Anatomy of Failed Design: Exalted

[MGuy]

But right now, Atemi means "strike" and if you have a combat maneuver that is an Atemi with a couple of adjectives on it, you are talking about a very specific strike and not talking about other things.

Come on, Frank. Now you're just being stubborn. What they're beating around is "if atemi has such a specific meaning, then don't use it in your ability names." Also, the fact that an ability has three words in its name does not make it an atemi.

I hate to say it but Frank is not being 'stubborn' or anything. He's saying that what's being proposed by the existence of any one 3 word combat maneuver is an implicit, giant list of other combat maneuvers. So even if you don't use 'Atemi', by virtue of there being 3 descriptors in 'whatever' maneuver your system very likely has a metric ass tonne of other maneuvers that aren't that specific 3 term maneuver. He's very specifically saying that there's no way for there not to be.

[Orion]

This is a short list of maneuvers that all have names in Karate.

Nice chart. I'm curious, what RPG rulebook is that from? Could it be: A: Exalted 1E? B: Feng Shui 2E? C: Legends of the Wulin? Or could it be D: This chart has never been printed in a game book because RPGs do not track individual arm motions, even if they are D&D or Rolemaster? Look, even if we cared to discuss individual movements, you would still be very wrong. You would be wrong because you are confusing IC and OOC nomenclature, and also because you are still confusing names with descriptions. Let's start with the first problem

The moves that The Beast uses do have names. Enthusiasts who watch that fight can tell you what they are. That's just a fact.

Martial arts enthusiasts might be able to tell you what a karate teacher or a kung fu teacher would call those moves. They cannot tell you what a "Kwan Lun Toad Style" teacher would call them, because unless Google has failed me badly, I'm fairly sure Kwan Lun Style is not a real thing. Oh, and just because there are karate words for those moves doesn't mean they have names.

Just to give you an idea of how far the rabbit hole goes: Every potential striking surface has a name.

If the striking surfaces have names, the moves don't. "Knee to the groin" isn't a name. Nor is "instep kick to the outer knee" or " elbow to the solar plexus." Those are procedural descriptions of motion and you can generate them ad nauseam. If I told a fencer I saw someone do a "counter-counter-parry 3" they would probably know what that meant, but they would think I was crazy if I proposed writing it down on someone's character sheet. Move names in Wuxia fiction aren't technical descriptions of action. They're either historical homages to the original uses or users of the move ("Dragon-Slaying Kick"; "Wukong's Lost Kata"), metaphorical descriptions of action ("Pounce Like Tiger" "Crane Stance"), completely irrelevant poetic imagery ("Heaven and Earth Fist"; "Blessed Chrysanthemum Movement") or, rarely, descriptions of the result of action ("Heart-Stopper Strike"; Head Exploding Touch") Most characters in most stories don't need more than three of them, and in fact as you add more, audiences generally find it increasingly difficult to take seriously.

[Chamomile]

Frank's doing a pretty poor job of justifying it, though. There is a real, actual martial art that has moves with names like "Mounting Badger" and "Five Swords Technique," but it doesn't work anything like what Frank thinks it does. Because Five Swords Technique isn't a very specific kind of punch. It's an inward-extended block, followed by a swing-step coupled with a hammer fist, followed by a chop to the neck (the first "sword"), followed by a heelpalm to the face, and then a bunch of other stuff I can't quite remember involving four more chops mostly to the neck which are supposed to keep the other guy stunned and off-balance while you set yourself up for a hammerfist to the groin followed by running the Hell away. I stopped practicing the big flashy combo because it's way more efficient to just uppercut the guy to the gut and be done with it.

The point here is: That big long chart of combat techniques that Frank posted? Those aren't combat techniques. Those are building blocks for the combat techniques. Those are individual kicks, steps, and blocks that comprise techniques. If you want to have a game where you model having both a hammerfist (which is an atemi) and the Five Swords Technique, then you don't model those as different techniques on the same level. The hammerfist is a thing that is inside of the Five Swords Technique.

But let's ignore the part where Frank posted a list of things that aren't combat techniques and called them combat techniques. Let's just look at the actual list of combat techniques that a single martial arts style can teach. It is indeed pretty big. In the one style I'm working off of here there are like eight different badger techniques used for making your opponent wish they hadn't tried to drag you to the ground where all our fancy kicks are useless. And there's Halting Ram for people who try to tackle you and Prancing Hoof for when a dude tries to roundhouse kick you and on and on and on. There are something like two dozen different named techniques in the style.

