Minor game stuff from around the web for commentary...

[Schleiermacher]

It's years late, it's twice the word count it has any right to be, and it doesn't cover a quarter of the content it promised. It's shoddy, unfinished, and totally lacking any design. It's not even a game, it's just one of those "books" that copypastas wikipedia articles or something. I'm not mad at Exalted 3rd edition, because there obviously is no Exalted 3rd edition and there was probably never any serious plans to make one.

They just ran a bunch of internet rantings about Exalted by some internet fans of Exalted into a big rambling text, and called that a book. It's not a book. It's just a bunch of rambling.

Years late: Oh so very true.

Excessively long: True, but mainly because of their wrongheaded choice of Charm design paradigm, IMO. When you have that many different kinds of supernatural creature and they all have separate power lists, you want each power list to be short and flexible, not long, spesific and full of mechanical variety for its own sake.

But when you say that it "doesn't cover a quarter of the content it promised", what are you referring to? I don't think they ever promised more than Solars, Mortals and core system in the corebook.

And when you say it's shoddy, unfinished and arguably not a game at all I'm going to have to ask you for spesifics. I sat down and plowed through all 950 pages, and I'm pretty sure there was a game there - a game that looks like a big improvement on 2E in all respects, as faint praise as that is.

[Longes]

Excessively long: True, but mainly because of their wrongheaded choice of Charm design paradigm, IMO. When you have that many different kinds of supernatural creature and they all have separate power lists, you want each power list to be short and flexible, not long, spesific and full of mechanical variety for its own sake.

Charms take up 300 pages.

WHO YOU ARE
Shortly after the disappearance of the Scarlet Empress, a door that was never meant to be opened was wrenched asunder by the ambition of great evils. Five years ago, the Deathlords connived to seize the banished power of the Solar Exalted.
They half-succeeded.
From their success were born the deathknights, and from their failure, the Solar Exalted sprang forth again. Imprisoned and denied reincarnation for centuries, the power of the Solar Exalted relentlessly seeks out talented and ambitious individuals and starts them on a meteoric path to prominence and supernatural might. Though only half as many Solars exist now as did in the First Age, they are still mighty enough to reshape the world.
These reborn heroes, their immense power long banished, their memories vilifi ed, are the last hope of a world wracked by turmoil and strife. Yet, within them lie the seeds of the same darkness that consumed them at the dawn of history.

"Solars are better than you" is a point that keeps bashed over and over in Exalted. People can't maintain First Age technology without Solars. People can't keep up the size of Creation without Solars, even thought warding of the Wyld is the current fucking job description of Lunars. People can't deal with death zones (I forgot what they are called) without Solar Sorcery. Get on your knees and suck Glorious Solar Cock, or you are dooming the world with your arrogance.

[Dogbert]

So, Solaroid hate-ons aside, would the game feel less of an odious cheat if...

a) Non-solars were compensated with an extra amount of chargen points proportional to how lower they are on the Totem Pole?
b) The text was rather specific in saying that players are meant to play Solars, and the creation rules for other Exalts were instead moved to an "optional rules" chapter with the clear warning that the option is meant to be used for "B-Team games" and if you do otherwise you do it at your own peril?

I mean, from where I see it, the (concept) design objective was always crystal-clear (Solaroids>everything), it's the wishy-washy implementation of allowing sub-par Exalts as playable characters that left players demanding a game balance that was never meant to be there.

Either fix the mechanics to get back on track with the design objectives, or re-write the whooooooooooooooole fluff to fit Muh Game Balance, case in which you're no longer playing Exalted... after all, if Solars were never above the rest, then they never had a chance to abuse their power (because they never had any abusable powers), they were never exterminated, and even if they were for whatever Sidereal clerical error then the terrestrials never had need to create the Jade Prison anyway (because they could just "camp" the Solars on respawn as needed with little hassle), and thus Solars never "returned" (because they never even left).

[Username17]

It doesn't matter if characters other than Solars were never "intended" to be playable. There are only five flavors of Solars (and only 150 Solars total). That isn't enough player character options. People rejected 4e D&D out of hand because they went to print with eight character classes and promised more in the future. "Come back when I can play a Druid or Bard!" people said. Exalted is, while not actually "in print" at least "available for download" with only five character classes. And rather than begging forgiveness for this travesty by promising to add more in a series of separately purchasable supplements, they are promising that even if they do get around to writing more character options they won't be playable in games using the ones they already made.

