Anatomy of Failed Design: Exalted

[theye1]

I don't know. I like the Exalted setting as it is, especially the Infernals.

[DeadlyReed]

Good for you. I don't agree however. Especially when it comes to Infernals. I think, as they are now, they fit the setting less than the Autobots.

[Mask_De_H]

"Whiny emo PoS" is okay, as long as the character does not shinj.

Apparently "Shinj" is not on Urban Dictionary. I have taken steps to rectify that.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I don't agree with Exalted's wanking to the idea of merit > accident of birth.

While in real life it's really, really evil to deny people opportunities or happiness due to accident of birth, let's get serious here... a person with muscular dystrophy, even if they train really really hard, will never break any Olympic records.

Even if you try to justify it as 'the fates decide to Exalt this person because even though he sucks at running he tries harder than anyone else', that still ruins the hard work moral you're trying to push.

[theye1]

I don't agree with Exalted's wanking to the idea of merit > accident of birth.

Why not? I don't see anyone claiming that the aristocracy is inherently better then some Poor asshole from the Ghetto.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

I don't agree with Exalted's wanking to the idea of merit > accident of birth.

Why not? I don't see anyone claiming that the aristocracy is inherently better then some Poor asshole from the Ghetto.

The Gaming Den - or at least the people in it that talk about Exalted a lot - seem to think that Exalted is unironically lauding Great Man Theory and the conceits of aristocracy. Yeah, I know, I don't understand it either. My assumption/hope is that I'm wildly misunderstanding them.

[FatR]

I just want to say, that I'm not gone and hope to comment on this thread, and to continue posting my thoughts, some time later. At the moment I lack time and energy.

[FatR]

The Gaming Den - or at least the people in it that talk about Exalted a lot - seem to think that Exalted is unironically lauding Great Man Theory and the conceits of aristocracy. Yeah, I know, I don't understand it either. My assumption/hope is that I'm wildly misunderstanding them.

But I think, I can say one or two phrases about this one.

Exalted "irony" about Great Man Theory is just like Gundam franchise "anti-war message". They are nominally there, but the main selling point of Gundam (besides prettyboys for slasher fangirls out there) is beautiful, shiny, awesome giant mecha war, and the main selling point of Exalted is wanking on PCs awesomeness and ability to do whatever they want with muggles.

[FatR]

I don't agree with Exalted's wanking to the idea of merit > accident of birth.

Slowly returning to posting... I won't say that Exalted wanks about that. Partially because Exalted cannot decide whether Celestial Exaltations are awared by a benevolent gods, merit, destiny or ambition and stick with the decision.

Well except for the mention in 2E Core that Exaltations aren't awarded for physically handicapped people. The same book that says that 10 Solar motes are comparable to Hiroshima bomb in power (which is patent bullshit, once you look at mechanics and see that Exalted are really only good at hacking mechanics of the game and their ability to blow shit up or produce other large-scale magic is fairly unimpressive, but I digress). Frailties of mundane human body don't fucking matter once you are infused with such power. Seriously, the difference between a wimp or an Olympic athlete shouldn't even register on this scale.
That's why I say that thinking about the desired powelevel of your game and about what it actually means should be done at the earliest stage of the design process.

[FatR]

FatR, about Abyssals.

First of all, Self-Pity Emo with Drama as it seems to me is failed concept. We have to play glorious and heroic characters and ANGST-BUTTHURT as characters main theme is better suited for some VtM.

The choice of words more than a bit tongue-in-cheek. I don't even run VtM in angsty ways.

But the fact is, Abyssals need a schtick that will differentiate them from Solars in more than color-coding. And being people with dark powers is better than nothing (in addition to other schitcks, like being champions of the dead). As long as said powers are not too dark and do not, in fact, force you to reject them or be the villain (see anime: it is probably easier to list shonen protagonists who don't have "dark" powerups, but in very few cases the drawbacks and risks are actually severe enough to bite them in the ass meaningfully).

FatR, about Abyssals.
Third. There is nothing bad in Better than You Deathlords, as long as they are not dicks who are trying to use you. Even Son Goku had to train under teachers who were stronger than him. Well, eventually he surpassed them all. But still, there is nothing bad in sensei.

