Quote Originally Posted by Xefas View Post
It wasn't great, but it gave me more Exaltedness in its combat than Exalted did.

For instance, we had a combat with a sea hydra while on a boat.

I immediately tore off the mast of the ship with my bare hands and made to gut one of the Hydra's heads with it like a spear.

Why? The game rewarded me hugely for doing so. I got a far better roll doing that than, say, Generic Flurrying at it, and the whole action took 1 single roll of the dice.

Whereas, in Exalted, I'm heavily rewarded for Generic Flurrying, and heavily punished for doing otherwise. To tear off the mast and use it like a spear, I would have had to take an action to make a check to see if I could break the mast off (which is time consuming and inflicts a penalty on all further actions in the flurry), and then I would take a huge accuracy penalty for using an improvised weapon, I'd have less available attacks, and I'd do far less damage than a basic artifact weapon. My whole move would take multiple rolls, layers of math, and a ridiculous amount of game time. (This isn't even factoring in things like charms.)

With Fate, it was one roll, 30 seconds, huge bonus, done.

What did my teammates do? One leapt 40 feet in the air and rained down a hellstorm of arrows into the hydra to distract it. One roll, 30 seconds, done. The other wrenched its jaw open, climbed into its mouth, slid into its stomach, dug its way into the Hydra's guts, and then ate its heart, killing it instantly. One roll, 30 seconds, done.

The whole thing was a rush of awesome and, including the Hydra's turn(s), it only took a few minutes, and then we were on our way.

In Exalted, we'd have spent hours rolling flurries and subtracting motes and analyzing willpower expenditure. That is absolutely antithetical to cinematic combat.

Fatexalted wasn't a great game, it just wasn't going the exact opposite direction of what it should've been doing. Plenty of other games have combat on that caliber.
Not great? I can't concieve of better combat than that, but this coming from the guy who hasn't played much of anything.

One method could be...letting you do stuff like spearing a hydra with the mast of the ship, a number of times equal to essence x N...no, still too much bookkeeping, punishment fo trying to be cool. Oh! Cooler stunts for higher essence pool. You could do the mast thing at 4, but not 2 or 3?

This elaboration is good stuff. Apparently, the less interruption and tinkering with mechanics that aren't part of the story, the better. And what causes the most interruption in Exalted? Combat charms and essence management. So, the thing that Exalted is built for has a lot of excess junk attached.