Anatomy of Failed Design: Exalted

[FatR]

As I'm quite busy and things that piss me off in Exalted are without end, I've decided to split the analysis. This is the first part, mostly concerning the basic mechanics of combat resolution.

Warning: after tangling with this game for many years, I've built up a lot of spite towards the clusterfuck White Wolf calls its mechanics (the setting as a whole also started to suck hardcore by early second edition of the game, but I still like at least some parts). I'll try to be as fair as I can, but expect a lot of rambling, swearing and foaming at the mouth.

1. oWoD characters are way too durable for our superhero fantasy, or basics of combat failure.

So, Exalted, the attempt of White Wolf to create a high fantasy game, where you play actual, world-important badass. "Will you be the savior of
Creation or one of the terrible menaces that beset your world?" or so they say around p.13 of the first corebook. Suggested resourses a few pages later list things from The Iliad to Final Fantasy, as inspirations for the game, so you would expect alot of superheroism and specialness from the characters*. You would also expect, that they come up with a new core system, or at least seriously redo and rescale their Storytelling mechanics. That would be totally necessary for a wealth of reasons, starting from the overall increase in power level to genre change that requires more, you know, ability to do heroic stuff, from characters, right?

Apparently, wrong, at least in the opinion of WW designers, who, it seems, learned nothing from the failure of Aberrant. Only in the second Edition Exalted's core resolution system was made significantly different from the Storylelling engine, and even then in all the wrong ways. To elaborate why this is horribly wrong. First of all, scale. The Storylelling system was made for WoD games, where you play low-key supers. Dicepools that you have rolled to do stuff scaled from 1 to 10 for normal humans (10 being the absolute peak of human potential), and supernaturals within the intended playable range had relatively limited ability to add more dice to their pools. My most twinked oWoD characters had only about 16-18 dice in their "Killing People" dicepools. Now, in Exalted you play supers without "low-key" part. The designers decided to emulate that by keeping your basic Attributes and Abilities within the human range, but giving you alot of things that can temporarily increase your dicepool. As a result, one of PCs in my very first Exalted game (obviously, not very optimized, and of the weakest character splat**), once rolled 28 dice to hit an opponent! Now, rolling 10+ d10s and counting how many of them come up with 7+ already slows the game, but 20+? That's insanity. That was also utterly predictable. And the designers still decided to implement that!

Second, in the Storytelling your characters are quite fragile. A single attack delivering damage that you cannot soak can potentially strip you of all your seven hit points, ahem, Health Levels. This is OK if the system tries to tell you that fair fights with enemies of similar strength are foolishness. This is not OK in the game where you're supposed to be, at the very least, as tough as Hector or Lu Bu. What did designers of Exalted about this problem? They made it fucking worse. You see, in oWoD you often had some ways to cheat death. Vampires were quite hard to permanently kill with bullets and swords, so being incapacitated in combat was not necessarily a Game Over. Werewolves had ability to try and regenerate on the spot after a fatal wound. Demons had ability to try and possess a new body, after getting their old one ventilated. In Exalted? In Exalted you have a very small window of swiftly bleeding to death after losing your Health Levels, and after that you just die. Did I mention, that you're stuck in the world with no resurrection and, depending on splat, your healing powers can be piss-weak? Oh, you can get a little more Health Levels, but they are costly and, generally, aren't even close to compensating for increased damage of weapons alone, never mind attack Charms. There are weapons that add 12 or more dice to damage, with each dice removing a Health Level 40% of the time, and remember, that you only have 7 Health Levels, as a base. You can improve your lifebar with Charms, but they add only 2-4 Health Levels per purchase. At absolute maximum, you can have 27 Health Levels at chargen, and that's only achievable by belonging to the splat that gets best Health Level returns for their Charm investments, and completely gimping yourself by blowing 5 out of 9 your starting Charms on that, as well as raising Stamina to the max. By comparison, a damage pool of 20 is modest for dedicated big weapon users. 12-15 is common for those who uses weapons with a good balance of stats, instead of focusing on the damage (although in 2E it's strictly better to focus on the damage for half of the splats). My last characters had Damage 14 after hulking out, for example, and he was built for style, as opposed to efficiency. And the game gives characters means to attack 3-4 times per action right from the start. In the first edition, you could somewhat compensate for the inflation of damage by wearing armor, which was very useful. This, by the way, nerfed anyone who wasn't carrying big fucking weapons with +alot to damage. Yes, your unarmed martial artists, knifefighers and swashbucklers may just go cry quietly in a corner. You pretty much needed a Buster Sword to be not boring to play (because pinging enemies to death over a dozen of rounds is boring) if not irrelevant. In the second edition armor was nerfed hard. And the biggest, most damaging weapons were boosted. This made you die considerably faster, without making the above-mentioned classic archetypes competitive. And in both editions you pretty much just die, if an enemy supplements a successful attack with a decent damage-enhancing Charm or two. In short, as a result of taking the oWoD system and adapting it very poorly to the new setting, the basic math of combat is fucked and your world-conquering superhero is actually fragile as glass in battle against anything remotely close to his level of power. Later I'll demonstrate how the designers tried to deal with this obvious problem in various roundabout ways, each of which screwed up the game (instead of, you know, fixing it at the root).

Third, the Storytelling system is just not a very good system in general. Dexterity is king, Appearance is useless, Backgrounds are broken, and so on, you know the drill. In Exalted they have tried to fix some of the problems, by, say, making the target number fixed (7+ on d10 is always a success), but added new and worse ones. For all their flaws, pre-Revised oWoD mechanics were intuitive and relatively light. Exalted, particularly the second edition, is anything but, thanks to constant crunch bloat. Not only you have more rules for resolving stuff in general and these rules are more complicated; you also have a huge lists of Charms, magical bling of various sorts and whatever. Knowing them and their synergies is incredibly important for building an optimal character. This is a problem by itself, and building up all of this cruch on a fundament that wasn't sound to begin with causes obvious problems. Such as making lots of theoretically present options suck balls just because (Strength-based "Mighty Glacier" warrior? Whatsthat?) or taking the known flaws, such as punishing generalists and rewarding specialists, to the extreme.