By Better Than You I mean that the entity in question is, in fact, better than PCs, so PCs actually catching up is out of the question. Which is true for the Deathlords. In practice, there is no way for PCs to ever get above Essence 5, even if GM is willing to waive the age requirement. The campaign is simply extremely unlikely to last long enough, and extreme mechanical complexity bars anyone but the most hardcore fans from beginning it at high-Essence levels (in fact, as I mentioned earlier, even default Exalted chargen is too complex for newbies and casual players).

And the current Deathlords/Abyssals dynamics is unsalvageable without changing its essence entirely, so why bother too much about leaving the facade intact. Their goal is bad (and by "bad" I mean bad for playability), the power level of Deathlords is bad, and the extent of control they have over Abyssals is bad. Abyssals as present serve only to provide Solars with elite (but still actually weaker) opponents to kill or as fodder angst-redemption stories (which fundamental premise is rejecting said dynamics and the fundamental values of the splat).

As about visions of the future that rulers of the Underworld might have, I intended to tell about these things in factions writeup (cause, as was mentioned here, splats should not be completely equated to political/philosophical factions). Hope I'll get to it sometime.

[Grek]

So, if we do the new Exalted thing, what would the major factions be? I'm seeing the following:

-Bronze Faction+The Realm Alliance
-Gold Faction+Heaven Alliance
-The Infernals+Yozi
-The Abyssals+Deathlords
-The Wyld+The Fair Folk
-Anti-civilization Lunars

[Lago PARANOIA]

Are Sidereal Martial Arts really all that?

I mean, they do some extremely weird bullshit and there are some genuinely problematic ones (like most of the charms in the Obsidian Shards of Infinity style, some 'more perfect than perfect' attacks), for the most part it seems like a well-built Melee-Schtupping Solar out of the basic book will just casually keeping going 'lol no' until the reality warping juice runs out and the Solar casually lops off the SMAist's head.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Actually, let's talk about Obsidian Shards of Infinity for a bit.

This style is like one of the most hilariously broken things ever published. I mean, granted, it's Exalted, but I mean that this is broken in a way that exceeds the power of even SMAs. Here's the fluff excerpt:

Little groups of pattern spiders congregate near the patches of fate where this style has been used. They chitter to each other softly, appearing—as much as metal spiders with unblinking jade eyes can—to be disconcerted, slightly confused, even upset. They do not speak of any concerns they might have, and no spider has directly confronted a student of this style.
In the company of a practitioner, the spiders show the same deference they would give any Sidereal Exalted—no more, no less. Yet, they leave his presence as soon as possible.

A practitioner of the Obsidian Shards of Infinity Style seems to understand something his opponents don’t. A subtle, knowing look lies in his eyes, even when he seems to look at things that aren’t there. Every move seems strange, slightly jerky. The logic behind his motions is impenetrable; his attacks, flatly impossible. When he divulges his philosophy, he speaks in nonsensical metaphors, and it is difficult for others to make heads or tails of it—even other masters of the style.

Perhaps the Sidereal says there are many ways of seeing. Perhaps he says there is only one but it can be portrayed as many. Perhaps he merely says one can choose as one will and punctuates the statement with a perfect strike.

Yeah, you pretty much need to use mirrors for most effects in this style. But you know what's a really good mirror that's always available? The human eye. Like, the ones that are in your head. Yeah, seriously, that's how you see. By any reasonable definition that would let a bathroom mirror and a piece of glass be a mirror, a human eye is also a mirror. Except for a couple of effects, you can pretty much tell any 'but what if he gets caught without his spellbook?' limitation to go fuck itself. You still want some mirrors on your person anyway for the infinite spellpoints charm and the simacrulum loop charm. Yes, you heard me right.


Black Shards Fall Like Ice: Yeah, this kind of sucks. Base 15L damage in an area that costs 10 friggin' motes?! No thanks. It gets better (MUCH better) with a later broken charm, but for right now this is a kick in the balls.


Ripple in the Silvered Class: This one is really weird. It's a perfect defense that costs a willpower point, which makes you think that it'd suck, but it also has a side effect that completing the perfect defense also creates a reality-warping botch that can include effects like breaking the foe's weapon or stabbing themselves with it. The downside is that the foe can spend a point of Willpower to negate it (which is good, since it puts you at Willpower detente) but can also roll a Wits + Awareness test minus the Martial Arts + Essence modifier to attempt to undo it. 1 success negates the botch, 3 successes lets the attack gets through. It's an enormous gamble that can oftentimes pay off, but if you fuck it up you can REALLY fuck it up.


