Anatomy of Failed Design: Exalted

[FatR]

Okay, the long-promised rant about the elitism in Exalted.

6. The lottery winner is you, or there are only 700 people who are supposed to matter in the whole world.

Okay, criticising a While Wolf game for making PCs precious and unique snowflakes might seriously seem as weird as criticising any incarnation of DnD for being too focused on hack and slash. That's sort of a key point of their entire range of original products, after all. Well, at least it was, until "PCs are created to suffer before the GM's might" line of thought achieved the absolute domination during the creation of nWoD. Which only proves that PCs being inherently special, and cool, and elevated over muggles was a key selling point of WW books, considering how hard nWoD fell from the heights hold by its precedessor. And it's not like there is anything wrong with PCs being special - most heroic and practically all superheroic fiction, even the settings where you can get powers by training alone, tend to make the main characters extraordinary indeed (usually by accidents of birth, although winning the superpower lottery can happen too). Moreover, the premise of a bunch of heroes being able to change the world in significant ways inherently comes with the requirement of heroes being special and Better Than Masses. So does the premise of wish fulfillment fantasy (I suppose there are people who play RPGs for other reasons than wish fulfillment, but Exalted is clearly not for them).

So, why rant about this? Well there are two reasons. The first is failed expectations. The second is the fact, that nearly all things can be taken too far, and Exalted certainly takes its elitism too far.

As a side note, this part will concern only fluff. I believe everyone have noticed already, that mechanics tell a different story, and I'm aware of that.

From where the failed expectations came from? Why, of course from the schizofrenic and self-contradictory development of the setting. To see where I'm coming from, let's compare the workings of Exaltation for Solars, the top dogs of the setting, presented in 1st and 2nd edition corebooks (not that these are only versions of Exaltation mechanics, there actually are more, because fluff consistency obviously is not something WW cares about, but let's simplify things).

In the 1st edition, a Solar Exaltation was like a reward for already-present badassery. A thing that explicitly existed to empower brave but inherently-powerless mortals and allowed them to rebel against corrupt Dragon-Blooded aristocracy which received powers from birth and maintaned its rule through a false, oppressive religion, as well as to resist various monsters which wanted to eat the world (either wholesale, or one person at a time). It was given by the sun god, which finally decided to stop sulking after various misdeeds committed by Solars in violation of his teachings in the previous Age and give the world another chance. Yes, there still was a murky matters with PCs being reincarnations-except-not-really of the (corrupt like you wouldn't believe) First Age Solars, which gave them certain memories from the past, but still kept them entirely different people (later authors explained that the memories were recorded by Exaltation shards, or whatever). But on a whole, it is not hard to see where the viewpoint of Solars as incarnations of social mobility and empowerment by heroic spirit and sheer determination came from. Note, that they still clearly were designated overpowered heroes, so I didn't like them.

Now let's look at the 2nd edition corebook, which mostly gathered together various pieces of fluff that appeared in 1st edition supplements. And oh man, did it paint a different picture.
First of all, the criteria for Solar Exaltation have changed. I shit you not, in 2E the access to Exaltation is determined by one's destiny. If you don't have an important destiny from birth or don't get one by accident (mortals cannot ever mess with their destiny in the Exalted world, but magic-users can, for themselves and those who happened to be nearby), you're pretty much fucked, no matter what you do or how much you struggle*. Also, anyone physically handicapped in any way is near-automatically shafted, even though trivial frailties of a human body logically shouldn't even register on the power scale of beings, infused with power, which authors themselves describe as comparable to that of an atomic bomb.

Some people might say (and some people did say) that this is solely a matter of descriptions and does not matter in the actual game, as you, in practice, still are rewarded by Exaltation for being badass, and existential underpinnings of your badassery can be irrelevant. Well, to me that sure as fuck matters, at least when I'm trying to play/run the game where heroes are supposed to know how their fucking world really works, so that they can change it.