2. The duel of turtles, or how they tried to make Exalted combat playable.

So, we've established that Exalted combat is pretty much screwed-up, thanks to your PC being not much inherently tougher than mortals in the world where everyone of importance throws around incredibly deadly attacks. Designers themselves have noticed this, and tried to apply the obvious fix of making characters really hard to hit. Unfortunately, the specific ways of implementing this fix are total ass in both editions.

In the first edition your hope and salvation was stacking your scene-long defensive Charms. (Unless you're from a spat that doesn't really have them, in which case you must get one of rare tricks that work just as well, such as uber-regeneration or a Charm that makes you take only 1 Health Level of damage per round no matter what, or accept your highly-probable untimely death.) This allows you, in the very basic form, to apply both parry and dodge to an attack (without sacrificing actions). As a result, you'll generally have much more dice in your entirely reflexive "avoiding attack" dicepool, than the enemy has in its "hitting you" pool. You also can back this up with "perfect defences" - another obvious result of WW recognizing crappyness of their own math. These are Charms that allow you to deflect an attack of arbitrarily high strength and accuracy for a flat cost. The obvious side effect of that is gruesome killing of the very concept of big, flashy, massive, expensive attacks and spells being actually useful in combat. But at least in the first edition perfect defences were expensive enough to use them only in emergencies - say, when an opponent activates enough Charms to likely get through your scene-long defences. Still, the result was predictable - the dedicated high-end combatants were almost unkillable in the first edition, unless caught by surprise, with their scene-longs inactive (in which case the above-mentioned lethality of the system kicked right back), or confronted with massively more powerful opponents. There were some limited ways to get past (stacked scene-longs + perfects) turtle combos, but it still was so bad, that even the biggest proponents of the game flat-out said that the GM should compensate for this by providing other goals for combat scenes than killing the opposition, otherwise the system will produce long and tedious slugfests. (It should be mentioned, that in Exalted there are more than enough opponents for which stabbing you in the face is a goal in itself and which are extremely unlikely to be stopped in any way, other than stabbing them in the face.)

So, what the designers of the second edition decided to do about all these glaring flaws? Well, shit, we're talking about nWoD-era WW designers here. Of course they made everything even worse. Well, they had just enough braincells to figure out that fights like this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrNXjE0BeS0
suck balls, particularly when you don't have a CPU to make all the calculations for you and provide pretty graphics. That was probably not hard, considering all the complaints on the forums. They, however, had not enough of them to notice that core of the problem is in the system underlying math. So they came up with another Charm-based fix. Remember those perfect defenses I mentioned above? In the second edition they are no longer expensive. Moreover, you can relatively easily (by paying annoying, but not crippling point tax) ensure that you'll have them available no matter what, so, unlike the first edition, you cannot ever get past the enemy's turtle shell via surprise attack or any other sort of advantage. What does this achieve, besides ass-raping "big attack" users, such as sorcerers (sorcery is relatively slow to use in Exalted and usually unleashes one powerful attack) again, this time without lube? Well, in effect your Essence (mana) and Willpower (mana of another color + pool of social Health Levels) become your true HPs. As long as you have them you pretty much cannot be touched by anything harmful ever***. Except, you also cannot ever lose more than 4 HPs from a single attack. Oh, and other defenses are highly unreliable, outside of about one splat-specific build. As I already said, armor, and ability to soak damage in general was nerfed, and the heavy weapons were made more damaging. Ability to parry/dodge attacks without perfects also became much less effective: although in 2E you can do it reflexively without using Charms, your cannot stack parry and dodge, and your defense value hard-capped at the level than ensures getting hit by an opponent of equal strength about half the time. And taking hits is generally unacceptable. So, you must spam perfects againg non-mook opponents. Turning the magic juice you once used to do cool things into your HPs, which you obviously must conserve, is quite bad for a game that is supposedly all about doing cool things. But this wouldn't have been that horrible, if the system had explicitly acknowledged that any combat tactics not based on spamming lots of zero-cost/very low-cost attacks just shouldn't exist anymore. As you can guess, it doesn't. A lot of Charms is designed on the assumption that making a single attack per action at a hefty cost or pumping Essence motes into adding effects to your attacks actually does something in serious combat. Well, for that matter it does something, it is just that something is draining your lifebar for no effect. If your enemy is out of juice you'll murder him anyway, so combinations of Charms that upgrade your attack from "massive hurt" to "certain death" can only be useful if said enemy made a suicidal move that leaves him without perfects for an action. Even then you stand a good chance of pulverizing him with your normal attack routine. As a result of ignoring all that, 2E provides very, very, very many trap choices. And recommends some of them to new players as "good". And punishes you for using flashy effects, instead of just swinging your mega-hammer some more. And, of course, it encourages focus fire. And eliminates any negative conditions between "fine" and "fine red mist". And still makes battles between fully tricked-out characters last for way too long, because you can also have tricks that help to avoid being targeted by more than one attack from the enemy's flurry, albeit at extra Essence cost, so lasting for 7-8 actions (unless you're gangbanged by multiple attackers) is fairly easy.

But that's not all yet! Another consequence of Essence turning into HPs is ability to restore your lifebar by things that once restored just your mana. 2E got a fair bit of them as a legacy of 1E and then added some more. You can create a perpetual Essence motion machine that is nigh-impossible to kill right out of the corebook, and it isn't even hard (just combine a Twilight Caste Solar with heavy armor and soak-boosting spells - one of the two builds that actually can shrug off unenhanced hits from its peers - with Essence-Gathering Temper Charm, that gives you Essence for getting hit, then perfect away any attack that is actually threatening you). Yes, this is as broken, as Wish loops and will be banned by almost any GM, but this illustrates the problem nicely. One particularl consequence of that really can fuck the game up for many players. You see, in Exalted you have "stunts" - the system awards you for imaginative descriptions of your actions with a small amount of extra dice and Essence/Willpower recovery. And Essence/Willpower recovery. As you can guess, stunting as often as GM allows you is mandatory for maintaining your combat efficiency in 2E, even though stunt dice bonuses hardly matter in the world of perfect defenses spam. Also, as you can guess, stunts are not something that you do for fun anymore, but a word tax that you must pay to GM for staying alive****. Which sucks.

