Exalted 3rd Edition Kickstarter

[RiotGearEpsilon]

Playtesting hasn't actually started yet, which isn't a great sign. It won't be an actively BAD sign unless/until they decide to just skip it altogether.

[Almaz]

One of the most exciting but also worrying things about the new Exalted edition is the explosion of new splat types. This is good and bad. 1) It means they have hypothetically more playable options, with less shoehorning people into existing splat types. If they're leaning more towards the "Our team is a Solar, a Lunar, a Sidereal, and a couple Dragon-Bloods" style of play, and have a better approach for inter-splat balance, that's great. 2) A single Exalt type is a clusterfuck, adding several new ones is an explosion of clusterfuck. And they appear to be adding three - Exigent, Getimian, and Liminal Exalted.

In addition to something that sounds like a wholesale redesign of Infernals, so they are effectively adding four. Infernals was a giant pile of mess and chaos and good design built on a really terrible foundation, such that when built up and thought more about it quickly evidenced how much the entire project was a bad idea, so chucking their base concepts and introducing something new is fine by me.

The Exigencies are being presented really well but have the problem of being the Steve Exalted. That is, every single one is unique and special because they all come from different gods and gods flavor things different ways. And once we are all Steve, then no one is Steve.

Getimians apparently have something to do with Sidereal bullshit. Frankly, giving Sidereals something to wank over that isn't Solars and the Wyld Hunt gives them something to do that isn't be a relentless pkill. They apparently are the KotExalted and get to have their own unique mechanic for how they spend Essence. Sure, why not.

The Liminal Exalted were leaked a while ago and are apparently some kind of creepy death Exalted. They're not Abyssals though. Some people have theorized they're some kind of Modern Prometheus reference than a Dracula reference like the Abyssals, as a result. Who knows.

At this point the Kickstarter is pretty obviously a marketing ploy to build hype.

[Plague of Hats]

The Exigencies are being presented really well but have the problem of being the Steve Exalted. That is, every single one is unique and special because they all come from different gods and gods flavor things different ways. And once we are all Steve, then no one is Steve.

Uh, the Dev Chat video should be coming out relatively soon. Maybe listen to that.

At this point the Kickstarter is pretty obviously a marketing ploy to build hype.

Our devious plot to sell our game, revealed!

[RiotGearEpsilon]

At this point, the Kickstarter looks more like a way for them to giggle helplessly as money rains down on them hand over fist.

[mikal768]

At this point, the Kickstarter looks more like a way for them to giggle helplessly as money rains down on them hand over fist.

On the PDFs and other feelies sure. Wonder how much profit the actual deluxe hardcovers provide per book though. And by them I think you mean him. OPP is like literally one guy who just contracts out stuff to writers.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

More or less, although it's a bit less absolute in hierarchy than that.

Buy MY book instead!

[Avoraciopoctules]

At this point the Kickstarter is pretty obviously a marketing ploy to build hype.

Our devious plot to sell our game, revealed!

Nice.

I'd say you've done a pretty good job of pitching your game. I'm curious enough to check it out even though I don't like rolling d10s. I mainly follow the SA threads, and if this turns out to have decent rules for both face-stabbing and empire building I will be very happy.

[Longes]

So, is Exalted 3e like the dragons in Song of Fire and Ice? It's definitely comming, but it never arrives?

[Silent Wayfarer]

So, is Exalted 3e like the dragons in Song of Fire and Ice? It's definitely comming, but it never arrives?

That, and set to the official cockbarrel theme song.

[Longes]

Given what we've seen in the presented materials... Yeah, that's pretty much Exalted Theme Song.

[Silent Wayfarer]

I mentioned at the start of the thread that I was a backer for the Deluxe Edition. Here's what my latest update says:

Holden says: "Lea finished. The book is out of editing and back in my hands. I'm going through, reviewing Lea's edits and implementing them into the master draft. This process is finished for the Introduction and Chapter One, am on Chapter Two right now. I am aiming to have the complete finished manuscript ready for you and Maria this week. Holy shit. Three years. This beast is finally about to be out of our hands at last. (Also I am now riding him mercilessly about getting the Quickstart finished.)"

Maria Cabardo and I are finishing up reviewing final pieces as they pass through our hands and are approved by CCP. Only a few remain to get to finished state at this point including some of the full page pieces. There are a few pieces we need the completed text for so we can do the design thing we want to do with the art working the way we need it to in terms of working with the text.

Once Holden passes the text to us, Maria will start combining text and design ideas to create the page design format, and the art will also factor in there. Because this is a new design, with a new art director/designer, we will be going back and forth a bit to perfect it, so estimates on how long such a process will take are still not possible. When the format is settled and Maria gets a few chapters under her belt, we'll be able to take a stab at how long the rest of the chapters will take to lay out.

