Quote Originally Posted by Xefas View Post
No.



He's saying the above in contrast to my notion that Exalted would be improved by having more narratively abstract resolution mechanics.

I'm saying the two are not mutually exclusive.

To give an example: Free Market. Very similarly to Exalted, its mechanics are transparent with the game. Just like, in Exalted, you can say "I learned Murder Is Meat, and that's why I'm crazy", in Free Market you can say "I gave an Attaboy to my MRCZ leader, which granted him 2 Flow, and in exchange, he let me use his Mindscrewer 2000, which has the tags Ominous, Unnecessarily Violent, and Ephemera, to remove the Memory I got yesterday in response to that Ghosting Challenge."

All of those are game mechanics, and terms that define the way the setting functions. Every single term on the Free Market character sheet is an in-setting term, which is something that not even Exalted can boast.

At the same time, many of its conflict resolution mechanics involve abstraction.

There seems to be this idea that you can't have a mechanically dense game that also tells a good story. I would cite Burning Wheel, which is easily as complicated as D&D or Exalted, with a Core Book + Character Burner, Monster Burner, Adventure Burner, and Magic Burner. In combat, you easily have more options than the majority of Exalted characters. But all of those mechanics are well designed, and tell a good story.
Hmm...you do provide good examples. Since I'm not very familiar with more story-based RPG systems, I wasn't aware they could get so mechanically involved. This does indeed seem closer to something Exalted could manage.

Still, I think that part of Exalted's charm is that it riffs off of established gaming structures. When I said that it was a gaming system made into a world and not vice versa, I don't mean just that the system maps well to the world, but that the system is partially based on independent, preexistent styles that in turn are forcibly applied to the setting. In a way, Exalted is a partial Tippyverse, to use this forum's terminology. The mechanics Exalted forges into its setting are by and large quite recognizable, and while they're modified to feel Exalted-y they still are very much a part of traditional gaming. Once Burning Wheel derivatives become more popular, I could see a world that riffs off of them being interesting. But currently they aren't common enough for Exalted to get much mileage by referencing them in its world design.