This dependence of whole splats on a particular combination of powers for their basic combat needs illustrates the general design flaws of Exalted. The number of viable options, compared to the number of theoretical options, is very narrow in this game, and gap between "viable" and "everything else" is very wide. Even difference between Exalted characters and mere mortals pales in comparison. You simply play on different levels. So you must shoehorn your character into one of a few workable builds to get Da Powah - and, what's worse to simply survive without GM fudging dice for you - and characters without these builds, or, even worse, access to them (due to hailing from a gimped splat, not having the requisite power stats, or whatever) just cannot compete at all. Except, maybe, in a narrow set of favorable circumstances in 1E - and never in 2E, as there is no tactics, tricks or situations that can bridge the gap between those who have viable builds and those who haven't in 2E. While a massive advantage in sheer stat numbers can allow to defeat a basic perfect turtle without being one, such difference is unachievable at remotely comparable EXP levels. This fucks over whole splats, by the way. Not everyone in 2E has the basic survival packgage without which the game is super-lethal and requires serious GM fudging to keep PCs alive! Isn't that a beautiful fucking design? Massive difference between various character tiers also completely warps certain other aspects of the game, which will be mentioned below.


Another endemic flaw, that is not so immediately obvious from the description above, but really put a cherry on top of this ass-shaped cake, is the lack of tactical options and diversity. Exalted has no tactical positioning system (the second edition has tactical timing system, but as the best action is nearly always "attack every time and make sure to attack as often as you can" it is largely meaningless), so only interactions of powers can provide any sort of meaningful decisions in combat. And these interactions boil down to finding an action that works best against your opponent's defenses, then repeating it until one of the combatants dies. Both editions have about one way to build viable defenses per splat, these ways can be very similar between splats, and, particularly in 2E, there is no variety in existing ways of overcoming those viable defenses - the problem exacerbated by wonderful decisions like tying the combat competency of an entire splat to a single Charm*****.

Let's, for example, look how Solars, the main splat and one with most mechanical support by far, fight in 2E. Against enemies worth mentioning, you either spam your best Extra Action Charm with big-ass weapon, or, if they can jump away from your massive flurries, you spam your basic attacks. You activate the same defensive combo every action. Maybe you kite enemies with archery attacks, in which case you win if your movement is better, and lose if it isn't or if you need to get an enemy that does not need to leave an enclosed space (unless you have built an archer that abuses a theoretical variant of a supplement-book artifact to make its archery attacks do obscene damage). Maybe you have an Essence-expensive attack combo that serves as a "Kill" button, which you press against the enemies that leave themselves open or GM-invented big monsters (official big monsters can be easily killed by repeatedly swinging your big-ass weapon). And that's it. Note, that other splats either have even less options, or don't really have any. Note also, how fucking fighters in 3.X have more diversity. Seriously. In a game that's supposed to reflect a seriously huge range of sources of inspiration, remember. In truth, Exalted, particularly 2E, cannot even model their its own fucking iconic characters without putting them on a very swift-sailing failboat. (In particular: while you can get away with not wearing armor in 2E, concepts like "being an unarmed martial artist", "fighting with vaguely dagger-like weapons" or "being a combative sorcerer" are so inherently gimped in both editions, that they just do not work at all against opponents with comparable powers, barring maybe a few exotic abuses. And that's three of their five iconics.) And this stylistic narrowness pisses me off much more than any potential for breakage ever did.




3. Swords, not words, or why Diplomancers aren't welcome in the Creation.

This question is not hard to answer. See how Exalted characters are separated into distinct tiers with vast gaps in power between them? It is not hard to guess how this breaks social characters. Making people your bitches is much more advantageous than stabbing them in the face, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, this usually means that mindfuck powers must either be restricted enough to be almost useless or be very overpowered. And in the game, like Exalted, the power scale isn't remotely gradual, but makes huge jumps between each tier (mortal -> Exalted -> turtle-build Exalted, and so on), this problem is very prominent. Either you can make people of your power tier your bitches, in which case your diplomancy is broken as fuck. Or you can't, in which case you're useless, because ability to raise armies of fanatical mook followers or make muggles suck your cock and ask for more doesn't mean squat in the world where armies of mooks are notoriously useless and muggles are nothing more than scenery.

I'm not sure, whether authors of 1E were aware of this problem, or not. Because social powers in 1E are not written coherently. The fluff implies, that things you can do with them are indeed diplomancy, so social characters must be overpowered enough to make Chuck Norris cry (five successes on a social roll seriously are supposed to be an equivalent of switching the targer's attitude to Fanatic in 3.X, and getting about 10-15 successes is not particularly hard). But mechanics... do not reflect this at all, which shouldn't come as a surprise to those familiar with WoD. So your awesome social rolls basically have the result of "GM's Fiat", except for certain Charms that have their own individual mechanics for various forms of explicit mindfvck. So, those splats who have lots of direct mindfuck Charms (mostly Solars) totally rock your face off in social situations anyway (because said Charms tend to be hard to recognize as magical mental influence, hard to protect yourself from, and, while not granting any sort of direct mind control, still can make people your bitches, or at least pawns), and others must contend with the fact that their social Charm trees and abilities are rarely worth the trouble.