It's so laughably insufficient as an offering that it isn't even worth having a meaningful discussion about. It's the 4e PHB with more than twice the wordcount but less than two thirds the player accessible content. And their expansion promises are that they aren't going to fix that. It's just fucking pathetic.

People skipped early adoption of 4e D&D because it didn't look like a finished product. Then they skipped late adoption of 4e D&D because the finished product was shit. Exalted "3rd edition" is by every measure massively less of a finished product than 4e D&D was. What possible reason would there be to even take that seriously?

-Username17

[Schleiermacher]

Charms take up 300 pages.

If you include Martial Arts, example Sorcery spells and Evocations, which in this context are effectively Charms, it's 400 pages. It should be half that, at most.

In the Traits Chapter you could at the very least cut all the vignettes introducing each(!) of the 26 Abilities. I can see why they wanted those, but it's an indulgence you simply can't afford when you're at over 700 pages before art. But that would only save you 8-9 pages, and while there are probably more pages to be saved in that chapter by parsimonious writing, I'm not going to re-read and re-write the entire chapter in my head.

But the thing is, stuff like the Antagonists chapter and the Setting chapter are 190 and 90 pages respectively and yeah, that's a ridiculous amount of text, but what's in those chapters is stuff that the audience has been screaming for for years, and if you cut that in any significant way then you're cutting content, and important content at that. (I mean, you could definitely save a few pages with some tight editing and, again, less mechanics for mechanics' sake in the Antagonists chapter but that wouldn't add up to much in a book this size.)

It would be perfectly possible to get down to 700 pages, which is somewhere between the size of the core rules for D&D 3.0 and those of 3.5. I think that is a reasonable length. But getting significantly smaller than that requires you to cut stuff that people will actually miss. The bulk of what you'd be cutting -200-and-some pages- is Charms and Charmlike mechanical stuff. That is why I said the Charm paradigm is to blame for the excessive length.

[Longes]

Charms take up 300 pages.

If you include Martial Arts, example Sorcery spells and Evocations, which in this context are effectively Charms, it's 400 pages. It should be half that, at most.

In the Traits Chapter you could at the very least cut all the vignettes introducing each(!) of the 26 Abilities. I can see why they wanted those, but it's an indulgence you simply can't afford when you're at over 700 pages before art. But that would only save you 8-9 pages, and while there are probably more pages to be saved in that chapter by parsimonious writing, I'm not going to re-read and re-write the entire chapter in my head.

But the thing is, stuff like the Antagonists chapter and the Setting chapter are 190 and 90 pages respectively and yeah, that's a ridiculous amount of text, but what's in those chapters is stuff that the audience has been screaming for for years, and if you cut that in any significant way then you're cutting content, and important content at that. (I mean, you could definitely save a few pages with some tight editing and, again, less mechanics for mechanics' sake in the Antagonists chapter but that wouldn't add up to much in a book this size.)

It would be perfectly possible to get down to 700 pages, which is somewhere between the size of the core rules for D&D 3.0 and those of 3.5. I think that is a reasonable length. But getting significantly smaller than that requires you to cut stuff that people will actually miss. The bulk of what you'd be cutting -200-and-some pages- is Charms and Charmlike mechanical stuff. That is why I said the Charm paradigm is to blame for the excessive length.

SR4A is 400 pages. Vampire 20th is 500 pages, and contains all important information about the setting, as well as nieche stuff like bloodlines and unique disciplines. D&D 5th edition player's handbook is 300 pages. I seriously don't know what Exalted put into 600 pages of basic setting information.

[Longes]

Looking at the book carefuly, it is insanely wasteful. Writeup of Octavian, a high level demon unlikely to appear in most games, takes 5 pages. FIVE. A cloud elemental takes 2.5 pages. A brigand is 1 page long. A fucking bear has a page long charsheet. Also it looks like Resources system is still shit, and there is no sample adventure, which is a damn shame.

[Longes]

I seriously don't understand design choices that went into Exalted 3ed.

Infernals, despite the problems with the book, were very popular. They were probably the best thing to come out of second edition. Them being kicked out of the setting will butthurt a large number of fans (including me).