But wait, that's far from all. You see, in 2E core the number of Celestial Exaltations is totally and irreversibly fixed at 700 (300 Solars although 150 Exaltations were snatched by Team Evil, 300 Lunars and 100 Sidereals, because the villain faction must be outnumbered). So if Mr. Joe Mortal happens to be badass enough to make Batman cry, but there are currently no free Exaltations? Yeah, canonically he's still fucked and doomed to be irrelevant. (A GM might pull a Terrestrial Exaltation out of his ass, with justification that after millenia everyone has some drop of Dragons' blood - but in 2E this turns you into subhuman cannonfodder, despised by everyone with a clue, and only makes your life easier as long as you restrict yourself to local-level adventuring.)

As a side note, look at the quote below. Yeah, Solars (and other Exalted) are not empowered by a vaguely benevolent god (in fact, 2E mostly runs with the earlier idea of gods as runaway world-maintenance programs who are either too busy shooting celestial crack to care about anything; or think that squeezing mortals for worship, so that they can live in unimaginable opulence, as opposed to mere comfort, while, at most, performing their original duties in return, is the fairest of arrangements), they are picked by a program that explicitly does not give a flying fuck about the consequences of them utilizing their power to the fullest only about their willingness to do something impressive with it. So, basically, people like Genghis Khan and Mao Tse-tung are perfect candidates for a Solar Exaltation. And if that's doesn't seem to be that much of a problem, people like Jack The Ripper pass the test too.

But you know what's funny? Despite being chosen by a mindless program, that runs the lottery with only 150 winning numbers for the entire population of the Creation (and the winners holding their places for millenia, unless something going wrong), and gives absolutely no consideration to the consequences of its choices for the world, Solars still are supposed to be fucking Lawgivers and the corebook seriously implies that the people should get into queue for the privilege of fellating them ASAP. Because they are, like, the best at everything, and the head honcho of heavens said that they should be on top, before fucking off to get perma-high on celestial crack.

And here we are getting to my second point, namely the notion that everything can be taken too far. And the idea that the some group of people is teh speshul and awsum can very easily be taken too far.
Ever noticed, how in various media, featuring characters of inherently and vastly different power levels (most noticeable in shonen anime), it is always the villain who brags about how special and unique he is, and how his powers are so much better that everyone else's, and how this gives him right to be a total asshole? Or how good guys, who are unquestionably overpowered for their settings, like Superman, practically always tend to be examples of humility? That's all for a reason. Overpowered characters who actually are self-conscious and smug about their overpoweredness are unlikeable. Doubly so, when their overpoweredness is produced by an accident of birth or winning the lottery of superpowers. That's yet another facet of the reason I never liked Solars. For fuck's sake, the writers of Exalted even realized this, as this was the characterisation element they most often used to portray the Dragon-Blooded as bad guys. I don't know, how they missed the fact that it applies to Solars, as presented in 2E, thousandfold. Or, maybe, they didn't miss it, but decided to explicitly concentrate on milking the most blatant and shameless forms of wish fulfillment and power fantasies as the main selling points of their game.

And of course, when characters with such rich potential for being word-class dicks, are supposed to be the rightful rulers of the world, with anyone who opposes them being apriori wrong, this isn't even power fantasies, this is wank the likes of which are rarely seen even in fanfictions.

And yes, while it was blurry for a long time, by late 2E anyone who opposes Solars is apriori wrong and either is a loser or works for Team Evil. And the world is supposed to relax and try to enjoy it. And even Lunars aren't spared, as 2E dropped an one-sided magical bond to Solars on them. And about every second new books took an effort to demonstrate, how much ass suck factions, traditionally opposed to Solars.

And the rest of the world gets a lesser versions of this to Celestials in general. Even if Sidereals and Lunars still are supposed to be Solars' bitches, that does not mean that the fluff holds fucking with lesser beings for fun and profit (sometimes literally) against them. They are still naturally above the masses and opposing them is wrong and stupid. The ideal state of the world seriously is subservience to 300 shining overlords and their 400 advisors/consorts. Dragon-Blooded are wrong not because their regime makes mortals subservient to superpowered nobility, but because their version of nobility is not superpowered enough. Seriously. I don't remember if any piece of Exalted fluff where the wholesomeness of such setup is ever quetioned. Even if there are some, the world is currently constructed in such a way, that any compromise between unlimited power of Celestial Exated and any other system, is, as I said before, explicitly the compromise between coolness and fail.