Reaching Through the Mirror: For the low low cost of 8 motes per target, for the rest of the scene you can attack the person's reflection, making this attack undodgeable and applying a minor parry penalty. The parry perfect defenses are worse than the perfect dodge defenses, so it's quite likely you'll be blazing through a foe's motes.


Shattering the Balance: This is a martial arts attack that inflicts one kind of mental illness on the target and thus gets more powerful the more you read medical journals and come up with whatever weird inflictions you can come up with. It has keywords that let other people cockblock you however, which is sad, but it also doubles as a perfect defense for compulsions by letting you overwrite what was going to happen with some other mental illness. I pick megalomania.


Obsidian Shards of Infinity Form: All right, gang, the previous effects were pretty boss from a roleplay and game mechanics standpoint, but we're about to board the Crazy Train to Crazy Go Nuts University to be greeted by the President of the Korean Friendship Association after he's been tripping on meth and datura while watching Fox News. We're not on the Crazy Train yet, we're still getting our ticket read, but here's what to expect:

You get a scenelong series of perfect defenses that activates without even spending any Willpower. Yes, you can thwart this by having someone else ready an action (unless you have something crazy like Charcoal March of Spiders) whereupon this Form charm won't help you. The other drawback is that occasionally you'll perceive the results of your action or an opponent's action incorrectly but plausibly. There are ways to get around this, though, because it's fucking Exalted.


The Mirror Does Not Lie: This scene long charm allows you to reflect any, and I mean ANY attack -- they specifically include mass combat and social attacks -- printed right away at some other target. The only drawback is that A: you can't reflect it back at the attacker but there's an easy way around that even if you care and its solution is even more ridiculously and B: it only works if an attack is truly unseen. There are also ways to get around that, too.

Unless someone else has some similar fuckoff charm (and believe it or not, they do exist) they're just fucking fucked.


Vanished Within the Glass: This is effectively a one-hit KO which must be perfect defense dodged. Which makes it no different really than any other fuckoff attack you might come with. The Willpower and Mote cost is a bit too high. Probably the least crazy power in the entire set.


Draw Forth One Shard: Congratulations, you get access to motherfucking Simacrulum, dood. With no experience point expenditure. That would be hilarious enough, but what makes it even worse is that the duplicate's powers draw from the parent's essence pool instead of the users' or its own. Yeah, really.

You can even sweeten the deal by letting the duplicate draw on the original's experience points, too. You can cause diabetic shock with the deal with an option that knocks the original unconscious if it's killed. You can downright entomb the recipient of the deal in a warehouse of sugar with the realization that this power lets you use any reflecting surface for it, which earlier mentioned scrying pools. So forget teleport ambush, we have motherfucking 'safety in your own home' ambush.

Are there any limitations, let alone downsides to this power? Well, there are a few. But this being Exalted, they're easily thwarted.

1.) The duplicate lasts indefinitely but is only loyal for a week instead of indefinitely. If you want longer than that, you need to expend willpower. If this was 3E D&D we'd be implementing a ludicrous chain of command where you had slavemasters sitting someplace safe while doing nothing but expending willpower to maintain loyalty, but fuck that. This is Exalted and there are charms out there that completely force loyalty.

2.) You can't duplicate someone who has a higher essence than you. This is a pretty big problem, but there's a form charm for Prismatic Shards of Creation that makes your Essence 10 for the purpose of effects. Awww yeah boy.

3.) If the person that the duplicate is duplicating dies, your duplicate immediately slips free of control. Of course you also have the option of making the duplicate die with the original. This is the same option that makes the original go unconscious if the duplicate dies.


Draw Forth Every Shard: Simacrulum loops are pretty fucking fun, but the problem is that a truly Gygaxian ST could probably keep pressing you until you fucked something up like the old Wish arguments. But say that you don't want to kill Mask of Winters while he's on the toilet. You just want 500 duplicates with access to all of your powers with them being infinitely loyal to you. What do you do? This charm has your back. The duplicates are created much more quickly and cheaper to boot. Oh, yeah, and everything gains the advantage of the Obsidian Shards of Infinity Form as well. Each duplicate costs 2 motes to make.