Inclusion of two new Exalted types - Exigents and Liminals, will also alienate some fans, because it waters down the setting (Exalted are rare and few) and pushes back the book of [favored splat].

I... I just don't know what they were thinking while writing this monstrocity. It's the 4th edition gnome fiasco all over again.

[Schleiermacher]

Four pages. Not that that's not bad enough. That would be the aforementioned mechanical excess of the Antagonists chapter, which it seems is actually worse than I remembered, too. But again -while there's no sensible reason to devote 4 pages to Octavian, you can't have an Exalted core book without stats for him. So let's say you could cut the Antagonists chapter by half like the Charms -then we'd be looking at 600 pages. Short enough yet?

The Resources system is still very vague, but now things actually have prices in in-setting currency and the setting chapter talks a bit about economy, so you can work it out for yourself if you feel the need -not that you should have to, but that's a definite improvement.

Edit: I am 100% certain Infernals aren't being cut. They're only barely mentioned in the core book, but the same applies to the Getimians -and there's been talk about other kinds of new Exalted too, which aren't mentioned in the core book at all (And neither are Alchemicals, which are probably returning too). I'm pretty sure it's just that they're getting an overhaul and the writers don't want them to take the spotlight from everyone else like they did in late 2E.

And yes, I'm feeling kind of alienated by the Liminals, which read like Sheppard's pet project or something to me -but so what? There are tons of Vampire clans I pretend don't exist too, so ignoring them in the games I play isn't going to be much of a burden. Heck, that's what I did with Infernals in 2E. I think most people are able and willing to do that with the parts of the setting they're not interested in.

[OgreBattle]

So what's the most efficiently writtern tRPG rulesbook in terms of getting the point across?

[Schleiermacher]

Lamentations of the Flame Princess is pretty efficient.

Of course, that's a retro-clone, so it's also very limited in scope. The winner would be whatever game got the biggest playspace into the smallest number of pages.

[erik]

I wouldn't say LotFP is efficient. They just neglect some areas and go overboard on others. And none of it is efficiently organized. In your first go-through of the book you will be discovering rules for this or that in the most random of places (usually finding out that yes, once again Elves are better than everyone else). It's Earthdawn level bad organization.

Case in point, a single spell available at level 1 is capable of wrecking the world and has 10 pages of description. As opposed to skill usage which for 90% of situations is you roll a 1d6 and fail 5/6 of the time.

Efficient would be a game whose rules book covers a lot of facets with minimal word/page count.

Battle Stations is pretty damned efficient. It's sort of what you would get if you took a board game of Arkham Horror level complexity and increased that by just one more notch. Battle Stations is just clearing the threshold into being considered an RPG (your characters level up and have continuity and there is more flexibility... if you could do that with Arkham Horror I'd consider it a ttRPG as well). Just clearing the threshold of being an RPG from a board game is really about as efficient as you can get. Minimalist without being rules-devoid.

[Username17]

Efficiency in language is saying the minimum amount necessary and not less than that. It's a pretty fluid concept, but while the 1st and 2nd edition AD&D PHBs were shorter than the 3rd edition one, I would not say they are more efficient. I don't think 3.5 was particularly clearer or better than 3e as a base product, but it was considerably more pages, so I would give the nod to 3e in a D&D head to head.

The truth though is that maximum efficiency is not a terribly important goal. The insane page bloat of RPGs in the 21st century is indeed a terrible thing, but there's still a huge amount of available slack. I think we can all agree that a game book that is four hundred thousand words is too long, but that doesn't imply that a book that is one hundred or two hundred thousand words is either too long or too short.

Some styles of prose will inevitably be longer or shorter than others. And that's OK. Where it's not OK is when things get shovelwared - where the text drags out because no one is doing meaningful edits. White Wolf got that way even before oWoD came to a close, and by the time the company folded it was absolutely insane about it. Geist was literally edited by a web-based spellchecking service. Onyx Path Publishing material is simply not edited at all.

-Username17

[fectin]

Writeup of Octavian, a high level demon unlikely to appear in most games

Really? I don't think I've ever heard of an Exalted game that didn't either end early or have Octavian show up.

[Kaelik]

Writeup of Octavian, a high level demon unlikely to appear in most games

Really? I don't think I've ever heard of an Exalted game that didn't either end early or have Octavian show up.