And yet, in contrast with practially all other settings, that postulate some sort of a divine mandate or inborn right to rule (including even earlier White Wolf games, at least those where PCs weren't supposed to be, well, evil and perceived as such), Exalted presents the eponimous Exalted with no moral obligations or conditions whatsofuckingever. It is not merely elitist. By now, authors are increasingly blatantly getting off to the idea of superhuman nobility trampling muggles forever and ever, and muggles loving them for it. Even if they are smart enough to avoid saying this directly.



* "The Exaltation demands heroes. Exaltation is a fundamental alteration of destiny, turn a mortal into a semi-divine weapon. To be capable of benefi ting from the Exaltation’s power, the Exalt-to-be must already have an important destiny. No Exalt is unwilling to wield his power. The Exaltation is not a rational or moral force, though. It simply seeks out beings who can and will wield divine power. It could descend on the most pious of hermits or the most immoral of rascals, so long as the chosen one is of consequence to history and will put its might to use." 2E Core, p. 32.

[Lago PARANOIA]

FatR, that is absolutely awesome and I'm drooling with happiness right now.

Do you have any more rants planned for Exalted or is that about it? I think we pretty much completely destroyed the setting. I guess the only thing left to do is make fun of the authors.

[FatR]

I wanted to rant about fantasy Cold Wars and the reasons they suck, but this is not limited to Exalted and probably deserves its own thread. Unfortunately, work and cold are kicking my ass. I'm not sure when I'll be able to write it.

As a side note, I still wonder, how Exalted managed to inspire an awesome fan community on rpg.net and eslewhere, whose works are way superior to the official setting (in fact, my feelings towards Exalted started turning to hatred when I realized that the official Exalted bears only superficial similarity to rpg.net Exalted). Might have something to do with vagueness of setting presented in the first books - people with active imaginations were drawn to a setting with a solid initial premise and lots of gaps they could fill personally. Applies even to art - not only Exalted has better fan-artists than official illustrators (even if half the fanart they draw is porn), but when these same fan-artists are hired by WW (which, WW, for no discernible reason, does way too rarely), the quality of their works tend to drop.

[Nicklance]

FatR, being an avid Exalted 2ed player, I feel that because I see so much potential wasted in what can be a great setting and game, I want to contribute by tying up loose ends, fixing crap rules and introducing more stuff into it.

Isn't it one of the few reasons why The Gaming Den is founded too?

[DeadlyReed]

Exalted is salvageable but it's too much work. You are seriously better off writing new and separate games for each splat type from scratch.

[FatR]

The system is without hope. While I did a lot of fixes for myself (and may PM them to anyone who cares), this is like bandaging a fist-sized hole through the chest. Unless you care about tactics and mechanical interactions a lot, it's probably better to just use your favorite generic lite system or one of Exalted-lite fanmade systems. Unfortunately, I do care.

The setting had good ideas and potential. But overcoming its current vices requires a massive rewrite. I might post my ideas about that later.

[Mask_De_H]

I'd like to see your fixes for Exalted, for I'm working on a homebrew game and it's good to have a wide variety of sources for game design.

[DeadlyReed]

Me too.

[Username17]

Fixing Exalted is essentially the same difficulty as porting Shadowrun into Fantasy: you have to write a melee combat system - from scratch that is interesting and interacts with the dicepool system in some obvious and vaguely balanced way.

The assistance provided by starting with Exalted begins and ends with the fact that you start with a couple hundred ability names to steal and an expectation by your public that the tactical effects will be completely nonsensical and that this is totally OK, even desirable.