There are four major drawbacks/differences with this form, though.

1.) Draw Forth Every Shard only creates duplicates of you, not everything. As always, there are ways to get around this such as a charm from the Prismatic Arrangement of Creation that lets you share your charms. And with your Mask of Winters clone you can have a Mask of Winters army.

2.) The duplicates have to do the same broad action that you're doing. This is annoyingly vague, because two of the examples are 'crafting a daiklave' or 'fighting an army'. Whatever.

3.) The duplicates can only exist as far apart as you can perceive (once again, there are ways around this) and you can only create Martial Arts x Essence amount of them at any time.

4.) You can use one of your charms through all of the duplicates at once. At an extreme, extreme cost savings. Like, a 1 mote per duplicate cost savings. Remember those loser powers we had earlier? Vanished Within The Glass (which unfortunately costs willpower, but is a 1-hit KO) and Black Shards of Ice (which does not cost willpower)

Oh, yeah, one final note. Remember The Mirror Does Not Lie? Here's a simple 'trick': bounce that power off towards a duplicate, who uses The Mirror Does Not Lie itself as well to bounce the power back to the originator.


Echoes of Infinity: The previous charms, while already completely gamebreaking, do have a theoretical drawback in that they will suck you dry essence like Ted Haggard... never mind. This charm takes care of that. That's right, as long as you have at least a square yard of reflective surface or in a room that sufficiently echoes, powers no longer cost any motes. What the hell.


Breathing on the Black Mirror: So against all logic, your ST has somehow pierced through your layers of simacrulum armies and perfect attack reflection and has you on death's door. What are you going to do? Well, a ST who has the mojo to get past that layer of pure bullshit pretty much already has you cornered... so what CAN you do?

Simple. Tell the ST to go fuck himself and get a sandwich, you're taking control for a few minutes.

This charm, this freaking charm, is not just reality-warping but metagame warping. When you use it, it stops time and presents five broadly favorable paths for you to use and you get to have your choice of one. The 'worst' outcome is that you defeat any hated enemy but lose someone you love in return. And if you're enough of an asshole to get this far with Obsidian Shards of Infinity this sacrifice doesn't hurt you one bit.

There's the mewling of 'This Charm may be used only during a climactic scene, when fate hangs heavy and the balance is easily tipped.', but seriously, a scene in which someone actually manages to make a(n ab)user of this school fear for their future should automatically count as climatic.


So yeah. That's Obsidian Shards of Infinity for you. Most broken thing ever that had stats committed to it.

[FatR]

Well, you're right, currently SMAs except Obsidian Shards of Infinite Breakage are underwhelming. It is even generally recognized. Their time to shine was 1E, when other splats simply did not have access to any Charms of comparable Essence. Even then the problem wasn't so much in the fact that they made Sidereals invincible, because they didn't, but in the fact that they sodomized existing assumptions about Charm designs in several ways that damaged the game:

1)SMAs blew sorcery out of the water in terms of scope and usefulness. This not only reduced sorcery to "minionmancy and a few esoteric utility spells", but significantly increased the assumed power level of the entire setting. Before SMAs you had to spend a day and risk failure to complete a city-killing spell, after SMAs you could wipe out everything within your line of sight in seconds. Essentially, SMAs officially dumped Dragonball-level firepower in a world that was supposed to work like Dynasty Warriors.

2)Before SMAs it wasn't quite clear if high-level Charms are supposed to give you exponentially bigger numbers or just new options. SMAs appeared and confirmed the "numbers" route. This contributed to uber-elders problem even more than ability to blow up armies in a round, and also ensured that high-power games will disintegrade under the weight of a million dice.

3)SMAs subscribed to "Martial Arts can do everything" school of thought.

4)Original 1E SMAs tried to compensate their overpoweredness by leaving enough weak points to make their users vulnerable. Do I need to explain why this idea sucks when you're setting a precedent for power design in a game, where everyone de-facto has open-ended powersets (yes, even Sids, see #3 and remember that one can design new martial arts styles)?