Matt Forbeck's EX3 Novel is being written and the EX3 Anthology is in second drafts with the writers. Composer James Semple (he created the music we used in the KS video) and I talked and he is working on new material finally for the EX3 Music Suites. Writing is being done on the EX3 Quickstart (note Holden's comment about that above).

[Longes]

I'm also a backer, but I kinda stopped following the updates after I grew disillusioned in Exalted.

[Orion]

If you wanted to design a game for the Exalted-fan market, how would you do it? What would be the feature list?

[Schleiermacher]

Depends on which slice of the market you're after. Exalted fans are really five or six different fandoms who are fans of different games, and the majority of their discussions are acrimonious fights about which of those games Exalted "really" is and whose tastes should take precedence in setting and game expansion. They want everything from realistic sociology in a magical world to blatant power fantasies where anything goes as long as it's "cool" - everything from highly tactical combat with tons of resource management and mechanical differentiation to combat as a primarily narrative-driven, dramatic exercise. They want infrastructure and assymetric power gain to be very important -except when they don't- and they want the playable character types to be drastically different in power and capabilities -except when they don't- and on and on. Make whatever JRPG-flavored fantasy game you personally want to make, put in some strategically-placed IP and you can probably market it as Exalted to some segment of the fanbase.

[Lago PARANOIA]

First things first would be paying a marketing firm several thousand dollars to do an Olive Garden style deconstruction of the Exalted brand fanbase and getting an actual proportional breakdown of preferences. Because as Schleiermacher mentioned, there are multiple contradictory visions of the game -- so you're going to end up disappointing someone and probably a majority of someones.

My gut feeling, however, that people want an Exalted that contains very blatant power fantasies, action resolution being driven by broad storytelling actions instead of granular rules, and strong mechanical differentiation between splats. If I had to take a chance on an Exalted game (probably with a gun to my head) I'd probably use Burning Wheel as my inspiration and resign myself to spending several months upscaling the game effects. If I couldn't use that, I'd use a 4E D&D hack with some kind of (working) Skill Challenge thing and Rituals-by-level hacked in after resigning myself several months to writing my own classes. If I couldn't use that I'd just let them put a bullet through my brain.

ED: If you haven't read Starboard's takedown of Olive Garden's suckiness, you should. It's really lulzy.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Well, as long as we're discussing "how would you do Exalted?", I'll toss out some ideas I have:

• Figure out some way to have levels without appearing to have levels. If that fails, just have levels.
• The audience wants "Perfect Defenses", but having to save all your mojo for that is lame, so they'll use their own resource, and it will basically be, "you have X perfect defenses, based on this formula..." (which will be approximately f(Level))
• Each splat gets the traditional number of Castes (classes), with "Favored [FOO]" as a subclassing system. ("based on your level, you can have X Caste charms, Y Favored charms, and Z Splat charms")
• Mechanically, splats are defined by their resource management mechanic (e.g., maybe Lunars get a card-based WoF that works something like Dominion / Eminent Domain). This lets us obfuscate power level a bit, so we can appeal to both sides of the question "should splats have divergent power levels?" through deception.
• Based on my observations of Exalted discussions, I'm inclined to believe the "higher" splats should go for the more restrictive resource management mechanics, so the meme "Solar charms are supposed to be more powerful than DB charms" can be both true and playable.

[Orion]

The idea is not to remake Exalted but to do an original property that does some of (bu certainly not all of) the things Exalted promises. From my perspectives the really key features are

• Fantasy world that looks chinese but not Shaolin
• supernatural powers extend rather than replace the skill system
• mythic history defined by cyclical, spiraling conflict
• large-scale noncombat abilities, like fast horseback travel, or political tracts that persuade cities
• hardcoded PC/mook distinction
• an instantaneous transition between being a mook and a real character
• real characters have a psychologically significant external power source.

My question is what else is desirable and doable.

My idea for the core splat is based around an otherworld called "the library." It records the deeds and knowledge of the culture heroes who founded the first empires, systematized calligraphy and martial arts and medicine and astrology, and whatnot. Half of it is like Jedi holocrons and half is like the Jedi Sensorium. Selected people visit the Library in nightly dreams, where they learn extraordinary abilities from a long-dead mentor. Their primary class is defined by that mentor, but doesn't necessarily have much to do with their original personality or ambitions, which are reflected in a subclass.

[Silent Wayfarer]

Hey, remind me again where in the Infernals book it sez that Infernals can start with mutations? I'm planning to go Devil Tyrant Avatar Shintai anyway but I like having mutations in my baseline state.