Making up ability names is frankly not difficult, especially when they are bullshit names that sound like they came off a random ability name generator like "Artful Sprinting Theft," Implausible Lunar Panoply" or "Words are not Enough Infliction". I mean fuck, if you have a fanbase who is totally content to write "Tiger and Seahorse Dynasty" down as an actual ability on a character sheet, there's no particular need to dumpster dive through the actual Exalted books to get bullshit names. You could name the abilities just by having your niece shout random shit while you write the words down in order.

But the fact that people will accept that an ability called "Meditations upon the Laurel" is a weapon attack that drains your opponent's power reserves over time - that is actually pretty helpful for a game designer. It means that you can make basically any abstract tactical game at all, and write totally game mechanical abilities and give them totally bullshit random names. If you need an ability that lets you walk off one edge of the battle mat and come out the other edge like Pac Man or Wiz War you can just do that. And call it something like "Horizons are Identical Step" and Exalted fans would be OK with it. If you want to keep position totally arbitrary and have all effects be the equivalent of playing Magic Cards you could do that too.

But that's all the help you get. Exalted is not balanced. It's not tactically interesting. And nothing you can do to the current setup will make it either of those things. Your task, if you choose to accept it, is to make a sword and sorcery themed tactical game from scratch.

-Username17

[mean_liar]

On it.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

Exalted is not balanced. It's not tactically interesting. And nothing you can do to the current setup will make it either of those things. Your task, if you choose to accept it, is to make a sword and sorcery themed tactical game from scratch.

It's a credit to the setting of the game and to the fandom that people keep doing this. How many complete rulesets have people written trying to make Exalted meet your provisions? Like, ten?

[FatR]

I have relatively few general homrules for 2E (because the structure of the game ensures that most changes in the ruleset create shockwaves through Charm trees).

- I award successes for stunts, instead of dice. Not only it makes them a little bit more relevant, it also obviates the need for recalculating DV after every stunt.

- Every two dice past 10/11 count as a success. Apparently, there are people out there who can count the results on 20 dice without slowing down the game, but my group lacks them.

- Speed cannot be lowered below 3, any effects that do that instead improve Rate. But, it seems, everyone plays with this rule.

- All Craft subabilities are subsumed into the basic five from the core. Cause, the only thing WW hate for crafters does is making people specialize at Craft (magitech) and not give a shit about crafts that actually can be used to create cool stuff. Also, raising Crafts beoynd the fist costs half.

- I'm still using 1E rules on the Great Curse for DBs and Siddies. Fuck PC-shafting retcons.

- Instead of Flaws of Invulnerability, you become dead meat lose the use of your perfects associated with a virtue in any scene in which you tried to suppress that virtue. Conviction is still better, but not quite to the same extent. Also, simpler to remember.

- I use one of fan versions of the Familiar Background. Cause, who will be stupid enough to pick an unusually smart pet over Megablade of Swordination? Well, if your pet is Godzilla-sized, or can use magic, there is actually an argument for that.

- We don't bother with knockback and knockdown. But again, as far, as I can tell, no one does.

- We never used social combat. Players are fine with me adjudicating effects of their powers on social interaction through fiat.

- I don't use mass combat rules. Instead, whenever I feel like making a fight with a couple dozens or hundreds of extras, they are divided into a manageable number of units/mobs/grous, each of which is treated as a normal combatant (with stats based on extras that compose it, but obviously buffed).

- I did a massive rewrite of Dragon-Blooded Charms, combined from compilation from net sources, to make them more interesting in play and to bust their power level back to early 1E levels.

- Essence 5+ Charms are more or less excised from the setting. PCs can use the existing examples as templates for developing their own, with every Charm passing my approval, but NPCs aren't supposed to have any.


None of this removes the fundamental flaws, though.

[Lago PARANOIA]

What's so great about the setting that's worth saving, anyway?

If you're going to go through so much work, why not make something from scratch? I can think of many settings that would be a lot more rewarding if you put the effort into it: Skies of Arcadia, Final Fantasy X, Endless Frontier, part 1 Naruto, One Piece, Paper Mario, Legend of Zelda, etc..