That is technically true of every Exalted game I have ever heard of... in the same sense that it would be fair to say that every Exalted game I have ever heard of either ended early or literally cured cancer of all the people in the real world through it's completion.

[fectin]

While you are technically correct, you could safely assume that I meant my statement in the non-trivial sense.

[Kaelik]

While you are technically correct, you could safely assume that I meant my statement in the non-trivial sense.

My point is that the ratio is so absurd that your "non-trivial" sense is trivial. You could be talking about literally one game, and that would be as likely as not. You could be talking about one group with a huge hardon for this guy, and that could be all the games that have ever completed.

[fectin]

But you also haven't talked about playing Exalted, haven't posted logs from running Exalted, and don't usually get involved with Exalted discussions. In fact, based on you picking this to quibble over, I suspect you've never looked at actual Exalted play at all:

Anyone who can get to Celestial circle sorcery (which includes nearly all of the splats) can summon demons of the second circle. Demons of the second circle are all individuals, but there are basically only two that you usually care about: Octavian, who punches things in the face harder than anyone else, and Alvuea, who does Logistics and Dragons better than anyone and comes with for-real teleporting. Saying that every game includes Octavian or ends early is about as exciting as saying that every D&D fighter gets an artifact sword (or the game ends early).

[Kaelik]

But you also haven't talked about playing Exalted, haven't posted logs from running Exalted, and don't usually get involved with Exalted discussions. In fact, based on you picking this to quibble over, I suspect you've never looked at actual Exalted play at all:

Anyone who can get to Celestial circle sorcery (which includes nearly all of the splats) can summon demons of the second circle. Demons of the second circle are all individuals, but there are basically only two that you usually care about: Octavian, who punches things in the face harder than anyone else, and Alvuea, who does Logistics and Dragons better than anyone and comes with for-real teleporting. Saying that every game includes Octavian or ends early is about as exciting as saying that every D&D fighter gets an artifact sword (or the game ends early).

More like, you are saying that every game involves an Ur-Priest casting 9th level spells. (Or some other stupid suck now, win later bullshit that kciks in a couple levels before that.)

If you are starting at the level where you get to break the game, you can break the game, and that's cute, but if you are starting with origin characters, it is fucking hellishly monstrous to have to play through shit to get to that point, so I have difficulty seeing one character in literally every game committing to that shit. I mean, every game I have played in ends early, but I have played like one game where someone actually started with Sorcery.

Minor Point: I have never played 1e Exalted, so maybe it is different.

[souran]

Saying that you have broken exalted or that a particular thing shows up repeatedly in your exalted experience is neither impressive nor helpful.

Exalted, even 1st edition, is so broken as to be pointless from the moment character creation is finished. Further, the level of stupid from the mechanics is usually defended with statements like "everything is broken so as a whole its balanced" which is both wrong and stupid. Quite simply breaking combat or diplomacy is a lot more useful and powerful than shitting all over the games rules for navigating a boat.

Exalted did not need a 3rd edition, it needed a page 1 rewrite. Further, all previous arguments about the status of solars compared to other exalts is pointless because using the game as written there is nothing in the game that is challenging to a competently built dragon blood much less any of the celestial exalts.

I ran a game of exalted with 3 permanent members and 3 floating members for 18 months when I was getting my undergrad. There is no game here. The storyteller has to rewrite the whole game to even make it a game.

[fectin]

Minor Point: I have never played 1e Exalted, so maybe it is different.

I haven't either. I assume it's substantially different and worse, based on how Kablack talks about the resolution system.

Sorcery goes terrestrial->celestial->solar. Demon of the Second Circle is really about as exotic as a wizard casting fifth-level spells (i.e. Lesser Planar Binding), except that you can cast it right from the start (Really. The only noticeable limit is essence, AKA "the stat for being awesome at everything"), and the core book takes great pains to explain that summoning demons is your bread-and-butter as a sorcerer.

Pokeballing Octavian is somewhat ambitious. He has a fairly large pool to resist with, and buying it down costs quite a lot of essence. Obviously it's trivially easy to do if you build for it, but even otherwise, it's not too hard once you have the xp to buy the things you were going to buy anyway.