By the time of 2E the new team of designers realized that social rules of Exalted fucking suck, because either you use brokenly good direct mindfuck, or the results are really determined by GM fiat and roleplay (there is some middle ground, mostly in the form of things that do not interact with social rolls directly, such as information-gathering Charms, but not enough of it). As, again, you can expect they learned all the wrong lessons from the mechanical failure of 1E. In 2E the social interactions were given their own system of "social combat", which complicates these interaction quite severely, and officially makes those of them that aren't based on direct supernatural mindrape stop working. I've already mentioned, that Willpower points serve as your social Health Levels (you can spend them to resist social/mental effects). The problem is, Willpower rating usually hangs around 8, and temporary Willpower is very easy to recover (a successful 2-die stunt gives you a point, so even if you don't abuse RAW by stunting some random shit you do while trying to ignore a diplomancer, to avoid any chance of action failure, you are at least supposed to enter a conversation with most of your pool intact, unless you are fresh from a major battle), and attacks other than explicit and direct mindrape cannot strip you of more than 2 temporary Willpower points per game scene. So, unless you brainwash a prisoner, or something, you just cannot convince anyone who does not want to be convinced, period. You either fail, or hope that your GM likes your roleplaying enough to make the target not spend Willpower to resist. Why then you needed to buy all these dots in social stuff? Ask designers, not me.

By the way, this problem was brought up within days of 2E corebook release. Authors (Rebecca Borgstrom, to be precise, although others spew the same shit now) responded by cooking up and posting on the Web some bullshit about how spending Willpower to negate social attacks is suddenly a big deal. Why this is bullshit? Because spending Willpower for any other purpose, is most definitely NOT a big deal. The combat system of 2E pretty much assumes that you blow at least a point of Willpower every fvcking action, to make Charms that form your turtle shell of invulnerability work together. And, as I noted, recovering Willpower is easy as pie. You seriously can burn 2 times your rating in temporary Willpower points per serious combat. Moreover, if your fucking system needs special guidelines about Willpower spending just to fucking work at all, why the fuck you didn't put them into the fucking book? Rebecca Borgstrom, seriously lost my respect at this point.

Oh, and how about outright mindrape? Well, the problem is, the target still can spend some Willpower to resist the first attempt. Then, as things like throwing off thought-bending enchantments by a supreme effort of will are not something that one might miss (and there are many, many ways to see magic and therefore automatically detect things like this), the target can roll for initiative. 99% of social powers are explicitly useless in combat timeframe, so this negates social monkeys almost automatically. Therefore, just killing those who attempt social-fuing you into submission is always an answer, while talking people who intend to kill your ass from the beginning (and the world of Exalted provides no shortage os such people for any splat) out of it is practically impossible. Moreover Solar Exalted (and those who duplicate their Charms, including the most dangerous faction of BBEGs) can make themselves practically immune to mindfuck forever with about 2 Charms. Accidentally, Solars are about the only splat that has decent mindfuck powers, everyone else is inferior in this department by a huge margin. Also, if you follow me, you should already know, that ability to make lesser beings into your bitches is not that good in Exalted, because differences between the tiers of character power are massive. So, brainwashing people that you can defeat despite not being completely combat-optimized, to assemble a Team Meatshield, might be not particularly useful. They have tried to fix the latter problem problem, by introducing mass combat rules, that turned armies of mooks into invisible giant robots, that granted their commanders massive bonuses to combat stats, while benefitting from full protection of commander's Charms. No, I too don't know how ability to make your own body briefly impervious to damage can allow you to protect your army of cannonfodder from a nuke. Apparently, the current designers of the line don't know too, as in their mass combat supplement (Scroll of Kings) this ability was ruled out of existence and now sufficiently big area attacks just kill your mook armies outright. So, raising them in the first place is still not worth the effort.

In short, Exalted, particularly 2E, has one of the most unspeakably awful systems of social interactions I've ever seen. It combines worst of the both worlds - heavy crunch and complete reliance on GM fiat.

*In retrospect, reading these sources should have been a first warning that we can expect a lot of crap from this game. Not only the inspirations are not at all compatible in feel, style, and power level, making the massive crossover between them a very hard mechanical task (in all likelyhood impossible for White Wolf hacks), but also we have bullshit like "The Lady and The Ten Who Were Taken are excellent inspirations for Exalted. Shapeshifter would make an
excellent Lunar Exalted, and The Lady would make an very fine Solar. Also, the slow but very powerful magic of this world is a good inspiration for Storytellers trying to imagine what Exalted's sorcery looks like." Three guesses what part dumbfucks from WW got wrong. And guesses other that "The Taken and their likes could complete their spells only a little slower than DnD 3.X mages do" don't count.
**Yes, different playable - playable! - splats in Exalted are massively different in power. No, don't ask me how you're supposed to play Terrestrial Exalted in a mixed party with Solar Exalted, if Terrestrial PCs are told by mechanics to suck Solar PCs dicks in every conceivable area of competence. Even though not making them more equal at least at the start is counterintuitive, and not even allowing such option at chargen is dumb, considering that most Terrestrials are older and more experienced in-setting.
***Well, actually that's arguable. The definition of "attack" on which the perfect defences are based either allows you to parry arguments, or, if your GM thinks that this is stupid, does not protect you from combat-time Mindfvck Fields, an example of which we have in the 2E corebook.
****This isn't the only problem with stunts, by the way. The definition of what stunts can do (namely, whether they allow actions you can't attempt normally or only enhance actions that you can attempt) remains maddeningly contradictory and unclear even after two whole editions.
*****Lunars and Claws of the Silver Moon, if anyone is curious.

[Lago PARANOIA]

FatR, that is just perfect.

Can I do a few requests?

Celestial/Sidereal Martial Arts
Magic Items how they are broke
Those dumb crystals that let you store the essence of demonz
Going off the beaten path once you have a character build in mind
The lack of any real challenges for Solar Exalts setting-wise
How fucked up the setting is to begin with and how the landscape should be a smouldering crater rather than an empire on the decline
Exalted's fucked up 'magic and elitism is cool, going above your station or combining weak forces is bad' morality.

[Mask_De_H]

I love you for this FatR, Exalted seems so cool until you actually read it. Then it is made of broken dreams and failure.