Granted, a lot of those places aren't exactly award-winners, but they're still an order of magnitude better than Exalted. I mean, honestly, other than the opportunity to masturbate to your awesomeness like a motherfuck, what's the big deal?

[Username17]

People are willing to write a new mechanic or setting element to replace a mechanic or setting element that is in an already extant game. They are willing to repeat that process for every single game mechanic and setting element in the entire game. They are not, however, wiling to write a whole new game. They are willing to do this work even though superficially it appears that they are in fact writing a whole new game. In that by the time they are done there will be no game mechanics or story elements left from the original product.

This is because making a whole game requires producing a lot of game mechanics and story elements. And most people cant just write a mechanic out of whole cloth to sit motionlessly in space while they consider writing another mechanic. For most people, a Role Playing Game is simply irreducibly complex, and they cannot imagine how to design one in empty space. So what they do is they take an existing system and they evolve it. The entire product exists and thus each piece they make fits into a whole until every piece left in it is a piece they made themselves.

So the fact that a number of people have done full rewrites of Exalted simply means that it's popular. People who are making their own game tend to scaffold off of something they are familiar with.

-Username17

[souran]

Why keep this setting?

Becuase there is an unexplored and desirable playspace here that people like.


Look if you really shake exalted down its just D&D only instead of playing fighters and wizards you play herculeas and gandalf (not the "hes only a level 5 cleric but the hes a celestial being akin to an angel come to save humanity till greater gods say he is through)

Although there probably was some game that was published that let you play such characters, there was not a widely distrubted game (on the scale of d&d or say gurps) really let you play characters who were what exalts were presented as.


Now, the mechanical power level didn't really match the fluff when it came to certain aspects and even high level exalts are put to shame by high level d&d wizards, but that doesn't really matter. The simple fact is no D&D dm is likely to let players be the sons and daughters of the games dieties, or the nephew of eliminster or a blood relation to Orcus. Most gamemasters don't want that headace/sidetrack/derailment.

However, exalted supposedly let people play that out of the box. It fails specaturlly, but if it could be made to work its actually a game idea that several of my friends really like.

[FatR]

What's so great about the setting that's worth saving, anyway?
If you're going to go through so much work, why not make something from scratch? I can think of many settings that would be a lot more rewarding if you put the effort into it: Skies of Arcadia, Final Fantasy X, Endless Frontier, part 1 Naruto, One Piece, Paper Mario, Legend of Zelda, etc..

I disagree. Those of them I know are so dominated by the original story protagonists', that to make them work as a RPG you must make them resemble the setting of that original story in name only.

Granted, a lot of those places aren't exactly award-winners, but they're still an order of magnitude better than Exalted. I mean, honestly, other than the opportunity to masturbate to your awesomeness like a motherfuck, what's the big deal?

Conjuring mental images that people like.

[Josh_Kablack]

What's so great about the setting that's worth saving, anyway?

1. My own personal influence on the proto-version of it.
2. The purposeful excision of Tolkienisms.
3. It's not <<insert D&D setting you personally hate here>>

That's all I can come up with.

[Mask_De_H]

Don't forget the Xbox hueg world, each with it's own theme park version of a standard fantasy story setting.
Weeaboo fightan with Wuxia assist.
A feeling of traversing to fantasy set pieces turned to 11.
Did somebody say weeaboo?

[Orion]

FatR, out of curiosity, what is your complaint with Exalted's Mass Combat rules. In my (very) limited experience, it was one of the few parts of the rules that worked well and did what I wanted it to, to the point where it was a major selling point for me.

[Silent Wayfarer]

Dunno about FatR, but for me Mass Combat produces situations where a Solar, who is normally immune to extras, can suddenly be threatened by those very same extras when they stand closer to each other.

[FatR]

FatR, out of curiosity, what is your complaint with Exalted's Mass Combat rules. In my (very) limited experience, it was one of the few parts of the rules that worked well and did what I wanted it to, to the point where it was a major selling point for me.