----

Okay, after poking around a bit, sidereals and lunars can't start able to use celestial circle under core rules (because they can't hit essence 4). Solars and bad-touched solars are still good to go.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

(E)very game I have played in ends early

I don't give a dry hump about Exalted, but suck on some parsimony you shitbag common denominator.
I bet your mothers no longer acknowledge you in public.

Arguably more interesting than discussion of efficiently written rules is that of elegantly written ones. Microlite d20 ain't the absolute worst about getting to the fucking point, but uses 3-stat and drain-casting and so is somewhat less than easily portable.

[Kaelik]

(E)very game I have played in ends early

I don't give a dry hump about Exalted, but suck on some parsimony you shitbag common denominator.
I bet your mothers no longer acknowledge you in public.

Arguably more interesting than discussion of efficiently written rules is that of elegantly written ones. Microlite d20 ain't the absolute worst about getting to the fucking point, but uses 3-stat and drain-casting and so is somewhat less than easily portable.

Uh what? If you don't care about Exalted, why are you arbitrarily attacking me for bringing up the commonly accepted point that Exalted games die off without finishing?

It is a poorly designed game with baroque character customization and advancement, focuses on hugely world spanning themes, and has combat that is doing it's best to emulate Shadowrun Matrix levels of rolling more dice than any 8 people own, and having most of those dice be meaningless. The point that Exalted games end early should not be confusing or contentious.

[FatR]

You're not actually intended to play a rainbow coalition of different Exalted types like you were the Legion of Superheroes

We know. And that intent is objectively shit.

Speaking from experience, once the size of an Exalted player group exceeds two people, the possibility of someone strongly wanting to play a splat other than the established default approaches 100%.

But the game is intent on shafting PCs and ruining parties for picking even those splat combinations it explicitly advertises, like Solar-Lunar pairs.

I blame the fact that by their very nature Solar have attracted a largely poisonous circle of fanboys, and by now inmates are running the asylum.

See, I don't think it's a dodge -that would imply the designers and audience of Exalted consider the imbalance between Exalted kinds to be a flaw that needs defending, while in my experience most of them consider it a feature.

Audience of Exalted no longer exists. Fucking AD&D is several times less dead than Exalted. Looking at Rolld20 data
http://blog.roll20.net/post/10795719471 ... rt-q4-2014
all non-WoD White Wolf games have combined popularity less than bloody 13th age. Exalted is likely to account for nearly all of those, but still, a pathetic number.

And making shit decisions like the above had undoubtely contributed to this.

[FatR]

a) Non-solars were compensated with an extra amount of chargen points proportional to how lower they are on the Totem Pole?

Not in 1E or 2E. The key to Solar power was them just having vastly better Charms.

b) The text was rather specific in saying that players are meant to play Solars, and the creation rules for other Exalts were instead moved to an "optional rules" chapter with the clear warning that the option is meant to be used for "B-Team games" and if you do otherwise you do it at your own peril?

This is what they actually did. And it didn't work after they actually published books for other splats.

Either fix the mechanics to get back on track with the design objectives, or re-write the whooooooooooooooole fluff to fit Muh Game Balance, case in which you're no longer playing Exalted... after all, if Solars were never above the rest, then they never had a chance to abuse their power (because they never had any abusable powers), they were never exterminated, and even if they were for whatever Sidereal clerical error then the terrestrials never had need to create the Jade Prison anyway (because they could just "camp" the Solars on respawn as needed with little hassle), and thus Solars never "returned" (because they never even left).

DnD settings are chock-full with asshole wizards and demons and things getting sealed away and then returning, even though they also feature other wizards and angels and whomever, who theoretically are just as capable. So this complaint is invalid.

And the fluff needed a very major rewrite anyway. You might have noticed it from how many Exalted grognards are not allowing in their games any setting materials after few early 1E books, that left the setting very vague.

I ran a game of exalted with 3 permanent members and 3 floating members for 18 months when I was getting my undergrad. There is no game here. The storyteller has to rewrite the whole game to even make it a game.

Yup. I went back to DnD, because DnD actually offered me some support for my GMing duties, even if that was not very good support. In Exalted I had to handwave the opposition all the time, and Dragonbloods were the only sort of Exalts for whom adventure seeds and ideas offered by the setting worked at all - for Celestials the need to make absolutely everything myself was apparent.