I can try to cover some of your stuff Lago; I'm not the most knowledgeable on Exalted, but I'm bitter enough and dumpster dove for long enough to give at least brief snippets.

Celestial/Sidereal Martial Arts:
Japanese Title: Splat Races Get Nice Things? No Wait, Just Solars.

Okay, the Celestial Martial Arts are a strange bunch. They are supposed to give you cool things to do involving combat but are primarily for Solars. Each splat gets a "Hero Style", which is basically their unarmed combat charms. If you're a Solar, you are the Invincible Sword Princess with a Goremaul and don't give a fvck like Dr. Dre. If you're anything but a Sidereal, you don't give a fvck. If you *are* a Sidereal, enjoy having some of the most awesomely mistranslated power ever.

This rings doubly true if you stick with the Core book, there are two styles and about as many useful bits in them (although there is a $TEXAS damage trick involving the SHS throw equivalent of Dungeoncrasher: just choose the ground as a target.) However, they try to get you to care with guns and kinky S&M-fu, splats and random powers. Heavy on the random powers. Take Dreaming Pearl Courtesan for example: you go from "Minor things to help you not get splattered for being an unarmed fighter you dumbass", to "Long-range Essence based flurries and reflexive flurry grapple/tentacle rape" to "Social-Fu sustained SoD" to "oh god im a gazelle-carp what is this i dont even" The other Celestial styles are rather boring, and most of the silly shit is in the Terrestrial styles that Dragon-Blooded get. Granted, if you're a Solar (and unless you're a furry or you hate yourself, why wouldn't you be), you can take Terrestrial styles like it ain't no thang. Hell, the fluff basically tells you if you're a Solar, you can do that stuff in your sleep already.

Oh, and Sidereal Martial Arts. Taking a Sidereal Martial Art is akin to starting a Djinn Wish-brothel. The game is irrevocably changed and you can basically tell the ST to open his fake-fanged lined mouth and suck it DX style. The straight up Save or Dies and Die, No Saves are in Sid MAs. Either Charcoal March of Spiders or Citrine Poxes of Contagion allows you to with two charms, basically wipe out any and everyone you can see. Just straight up nuke them. Kung-fu Freudianism is a cross between rewriting the campaign, NPC by NPC and telling the ST/other players/yer mum to hand over their sheet so you can defile it. Even the second least crazy style is just over the top, it has a NO U button as the second charm. The least crazy style gives you huge armor bonuses and after you take the lamesauce starter forms, allows you to annul or redirect any Charm or Charm combo on a character that's around.

That's not even talking about the basic Sid stuff they get, which is far and away better than anything but a Solar (and if you're an Eclipse Caste, you get that stuff on top of your Solar awesomeness)

Magic Items:
Japanese Title: Rage! 2E Is Less Strict Than This!

I don't quite remember how silly the magic items get, but Manses + Artifact Weapons = Magic Item Economy in D&D, only everything is fuck-off rare. Unless you get the Craft tree that ends in Craftsman Needs No Tools, and then you can shit out Artifact Daiklaves. You need an Artifact weapon to stay relevant, as well as Artifact Armor, several Manses/Hearthstones and some other random magical bullshit (like GIANT ROBOTS and laser weapons.) Magic items are just far and away better than anything ever. Plus, there are hearthstones (the things that you need to blow XP to just have the ability to possibly have) that give you +4 to your relevant combat stat and others that change your gender.

Going off the Beaten Path:
Japanese Title: Laugh! Creativity, What's That?

Things in Exalted cost a lot. There are the Charm chains you need to not die, and that takes a great deal of time, effort, and XP expenditure to grab. Once you have an idea for a build, everything needs to go into it. Melee? Prepare to blow a good 4-5 charm slots so you can go nuts and kill things, as well as Fivefold Bulwark. Thrown? What are you, dense? You only get like 3 or 4 charms in that one. Archery? 5 or 6, and half of them are traps. Martial Arts? 10 charms to mastery, and you need to take the suck to get to the good stuff (if there is any). Want to leap from treetop to treetop like a Wuxia hero? You must be this tall to fly, as well as sink two charms into it. And the real sick thing is, you only get like 11 charms at chargen. And if you want to live, you cough up five+ to get the basic survival package. It's quite nice, if by "nice" you mean "infuriating". Oh, and enjoy taking months in game time training and getting dicked by your ST so you can grab a new one in game.

Lack of Challenges
Japanese Title: Sigh! It's Lonely Being Uber

Solars are awesome. Incredibly awesome. Twilights are infinite Essence machines, Eclipses get all of the delicious dumpster-diving awesome (like an alternate way to flurry that Spirits get and some of the poorly worded Sidereal stuff), and the others are just innately more awesome than other splats. A well-put together Solar can whup on anything outside of a Dragon-Blood gangbang, and that's only because DBs get an unblockable, unfvckwitable Essence-drain attack. Solars are supposed to be hunted and feared, but they can dismantle muggles like so much wet tissue paper, most of the baddies just can't compete unless you specifically make them into the uber-builds (A Lunar taking Silvered Claws and becoming a berserker T.Rex that pisses heroin for example), and if it weren't for the ST/the setting going "lol no u dont idiort," there is no conceivable reason that Solars haven't found their rightful place as the Prince of Bel-Air rulers of Creation again. The ST has the same problem that players have: if the NPCs don't have the skills, they die in a round or so, if they do, it's a war of mote attrition.

The Setting Is More Fvcked Up Than 4Chan
Japanese Title: Shock! Even We Wouldn't Make This Crap.

See the previous entry, except for the fact that the Sidereals control reality. And the Abyssals are nega!Solars with the same basic powers. And the Wyld is comprised of fae eggshells with hammers. And the Lunars are furry raep machines. And the Solars are more awesome than pretty much anybody. There is no reason that with so many people with so many crazy powers and so little restraint between them shouldn't be trying to wreck shit every chance they get. The Terrestrials are the weakest group, and they're not too plentiful. Attrition is on the other freak's sides, all their Essence draining bullshittery aside. And outside of Lunars and Solars being OMG LUVERS 4EVA!!! everybody hates everybody else. It's like having a world full of North Koreas. With nukes. Kung-fu nukes. That shoot more nukes, because if you ain't flurrying, you ain't shit.