[fectin]

But you know what's a really good mirror that's always available? The human eye. Like, the ones that are in your head. Yeah, seriously, that's how you see.

That's really not true. If it were, you could use your eyes as tiny projectors.

[Princess]

It seems that this thread will outlive the Exalted system itself.

[Black Paper Moon]

Exalted 3E is coming out in a couple of months. I'm looking forward to reading a tear-down and discussion of it here.

[OgreBattle]

http://avatarcomic.net/ExaltedWiki/medi ... at_We_Know

A wiki of gathered info on 3e

Q: From my perspective, perfect defenses have two main virtues, neither of which are setting-based:
Firstly, they're robust against bad mechanics writers, and confer some of that protection to characters. (Gayo)
A: If we have bad writers doing our mechanics, the game is fucked regardless. (Holden)

[Lago PARANOIA]

Much like 4E D&D, perfect defenses completely stripped Exalted of its cool by filtering unique and diverse powers until they were judged strictly by their accuracy, damage, and mote cost. In much the same way that a reality show contestant makes coffee by using their underwear as a filter.

Holden having the courage to operate without a safety net is encouraging, but I'd be more encourage by a reply as to why PDs are bad.

[OgreBattle]

They actually give a large deal of information on Perfect Defenses

(Plague of Hats)

While issues like this aren't all that simple, I think it's sufficient for most people to explain it this way:

Perfects were sort of just a system unto themselves. They ended up saying "Why play with the game system we just spent 10, 20, 50 pages talking about when you can play rock vs. scissors?" Their best, most interesting implementation, from Infernals, really just added another meta-system that you had to layer on top of everything else to get back to "rock vs. scissors." Part of the remedy to this problem is to create a core system in which you can reasonably play out a battle.




(Holden)
On perfects:

"Heavenly Guardian Defense" is still a Charm that exists.

Being able to burn X motes and just go "nope.jpg" in response to whatever your opponent did, whenever you want, is a horrible thing to put in a game, assuming you want that game to be interesting, tense, or any other positive adjectives.

Or to put a finer point on it:

You're speculating about implementation of perfects without yet knowing about the combat framework they occupy. I've said it before, I will say it again: EX3 battle engine does not look like EX1 or EX2 with some numbers rejiggled. It is something genuinely new.


(Plague of Hats)
Mechanically, the "nope.jpg" aspect of perfects was pretty goddamn boring. There are ways and ways to parry mountains or explore the ocean depths on a single held breath.


(John Mørke)
Perfect Defenses are just boring. A "nope" response to someone's painstakingly honed ultimate attack doesn't make your character look cool, it just makes your opponent look like shit...considering that you can pull the same response to anything he does. A perfect is only special if it's surprising and it happens when it isn't supposed to, and only happens once.


(Stephenls)
Okay, I wasn't going to start this discussion, but now that it's begun, best to have it.

Perfect effects as they existed in 1e and 2e are one of a number of things in Exalted I'd call "system-as-statement."

That is to say, they're a piece of mechanics that exist, or that the fanbase believes are important, not because of their mechanical effect but because of their rhetorical effect. Someone reading the mechanic goes "Wow!" and that influences their understanding of the setting. Other examples of this are, say, Mount Mostath's physical traits, Juggernaut's Magnitude rating, and the Wyld keyword as it applies to the Lunar Charmset.

(The Wyld keyword is a keyword that just means "This effect only works in the Wyld," and yet, only Charms in the Lunar Charmset carry it. Solars have several Charms that only work in the Wyld. Vocal portions of the fanbase got very angry when someone suggested the errata should give the Wyld keyword to those Solar Charms, because "The Wyld keyword is exclusive to Lunars.")

Someone reads Heavenly Guardian Defense, notices that it allows a Solar to parry a thrown mountain, and goes "Wow, Solars can parry a thrown mountain! That's awesome!" Someone reads Juggernaut's or Mostath's statblock and goes "Wow, Juggernaut's really strong! Like a Magnitude 10 army!" or "Wow, Mount Mostath is really tough! Hundreds of health levels!" Someone reads the Lunar exclusive keyword list and goes "Wow, Lunars have exclusive WYld magic!" In all cases the reader comes off as impressed, spreads the word about this fantastic exciting new thing, and talks about it to friends.

