting with the weakest and working up.

- Still having stronger and weaker splats, for that matter. I've taken a peek at Exalted subreddit recently, and to my lack of surprise, one of the threads on the first page was about balancing a party of different Exalts and how this still is not really possible. Lack of surprise was due to the fact that whenever I had run or played an Exalted game with more than one person besides the GM, people wanted to play different splats. There is absolutely NO justification for not having playable Exalted be mechanically balanced, given that I've managed to think of about 3 ways to make them so and stiikk keep all the current premises and core history of the setting while taking a shower.

That's just the unforgivable sins they committed while staying fully within the existing paradigm. Which may be considered shitty in itself.

[Omegonthesane]

If they weren't so determined to wank to Solars being the best at everything, you could get some of the way while maintaining some of the intentional tiering by having some more supported character types at Dragonblood tier and getting all the celestial-types to materially the same power level. Which is probably still somewhat in a Solar's favour for simply not having an area of specialisation as a splat, whereas Abyssals will always be killy, Lunars sneaky, Sids the NWO, and Infernals... some stupid shit.

A more efficient approach, of course, would be to rip it up and start again.

[Username17]

A more efficient approach, of course, would be to rip it up and start again.

This is basically where I'm at.

In 2000, White Wolf was one of the two biggest RPG companies. They were the biggest right until WotC dropped 3rd Edition D&D on the world. White Wolf was big and important, and even if you didn't like their games, you knew where you could find someone who was playing them. Discussions about how to fix or at least improve a White Wolf game made a lot of sense during Bush Jr's first term in office.

That was a long ass time ago. I have no idea where I'd find an Exalted game or even a Vampire game in 2019. So the central question of Exalted is "Why?" And for that, I have no answer.

There were historical reasons we took 1st edition Exalted seriously as a fantasy RPG contender back when it came out. But none of those reasons apply anymore. "White Wolf" has gone bankrupt and the people who bought the IP also went bankrupt. I just don't see why we'd even attempt to use any edition of Exalted as a starting point for trying to put together a game.

-Username17

[Koumei]

That was a long ass time ago. I have no idea where I'd find an Exalted game or even a Vampire game in 2019. So the central question of Exalted is "Why?" And for that, I have no answer.

I totally understand if you apply the caveat of "in person" or even "in real-time", and in that instance I absolutely cannot help the hypothetical person looking for a game, but there are plenty of options on PbP sites like rpol.com - right alongside other hot properties like Rifts (TM), Legend of the Five Rings, Dark Heresy, BESM, and "systemless anime game where you can play any character or Donut Steel". This puts it a step above Godlike and Cybergenerations, which aren't even found there, but if you go to something like the sup/tg/ IRC channel you can probably find a game of [some version of D&D] that is in real-time, and you could not find the same for anything produced by White Wolf.

"White Wolf" has gone bankrupt and the people who bought the IP also went bankrupt.

Pretty sure the entire country of the company that bought the IP also went bankrupt, and while you could place the blame for that on the shoulders of the global economic crisis and Germany's approach to bail-outs, I think we should at least consider the possibility that White Wolf is that big a catastrophe.

[maglag]

Pretty sure the entire country of the company that bought the IP also went bankrupt, and while you could place the blame for that on the shoulders of the global economic crisis and Germany's approach to bail-outs, I think we should at least consider the possibility that White Wolf is that big a catastrophe.

"Exalted is so bad it crashed a country's economy" sounds pretty true hilarious.

[Longes]

You can absolutely find WoD games on Roll20.

Pretty sure the entire country of the company that bought the IP also went bankrupt, and while you could place the blame for that on the shoulders of the global economic crisis and Germany's approach to bail-outs, I think we should at least consider the possibility that White Wolf is that big a catastrophe.

CCP has not gone bankrupt, but it has suffered losses due to bad EVE expansions and was bought by Koreans last year. But that's about five years after they sold White Wolf to Paradox.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

So I ran a game for a few months with my son, when he opened up one of my Exalted 3E core books out of the shrink wrap. Turns out he got tired of reading my D&D books.