And the average number used in an actual fight is zero. As a general rule, your opponent is not going to be kind enough to set themselves up for one of the two dozen out of multiple hundreds or thousands of situations you might find yourself in. Guy roundhouse kicks your knee, you use Prancing Hoof. He roundhouse kicks your stomach and you are on your own. Make something up. Guy tackles towards your stomach and you use Halting Ram. Tackles towards your legs and you figure something out for yourself.

Relying on individual named techniques in a fight is actually the mark of a rank amateur who can't improvise, and when you see some dude going crazy in a kung fu movie the overwhelming majority of his attacks are not named techniques. Their names are just things like "jab" and "left hook" and "sidekick."

Seriously, this fight? From 1:30 to 1:40 we see Daredevil take out one of the thugs with a string of attacks. And that string is parry-jab-jab-jab-hook. The three jabs in the middle are all on the same arm, which is actually pretty sloppy technique. From 1:50 to 2:05 I see one front kick, an uppercut, a few jabs, and like a million hook punches, although it's kind of hard to see in detail due to the angle. One of those hook punches came after Daredevil pushed himself off the wall with his foot, something which might have a name in parkour but does not have a name in martial arts that I know of.

From 2:05 to 2:10, Daredevil uses an inward-extended block with a grab to catch a punch (this is almost identical to the opening of Five Swords Technique) then uses a headbutt, a knee strike, followed by a push and a butterfly kick (none of these have anything to do with the Five Swords Technique). What we learn from this is that a system in which each individual atemi is modeled separately is a system in which five seconds of combat involves no less than four moves - assuming we don't count the push used to set up the butterfly kick separately from the kick itself and Daredevil's block of the incoming punch is an automatic result of the attacker failing his roll rather than a specific reaction Daredevil has to declare. That if we are modeling each and every atemi then about 70% of Daredevil's moves are hook punches, about 20% of them are jabs, and the remaining 10% are mostly things like knee strikes, elbow smashes, headbutts. About once per fight he busts out something fancy like that butterfly kick.

So what is Shell Crushing Atemi? It is the butterfly kick. Since it's your only attack in a 6-second round, there will be some number of other strikes leading up to it, but we don't care what they are. What we care about is the butterfly kick. What is Daredevil doing from 1:40 to 1:50? He is making a standard attack. It doesn't need a name. It's a bunch of very basic moves strung together like you do, and it's way sloppier than any named technique would ever be. You don't throw three strikes from the same side of your body like that, it's a waste of momentum. What is he doing from 1:50 to 2:05? He makes lots of standard attacks, and maybe that wall-jump of his is also a named attack - although there's no reason it couldn't be the same ability that lets him walljump generally, because there is no reason to require him to have a third ability to allow him to walk and chew bubblegum at the same time.

If you want to track individual combat techniques, you need some way of handling the 95% of moves that are not part of any named technique, and also none of your techniques can have "Atemi" in their name. If you want to track each individual strike, you are insane.

[Username17]

What they're beating around is "if atemi has such a specific meaning, then don't use it in your ability names." Also, the fact that an ability has three words in its name does not make it an atemi.

That doesn't help. I mean, obviously Exalted fucking loves the word Atemi, because all of the weird-ass Atemis I've been using in examples are actual Atemis that Exalted martial artists can learn. But from a simple game design standpoint, Omegonthesane's choice to talk about "Seven Shadow Evasion" is even more restrictive. It's a defensive interrupt maneuver, that's what it is. Just having something like that demands:

• An action economy so that you can slot in times when you can use your defense and attack maneuvers.
• A resource management system to keep battles from going on forever as soon as people have defenses that beat each other's attacks.

A D&D Warblade is literally the simplest possible character that can exist within those restrictions. "One Counter Per Turn" is the simplest possible action economy that allows you to use a three word named dodge interrupt maneuver. One card per maneuver is the simplest possible resource management system. Anything else you could write would be more complicated than a D&D character that everyone agrees is already a bit on the complicated side for D&D.

I'm curious, what RPG rulebook is that from?

No no no. You're not getting it. The point is that you don't get to talk anymore because what you have to say doesn't matter. It's like if we were talking about making a game about American Football and you had said "Unlike the quarterback, the other positions don't have names." Or we had been talking about making a game about Iron Chef and you had said "Chefs cut things sometimes, but the various knives they use don't have names."