[RadiantPhoenix]

I don't think that rule is in that book.

It's probably either in WW80216 or WW80209

[Josh_Kablack]

If you wanted to design a game for the Exalted-fan market, how would you do it?

I'd forgo maxing out my IRA this year, walk 9 blocks and give Grabowski a grand to slap his name on some crazy fan wank I would pull off the internet.

Then I'd put together a fancy Kickstarter page which would charge people $15 for a .pdf and $100 for a hardback, with a bunch of interbetween levels shoveling fanfic at suckers.

What would be the feature list?

You play as over the top powerful heroes who go around punching gods in the face, but playing as a mortal is supported too. Combat is all about shouting out flowery technique names superhero wire-fu style, but informed by historical reality. The focus of the game is about storytelling, but players are free to pursue whatever story they want. Both X and not X in as many ways as I can translate it into marketingspeak.

[Longes]

Hey, remind me again where in the Infernals book it sez that Infernals can start with mutations? I'm planning to go Devil Tyrant Avatar Shintai anyway but I like having mutations in my baseline state.

It's either Corebook or Scroll of Heroes. Everyone can start with mutations - you just pay their cost in BP. I highly recommend Eyes of Madness (from the Infernals). It's a nice bloodless way of dealing with puny mortals.

[FatR]

You play as over the top powerful heroes who go around punching gods in the face, but playing as a mortal is supported too. Combat is all about shouting out flowery technique names superhero wire-fu style, but informed by historical reality. The focus of the game is about storytelling, but players are free to pursue whatever story they want. Both X and not X in as many ways as I can translate it into marketingspeak.

You know, recently I had the same thought about Solars, they owe their popularity as a splat, which long was inexplicable to me, to the fact that the game simultaneously markets them as oppressed underdogs and absolutely invincible god-kings. But I've never thought to generalize this explanation. Bravo.

[Longes]

You play as over the top powerful heroes who go around punching gods in the face, but playing as a mortal is supported too. Combat is all about shouting out flowery technique names superhero wire-fu style, but informed by historical reality. The focus of the game is about storytelling, but players are free to pursue whatever story they want. Both X and not X in as many ways as I can translate it into marketingspeak.

You know, recently I had the same thought about Solars, they owe their popularity as a splat, which long was inexplicable to me, to the fact that the game simultaneously markets them as oppressed underdogs and absolutely invincible god-kings. But I've never thought to generalize this explanation. Bravo.

For solars both "underdog" and "invincible god-king" is true. A chargen solar is an invincible god-king to anything that's not an exalted. However, since the setting has a hundred fate ninjas who are older, better trained, and better equiped than you, has rapy Lunar elders who are older, better trained and better equiped than you, and has Deathlords, who have Essence 10, all solar and abyssal charms, know sidereal martial arts (which are horrendously broken. Obsidian Shards capstone is "Pick the way you won", literally). Compared to those people you are not even a blip on the radar, and you are supposed to fight them (in theory).

That's my main problem with the Exalted setting. The game lures you in with the promises of grand, high level adventures, where you decide the fate of the world. In reality the world has at least 20 god-kings who can squash you at-will, all of them representing factions either trying to end the world, or spreading the religion that blames you for ending the world. As soon as you try to do anything meaningful, you should be destroyed. So all Exalted GMs give out mind caulk like candy, to avoid any of the bad stuff to actually happen.

[Username17]

Certainly when we were doing a reading of Exalted: the Lunars, AncientHistory and I were doing spit takes every couple of pages as the monumental audacity of the book attempting to get us to buy the "freedom loving / slave holding, wise rulers / food security rejecting, heroes / cannibal rapists" just kept making our heads explode. X and ¬X were layered on constant and thick. White Wolf created Exalted with basically incompatible and indeed opposite design premises on pretty much every possible axis - and then whenever anyone complained about anything just told people they must be playing it wrong.

Denial in depth is pretty much the entire Exalted strategy. Shout a bunch of buzz words and throw out a bunch of crazy incompatible ideas until people are intrigued enough to buy your book, and then tell them to work it out their own damn selves once they actually have. It's like snake oil salesmanship, but for RPGs.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Exalted has a massive amount of words but very little content. There's worldbuilding in the game, but it's empty fill-in-the-blank-spaces-on-the-map worldbuilding - there's nothing new or interesting to it, there's no top-down design, it's generic and forgettable random fantasy world stuff. DwarfFortress has built in algorithms for generating world content that make more sense and are less offensive than some of the crap put out in this book supposedly written by human beings.