This says nothing of how much weeaboo wankery, fantasy kitchen sink, let's-see-how-much-Asian-shit-we-can-rip-off, counterculture shit is in the game. It's a shambling mess of ideas and xerox copies of cooler things, lurching and vomiting Ryan Kinnard-penned topless women. Creation is fvckhuge, and each pole is supposed to be something different: North is Russia, South is India, West is D&Dland, and East/Center are The Parts of Asia We Care About(TM). There's so much there, and it's all poorly fleshed out. There's just vast expanses of nothing, and maybe one or two cities you care about. It's not a World of Adventure, it's a featureless plain cum JRPG map.

Phew, that felt good. Now, it's been a while since I've even opened an Exalted book, so this is from memory.

[mean_liar]

Having attempted to play Exalted once by poring through the splats, I came up with...

A Full-Moon Lunar Tyrant Lizard who spams no-Essence attacks in order to conserve Essence for... well... I couldn't figure out what I was conserving it for since I didn't have any defenses worth a damn. Soak was high in the 20s or 30s but Hardness was 2 or 3, I think. Not enough.

And then I realized that I had built this thing because it was a Lunar game and there were, to me, no other builds worth a damn other than some DnD-style Heavy Armor + Grand Goremaul + Shield or Baneclaw action. It was pathetic.


RE: Artifacts.

Get some. The investment in them: 1pt per pip, with a 4- and 5-pip Artifact being able to "reshape Creation" or some shit by the guidelines, as well as mimic Charm-level effects, means that if you don't start the game laden down with gimmicky artifact bullshit you have just shot off your own foot, because what the fuck else did you spend your Freebies on and did you really think it meant anything?

You figure out pretty quick that there are one or two Charm trees that you're going to positively need (attack and defend and then you're done), but other than that your heavy lifting is all going to be done with Artifacts that your ST is sure as shit not going to give you once the game actually starts.

[FatR]

To Mask_De_H, a small correction: theoretically, all Solars can learn Sidereal MA, it is just that it is hard to justify in-setting and Essence requirements bar PC-level Solars from the best stuff.

Also, I disagree, that Solars have no challenges in the setting as written. They have. It is just that characters that can challenge them are so ridiculously overpowered, so much beyond everyone else, that their presence crashes the setting, therefore hardly anyone who realizes full implications of their statblocks uses them as written. Well, I'll dissect this in more details later.

Lago, I'll try to offer my opinion on the other things that you requested to analyse in the next parts.

[mean_liar]

1pt Ally - Gold faction sifu, preferably with a little Sorcery and maybe even the Key so that they can teleport to you and impart everything they know in an hour. Anyone can learn Sidereal Martial Arts if they can scrounge up the Essence and XP. One Freebie Point gone, o no!

The lesson here is that Backgrounds are, of course, stupid.

[FatR]

That depends on whether GM feels like allowing Allies to ignore in-setting policies of their faction. And he might not, as the lengths at which Allies are willing to go for you were always determined by fiat (so this Background can be either ridiculously good or functionally worthless, depending on GM). Also, you still cannot meet Essence requirements for Essence 6+ stuff, period.

[souran]

Honestly,

[Edit] For some reason sections two and 3 were not diplaying. Your analysis of exalted combat is quite on point.

The whole game boils down to incredibly stupid position that a differnce of 1 essence point makes you invincible. A person with even 1 more essense will always have more motes left after everybody has shot their wad. Then they walk around and use middling essence powers to kill everybody.

This basically makes it so that the party facing one tougher opponent never works. Either they are always too easy becase they don't have the ability to reuse their charmed defense, or they are inviincible beause they have a higher essence than the players in the party.

So the only real thing that hte players can fight is "a group of indentical in number and similar in power exalts" I.E. everybody has their own personal doppleganger twin who is just like them but really evil! Boy are we storytelling NOW! I always thought that the problem with heroic fantasy was that it was not structured like episodes of G.I. Joe.

I get that as super hero types in fantansy the players should not be challenged by simple things like climbing or jumping or whatever.

However, the thing that makes even guys like herculeas heoric is that they were still challenged. Exalted has NOTHING that is remotely challening to any player who can add. No foes, no situations, I got really frustrated running the game because even though there were dice and mechanics it was really just magical tea party with rolling of 20 d10 every few moments to prove how cool somebody is.

[Mask_De_H]

To Mask_De_H, a small correction: theoretically, all Solars can learn Sidereal MA, it is just that it is hard to justify in-setting and Essence requirements bar PC-level Solars from the best stuff.

Oh yeah that's right. That becomes a moot point if you're playing 1st Age/High XP start, but that's akin to starting 3.5 at level 15. And in the Sid arts, the starter and form charms are Essence 4-5. As are the next step up, which is where the NO U charms start coming in.

[Orion]

The whole game boils down to incredibly stupid position that a differnce of 1 essence point makes you invincible. A person with even 1 more essense will always have more motes left after everybody has shot their wad. Then they walk around and use middling essence powers to kill everybody.

Could you elaborate on this? I've only played exalted once, and I could definitely see most of the problems mentioned, but this one puzzles me. If you have a team of young exalts ganging up on any Abyssal, isn't he going to have to perfect parry more times per round and thus run out faster? Sure, if you let him stunt every parry he's still immortal, but then so is everyone else.

EDIT: Also, whoever said appearance is useless is crazy. Appearance is broken. It adjust the DEFENSE VALUES for social attacks point for point in your favor, meaning one point of appearance = two points of Charisma + two points of Manipulation.

Except if you're a Solar you can use skill excellencies, which makes one point of charisma AND one point of manipulation, together, ALMOST as good as a point of appearance. If you're a Lunar, however, you take Appearance Excellency and like it.