You don't know anything about this topic. You know so little about this topic that you don't know that there are things to know about this topic that you don't know. So your opinions, whatever they are, don't matter. Just shut up and walk away.

If the striking surfaces have names, the moves don't.

See this? This is embarrassing. You've already shown that you don't know even the most minimal amount of knowing what there is to know, and then you say shit like this. This is so wrong that every preconception required to even form this conditional is also wrong. This is an amount of ignorance that is actually offensively disrespectful if you keep talking. Have some pride, have some humility, and shut the fuck up. Stop saying stupid things.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

...But right now, Atemi means "strike" and if you have a combat maneuver that is an Atemi with a couple of adjectives on it, you are talking about a very specific strike and not talking about other things. And if you meant to say something else, but actually said that, then you are at best an idiot and the only other option is that you're an asshole who is being anti-communicative for the lulz.

If you have a power on your character sheet in an RPG that calls itself "X Y Strike", for almost any X and almost any Y, are you expecting it to be an extremely specific response to an extremely specific set of circumstances in a fraction of a 6-second combat round? Or are you expecting "Like a Standard Attack but better, and usable in about 80% of circumstances where a Standard Attack would be a thing?"

If you have personally available specific maneuvers that do specific things, regardless of how they are flavored, you are making a specific claim about how detailed the combat system is going to have to be. And it's damn difficult for me to imagine a game in which the choice to use "Kaleidoscopic Disrecognition Atemi" does not imply the following:

• That you have other maneuvers to choose from that aren't a Kaleidoscopic Disrecognition Atemi.
• That each round you are selecting at least one maneuver to use from a list long enough to have Kaleidoscopic Disrecognition Atemi on it.
• That your opponents have enough moving parts during combat that it would be important or meaningful if and when you chose to use your Kaeidoscopic Disrecognition Atemi.

I'm going to play word swap here:

And it's damn difficult for me to imagine a game in which the choice to use "Lightning Strike" does not imply the following:

• That you have other maneuvers to choose from that aren't a Lightning Strike.
• That each round you are selecting at least one maneuver to use from a list long enough to have Lightning Strike on it.
• That your opponents have enough moving parts during combat that it would be important or meaningful if and when you chose to use your Lightning Strike.

You wrote a game in which some and not all characters have a move they can use in combat called Lightning Strike, in which they spend a full round to cause a lightning bolt to hit the person they want to be hit with a lightning bolt.

In this game that you wrote where there is a move people can use in combat called Lightning Strike, the move named Lightning Strike is on a themed list of six other moves, all of which are to do with controlling the weather and none of which are direct attacks.

Given that this was a discussion about Exalted not having enough charms to justify using 3 words on charms, and given that "not-Exalts" don't necessarily get any charms, the fact that Lightning Strike is very obviously a magic spell and not a kind of kick does not wash as a criticism of it. It is a two word combat maneuver on a list of powers that is not nearly as long as the list of powers in Exalted, let alone the list of powers you appear to think is necessary for a game to have "Strike" in a 3-word power name. If you're going to kick up a fuss about how 3 words is the magic line, I refer you to Rain of Glass, Glimpse of the Abyss, or Rain of Vitae.

If "Atemi" is a bad word to use in a maneuver name, so be it. That doesn't say anything about 3-word maneuver names in the general case; it just says that none of the things on your character sheet are allowed to contain the word "Atemi".

What they're beating around is "if atemi has such a specific meaning, then don't use it in your ability names." Also, the fact that an ability has three words in its name does not make it an atemi.

That doesn't help. I mean, obviously Exalted fucking loves the word Atemi, because all of the weird-ass Atemis I've been using in examples are actual Atemis that Exalted martial artists can learn.

I wouldn't want you to confuse my criticisms of specific decisions with defense of Exalted's actual charm mechanics as a whole. They have too many charms; independently of that, they decided having 3-word charm names was a good idea.

But from a simple game design standpoint, Omegonthesane's choice to talk about "Seven Shadow Evasion" is even more restrictive. It's a defensive interrupt maneuver, that's what it is. Just having something like that demands:

• An action economy so that you can slot in times when you can use your defense and attack maneuvers.
• A resource management system to keep battles from going on forever as soon as people have defenses that beat each other's attacks.