My short review is that the power curve got shrunk, what passes for an essence 5 charm in 3E is maybe an Essence 2-3 charm in 2E. They also changed the power curve by creating a shit ton more charms, there's WAY more to purchase for a given build. They upped the XP awards per session but not by nearly enough IMO.

Also, I made a GM-PC crafter for fun. By doing this I discovered that the Craft tree is a super fucked up mess. 40+ charms when they needed maybe 10-15. Very frustrating, whole subtrees just don't matter, given how OP one particular tree is.

The game is fun, my son wanted to fight different types of Exalts, and we did that. We got cinematic anime style combat, which was great. I printed off charm cards for him to look at and refer to, as he played a Dawn Caste combat monster.

The game is super crunchy and requires tons of system mastery to play well. I would not recommend a new group play as exalts, just to play as mortals to first to get the hang of it. It solves many problems in 2E, while unfortunately creating new ones.

It's also obvious the game was written for existing 1e/2E fans, with little thought on how to appeal to new players and grow the game.

[hyzmarca]

If they weren't so determined to wank to Solars being the best at everything, you could get some of the way while maintaining some of the intentional tiering by having some more supported character types at Dragonblood tier and getting all the celestial-types to materially the same power level. Which is probably still somewhat in a Solar's favour for simply not having an area of specialisation as a splat, whereas Abyssals will always be killy, Lunars sneaky, Sids the NWO, and Infernals... some stupid shit.

A more efficient approach, of course, would be to rip it up and start again.

Yep. This is a problem. Narritively, you want to the party to consist of a Solar (Luke), A Lunar (Leia), A Sidreal (Obi-Wan), and a couple of dragonblooded (Han and Chewie). But this isn't a party you can put together, in fluff or in crunch.

Instead, each splat is subdivided into 5 sub-splats and you're supposed to play Dawn, Zenith, Twilight, Night, Eclipse. And I guess everyone is a flavor of Luke Skywalker.

[K]

I think a lot of core conceits and most of the setting could be salvaged. There are enough people watching Asian epics on Netflix to warrant that kind of game, so if 80% of the fluff is OK, you can make a game.

The problem is that making the crunch IS THE GAME. You can throw a rock in an RPG convention and hit six people who can write fluff for a decent RPG, but writing a set of rules that isn't actively harmful to the hobby of roleplaying is hard as fuck.

It's so hard that anyone who can do it deserves to make whatever setting they feel like. Its literally the only reward since in almost all cases financial success is almost impossible.

[Dean]

One thing I would be curious about is how badass a mortal could actually get in Exalted. If you really wanted to and went really hard with rule-fu how good could you make somebody? One of the few things about the Exalted world that is appealing to me is the idea that there's this whole class of ubermensch that no one thinks a mortal can compete with and, obviously, my immediate desire to play a mortal that can hack their way into competing. Basically wanting to be Vlad Taltos now that I think about it.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Mortals could get low-end charms, and if they got enough of them they could kind of compete with low-end Exalts, but the big problem was that mortal Essence reserves were tiny and they’d run out of gas really fast.

Your best bet is to get your hands on some sort of self-powered ultra-artifact. One antagonist in the setting was a mortal with a rod that let him coerce even Exalts into being his stooges, so they did exist.

[K]

One thing I would be curious about is how badass a mortal could actually get in Exalted. If you really wanted to and went really hard with rule-fu how good could you make somebody? One of the few things about the Exalted world that is appealing to me is the idea that there's this whole class of ubermensch that no one thinks a mortal can compete with and, obviously, my immediate desire to play a mortal that can hack their way into competing. Basically wanting to be Vlad Taltos now that I think about it.