[souran]

Could you elaborate on this? I've only played exalted once, and I could definitely see most of the problems mentioned, but this one puzzles me. If you have a team of young exalts ganging up on any Abyssal, isn't he going to have to perfect parry more times per round and thus run out faster? Sure, if you let him stunt every parry he's still immortal, but then so is everyone else.

A person who has 1 more essense than a single foe is always going to beat that foe. The formula for your motes allows you to make big leaps. Now if you have groups it gets a little wonky, but it is possible for 1 well built character to have more motes than 2 or 3 less optimized ones. Or even a character who figures out how to optimize motes/demanse compared to a character who optimizes attacks.

Your essence also acts as a soft cap for a number of powers. limiting how deep into some trees you can get and other bs stuff, including my favorite minimum damage on a hit. High raw essence means no amount of soak on an attack that actually hits is useful.

You are correct if your party significantly exceeds the motes of essence of their foe then they will kill him without real challenge.

However, if you make a big bad who has the same number of motes of essence as the party his higher raw essence will mean that he is basically invulnerable to them. Once everybody hits zero he will be able to dispatch them easily.

Anyway, combat is so lopsided that you cannot actually RUN a single big bad or even a smaller group fighting a larger group. Combat always tends towards the side with more motes and then to the side with the higher raw essence.

That meant that hte only group of bad guys I ever found who were a challenge for my party was the "evil abyssal doppleganger" party. A group that had an evil twin of each of the heros.

The thing is that sucked because it was slow as fuck to try and run 5 exalts while the players each only had to run 1.

I actually don't have as many problems with the setting as other people do. I think it could be cool if the game portion of it worked.

[Orion]

Yeah, I've been wondering if it would be worth giving Exalted the Tome-style treatment. Except more drastic. I guess giving it the aWoD treatment is more accurate.

Later today I'll make a post listing things I LOVE about Exalted -- not because the criticisms on this thread aren't valid, they're correct and infuriating, but for balance.

[souran]

Here are the cool things about exalted

1) Dice pools -> there is a certain inherent satisfaction in rolling lots of dice. Its slow, but its also fun. Exalted should be the model dice pool rpg.

2) being heroes of legend -> in most games people play variations of aragorn, gimili and legolass. In exalted you play gilgamesh, beowolf, lancelot, and rustan. You should be modeling your swordmaster on achilies, and based on the way the game is written you should be just as strangely moody and stubborn as that hero. Exalted lets you do this through powers.

Basically, powers need to be more important than skills. Your powers define you, not your skills.

3) The interplay of charms has the same lure as a card game...but none of the satisfaction.

Charms need to be more like a card game. When one person plays flittering leaf style you respond with 10,000 fold blow which they respond to with the electric slide or whatever. Honestly there possibly ought to be some random card type element to what charms you can do at a given point.

4) Exalted like all wod games should be played without minis and so doesn't need rules for things like real speed etc. Exalted combat should happen on a "pseudo map" a picture of a room or something.

Imagine a dinning hall with a massive chandelier. The hall has a head table and two really long wooden tables at which a whole cohort of imperial legionares can eat. At the head table , all facing twoards the door is a table where there 6 dragon blood officers eat.

There is a big rug running the length of the hall. There are massive marble columns.

These items are there to stunt against. You swing on the chandalier. When the legionares get up you pull the rug out from under all 100 of them. When fighting the dragon blood you swing your sword with such force you cut completely through a stone column. Etc. These are PROPS for stunting.

As for who you can fight: Exalted should just have range categories. You are in in close reach with somebody, at short range, or at long range. If you wish to move you can either "close" with somebody, "open distance" etc. Exalted should really simplifiy the tactical part of combat in favor of focusing on the charm interaction element of combat.

The whole game needs to be revisited, ever single section in the rulebook. However, first thing that needs to be done is get combat to where it is a simple and entertaining minigame itself.

[Mask_De_H]

Basically it's a clunky, rules-heavy system that should be a breezy, rules-light system like every other ST game. Less Hackmaster, more Wushu, right?

[TavishArtair]

Less Hackmaster, more... Magic: the Gathering.

Seriously, the basic unit of design was originally the Charm, and GCG intentionally wanted Charms to feel like MtG cards, with mortals intentionally missing out on this system so that they were grounded in a setting of suck and fail, which they could only rise above if other entities used Charms on their behalf. Or be Exalted, at which point they spontaneously develop Charms.

He just picked a very shitty base system and made it matter too much to Charm-possessing beings, in my estimation.

[Josh_Kablack]

He just picked a very shitty base system..

Okay, that one I gotta quibble with: the reality of the industry at the time was that the system picked him.

[Ice9]

Charms need to be more like a card game. When one person plays flittering leaf style you respond with 10,000 fold blow which they respond to with the electric slide or whatever. Honestly there possibly ought to be some random card type element to what charms you can do at a given point.

Going with this, IIRC there are two types of power points - personal, and in the aura, with the aura holding a lot more. Maybe the power comes in different "colors", and you can choose what colors to store in your personal pool, but the ones from the aura are random each round. So generally, you want to go with what the aura gives you, but if you really need blue (and have blue left in your personal pool), then you can get it. Probably you can change the colors stored in your personal pool in a fairly short but non-combat amount of time, like five minutes. Seems like it would give a good mix of preparation and uncertainty.

[souran]

Basically it's a clunky, rules-heavy system that should be a breezy, rules-light system like every other ST game. Less Hackmaster, more Wushu, right?

Yes and no. The game should have good rules for the things it does. It just does not need rules for certain things.

Exalts can call the chariot that pulls the sun down from the sky and use it to travel around. Therefore signficant overland travel rules are stupid.

You are correct most of the rules need to be very light, but that doesn't mean that they cannot have deep interactions.

[FatR]

Yeah, I've been wondering if it would be worth giving Exalted the Tome-style treatment. Except more drastic. I guess giving it the aWoD treatment is more accurate.