A D&D Warblade is literally the simplest possible character that can exist within those restrictions. "One Counter Per Turn" is the simplest possible action economy that allows you to use a three word named dodge interrupt maneuver. One card per maneuver is the simplest possible resource management system. Anything else you could write would be more complicated than a D&D character that everyone agrees is already a bit on the complicated side for D&D.

I'm confused. I thought the acceptable complexity bar in D&D was Dread Necromancer, not Warblade.

Also, see the Tome Fighter's "Foil Action" ability, which costs Attacks of Opportunity and cannot be counter-countered other than by him running out of those. Though admittedly that's meant to be a complex class.

[Omegonthesane]

On what appears to be a largely independent note, we're getting hung up on Exalted being bad at describing martial arts charms and simultaneously giving too many MA charms for a game where not everyone can MA and not enough of them for a martial arts sim.

Exalted isn't meant to be a martial arts sim. You're meant to be able to write multiple different approaches to "beatstick" that don't even touch martial arts. You aren't even meant to have to use the martial arts charms OOC for your character to think themselves a martial artist and be hardcore enough to back up that claim IC. So spoke the core rulebook.

So, the fact that there are whatever ridiculous number of martial arts styles in addition to more broad-use Melee Charms is itself a decision that could do with deconstructing. (And mocking, but mainly articulating why they should have gone with one level of granularity or the other or else defending that design decision on the drawing board even as its implementation is mocked.)

[Username17]

It is entirely possible to make a game that doesn't track maneuvers. If you are making a game that does track maneuvers, you are committing yourself to a level of complexity and combat focus where it makes sense to discuss those things.

It's totally fine to have players playing Warblades and Crusaders. People like Martial Adepts. But having characters worrying about their stances, strikes, and counters is wholly incompatible with having other characters who ignore combat altogether. Martial Adepts exist in a game where every character is expected to do combat stuff, and they would not be appropriate in a game where combat effectiveness was optional.

You could make a game where people who were good at combat just had an ability called "Tiger Style" where they turned into a tiger and then had big numbers for blowing through a rules-lite combat system and other characters didn't. But if you track individual strikes and dodges you obviously haven't written that game.

With the kinds of powers Exalted actually wrote for itself, the maneuvers list needed to be more like Tome of Battle in presentation and length and everyone needed to be fighty. That is at odds with many of the other ideas that people had about what Exalted was supposed to be - but Exalted being incoherent from a design standpoint is hardly news to anyone.

-Username17

[Orion]

He's saying that what's being proposed by the existence of any one 3 word combat maneuver is an implicit, giant list of other combat maneuvers. So even if you don't use 'Atemi', by virtue of there being 3 descriptors in 'whatever' maneuver your system very likely has a metric ass tonne of other maneuvers that aren't that specific 3 term maneuver. He's very specifically saying that there's no way for there not to be.

It's actually very important what base noun you use. See, the problem here is that no one wants to imagine their character looking like they were playing by a button-masher. Doing the same jump punch over and over or trying to elbow-smash all enemies at all times is dumb and people don't want to imagine it. You get this problem when (1) people have to use a named ability from their character sheet each round, (2) people have only a few named abilities on their character sheets, and (3) each named ability corresponds to one fighting-game button-combo. So for people to feel like they're playing martial arts badasses, you need to knock out one of these pillars. Frank wants to take out pillar 2. If you gives people lots of moves on their character sheet, they can use a different one every round and none of them will get overexposed. Then you just need a randomizer to make sure they actually do use a variety of moves, and your choreography looks cool and not stupid. That's a real solution that totally works if you're willing to write that many moves and the players are willing to go along with winds of fate.