First, it is unclear when Mass Combat starts and normal combat ends. As under the original rules leading a unit amounts to being in an invisible warstrider, except better, and simply being in Mass Combat gives gigantic benefits to certain splats, this is a big flaw. Second, if you ever want to fight throngs of extras, without endless rolling for every single combatant, you must pay point tax to become competent in War. While the Mass Combat system is not broken, I suppose, I would have preferred mook squads simply being treated as single entities for the purpose of fighting them.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

First, it is unclear when Mass Combat starts and normal combat ends. As under the original rules leading a unit amounts to being in an invisible warstrider, except better, and simply being in Mass Combat gives gigantic benefits to certain splats, this is a big flaw. Second, if you ever want to fight throngs of extras, without endless rolling for every single combatant, you must pay point tax to become competent in War. While the Mass Combat system is not broken, I suppose, I would have preferred mook squads simply being treated as single entities for the purpose of fighting them.

Also, it has a lot of weird glitches. For example, one of the best, cheapest boosts for a unit of soldiers in Exalted is for their commander to have a lot of health levels - which are explicitly NOT abstract measurements of damage avoidance like hitpoints are sometimes described as. Yes, I did ten thousand situps and now my troops are harder to kill because I can be stabbed more.

It's not irretrivably horrible, it's just quirky in some stupid ways.

[Crissa]

Well, technically, if the commander isn't going to die from random damage to the group, the group will continue to perform better... To a point.

-Crissa

[angelfromanotherpin]

There's a guy on rpg.net called Jon Chung, who really seems like he'd fit in around here, and he has on several occasions gone into detail about the stupidities of the Exalted mass combat system.

Fact: Even as a solo unit, fighting in War gives you free reflexives.
Fact: Even as a solo unit, fighting in War screws everyone who doesn't have War.
Fact: Join War overrides normal combat automatically by RAW.
Fact: There is no lower bound on entities required to Join War.

Therefore, if one doesn't houserule this or prevent it some other way, if PCs notice this interaction, every combat ever will take place in War.

Translation: Look at this bug, it's actually a feature. It's intended that you can Join War with five people as solo units and enjoy free reflexives and penalties to enemy combat stats all you like, for free. It's intended that large-scale area attacks meant to destroy large numbers of mooks actually... don't. It's intended that using mass combat and abstracting out normal combat produce completely different results, defeating the purpose of having a mass combat system, instead creating two mutually exclusive combat systems in the same game. Right. Sure.

If it's in fact intended, it certainly is a terrible decision. Luckily for us, mass destruction events cheerfully ignore mass combat now thanks to a handy patch, so, refer to your friendly neighbourhood Twilight Caste to clear away the chaff with a tasteful WMD and just get on with your regular business.

Jon Chung hates Mass Combat and nothing you say will convince him it is worthwhile.

Because it's shit, and I've hated it ever since I saw it in the Player's Guide and it was called Mail and Steel. Because the You Wear Them abstraction is fucking stupid.

I fire Total Annihilation at a Solar with no War and his 2000 extras. He activates SSE, Soaring Crane and Leaping Dodge. The entire army impossibly dodges the attack and goes sailing through the air 6000 yards away? Really? I take a Directional Titan and fire the city-glassing Eye of Judgement at the blob. This is an infinite damage attack with a large automatic hit radius. Extras should automatically expire, right? No, the 0 War Solar hits Seven Shadow Evasion again, and his tiger warriors make their morale check by luck. Not a single one of them is scratched. Really? Oh, let's see, I activate Eagle-Wing Style, and all these extras are flying along with me... somehow.

Or let's say I want to play Zhuge Liang or some other tactical genius general. Oh look, I can't, because the only thing that matters in Mail and Steel is how good you personally are at killing people, your tactical ability means absolutely nothing. Way to support my character concept.

The Leader keyword is the best thing to be attached to that failure of a system in years - defining what works in mass combat by default and what you need to convince your GM is not stupid before you can do it with a stunt.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

We love that guy. He's like a giant breath of fresh air in the system-waffle culture of White Wolf. There are a lot of people who rally around him, now, because frankly Exalted is mechanically complex enough to attract people who think like Denners.