Yes. Successfully rebalancing Exalted while retaining its core assumptions is impossible, no matter how much you rewrite/ivent powers (It took me a lot of writing/rebalancing/compilation just to get a Dragon-Blooded Charmset that at least gives PC ways to to cool and relevant stuff for each Ability). You can fix certain annoying and pointless bugs (Jon Chung on rpg.net did this pretty well), but fixing the core problems of combining heavy crunch with tactical shallowness, or being weighted down with pointless mortal-level mechanics, or lethality/necessity of unbreakable defences requires total or near-total reimagining.

[Orion]

The reason I think I might succeed is that my design goals are rather more modest.

-- Dragon-Blood PCs can fuck off. Or at least, the assumption that they should be balanced with Solars is not an assumption I care to support. I mean, it would be nice I guess if I could make all exalts of the same Essence equally strong, and just put an essence cap on Dragonbloods, and allow mixed groups for low-Essence play. But I don't care much either way.

-- Tactical complexity can fuck off. I don't mind if combat is boring, I just want it to be FAST. The way I like to play, most fights should be decided by maneuvering an opponent into a situation where his perfects fail him, or a plot-related artifact, or who has the pet third circle demon, or squadron of tiger warriors, not by tactical wargaming. If roughly equal people trade blows without hurting each other much that makes it easy to keep recurring antagonists alive.

[souran]

-- Dragon-Blood PCs can fuck off. Or at least, the assumption that they should be balanced with Solars is not an assumption I care to support. I mean, it would be nice I guess if I could make all exalts of the same Essence equally strong, and just put an essence cap on Dragonbloods, and allow mixed groups for low-Essence play. But I don't care much either way.

I basically agree with this. Solars are just better. They don't need to be balanced with anybody else. The idea is not that you play a mixed bag game, but everybody plays solars or siderals or dragon blooded. Whats mor the varying base power level lets you set the games overall difficulty. On the other hand, lunars/solars/abysals should all be close enough to be playable together. Dragon bloods are weaker, therefore they should just be weaker.

-- Tactical complexity can fuck off. I don't mind if combat is boring, I just want it to be FAST. The way I like to play, most fights should be decided by maneuvering an opponent into a situation where his perfects fail him, or a plot-related artifact, or who has the pet third circle demon, or squadron of tiger warriors, not by tactical wargaming. If roughly equal people trade blows without hurting each other much that makes it easy to keep recurring antagonists alive.

I don't agree with this. I just think that combat should have its emphasis on the complexity of playing charms. The game doesn't need skirmish rules. The armies rules are a good idea and are one of the few games were the armies actually work. However, it should really just be subsititing one set of charms for another and playing them against each other still.

Exalted should be "magic the roleplaying game" +dice. A card game can be complex and statifying too.

[RandomCasualty2]

Basically it's a clunky, rules-heavy system that should be a breezy, rules-light system like every other ST game. Less Hackmaster, more Wushu, right?

Yeah, really anytime you have a system with people performing mythic feats, it should probably be relatively rules lite.

[FatR]

I basically agree with this. Solars are just better. They don't need to be balanced with anybody else. The idea is not that you play a mixed bag game, but everybody plays solars or siderals or dragon blooded.

This idea sucks. Like, totally. If you're not supposed to play mixed games, then everyone should be cool enough to justify bothering to play them, no matter what other splats get or don't get. In fact, the splats might as well exist in similar but separate settings, oWoD-style. If crossover is intended, then everyone should be able to contribute. In Exalted as written, every splat but Solars is deliberately gimped thanks to the policy of entirely one-sided niche protection. So, Exalted once again choose the worst of both worlds: it is very crossover-unfriendly (intentionally so), except for Solars/Lunars crossovers, but authors' crossover-related ideas about how splats should stack against each other still fuck you in the ass, if you play anything but Solars. Even if you don't give a shit about Solars' existence. I seriously don't even fucking care about splat penis measurements (anymore - the experience taught me, that Exalted crossovers should just be avoided, mostly), but I do care, that Lunars aren't any good at anything than smashing stuff and infiltration; and Dragon-Blooded must dumpster-dive like there's no tomorrow to get Charms that actually do something useful; and Infernals must buy semi-random crap in the process of getting to the stuff they need and struggle with screwed-up trees as well as narrowly-useful Charms. All because their Charmsets were deliberately made deficient.

[souran]

I agree that dragon bloods need to be fun and playable within their own space but dragon bloods are only a baby step from mortal anyway.

Seriously, according to the games story their whole point was that because they could pass on exaltation genetically there were more of them than anybody else.

There is no way a game where there is one dragon blooded character and then a bunch of higher order exalts is ever going to work. It shouldn't work.

Dragon bloods are supposed to work better in tandem than other exalts, they are like trolls with a couple of class levels.

The other group that really creates trouble is siderals. There are supposed to be fewer of them than solars, and they are again weaker than solars as a matter of brute power. However, they are supposed to be more long sighted than solars..... Again, they really need their own play space in order to be fair.

Solars/Lunars/Abyssals/Infernals/Alchemals should be able to be played in mixed groups.

However, of those only solars, lunars and abyssals have anything resembling real thought put into them.

[Orion]

Souran:

Isn't "there is no way" a little strong? There actually are a number of ways, under tightly controlled conditions.

In the game as written, It's definitely possible for a Dragon-Blood character to carry his weight in a Solar-level team, provided that the Dragon-Blood is given a substantial pile of free XP and backgrounds, and the solars don't get past essence three or possibly even early four.

After all, Dragonbloods can learn Terrestrial Sorcery, which has a number of extremely useful effects even in higher-level games. If there's no solar sorcerer in the group, he can carry his weight JUST by summoning demons, scrying, dispelling sorcery and ferrying the group around. Even if there IS a Solar sorcerer you could just give the dragonblood enough XP to know way more spells. Give him enough contacts and allies and he'll be able to participate in "social" adventures even without solar mindraping charms. Make sure he gets initiated to celestial martial arts, too, and he can pick up some other weird utility powers.