You can also take out pillar 1. Real martial artists know hundreds of strikes, and so people are insulted if you tell them their character only knows 3. But if you tell them their character knows hundreds of strikes, but you're only writing down the 3 secret or self-taught moves that are the character's signature," I think they're okay with that. In theory, people are cool with the idea that their hero knows "karate" and also "earthshattering elbow smash", their friend knows "tai chi" and also "sharknado suplex" and their rival knows "karate" and also "chi-poisoning finger." You just abstract all the other hundreds of moves they know into "basic unarmed attack." The only problem is that if the player can get a bonus every round by using their signature moves, they will do that. And thus, their character degenerates from "master of karate with a signature elbow smash" to "no items; elbows only; final destination." The only way to fix that is to make basic attacks appealing. If your named moves are niche moves with utility only in special circumstances, then you can have a guy who only has 2 but doesn't spam either. Actually, the "Atemi" in exalted are pretty good examples. 2 of them are Lunar Strength charms that are probably mis-named, but 4 of them are from sidereal martials arts, and they are extremely esoteric finishers. Kaleidoscopic Disrecognition Atemi is a real charm; it lets you punch someone so good they become unable to identify people correctly. Everyone they know will look like someone else they know, and the disguises will reshuffle every time they sleep. That's ... just really weird. If that was literally the only special ability I had, I still wouldn't use it every fight. I would say "basic punch please" fairly often.

Finally, you can take out pillar 3. It's okay to use the same charms every fight if each charm is broad enough you can imagine using it every fight, and that's why the noun in your three word move matters. "Atemi" is actually quite rare in Exalted, and I don't believe it's used once in the core Solar book, although "Strike" is. A lot of charms are "methods", "attacks," "techniques," "forms," weirder things like "refinements," "approaches," and "perfections," or completely figurative things like "wind." That matters. Here are some actual Solar charms: Accuracy Without Distance; Heavenly Guardian Defense; Seven Shadow Evasion; One Weapon Two Blows; Reflex Sidestep Technique; Trance of Unhesitating Speed Which of these would it sound stupid to use every turn, or every time they're applicable? If you're use the Heavenly Guardian Defense, you're using the Heavenly Guardian Defense. You're a heavenly guardian and you're defending yourself. Maybe you know an alternate way to defend, maybe you don't, and when someone breaks this one you just get hit. One Weapon Two Blows? It doesn't tell you which two blows. It just says you know how to move your sword fast. You can still refer to Frank's karate chart to decide where you're sticking it each turn. Here's a Solar charm that might sound dumb to repeat: "fire and stones strike." If you told me "I feel stupid spamming fire and stones strike on every armored enemy until they die," I would be sympathetic to your position. Then I would rename it the "fire and stones method" and say that you use this method against every armored foe because that's how you were trained to do it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Did Exalted 3E do anything about ridiculous dice pool sizes? Given those example charms they laid out, where something rather basic (Survival 5, Essence 3) had you rolling a Skill + Stat for a dicepool it sure doesn't seem fucking likely.

Like, did the mods not notice people complaining about how idiotic it is to roll 16 d10s right out of the gate? It's even stupider considering the relatively high TNs. If they used lower TNs, they could instantly shrink the size of the dicepools while barely touching the probability curves. Shit makes so sense.

[spongeknight]

Did Exalted 3E do anything about ridiculous dice pool sizes? Given those example charms they laid out, where something rather basic (Survival 5, Essence 3) had you rolling a Skill + Stat for a dicepool it sure doesn't seem fucking likely.

Like, did the mods not notice people complaining about how idiotic it is to roll 16 d10s right out of the gate? It's even stupider considering the relatively high TNs. If they used lower TNs, they could instantly shrink the size of the dicepools while barely touching the probability curves. Shit makes so sense.

Uh, it's White Wolf. The easy and effective solution is not even considered as an option.

[OgreBattle]

Is there a quick fix to adding magic swords to Shadowrun 4e that a street samurai can use

[Orion]

Yes. Write a magic sword and put it in.

EDIT: The easiest way to make "magic sword" is to have a possession mage bind a spirit and tell it to possess a sword. If you want it permanent, you could write a custom version of Inhabitation that inhabits metal instead of flesh, and then make your magic sword be a free spirit "flesh steel form" merged into a weapon.

[Mechalich]

So, Exalted 3e now exists - for 'you can buy it from DriveThruRPG' values of exist. Despite being literally years later than promised, Onyx Path did at last manage to release something. I'll admit to having looked at the material briefly and being unimpressed. I can't speak to the mechanics much (and since like the last edition this is a Solars only core book its only a fraction of the mechanics anyway), but there's no indication that they fixed the fluff in any real way and in fact may have just made it more complicated and worse. Example: Creation was already too big and unwieldy and they chose to make it even bigger for no good reason.

Any thoughts?

[OgreBattle]

Example: Creation was already too big and unwieldy

How big was it? I just kind of imagined the distance between the central island and the other lands to be like from Taiwan to Japan.