That nothing prevents Primordials from tossing mountains at Solars until they're mote-tapped, that there's no clear indication of exactly how Juggernaut's Magnitude 10 interfaces with the mass combat system (does it multiply his health levels by 10 or just his damage and soak?), that the combat system breaks down when you try to use it to fight Mount Mostath, and that there is no difference between a Charm that says "This only works in the Wyld" in its description and a Charm that has the Wyld keyword, all somehow fail to come up.

...

We're moving away from system-as-statement. Mechanics need to work at the table more than they need to impress readers. We want to keep the good parts of the stuff those mechanics represent -- Solars should be able to parry a mountain or explore the depths of the sea with only a single held breath -- but we are not attached to their current implementation, nor to the idea that the new implementation must necessarily carry as much immediately impressive rhetorical weight upon first read as the 1e and 2e implementations did.

This is interesting, it's "Throw someone so hard they crash though the sky and end up in hell" as an effect equal to "throw them so hard they die"

Hmm.

I'm not the one writing the Charms. That said, there is very little effective difference between throwing someone so hard they die, and throwing someone so hard they crash through the sky and into Hell. Throwing someone so hard they die isn't that difficult to achieve; I mean, a throw is a combat maneuver and you typically try to kill people with those.

So for all I know, "This Charm triggers upon killing your opponent with a throw; you may activate it to leave your opponent alive but instead throw him so hard he crashes through the sky into Hell where he exists in a state of temporal stasis for five days until the time differential is accounted for" is an example of a custom Essence 6 Charm that some Exalt somewhere has. Or not! Keep in mind as you read this that I have not seen the new Charms; as the book's editor it's sort of important to leave me out of the process of drafting the actual text so I can see the typos as they exist now and not as they existed in earlier drafts I remember seeing in the past.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Unless Exalted plans to wow me and is literally going to be the best system I've ever seen, all this talk about 'Solars throwing around mountains' immediately makes me lose hope in the setting.

I'd much rather they started on getting the Dynasty Warriors 2: Electric Boogaloo portion of the game working before they work on higher-level shit. Because if they don't, they're going to have either a 4E D&D epic level fiasco or a 3E D&D epic level fiasco on their hands. Smart money is on the 4E D&D epic level fiasco.

[RadiantPhoenix]

a 4E D&D epic level fiasco or a 3E D&D epic level fiasco

What do you mean by these terms? (short summary preferable)

[OgreBattle]

a 4E D&D epic level fiasco or a 3E D&D epic level fiasco

What do you mean by these terms? (short summary preferable)

4e epic is where you hit an epic orc with your epic sword or epic magic missile in an epic dungeon

3e epic is where the writers make epic +1 to hit feats for epic warriors while the wizard is a lvl 20 wizard and breaking the game into bitty pieces cause the designers never actually understood what lvl20 wizards were capable of

[Lago PARANOIA]

4E D&D epic level fiasco -- hyping up the game in flavor text about being world-shattering and superpowered and paradigm-shifting and whatnot, but an actual examination of the mechanics shows that it's the Same Old Shit with 500% more lying fluff. See, oh, every epic destiny ever printed for 4E D&D.

3E D&D epic level fiasco -- the game completely implodes in on itself due to certain facets of the game being either fluffedly or mechanically out of sight with each other. A 25th-level epic wizard isn't even on the same planet conceptually speaking as a 25th-level or even a 35th level epic fighter. In Exalted for example, unless you want the game to devolve into a Deus Ex Machina powered Boss Rush there's literally nothing for a well-built Essence 6-7 Solar troupe to do that isn't a complete cakewalk.


It's certainly not inevitable for Exalted 3E to end up falling to either of those two paradigms, but when people start hyping up their Exalted game as 'Solars throwing around mountains' despite the fact that this is mechanically and narratively the weakest and worst-written part of Exalted it either means that they are going to pull an entire rabbit warren out of their hats or the game is going to collapse in one of the two ways I mentioned. Since the current Exalted game designers seem smarter than the average bear yet very few criticisms of 4E D&D involve how fake and artificial their epic levels are, smart money is on having the game collapse like 4E D&D did.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Given those definitions, if I were going to bet money, my money would be on a 3e-epic-style situation, because that's what the fans seem to expect and want.