I explored this conceit a bit with 2e rules. The answer is that with the right Terrestrial Martial Arts and the right sorcery spells and the right artifacts and mutations, you could be badass enough to beat up Essence 3-ish Celestial Exalts or any Dragonblooded without Celestial Martial Arts. Exalted 2e has so much material that with enough XP and time you can correct for deficits like low Essence pools or lack of access to perfect defenses with artifacts and mutations and spells.

At Essence 4, Celestial Charms and spells start to go nuts and you basically have to play Shadowrun to compete with Exalts. That's still playable, and honestly more of the setting that the ruleset implies.

[OgreBattle]

The sort of storytelling Exalted encourages seems more suitable for a system that handles combat more abstracted, not one that does combat blow by blow

[czernebog]

A more efficient approach, of course, would be to rip it up and start again.

Yep. This is a problem. Narritively, you want to the party to consist of a Solar (Luke), A Lunar (Leia), A Sidreal (Obi-Wan), and a couple of dragonblooded (Han and Chewie). But this isn't a party you can put together, in fluff or in crunch.

From the little I understand of Exalted, it sounds like you would be better off making an ensemble of various exalt types, proclaiming the party to be a ka-tet, and sending them off on an adventure to defend a guardian of the beams in the mythic early days of All-World. Is the primary crunch reason that an ensemble wouldn't work one of power levels?

(I tried reading Exalted 3e core books a couple of times, but they're... not particularly readable. Never having played Exalted before, I had nothing to mindcaulk with, and no one I DM for has even heard of the game, so I really didn't have much stamina for digging through endless pages of charm trees and stilted fluff potpourri.)

[Omegonthesane]

Variance in power levels makes it an iffy proposition to have mixed types of Celestial Exalts, and makes it infeasible to have mixed parties that include dragonbloods.

There are also specific fluff details which would make it difficult in fluff to justify an ensemble cast of different celestial types.

[Username17]

Like Scion, Exalted has very little game other than the excruciatingly detailed combat measured tick by tick and blow by blow. If you aren't swinging swords at each other, the game doesn't really tell you what happens. It's a bullshit fantasy world, so you can't even go to Wikipedia to find out how many people live in an area or what kind of export products are made or whatever. If you want to do something political or economic or something, go fuck yourself. The information you'd need to interact with just does not exist. Not in the mechanics, and not in the setting.

So the fact that the combat numbers of characters from different splat types do not play nicely together is basically the entire game, and the entire game is telling you that you can't play Dragon Blooded and Solars together.

-Username17

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

Like Scion, Exalted has very little game other than the excruciatingly detailed combat measured tick by tick and blow by blow. If you aren't swinging swords at each other, the game doesn't really tell you what happens. It's a bullshit fantasy world, so you can't even go to Wikipedia to find out how many people live in an area or what kind of export products are made or whatever. If you want to do something political or economic or something, go fuck yourself. The information you'd need to interact with just does not exist. Not in the mechanics, and not in the setting.

So the fact that the combat numbers of characters from different splat types do not play nicely together is basically the entire game, and the entire game is telling you that you can't play Dragon Blooded and Solars together.

-Username17

The game has a revised Artifact creation system that is... involved: People either love it or hate it. Essentially if you want to play a MacGuyver that constantly affects the plot with constructing things for shennanigans, it's *perfect*. If you want it in the background and only done on downtime... It falls apart.

The sorcerous works section is compact and to me, innovative. The social combat is also heavy duty, not sure I'd use it.

The economic section though? The leading of a nation section? You know, the things that Exalts are supposed to change? LoL What sections?

And yes, at the basic resolution level unfortunately, after 5+ successes, nothing means anything unless it's for a contested roll to see who gets more. My 11 year old was disappointed when he realized there wasn't much difference between 5 and 10 successes. I tried to embellish things for him more after that in defiance of the boring "rule."

There is a whole ST supplement coming out, that should have been in the core book. It's fairly obvious that despite taking a long time, there were critical decisions in the 3E core that handicapped the whole game.

[Libertad]

Pretty much every person I know who has been interested in Exalted ended up playing Godbound instead. And based on what I hear about the former, we're likely all the better for it.