I like the idea of having some vaguely defined spaces for storytellers to set their own kingdoms and PC's to build their own kingdoms but I think most people played in the well defined cities.

[Milkmaid79]

I think Creation originally had twice the land area of Earth, but with a much smaller ocean area.

[Mechalich]

2e Creation was significantly smaller than Earth but had roughly equal land area - which meant it had more because it didn't feature Antarctica. 3e Creation has almost exactly 2x the land area of Earth in spite of having the oceans vastly enlarged.

Distances on the 3e map are huge. This site has a mapping tool that gives you an idea of just how far apart things are and how long it takes to get from one place to the next (even using an absurd mounted travel rate of 40 miles per day).

A useful example: Lookshy and Nexus are roughly as far apart as Paris and Berlin. That's cool, two regional powers with known interactions. The problem, no one has ever, in any official source, put anything on the map between the two. Between actual Paris and Berlin you have the entirety of Belgium and Luxemburg, the French city of Reims, and the German cities of Dusseldorf, Bielefeld, and Hanover - all of which would represent city-states in their own right.

There's under 70 named locations on the 3e Exalted Map. 2 Earths and 70 settlements. So in order to run Exalted you basically pick 1-3 of those places as a seed and have to build your own setting up from nothing. That's a task, considering that even weak exalted are big time players who inherently interact with the power structure of anywhere they go.

The funny thing is, 2e at least made the implicit assumption that you were playing in the Scavenger Lands - the 2e corebook at least attempted to develop that area as a setting. The effort was in no way sufficient, but they tried. The 3e setting chapter describes a few dozen places in very short paragraphs. The city of Champoor, which has no neighbor for 1000 miles is described in 150 words. So good luck with that.

[FatR]

There's under 70 named locations on the 3e Exalted Map. 2 Earths and 70 settlements. So in order to run Exalted you basically pick 1-3 of those places as a seed and have to build your own setting up from nothing.

That's exactly the problem I've encountered as a GM. Most of the setting is deliberately written as small points of something scattered across huge white void. So that the GM would be free to place whatever he wants into void. Of course, being allowed to write most of the setting yourself means has the drawback of having to write most of the setting yourself. And then what's the reason to buy books?

The initial assumption was, I suppose, that a party of Solars can just nuke almost anything they want on the Threshold right out of the gate, so writing up details places that are going to be swept like sand castles is just wasting wordcount. However, this kinda-sorta becomes a problem when you have little reason to be attached to the world you're supposed to protect and places where you can have meaningful adventures not boiling down to pressing "I win" buttons (Yu-Shan, Underworld, Malfeas) are not in the core rulebook.

[OgreBattle]

How fast does exalted overland/sea/air travel go. I don't mean "ride a geular horse" but riding a solar horse, an airship, using charms, etc.

[Longes]

How fast does exalted overland/sea/air travel go. I don't mean "ride a geular horse" but riding a solar horse, an airship, using charms, etc.

You are not using charms because you only get 10 of those, and the "not die when someone looks at you funny" basic kit takes about 7 of those. So anyone who actually wants to travel uses the giant demon wasps Agata, which your party sorcerer summons for you (because demon summoning is the only thing worth a damn in Sorcery). I don't remember the exact details, but I think Agata fly at two or three times horse's speed.

[Mechalich]

The principle party travel spell in Exalted 3e is Stormwind Rider, which allows a party to travel at 100 mph. Depending on how much essence management is undertaken and who's casting the spell a party could probably manage 1000 miles in a dedicated travel day and significantly more if they really push it.

Charms are more plentiful now so its probably not a big deal to have the party sorcerer burn one for it. Even if it is, its not that big a deal to acquire a dragon-blooded minion to cast it for you (in 2e you could have a mortal minion do this, but sorcery has been altered so that mortal sorcerers aren't quite the pushovers they were - at least I think so).

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

One of the problems with 1E and 2E was that the freelancers hired to write the world described as if only the cities in the corebook existed.

Somehow, over time, that meant creation got narratively smaller, not larger. The blank spaces are meant to be "play" areas for SGs. And yes, it's a problem, but so is describing the whole setting in exhaustive detail so a DM has no personal room to manuever in.

That said, being a 3E backer myself... When I finally get my deluxe books, I'm selling them on Ebay. I'm done with this game - I loved it to pieces when I was younger. Now that I'm older, it's just... not what I want anymore.